“Come to me now,” he said, curling his fingers at her. “Come, hen.”

It made her laugh out loud to hear him call her hen, as if they were old dears married thirty years. She came closer and closer still, but not quite close enough.

She said, “There's only room for one to sit there.”

Quick as a snake he leaned forward, snatched her wrist and lifted her out of the water as if she weighed no more than any other fish that might swim into his net.

“What are you doing?” A stupid question if ever there was one, but he grinned at her, this new grin she had already come to recognize and appreciate.

“Why, Jennet Scott,” he said, pulling her into a straddle over his lap so that they were face to face. “What else would I be doing but once again proving you wrong?”

Chapter 7

Late September, Paradise

In the cool hour before dawn Elizabeth woke with a start and realized two things: her husband was gone, and a white owl was perched in the jack pine outside her chamber window like a lost child huddled into a blanket.

A bird and nothing more, she told herself. Feathers, beak, eyes that shone like lanterns. She would not entertain dramatic notions or talk of omens; this was her home, not a theater or one of the novels that her cousin sent her from the city.

Nathaniel was gone to hunt or check his traps or both. She would see him before long, coming into the glen with a brace of grouse or a turkey or with a doe draped around his shoulders and he would smile and hold up a hand in greeting when she came out on the porch.

Her husband was gone and so were Daniel and Lily, but Nathaniel would be back in a few hours and they would not; not today or tomorrow or even next week. Lily was in Montreal living a life Elizabeth could imagine with little trouble. She led a day-to-day existence something like the one she herself had led at the same age, when she still lived at Oakmere with her aunt and uncle Merriweather. Elizabeth had been an orphaned cousin of little means or beauty but great ambitions and imagination, but Lily was far richer in every way.

There had been one letter from Lily, if it could be called a letter at all. When the string was cut a whole sheaf of drawings had unfolded in Elizabeth's lap, each with words scribbled along the margins. Houses and shops and lanes, a market square crowded with people, a butcher's errand boy clutching a piglet while he argued with a soldier three times his own size, Wee Iona asleep in front of the hearth with her knitting in her lap, Luke bent over his ledgers. By piecing the drawings together it was just possible to extract the story of Lily's first days in Montreal.

But there was no word thus far from Daniel and Blue-Jay, who had disappeared into the war, doing things Elizabeth would not, could not, let herself think about.

She made herself look out the window only to find that the owl was gone. Some of the tension ran away from her like water wrung from a cloth; she was relieved and irritated at herself too. Elizabeth had started to think that perhaps superstition crept into a woman's mind as she got older and could no more be willed away than the lines that dug themselves into the corners of the eyes and mouth.

She sat up in bed and was thankful for the common things: the crackle of the mattress, the feel of linen against her skin, the smell of wood smoke and pinesap and her own body. The ache in her belly that only food would quiet; the fact that her fingernails needed trimming and her hair washing. Things to anchor her to this world, the one in which she must live and move no matter where her children might be.

Enough light had seeped into the dark that she could see Nathaniel's imprint in the bed beside her, the long fact of him, his weight and shape. He had left a single hair behind, a long dark hair on his pillow like a line of writing in a strange language.

Autumn had settled down over the world and the evidence was everywhere to be seen. Every day another wash of color in the forests, each more insistent than the last; the first geese vaulting themselves into the sky in the shape of a giant wing; the first squash and pumpkins ready for harvest. But even without those things Nathaniel's absence said the same thing to her, and said it more loudly.

Now that the hunting and trapping season had started she would wake every morning alone, because they were no different, really, than the beaver or the squirrels or any of the animals in the forest who must make themselves ready for the snows. Every year it was the same and every year she must struggle anew and struggle harder not to be resentful of the work that took him away from her while she slept.

Overhead Elizabeth heard stirring followed by a good thump and the sound of Jennet's laughter. She had fallen out of the bed again, as she did most mornings, dreaming herself back to her wide bed at Carryckcastle. While Elizabeth dressed she listened to the sounds of talking, too muted to really make out what Jennet and Hannah were saying, but musical and pleasing as the singing of thrushes.

They were women well versed in the sorrows of the world, but together they worked some kind of magic on each other. In this house they were become girls again. Jennet and Hannah and Gabriel and Annie; Elizabeth thought of them as four children, brimming with surprises and promise and distraction. When Hannah and Jennet had more serious things to discuss, something that Elizabeth knew must happen, they did that out of her hearing. Whether out of concern for her state of mind or simply for privacy she did not know, but Elizabeth was thankful for the wall they built between herself and melancholy.

Today when her part of the housework and fieldwork was done she would sit down at her desk. First she would finish the essay she was writing for the editor of the New-York Spectator, which must go with the next post to the city. In six or eight weeks it would come back again in smeared newsprint. When that obligation was met she would write a letter to Lily, and one to Daniel.