His chin jerked down. “I do not call the French a very good ally to the People. I do not wish to bend to their wishes like slaves. My concern here is the risk to Bright Star if she is caught. This is a dangerous undertaking even for a friend, and Samuel Crane is not her friend, nor mine. Catherine, he is not even yours, or he would not have broken his treaty with you. He hurt you and Thankful when he had it in his power to make both of you happy. Why would we help this man?” Lifting his chest, he crossed his arms and frowned.
Catherine’s throat dried. How she loved this half brother of hers, shunned by Gabriel and yet fully devoted to his sisters. In many ways, he was the link between them. If he hadn’t told Catherine when Bright Star’s first husband and children had died, she would never have reached out to her grieving sister. If not for his encouragement, Bright Star may not have agreed to trade in Albany with Catherine. Now he had placed himself at the crossroads of their well-being yet again. Catherine knew he questioned her out of concern, not contrariness.
“I don’t see this as just helping one man,” she ventured, “but as aid for a cause. If what Samuel says is true, his information can bring a victory so resounding that the war would end before another winter sets in. This is for peace.”
Bright Star slid down from the branch and placed a hand on her hip. “A peace by which his empire stands to gain. Will the British respect our land and customs any better than the French?” Her lips puckered. “I do not trust Samuel Crane enough to expose my neck for him.”
“What do I do?” Catherine whispered to herself, barely aware she’d spoken.
“Do nothing.” Joseph’s tone brooked no argument. “Leave the British man to his captors. It is not your place to save him, so let his path run its course. But you must do nothing to change it.” His hand again clutched the handle of his tomahawk.
“Promise,” Bright Star prompted.
Catherine forced her lips to bend in half a smile and slid down to stand beside her sister, smoothing her skirts from her waist. But as they parted ways, one refrain echoed in Catherine’s mind: Jaghte oghte.
Chapter Fourteen
August 1754
Five Years Ago
Crack!
Catherine sat up in bed, listening. Hugging her feather pillow to her chest, she leaned against the mahogany headboard and stared at her open bedroom window.
A pebble sailed in on a moonbeam and skittered across the floor until it disappeared beneath her bureau. Wide awake now, she parted the netting that surrounded her bed, then went to the second-story window and leaned out, her braid a thick rope hanging over her shoulder.
Starlight glanced off Samuel’s cheekbones as he beckoned to her from the ground. With a finger to her lips, Catherine gestured for him to wait. Tugging a light shawl over her shoulders, she stole down the corridor. Snoring sounded from her father’s chamber, and when she paused at the door to Thankful’s room, she heard no sign that the girl had awakened. Satisfied, Catherine glided down the winding stairs and out of the house.
Samuel captured her hand and brushed a kiss to her cheek as soon as she stepped outside. Moonlight cloaked the moment in silver, an ethereal glow that almost convinced her she was still dreaming.
A dream, indeed, to have the love of this man before her.
“I can’t sleep,” he murmured. “I had to see you one last time before I leave in the morning. Come,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
The hem of her nightdress absorbed the dew from the grass as they crossed the yard, moving past the trading post and into the woods. “Samuel.” Her steps slowed as the trees blotted the stars from the sky. She had no idea where he was taking her.
“Trust me.”
She did.
Blindly, she followed him, her braid swinging behind her, brushing the backs of her legs above her knees. Fallen pine needles and twigs crunched beneath her toughened feet until they came to a clearing where a small wooden house rose up to greet her.
So this was the secret project he’d been disappearing into the woods to work on in his free time this summer. No wonder he’d made her promise not to follow him or ask questions. This was for her. For them. For the family they would begin.
“I thought—I thought you hadn’t decided where we would live yet.” She squeezed Samuel’s hand, the roughness of his palms as endearing as his smile.
He leaned down and kissed her forehead. “I made up my mind. There’s plenty of room in your father’s house, but you know I can’t share a roof with him. Even Joseph agreed with me, which is why he lent a hand a few times himself.”
“My brother helped you?” She looped her arms around Samuel’s solid waist.
“I caught him spying on me, as usual. When I asked for his help, he gave it. He doesn’t say a lot, but I can tell he loves you very much.”
Catherine smiled. Joseph had been more accepting of the engagement than Bright Star had been. “I’m glad you could work together.”
Samuel raised an eyebrow. “Gabriel wasn’t about to try. We’re lucky your father is letting me go now and then pay off the last year of my debt after we’re wed. He knows I’ll come back for you, if not for him. When I do, I’ll take you out from under his thumb, too.”
“Samuel,” she scolded gently. “He doesn’t show it very well, but deep down, I know he loves me.”
Samuel led her to a pair of rocking chairs on the front porch of their new home. He sat in one and pulled her onto his lap. “He needs you. As he needs me, and even Thankful, whether he’ll admit it or not.”
Catherine tried not to chafe at his words. “Need and love are practically the same thing, aren’t they?” For she loved Samuel and needed him, too. In different ways, she loved and needed her father in her life.
“Ah, but to love someone even when you don’t need them—isn’t that a deeper, less selfish kind of love? To say, ‘I love you and will always love you, even if I stand to gain nothing by it.’ That’s sweeter still, is it not?”
She took in the depths of his eyes, moved by his sincerity but unable to grasp this kind of love. “That doesn’t sound like a good trade to me.”
Samuel chuckled and kissed her cheek, coaxing a smile from her. “I’ll spend the rest of my life showing you what I mean. Now, as to this house, it isn’t large, but it will grow as our family does. I wanted you to see it before I begin the journey tomorrow. It’s a promise, Catie. A promise that I’ll return after I’ve seen Joel. I need to tell him that what man meant for evil, God used for my good. He’s given me you. And then I’ll come back.”
Catherine had no reason to doubt him, and it was only right that he visit the brother he’d spoken of so often. Yet she was unsettled by the prospect of his absence and the distance he must cross. Dismayed by his inference that he loved her but didn’t need her.
“I wish I could go with you. I’d love to meet Joel.” Gladly would she help paddle and portage the canoe.
“Your father would never agree to it. Keeping you here guarantees my return.” He winked. “Besides, he may have begun the trading post here, but you’re the one who keeps it running smoothly. The Mohawk porters will work for you in ways they would never work for him. He doesn’t respect them, and it shows.”
But Catherine couldn’t ignore the foreboding that claimed her. “I can make arrangements,” she said, her hand on Samuel’s stubbled jaw. She breathed in his scent of sawdust and pine. “Give me an hour of daylight before you leave, and I’ll go to Kahnawake to ask Bright Star to stay here and manage the post while I take you instead . . .” Her voice trailed away as she heard herself grasping after him. It wasn’t like her.
Neither would it work. Bright Star would never work directly with Gabriel, even if begged. Besides, Catherine had Thankful to think of. The child would hate being left behind by both Samuel and Catherine. Her fear of losing Catherine was beyond all reason until one considered how she had lost her parents.
A sigh brushed Catherine’s lips as she surrendered to the ori
ginal plan. She would stay with Thankful, Gabriel, and the trading post. Bright Star and the other porters would take Samuel as far as Albany, where she would conduct business for Catherine’s post, trading beaver pelts for British stroud and kettles. From Albany, Samuel would travel east to the Massachusetts Bay Colony while Bright Star returned to Kahnawake.
“I’ll stay,” she conceded. She wondered if this was how her mother had felt in those years when Gabriel had left her to go trapping. He had always returned to her, though months stretched long in between. How she wished she could talk to Strong Wind now.
“If anything should delay me, know it’s only temporary.” Samuel spoke in soothing tones, but all she heard was delay. “Come here, to our house, and imagine how it will be once we’ve filled it with children of our own. I’m coming back for you, Catie. Do not doubt it.”
She turned to him, wrapping her arms about his neck, and kissed him with an urgency she could not name, a need she would not admit.
He loved her, and that was enough. He would come back to her. All she had to do was wait.
Chapter Fifteen
August 1759
Shadows retracted as the morning sun crept higher. A half hour had passed, maybe more, since Bright Star and Joseph had disappeared into the wood, leaving Catherine with their refusal to escort Samuel to Quebec. She understood their reasons.
And yet the matter remained unresolved in her spirit.
Wind sashayed through the branches above her, sending fallen leaves into a swirl that reflected her tumbling thoughts. Suppose Samuel did not take his information to General Wolfe. Suppose there was no battle before the British were frozen out of the St. Lawrence River, and that the wheat harvest was delivered to the French and Canadian troops on time. If what Moreau had said was true, Quebec might survive this winter, but what of the people of Montreal, with all of its grain gone north? And what of next winter? Would the country remain on the brink of starvation, cutting rations by quarters and halves?
The air smelled of warm earth and pine needles, but Catherine could already feel the season beginning to turn. Another thought gripped her, bringing a chill to her skin. King George’s War had lasted four years here in North America, and at the end of it, all conquered territories were returned to their original empires. Four years of fighting, suffering, capturing, dying, for naught. The only difference at the end of that war were the families ripped apart by raiding abductors or death. Across the Atlantic Ocean, France and England had vied for more land. The colonies had fought, along with their Indian allies. People died, homes were destroyed, and relationships ruined. And nothing was achieved.
Would this war be any different? Or, if British victory was inevitable, what would be gained by delaying it?
Unease screwed tight in her middle, its sharp edge wrapped in the usual hunger. The cramping in her stomach had grown harder to ignore. Perhaps she shouldn’t, for it represented the hunger so many people now endured. The empires were using the colonists as a puppeteer pulls the strings of marionettes, but another year of war was one more year New France could not afford.
A rhythmic pounding drew her attention to Samuel perched on the roof of the house, hammering new shingles in place of leaky ones. From the shade, she could watch him unobserved. But she would not allow herself to do so.
Hands still stinging from scrubbing laundry, Catherine retied her hat into place. Flapping her apron against a cloud of gnats, she stepped between pinecones and emerged into the sun just as her father came out of the kitchen, a yoke over his shoulders. Empty buckets swung from ropes on each side. Hat askew upon his bowed head, his left hand and right elbow held the ropes to keep the buckets from swaying too wildly.
Hoisting her skirts in her left hand, she hastened to meet him. “Out of water, are we? I can help, if you like.”
“Let an old man be of some use yet, won’t you?” His tone was gruff, but the plea behind it sincere.
“Then I shall walk with you.”
A grin softened his weathered face. “And I shall be glad of the company. You’ve been gone so much lately.”
So he’d been lonesome. For her. It was a notion both sad and soothing. Glancing at her father as they walked, Catherine noted with a pang how thin his shoulders and arms had become, how narrow his neck. Even his hair had thinned, either from age or the famine, or both. His hat slipped forward, and she pushed it back into place with a smile.
Beneath a sky of peerless blue, they went to the creek behind the trading post and found the spot where water ruffled over rocks made smooth and round by its flow. On the opposite bank, butterflies opened and closed their black-veined wings on purple wildflowers. Gabriel knelt on one knee, and Catherine scooped clean water into each bucket.
“Ach.” Pushing himself back to his feet, Gabriel widened his stance to support the weight of the full pails. “Look at your hands now. Come, let me see the extent of it.”
Reluctantly, she turned them up and back again, revealing blistered palms from scythe and sickle, and cracked knuckles reddened from soap. “They’ll heal, Papa.” She slipped her hands into her apron pockets.
He exhaled the sweet tang of his pipe smoke. “I never meant you for fieldwork, you know. I’m not pleased it’s come to this, no matter the bluster I may put on for the captain. The sooner his business here is done, the sooner you and I can get on with ours, eh?” He slanted his head toward the trading post. “We’re losing trades with you away at the fields every day.” The sleeve on his abbreviated right arm worked loose of its pin and fluttered in the heat-laden breeze.
As she repinned the sleeve for him, Catherine felt how reduced the stump had become beneath the linen. “Business is slow right now, anyway, and likely will be until our porters return from New York. But I appreciate you heeding my wishes and keeping the post closed while I’m not here to manage it.”
His laugh was not darkened by drink or bitterness. “You and I both know I make a muddle of things almost as soon as I enter the place. I don’t know where I’d be without you.”
The rare praise took Catherine by surprise, but she knew better than to make too much of it. “Thank you for saying so,” was all she allowed herself, grateful that this time his words were a balm and not a club.
He winked at her. “I don’t say what I should often enough, I own. And what I shouldn’t say likely comes out too frequently. That’s the drink, you know, don’t you?”
Sunshine beat down upon Catherine’s hat and shoulders. With only a moment’s hesitation, she decided to take advantage of his good spirits. “I do. You’re a better man without it, Papa.”
Gabriel gripped the rope from which one bucket hung. His opposite elbow steadied the other. “It’s a man’s right to ease his burdens and wet his whistle. Besides, your mother tried keeping me from my drink for a time, and my body couldn’t cope with the deprivation.” He licked his lips. “The only thing for it was more rum. It’s good medicine, that, and I take it faithfully.” The discussion ended, he pivoted to carry the water away.
But when he cast a glance toward Samuel, who was climbing down the ladder from the roof, he turned back toward Catherine, sloshing water into the grass.
She went to him. “What is it?”
His voice lowered. “Moreau told me the Montreal prison is still overcrowded, but as soon as the space allows, he means for Samuel to go. I fought him on it, of course, since Crane belongs to me and has committed no crime. Moreau styles himself a stallion in that fancy uniform, but he’s skittish as a colt. If he takes Crane, he’ll be stealing my property. I daresay the law is on my side. But if you see Crane saying or doing anything to incite the soldiers, put a stop to it straightaway, or we’ll lose more than we already have.” He tapped the side of his nose. “Crane is an infuriating fool, but a useful one. Talk sense to him, Catherine, in the way only you can. I’ll leave you to it.” Bearing his yoke, he trudged away.
Samuel headed toward her, the sun gilding his hair and shining on bronzed arms where h
is shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbows. She met his gaze across the distance of years and broken dreams, for she stood beside the very creek in which he had proposed marriage.
But it was a question of war that brought him now, and she could no longer put off her answer.
Pulse quickening, Catherine beckoned Samuel into the dappled shade of birch trees. “I see my father has put you to work on the Sabbath, too.”
“The roof, you mean?” He moved his shoulder in a circle, the one he’d dislocated years ago. “I didn’t mind. It was easy enough to repair.”
If only all things were. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. By the way, you’d be amazed at the view from up there. You want to know what I saw?”
Catherine waited, head tilted.
“Your hands.” Smiling, he reached into a pocket and withdrew the jar of salve she’d made for his ankles. “All right, I didn’t get a good look, but if they held your father’s interest, my guess is you could use some of your own medicine. Let’s see.”
Resigned, Catherine held out her hands. What a mess of calluses, blisters, and cracks. Whatever vanity she may have owned had dissolved in the laundry tub along with the lye.
“See, that’s what happens when you don’t spend years toughening up your hands like me.” He scooped ointment out of the jar with his finger and gently applied it to her skin.
She sucked in a breath at his touch on her palms, fingertips, knuckles. The slight pressure brought relief to her skin, but her heart pushed hard against her chest. Mastering herself, she chuckled. “I am covered in salve enough for both of us. You might have saved more for yourself.”
Replacing the lid, he slipped it into her front apron pocket. “I suspect Thankful may have use of it, as well.” Bending, he snapped seedpods from some pickerelweed, and Catherine’s stomach groaned loudly enough to hear. It felt as though it were gnawing at her backbone.
Samuel noticed. “I’d say it’s time you pick some seed yourself, but I don’t think it would taste very good right now.” He nodded at her ointment-coated hands. “Anyone watching us?”
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