A cold wind riffled through Samuel’s hair and brought a faint pink to his nose and ears. “It is. I know you’re anxious to return to your family. There’s a British sloop heading upstream tomorrow morning. The captain has agreed to take you and your canoe as close as he can get to Trois-Rivières. He’ll give you rations for the rest of the journey, which you’ll have to manage on your own. Would that suit?”
Relief washed over her. “It would suit me very well.” Paddling upstream would test her stamina and her three-week-old wounds severely. She doubted she’d have much energy left to forage for food.
“It will cut your travel time by half and protect you for the most contested stretch of the river. French troops who retreated after the battle are still camped between here and there, with a large group near the mouth of the Jacques-Cartier River.”
Seeing Cap-Rouge in her mind, she drew a fortifying breath and felt only the slightest twinge. “Whatever happened to all that wheat, Samuel? All the grain from Montreal. Where is it now?”
He shifted on the bench. “I don’t know for certain. Some say that as the Quebec garrison laid down their arms in surrender, Monsieur Cadet was still desperately trying to get provisions to the city. He was too late, of course, and I hear that what he brought was soggy and rotten.”
Dismay crawled over Catherine’s skin. “But the majority of it was edible.” The pleading in her tone surprised her. “Please say it wasn’t all wasted.”
Small lines bracketed Samuel’s mouth. “I reckon you were in too much pain to notice, but two days after Moreau attacked you, the heavens opened up, Catherine. Torrents of rain, high winds. The wheat was still in transit in open bateaux, with only burlap sacks and wooden barrels to protect it.”
“Then it was ruined!” Her stomach rolled at the magnitude of the loss. “All that food. It never reached the soldiers. Montreal will go hungry another year for nothing.” A groan rose from the depths of her spirit. Trapping a sob in her chest, she let tears roll silently down her cheeks. She lifted her face to the open sky and whispered, “Lord, how long until we have peace?”
Samuel clapped his hat over one knee and leaned forward, clenching his hands together. “I am sorry. Truly.” From the courtyard behind them, the grenadiers laughed with the staccato burst of musketry.
Catherine tasted the smoke in the air from their cookfire. “Will the British army feed the residents here with their provisions?” The British Royal Navy had already been landing food for their garrison in addition to the cattle she’d seen on the fields.
“Not as an official policy, no.” Shadows layered Samuel’s expression. “A couple dozen soldiers are helping harvest the wheat in surrounding fields here, whatever can be found this late in the season, but British rations must be distributed to the military. Even so, soldiers have been trading their food with residents already.” He glanced at her. “You understand.”
A rueful smile curled her lips. Of course she did. The ankle-length, fur-lined cape and silk hood he’d brought her were his to give because he’d traded his food to get them.
Quiet enveloped them as they sat side by side. There was little left to say. Pressing a hand to the fluttering in her stomach, she asked where and when to meet the sloop in the morning, adding that there was no need for him to see her off, for she hated drawn-out farewells.
“So this is good-bye, then.” Samuel stood and helped her do the same. A muscle worked in his jaw. “To say thank you seems so insufficient. So incomplete. I can’t repay you.”
She smiled into his sun-bronzed face. “If I’ve learned anything from you, it’s that life is about far more than equal exchange.” She paused to master herself. “I’m so glad I knew you, Sam. You gave me hope and love when I needed it most, and more confidence than I knew I could possess.”
He swallowed. “And you have been more to me than words can say. Those years we had together—” He paused as if gathering his thoughts from a distant place and time. “We were kids when we met. I was shattered and lost, but you helped shape me into the man I am. For that, and for these last few weeks, I’m grateful.”
The crack in his voice sent bittersweet memories washing through her. “After you left, I was so hurt,” she said, “that I wished I’d never met you. But what a loss that would have been. I love all the things you were to me. I love that you do the right thing.” The admission was a release, for her and for him. Tears rolled down her cheek, and she dashed them away.
His lips parted in obvious surprise. “Thank you,” he whispered. “I cannot tell you what it means to hear you say that.”
“You don’t have to. I know.”
Samuel shifted his feet, and dust clouded the tops of his boots. “I once told you to find a husband to bring you the happiness you deserve. That was ill phrased. I wish for you all the happiness and peace that life and God can offer, Catie, whether or not you marry.”
She tucked a loose strand of hair back inside her hood. “And I wish you the same, with Lydia, Joel, and Molly.”
Lines fanned from his brimming eyes to match his wavering smile. “Could I—if it wouldn’t hurt—” Samuel dropped his gaze to the hat in one callused hand, then looked back up at her. Without another word, he opened his arms.
Swallowing a swell of emotion, she stepped into his embrace and felt it wrap gently around her one last time.
Then she let him go.
Chapter Thirty-One
It was not weakness of body that shuddered through Catherine as she pushed southwest on the St. Lawrence River. Before she’d parted ways with the sloop downstream of Trois-Rivières this morning, one of the laundresses on board had helped her bind her ribs, the constriction a necessary support. Gone was the freedom of movement afforded by the buckskin dress she’d lost. But this was not what hindered her breath.
Dark rumors had swirled about the docks where she’d disembarked. Stories too horrible to be believed. She’d heard tales like this before.
Some time after Catherine moved from Kahnawake to live with her father, he told her about a man who skipped observing Lent seven years in a row and turned into a loup-garou, a werewolf forced to wander the countryside alone for the rest of his life. There was only one cure. Someone who had known the werewolf as a man had to recognize him and draw his blood. Catherine came to think of Gabriel as the loup-garou, cursed to meanness and isolation. She’d convinced herself she could save him, for she remembered the merry papa he’d once been. “But will you draw his blood?” Joseph had asked, and her heart sank. He would do it himself to save her, he’d said, but he harbored no memories of Gabriel being kind.
Later, Catherine had been trimming her father’s fingernails for him and accidentally cut close enough to the quick that he’d bled. She apologized profusely, but to her astonishment, he chuckled and wiped the drop away with his thumb. “Ah, child,” he said, eyes crinkling, and kissed the top of her head. “I daresay I’ve had worse cuts than this.” Her gaze dropped to his shortened arm, then back to the rare smile on his face. “Come now, clean me up, for you’re the only one who can.”
She’d broken the curse, she told herself. The papa she remembered and loved was back.
But his good humor didn’t last. Catherine hadn’t cured him of himself after all. “Some stories don’t end the way we want them to,” Bright Star had replied when Catherine told her.
The river widened, and Catherine glided onto Lac Saint-Pierre. As far as she could see, the surface was covered with snow geese gathered for their annual migration. Then a wave of the honking birds took flight. More rose up after them by the thousands. Tens of thousands. They lifted in clouds and in lines, layering to blot out the sun. The squawking magnified to an impossible scale, buffeting her ears. Still she paddled beneath a sky turned dark with black-tipped wings.
How she envied the geese their effortless speed. By the time she reached the end of the lake, her ears still rang with their noise, and her spirit still felt shadowed, though daylight had returned.
/> The story that haunted her now was the news that there had been a raid at Odanak just yesterday morning by an entire band of men who might as well be loups-garous. “Only a few escaped,” she’d heard.
At last Catherine turned onto the Saint-François River and paddled toward Odanak. Nerves taut, she scanned the shoreline. Her siblings and Thankful ought to be home by now. But if Joseph’s convalescence had dragged on, they might have remained in Odanak, as Catherine had tarried at Quebec.
Miles passed. The air began to smell and taste of smoke. The bindings about her ribs forced her breath to remain unnaturally calm.
A canoe floated ahead of her, caught between the shore and an uprooted tree that had fallen into the river. Pulse throbbing, she steered for it. “Hello?” she called. “Is someone there?”
Catherine pulled alongside and peered in. Two adults and a child were bent forward, bullet holes in their backs, their blood dark puddles beneath them.
“Bright Star!” she cried, jerking away from the Abenaki bodies. “Joseph! Thankful!” The names of those most precious to her tore from her lips with a force that stabbed her rib. Sweat covered her in an instant. Slashing her paddle through the river, she scanned all around her, searching and praying she would not find them.
A woman’s body was splayed on the shore as if she had just climbed out on the other side. A gash through her Abenaki tunic was the size of a tomahawk blade. Catherine’s stomach emptied, and she could not fill her lungs. Fear and horror turned her hollow.
She clawed off her hood and cape, leaving them in her canoe when she beached it on the low-lying terrace that led to the settlement. Her skirts in one hand, she stumbled up the slope to a village all but razed to the ground. The wooden palisades were gone, the roads piled with ash and cinders. Wampum beads mixed with melted silver. Every house had been torched save the three that had been used to store corn. Bodies were strewn facedown in the streets, cut down by bayonet or tomahawk and left without their scalps.
“Bright Star! Joseph! Thankful!” She called their names again and again, like Hail Marys on an endless string of rosary beads. She was gasping, tripping, shaking.
Catherine’s chest burned, but her hands and limbs were shaking with cold. She felt no pain in her rib or stitched-up cut. The sun stood still as she combed through Odanak for the living or for the remains of those she loved. After finding a broken pipe stem that had once belonged to Fawn, she dropped to her knees and wept, for she could not muster the air to scream.
Sluicing the tears from her face, she summoned her memory. What had she heard this morning? That American rangers had done this, led by Robert Rogers, on General Amherst’s orders. That the carnage was reprisal for all the native raids launched from Odanak on New England for decades. Or was it in retaliation for the mistreatment of the two British officers and six Stockbridge Mohicans the Abenaki had called spies? Whatever the reason, the rangers had attacked before dawn and massacred all but twenty captives—
Captives. Bright Star and Joseph might be among them. Thankful might have been spared because of her heritage. Her thoughts spun until she forced herself to focus on the fact that there were survivors. She searched her soul for some promise she might offer up to God so that her loved ones would be among them.
But that was folly, an old trading habit. God was not to be bargained with. She had nothing to entice Him, for she possessed nothing He needed. Yet He loved her, and that was what she clung to. With empty hands, she begged that Bright Star, Joseph, and Thankful were safe. But the question trailing her prayers grew harder to ignore. If she could not bend God’s will to hers, could she possibly bow to His?
A howling gust of wind kicked up a cloud of dust. Coughing, she pushed herself up from the ground. Such a wind would have lifted the scalps on the hundreds of poles around this town. Now it stirred the ashes of the Abenaki who had taken them or condoned it.
Her shadow lengthened as she stood there, until finally she realized time had passed without her. Still dazed by the destruction, she walked back to her canoe. She would travel no farther tonight and had no appetite for her rations, but her cape would be her blanket while she rested in one of the houses still standing.
Stiffly, she scooped up the garment from the bottom of her canoe, then folded it over her arm and trod up the sloping shore. Soft ground cushioned her steps, and the air was fresher here among the pines that fringed the banks. This was a better resting place than one of the storehouses. It was not unlike the one Bright Star had found for those two French lookouts. There was even a willow tree a short distance away from the river, boughs bending as though to comfort. She drew near it.
And stopped.
A bed of rocks mounded the earth at the base of the trunk. The rectangular shape stretched as wide as a man and as long. A grave, carefully made, the way Bright Star had taught Catherine to do.
Her spirit reeled back even as her feet slowly carried her to the grave’s edge. There was carving on the wide trunk behind it.
JOSEPH MANY FEATHERS
Slain protecting his sisters
4 Oct. 1759
WE LIVE
Unable to breathe, Catherine dropped the cape, fingers flying over the buttons on her bodice to unfasten them. Tears blinded her, and sobs struggled to break free. If she could not get air, she would drown in her grief. Nearly frantic, she peeled down her sleeves and bodice, ripped out the pins that held the bindings in place around her torso. She unwound the strips with shaking hands until she stood panting in chemise and skirts.
A keening erupted from her unbound lungs with such force, her mother’s people would have been ashamed. They would have admonished her to endure it with dignity, like the eldest sister in Bright Star’s story, the one who mourned the loss of her siblings without bowing down.
But Catherine was not Strong Wind or her people. She was fully and wholly herself, and right now she felt every inch a river rapid raging with her own tears. She gave herself up to their release. Without thought for her rib, she threw herself down on Joseph’s grave and wept. If she was a river, he was the rocky bed beneath her.
Pain rushed in where she’d been hollowed out by the sight of Odanak’s ruins. The aching rib and lungs were nothing compared to the loss that filled her now. This was her Joseph, the son whom no father had claimed, the brother who had bridged the gap between sisters, and chosen not a wife to protect, but them.
Darkness fell, and the stones grew cool, but Catherine did not forsake her hard bed. After rebinding her ribs, she refastened her bodice and pulled her cape to cover her and her brother both. The sharp edges of Joseph’s stony mantle pushed into her body.
Wind sang through the willow, a lullaby. The river lapped at its bank, steady as a heartbeat. Eventually, sleep carried her away. In her dreams, she saw her brother whole and healthy, many feathers in his hair. She heard him say, “You live,” and then woke with a stabbing pain beside his grave.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Dawn lanced through the willow tree and the pines that flanked it. The act of sitting up punished Catherine for her hours of paddling and for her unabashed mourning the night before. But now it was dread for the living that consumed her.
Bright Star and Thankful had been alive to bury Joseph, but what had happened to them after that? Fresh worries stabbed as a slew of possibilities leapt to mind. Were they hurt? Had they been captured? Were they too terrified to move? Catherine needed to leave. They could need her help, even now.
Groaning, she pressed her hands to her temples. What would Joseph’s death mean to Bright Star, who had already lost so many? Whatever fragile ground she and her sister had gained of late, surely it wasn’t strong enough to hold the weight of their brother’s death. Bright Star might never forgive her, and Catherine would understand why.
Her thoughts shifted violently to Thankful and to the parting assurances that she would be safe. What havoc had the massacre wreaked in Thankful’s heart and soul?
Wincing, she stood, bracing
her rib with one hand. She would push through any pain to find them, even if they had no desire to see her. Let them hate her, if it soothed them. Let them blame her for their stay in Odanak. But please, she prayed, let them be safe.
Leaves shivered and dropped from their branches, sprinkling gold over the stones and earth. Twigs crunched behind Catherine. Turning, she cried out in surprise.
“Catherine?” Thankful dropped a bouquet of sunflowers, new lines on her face aging her beyond her sixteen summers. Blond hair loose over her shoulders, she still wore a simple French gown beneath a woolen cloak, a fashion that might have saved her life.
Relief and sorrow shuddered through Catherine at the sight of her friend’s haunted face. “I’m sorry,” she rasped. Vision blurring, she ran toward Thankful on unsteady legs. “I’m so sorry. I cannot say how much. This would never have—”
Thankful closed the remaining distance between them, hair streaming behind her, and captured Catherine to herself. “You’re here. You’re . . .” But her words disappeared into sobs.
Ignoring the pain to her rib, Catherine squeezed the girl’s thin shoulders, rocking from side to side as tears rolled down her face. The smell of fire clung to Thankful’s clothing.
“Bright Star’s coming,” Thankful whispered, then pulled back.
Catherine lifted her gaze and saw her sister twenty yards away. Wind ruffled the fox fur mantle on Bright Star’s shoulders and the ribbons binding her braids. She was looking at their brother’s grave, her face a mask, a defense, a wall unbreachable.
Grief and guilt forged a blade in Catherine’s throat. The rangers had wielded knife and gun, but it was she who had led her loved ones here. Releasing Thankful, she stepped into her sister’s line of vision.
The instant Bright Star saw Catherine, her eyes flared. She broke into a run. Nearly tripping over her skirts, Catherine raced to meet her, halting only when Bright Star seized her in an embrace so fierce, it sent fire searing from her rib. Catherine cried out in terrible pain and ferocious joy.
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