Shadowbrook (8 page)

“But these negotiations, they came to nothing?”

“Less than that,
mon Père.
Hale wanted too much and we had too little. And the womenfolk dinna want the young to go.”

Père Antoine bent once more over the map. “Exactly like this?” he repeated.

“Aye, I swear it.”

“Save your vows for the promises you make to God, my son. Here we are talking only of human intelligence.”

“But for the good of Holy Church,
mon Père.
Is that na the same thing?”

“Perhaps.” The black-eyed glance examined the Scot. He was a short, thick man, with straggly shoulder-length hair that was half black and half gray. His breeches and hip-length, belted coat were faded to no color and shabby with wear. “So that is why you have brought me this, Hamish Stewart, for the good of Holy Church?”

“Aye, o’ course. Why else would—”

“Because you covet the Hale Patent. So it is to your advantage to break Ephraim Hale. If I send my Indians to burn his fields and he has no harvest …”

Your Indians, Stewart thought. Aye, that’s surely the nub o’ the thing. Why should I believe a Franciscan priest can say to a Huron savage “Go” and he goes, and “Come” and he comes? Lantak’s a butcher by all reports, as well as a rebel. A merciless wild man his own people have banished, savages though God knows they be. But that’s the way o’ it. This friar and Lantak. A pair o’ madmen making common cause for as long as it suits ‘em. Aye, and God’s truth, I’ve heard stranger tales. “The buildings as well, mon Père. It’s essential that as many o’ the wee out-buildings as possible are burned. The grain already harvested, that’s where it’ll be.”

“But not his house, eh? You wish me to tell Lantak and his braves very specifically that they are not to put the house of Ephraim Hale to the torch.”

He could na look into those eyes, however often he tried. Damn the man. Was it being a Frenchman gave him his superior airs, or his high-born family, or maybe the cloth and his holy vows? But that shouldna be. Supposed to be beggars, own nothing, go about barefoot doing good. Aye, that’s what St. Francis said. He’d have wanted no part o’ this French devil acting high and mighty and giving orders to a gaggle o’ bloody savages. “Shadowbrook’s a remarkable house,
mon Père.
None better in the province.” God’s truth, why was he mumbling and staring at the poxed priest’s poxed feet. Sandals, not barefoot. So much for St. Francis.

“My footwear interests you, my son? You are perhaps thinking that I should be barefoot as Blessed Francis ordained?”

Sweet Jesus, the poxed man could read his mind. Stewart felt the sweat making rivulets down his back, despite the cold. Colder than the Highlands, poxed Québec was. There was a fire in the grate, but so wee and poorly fed it cast a scant shadow and less heat. “I’m thinking,
mon Père,
that it’s past time I started back.” Stewart nodded toward a pouch of coins on the table next to the map. “There’s six hundred livres there. So I need you to tell me if it will be done.”

Père Antoine put his hand over the money, but he did not pick it up. “The burning and pillaging of Ephraim Hale’s Patent? That’s what we’re discussing, isn’t it?” Because if it is done when you suggest, the priest thought—in August, just as the harvest begins—Hale will be bankrupt. Like most men of property he has land, not cash, and he has mortgaged that land to the last sou. So if I do as you
ask, my one-eyed Scot, Ephraim Hale will be ruined. And his creditors will be happy to sell you his land for six of your British pence on the pound.

The Scot was standing with his hands clasped over the bulge of his belly, his single eye looking at the crucifix on the wall. Waiting for the priest’s final word, a picture of patient devotion whose only aim was to serve.

You’re a villain, Hamish Stewart, and you care as much for Mother Church as I care for that beetle crawling across the hearth. Less. But you will further our holy cause despite yourself. “It will be done, my son. I give you my word on it. And you in turn give me your word that afterward French troops and our Indian allies will have safe passage across this bit of portage?” The Franciscan drew one slim finger across the top of the crude map of the Hale land, from the southern tip of one long lake to the beginnings of the narrow waterway that debouched into another. Control the land between those two bodies of water and you had a straight path in any direction. The way west led directly to the French forts of the Ohio Country.

Hamish looked at the section of the land the Mohawk savages called the Great Carrying Place. “Aye, I swear it.” Finally Stewart made himself look directly into the priest’s God-awful eyes.

“Then you can return to New York with an easy mind, my son. I will arrange everything.” The pouch of coins disappeared into the folds of the priest’s habit. “Now, I will give you my blessing for the journey.”

Stewart knew what was expected of him and struggled to go down on one knee. Aye, and it werena easy. Eight years since devil-cursed Culloden Moor, since he’d been in fighting trim. More belly to him now, and his thighs grown like fat hams. Time was when he could live for six months on a sack o’ oats. Now he supped regularly on the incredible bounty of the New World where only the laziest fool need ever be hungry, and he feared it was making a woman of him. But if he got Shadowbrook, everything would be different. He’d be a laird, by God. He’d send to home for a young strong Scots wife and fill her belly with sons. Aye, the way a man was supposed to live. Na fighting and killing and losing, so your heart be broken along with your body. He bowed his head and waited for the priest to pray over him.

Père Antoine made the sign of the cross in the air above Stewart’s bent head and murmured a Latin benediction. Possibly, he thought, the Scot’s last rites. You are engaged in a perilous trade, Hamish Stewart. There are others who are much better at it, and they will squash you when and how it suits them. When that day comes, may Almighty God forgive you your greed and your venal schemes. May you be spared the fires of hell, but may you suffer in purgatory until the angels announce the Savior has come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. “Safe journey,” he murmured as, the benediction finished, the other man lumbered to his feet.

“Thank you,
mon Père.
I count on your prayers to make that a certainty.”

“In a few hours I shall offer Mass for that intention.”

The pair went together to the door. Stewart was wrapped in a thick woolen cloak, but the priest wore only his shabby brown habit. The night was cloudless and all the colder for it. The wind rose off the river and whipped their ears, and the stars were slivers of blue ice in a black sky. Above them the massive fortifications that surrounded the settlement stood out, clear in the silver light of a three-quarter moon.

Since 1608, when Samuel de Champlain resisted the lure of Montréal with its forests and numerous waterways opening to the west and chose instead to make his great military base the natural citadel of Québec, it had been the Fortress City of New France. Built on a rock rising between two rivers, the mighty St. Lawrence and the lesser St. Charles, Québec had remained unassailable for nearly a hundred and fifty years, anchoring Canada for the French king.

Champlain had begun his building in what was now the Lower Town, the place where the priest and his visitor stood. A century and a half later it was a clutter of three- and four-story wooden houses built close together on narrow and stony streets by the waterfront, and almost always wet with the spray that came in off Québec Harbor, the broad St. Lawrence basin that could shelter a hundred ships. Over the years the settlement had climbed the cliffs behind the wharves. Now the Upper Town was surrounded by massive walls, its skyline dominated by the steeple of the cathedral. A short distance away, almost as imposing, was the steeple of the church of the mighty Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. Black-clad schemers, priests like Père Antoine himself, but more clever than St. Francis’s simple sons. At least than most of us, the Franciscan thought.

The good God had made him a Friar Minor, but his brains had not been removed at ordination. The black robes had the ear of the bishop of New France and of the pope himself—some said of Louis XV, as well.
Eh bien,
Antoine would count on having the ear of God. As for this strange Jacobite, he would be made to serve Holy Church’s purpose in spite of himself. “Go with God, my son.” Another sign of the cross, sketched hastily in the chill air.

“Goodnight,
mon Père.”

Père Antoine watched Stewart hasten down a narrow alley between two rows of hulking cottages, listening until the ring of his boots on the cobblestones had faded. Then, despite the cold, he remained a moment longer, looking toward the charity hospital known as the Hôtel-Dieu, then letting his gaze roam upward to the redoubt outside the town walls, and the high flatland called the Plains of Abraham where a few of the locals, the
habitants,
struggled to grow crops during the desperately short growing season. Their success was limited, and not just by the endless frozen winters. Corruption riddled the Canadian economy. The few
got hugely rich and the many starved, particularly the native population whose way of life had been so disrupted by the coming of the Europeans. In bad years, the priest had been told, the Indians were reduced to gnawing on the leather diapers of their children, though the infants had beshat them a thousand times. Père Antoine had seen hunger before. He believed the report to be entirely accurate.

There was no starvation for the wealthy Québécois living within the shelter of the city’s mighty fortifications. They ate the best of everything and lived like kings. Europe’s taste for the furs of the far north makes them rich, along with their willingness to engage in deception and thievery. They destroyed the old way of life of the Indians and made them virtual slaves, forced to trap and trade in return for the made goods they can’t now do without. Cloth and metal goods, but guns mostly. And alcohol, the devil firewater. Antoine was convinced that the Jesuits, Almighty God have mercy on them, were at the center of this vicious exchange. Under their all-powerful provincial, Louis Roget, they were black spiders in the middle of an endless web. More killing and starvation and disease and death, that’s what the savages got from the missionary efforts of Louis Roget.

Dear Jesus, let me show them Your holy and loving face. Let them be saved for You who thirst for souls.

A few Franciscans were with Champlain when he came. God help them, they had given up. The Jesuits filled the void, becoming the missionaries to the Indians of New France.

Allow us to return to the rich Canadian harvest, Lord. Grant us our chance to be martyrs whose blood will give You glory and insure the future of the order.

Père Antoine felt warm despite the frozen night. He stared a moment longer at the symbols of eminence in the city above his head, then turned to the hut a few doors from his own here in the Lower Town. It was bigger, but still a hovel. The Jesuits had seen to that. As if putting the Poor Clares in the humblest dwelling in the city did anything but make them more acceptable to the Savior.

The roof of the archbishop’s château was halfway up the steep cliff, midway between where the priest stood and the steeples of the grand churches at the top of the city. According to the Vatican, the archbishop of Québec was responsible for the spiritual welfare of all New France, which, if the entire territory it claimed were counted, was considerably larger than Europe. New France stretched from the Atlantic coast to land yet unexplored in the far west. It encompassed the valley of the Mississippi River and the area known as the Louisiana Territory. Unlike his predecessors, the current archbishop, Henri-Marie du Breuil de Pontbriand, lived mostly in Québec.

Père Antoine made yet another sign of the cross, this one in thanksgiving. How wondrous are Your ways, Lord. For if the family de Pontbriand did not have
ancient debts to the family de Ruben Montaigne, the Poor Clare Colettines would not be established in a stinking, half-rotted fisherman’s cottage at the edge of the fortress city. Saving its soul. And the souls of how many savages, You alone know.

It was because of those old family ties and obligations that Pontbriand had gone against the advice of the Jesuits and allowed the nuns to make their foundation in Québec, and permitted Père Antoine to accompany them as chaplain. And it was those five nuns who would see to it that Franciscans, not black gowns, brought the Holy Gospel to the Ohio Country. Who better than the simple sons of Blessed Francis to speak to the primitive hearts and souls of the Indians?

The priest looked once more at the hovel that had become the Monastery of the Poor Clares of Québec. Much of the mortar in the stone foundation had rotted and fallen out. The bell tower, hastily erected just before the nuns came, was crooked, and barely large enough to contain a single bell. When the nuns saw it they were delighted. Just like San Damiano, they said, the ruin where Francis put Clare when she became the first nun of the Seraphic Order.

Those five women assailing heaven on behalf of the Order of Friars Minor would prevail. Nothing was more certain. They were not the first consecrated women in Québec. There were the Ursulines, who schooled girls of the best families in their large and beautiful convent on the Rue des Jardins, and the Augustines Hospitalières caring for the sick poor in the Hôtel-Dieu, as well as a breakaway group of the same congregation who had built another, grander hospital, the Hôpital Général, in the Upper Town. But women whose vows bound them to give their lives to constant prayer, fasting, and penance … in all the vastness of New France there was nothing to compare to his five Poor Clares. Soon to be six. Just yesterday Mère Marie Rose had said that sometime in the near future she expected a postulant to join the order. The first since they’d arrived in Canada the previous spring.

A new postulant was an omen, a sign from God that the prayers and penances of the Franciscans in Québec were accepted. Père Antoine was so sure of this he had already sent word to a house of the order two thousand miles south in Havana. They were to prepare to send him friars to be missionaries—God willing, perhaps martyrs—among the heathens in the Ohio Country.