"What did Sarah think of this?" Elizabeth asked, because it seemed the safest thing to ask and also because she was truly wondering.

"I don't think she much minded, to tell you the truth," Nathaniel said. "She never held it up to me, never made any complaints. She wanted me, or she wanted Lake in the Clouds. Whichever it was that was more important to her, the result was we didn't go back to the long house.”

Nathaniel had been talking calmly, this story with all of its threads unraveling evenly. But there was a pause now, and Elizabeth thought that if she relieved him of the responsibility, he would just stop and turn inward. He glanced at her from the corner of his eye and sighed.

"Well, I was angry. Although I wouldn't admit it to anybody, even myself I didn't like the way things were going, and I didn't like Sarah much for keeping me there, and I suppose I blamed her for not getting with child, unfair as that was. So I started spending more time in the bush. Went farther afield every time I went out, and stayed away as long as I could. Spent the season up here trapping with Robbie the winter of '82, didn't get home until the spring. With a fine lot of furs to show for my trouble but with a hatful of guilt, too, for leaving Sarah alone for so long. Robbie had done some talking to me."

Elizabeth had an image that was very real to her, of a younger Nathaniel, moodier and ill at ease with himself spending long evenings in Robbie's company. She could well imagine that Robbie had talked to him, sparing him little truth, but doing it gently.

"He sent you home to Sarah," she concluded for herself.

There was a grim look to Nathaniel's smile. "That he did, with as much good advice as he could stuff into my head."

"But it didn't work?"

"It might have," Nathaniel said. "I was willing to make some compromises at that point. But no, it didn't work."

"Because?" Elizabeth prompted, gently.

"Because while I was gone Richard Todd had settled in to Paradise and built a fine house, started doctoring and making a place for himself in the village."

He was silent for a time, with no sign of what he was thinking with the exception of the fluttering of a muscle in his cheek. Elizabeth had come to recognize this sign, and knew that she had best leave him some room. When he looked at her again, the old anger was back, uncompromised by all the years that had passed since this hurt.

"I saw right away what had happened, that she had fallen in love with the man. She could never hide what she was feeling, not from me."

"But why?" Elizabeth said. "Why, given what she knew of him, what she had seen him do?"

"I don't know. Yes, I do. At least some of it. Because he never chided her about leaving behind the Kahnyen’keháka in her," Nathaniel said. "Because he was a challenge." There was a long pause, filled with tension. "Because he paid attention to her."

"Your mother," Elizabeth countered. "She must have known, she must have tried—”

“Oh, she tried," he said easily. "And so did my father. But there wasn't much to be done about it. They weren't obvious, you see. They didn't flaunt anything. To this day, I don't think anybody in Paradise has any idea of what went on.

"Curiosity does," Elizabeth said quietly.

"Because Curiosity was there for the first birthing," Nathaniel said. "Before that point she knew as little as anybody else."

"Then Hannah is in fact Richard's child?"

"No," Nathaniel said curtly. "She is mine. She was conceived the night I got home from the bush, and nine months later Sarah brought her into the world. Along with a son, who died in my hands." He sat up, his hair falling forward, and he looked Elizabeth directly in the eye, but he didn't touch her. "Hannah is my child, and I'll ask you kindly to take that as fact and never question it. Can you do that for me?"

He was looking at her impassively, but there was a wariness about him.

Elizabeth nodded.

"Now, you know about Sarah," he said, lying down again, next to her but somehow not next to her any longer. "And it's time we got to sleep."

But of course she didn't know about Sarah; she knew less of her than she had known to start with. Still, it wasn't Sarah who mattered right now. Nathaniel needed things from her that she could give him, at least for this moment, at least for now: her silence and her acceptance. Although he did not invite it, Elizabeth put her arms around Nathaniel and held him until she felt him begin to relax. In time she fell asleep herself wondering about these wounds of his, and if it might be in her power to heal them.

Chapter 31

"I wish that man would set still," Curiosity grumbled out loud as she bent to pull on her shoes.

"I'm too old to be running around this village ever time Dr. Richard Todd take it into his little head to go hightailing it into the bush."

Galileo stretched and yawned his acknowledgment, snapping his suspenders into place. "I'll have the team ready in ten minutes," he said as he closed the door behind him.

"You'd think I was the only woman in this part of the world to have ever borned a child," she called after him.

Then she looked up, eyes narrowed, at Moses Southern.

"How long she been at it?"

He fingered his beard, and refused to meet her eye. "Since early this evening."

"Hmmph." Curiosity stood and stamped her feet one after the other to make her shoes sit right. "Could go on all night."