Shadowbrook (23 page)

The priest slowed as he approached a large rock with a flat, tablelike top. An Indian appeared in front of him as if he’d been conjured from the air. A Huron, but not one of those who had been at Mass. This one had a musket over his shoulder and a tomahawk in his hand. The Franciscan nodded toward the tomahawk. “You can put that away. I’m the man you are expecting.”

The Huron didn’t acknowledge the words, just used the tomahawk to point to a small, half-hidden path that cut off the main one the priest had been on. “Very well. I will follow you.” It was exactly what he had arranged. And prayed for.

A few minutes later he was sitting on the ground across from the renegade Lantak. The Huron said nothing, waiting for the priest to speak. “I am glad you
could meet me here,” Père Antoine began. “It is good to see you again, Lantak. Have you thought about what we discussed last time we spoke?”

“Your words are like the snow, priest. When it falls it seems heavy, but as soon as the sun comes it melts and disappears.”

“Jesus Christ does not disappear, my son. He is with His followers always. Here.” The priest touched his heart. “In the Mass He gives us His Body and Blood to eat, food that will never fail.”

“Two winters past, in the mission of Ste. Charité, twenty-seven Huron died of disease and starvation. The black robes who lived with them died as well.”

“Ah, but Lantak thinks in terms of this life only. Our time on earth is short. It is important only because it is a test, an opportunity to give ourselves to the love of Jesus Christ. When it ends we rejoice with Him in heaven. If …”—the priest paused for effect—”… we have not failed the test.”

Lantak spat on the ground. “Your words make an ugly taste in my mouth. Perhaps I should wash it away in your blood.”

Père Antoine felt a pleasurable trembling deep in his belly, the same unbidden ecstasy that sometimes came to him at night when he was sleeping and could not control … No, no. He could not expect this. It was too easy. To be martyred here and now, on the feast of the mother of the Blessed Virgin, shortly after offering Holy Mass. To go straight to heaven this very day. Thank you, Lord, but I do not yet ask for such an honor. I still have much to do for Your Church. “I do not think that is what you want, my son. I am useful to you, am I not?”

Père Antoine took a pouch of coins from a pocket in his habit and put it on the ground between them. Would it count as martyrdom to be murdered for money? And blood money at that. But the answer need not concern him. Lantak was smart enough to understand that once you wrung the neck of the gander, there could be no more golden eggs. “Two hundred now,” the priest said. “Two hundred more when the deed is done.” He had made an offering of a third of Hamish Stewart’s original six hundred lives to the upkeep of the Poor Clares. Their prayers might keep the Scot from eternal hellfire.

For a few heartbeats Lantak did not answer. The priest watched him and waited. It was said that though Lantak had been born in the Longhouse, he had a white father. If it were true, it did not show on his face. His bronze skin was stretched over prominent cheekbones, and his nose was beaked in that manner peculiar to many of the Huron. His straight black hair fell almost to his shoulders, and he wore a single white feather pointing down toward his right shoulder. The feather and his tattoos contrasted with the rest of his appearance. He had on neither the breechclout of the Longhouse nor the linen smock and loose trousers of the Jesuit missions. Lantak wore the buckskins of a
coureur de bois.
Probably stolen from one of the many people he had murdered. A long gun lay
on the ground a short distance from his hand. Doubtless he’d gotten that the same way.

Finally the Indian spoke. “Sometimes, yes, you are useful.” Père Antoine knew he would not be a martyr this day. “Why did you want to see me?”

“Shadowbrook,” the priest said quietly. “I wish to speak to you about a place many leagues south of here called Shadowbrook.”
Then Jesus said, “I come to cast fire upon the earth and what will I but that it be enkindled?”
Blood shed to save.

The way to the sugarhouse was through a dense and deeply shadowed wood. Mostly mixed oaks and elms and maples, Quent explained, with some conifers, pine and blue spruce. They were great trees; Nicole could not wrap her arms around them. It had been the same in the Ohio Country. “In the Old World,” she murmured as they walked the narrow path, Monsieur Quent ahead of her as always, showing the way, “I have never seen trees of such girth.”

“That’s because white folks have been cutting down the trees in the Old World a lot longer. The Indians never do such a thing, and we whites haven’t been here long enough to spoil the New. My guess is we will soon enough. Mind how you go here,” he added. “The path narrows.”

One moccasin wide, he’d explained, was how red men made a forest path. It was all they needed, so they chose not to disturb the woods more than necessary. She too wore moccasins, white ones made from the hide of a white bear, but still it seemed to Nicole as if there were no path at all. Only Monsieur Hale who … No, not monsieur. He wanted her to call him Quent, and he was a man accustomed to getting his way.

The size of him blotted out much else. How many times now had she walked behind that broad back? More than she could count, but she remembered each one. Or thought she did.

“Moccasins still comfortable?” he asked.

“They are wonderful.” It was true. Quent—it was easy to think of him by that familiar name, but not so easy to speak it aloud—had waited until they were out of sight of the house before giving them to her. “Take off your boots,” he’d said, indicating a log she could sit on, “and your stockings as well. You need to be barefoot for moccasins to grip properly. I’ve been thinking of giving this pair to you for some time. I figure they’re about the right size.”

He was gentleman enough to turn away while she removed her boots and hose. As if he hadn’t already seen her ankles and even her legs many times. “I am ready,” she said finally. “Please, give them to me.”

He turned back to face her and knelt beside the log. “Let me do it. They have to go on just so, with the drawstring adjusted to make the fit perfect.”

She was embarrassed by his touch, and by a feeling to which she’d chosen to give no name. It was somehow more intimate than all the many times he’d carried her through the forest. His big hands had cradled her feet as he slipped on first one moccasin, then the other, and tightened the lacings and molded them to her instep. His hands were remarkably gentle. She had wanted to ask if the moccasins had belonged to his wife, but he’d given her no opportunity, just tied the laces of the boots together and put them around his neck “I’ll carry these for you. You’ll need them later.”

“Later” had apparently arrived. “We’re almost there. You’d better put the boots back on.” Quent swung them off his shoulders and gave them to her, and Nicole again sat on a log and changed her footwear. This time he didn’t help, just turned his back to once more give her a bit of privacy. For the hundredth time she wondered if he’d ever peeked while she was bathing naked in the forest streams. A tiny corner of her mind told her that she wished he had, and her cheeks reddened and her breath came fast. Nicole laced the boots so tight they hurt, to remind herself of who she was and where she was going. “Very well. I am ready.”

He turned back. “You want me to take those?” He nodded toward the moccasins she held in her hands.

“I can put them in my pockets.”

“Fine. They’re yours now. You can do as you like. We’d best get going.” He started walking again, leaving her to follow.

“The moccasins,” she blurted out, “were they Shoshanaya’s?”

He stopped walking for just a moment—a half step lost, then quickly regained—and he didn’t turn around. “What do you know about Shoshanaya?”

“Only that she was an Ottawa princess, and your wife, and that she died. I offer my sympathies for your loss,” she added. It was difficult to walk in the hard-soled boots now that she had become used to the way the moccasins glided over the woodland path. Besides, she’d made the laces so tight they were truly painful. She slipped and slid as she struggled to keep up. “I heard that Shoshanaya was very beautiful.”

“She was.” He slowed and Nicole wasn’t sure if it was because he sensed her difficulty or if it was the heaviness of his thoughts that checked his pace. “Did my mother tell you about Shoshanaya?”

“No, Madame Hale has not mentioned her. It was Torayana, the Shawnee squaw, the night of the drums.”

“Seems like there was a lot that got itself done or told about that night.”

“I am sorry if I have offended you, Mons—Quent. I only wanted to know.”

“The moccasins are Potawatomi, not Ottawa. You can tell by the way they’re made, and the feet that there is no beading. They’re white bearhide. That’s unusual. They belonged to Pohantis, Corm’s mother. She had a liking for white skins, and
she knew how to get them. Pohantis died a long time ago. She’s buried up by Squirrel Oaks, the Shadowbrook burying place, but some of her things are still around. All Shoshanaya’s things were sent back to her people, after she was gone. To honor her.”

Nicole wanted to ask why, if that was the way Indians honored their dead, the same had not been done for Pohantis, but she had become adept at reading his back. Now it cautioned her to silence.

“Almost there,” he said after a little time. “You’ll see the road just as soon as we get past that stand of oak up ahead.”

The light was changing, the shade brightening. Soon sunshine burst upon them and they were on one of the wide roads he’d pointed out the day they first walked onto the Patent. The heat of the road was devastating after the woodland cool. Fortunately they did not have far to go. “There’s the sugarhouse.” Quent pointed to a large building made of logs, with a steeply pitched roof and one enormous brick chimney. “And there’s Deliciousness May, waiting for us.”

The black woman had white hair and her face was deeply lined. She was older even than Kitchen Hannah, Nicole decided, but Quent was every bit as fond of her. He picked her up and swung her around in greeting and Deliciousness May giggled like a young girl. “’Bout time you got yerself home, Master Quent. And how come it took you better ’n a whole week to come see Deliciousness? Never you mind, I got a pair of hares all sweetened up with a bit o’ syrup from last winter, the way you likes, and two peach pies ready to go in the oven. Lilac! You hear me, girl? You waitin’ there like I told you?” All the while she was speaking the black woman was eyeing Nicole up and down, never once letting on that she was doing it.
Grace áDieu,
the moccasins were in her pocket, not on her feet.

A little girl jumped out from behind a large elm. Perhaps four, Nicole thought, with black curly hair that was parted in the middle and tightly gathered over each ear, and surprisingly light skin. “This be one half o’ what my Runsabout popped out year before you went away. You remember that, Master Quent?”

“I surely do, Deliciousness. The other one’s a boy, isn’t he? Willie?”

“Sugar Willie he be now,” the woman said with some pride. “Moves the sugar faster than any mule ever been seen around here.” Deliciousness May nodded toward the sugarhouse at the same time that she gave Lilac a shove in the opposite direction. “You go on home, girl, tell Mistress Sarah that Master Quent and his visitor be here. Go on! And you help Mistress put them peach pies in the oven. The heat be just about perfect now.”

Quent showed Nicole the inside of the sugarhouse before they went on. It was a huge open space with an elaborate still in one corner. The smell was sickly sweet, almost overpowering. Nicole felt ill, but Quent didn’t seem to notice. “The
sugar comes from the islands, in the ships that take back our flour and vegetables,” he said, “and—”

“I didn’t know Runsabout had a husband and children.”

“No husband. Just the twins.”

“But they are here at the sugarhouse and she is—”

“Everyone goes where their work is needed. Besides, Deliciousness May is Runsabout’s mother, and Lilac and Willie’s grandmother. Her husband, their grandfather, is Big Jacob. He lives here at the sugarhouse most of the time, too. His main job’s to look after the young horses. The paddock’s not far from here.”

“That day … when you stopped the whipping, Big Jacob’s the one you called to untie—”

“That’s right.” He hated that the abomination in the Frolic Ground had been the first thing she saw of Shadowbrook. “The Frankels, the people who run the gristmill and the sugarhouse, treat the slaves fairly. You’ll see.”

Nicole nodded. “I already see,” she said. “This place, your Shadowbrook, it is a great enterprise.”

“It is. In the sugarhouse, for instance, we make rum not just for ourselves, but to trade with the Indians. I’ll take you up to Do Good sometime. You can meet—”

“I must go north, Quent. To Québec. You promised.”

“Do Good’s north. Three hours distant by wagon. Road’s somewhat roundabout because it skirts the hills. If you don’t mind a bit of climbing you can walk. It’s a shorter distance. Either way, don’t worry, I won’t forget my promise.”