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sweet tea with something else in it, just like this—fiery and sour.
    He felt the presence of the missus, with her kind gray eyes and her hand on his shoulder, and knew he would never see her again, either.
    He took another swig and then stumbled as some big creature passed under the flatboat. He felt a steadying hand at his side.
    â€œSit here with me,” the herb woman said, pulling him back into the present.
    He sank down heavily beside her, almost spilling the precious elixir that had brought his old life back so vividly. Would he ever feel at home again?
    How much farther did he have to go to find that place?
    OCTOBER 1820
    QUEEN CITY, OHIO
    Under a clear October sky, the woods bordering this river town and the hills on the Kentucky side had burst into color. Maple trees flamed orange, the dogwoods deepened into a reddish purple, and the redbuds glowed a golden yellow. Only the sycamores, with their ghostly peeling bark, did not put on an autumn display. Their leaves simply dried up and fell.
    John James would not notice the trees, as his wife, Lucy, knew. He was looking for birds. With any luck, a blue heron, a bald eagle, or a passenger pigeon. He had taken the boys, Gifford and Woodhouse, with him. And when they returned at dusk, they would all be together again. Lucy treasured this time when they all lived under the same roof because she knew it would end soon. It always did.
    Lucy, small and dark haired with a ramrod posture, saw them in her mind’s eye making their way along the marshy areas of the Mill Creek. Back in Pennsylvania, when she and John James were courting, she would have gone with him, returning later to paint a watercolor in her sketchbook or play an arpeggio on her pianoforte, the descending notes like falling leaves.
    But now there was no sketchbook and no time to paint. There was no pianoforte. There was only this bare little house and the arts of a gentlewoman’s life that she now taught to private school students. For pay, not pleasure.
    The only piece of furniture she did not miss from their oldlife was the painted pine cradle that had rocked their two baby girls, buried only a year or so apart in little graves down the river in western Kentucky.
    Lucy looked out the window onto the dusty street. It did not help to ruminate on life’s misfortunes, she thought, but she had no one to talk to but herself.
    She loved her husband. She
loved
him. He was handsome, affectionate, intelligent, and good to her and the boys. But it was difficult, sometimes, to live with him, just as it was once difficult to understand his French-accented English with Quaker “thee” and “thou” added for good measure. That was how he had learned English when he recovered slowly from yellow fever years before, and that was how he spoke it still. Lucy had always found it charming, but most people didn’t know what to make of him, even here in this frontier town, where one would meet every kind of vagabond in buckskin clothes and coonskin cap.
    John James Audubon was a born dreamer. Lucy had to be the practical one.
    His $125 monthly salary at the new Western Museum, promised by Daniel Drake, had not materialized, nor was it likely to. The financial panic that had doomed them in Kentucky now surged like a tidal wave upriver to Ohio. Daniel Drake was about to lose his fine house, his garden, and his carriage. After a few weeks of exacting taxidermy and painting realistic backdrops for wildlife exhibits planned for the new museum, John James had wisely packed up and brought his work home.
    With no other means of support, he turned again to portraiture, charging five dollars for each work, as he had in Louisville. He limned General and Mrs. William Lytle in three-quarterprofile and was paid before they, too, became victims of the crash. When portraiture was scant, he gave drawing and painting lessons at Miss Deed’s Seminary for Young Ladies. But this could not go on.
    If Lucy’s