Shadowbrook (43 page)

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1754
SHADOWBROOK

QUENT STOOD BESIDE
the rushing stream. The five mighty oaks—Squirrel Oaks—were behind him. They separated him from the burial ground, but he could still hear the sounds of Jeremiah and Little George shoveling dirt onto Ephraim’s coffin.

Everyone else had left. The Anglican minister and many of the other mourners had come all the way from Albany—John and Genevieve Lydius and their entire brood among them. Every slave was present, and all the tenants, even those from distant Do Good. The Kahniankehaka, too. Chief Thoyanoguin had arrived wearing his jacket trimmed in gold braid and his tricorne. A dozen braves had come with him. Such a large delegation paid Ephraim high honor. Like everyone else, the Indians stayed until the service ended. Only Corm wasn’t there.

It was often Corm’s way to move south before the great snows. Quent had hoped he’d show up as the autumn passed into winter, but so far it hadn’t happened. Meanwhile, until three days earlier, Ephraim had seemed the same as he’d been since the summer, no better but also no worse. Then, three mornings past, Runsabout had gone to bring him his morning ale and found him dead in his bed. Too late to send word to Cormac, even if he was still at Singing Snow.

After they had gathered around Ephraim’s grave and listened to the minister speak of resurrection and eternal life, John invited the mourners to stop by the Frolic Ground before departing. There would be johnnycakes to fortify them for the journey home, and a cup of punch lifted in Ephraim’s honor. John didn’t look at his younger brother when he spoke, and Quent knew the invitation didn’t include him. That didn’t matter, but his mother did. All during the funeral, each time he glanced up she was staring at him, defeat and despair all over her face. It was the first time he’d ever seen her look like that. When the minister had said everything he had to say and handed Lorene a clod of earth, she’d thrown it into Ephraim’s grave and looked like maybe she wanted to die, too. Quent took a step toward her, but Lorene had turned aside. She’d never before closed him out like that. He’d known then he wouldn’t be joining the others at the Frolic Ground.

The sound of shoveling stopped. “That’ll rest him.” Jeremiah’s voice came softly from the other side of the oaks, traveling easily on the cold, dry air. Little George murmured an assent.

Quent heard the sound of their footsteps leaving the burial ground, which also contained the remains of his grandparents and a couple of aunts and uncles and cousins he barely remembered or had never known, and the small, long-worndown mounds of the six dead children Lorene had borne but been unable to suckle to life beyond a paltry few months. Pohantis was there as well, buried a distance away from the others because Ephraim had insisted on that, and Shoshanaya, and Quent’s son. The child was unborn, but he’d always been sure it was a son. Shoshanaya had said so and he believed her. All bones in the ground now. Soon Ephraim would be the same. The worms were probably already busy with his father.

He was dressed in a coat and breeches and a white shirt, his home clothes, but there was no longer any place for him to call home. Shadowbrook was John’s now.

Quent stripped off the fine clothing and threw himself naked into the rushing stream. The frigid water came from high up in the hills, from the underground river that flowed through Swallows Children. Deliberately he swam upstream, fighting the intense cold and the swift current, taking perverse comfort in the struggle. The air was bitter and each sharp breath tasted of snow. At last, spent, he flipped over and lay on his back in the turbulent water and let it carry him back to the place he’d started, his heart racing less wildly now, his spirit calmed. He clambered ashore and pulled on his breeches and his silver-buckled shoes; everything else he left lying where it was. Then he headed for the big house.

Less than an hour later, in her dead husband’s room, where she had been searching one last time for the bequest Ephraim had made but must have later destroyed, Lorene looked out the window and saw her youngest son leave the Patent. He had on buckskins and his long gun was slung over his shoulder. She watched him striding down the path toward Hudson’s River until she could see him no more, then she sank to her knees, and for the first time that day, she wept.

Quent did not once look back. It was over. Shadowbrook was no longer his home. What next? He had buried his birth father, Potawatomi custom said he must now go at once to show respect to his manhood father. He should spend a year, twelve full New Moon Tellings, in Singing Snow. Take a wife there. Sire a child. Become a manhood father to a boy. Thus did life go on in the face of death. So had the Great Spirit Shkotensi made the world.

A great distaste rose in him, a protest that tasted of bitterness and rage. He was
sick of old men dictating to young men how things had to be. Quent turned south, not north and headed for the Ohio Country.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1754
MONASTERY OF THE POOR CLARES, QUÉBEC

The refectory table was a single wide plank on a pair of trestles. The chairs of the nuns were low, backless stools. There were six of them, one for each member of the community. Nicole’s was empty. She knelt on the other side of the table, on the stone floor, both arms outstretched before her, clasping the empty wooden bowl that should have contained her midday meal. “I accuse myself of falling asleep during silent prayer,” she had admitted at the Chapter of Faults that convened that morning.

“That is a grave sin against the Holy Rule of our Mothers Clare and Colette,” Mère Marie Rose replied. “You will beg for your dinner every day this week.”

So she was here. Silently imploring her sisters—they were her sisters, Nicole reminded herself, they had become so exactly sixty-one days ago when she’d crossed from the world to the cloister—to share some of their food with her. Dear Lord, her arms were on fire, held out in front of her like this for so long a time. But she must not lower the bowl until it was filled. To do so was a sign that she wished to fast. That would be a holy thing if I could do it, mon Dieu, but forgive me, I cannot. Already the waist of the black dress she’d been given the first day had been tucked three times.

And I fell asleep when I was meant to be concentrating on You because our cell (a Poor Clare never referred to anything but her sins as her own since the nuns held all in common) is so cold at night that I shiver instead of sleep. If only I could have a blanket,
mon Dieu,
even just a little thin one, I would not be so—Oh! She had been concentrating so hard on this litany of complaints she’d almost lowered the bowl. That would signify that she meant to fast. Oh no,
mon Dieu,
please. I must eat. Forgive me my sins and strengthen my arms. For the sake of Your Holy Mother. Nicole gripped the bowl as tightly as she could and stiffened her arms yet again.

None of the other nuns paid any attention to the struggle of the young woman they called a postulant while they tested her fitness to become a novice member of the community. Until she took the habit, she was with them but not entirely of them, and each of the nuns tried to maintain a slight distance to protect her heart. It was desolation to lose a companion, a sister who gave up the struggle and left before making her vows. As for today, the punishment
la petite
was undergoing was something every one of them had endured numerous times. They knew it was kinder not to look. Besides, the Holy Rule forbade eye contact during meals.

Poor Clares ate no meat, and fish only on major holidays. This was an ordinary
day; the martyrology read before the meal commemorated saints Vitis and Agricola, fed to the lions of ancient Rome. Today the black-veiled heads remained bent over servings of beans and oats cooked into a gruel, and for the monastic third portion—what they were served in place of meat—boiled turnips. The nuns ate quickly, but the refectory was so cold each woman could see her breath. The food congealed in their bowls before they could get it all down. When only a single spoonful remained each nun scraped it up and leaned forward and tipped it into Nicole’s bowl.
“Que le bon Dieu vous récompense pour votre charité,”
Nicole responded each time. May God reward you for your kindness.

Mère Marie Rose waited until every nun had put down her spoon, then she stood up. The others immediately did the same, including Nicole. Thank you,
mon Dieu,
thank you that I am no longer kneeling on these stones. And that I can lower my arms. She held onto the bowl with her left hand and used her right to make the sign of the cross.

“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti …”
The abbess intoned the long Latin grace. When it was ended she picked up the spoon she had herself used and gave it to Nicole. Nicole’s own spoon was at her regular place, clean and untouched. She must eat her cold dinner with the other woman’s utensil, a further humiliation. “You may eat, child. And when you are finished you will clean the refectory floor. Soeur Angelique has left a brush and a bucket for you.”

The nuns left the refectory in procession. When they were gone, Nicole downed every morsel that was in the bowl, tasting nothing, only grateful that the empty place inside her was a little less empty. Begging for her dinner meant that she did not get a slice of the rough brown bread, nor a glass of the thin, acrid wine that accompanied the meal for those who were not guilty of grave sins against the Holy Rule.

There was a bucket of sand in one corner of the room. Nicole carried the bowl and the spoon there and rubbed them clean, then replaced them on the refectory table, the bowl at her own place, the spoon at that of the abbess. She undid the cuffs of her black dress and rolled them above her elbows. When she took the habit she would roll back wide gray sleeves and fasten them to her shoulders with a single pin the way she’d seen the nuns do. And when would that be? She had no idea. The date of the Clothing, as it was called, was at the discretion of the abbess. When it comes, mon Dieu, I will wear a white veil and truly be your bride.

We will be married,
Quent had said that day in Do Good, with the Quakers in the next room and the pain of betraying her sacred promise still burning in her heart.
Wait until I return and you will be my wife.
When he spoke those words, how clearly she had seen herself standing beside him in the Frolic Ground with flowers in her hair and her heart singing, then living as his wife in the beautiful house that was his birthright, and that she knew Madame Hale intended him to
have, bearing his children … O Blessed Mother of God, surely you do not hold it as a sin that I wanted to say yes. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. It can be no sin merely to have imagined marrying the man I love, Blessed Mother. Loved, she corrected herself. You cannot love him now. You have given yourself to God.

There was a thin film of ice covering the water in the leather bucket. Nicole resisted the urge to break it with the scrub brush and plunged both her chapped and reddened hands in first. Then she soaked the brush in the frigid water and knelt down and began to scrub the stones.
“Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce …”
She whispered the prayer beneath her breath, it would help the task go more quickly. Never mind that her knuckles were bleeding.
“Vous êtes bénie entre toutes les femmes, et Jésus, le fruit—”

“—de vos entrailles, est béni. Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu …”

Nicole had not realized that another pair of hands was also scrubbing the floor until she heard a second voice join in the prayer to the Holy Virgin. It was little Soeur Angelique, whose job this usually was. Next to Nicole, Angelique was youngest. She had been last in the line of nuns to welcome her new sister that day in the chapel, but Nicole was sure it had been Angelique on the other side of the turn when she first arrived. Now it was Angelique who in her charity had given up her hour of recreation—the time when the nuns sat together around a small fire in the common room and talked and laughed without restriction—and come to help the sinful young postulant scrub the refectory floor.
“… Priez pour nous pauvres pécheurs, maintenant et àl’heure de notre mort. Amen.”

Not just for us poor sinners, Holy Mother of God, Nicole added silently. I beg you to pray for Quent. Ask your Blessed Son that Quent may be safe and happy. Happy. She thought the word a second time as she continued to intone Aves with Marie Angelique. Then a third. Happy. So, was she asking the Holy Virgin to send Quent another love, another woman to stand beside him at the Frolic Ground with flowers in her hair? Yes, probably. The thought made tears prickle behind her eyelids, but her beloved needed someone and it could not be her, no matter how much her heart ached for him.
“… Maintenant et àl’heure de notre mort. Amen.”

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1754
THE SLAVE MARKET AT THE FOOT OF WALL STREET, NEW YORK CITY

By God, and this New York was a city worth putting a pox on. Na like God-cursed Albany or Edinburgh. More like Glasgow, Hamish Stewart decided. A place where canny folk pursued business in every lane. God blight all cities, but this one was at least worth the spit o’ the curse.

All the same, cities made him tired. And he wouldna be refreshed until he was laird o’ Shadowbrook. A pox on the blighted, devil-sent rain that had made that day further off then he’d hoped. They said in Albany that Shadowbrook was ruined. But for his purposes, not ruined enough.

“Prime,” the black auctioneer called out. “All prime, gentleman. Particularly this fine young Ashanti buck here.” He pointed to one young man in the middle of the line, shackled to his neighbors with a short length of chain and, like them, restrained with leg and wrist irons. The auctioneer’s black assistant prodded the lad with the tip of his bullwhip. The youth stumbled a few steps forward. “Prime flesh if I’ve ever seen it,” the auctioneer repeated. “Look at those muscles. Plenty of labor in those arms. And look here.” This time it was the auctioneer himself who stepped from behind the podium and used a long stick to raise the youth’s loincloth, exposing his genitals “Plenty of labor here as well, if you’ve a mind to make use of it.” The crowd of bidders erupted in laughter. The lad stared straight ahead.