by Sara Donati
She paused, and then held out a chipped wooden bowl which had been hidden in the folds of her skirt.
“Would you like some meat? It’s just off the fire.”
Four tiny breasts; hardly enough for a single serving. Elizabeth felt a wave of nausea rising in her throat as surely as the tide. She looked around herself in desperation, but Nathaniel and Hawkeye had moved off to join Chingachgook and Axel. With a start, she realized that her father stood just a few feet away on the rise that looked over the lake, and that his attention was on her, all frowning concentration, his disappointment and disapproval radiating in warm waves. She swallowed hard, and wiped her brow.
“Are you all right, Miz Elizabeth? Don’t you care for duck?”
She shook her head, and then sat abruptly on the sand. Martha came closer, her gentle, plain face creased in concern.
“Martha,” Elizabeth said softly. “Thank you very much for your kind offer, but I’ll have to ask you to take that away, now. The smell—” She swallowed hard again, and met the younger woman’s gaze.
“I’m in a family way, you see.”
The anxiety on her face was replaced suddenly by an understanding and empathy so sweet and welcome that Elizabeth’s nausea ebbed a few steps in response.
“Oh, I see. That’s good news, now ain’t it? Just a minute, let me put this down—” And she hurried off, only to return in just seconds with a chunk of plain bread.
“Bread always did help my stomach to settle,” she explained, handing it over. Elizabeth murmured her thanks and took a small bite.
They were alone; the children were busy on the far side of the bonfire burning fingers and mouths as they plucked at the roasting meat, eating without thought or pause. The women were elbow-deep in blood and feathers. Anna made a comment and loud laughter rose over the lake in response. In the canoes the men were still at work, far up the shore. No sign of Moses Southern.
“Could I hold your baby? Just for a moment?”
Without a word, Martha reached into the cradle made of her shawl and handed him over to Elizabeth. Then she settled down on the sand next to her with her arms slung around her knees.
Elizabeth took the swaddled child into the crook of her arm and looked down at the face, rumpled now in a thoughtful way.
“He looks very serious,” she said, testing the solid weight of him, warm and slightly damp and definitely thrumming with life.
“I’m afraid he takes after his pa,” Martha said, and then bit her lip, nervously. She cleared her throat. “You never held one before?”
“Not one this small,” Elizabeth said. “He’s very … compact.”
“Unwind him and he’ll start working those arms and legs, like one of them crawlies with a hundred feet. When he starts to walking, I’m the one who’ll need all that get-up-and-go.”
The child opened his mouth to burble at Elizabeth. She made a similar sound back at him, and she was rewarded with a toothless smile.
“There!” said Martha. “He don’t do that for everybody. Jemima is the only one he’ll smile for regular, like.”
When the baby’s smile was replaced with a rumbling frown, Elizabeth handed him back to Martha, who looked out over the water again, scanning it warily. Then she settled the child back in the sling and opened her bodice to his seeking mouth.
“How is Jemima?” Elizabeth asked, watching closely.
“Fractious as ever,” Martha said easily, casting her a sideways look.
The baby made mewling sounds, gulping noisily and waving a suddenly freed fist in the air.
“I wished I could’ve sent her to school again,” Martha said softly. “You did her good, although I guess it didn’t feel that way at the time.”
“Maybe in the fall,” Elizabeth said.
Martha sighed, patting the curve of the child’s hip. “You don’t care for this party much, do you?”
In the twilight Elizabeth looked over the beach. Everywhere there were bloody piles of half-dismembered fledglings, feathers ruffling in the breeze. Down the shore, another good-sized hill of carcasses had been abandoned, untouched.
“I don’t understand, I suppose—why is it necessary to take them all?” Elizabeth immediately regretted this question, fearing that she would not be understood, or that if she were, that she would give offense.
But Martha was looking over the lake with a thoughtful expression. “I grew up in Fish Creek, did you know that? There were fourteen of us, and I was the second youngest, the only girl.” She glanced at Elizabeth to see if this story was welcome, and then she murmured a soft word of encouragement to the child. “There was never enough on the table. We didn’t starve, you understand, but you could never be sure of the next meal, either. You learned to be quick and to take what you could before anybody else caught you at it. Now, Moses is a harsh man at times, but there’s always plenty on our table, and I know as long as he’s alive I won’t have to worry about how to feed my children. But Miz Elizabeth, you know, I still have this urge sometimes—when I take the corn bread out of the oven, hungry or not, I could eat the half pan standing there, and hide the rest under my pillow.”
“Martha,” Elizabeth said. “You could, but you do not. You have learned not to. When I look at this—” She lifted her chin toward the littered shoreline. “It seems so wasteful. Next year there will be no more wood ducks, and how sad that is.”
“But of course there’ll be wood ducks next year,” Martha said, surprised. “There’s always wood ducks. They come up in the spring, they always have and they always will. If that weren’t the case, the judge would make a law and put an end to the ducking, ain’t that so?”
There was a harsh sound just behind them. “What in hellfire do you think you are doing, woman?” Moses Southern bellowed.
Martha launched herself to her feet. Elizabeth caught sight of one white breast dripping milk and the outraged face of little Jeremiah, suddenly deprived of his meal. Before she could rise, Moses had pushed past her, advancing on Martha.
“You got no more brains than a mudpuppy! Get on home, now, and wait for me. I’ll deal with you later.”
Nathaniel had appeared at Elizabeth’s side. He helped her to her feet just as Southern whirled around. With his eyes narrowed and his great nose red and swollen in irritation, he looked almost comical. If it weren’t for the fact that he would take out his anger on Martha, Elizabeth would have laughed at him.
“You leave my wife alone!” he shouted.
“Lower your voice, man,” Nathaniel barked. “You’re making a fool of yourself.”
Elizabeth was aware of Hawkeye coming up behind her.
“I know what she’s up to, and I won’t have it!”
“We were just talking, Mr. Southern,” Elizabeth said calmly. “Nothing more.”
“Tell her, Bonner. Tell her to stay away.”
“I hear you myself, Mr. Southern. I think everyone in a ten-mile radius hears you.” In fact every man, woman, and child on the lake had put aside their work to watch. At the very edge of the crowd Elizabeth caught a glimpse of Martha, pulling her two reluctant children away.
There was a soft clearing of a throat, and Elizabeth realized that her father had come closer. Moses turned to him, his expression suddenly gleeful at the unexpected appearance of an ally. But the judge only looked at him with a small frown.
“Moses,” he said finally. “I suggest you go now, before you get yourself into more trouble than you can handle.”
New outrage spread over the trapper’s already florid face. “So you’re taking her side, are you? She run off, stole you blind—”
“Goddamn it, Judge. Tell him to hold his tongue.” Nathaniel’s face hardened into the mask she knew so well, the one that meant he was just barely keeping control of his temper.
“I am taking no one’s side.” The judge raised his voice slightly. “But I can see where this is headed, and I see no reason to ruin the evening for the whole village.”
This drew Mose
s up short. He glanced around himself for the first time and saw the audience he had drawn. With a mumbled curse, he turned away and stamped off in the direction of a group of men gathered on the far side of the fire.
At the same time, Liam Kirby started toward them, convulsively twisting his cap in his hands. He stopped in front of Elizabeth.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his gaze fixed firmly on his own feet.
“It’s not your fault, Liam.” Elizabeth tried for an encouraging smile.
“No, I’m sorry I can’t come to school.” He would not meet her eye, but even so she could see the bruise that covered a good part of his left cheek.
“I see,” she said softly.
“Will you tell Hannah I’m sorry to miss the games?” His voice was so low that Elizabeth thought at first she had misheard him. His blush told her that she had not.
“I will tell her.”
The boy nodded jerkily and then turned away, walking back to the group of men where his brother waited for him.
“Won’t you come eat?” Anna called from the fire, gesturing to them. “More than enough to go around.”
Her students, their faces turned toward her hopefully, fingers and mouths shiny with grease; the Camerons, the Smythes, the McGarritys, all of them willing to welcome her. John Glove came forward, speaking sensible words in a kind tone.
“Don’t be chased off, now, if you’d care to stay and eat with us. He won’t bother you anymore.” He was a wealthy man, the owner of the mill, the owner of slaves; his children sat in her classroom.
Chingachgook stood on the shore, his expression unreadable. Behind her Nathaniel and Hawkeye were silent, waiting for her to make this decision. Elizabeth felt suddenly very weary, and unbearably sad.
“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Glove,” she said. “But I think we should be away home, don’t you, Nathaniel?” She turned, seeking out Hawkeye’s eye. He nodded at her silently.
There was not one bird or duck on the water, not as far as she could see: a new kind of wilderness. As the canoe moved into the new darkness of the evening, Chingachgook’s song rose again, strong enough to be heard all around. On shore there was sudden silence. She thought, she hoped, that they were hearing the song of appeasing words to the spirit of the lake. Other words ran through her head: In the day shalt thou make thy plant to grow, and in the morning shalt thou make thy seed to flourish: but the harvest shall be a heap in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow. These words Elizabeth kept to herself, for the song said the same thing to anyone who would listen.
There was a screech of high laughter from the shore, and a splash as the boys tossed one of their unfortunate own into the water. The judge stood apart from the crowd, watching with his hands crossed on his back and his chin on his chest.
The breeze rose cool. Elizabeth turned her face to the sky, and out of the darkness a single mottled brown feather came twirling to brush against her cheek. She caught it in her fingers and examined it for a long minute. With hands slightly trembling, Elizabeth tucked it carefully into her bodice.
“A keepsake?” Nathaniel asked behind her.
“A reminder.”
“Wasn’t the most pleasant evening of your life, I’ll wager.”
“No,” she agreed. “But perhaps it was one of the most instructive.”
“Don’t judge them too harsh,” Nathaniel said softly. “Or yourself, either. It’s going to take some time.”
Chingachgook’s song trailed away into the night sky, as light and soft as a feather on the cold night breeze.
Nathaniel lit a torch and they went down to the waterfall. The slick stone steps were familiar to him even in the dark, but she moved cautiously, digging with her toes into the deep green moss. Wedged between rocks to extend over the water, the torch threw a bright, rippling flower onto its dark surface.
In the sticky heat of the July night, she waited for him to go first. He submerged himself and welcomed the cold. When he surfaced she had unplaited her hair so that it swept around her hips. Her skin glowed in the faint light, whiter than the reluctant moon. Below her ribs there was the hint of a newly sloping curve to her belly, there where the child grew; between the rounded weight of her breasts a glistening of sweat.
He held out his arms and she came to him. She drew in her breath at the cold, her nipples hardening against his chest.
They swam to the falls and then dived under the rushing water to the cool darkness behind. On the other side of the flowing curtain the torch wavered and blinked like a benevolent spirit, the only light in the world. He showed her the footholds, guiding her hand to them one after the other. Then he climbed first and, reaching down, lifted her over the edge into the cave where they had first come together.
He lit another torch and made a new nest of furs against the cool damp. Wound together they shivered, and then they stopped shivering. Near sleep, she suddenly stiffened in his arms, all her focus and attention turned inward. She took his hand and put it on her belly, hushed him when he tried to speak. He felt it then: the soft tumbling that was the child announcing itself, a swimmer in a quiet sea.
She fell asleep with her hair drying into curls around her face. Nathaniel listened to the rhythm of her breathing, but he lay awake himself for a long time, thinking about her. Her pleasure in the children she taught; her endless patience with them. Her disappointment and impatience with the parents of those children. She had the knack of righteous indignation without bitterness, but for how long? Nathaniel wrapped a strand of her hair around his finger to tie her to him and wondered how long she could tolerate living in Paradise.
L
“Good God. They are talking of trying the queen of France as an enemy of the state.”
Nathaniel produced a questioning sound around his spoonful of porridge.
Elizabeth never looked up from Mr. Schuyler’s copy of the Gentlemen’s Periodical. “The Jacobins. They will end up putting her to the guillotine as they did the king. Is there no end to this insanity?” She pushed her bowl away to make more room for the newspaper, her eyes flying greedily over the small print.
The housekeeper hovered, clucking nervously.
“Boots, eat your food,” Nathaniel said. “Mrs. Vanderhyden here will fuss herself into an apoplexy if she thinks she’s sent you off without a decent meal. Imagine how she’d explain herself to Mrs. Schuyler.”
Elizabeth cast a distracted but apologetic look toward the housekeeper, and then reluctantly put down the paper to pick up her spoon.
“You said you were looking forward to the news,” Nathaniel reminded her. “Guess you didn’t think so much would be afoot.”
She swallowed hastily. “Well, yes. The yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia is truly horrifying, Nathaniel. So many have died. And then there is this Monsieur Genet from the revolutionary government—if half of this is true, he is a revolution unto himself. He is determined to pull this country into the European war, and on France’s side.” Elizabeth looked out the window to Catherine Schuyler’s manicured garden. It seemed so peaceful here, but she was beginning to believe that peace could never be anything more than a deceptive lull in an ongoing storm. “The revolution seemed such a hopeful thing in the beginning. I can hardly imagine what it’s turned into.”
“I can,” Nathaniel said. “Listen, Boots. I don’t want to say it ain’t important, what’s going on in the world. But we’ve got a few things here to work through today.” With his chin he gestured to the unopened letter on the table.
When they had come to the Schuylers’ Albany estate the evening before, they had found two letters. Elizabeth had read the one from Mrs. Schuyler straightaway: it was all apologies for the family’s absence, instructions on how to best enjoy herself in Albany, and a three-times-repeated invitation for them to stop at Saratoga on their way home. The second letter was from her aunt Merriweather; it was still unopened.
“I will read it later today, when our business is concluded,” she said. “It will be easie
r then.”
Nathaniel touched her knee under the table.
“We’ll manage this, Boots. We’ve managed worse.”
Elizabeth shook her head while she drank the last of her tea. “I will believe that when we have put the breach-of-promise suit behind us.”
They left the neat grounds of the Schuyler estate and walked through fields that bordered the Hudson, thick with growing wheat and rye, corn and beans, separated by rows of gnarled apple trees standing sentry. Behind it all, boats moved along the Hudson so that their sails seemed to skim the sea of grain. The sky was wider here without the mountains and in it the clouds skittered along as if to keep up with the sailboats.
Albany in the late summer was almost as unpleasant a place as London, Elizabeth thought as they made their way along Ferrington Street into the center of the city. They had come on business that could not wait, and she would be happy to leave as soon as they possibly could. The roads were crowded with housemaids swinging baskets on red-chapped arms; peddlers hawking sticky peaches, sugar-sweet melons, wilted kale; young women in watered silks with feathered parasols tilted against the sun; River Indians dressed in fringed buckskin and top hats; slaves hauling bales of rags and herding goats. It was not so dirty and crowded as New-York had been, that was true. There was a pleasing tidiness to the brick houses with their steeply tiled roofs and bright curtains, but still the humid air reeked of sewage, burning refuse, pig slurry, and horse dung. Elizabeth swallowed hard and put her handkerchief to her nose and mouth, wondering to herself that she had forgotten what cities were like in such a short time. Three months in the wilderness had changed her, stolen her patience for the realities of a crowded life.
To her further surprise, Nathaniel seemed at ease. Men leaned over half doors to call out a welcome, dropped their tools to come into the street and talk to him, wiping dirty hands on leather aprons. Nathaniel touched the small of her back as he introduced her. “My bride,” he said so many times she lost count. “My bride, Elizabeth.” It caused her both a great deal of pleasure and acute embarrassment. She had never minded being called a spinster: there was something solid and rational about the word, and she had made it her own. But never had she imagined herself as a bride; she still could not, although it pleased her endlessly that Nathaniel saw her thus.
