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it was hard.
    “How’s Kitty?” Hawkeye asked.
    “Poorly, but she’ll pull through. She always does.” Not sounding as if he regretted that fact—he was not that far gone—but weary and angry and sick at heart. Just when Nathaniel was starting to soften toward him, Richard cocked his head and looked him in the eye, as plain bad tempered as ever.
    “Remember that day I told Elizabeth you couldn’t sire a child? The look on her face. But you proved me wrong, so it looks like the joke’s on me.”
    Hawkeye said, “Strange talk for a day like today, Todd.”
    He shook his head. “I’m confessing something here, Hawkeye. Doesn’t happen too often, so you should listen. Nathaniel’s got how many to his name now, four? And three in their graves that he can claim as his own. We’re even on that score, at any rate. One contest I didn’t plan to win.”
    Nathaniel jolted at that, but his father put a restraining hand on his shoulder. Hawkeye said, “If you’re looking for a fightyou won’t get it from us. We’ll just have a word with Curiosity and then we’ll be on our way home. We’ll take Ethan up to Lake in the Clouds for a few days, if you can spare him.”
    Richard grunted. “Suit yourselves.” He flashed Nathaniel a sidelong glance. “If you’re done with this little condolence visit, you can leave me in peace.”
    Curiosity was waiting for them in the hall. Standing with her arms wrapped around herself and her head turned to rest her cheek on her shoulder, lost in her thoughts. When she was as tired as she was now she somehow reminded Nathaniel of his own mother, another woman who had worn down to leather, each year scraping a little closer to the bone.
    When she looked up, Nathaniel knew that she had heard at least some of the conversation with Richard by the expression on her face.
    “I already sent Ethan up the mountain,” she said. “It don’t do the boy good, listening to his ma wail.”
    Hawkeye said, “Blue-Jay and Daniel will take care of him. We’re hoping you’ll come along too, Curiosity. If you can leave Kitty for a while and can spare the time.”
    She pulled back her head to look at them hard. Nathaniel had known this woman all his life, but sometimes it still took him by surprise, the way she read things off people’s faces.
    “Trouble?”
    Hawkeye raised a shoulder. “Maybe. We ain’t sure, quite yet.”
    She took her cloak down from its peg and settled it around her shoulders. “I hope it can wait a few hours. Look like Mariah Greber about to bring her sixth child into the world.”
    “Then we’ll walk you out to the stable,” said Nathaniel.
    “I was hoping you would.”
    When they were clear of the house Curiosity said, “I surely would like to take a switch to Richard. Don’t know why it is some men got to plead angry when they hurt.”
    “That’s the brandy working,” said Hawkeye.
    “‘Course it is, and more’s the shame on him.”
    Richard Todd was her employer, but he had also been the first child Curiosity ever delivered; she wasn’t intimidated by his money, his place in society, or his bad tempers. Not so long ago Nathaniel wouldn’t have believed that Curiosity would ever get along well enough with Richard to look after his household, but then the old judge died and for once Kitty hadput her foot down: she would not stay on in Paradise without Curiosity and Galileo. For Kitty’s sake and his own peace of mind and home, Richard had made an uneasy truce with Curiosity, but they hovered forever on the brink of warfare.
    Nathaniel wondered himself at Richard, a man who was always so busy calculating what he didn’t have that he lost sight of what was in front of him: Kitty was a good wife, mostly grown out of her flightiness and eager to do right by him. She had brought him a fine son by her first marriage to Elizabeth’s brother Julian, and that son had inherited more than half of the judge’s holdings. It seemed like Richard had almost everything