by Sara Donati
Bonner resides on the northernmost frontier of the State of New-York, where he was raised—as you always believed—by Natives. I trust you will be pleased to learn that he took as guidwife a Scotswoman (now deceased), whose father was, by fortunate circumstance, a Munro cadet of Foulis. She bore a son, called Nathaniel, now some thirty-six years of age, in robust health and with a new guidwife in hopeful expectation. Both father and son have made their living as hunters and trappers in the wilderness that the Natives call the endless forests, between this place and the Mohawk Valley. That is where I found Nathaniel, who then directed me here to Montréal. He is a likely young man, and I believe you will be well pleased with him.
Before I can carry out the task entrusted to me and convey Bonner and his son home to Carryck, Dan’l must first be disengaged from the military garrison where he is currently being held for questioning, in the matter of a large shipment of the King’s gold, missing for some forty years.
You see that the family resemblance is more than simple physiognomy.
I have had word from Pickering, who has docked the Isis at Halifax, but first getting to Bonner is a very complicated undertaking, and one which may require some drastic steps. The whole venture is made even more complex by the interference of the Lieutenant Governor, Lord Bainbridge. My Lord will remember Pink George from the unfortunate incident with the pig, I trust. He, at any rate, has not forgot it.
Yours at command, My Lord
Angus Moncrieff
Montréal, this third day of January, 1794
To Mr. Nathaniel Bonner
Paradise, on the West Branch of the Sacandaga
State of New-York
Sir—
With the prodigious help of Rab MacLachlan and your excellent directions, I have found your father. Unfortunately, the Lieutenant Governor had found him first and he paces a cell in the garrison gaol while being questioned on a matter referred to only as the “Tory gold,” details of which MacLachlan scruples to share with me. While I have seen your father for only a moment I can report that he seems to be in good health. A message in two parts:
First, a young man called Otter, of the Mohawk (or Kahnyen’kehàka as I understand they call themselves), was arrested with him, but is unharmed. Second, your father believes that a “visit to the pomkin patch” is the only way to resolve his current difficulties.
If, as I suspect, this means that you will be coming to Montréal, I beg you to call on me in my rooms in the rue St. Gabriel. You will find me to be an experienced and willing assistant in the garden. I ask only for your father’s ear for an hour to present my lordship’s case.
I believe your lady’s time must be close at hand. Please allow me to send my very best wishes for her safe delivery, and for the continuing health of your entire family.
Your Willing Servant
Angus Moncrieff
Secretary and Factor to the Earl of Carryck
Montréal, this third day of January, 1794
PART I
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North to Canada
1
February, 1794
On the edge of the New-York wilderness
In the middle of a blizzard in the second half of the hardest, snowiest winter anyone in Paradise could remember, Elizabeth Middleton Bonner, sweat soaked, naked, and adrift in burning pain, wondered if she might just die of the heat.
Once again she grabbed the leather straps tied to the bed frame to haul herself forward, and bore down with all her considerable strength.
“Come, little one,” sang the girl who crouched, waiting, at the foot of the bed. Her ten-year-old face was alight with excitement and fierce concentration, her bloodied hands outstretched, beckoning.
From a basket before the warmth of the hearth came the high, keen wail of Elizabeth’s firstborn: a daughter, just twenty minutes old.
“Come, child,” crooned Hannah. “We are waiting for you.”
We are all waiting for you.
In the grip of a contraction that threatened to set her on fire, Elizabeth bore down again and was rewarded with the blessed sight of a crowning head. With shaking fingers she touched the slick, wet curls and her own flesh, stretched drumtight: her body on the brink of splitting itself in two.
One last time, one last time, one last time. She strained, feeling the child flex and turn, feeling its will, as strong as her own. Elizabeth blinked the sweat from her eyes and looked up to find Hannah’s gaze fixed on her.
“Let him come,” the girl said in Kahnyen’kehàka. “It is his time.”
Elizabeth pushed. In a rush of fluid her son, blue-white and already howling, slid out into her stepdaughter’s waiting hands. With a groan of relief and thanksgiving, Elizabeth collapsed backward.
For one sweet moment, the wailing of the newborns was louder than the scream of the blizzard rampaging through the endless forests. Their father was out there, trying to make his way home to them. With her arms crossed over the warm, squirming bundles Hannah laid against her skin, Elizabeth muttered a prayer for Nathaniel Bonner’s safe delivery from the storm.
As Elizabeth labored, the small handful of farmers and trappers with the good sense to be stranded by the blizzard in Paradise’s only tavern sat huddled over cards and ale, waiting out the weather. While the winds worked the rafters like starving wolves at a carcass, they told stories in easy, slurred voices, but they watched their cards and tankards and the long, straight back of the man who stood, motionless, at the window.
“Strung as tight as my fiddle,” muttered one of the card players. “Say something to him, Axel.”
Axel Metzler shrugged a shoulder in frustration, but he turned toward the window. “Set down, Nathaniel, and have a drink. I broke out my best ale, here. And the storm won’t be letting up for you staring at it.”
“Women will have babies at the worst times,” announced the youngest of the men solemnly.
“Now, what would you know about it, Charlie? You got a wife hid away somewhere?”
“A man don’t need a wife of his own to see that it’s damn hard luck to have run into this weather.”
The storm raised its voice as if to argue. The roof groaned in response, and a fine sifting of dust settled over the room and the uncovered tankards.
Axel plucked the pipe from his mouth in disgust and pointed his tattered white beard toward the heavens, exposing a long neck much like that of a plucked turkey. “Shut up, you old Teufel! Quiet!”
The winds howled once more, let out a longish whine, and fell silent. For a moment the men stared at each other and then Axel tucked his pipe back in the corner of his mouth with a satisfied grunt.
A woman appeared at the door from the living quarters just as the man at the window turned. The light of the fire threw his face into relief: half shadow, all worry, his high brow furrowed and his mouth pressed hard. In his hand was a crumpled sheet of paper, which he tucked into his shirt with one hand while he reached for his mantle with the other.
“Curiosity?” he asked, his voice hoarse with disuse.
“I’m right here, Nathaniel.” Long and wiry, straight backed in spite of her near sixty years, Curiosity Freeman moved briskly through the room, her skirts snapping and swirling. The hands adjusting the turban that towered above her head were deep brown against the sprigged fabric. She turned to a boy who sat near the fire, big boned, ginger haired, and pale with sleeplessness. “You there, Liam Kirby. Look lively, now. You fetch me my snowshoes, will you?”
He sprang up, rubbing his eyes. “Yes’m.”
Axel stood and stretched. “Good luck, Nathaniel! Give Miz Elizabeth our best!”
Nathaniel raised a hand in acknowledgment. “Thank you, Axel. Jed, I was supposed to send Martha Southern word, would you take care of that for me?”
“I will. Tomorrow we’ll wet the child’s head, proper like.”
“We’ll do that, God willing.”
Liam had gone out onto the porch, but the older woman hung back to put
a hand on Nathaniel’s arm. “Elizabeth’s strong, and Hannah’s with her. That girl of yours has got the touch, you know that.”
She’s only ten years old.
Nathaniel could see that thought sitting there in the troubled lines that bracketed Curiosity’s mouth. “Elizabeth asked for you. She wanted you.” And me. I should be there.
Curiosity squinted at him. Never the kind to offer false comfort, she nodded, and followed him outside.
Strung out in single file with Nathaniel leading and Liam bringing up the rear, they left the village on snowshoes. They carried tin lanterns that cast dancing pinpricks of light over the new snow: a scattering of golden stars to match the fiery ones overhead. The night sky had been scrubbed clean; the moon was knife edged and cold, as cold as the air that stung the throat and nose.
Nathaniel glanced over his shoulder now and then to gauge Curiosity’s pace. Thus far she showed no signs of tiring, in spite of the late hour and interrupted sleep. Frontier women, his father often said. When one of their own is in need, they can set creation on its ear.
He had set out to fetch her almost twenty-four hours ago. She was his father-in-law’s housekeeper, but Curiosity Freeman was more than that: Elizabeth’s friend, and his own, the clearest head in the village and the closest thing Paradise had to a doctor since Richard Todd had decided to spend the winter in Johnstown; she had always been a better midwife, anyway. With a midwife’s sense of timing, she had been ready for him, her basket packed. She wiped the flour from her hands and arms and passed the kneading over to her daughter, calling out to her husband, Galileo, that she was on her way. Judge Middleton was still abed, and they left without disturbing him.
“Let him sleep,” she had said, strapping on her snowshoes. “Ain’t nothing a man can do to ease a daughter in labor anyways, and my Polly will see to his breakfast. Did you send Anna word? I’d be glad of her help, with the rest of your womenfolk away.”
“Liam’s gone to fetch her.”
“Let’s get moving, then. First children ain’t usually in a hurry, but you never know.”
But the whiteout had come down on them just outside the village, turning the world he knew tree by tree into a flickering mirror of silver and white, impossible to navigate. That they had found the trading post was a miracle in itself; that he had been able to wait there hour after hour without losing his mind was another. Nathaniel could not put the picture out of his head: Elizabeth in labor with only Hannah beside her. He had lost his first wife—Hannah’s mother—in childbirth on a warm summer night that felt nothing and everything like this one.
He wiped the freezing sweat from his brow, and increased his pace.
The mountain was called Hidden Wolf, and the high vale where his father had built a homestead forty years ago, Lake in the Clouds. This was a translation of the Kahnyen’kehàka name, but the whites had never found anything better to call the place where the mountain folded inward on itself. Triangular in shape, the valley was big enough for two L-shaped cabins, a barn, kitchen gardens, and a sizable cornfield on its outer edge, where the shoulder gave way to the precipice. At the opposite end, a waterfall dropped into a shallow gorge in a series of glittering, frozen arches. Below it a small lake was ringed with concentric collars of ice.
When he was within earshot of the falls, Nathaniel broke away and left the others to struggle on without him. Past the first cabin where he had been raised, dark now with his father gone to Montréal and the rest of the family at Good Pasture. On through the small grove of beech, pine, and blue spruce to the far cabin, built less than a year ago for his new bride, Elizabeth Middleton. She had come from England to join her father. Well educated, able to speak her mind and willing to listen, with money and land of her own, and plans to teach. She had called herself a spinster without flinching, showing him sharp edges and soft ones, bone-deep curiosity and a well of raw strength and courage. From Chingachgook, his Mahican grandfather, Elizabeth had earned the name Bone-in-Her-Back.
On the porch Nathaniel kicked off his snowshoes and threw open the door to fading firelight and warmth. The cabin smelled as it always did: of woodsmoke, pine sap, lye soap and tallow, curing meat, corn bread baking, dried apples and herbs, of the dogs and of pelts newly stretched and scraped, and of her smells, for which he had no names but a hundred images. And there was the smell of blood recently shed: copper and hot salt.
Nathaniel put down his weapons and dropped his overcoat and mitts as he strode across the room, scattering ice and clots of snow. He paused before the open door of the small bedroom to breathe in. To force himself to breathe. His own blood hammered in his ears so that he could hear nothing else.
They were there, asleep. The banked fire showed him his Hannah, curled at the foot of the bed, one arm across the long line of Elizabeth’s legs. Her face was hidden in the shadows.
He crossed the room without a sound and went down on his knees. Elizabeth was breathing, her mouth slightly open, her lips cracked and beaded with blood. There was no fever flush—she was pale, her skin cool to the touch. The fist in his gut began to loosen, finger by finger, to be replaced by a warm wash of relief.
Nathaniel pulled his gaze away from Elizabeth’s face to the bundle at her side. And blinked.
Two infants, swaddled in the Kahnyen’kehàka way. Dark hair, rounded cheeks, white and pink faces smaller than the palm of his hand. One pair of eyes flickered open, unfocused. A tiny red mouth contorted, the cheeks working, and then relaxed.
Twins. Nathaniel put his forehead on the bed, drew in a long breath, and felt his heart take up an extra beat.
2
The winter morning came with a pure, cold light, setting the ice and snow aflame with color and casting a rainbow across Hannah’s face to wake her. She lay for a moment, listening to the morning sounds: Liam was feeding the fire, humming to himself. The dogs whined at the door, and then a woman’s voice: familiar and welcome, but unusual here, so early in the day.
The events of the previous night came to her in a rush and she stumbled out of her loft bed and down the ladder, pulling her quilt with her.
Liam held out a bowl. “Porridge,” he said, without the least bit of enthusiasm. Since he had come to live with them Hannah had learned that Liam’s first allegiance was always to his stomach, but she could not keep her gaze from moving toward the bedroom door. It stood slightly ajar.
Curiosity appeared as if Hannah had called for her.
“Miz Hannah,” she said formally. “Let me shake your hand, child. Are we proud of you? I should say so.”
Hannah found her voice. “She’s all right?”
“She is. And those babies, too.” Curiosity laughed out loud. “If the Lord had made anything prettier he would have kept it for hisself.”
There was a feeble cry from the next room. Hannah stepped in that direction, only to be caught up by Curiosity, who took her by the elbow and steered her back toward the table.
“Just set and eat, first. Pass some of that porridge over here, Liam, and stop pulling faces. It’s honest food, after all.”
“They are awful small,” Hannah said, accepting the bowl and spoon automatically. “I was worried.”
“Twins tend to be small,” said Curiosity. “You were, when you come along. Nathaniel could just about hold you in one hand, and he did, too. Carried you around tucked into his shirt for the longest time.”
“He carried you up to bed last night, too. Guess you didn’t even notice,” said Liam.
“Well, he’s feeling perky, is Nathaniel.” Curiosity put a cup of cider on the table in front of Hannah.
“A boy,” said Liam. “Chingachgook was right. Nathaniel’s got a son.”
“So he does. And two fine daughters,” added Curiosity. “Never can have enough daughters, is how I look at it.”
Hannah’s smile faded. “My grandfather should be here. He should know. I wish we had some word of him.”
Curiosity sat down with a bowl of her own, and leaned toward t
he girl to pat her hand. “It looks like the good Lord is smiling on you today, missy. Jan Kaes brought a letter in from Johnstown just before the storm broke. Came all the way from Montréal.”
“From my grandfather?” Hannah sat up straighter.
Curiosity pursed her mouth thoughtfully. “Don’t think so. It was writ with a fancy hand, so I’d guess it was from that Scot—Moncrieff was his name, wasn’t it? The one that come through here at Christmas. I’ll wager he had some word of Hawkeye, though.”
Outside, the dogs began barking and Liam got up to see to them.
“That’ll be the judge,” said Curiosity. “And half the village with him, by the sound of it. Ain’t good news louder than Joshua’s horn?”
“It is,” said Nathaniel from the doorway. He looked tired, but there was an easiness to the line of his back that Hannah hadn’t seen in a long time. She launched herself at her father; he caught her neatly, and bent over to whisper in her ear.
“Squirrel,” he said in Kahnyen’kehàka, hugging her so hard that her ribs creaked. “I am mighty proud of you. Thank you.”
“Is there word of Grandfather?” she whispered back.
A sudden wave of cold air and an eruption of voices at the door pulled Nathaniel’s attention away. He patted her back as she let him go, but not before she saw the flash of worry move across his face, only to be carefully masked as he turned to greet his father-in-law.
Elizabeth Bonner believed herself to be a rational being, capable of logical thought and reasonable behavior, even in extreme circumstances. In the past year she had had opportunity enough to prove this to herself and to the world. But next to her, soundly asleep in the cradle beside the bed, were two tiny human beings: her children. She could not quite grasp it, in spite of all the evidence to hand.
