Chapter XXIV

In a day’s time, when it had all been accomplished and Lily was safe at home, Elizabeth found herself alone in the kitchen with Jennet. Jennet looked around herself to make sure she wouldn’t be overheard, and asked a question Elizabeth had been waiting for.

“I havenae seen Daniel, not since all this moving about was decided at the supper table. Have you?”

Elizabeth had not. Daniel made himself scarce through all the tumult of moving Lily up and Martha down to the village. She told herself that he stayed away because if he could not be of help—and he could not carry anything over a certain size—he would rather not watch others do that work. But there was something else, something wrong.

“Do ye think his shoulder is paining him?”

Elizabeth touched her skirt and heard the comforting crackle of paper. The letter was addressed to Hannah, but it fell to Elizabeth to share what it said with Daniel.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Though I doubt it. If the pain were bad enough to send him to ground, he wouldn’t be around at all, and Daniel has been spending most of the day at the schoolhouse.”

Jennet pushed out her lower lip as she thought. “I thought he would come to see Lily as soon as she put foot over the threshold—oh aye, but ye ken what I mean. It’s been a full day and no sign of him. Are they at odds again?”

The little bit that Elizabeth knew she would not volunteer, nor did she want to talk about her suspicions. Because she did have them, and they had to do with Martha Kirby.

“Do ye ken if he’s been by to see Martha?”

That their minds had moved along the same series of questions did not surprise Elizabeth, but neither did it move her to talk about what she could not know for sure.

More to herself than to Jennet she said, “The only sensible thing to do is to ask Lily directly. If—when her mood settles.”

“Aye,” Jennet said. “I can do it, if ye like.”

There would be some advantages to having Jennet take on this conversation with Lily in her current fragile mood. Especially if Lily was fretting over the idea of Martha Kirby and her cousin Ethan.

There was nothing between Ethan and Martha, but there might be something—given time and opportunity—between Martha and Daniel.

Of all the Bonners, Lily was the one who was most vehement about Jemima. There were reasons for Lily’s animosity, certainly. But Daniel had the same history with Jemima, and he was far more detached when the subject came up. Certainly he did not look at Martha and see Jemima, while it seemed that Lily could not or would not distinguish between daughter and mother.

In the end, none of it was Lily’s business, just as Daniel had had no business meddling when she had first shown an interest in Simon Ballentyne. Such personal matters should remain personal, and Elizabeth must trust her adult children to make reasonable choices. She would not follow her father’s example. Judge Middleton had wanted Elizabeth to marry Richard Todd; her refusal and his interference had set a series of events in motion that ended badly. Nathaniel had lost his grandfather Chingachgook and Jemima her father.

To Elizabeth it seemed that any hope for Jemima had gone to the grave with Moses Southern. Since that day she had blamed the Bonners, and her hate for them had grown to encompass everything that stood between her and the things she believed were owed her.

But once there had been hope for her. As a young girl in Elizabeth’s classroom she had been surly and uncooperative in that first year, but toward the spring she had begun to take pleasure in her small victories. She was very good with numbers and she had a beautiful singing voice. Unfortunately she also had a sly way that made her unpopular with her classmates.

Just lately Elizabeth had been thinking a great deal about that first winter and spring in Paradise, how very different it had been from her imaginings. Elizabeth found that she was protective of her younger self, that woman on the verge of thirty who came to teach in a wilderness school with such earnest and naïve goodwill. At sixty she could see many things that had been unclear still at forty or even fifty.

Often these days she had the sense of herself nearby, watching. In those moments she had the strong urge to speak to her younger counterpart in encouraging words. She would use the same tone she did when Lily and Hannah needed comforting.

The future is mysterious and frightening to you now, but in the end all will be well. There will be great happiness and great sorrow, you will have a family, you will find yourself capable of things you cannot now imagine. But you will persevere, and one day you will look around yourself and know that your life is good and that you are, in spite of all your early doubts, happy.

“Elizabeth?”

Jennet touched her wrist, and Elizabeth startled up out of her thoughts.

“Pardon me,” she said with a small laugh. “Woolgathering.”

“We were talking about Lily. Whether I should approach her and try to find out what’s got her upset.”

Elizabeth nodded. “I think she would respond more openly to you. You are sensible and you understand her condition. I remember the affinity I felt for other bearing women when I was increasing.”

“Women going off to battle together,” Jennet said with a grim smile. “Ye neednae fash yersel, I’m not easily put off and should she throw paint pots at my head, as was once her habit.”

Elizabeth was content to leave it at that, but she reminded herself that Lily was not sick. She was with child, a condition that was always dangerous but natural nonetheless. She herself had had a difficult delivery with Birdie, and with less experienced midwives she might well have died. Now Many-Doves was gone, but Curiosity would be there, and Hannah, and Friend Molly Noble, whose skill and experience Curiosity and Hannah respected. And Simon. She would have Simon, who had loved her from the beginning though she fought her own emotions and strove to deny the attraction. Sometimes with words, and sometimes with paint pots.