Shadowbrook

by Swerling, Beverly

  “Thee owes no explanation to me, Quentin Hale. It is that young woman who is beside herself with dismay.” She nodded toward the room behind her.

  “I haven’t got time right now. There’s trouble, Esther. I told you—”

  “Thee alone can decide where thy obligations lie, Quentin. Thee owes no explanations to me.”

  What was his obligation, as Esther put it? Damn! What difference did obligation make? He loved her. He wanted to marry her, but for the moment Solomon needed him a hundred times more. Nicole was an innocent, a virgin. He knew that now, and … Sweet Christ! How could he have been so blind? She was indeed a total innocent. And she thought that what had happened was all there was, that merely by kissing her and fondling her he had …

  He glanced back at Judith, neatly laying out the food and pretending that nothing unusual was taking place. She looked as if she would foal any day, but she moved in a permanent, joyful glow because she had a husband and a respected place in the community. What if Nicole was worried that she might have conceived a child as a result of the caresses they had shared? What if she thought he was going off and leaving her alone with some terrible shame? It was an unbearable notion.

  “Give me a moment alone with her, Esther. I’d appreciate it.”

  Esther Snowberry stepped aside and nodded toward the door of the small storeroom where she’d taken the girl to change her clothes.

  Nicole was standing beside the window, wearing a plain gray Quaker frock. A pile of bright-colored trade goods, the homespun smocks that had been dyed red and yellow and green as the Indian women preferred, were stacked on the chair beside her. Her back was to him, and he could see that beneath an austere mobcap without so much as a ribbon or a ruffle, her hair was still in a single plait hanging down between her shoulders. “Look at me,” he said. “I have to speak and there isn’t much time.”

  She turned her lovely face to him and he wondered if he could be wrong. Her expression and bearing weren’t those of a frightened young woman who thought she’d been taken advantage of, they were those of a queen. “You gave your word,” she said, “and you are breaking it.”

  “Damn it! I’m not! Can’t you understand? I’ll come back and we’ll be the way we were yesterday by the waterfall. I love you, Nicole. I want to marry you.”

  “I cannot ma—”

  “Ssh. Don’t say anything. Just listen to me.” He took a step closer and put his hands on her shoulders. This time she didn’t push him away. “Nothing happened between us yesterday that should not have happened, Nicole. I give you my word it did not. You are in no danger of—”

  “Your word is not worth having. You have proved that.” She regretted the statement as soon as she made it. She saw first the hot rage in his eyes, then the coldness. “Quent, I did not mean that. I have not explained very well. Please, let me try.”

  His anger died as quickly as it had been born. “Ah, my love, I need no explanations.” He put his hand beside her cheek and she allowed it to remain. “We’ll be married,” he said softly. “As soon as I deal with the renegades and bring Solomon back to the Patent. Then I’ll show you what truly happens between a man and a woman. What happened yesterday, my love, in the glen, that was only the beginning. Nothing we did can cause—”

  “I cannot marry you, Quent.” She reached up and removed his hand from her cheek. “I have sworn to be a nun.”

  “A nun! Good Chr—That was no nun with me beside the waterfall yesterday. What kind of an insane—”

  “Yesterday I almost forgot a vow I made to Almighty God kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament, and again at the bed of my dying maman. Yesterday is one more terrible thing for which I must do penance the rest of my life.”

  “Penance … Nicole, I don’t pretend to understand your religion, but surely not even popish priests would teach that the natural way of things between a man and woman is cause for penance.’

  Nicole glanced at the door. It was shut, but heaven knows what these people must think of what was happening inside. “Ssh,” she said. “We give scandal. I do not speak of what we did in—”

  “Almost did,” he corrected in a harsh whisper. “I told you, nothing happened that is reserved for a husband and wife.”

  “I know.” She didn’t, not really, but she had no reason to doubt his word about such things. “I am trying to tell you something much worse than anything you are thinking. The little twins, Lilac and Sugar Willie …” She took a step backward, away from him. “They are dead because of me.”

  “That’s insane as well. They and the others are dead because a vicious Huron renegade named Lantak attacked the Patent. It has nothing to do with you.”

  “How many others?” And when he didn’t answer: “You must tell me! How many?”

  Ephraim counted blacks and whites separately. Quent didn’t look at things that way. “Eleven, not counting Solomon the Barrel Maker. He’s been captured, but I am sure he’s alive.” For a time at least. But if he didn’t get to him quickly, Solomon would be praying for death.

  “Eleven dead,” she whispered, making the sign of the cross. “Tiens pitié, mon Dieu. And the rest? There was more destruction, I know there was, I saw it.”

  “Eight horses, stolen or so badly wounded they had to be put down. Almost half the wheat crop burned. And the sawmill is totally destroyed. What do you mean, you saw it? You were in the cave behind the waterfall.”

  “I saw it,” she repeated. “Le bon Dieu showed me what I was causing by my willfulness, my refusal to honor my vow, my sin of disobedience.” She hesitated. “And what I almost did—what I wanted to do—with you.” She stared at the floor. Her voice was so low he could barely make out what she was saying.

  “We love each other. What kind of God would begrudge us that?” Even as he said the words he knew it was hopeless. She barely reached his shoulder but she was a tower of determination. By Christ, what a woman! And he was going to lose her to a nunnery, a swamp of popish superstition. It was an abomination.

  “I have no right to love you.” Nicole raised her face. She was still very pale, but there were no more tears. “Long before I met you, I had already given myself as an offering to Jesus Christ. In reparation.”

  “Reparation for what? What can you have done?”

  “For myself, I did nothing. I do not have that on my conscience. But I watched what others did. What my own father did. You have heard of the Jacobite Rebellion, the forty-five in Scotland? Of Culloden Moor?”

  The stories of Culloden Moor had reached as far as America. It had been a field of slaughter, terrible carnage. What could such things have to do with Nicole? “There is no joining between—”

  She shook her head, impatient with his disbelief. “There is every joining. I was there. I saw it. No, don’t look like that. I do not mean I was shown a vision. I saw it with my own eyes, just as I am looking at you now. I was ten and Maman and I were living in a little house near the barracks at Ruthven, in the Scottish Highlands. Many of the other wives and children had already been sent home to England. But Maman said we would not go because so many doubted the loyalty of my papa, since his wife was French and a Catholic. And the day after the battle we were taken to see the scene of the great English victory. The dead and the dying were everywhere. The king’s soldiers, even Papa, walking among them, cutting the heads off the wounded. They scoured the countryside for any who might be hiding. When they were found, they were hacked apart and the place that had sheltered them burned to the ground. I saw everything and I made a vow that I would be a nun to save the soul of my beloved papa. Le bon Dieu is kind. After he was retired from the army, Papa renounced his Protestant heresy and was received into the True Church. I did not know what convent I was meant to enter until, by chance, I heard of the Poor Clares of Québec, the smallest, humblest monastery of the order. Papa had business in Virginia, so he took me with him.” She managed a smile, as if everything was now explained.

  Quent stretched out his hand, but she bac
ked away. Nothing he could do, nothing he could say, would alter her decision. All the same, he had to try. “Nicole …”

  “There is no more time for words, Quent. I must go to Québec.”

  He had lost. He had only to look at her to know that. “Very well. If you insist this is what you want, I will take you to your convent.”

  Merci, mon Dieu. Since the terrible visions that had come to her in the cave behind the waterfall, the pain in her heart had been intense, a misery of sorrow and regret. Now her grief eased. “I will always pray for you. You will never—”

  “I’ll take you as soon as I’ve brought Solomon home. Meanwhile you have to go back to Shadowbrook.”

  “No! Quent, you cannot—”

  He turned and walked back to the main trading hall.

  Judith held out the parcel of food for him. He took it and stowed it in his haversack. Esther said nothing, but her glance darted between Quent and the girl who stood in the open doorway staring at him, looking as if her world were totally destroyed.

  “Take her to the big house,” Quent said as he strode toward the door. “Kindly tell my mother I’ll return as soon as I can. Then I’ll take Mademoiselle Crane wherever she wishes to go.”

  The doors of the trading post swung open before he reached them. The man who came in wore a blue jacket trimmed with an officer’s gold braid, a ruffled shirt, and an officer’s tricorne. Beneath it his long hair was pure white, tied at the back of his neck with a grosgrain ribbon. His face was marked by the ritual tattoos and scars of a Kahniankehaka chief. “They told me I would find you here, Uko Nyakwai. Skennenteron.” Peace to this house.

  “Skennenise,” Peace to you. It had been many years since Quent had seen Thoyanoguin, the Mohawk chief the whites called King Hendrick. He had changed little, as wizened and wrinkled now as when Quent was a boy. But his eyes, usually pools of calm, were troubled. “Why does the great Lord of the Kahniankehaka look for Uko Nyakwai?” Quent asked.

  “Teiononhkert, Red Bear.” Things have gone wrong.

  “What things?”

  “There are five dead horses by Bright Fish Water. Killed not for food or for mercy, only for spite.”

  Bright Fish Water was the northernmost boundary of the Patent, but only half on Hale land. It took a long day to paddle a canoe from one end of Bright Fish Water to the other, and when you arrived at the far shore you were in Canada, in what the French claimed as New France, on what they called the Lac du St. Sacrament. “Does Thoyanoguin know if the horses belonged to my father?”

  “They were stolen by Lantak in the raid.”

  No surprise there. Thoyanoguin had probably known that Lantak and his renegades were on their way well before the murdering bastards appeared. But as long as they went after whites, not Mohawk, the old chief was content to let things take their course. He’d not have come to warn Ephraim Hale unless there was some immediate gain for him in it, and obviously he’d seen none. But why come to Quent with this news now? He didn’t ask the question outright. No one put a higher value on negotiation and subtlety than a member of the Iroquois Federation, and no one was better at it then Thoyanoguin. “Did the Huron renegades slaughter their horses because they had a canoe? Since they are so far from their homelands, where would they get such a thing?”

  Thoyanoguin shrugged. “Canoes can be found, or even stolen.”

  You’re lying, you clever old fox. Quent thought. You don’t give a blacksmith’s cuss for what Lantak and his men did on Shadowbrook. Hell, you sold them the bloody canoe to make sure they got away. And one of the things that’s made you decide to come and tell me about it is that instead of turning the Hale horses loose and giving you a chance to round them up, they killed the poor animals just so you wouldn’t have them. “The renegades took a captive from my father’s lands, wise Chief. Only one. Did you see him?”

  “I told you, I saw nothing. If I had been there I would have demanded an explanation of all their evil deeds and brought them to your respected father for justice. But two of my braves saw Lantak and they told me of the captive. A black man. One of the ones you call slaves.” Thoyanoguin’s disgust showed in his tone. “The black man’s blood was on the ground near where the canoe set out on the water. My braves tell me that it was the same color red as yours or mine.”

  “I know that, wise Chief. Red or white or black, the same color blood.” Quent suppressed the sense of urgency that was making his skin crawl. “The captive’s name is Solomon. He is a good man. Is he near death… tehokonhentonsken?”

  “He is not yet dead. Not even dying.” Thoyanoguin’s glance had fixed on Nicole, standing in the shadows by the storeroom. The Mohawk kept looking at her even as he spoke to Quent. “But now this Solomon, he sees singly.” He raised his fist to his face and made a gesture indicating a knife gouging out an eye.

  He’d hoped Lantak might wait till he was back on his own ground before… Sweet Jesus Christ. “The Huron, Thoyanoguin, to nihati?” How many did you see?

  “I told you. These old eyes saw nothing. My braves tell me there were five pieces of Huron dung stinking up the place. Uko Nyakwai … there is something …”

  It was coming at last. “I am listening with both my ears, wise Chief.”

  “Last night, before the horses were killed and before my braves saw these Huron dog turds, I had a dream. I saw a red bear.”

  Quent clenched his fists, but left his arms hanging loose at his sides. He mustn’t in any way betray his impatience. But the total trust in dreams that Indians had escaped him. He never had felt the same. If my white son does not trust the spirits that come when he sleeps, soon they will not bother coming. Bishkek, his manhood father, had told him that long ago. And when Bishkek was teaching him to fashion his death song, Quent did indeed have one dream that helped him. He must have interpreted it correctly, because his song was good and powerful. That had been proven the day in the Shawnee camp when Pontiac could have killed him, but didn’t. “I was the red bear in Thoyanoguin’s dream?”

  “Hanio! Who else could it be? But until now I did not know the identity of the raon, the tiny bird that beats its wings so fast they cannot be seen, so it seems still when it is moving. Now I know.”

  The Mohawk continued to stare at Nicole. She was the hummingbird in Thoyanoguin’s dream, Quent realized. “What happened to the raon?”

  “A hawk came and tried to capture it, but the little bird escaped. Still the hawk flew after it, and when the little bird grew tired of beating its wings so fast, it landed on the back of a red bear and asked the bear to carry it to safety. But even though the bird was very tiny and the bear very big, the bear said it could not and rose up on its back legs and shook the little bird off its back. Then the hawk swooped down and killed the raon. And the blood from that one tiny bird covered the village of Thoyanoguin and many other villages. And all the Kahniankehaka were drowned in it.”

  Nicole was aware of the currents, if not the meaning of the words. “He told you something about me, didn’t he?” she whispered to Quent. “What did he say?”

  You tell me, my white son, that Christians believe in Shkotensi, the Great Spirit, that they know that all of us were put here to play our part in the Telling being told by the Great Spirit. But how can we know what Shkotensi says if we do not listen when he speaks? He’d had no answer for Bishkek then and he had none for Thoyanoguin now. A river of blood. Cormac had seen that, too. And many little birds protected by a bear. Here, now, there was only one little bird.

  Quent found his voice and spoke to her, not to Thoyanoguin. “You said you expected me to take a horse when I left Shadowbrook, that the reason you took Pohantis’s clothes was so you could ride. But there’s no—”

  Nicole interrupted him. “No sidesaddle fit for a lady in your stable. I know, Little George told me that weeks ago. It doesn’t matter. When we lived in Ruthven, near the barracks, the soldiers amused themselves by teaching me. I can ride astride like a man, even bareback.”

  Not in a Q
uaker frock she couldn’t. “Then go change. Hurry.” Then, to Esther: “I need two horses.” There was a wide and decent path between here and Bright Fish Water, and much as he would like the feel of her mounted behind him, two horses carrying single loads would make far better time. “I did not bring money, but I will pay when I return.”

  “Thee can have whatever thee needs from this place and welcome, Quentin Hale.”

  He turned to Thoyanoguin. “When I get to Bright Fish Water I will need a canoe.”

  “It is waiting for you already. Ahkwesahsne.” In the place where the partridge drums. “Tyientaneken kanehsatake” Two logs side by side on the crusty sands. “Follow in the direction they point. The canoe is well hidden, but because you know it is there, you will find it. And there are two paddles,” Thoyanoguin added, nodding toward Nicole with satisfaction.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1754

  MONASTERY OF THE POOR CLARES, QUÉBEC

  TO PAD ALONG a rough stone floor in your bare feet was not much of a penance in September, even in New France. When she was a child, a little girl in the great château on the banks of the Loire, Mère Marie Rose used to get up in the middle of a winter’s night and test her fortitude by walking barefoot through the icy corridors and halls, always careful to avoid the rugs. Once, in February, she went outside and challenged herself to do the same along the frozen riverbank. Petí, her beloved bonne d’enfant, caught her that time, and there was no goûter for a week Mère Rose smiled slightly remembering Petí, who always smelled of powder and cloves, and the afternoon snacks of childhood, warm milk with honey and buns topped with fresh butter or sweet preserves.

  It was twenty-two years since she had tasted such things, since she was fifteen and the cloister door of the Poor Clares of Montargis was closed and locked behind her. At least the Ursulines, her mother had begged. Or the Benedictines. If you insist on pursuing this madness, choose a convent where you need not endure so much. But her mother would surely have agreed that the stone floor of the tiny monastery in Québec Lower Town presented no hardship in the middle of a September night. Besides, there was never very far to walk in this hovel of a monastery.