“And did you save me any to eat?” While she bantered with her young friend, Catherine heard through the open windows the rhythmic chop of blade through wood.
Thankful craned her neck to see through a nearby pane, then whispered to Catherine, “That would be Samuel, don’t you think? Preparing fuel for our winter hearths, just as he used to do.” Catherine had told her last night that Samuel had returned. Thankful had loved him like a brother when he lived here before. “I must greet him.” She tucked a coil of hair back under her hat.
Catherine watched her go, noting the spring in her step. Timothy skipped out along with her. Thankful had only been eleven when she’d seen Samuel last. In the years since he left, she’d grown into a woman he might not recognize.
Gabriel put up a hand to gesture that Catherine should stay, and Joseph turned to see her. Though no one spoke of his real father, it had become more obvious with each passing year that he was fully Mohawk. The shade of his skin, the broad planes of his hairless face, his height. The timing of his birth. Joseph was conceived, carried, and delivered while Gabriel was gone for two years together.
“Catherine,” he said, coming toward her, “you trade with me. I will not trade with this one.” He looked down his nose at Gabriel, who was a full head shorter than he.
Outside, the sound of chopping stopped, and voices of greeting took its place. Samuel laughed. So did Thankful. They were each happy to see the other.
“Catherine,” Joseph prompted. Grey Wolf moved from the musket rack toward the tobacco.
“Yes, of course.” She went to the counter. “You’ve brought something to trade?”
“Nothing but these deerskins.” Hand splayed on the pile of animal hides, his black eyes snapped with a meaning Catherine immediately understood. He had not brought any game to her, as he often had in years past. Six years her junior at nineteen summers, he took his role as the hunter for his family seriously. Mercifully, he chose to include Catherine in his family. Lately, however, Mohawk hunting grounds had been disappearing, another casualty of the war.
“We need powder and balls,” Joseph said. “Two more muskets.”
Catherine reached beneath the counter, pulled ammunition from the shelf, and placed the bag of powder and box of balls on the counter. Suffocating heat pressed her muslin gown to her skin. “Do the French not supply you with arms? You fight for them. You risk your life for them. They should at least give you what you need.”
Black flies cut through the thick atmosphere, landing on Joseph’s quilled shirt. He ignored them. “They give four Kahnawake warriors enough for two. Two muskets, two coats, two blankets, four shirts, four pairs of mitasses, a small pot of vermilion face paint, less than a pound of tobacco, and a few cups of spirits. All of this, we are to spread among four men. Does it sound like enough to you?”
It did not.
His expression turned stony as he transferred the powder and balls into a leather bag and slung it across his chest. “Here is a thing I will tell you, Catherine. I fight not for the French, but for the People. I fight against the British who say this land should be theirs.”
“And against their allies, the Mohawk still living among them?” Catherine took up a paper fan and stirred the stifling air. More than a century earlier, the Mohawk people had been settled along the Mohawk River in upper New York State. After the Jesuits established a mission there, they encouraged many to relocate to Canada, away from English influence. Clans thinned as the “praying Indians” moved north. This war now divided them by more than mere miles.
“Sister.” Joseph smiled. “You know kinship ties are stronger than all else. Do you not remember that battle I told you of? The Kahnawake warriors defied the French orders. We would not fight our own brothers, though they stood with the British. And they would not fire upon us. And so it will ever be. I will not draw blood from the People. Only the British.”
“Only British soldiers, you mean,” Catherine added, willing him to agree with her. For it was not just the Abenaki who raided British settlements. The most notorious raid on a British settlement was one Kahnawake warriors had made on Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1704. More than one hundred civilians were captured. Some died or were killed on the march north. Some had been ransomed. But several of the elderly in the Mohawk village had skin whiter than Catherine’s. Their English names had long since disappeared. They’d been adopted as Mohawks and had chosen to stay.
Joseph stood taller, raising one eyebrow in challenge.
“Joseph.” Her fan stilled, and she leaned across the counter, her stays constricting her ribs. “You do not mean you’ll make war on the innocent. The Great Good God loves mercy.”
His eyes narrowed. “The Great Good God is just. No one is innocent, sister. No one. The settlers encroach on Iroquois land, including that of our kin on the Mohawk River. Over and over they do this, so that no treaty can ever be trusted. The war is against them as much as it is against their soldiers.”
To this, Catherine had no response. What he said was true, and she knew the Jesuit priests at Kahnawake were keen to remind him of it. From what Joseph had told her, the black robes did not restrict their counsel to spiritual matters, but preached the rightness of Mohawks fighting with one empire against the other.
Grey Wolf approached, two muskets in his strong hands. “We take these, yes?” He reminded her of the number of deerskins he and Joseph had brought.
Catherine agreed, and Grey Wolf handed a musket to Joseph. “How many moons will pass before we fight the English at our very doors?” Grey Wolf asked. “The French say they will keep them away, but did they hold them back at Fort Carillon in July? Did they even try to keep them back at Fort Saint-Frédéric?”
He set his jaw, and Joseph’s knuckles tightened on the musket barrel. She read in these two warriors the same frustration they’d been exuding since returning from Saint-Frédéric earlier this month. The French had abandoned the fort without a fight, they’d reported, just a month after they’d done the same at Fort Carillon. Worse, at the same time Carillon—or Ticonderoga, as it was now called—fell to British hands, so had Fort Niagara.
“The French give up land that is not theirs to give,” Joseph agreed. “They surrender Mohawk land, hunting grounds we rely on to feed the People. The loss of Fort Saint-Frédéric on Lake Champlain has brought the British even closer to Montreal.”
No wonder Joseph and Grey Wolf were here to secure their own muskets. No wonder Captain Pierre Moreau looked hunted, and Gaspard Fontaine preferred rum.
Near the hearth, Gabriel sat on a block chair, rubbing a polishing rag over his boots, oblivious to the unhappy tidings spoken in the Mohawk tongue. On the mantel, a clock ticked away the silence that thinned between them.
Then conversation floated in from the window. English words. Samuel’s voice.
Joseph jerked his chin toward the sound. “Who do you quarter?” The words were low and accusing. His nostrils flared, and the cords of his neck grew taut. Her brother was not slow to anger.
“Gabriel has ransomed a British soldier, a military captive. That is all.” She kept her tone light. “He speaks with Thankful in their native tongue. Think nothing of it.”
The glance Joseph shared with Grey Wolf was wary. Inclining his ear, her brother listened. “They sound well acquainted already.” Before she could stop him, Joseph strode around the counter and peered through the window. When he turned to face her again, his features had hardened to flint. “Samuel Crane. You are pleased by this?”
“I am not.” The fact that he’d asked her, that he cared about her feelings, brought into sharp relief that her own father had not.
The firm press of Joseph’s lips bespoke a compassion, however subtle, that touched her. Then understanding fled his eyes, chased by an anger she’d seen in the young warrior before. In three long strides, he was beside Gabriel, dwarfing him with his height, unleashing a string of choice words. Polishing cloth still in hand, Gabriel stood and shouted back in Fre
nch.
Catherine rushed between them, a hand on Gabriel’s heaving chest and another on Joseph’s arm. “Please,” she said in both languages, feeling her father’s heart race beneath her fingertips. “Please, do not fight here. Let this be one place we come together in peace.” For what was a trading post for, if not to be the neutral space between nations and empires and family members, where people’s needs were acknowledged and met?
Joseph’s gaze did not waver from Gabriel as he stepped backward. “Peace? There is no peace.” He turned to Catherine. “I am to tell you the porters will come at first light.”
Muskets in hand, he and Grey Wolf departed, ducking their heads on the way out. The door banged shut behind them. Through the window, Catherine watched them stalk toward Kahnawake, Timothy running ahead of them, arms flapping like a goose. Slipping a finger between her chin and the ribbons tying her hat in place, she unstuck the satin from her skin and faced her father.
Gabriel sat back down on the block chair and resumed blacking his boot. “What was that about?”
“The furs from my trade at Lachine,” Catherine prompted. “Did you not see the bales in the storeroom? A dozen of them.”
He flicked a glance toward the rear of the post. “I had no reason to look.”
“The ledger would have told you as much.” But she should not have been surprised he hadn’t checked it. Without his dominant hand, he left all record keeping to her.
Gabriel shrugged. “So the men came to trade after all, then. Well done.” He nodded, an end to his praise. “But why Joseph should be in such a foul temper, I can’t begin to understand.”
“Can’t you?”
He straightened and looked her over, lingering on the bruises he’d caused. “Marie-Catherine, I dare not ask how you came to harm, for I fear I know the answer, and I’m sorry for it. More than I can say. Forgive me, ma chère. You are all I have in this world. You take care of me. I can do better than this.”
“Yes, you can.” Catherine squeezed his hand, the familiar rush of tenderness for him stifled this time. “But there is another matter we need to discuss.”
“Ah. It’s Crane then, is it?” Standing, he dropped the rag and pulled a pipe from the mantel.
Catherine took it, filled it with tobacco, and lit it before handing it back to him. “I saw him yesterday, completely without warning. I told him to leave, and he says he can’t. Why not?”
Pipe cradled in his hand, Gabriel sent sweet blue-grey smoke into the air and shuffled to the puncheon table in the back. She followed. Chairs scraped the floor as they sat. “I couldn’t believe it, but there he was, down by the waterfront.” He put the pipe stem between his lips and spoke around it. “Samuel Crane, exactly the way we met before. Only slightly different circumstances, of course.”
“What circumstances?” she pressed.
Smoke puffed from his lips in rings, and Gabriel chuckled. “You used to love that,” he said. “Remember?”
“Papa, please. Explain what happened, from the beginning.”
Reminiscence faded from his eyes, and he cleared his throat. “While you were waiting for the furs to arrive at Lachine, I went to Montreal to hear the news down at the waterfront. You remember our old rival, the merchant Trudeau?”
She did. Monsieur Trudeau had competed with the Duvals for furs before he joined the militia. He had been killed some months ago.
“I ran into his widow, the milliner Yvette, who inherited his business,” Gabriel said. “Safe to say, she’ll be no threat to our trade. She has no idea how to manage the business. No idea how to do anything but trim bonnets and hats.”
“I’ll call on her later,” Catherine resolved. “She was always kind to me. But what about Samuel?” Impatience laced her tone.
Gabriel inhaled on his pipe once more before responding. “Straight to the point, then. Crane and dozens of others were captured by Kahnawake at Fort Saint-Frédéric and sold in Montreal to help make up for the labor shortage.”
“To work like slaves, you mean.” She folded her blistered hands on her apron.
“Oh, put away your reproach. It’s an ancient practice going all the way back to Rome. Spoils of war. The conquered in battle get to work for the victorious. Regardless, I intend to get my work out of him. Apparently he was sold to the Sisters of Charity first—the ones who run the hôpital-général. They needed help building a seven-foot stone wall around their fourteen acres just outside the city walls. That work being done, the nuns were ready to sell him and brought him and several others down to the river gates. Of course I bought him. He left without finishing his last year for me, recall.”
Catherine stared at her father in disbelief. “So there were others you could have ransomed, but you chose him because you didn’t get enough work out of him the first time?”
“Seems logical enough to me.” He waved his pipe at a mosquito. “I didn’t bring him back so the two of you could repair what was broken between you, that’s certain. I’m no romantic. You of all people should know it.”
She thought of the sketchbooks she’d found years ago, containing page after page of his first wife’s image. Isabelle dancing, reading, laughing. Isabelle bathing. If he was not a romantic now, he had been once, or perhaps he was just filled with regret for that which he could no longer have. But she knew better than to voice that thought. “No, Papa. There will be no reconciliation between Samuel and me.”
Gabriel grunted. “I figured as much. You recovered from being jilted years ago. You’re a sensible woman. Strong, like your father. Makes it that much easier to have him stay in the house with us, since he surely can’t stay with Moreau and Fontaine.”
Catherine crumpled her apron in her fist. “Samuel is staying in our house?”
He set down his pipe and it tipped, scattering half-smoked tobacco on the table. “He wouldn’t be very well placed with the Frenchmen on the other side of the wood, now would he?”
Through the window, she could hear Samuel talking with Thankful as if their worlds had never diverged. What would she have given four years ago, even three, to have him so close? Yet now his proximity felt suffocating. She waved her hat to stir a breeze.
Gabriel was still talking, reminding her that the wooden stable Samuel had occupied last time had burned down, and since their horse had been taken by the army anyway, there was no reason to rebuild it. “I wouldn’t mind if he stayed in the house he built, but he’ll have to wait until after the harvest. Who knows but he would come to blows in close quarters with Moreau and Fontaine, and if Samuel is injured, he can’t work as well. And I do intend to work him. He has a year to make up for from last time, plus more for the price I just paid.”
Her mind spun. Years. No, Samuel would never give such a slice of his life to the Duvals again. He was twenty-six years old now. If Gabriel had his way, Samuel would be working here until he was past thirty. If he hadn’t even taken the time to write to her these last five years, he wouldn’t stand for staying another seven.
“Why so downcast?” Gabriel asked. “It’s labor we can use, and just recompense for what he did. I should think you’d find the arrangement utterly satisfying, as I do.”
He was right that her broken heart had mended during Samuel’s absence. But now that he was back, she doubted every stitch would hold. “No,” she replied at length. “I am not satisfied, not in the smallest degree.”
Gabriel’s chin jutted forward. “Then it is good you have no say in the matter. Discussion has ended.”
Catherine stood, chafed raw by her father’s words. If she had stayed in Kahnawake, her voice would be sought after, as Bright Star’s was. She would be part of a council of women, deciding which men to put in power. Instead she was here, silenced like a schoolgirl though she was five years shy of three decades on this earth and had saved the trading post from her father’s sloppy management.
“Oh.” Gabriel lifted his pipe to stay her a moment longer. “Captain Moreau came by just before you arrived. I invit
ed him and his militiaman, whom I have yet to meet, to dinner tonight. It may be in our favor to curry theirs, you know. They specifically requested that both of you girls dine with us. Don’t disappoint me by serving that wretched yellow bread, either. We dine at eight. I trust that is enough time.”
It was plenty of time, in fact, for there was scant food they could even prepare. “Close the post, then,” she said. “And keep it closed until after the harvest, when I can run it again myself.”
She did not stay to hear his reaction but whisked out of the humid space and into the open air once more. The sky that greeted her churned with steel-grey clouds. Lifting a handful of skirts, she clapped her hat back on her head and hastened to beat the rain.
“Catherine!” Thankful called, still standing by Samuel and the woodpile. Her face seemed lit from within.
Catherine refused to meet Samuel’s gaze. “We have company for dinner tonight.”
Thankful hurried to join her. “Let’s hope they like soup. Thin soup. And there’s the last of the blueberries we can put out, too.”
Drops began to fall. Samuel caught up with them, arms full of firewood, his shirt draped over the pile to keep it dry. “Who are you cooking for?”
Thunder cracked overhead, and rain pelted the ground, drumming against Catherine’s straw hat and spilling over the brim. “My father must have told you. Captain Moreau and Private Fontaine?”
“Who are they?” Samuel blinked away the water that streaked his face. Rivulets traced shoulders and arms leaner than they once had been. She wanted to ask how long he’d been in captivity this time that he should have lost so much weight. But of all the questions this man might answer, that one interested her the least.
“A French officer and Canadian militiaman are billeted here, since Fort St. Louis is overcrowded,” Catherine explained. “They’re staying in the house you built. Why else did you think my father decided you should sleep in ours?”
“House arrest,” he replied simply. “All the better to keep an eye on me, I supposed. But why are they here?”
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