Shadowbrook (24 page)

All the time they’d been on the trail he had been so reserved. Now … The look he was giving her was more than she could bear. It hurt her heart. Two people, a man and a woman, kissing in the sunlight, a unit so tightly forged, so at one, that even their own child could not know its depths. Nicole dismissed the memory. “You were explaining about the sugar.”

“Yes, we get it up here from the river in those carts.”

He indicated three large, open wooden chests, each with a pair of wooden wheels, and short traces that finished in a harness. “By mule?” she asked.

“Sometimes.” He looked uncomfortable. For a moment she didn’t understand, then she realized that the boy they called Sugar Willie had that name because his job was to be harnessed to the heavy wooden cart and pull it fully laden from the river to the sugarhouse. How far was that? A league at least.

They went outside. Deliciousness May was gone, and Quent led Nicole on a path through the woods to the house where a white woman was waiting for them. Tall and thin, with hunched shoulders and an unfortunately long nose, her narrow features all seemed crowded in the center of her face. “This is Sarah Frankel,” Quent said, “she and her husband are in charge of the sugarhouse.”

Sarah’s wide smile turned her homely face into something almost attractive.
She was less effusive than Deliciousness May had been, but she seemed every bit as glad to see Quent, and as curious about the young woman with him. Nicole was glad that the dark taffeta dress she’d chosen for this excursion didn’t show any dirt from the shortcut through the woods, and that the moccasins were in her pockets and not on her feet.

They were nine at the dinner table. As well as Quent and Nicole there were Sarah and her husband, Moses, a large red-faced man with the shortest, pudgiest fingers Nicole had ever seen. They looked out of place on his big hands, as if they belonged to someone else. Tim, the son of the house, was quiet and withdrawn and appeared to have no wife.

“Ellie and Tim and I pretty much grew up of a piece. We used to have lessons together at the big house,” Quent said, clearly trying to make her feel part of this group who had known each other so well for so long.

“And Monsieur Shea?” she asked. “He had lessons with you as well?”

“Corm, too.” Quent looked at her only briefly, but his blue eyes were dark, and for a moment fierce.

If a man delights you,
ma petite,
it is always wise to keep him the tiniest bit jealous.
Maman had said such things before she knew Nicole was to be a nun. It was sinful to think of them now. Worse to actually put the advice into practice. She would say two entire rosaries in penance. All fifteen decades each time.

And she would distract herself from wicked thoughts by paying attention to the others, not to Quent. Ellie—she had been introduced as Mistress Bleecker—did not have the puckered prune face of her mother, or the spare, narrow form. She was a big blowsy woman and her children, two girls and a boy, looked set to take after her. They sat silent at the foot of the table and pushed food into their mouths as if they had never eaten before, despite being repeatedly told by their mother and grandmother to mind their manners. There was no father to make them behave.

“My husband went logging last winter.” Ellie’s voice was so emotionless, she might have been asking for another hot biscuit. “Lost his footing and got crushed in the white water.”

“I am so sorry, madame.” Ellie shrugged, and Nicole leaned close enough to catch a whiff of the musky smell her brown kersey frock had acquired after
le bon Dieu
alone knew how much wear. She put her hand over Ellie’s, then quickly withdrew it, offering both sympathy and dignity in the space of three breaths.

“You were good with them,” Quent said after they left. “They liked you.”

Shoshanaya had never had much to do with the tenants. He hadn’t expected it of her, and they wouldn’t have accepted her in any case. He’d told himself it didn’t matter. It still didn’t. He was never going to be master of Shadowbrook. All the same, Nicole was different. But it was foolish to think of such things. The situation was no different than it had been. John was still the elder and the heir.

MONDAY, AUGUST 3, 1754
LORETTE, NEW FRANCE

IN 1535 JACQUES
Cartier explored the St. Lawrence River and claimed for France the Gaspé Peninsula. At that time the Iroquoian-speaking
Anishinabeg
known as Wyandot occupied their ancestral lands near what the French first called the Great Freshwater Sea. The Wyandot called their land Ouendake. The French renamed them ruffians, Huré, which became Huron. The sea was eventually known as Lake Huron and the Wyandot land was called Huronia.

The Huron were skilled farmers; no one knew better how to grow squash and beans and corn and insure that there would never be famine, but to ease their grief they made war. It had been so since the beginning of the
Haudenosaunee,
in the first Longhouse built on the turtle’s back where Sky Woman wept for her dead father.

When a family had suffered a loss, whether through illness or accident or a tribal raid, the lamenting survivors would for ten days be excused from all community duties, and even the most intimate obligations of bathing and dressing. For a year after that they would continue to neglect their personal appearance, while gradually resuming some part in village life. But if the women’s tears still did not cease, then only the replacement of their dead relative by a war captive would ease their pain. If the young men related to the survivors did not mount a raid to bring back those who might be adopted into the bereaved family, the women publicly accused them of cowardice and the braves were shamed before the whole people.

So the braves would form a war party and go to take captives from among their traditional enemies—sometimes other Iroquois speakers and sometimes those belonging to the Algonkian nations—and bring them back to the warriors’ home village. There the women devised many tests to see who among the prisoners could withstand the greatest amount of pain and thus be worthy of adoption.

A captive judged unworthy was slated for death. But first such a one was addressed as uncle or nephew and ceremonially painted for a death feast at which he was allowed to recite his war honors and receive the homage of the entire village. Then he was tied to a stake with a short rope, and the villagers, including the smallest children and the oldest squaws, used firebrands to burn him. They did so artfully and with imagination, working slowly from the feet up, all the while speaking in formal terms of the caresses they were bestowing. Before he died the prisoner was scalped and hot sand was thrown onto his bare skull. In this way he was allowed to prove his bravery and enter the next life covered with glory. Finally a knife or a hatchet ended his life. Then the women dismembered the corpse and threw it into cooking kettles from which the whole village feasted—including the chosen adoptees who were now considered to be truly Huron.

So the wound in the spirits of the bereaved was healed, and the empty place at their hearth in the Longhouse was filled. Always, for all the tribes since the beginning of time, there had been such wars of mourning. Until, in the words of the storytellers of the Longhouse, “Everywhere there was peril and everywhere mourning.” Seeing this endless river of tears, the Great Spirit whispered wisdom to the chiefs of five of the Iroquoian-speaking nations and they formed themselves into the Great League of Peace and Power. But the Huron had many years before formed a confederacy with some of the other Iroquoian-speaking tribes. They did not join this new league. So its members set upon them and drove them from Huronia. They said it was to bring them an end of mourning wars and to give them the
Kainerekowa,
the Great Peace.

When Cartier had first met those he called Huron there were forty thousand of them. A hundred years later, after the diseases brought by the Europeans and the wars made by the Five Nations of the Great League, there were perhaps a thousand left alive. The remnant of that thousand was driven from Huronia to take refuge in a village just north of Québec, called Lorette by the French. They numbered fewer than three hundred men, women, and children. Many of these had become Christians, but others had not and lived separately from the converts.

On a hot and humid morning in early August, Monsieur Philippe Faucon of the Society of Jesus ducked his head to enter the largest of the longhouses outside Lorette, then stood and blinked his eyes a few times to clear them of the smoke of the five fires that formed a single column marching from one end of the dwelling to the other. The total length of the structure was fifteen fathoms, thirty of a tall man’s strides. It was formed of saplings covered by bark, with a curved roof pierced in a number of places to allow the smoke of the many fires to escape. Family apartments were built along both sides. Each was constructed on a platform
built knee-high above the ground, separated by curtains of bark, and deep enough and high enough so even a man of the Jesuit’s considerable height could easily stretch or stand his full length inside, and wide enough so that even this big longhouse could contain only eight down each side. “The peace of Jesus Christ be upon this place.”

A number of squaws were tending pots suspended over the various fires. Some looked up at him, then looked away. Since they were not Christians they did not hold him in any particular reverence, but neither was he an enemy. The hot sun combined with the heat of the cooking fires made the longhouse uncomfortable. No braves were present, and no children. Only the cooks, and one old man puffing on a pipe. He was so thin his bones showed and he found the heat a comfort. After a few seconds the old one struggled to his feet. “Ah, Magic Shadows. Welcome to my hearth.”

“You sent for me, Geechkah. I am honored to come.”

“Yes, yes … You brought your medicine with you?”

“Right here.” The Jesuit held up a deerskin envelope that contained his sketch pad, sheets of bark, and his quills and bits of charcoal. The Huron were awestruck by the ability to draw. It seemed that no one among them had ever attempted to recreate what he saw with any degree of realism or proportion. Their language had no alphabet in the way of European tongues. In that sense neither they nor any of the red men of whom the priest was aware wrote words, but Faucon had been long enough among them to know that strips of cured hide called belts were frequently circulated among the tribes. The belts carried complex messages in the form of wampum embroidery and symbols cut into the leather. The savages could read the belts as readily as an educated white man could read a book. Even tribes that did not speak the same tongue could communicate by way of the belts because the markings, pictures of a stylized and symbolic sort, had been regularized for as long as anyone could remember. But as remarkable as that feat might be, the lifelike drawings of the Jesuit inspired wonder in the Huron. “I have my tools with me, Geechkah. I knew you would want me to bring them.”

The old Indian looked at the deerskin envelope and nodded with approval, then led his guest out of the longhouse and past fields where the com plants were as high as the Jesuits waist and heavy with ripening ears. Vining beans planted at their base used the thick cornstalks for support, and squash sprawled among them, luxuriating in the protection offered by the taller plants. Lines of fish had been hung to dry in the sun, strung between the longhouses like banners decorating the masts of mighty ships. Some distance away a group of young men were hacking apart the carcass of a deer. It would be dressed with the boiled-down sap of the maple trees and smoked over a fire of balsam branches before being set aside as provision for the winter. “The Great Spirit has taught the Huron how to
make good use of the land and all that is on it.” Faucon spoke the words to the old man’s back. Geechkah continued leading the priest through the village while Faucon talked. “Now the Spirit has sent the black robes to tell the Huron of the great Lord of All, Jesus Christ, and the truths that will offer eternal life to—”

Still without turning around Geechkah held up his hand. “Your words make me weary, Magic Shadows. We have discussed these things many times before. We do not have to talk of them again today.”

“But it is because I respect your great age and wisdom that I—”

“Enough. Look, this is one reason I brought you here.” They had come to a corner of the village where a squaw sat nursing a papoose. “My daughter’s daughter has given birth. I learned in a dream that her son will be a great chief. Make the child’s face appear on your magic bark.”

The bark was ordinary white birch and the quick sketch of mother and child was drawn with charcoal in a style that had been popular in Europe for hundreds of years. Still, when Faucon gave it to Geechkah the old man looked at in wonder, repeatedly turning his head to compare the subject and the drawing. “What I see on this bark is truly what my eyes see, but it will stay when the squaw goes,” he said in a tone of awe. “This is strong magic,” he added after another few moments. “This shadow that does not move will protect the boy until he grows to meet his destiny.”

“I can give the child better magic than that. If you allow me to baptize him and send him to a mission school, he will—”

Geechkah again held up his hand. “Come. There is something else.”

Faucon followed the old Indian. He hadn’t really expected to be allowed to baptize the infant and send him to live in one of the missions and be taught the Catholic faith that would save his soul. Given how important Geechkah believed the child’s future to be, it was impossible. But the priest always made some effort at conversion when he came to a longhouse. Otherwise he would not be able to honestly divert the criticism of his Provincial Superior; Louis Roget had little use for the meticulous drawings of local plants that were Philippe Faucon’s overwhelming preoccupation.

Philippe’s family—for generations keepers and trainers of the royal hawks—had made him a Jesuit priest; Almighty God had made him an artist, one with a small gift for portraiture, but a true passion for documenting the native flora of Canada. His drawings were said to be the delight of the king himself. Philippe was of the opinion that since Louis XV was known to be interested only in food and sex, it had to be his mistress, the powerful Madame de Pompadour, who made so much of the sketches of the Jesuit missionary, and arranged that the seeds he sent to Versailles were carefully planted and nurtured in the
jardins des roi.
No matter. Given that Monsieur le Provincial believed the king of France, and certainly
his official concubine, were both of considerably lesser importance than a Jesuit Superior, Faucon had always to be on his guard.