Between Two Shores

by Jocelyn Green

  The sky writhed like a serpent, its bright green twin wrinkling on the river. If there was one thing the display of Northern Lights told Catherine, it was that the Creator God was vast beyond all comprehension, and she was small. Perhaps even too small to capture His notice. Yet she prayed He would notice them now, and guide her.

  “What will your decision cost us?” Samuel muttered, jarring Catherine from her thoughts.

  The canoe neared. Bright Star paddled so that her vessel was parallel with Catherine’s, the sisters across from each other.

  She wasn’t alone. Joseph was behind her in the canoe, adding his powerful strokes to the water with his own paddle. No wonder they’d been able to overtake Catherine.

  Gaspard Fontaine hunched between them.

  Shock beat through Catherine at the sight of him, even as she noticed he’d been gagged and trussed, immobilizing any threat. “What are you doing here?” The question burst from her before her siblings had a chance to say a word.

  “This one was following you.” Joseph thrust the handle of his paddle toward Fontaine.

  “And so you brought him straight to us?” Samuel’s voice was flinty.

  “Because we were following you, too.” Bright Star looked over her shoulder, then continued to paddle.

  Catherine looked back, as well. Accompanied or not, the urgency to reach Quebec remained. “But why?” She sliced her oar into the water and pulled back, ignoring the ache in her shoulders. The burn in her belly was worse. Had she made a mistake in allowing them to reach her? Doubts circled, and she fought to chase them away. “Why have you come all this way?”

  The gaze Bright Star directed at Samuel was as pointed as her chin. “That one is British. We are at war. Even if we trusted him, who knows what may happen to all three of you because of the risks you take for this man?”

  “‘This man,’” Samuel repeated gruffly. “You know my name, Bright Star, and I know yours and Joseph’s. The only stranger among us is Fontaine. Tell me how bringing a Canadian militiaman right to us demonstrates a desire to keep us safe.”

  “Samuel,” Catherine whispered at him. “Don’t judge them quite yet.”

  “What would you have us do?” Joseph sat directly across from Samuel, river rippling between their vessels. “If we let him go, he could go back to Pierre Moreau or any of those schooners we passed, and they’d all be on the hunt for you at his bidding. Better to keep him close.”

  “You didn’t kill him,” Samuel observed coldly. “You could have. It might have been him who set fire to the barn.”

  Fontaine’s wide eyes gleamed as he stared at Samuel.

  “Kill him!” At last, Thankful found her voice. “Surely it needn’t come to that.”

  Catherine’s braids hung heavy on her shoulders as she rowed. She searched for meaning between and behind the words that were spoken, and within the words that were left unsaid. What she heard was that Bright Star and Joseph had come to protect her, a revelation which stood so tall in her mind that it nearly overshadowed all else. But beneath that notion she heard more. That Samuel wanted Fontaine dead, and that Thankful considered it murder. Fontaine had heard it all.

  Without altering their pace, Catherine slid a glance to the hunting knife that hung in its sheath around Bright Star’s neck, swaying against her white stroud tunic as she paddled. Joseph’s scalping knife made a dark outline against the French trade shirt he wore. Surely their canoe contained other weapons, as hers did. They distrusted Samuel as much as she distrusted Fontaine. What would happen when they stopped to rest?

  “The French are our ally until the Six Nations say otherwise.” Eerie light glowed on Joseph’s head where it was bald around his scalp lock. The feathers sprouting from his hair shivered in the breeze. “I will not kill Fontaine unless he poses a threat to my family.” He turned to Samuel. “I’ll kill any man who poses that threat, regardless of former allegiances.”

  Catherine shuddered at the fierceness in her brother’s tone. She had never seen him fight or kill, though she knew he had done both. He had hunted for her and brought her meat when she was hungry. Now he hunted for her in a different way.

  “I do not intend to hurt Catherine or Thankful.” Samuel’s voice held a struggle to keep calm.

  “We have no interest in your intentions,” Bright Star said. “Only in your actions. What would keep you from hurting her again once you get what you want, especially now that our nations are at war?”

  Catherine pulled harder at the oar, her focus fragmenting like the shards of green light moving across the night. Piece by piece, she mustered her wits. Samuel held his tongue, but she would no longer keep secrets. “Samuel can hurt me no further than he already has,” she told her siblings. “He is married. He’ll return to his wife and children as soon as he can.”

  “He has told you this himself?” Joseph asked in Mohawk, and Catherine confirmed it in the same language.

  “And still you do this for him.” A rare softness gentled Bright Star’s expression.

  “My aim is to help end the war,” Catherine reminded her, and in so doing reminded herself. “I have released Samuel Crane before.” She would do it again.

  The lack of response that followed was unsurprising. Bright Star and Joseph did not waste words and likely figured there was nothing more to say on the subject of Samuel’s family. They were right.

  A wolf howled again, and a muffled cry came from Fontaine. Catherine welcomed the distraction. Switching back to French, she asked, “And what does Fontaine have to say for himself?”

  Pulling his paddle inside the canoe, Joseph reached forward and yanked the cloth from the young man’s mouth.

  Fontaine coughed. His head hung toward his chest while he composed himself. “Water,” he rasped, and Joseph tipped a canteen into his mouth.

  Shifting her weight, Thankful turned toward the canoe. The press of her lips and tilt of her neck betrayed that she sympathized with Fontaine—if not for his actions, at least his discomfort. He appeared little recovered from the last time she’d seen him.

  “You have to believe me,” he panted.

  “No, we don’t,” Samuel said, and Joseph grunted his agreement.

  “Just listen. I did set that barn on fire.”

  Catherine’s attention jerked to Fontaine. Thankful gasped but made no further sound.

  “I knew it.” Samuel growled. “You couldn’t strike me with a rusty sickle while I was shackled, so you thought you’d commit a bit of arson while I was trapped inside. Not very sporting—”

  Fontaine cut him off. “Moreau ordered me to do it. Trained a gun on me and said if I didn’t obey a direct command, he’d shoot me for insubordination and wouldn’t miss me, since I was a useless drunk anyway. I was half out of my mind for want of drink, as you saw for yourself before he arrested you. He wanted you out of the picture, Crane, but didn’t want to dirty his own hands to do it. He said if I told the Duvals about the arrangement, it would be my word against his, and who would believe someone like me?” His voice was weak and reedy, but he seemed lucid.

  “So you did it,” Samuel ground out.

  “Consider my options!” Fontaine cried. “I would have been dead on the spot if I hadn’t. At least I knew the smoke would signal your location and you’d have some chance of being rescued. And that’s exactly what happened.”

  “Only now you’ve come to trap me and deliver me back to Moreau.”

  “No.” Fontaine shook his head furiously. “I’m deserting. I swear it’s the truth.”

  Catherine found that hard to believe. “Deserting? In the direction of Quebec, where all the armies are gathered?”

  His skin shone with a fever sweat. “We are both headed the opposite way others expect of us. Moreau believes that you headed south to Crown Point on Lake Champlain. So why would he send me north to chase after you?” He paused to catch his breath. “No, I don’t give a fig what you’re up to. I’ve had it with Moreau and with this war that never seems to end. It t
ook my brother’s life, and for all I know, my parents are starving on the outskirts of Quebec, while I spent the last few weeks surrounded by grain in abundance. No more. I’m going home to take care of my own.”

  The two vessels glided in tandem over the river. Samuel watched Fontaine in silence, his forearms flexed and tight. Bright Star and Joseph made no commentary, but Catherine knew they were listening to every word.

  She considered what Fontaine had just shared, measuring the tale in her mind. “Where is the wheat?” she asked at length.

  Fontaine stared at her for a moment before responding. “You know as well as I do. It’s being loaded onto schooners at Montreal.”

  “No. The wheat you took for your family. You would have brought some of it with you, n’est-ce pas? To feed your starving parents?”

  “You think I stole from Moreau’s storehouses?” A tremor shook his body.

  “Didn’t you?” she pressed. A man who deserted during war would have no qualms about stealing grain. Fontaine had not shown himself to be scrupled in general.

  She could hear his scowl in his voice. “You have trapped me. Neither answer would satisfy you.”

  A clever evasion. Catherine tilted her head toward one shoulder, then the other, stretching out the tension she carried there.

  “All I want is to get home. Gag me, truss me, do what you will, as long as I can reach my family. Why would you think I care any less for mine than you do for yours?” he asked Joseph. “We are not so different, you and I.” The canoe rocked, and Fontaine leaned over the side to retch.

  “Finished?” Allowing a few more moments to pass, Joseph stuffed the rag back into Fontaine’s mouth.

  Thankful winced. “How did you come by him?”

  “The day after you left, we noticed your canoe missing from your dock,” Bright Star said. “Gabriel remains at the house, and we knew you had taken the bateau, so we suspected it was someone who had gone after you, whether one of the People or one of the French. We didn’t know which direction your pursuer went, but since we knew yours, that’s where we headed.”

  “He made a fire his first night on land,” Joseph supplied. “Made it easy to find him. Easy to capture.”

  “And the canoe?” Samuel asked. “Where is it now?”

  “Lost.” Bright Star paddled with steady rhythm as she spoke. “He said he capsized near the rapids and couldn’t recover the vessel or supplies. He was soaking wet and trying to dry his clothing by the fire when we found him.”

  “So he could be telling the truth,” Thankful concluded. “He could simply be returning to his family.”

  “Or he could be lying through his teeth.” Samuel exuded frustration. “I’ll grant that you found him washed up with nothing. But I’d warrant he didn’t have proper supplies for the journey to start with. Except, perhaps, for rum.”

  Fontaine shook his head at this, protest sounding in his throat.

  “I have doubted Fontaine’s story, too, Samuel.” Joseph put his paddle back in the river. “But if he is lying, why would he confess to setting the fire? Whatever his true motives, I say we let the two men take the canoe, and I will take the women home in the bateau. I’ll loose Fontaine’s bindings so he can row to Quebec, as Samuel’s shoulder is not healed yet.”

  A knot tightened in Catherine’s stomach. Samuel’s eyes flashed a warning above his cheekbones. As tempting as it might be to say yes to Joseph’s plan, she couldn’t ignore its most prominent flaw.

  “Joseph. Thank you for wanting to keep me safe. But Fontaine has twice attempted to injure Samuel. We can’t be sure he won’t try again. Besides that, if Fontaine is unwilling to fight for his own country, he most certainly will not help Samuel serve his, even if he means him no harm. I don’t trust him to complete the task I’ve promised to accomplish myself.” She could scarcely believe her own words.

  Bright Star turned to face her. “Are you truly so full of conviction or merely grasping for more time with a man you cannot have?”

  Heat blazed across Catherine’s cheeks, though Samuel could not have understood the Mohawk words. “I’ve more sense than that, and you know it.”

  “What about Thankful?” Joseph glanced at her, a protectiveness in his tone. “Would you like to go home? I will see you safely there.”

  Thankful pulled her shawl tighter about her shoulders, pausing to consider. “What will you do, Catherine?”

  Frustration swelled, not at Thankful, but at the sheer number of times Catherine was required to make the same decision. She calmed herself with the knowledge that in less than two weeks, it would all be over and she would be home once more. “I will do what I said I would, and take Samuel to Quebec. Would you like to go back with Joseph and Bright Star?”

  Thankful’s eyes rounded.

  Joseph did not give her the chance to respond. “We will not leave you alone with two warring men. That is not something I will do.”

  Catherine met the steel in his voice with her own. “I’m going to Quebec, brother. Bright Star, I need you to be home in case the porters return from New York while I’m gone. I placed you in charge of their payment and the delivery of the trade goods they’ll bring.”

  Bright Star held up a hand. “It’s your trading post. You’re in charge.”

  Teeth on edge, Catherine calculated time and distance. By her reckoning, it was a month or longer to New York and back, less than two weeks for Quebec. “I’d feel better if you returned now, but if you refuse—I should be back before they arrive, anyway.”

  “Then so will we,” Joseph said. “We’re going with you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The river had grown narrow and felt even smaller since Bright Star and Joseph had arrived with Gaspard Fontaine. Now that the schooners had passed and would soon return, haste pressed the group to row through the night and continue on. All day, tension had strung between the vessels like a trembling fiddle string. But at least Bright Star had brought smoked fish to eat with the hazelnuts Catherine had packed in the carrying basket.

  With Thankful now near the bow with her oar on the port side and Samuel at the stern with the rudder, Catherine rowed on the starboard side from the middle, facing him.

  “Thank you,” Samuel said. “For honoring your agreement to take me north. It would have been easy for you to leave me.”

  “Not as easy as it was for you to leave me.” She bit her tongue, but too late. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  The top of Samuel’s nose and the tips of his ears were rosy from the sun, but the open collar of his fringed hunting shirt revealed the line where his skin paled to its natural color. “It wasn’t easy.”

  Easy enough. But then she chided herself. “You don’t need to explain. Best not to try.” As Thankful had pointed out, no good could come of it, and nothing would change.

  In the canoe, Fontaine bent his head over his knees, moaning about the vessel’s motion while Joseph and Bright Star paddled.

  Samuel ignored Fontaine’s groaning. “I’m not sorry for my choice, Catherine. I only want you to know it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I don’t regret it, and you need to know that, too. We’ll both be better off if we’re clear on this.”

  Water insects dimpled the river while dragonflies winged among the cattails by the shore. Catherine pulled the oar through the water a little faster, until her vessel glided ahead of Bright Star’s. “Clear on what, precisely?”

  His blond lashes lowered to his flushed cheeks. “There are different kinds of love. I do love my wife. Even though it began out of duty.”

  “How fortunate for her.” The words launched sharp and quick, and again she regretted them. Samuel was drawing a line between them, a boundary that neither should cross, no matter their past. But lingering disappointment clamored louder than logic, at least for now.

  “Fortunate?” The bateau rocked as Samuel shifted his weight and leaned forward. “Lydia was not fortunate to lose Joel, her true love, before he’d seen the face of t
heir child. It was not fortunate that when she remarried to save herself from destitution, it was to a younger man still in love with another woman, a man so lost in the destruction of his own plans that he was surely more child than husband. You didn’t see me when I was first captured and ransomed by your father, but I was nearly as adrift and useless to Lydia when I married her as I was then.”

  Catherine’s strokes slowed as she listened. She saw him in her mind as he must have been when Gabriel purchased him from his captors. Raw. Devastated. Utterly at sea.

  “Lydia knows about you.” Samuel’s grip flexed on the steering oar. “We had an agreement. She wouldn’t expect me to be Joel, and I wouldn’t expect her to be you, but there was the baby’s future to think of. I could barely look her in the eye for months, Catherine, even after we wed. I certainly didn’t touch her—not even her hand—until after the babies were born.”

  “Babies?”

  “Twin boys. I feared they would rip the life right from her as they came screaming into the world. I left the naming to her, and she settled on Joel and Samuel. The younger of the two was too small and wouldn’t nurse, and he didn’t survive his first month. Baby Joel lived, and it was a mercy indeed that my brother’s namesake was not the one we buried.” His voice grew thick. “Lydia had too much to bear. At the time, to my thinking, the wrong Samuel met his end.”

  “You can’t think God punished you by taking that innocent life,” Catherine told him. “Babies die so often, at least in New France, that there is no reason to call it judgment. It’s heartbreaking, yes, but not divine reckoning.”

  She saw his memories carry him far away and waited for him to travel back to her.

  “You could not have convinced me of that at the time, but I’ve come around,” he said at last. “But baby Samuel’s death piled sorrow on Lydia, too, and she certainly deserved no more. We swam through our grief separately for too long, but then we emerged to find each other. Lydia and I saw the burden the other carried instead of only the pain in ourselves. Comfort and patience led to respect, and eventually, to hard-earned love. I don’t use the word lightly, nor was it lightly given or received.”