Nicholas seemed his usual cheerful self, smiling broadly, one arm extended up and over his head so he could wave his whole body. The last Birdie saw of Jemima was her handkerchief waving in reply from the window.

“It don’t seem right,” said Henry.

“Should we take him with us?” Nathan asked. “Bring him home for dinner?”

“Maybe not today,” Birdie said.

“I just don’t understand it,” said Henry again. “Why would they go off without him?”

It was a question that occupied them all that Sunday at dinner and for the entire school week. Of all of them, Adam was having the hardest time understanding why Nicholas had been left behind.

Birdie had heard him asking Jennet and Luke about it after dinner that very day, and by the end of the week he had asked every grown-up in the family, as well as Curiosity and all Curiosity’s extended family.

Adam was worried, but Nicholas didn’t seem to mind that his mother and stepfather had gone away. If anything Birdie thought he was happier, mostly because he didn’t have to go straight back to the Red Dog after school, and he had more freedom to explore.

“Those boys move,” Curiosity said, watching them from her kitchen window. “Put me in mind of Daniel and Blue-Jay when they was that size.”

It was clear that Adam had appointed himself Nicholas’s guardian, and the two of them showed up everywhere, very often with Harper in tow. At first Birdie wondered if the other boys might take offense, but it was summer and there was no lack of things to do. They formed themselves into loose tribes that shifted day by day, rotating from Curiosity’s kitchen to their fort on the mountain to Lake in the Clouds to the apple orchard.

Once Birdie had followed them to the orchard after school, out of pure curiosity. Levi put her straight to work, as she knew he would. It was time to thin the apples on the branch, a tedious job. Only one in four or five apples could be left to grow, and the extras had to be carefully snapped off. The only thing that made it bearable was that everybody sang, following Levi’s lead.

Birdie had never seen Nicholas shirk any task, no matter how hard or dirty, but he had never seemed particularly interested either. Now she couldn’t tell if he liked working in the orchards, or if it was Callie who drew him back. She spent a lot of time showing him how to do things, explaining the why and how of it all. Some of it seemed to stick with him, but mostly he just gave her the same smile he gave everybody. She didn’t seem to notice that he wasn’t grasping things, or maybe she didn’t care. It was odd, and Birdie didn’t know how to explain it to herself.

“That Nicholas, he ain’t nothing like his ma,” Missy O’Brien had taken to announcing whenever she caught sight of him.

Ruth Mayfair was Quaker through and through and she never argued, but she made an exception and came as close as she ever would to calling Missy O’Brien rude.

“He is indeed a bright light in the world,” she said with a solemn look that Missy O’Brien didn’t care to notice.

“Must be Lorena’s influence,” Missy said. “She’s got a good head on her shoulders, does Lorena.”

There was another odd thing: Even people who were determined to dislike anything and everything having to do with Jemima took a liking to Lorena.

“The boy a little slow,” Curiosity said of him. “But pure of heart. Most of all, they ain’t the littlest bit of self-pity in him. He just take things as they come. That he did learn from Lorena.”

The only person who seemed to have any doubts was Levi. Levi could be standoffish, because, as Ma had told Birdie once, he had lost everybody he loved—his little brother to a terrible accident at the mill, his ma drowning, and Ezekiel gone too, and within two days of falling sick with the measles. He could be standoffish, but he loved the orchard and could be won over by anybody who showed any real interest. If Nicholas was going to make a friend out of Levi it would be by means of his help in the orchard.

If you took the time to visit with him, Levi opened up. He knew hundreds of songs and stories and he was generous with all of them. Once in a while he would play the fiddle at a party, and then he looked like a different person altogether, happy with himself and the world.

And Levi listened. He listened close, even when other grown-ups didn’t seem to take things seriously.

Birdie asked her ma about Levi and Nicholas, and from the look on her face she knew she had hit on something that troubled her.

“You know the stories about his mother’s death.”

“Cookie?”

“Yes. She died in a violent way, and some people believe Jemima was responsible.”

“I know that, Ma,” Birdie said. “Everybody knows that. When Cookie and Levi and his brothers were still slaves Jemima treated them awful. And then they got their papers—”

“Manumission papers,” Ma reminded her gently.

It meant something when Ma interrupted. A new question occurred to Birdie.

“Where did Cookie get the money to buy herself and her boys free?”

“It’s a complicated story,” Ma said. “I think all you need to know right now is that the enmity between Jemima and the Fiddlers runs very deep.”

Birdie took note of the word enmity, considered asking about it, and decided not to. Ma was looking for reasons to change the subject as it was.

“But why would Levi blame Nicholas? He wasn’t even born yet.”

“The deepest feelings are not always very rational,” Ma said. “That is especially true for the kind of wound Levi has been nursing all these years. He may believe that Nicholas is part of some scheme of Jemima’s.”