Curiosity's report was all that Lily had needed or wanted, and that she had got straightaway, and without embellishment. Jemima had acted as Jemima had always and would always act: with her own interest and survival first and foremost. She had let Dolly Wilde wander off to her death, and then she had taken advantage of a lonely man in mourning. And now she was pregnant by Nicholas, who had become the brunt of the joke.

“He was ripe for the picking,” Curiosity had told Lily. “All she had to do was shake the tree a little.” And then Curiosity had put her long, cool hands on Lily's face and said the rest of it.

“He did a foolish thing, child. But he ain't the first good man to be towed down the road to perdition by his privates, and he won't be the last. No call to go red in the face, now. I'm speaking plain, woman to woman. No call to hate the man either. Lord knows he's reaping a fool's bounty.”

Lily said, “I don't hate him. I couldn't hate him.”

“Good,” Curiosity said. “Now the next thing is, you got to put him out of your mind.”

That would be harder, of course. First, because unless she avoided the village completely, she must come across Nicholas or Jemima with some regularity; and second, because everyone in Paradise knew that there had been some connection between them. Some illicit connection, the nature of which required grave and nonstop discussion, if not direct questions.

In the trading post to buy some salt a few days after she came home, Lily came face to face with Missy Parker, who studied her waistline openly. According to Martha and Callie, who were willing to share all the village gossip that her own mother and Curiosity had held back, Missy Parker was convinced in her soul that Lily had been sent to Montreal to bring Nicholas Wilde's bastard into the world. Now, confronted with the fact of Lily's waist—narrower now than when she left—even Missy Parker must concede that point.

“You must be very disappointed,” Lily said.

Missy Parker sniffed, the tic in her right eye fluttering. She had no idea what Lily was talking about, and no time for such nonsense either.

Lily would have been satisifed to leave it at that, but Anna could not. To the men playing skittles in front of the stove and the girls examining hair ribbons and Nettie Dubonnet who nursed her youngest in the corner, she announced her opinion in a loud and clear voice: Lily Bonner was a fine girl of upstanding moral character and a friend to many folks, young and old, men and women, rich and poor, and if some folks had got the idea that she was anything but Christian and charitable, why then they should bring those claims directly to her, Anna Metzler Hauptmann McGarrity, so that she could set them back on the straight and narrow. And by the way, shouldn't those folks who professed themselves to be scholars of the good book remember that part about motes and beams and minding your own business?

This story Lily took to her mother, hoping to make her laugh. There was very little laughter at Lake in the Clouds since she had come home, or more upsetting still, very little talk at all. But Elizabeth had only listened in silence and then thought for a while, in her quiet way. Then she said, “In a week or so they will find something else to occupy them. You must be patient.”

Lily had been expecting something very different from her mother: a long talk about rights and responsibilities and appropriate behaviors. Elizabeth Middleton Bonner would approach the problem of a daughter's compromised reputation from a number of directions at once, and leave books on her bed with passages marked for her to read: Locke on education and potential, Paine on liberty and the rights of man, and most certainly her mother's favorite, the staid old German philosopher Kant, with his eternal chasing after truth on the wings of categorical imperative.

Lily admitted with some reluctance that she had missed such discussions with her mother, and had been looking forward to them again, even if it were her own behavior and poor choices that were to be taken apart and examined with the help of Mr. Kant. And it would have happened, if not for Daniel. The truth was, they were all too worried about what was happening in the stockade at Nut Island to talk philosophy or to pay any attention to the gossips, even when it came to the mess that Lily had got herself into.

It wasn't fair, and there was nothing to be done about it. Curiosity seemed to be the only one who took note, but the comfort that she had to offer was laced with bitter truths.

“One of the worst things about being a woman,” Curiosity had said to her, “is the waiting. Seem like you always waiting for something. Just now your mama plain out of her head with worry about your brother, and you got to wait until she come up for air and see you standing there. It don't seem fair, I know. It ain't fair, I suppose. But she ain't forgot about you.”

In the evening they sat together and her mother read aloud as she always had, except that now sometimes her voice trailed away to nothing. Then they would all sit in silence looking into the fire and thinking of Daniel and Blue-Jay and Jennet and Hannah, thrown back into the maw of the war she had never even wanted to talk about. Even Gabriel was withdrawn and difficult to reach. In the night sometimes he cried out.

It was a relief to have him to comfort. Lily sat with him, his head bedded on her lap while she stroked his hair and spoke calm words and watched until he drifted back to a more peaceful sleep.

Annie followed her around in the day, full of questions that had no answers. It was odd, Lily thought, how for each of them worry took a different face. Many-Doves worked from dawn and well into the night, until she fell into an exhausted sleep. Elizabeth knitted stocking after stocking and wrote letters to every cousin and friend; Nathaniel walked.