The Island of Doves (10 page)

Susannah touched the black bonnet to be sure it covered her hair, then backed away from the rest of the people while watching Wendell out of the corner of her eye. She tried to understand what was happening. Had Edward sent him after her? How had he known where she would go? There wasn’t time to find Father Milani or ask for his help. Wendell was not moving toward the gangway, and she remembered then what he had said at the dinner party—it seemed like a thousand years ago—about going to visit his cousin in Green Bay. So he hadn’t come at Edward’s bidding. But he would surely relish the chance to discover her and bring her back to him. If Wendell was going to stay on the boat, Susannah had to get off.

With her heart pounding in her ears, she pushed her way into the crowd and tried to put as many people as possible between Wendell and herself. She didn’t know if he had seen her, but she didn’t dare look back to find out. The departing passengers shuffled down the gangway at an unbearably slow pace. Susannah hugged her arms against her chest, counting her steps to keep the panic down. Finally they reached the dock and she broke away from the crowd and ran, the way she would run from a wolf at her heels. Her boots pounded the hard dirt as the distance grew between the whipping ends of her hair and the boat, one more link that tried to pull her back to Edward.

W
hat is hope?”

Magdelaine read the question from the clothbound book that lay open on her lap, then looked up at the four girls who sat before her in the sitting room and waited for an answer. For all her resistance to the house, Magdelaine was willing to admit that it had its benefits. When she had held her catechism class in the trading cabin, the girls shivered on cold days and argued over who would get to sit in the single chair. Now they were arranged comfortably on the sofa and in the high-backed armchairs, a fire warming the room, and each held a copy of the text and followed along. At noon, they knew, Esmee would serve them a meal at the dining table, and the promise of the food kept their minds from wandering too far from the lesson.

Three of the girls had been her students for nearly a year and Magdelaine was pleased to see their progress. They were half-breeds just as she was, all around fifteen or sixteen years old, living in cabins with dirt floors with mothers who waited for their husbands to return at the end of the trading season. The women knew very well that their men had white wives and children back in Quebec or Detroit. The Indian women were “summer wives,” and the men treated them with as much respect as they would a servant or slave. Yet the mothers gave their children French names. They were no fools, these summer wives. They had seen what white blood and a white name could get a person in this world, and they were determined their children should claim their due. These girls came to Magdelaine for lessons never having held a book, with no concept of how to read the words on its pages, but they were hungry to learn from her. The mere fact that she owned dozens of these mysterious objects made her, in their eyes, wealthy beyond belief.

And now she had acquired a fourth student, a taciturn girl named Noelle who, somehow, already knew how to read. She wore a large dress that hung on her shoulders and swam around her body, and her face was often flushed. Despite this she was arresting, with curling black hair and porcelain skin. She rarely spoke in front of the other students, but she always knew the answer to the catechism’s questions.

Magdelaine waited for the answer to her question about hope. “It is a virtue infused by God into the soul,” read Amelia, whose father treated his island children better than most. Amelia had a chance, Magdelaine thought, of marrying well, climbing up to a different kind of life. Though Magdelaine loved Mackinac down in her bones, she knew that a grim life awaited these girls if they didn’t try to improve themselves and their lot.

They continued on through the questions. Three times, Amelia rushed to answer ahead of the other girls, and finally Magdelaine raised an eyebrow at her. She sat back slightly in the armchair and pressed her lips together. Marie managed to stumble through a line without too much help and grinned at her teacher, showing off the gap between her front teeth. Pauline and Amelia took turns then and pronounced the words one syllable at a time, without intonation, without comprehension. Only Noelle refused to read aloud, shaking her head, her lips arranged in a perfect little circle of fear. She followed along, her mouth moving, as the others read, but the nature of her face changed as each question probed some aspect of the faith. Unlike the others, she was considering the words she read.

“Why is morning so fit a time for prayer?” Magdelaine read.

When the others remained silent, she nodded at Amelia. “To open the windows of the soul to the light of divine grace . . .”

“Marie, what do you think that means?” Magdelaine asked.

Marie’s eyes dropped to the page. She scanned the left, then the right, then back again, her finger trailing along the margin. She colored, blinking, and chewed on her lip before she apologized. “Madame, I seem to have lost my place.”

“My dear, the answer is not on the page. I am merely asking.
Why
do we pray in the morning?” Marie bit down harder on her lip and Magdelaine turned to the others, but a compelling spot of carpet or drapery held each one’s attention. She sighed. “All right. Here is another question, perhaps more difficult than the last. Why do you think I ask you to read this catechism?” She could hear them breathing, the sound of a frantic ankle tapping against the leg of a chair. Near the window, the preposterous dove rustled in its cage, and Magdelaine willed herself not to look at it. “Girls, come now. Show a little courage. You have minds—use them.”

Amelia cleared her throat. “Because you want us to learn to read and write?”

Magdelaine nodded. “Well, yes, that’s true. Those skills will set you apart, give you the chance to learn about things you might never see. But I have other reasons too.”

Marie whispered her answer once, and repeated it when the others couldn’t hear. “Because you want us to become Catholics, madame?”

Magdelaine nodded. She had seen what happened to the Odawa who dug their heels in, insisted on keeping to their old ways of living. You had to be pragmatic. It was a way of being shrewd, as one had to be shrewd in business. It was a way of surviving. But what she was trying to teach the girls had little to do with religion. “There is yet another reason. A bigger reason.”

“You want us to be careful,” Noelle said, holding Magdelaine’s gaze to avoid the sudden stares of the other girls. She rested her delicate hands on her lap one atop the other. The sleeves of her too-large dress nearly engulfed them.

The answer was vague, but something in Noelle’s expression communicated absolute understanding. “Yes,” Magdelaine said. “That’s precisely it. I want you to be careful, careful in what you say and what you do, what you allow your life to become. I ask you to read these questions because you are valuable to me. Your life is valuable to me, and it should be valuable to you. It is
certainly
valuable to God. And, if you can know this, perhaps you will think differently. Perhaps you will be careful, as Noelle says.”

She wasn’t sure how to make them understand. Women had little say over their fate, and half-breed women on this distant island had less say than most. But if they knew their worth, they might insist on respect, or kindness at the very least. They might have the wisdom to know the difference between a good man and a man who cared only for himself, who saw a woman as a thing to be used and discarded. Magdelaine couldn’t help but think of her sisters. Josette and Therese had been so valuable to Magdelaine. She should have let them know—should have made sure they knew.

Therese had been born first, and then Magdelaine, just one year later. But nine more years passed before Josette joined them. Their mother lost many babies in those years and had all but given up hope that she could birth another healthy child. When Josette finally arrived, she was greeted like the miracle she was. Magdelaine and Therese were in awe of her. Once she was old enough, they took Josette with them everywhere they went—their baby, they called her, their
petit lapin
. When Josette took her first steps, it was from Therese’s arms to Magdelaine’s that she toddled, on the sand of the beach Magdelaine could see now from her sitting-room window.

Magdelaine glanced up to see Esmee waiting patiently in the doorway that led to the dining room. Her apron was dusted with flour, her fingertips stained a purplish black from the elderberry preserves she had baked inside tarts as a surprise for the students. “Madame, the dinner is ready.” Magdelaine nodded and the girls went to the table. Esmee served the stew and each girl raised her spoon primly, careful not to slurp, as they knew that dining at the table too was part of their lesson. All except Noelle, who scooped the broth to her mouth twice as fast as the others. It dribbled down her chin and she leaned forward over the bowl.

“Noelle,” Magdelaine said. “There is no need to hurry.”

She nodded as she shoveled in a few more bites and wiped her chin with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I am so hungry.”

Magdelaine gave her a weak smile. They all were hungry, in one way or another, and she felt it acutely each time they were in the same room. She worried for them, and she worried for Miss Dove, who still had not arrived. The previous night Magdelaine had stood on the front porch and watched as a boat docked, then waited to see if she would be able to identify Miss Dove from afar. Men disembarked and walked up the beach—a few soldiers, a group of plain-dressed men who were probably missionaries coming to see Reverend Howe—but not one woman. Magdelaine wondered whether Miss Dove was still making her way west, or whether she would be like the others Father Adler had sent to Magdelaine, women who desperately needed help but stayed just out of reach.

Since she had first learned of Miss Dove’s impending arrival, spring had come to Mackinac. Magdelaine had been busy, first with settling in to the house and then overseeing production of maple syrup on Bois Blanc. She and Jean-Henri had tapped most of the trees themselves back in March, then hired a dozen men to work in shifts boiling the sap down in pots on an enormous fire over several days. These days, it wasn’t hard to come by men in need of work on the island. The beaver, which had made many white men very rich, was almost entirely gone from the region, and the men who made their living trading its pelts were now out of work.

After the girls had gone home, Magdelaine and Jean-Henri paddled over to Bois Blanc to bring back the last of the syrup. The grocer would sell some of it on the island to women who would use it in their cooking. The rest would travel on the next southbound steamer to Detroit and beyond, packaged as a souvenir of the quaint and backward Indian country, where they took their sugar from trees instead of cane.

The heavy pails of syrup were sealed closed with pine pitch, and Jean-Henri and Magdelaine lifted them one at a time into the canoes, then pushed off. They paddled slowly, careful not to rock their vessels, which rode low in the water from the weight.

“Mon fils,”
Magdelaine said to Jean-Henri. “When you write to Mr. Greive, be sure to tell him that you are able to depart for the city immediately, now that spring is here. We want him to know that you are a man of expediency.” She was anxious to get back and finish their work in case a boat should arrive before the sun set. “Not a moment to be wasted, your father always said.”

Jean-Henri sighed and said nothing. She glanced over at him. In the afternoon light he looked handsome but tired, with the beginnings of wrinkles fanning out from the corners of his eyes. He was no longer a young man, and she had known it for a while. But when had it happened? It seemed he had been a child—a trying child at that, full of fears she could never placate, nothing at all like his father—and then, suddenly, he had become this man who appeared before her, already worn down by the world. Where was his ambition, his pride?

“You
will
write to Mr. Greive, Jean, will you not?” He was running out of time. Soon it would be too late for him to start again. “Do you know how many letters I had to write to persuade him to consider you?”

Jean-Henri nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

She tipped her head back in frustration, then exhaled. “Is there something you are not telling me? Something that is keeping you here?”

“No. I don’t know how to make you understand.”

A thought occurred to her, and she brightened. “Do you have a lover? Because a grandchild could change my mind.” He was so morose, and she knew she only made it worse by prodding him. Loneliness oozed from him. She didn’t understand why he would want to stay here without a reason.

He shook his head. “There are girls. I know you think I’ve lived as a monk since Celine called off the engagement, but it isn’t true. There are girls. But I do not love them.”

“Love grows, over time. You are looking for perfection.”

“You and Father had very little time, but you had love, did you not? Do you not wish the same for me?”

Magdelaine scoffed. “I met your father when I was fifteen, married him at eighteen, buried him at nineteen. By the time I was your age I was a widow with a seven-year-old son.”

“What does age matter?” he said, almost to himself, as the paddle skimmed the undulating waves.

Her son was right. She and her husband had had love from the first day Henri passed through her father’s trading cabin after a long winter in the interior. He saw Magdelaine wring the neck of a chicken in the yard, her lean arms taut, and before she could look up at the sound his boots made on the gravel, he was beside her. He had a strong chin, wild curling hair filthy with months of work, with sleeping on the ground, and hands so dark with dirt they looked burned. He came back each year. One spring she had poured a cup of wine for him at the feast to celebrate the traders’ return, and Henri let his fingers linger on her wrist for a moment before he took the cup and drank it down. They married the following year. The wedding took place in the fall, and they left for the winter together and traveled as partners, despite his men’s grumbling. Magdelaine was no summer wife. When she left the hot heaven of Henri’s bedroll she gave orders—she learned how to oversee the care of the dogs, how to plan the day’s journey, how to ensure that they had enough food and fuel to make it to the next safe camp for the night—and the men had no choice but to obey. When Henri died that first spring, shot by an Indian to whom he had refused to sell liquor, she led the men back to Mackinac herself, Henri’s body in the bottom of her canoe and Jean-Henri already growing in her belly.

She wanted her son to have it, that kind of love, but Magdelaine suspected that not everyone could. It was reserved for the bold, the sure-footed, who seized a thing before they thought about the consequences. Magdelaine had known the joy of it. But Jean-Henri took after his Aunt Therese—he was cautious, hesitant. He waited so long to choose his course that it was chosen for him, or the path was closed off. This failure to act could lead merely to disappointment and missed opportunities, or, in Therese’s case, to an abdication with disastrous consequences.

Thinking about her sisters renewed Magdelaine’s anxiety over Miss Dove’s safety, and she let Jean-Henri’s silence rest between them for now as the last word on the subject of Montreal.