“I guess I must,” Daniel said. He leaned down to touch his forehead to her brow. “Luke?”

“With Simon and Da at the lake. Oh, look, the races are starting.” And she was gone without a backward glance.

He hadn’t gone more than a couple feet before he ran into Daisy and her daughter Solange, who had a fussing toddler on her hip.

“Hannah is looking for Callie and your ma,” he said to Daisy. “You know where I’d find either one?”

Daisy took more after Galileo than she did Curiosity, but once in a while he caught sight of her mother in the set of her eyes. She was looking at him like that now, concerned.

“Joshua took my mother home about a half hour ago,” she said. “Is there something wrong?”

“I’m just looking for Callie,” Daniel said. “Seems like the women are wanting to have one of their tea parties where men aren’t welcome. You should go along too.” It was a pure lie; he knew without being told that there was something bad going on and that Curiosity would not want her daughter and granddaughter drawn into it. But Hannah had given him no details, and most likely she had done that because she didn’t want him telling anybody anything. He managed what he hoped was a reassuring smile, but Daisy saw right through it.

She said, “You’d break into a sweat if I took you up on that, that’s plain. You come fetch me if need be. You know you don’t have to ask.”

Solange was looking around herself, and then called out. “You there, Markus! Come on over here, baby.”

Solange’s oldest boy had been running in the footrace and his clothes were soaked with sweat, but he was smiling too.

Daisy said, “You go find Miss Callie, and tell her Daniel is looking for her. Where you want to meet her, Daniel?”

“Send her up to your mother’s,” Daniel said. “That’s where I’m headed right now.”

“You planning on joining that tea party by force?”

He produced a grim smile. “If needs be,” he said. “You know I will.”

—

It was Richard Todd who had built himself the small laboratory at the edge of his cleared property, about a minute’s walk from the kitchen door. It was as well equipped as any laboratory in Manhattan or Paris or London, with a reverberating oven that had been hauled upriver by keelboat and then over land at huge expense.

Hannah had inherited her uncle Todd’s practice and his laboratory too, but while she made use of it for her medical papers and books and medicines, she balked at calling it anything but her shack.

Daniel knew his uncle Richard would find it amusing that Hannah shunned the scientific research that was his only real interest. He had found everything funny in the last years of his life, even those things that caused sincere trouble to others. He was a difficult man but a good doctor, and he had trained Hannah well.

As he came around the corner of the house Curiosity shared with Hannah and her family, he saw that the door stood ajar. Hannah leaned against the doorframe, a large open book in her hands that she was studying intently.

Curiosity appeared beside her and waved her cane at Daniel in a way that said very clearly that he had other places to be and if he hadn’t figured that out for himself, she would show him good and proper. It would take a stronger man than he was himself to challenge Curiosity brandishing her cane, but Martha was there and Martha might need him. He’d stay as close by as Curiosity allowed. Now he went a little closer, if only because he knew it would make her laugh, and Curiosity’s laugh was a kind of medicine all on its own.

“Just in time,” she called to him as he came closer. “Go on and fetch me the biggest jug from the springhouse, would you be so kind?” There was a glint in her eye that he dare not ignore, but Daniel came still closer and looked over Curiosity’s head to see Martha, who lifted her shoulders at him; whatever was causing such turmoil, she hadn’t been told yet either.

“Nothing wrong with her,” Curiosity said, thumping the ground with all the menace of an angry billygoat. “Nothing wrong with any one of your folks. Now fetch me that jug, will you?”

It was one of Curiosity’s oldest tricks, and still there was no avoiding it. Daniel fetched the jug and then was sent on a half dozen other errands. Curiosity didn’t want him to join them, but she did want to know where he was, and she was inventive when it came to errands.

First she wanted her fan, which might could be in her parlor or mayhap in the kitchen and praise God, wan’t it too hot to sit without one? Then, in possession of her fan, she realized that everybody could use one and she sent him back to look in the bureau below the looking glass in the front hall, in the cabinets under the stair, and a half dozen other places.

Daniel started with the last place she mentioned, but she had anticipated him; it took ten minutes to find the fans. It was like being caught up in a conjurer’s spell. By the time he had fetched fans, handkerchiefs, and a particular book, and filled the water jug three times, Callie and his mother had arrived.

Curiosity met him at the door again. “You can see for your own self, nobody in trouble here. So go on now, wait over at the house.”

Once again Daniel considered challenging such a dismissal, but a lifetime of experience told him it would be no use. Then he looked up and saw the rest of the men coming toward him.

Now and then Daniel had the strange idea that his father could smell trouble. It was less than rational, but then again his father had a way of showing up where he was needed, even if folks didn’t know they needed him yet. This time he had come with backup. In the three quarters of an hour since Daniel came up from the village, his father had rounded up Luke, Ben, Simon, and not far behind them Gabriel, Blue-Jay, and Runs-from-Bears.