“But you didn’t,” I guessed.
Her chin went up at that, and I tensed, wondering if she was going to launch another one of those attacks. Then she seemed to deflate, head drooping as her hair fell forward to conceal her face. “No, I did not.”
Jeremiah paused, his gaze moving from me to her and then back to me again. “In time she became my wife in more than just name. She learned from me, just as I learned from her. A little more than a year after she came to live with us, she gave me a son.”
“Jacob,” I supplied, recalling the name from the one and only time Connor had ever spoken of his long-ago forebears.
“Yes, and then you had all you needed from me, didn’t you?” Nizhoni spat.
For a few seconds he didn’t reply, only watched her from hooded dark eyes. “That is not true.”
She shook back her head. “You may speak untruths to this girl, and she may believe them, but I was there. I know.”
“You know what you have told yourself, but that doesn’t mean it’s the truth,” Jeremiah told her. Surprisingly, his voice was calm and even a bit sad. “The world was a different place then, and men did not speak of their feelings as freely as they do now. That does not mean those feelings did not exist. I will be honest and say I did not love my first wife. She was a cousin my father urged me on his deathbed to marry, and I was a good son and followed his wishes. But she had suffered from ill health for some time, and in the end she succumbed to a fever as we were traveling down out of Colorado. I buried her there, and mourned for a life cut short, but I did not feel any great loss.”
Kind of tough for her, I thought, but I didn’t say anything. I had no experience of living in that kind of world with those sorts of expectations, so I thought it better not to comment.
“But Nizhoni,” he began, then shook his head. His eyes met hers, and it was almost as if a spark jumped between them. Oh, yes, something still lay there smoldering, even after all these years, even after all the resentment and misunderstandings. “There was much made over Jacob, I know, because finally the primus had an heir, and so perhaps Nizhoni felt overlooked.”
Glancing over at her, I could see that her expression had grown blank and cool again. Never a good sign.
I wasn’t sure if Jeremiah hadn’t seen the look on her face or was ignoring it, because he continued, “And then when Jacob was only four months old, typhoid fever struck our settlement and many others in the area. We fared better than most, as my sister Emma was a healer. But then the fever took Nizhoni, and it seemed that Emma could do nothing for her. You have perhaps seen this even now, with your science. If someone doesn’t have the will to live….”
Something else Margot had gotten wrong. At the very least, she’d been given the wrong information, but I realized I shouldn’t be that surprised by how the story might have gotten twisted over the generations. When you came right down to the point, I supposed it was a fine line between killing yourself outright and not wanting to live anymore.
“Why should I have continued to live?” Nizhoni demanded. “When you saw me only as a vessel to bear you powerful children?”
His mouth tightened, but his tone was even as he went on, “At the end, she was not herself, raving in a fever. It was very dangerous, that someone with her power should be in so little control of herself, and my brother Edmund was forced to put a spell of binding on her, so that she could not hurt anyone in the family. She cursed me then, cursed me with her last breath, saying I should have no joy of any of my wives, nor would any child of my line. At the time I thought little of it, for, as I said, the fever had quite put her out of her mind.”
During this speech Nizhoni wore an odd expression on her face, a strange half grimace, as if she were recalling those hours of pain and delirium. “Do I look mad to you?” she said at last.
“Now, no, but then was a different matter. You were so wild, screaming in both English and Diné, that half the time we didn’t know what you were saying…not until later, anyway.” His gaze shifted toward me, although I could tell it was difficult for him to look away from his wife. “She died just before dawn, and was buried in a little stand of cottonwoods down near the stream.”
Cold flooded through me as I realized that was where we stood now. Somewhere beneath my feet were Nizhoni’s bones. No wonder she had lingered here, haunting this quiet spot, for almost a hundred and forty years.
“We all did mourn her, but life goes on. I had a son to raise, and I did not wish him to be without a mother his entire life. A little more than a year later, I married a woman from one of the neighboring settlements. That…did not go well.”