The other picture was of Lily. William Tear had painted it himself, and while he didn’t quite have the technical skill of Mr. Vinson, Katie thought that he had captured Lily much better. She was standing in a sunny field, dressed for hunting, so pregnant that she seemed likely to burst. She was looking backward over her shoulder, her face only an inch from laughter.
Mum said that Tear hadn’t painted this portrait from life, but from memory. Nevertheless, it was very lifelike, and it had always conveyed a sense of freedom to Katie. The Lily in the portrait seemed happy, extraordinarily so, but Tear hadn’t missed the subtle lines around her eyes and mouth, lines that spoke of long-buried pain, the hard life before the Crossing. Katie had no idea what that life had entailed, but it had taken its toll on Lily, sure enough.
“Eighteen years ago,” Lily remarked, moving up beside Katie to stare at the portrait. “I was pregnant with Jonathan, and we had just gotten over the starving time. It seemed like everything was ahead of us.”
“What happened?”
Lily looked sharply at her, and Katie wished she could take it back. Was she the only one who sensed something wrong in the Town?
No. Jonathan knows too.
After a moment, Lily relaxed and turned back to the portrait. “We forgot. We forgot everything we should have learned.”
Katie looked down and saw that the older woman was rubbing at the scar on her palm.
“What—”
“Come on in to dinner,” Lily said abruptly, and beckoned her forward.
The meal surprised Katie. She would have thought the Tears would eat better than any other family in town—though why she thought that, she couldn’t say; perhaps something Row had told her once—but their dinner was as simple as those she ate at home: roast chicken, broccoli, a loaf of five-grain bread. They drank water, rather than ale or juice. Tear and Lily sat at opposite ends of the table, Jonathan between them, and Katie sat on the other side. When she pulled the fourth chair out, she saw that the seat was covered with dust.
Katie had always assumed that the Tears must talk about deep, weighty matters at dinner, but here, too, they surprised her. Lily was full of gossip, good-natured, but gossip all the same. Melody Donovan was pregnant. Andrew Ellis had finished his house, but he wasn’t much of a carpenter; the walls in the kitchen were so drafty that they would need to be torn out and reworked before the winter set in. Dennis Lynskey and Rosie Norris had decided to go ahead and get married after the harvest.
At each of these pronouncements, William Tear nodded, rarely commenting, though he shook his head at the news about Andrew Ellis’s house, and Katie remembered something she had heard last year: that Ellis had refused all help from the Town’s better builders. He was determined to do all of it himself, and Katie had respected that. But now she wondered if Mr. Ellis was merely foolish. Even more, she wondered what she was doing at this table. Why had Jonathan invited her here?
Jonathan asked his father if they had found any trace of Yusuf Mansour yet, and Tear shook his head wearily. The shadow that Katie had seen over his shoulder, years ago, seemed more pronounced than ever now, as though he was somehow starting to fade. She wondered, again, whether Tear might be ill, but shelved the thought just as quickly. The Town without William Tear . . . that was nothing to think of. Fever usually traveled through entire households; if Lily was ill, chances were that Tear had been too.
“Wherever Yusuf is, he’s hidden well,” Tear told them.
“Do you think he’s dead?” Lily asked.
“No,” Tear replied. He looked about to say something else, but he firmed his jaw and remained silent. Fading sunlight slanted through the open kitchen window, glinting off the silver chain that hung around his neck, and Katie remembered something else from that long-ago night: Tear had said that his visions were often no more than shadows. Were Jonathan’s visions the same? She looked between the two of them, seeing a few differences—eye color, the red cheeks that Jonathan had gotten from Lily, in contrast to his father’s pale complexion—but far more similarities. Both tall, both lanky, but even more, Jonathan had his father’s air of observation, of sitting quietly and watching until it was time to make a decision, a decision that would undoubtedly be correct.
It was a pity that no one else saw this side of Jonathan. He barely came to school anymore, but he was still an object of distance. If people would only talk to him, he would get more respect. Not as much as his father, perhaps, but at least as much as he deserved. This sense of hidden value was familiar, and a moment later Katie identified it: it was the same way she’d always felt about Row.
The talk turned to the mountain expedition, which would be leaving next week. So far, there had been two expeditions to chart the vast land outside the Town, and on the second, they had come upon mountains, but not small mountains like those to the west. According to Jen Devlin, who had led the previous expeditions, the northern mountain range was vast, with peaks so massive that they appeared impossible to cross. But Jen was champing at the bit. She meant to climb.