Shadowbrook (64 page)

Cormac dropped his arm. It throbbed and quivered from wrist to shoulder, but that didn’t matter now. He was as light-headed as if he had already achieved the final victory.
Cmokmanuk
in the south,
Anishinabeg
in the north. Blessings on the Great Spirit and his white wolf totem and Miss Lorene’s Sunday morning Jesus God. He had maintained his Potawatomi honor, and possibly enlisted a powerful ally.

Neither man said anything while Cormac returned the other beads—the turkey and the elk and the possum and the racoon—to the Miami medicine bag and replaced it around his neck. The bag felt different, lighter. When Cormac got to his feet he nearly stumbled. Pontiac paid him the courtesy of pretending not to notice.

The rich odors of the cooking fires made Cormac’s mouth water and he looked forward to the meal. Stewed beaver, from the smell and the last of the season’s fresh corn. He was being treated as an honored guest and the Ottawa were known as fine cooks. It was said they flavored their food with dried sumac, but when squaws of other tribes tried the same tricks they did not produce the same taste. The Ottawa cooks had secret—
Ayi!

Corm saw himself lying on the ground at Singing Snow with the Midewiwin priestess leaning over him.
Because the leaves of a tree turn red in the time of the Great Heat Moon does not always mean the tree is a sumac.
That’s what she’d said and neither he nor Bishkek had known what she meant. Now he did. A thing might look like one thing but have an entirely different taste, because in reality it
was
something else. The brave who attacked him in the sweat lodge had looked like a Huron and smelled like a Huron, but that didn’t mean he was a Huron. Perhaps he had disguised himself as a snake because that was what he wanted Cormac to think. “
Ayi!
It could be so.”

He didn’t realize he’d spoken out loud until Pontiac turned to him. “What could be so?”

“Nothing. I was just thinking that in dreams, sometimes things are not exactly what they seem to be.”

“That is true. But put these thoughts aside now, Little Brother. It is time to eat and to talk, and later to smoke and sing and dance. The winter is coming. Then it will be the time to prepare for war. Or”—Pontiac touched the pouch at his waist where he had put the Suckáuhock—“to prepare for no-war.”

WINTER, 1755-1756
LAC DU ST. SACREMENT

A time to plan and listen, and think about war and prepare for war.

The French troops billeted at the northern end of Bright Fish Water, the lake they called Lac du St. Sacrement and the British now called Lake George, began work on a fort meant to be as impregnable as Fort St. Frédéric on Lac du Champlain. At first it was to be called Carrion, for Philippe de Carrion who had once maintained a trading post on this land. It was Vaudreuil back in Québec who rejected that idea. “Despite what passes for commerce these days, I will not name a fort after a smuggler.” Eventually they settled on Fort Carillon, for the pealing sound made by the outlet of the waters of the lake. It was a compromise made necessary because Vaudreuil also rejected the suggestion that they use Ticonderoga, the Iroquois name for the high rocky promontory between Lac du Champlain and Lac du St. Sacrement. This new
maréchal de camp,
the marquis de Montcalm, had the usual French disdain for all things Canadian and Indian. No point in alienating him so soon after his arrival.

Bright Fish Water was frozen solid by early January. Eight leagues to the south, in the thin clear air of winter, surrounded by a mostly leafless forest temporarily empty of enemies, the Yorkers heard the sounds of French axes whistling through the air and felled trees crashing to the ground. They too took up their hatchets and saws.

The Yorkers began by constructing a fleet of the flat, raftlike boats known as bateaux. Fast and simple to build, they were strong enough and big enough to carry at least twenty soldiers, as well as the heavy artillery that must sooner or later determine the outcome of this as yet undeclared war. Meanwhile, General Johnson sent out scouts who returned with the information that the French were also budding bateaux, and constructing a mighty fort. The Americans set about constructing a fort of their own.

It had four bastions and was set on a steep rise. One side faced a cliff that fell sharply to the lake below. To protect the other three exposures they dug a dry moat around log walls thirty feet thick and fifteen feet high. Johnson said the fort was to be named for the two royal princes. Most of the Yorkers, whose sweat and back-breaking labor had made this thing, were born and bred Americans and had less regard for the royals than an Anglo-Irish transplant like the general. Still, Johnson was in command and he prevailed. The new fort was named William Henry.

BOOK 3
The New World and the Old
1757

SUNDAY, JULY 22, 1757
QUéBEC UPPER TOWN

THE HALLS OF
the Collège des Jésuites were paneled with the finest woods. The floors were of red and white and black marble. The brothers kept everything spotlessly clean and gleaming, nowhere with more care than in the broad and colonnaded south corridor that passed by the private apartments of Monsieur le Provincial, where Philippe Faucon now walked silently reading his breviary. Old Brother Luke was twenty strides ahead, shuffling forward with large cloths tied to his feet, telling his beads as he polished the floor. His sibilant whisper could be heard clearly in the otherwise silent hall.
“Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce.”
Men became Jesuit brothers rather than priests because they were unschooled and could therefore not fulfill the priestly obligation to daily read the Divine Office. They prayed the rosary in French, while each priest of the Society read the Latin Hours by himself, fitting in the duty among his other chores.

It was Sunday. Philippe had no chores. He would have liked to be off sketching in the countryside, but he and Luke had been left to look after things while the rest of the community was away at a reception in the château of the governor-general. Ten strides from the door of the apartments of Monsieur le Provincial Philippe began the third psalm of Vespers for this feast of St. Mary Magdalene:
Quis ascendet in montem Domini? Innocens manibus et mundus corde.
Who can ascend the mountain of God? He with a clean heart and innocent hands.

The words chilled him. Philippe did not believe his heart clean or his hands innocent.

“Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu,”
the old man ahead of him murmured. It was not appropriate to do menial work on a Sunday, but Brother Luke had long since decided that polishing the floor while he walked was not actually labor and had dispensed himself.
“Priez pour nous …”
His purposeful shuffle carried him forward, past the door of the Provincial’s study and around the corner into the corridor leading to the Retraite de Ste. Anne, the community’s private chapel.

Philippe slowed his pace still further. He knew that when Luke reached the door to the chapel he would pause, remove the cloths tied over his shoes, and go inside. The old man spent hours in devout prayer. He was quite possibly a saint.

A few moments passed. The sounds of the whispered rosary grew fainter, then died away. Philippe heard the squeak of the one hinge that defied all their efforts to silence it; even a novena to Saint Anne herself had produced no results. The squeaking hinge meant Luke had opened the door of the Retraite. When it squeaked a second time Philippe knew the door had been closed.

Alors.
In practical terms he was alone in the house. He did not remember the last time such a thing had happened. It was a sign from God.

He closed the breviary and lay it on a nearby table, then hurried forward and without hesitation grasped the handle of the door to the Provincial’s study. It turned easily. He had told himself that if the door was locked that too would be a sign from God. He would make no effort to force his way inside, simply accept that what he was thinking was grave sin and prepare himself to do penance to expiate it. But Louis Roget had not locked the entrance to his private apartments. The door swung wide at Philippe’s first touch. The wondrous carvings of the
ébénistes
of Reims were spread before him.

Straight ahead was the panel that depicted the Flight into Egypt, which if he touched it in the proper place would swing wide and give him a view of the Lower Town and the wretched monastery of the Poor Clares, and the hovel where Père Antoine Rubin de Montaigne lived. On his right was the panel with the angel whose wings covered his face as he knelt in adoration before the Divine Throne. Philippe, too, put his hands over his face.

Lord, I wish to do Your will. His heart thumped wildly, his hands were icy cold. But it could not be the will of God that the night terrors would not leave him, that his grieving and sense of failure, were like a scrofulous growth in his belly which no amount of prayer or sacrifice could relieve.
It is not your fault, Philippe.
That’s what Xavier Walton told him each time he confessed the same sin of betrayal.
You did not desert the
habitants
of l’Acadie. They were sent away by the heretic English soldiers, may God have mercy on their souk. The English forbade you to accompany your parishioners. What were you to do?

What he had done was the only thing he’d known for certain was right and the thing God expected of him. He had borne witness, using the small talent that had been given him to document the sufferings of those entrusted to his care. And the moment he arrived here, back in the Collége, he had turned his drawings over to Monsieur le Provincial.

It had rained the afternoon of his return. Philippe remembered being soaked
to the skin as he walked up the Côte de la Montagne. No one knew he was coming so no calèche had been sent for him, and by his lights his vow of poverty—however loosely it was interpreted among Jesuits—prohibited him from hiring a cart and cartman. He remembered dripping puddles of water when he stood right here in this very room, facing his superior and clutching the deerskin envelope that contained his drawings.

“Welcome home, Philippe. You would perhaps prefer to dry yourself and change before we speak.”

“No, Monsieur le Provincial, with permission. I wish at once to give you these things.”

“Your drawings.” Roget could not quite suppress a sigh. “Yes, of course.”

Philippe opened the envelope and spread his sketches on the gleaming surface of a mahogany table. “This is what I saw, Monsieur le Provincial. Exactly as I saw it.”

For some moments the only sound was of rain thudding on the lead roof. Louis Roget had looked a long time at the drawings. Finally he made the sign of the cross and Philippe saw his Ups move and knew that Monsieur le Provincial was praying for the
habitants,
asking God that the sufferings of the Acadians might be rewarded with the joys of heaven. When he finished he gathered up the drawings, handling them, Philippe thought, with a certain tenderness. He had never before seen Louis Roget be tender. “You have done well, my son. I shall take charge of these now.”

Almost two years, and Philippe had heard nothing more. His record, the only thing he could give those parishioners who had been put in his care, had been stifled. At least that’s what he thought had happened. Twice he’d tried to ask Monsieur le Provincial what had been done with his drawings. Both times the question was answered with an icy stare and the reminder that it was not his place to concern himself with the decisions of his superiors. But,
mon Dieu,
this thing gives me no peace. I have to know.

Philippe crossed to the panel of the angel kneeling in adoration and pressed on the wings. The wall parted and a drawer slid forward. It was lined with velvet and deeper than he remembered, crammed full of papers. This time nothing had been left open for him to see.

The rasp of the Retraite’s squeaking hinge was unmistakable. Impossible! Brother Luke never left the chapel after so short a time. There was a second squeak as the door closed again.
“Je vous salue, Marie …”
Luke had left the Retraite and was retracing his steps, coming back toward Philippe.

He had not closed the door to the Provincial’s study. He raced toward it, resisted the urge to slam it shut, closed it carefully and soundlessly, and pressed his throbbing forehead against the coolness of the wood.

Luke’s footsteps grew louder.
“Priez pour nous pauvres pécheurs—”
The words stopped.

The old man was standing right outside Monsieur le Provincial’s study. He had stopped reciting the rosary. But Luke never stopped; decade after decade rolled out of him, a constant stream of petition. Philippe leaned all his weight against the door. Perhaps if Luke tried it and it did not give, he would assume the study was locked. The handle, however, did not turn. Philippe put his hand on his chest and counted his own heartbeats. They seemed to him loud enough for Luke to hear. He had reached nine when the river began again to flow.
“… maintenent et à l’heure de notre mort. Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu …”
Brother Luke continued on down the corridor.