Shadowbrook Part 53

"You look splendid," Quent told her.

"I wasn't sure you'd approve."

"Why not?"

"I'm not sure. Pretending to be something I'm not, perhaps."

"Is who we are a matter of what we wear?"

She was startled. "No, of course not. I just-"

"You're you, Nicole. Whether you're wearing the black veil of the Poor Clares, or a mobcap in the big house, or beaded buckskins." He fingered the neckline of the bodice. She couldn't be wearing corsets beneath this outfit. The time when she dressed herself in Pohantis's white skins, she'd known enough not to wear them then and when he lay over her for those few moments before she told him everything was different, he'd felt her flesh soft and yielding and unrestrained.

How familiar his fingers felt on the bare skin between the lacings of the dress. How right for this time and this place. As the veil had been right for the monastery.

I have tried to do what is right, ma Mere.

I know. And G.o.d knows. And now what is right is that you must leave.

He saw the shadow pa.s.s over her face. "What are you thinking?"

"That I do not understand very much." Then, before she could say more, Las.h.i.+ came and pulled her away. It was time to eat and the women must be separated from the men.

After the meal there was the calumet, and then, she knew, there would be the dance. Would the women choose a man as they had in the Shawnee camp and go off with him? And if they did, what would she do? I cannot, however much I want to. It is a sin. Help me, mon Dieu.

The drums began, many this time, and not with the prayerful solemnity of the earlier ceremony. Corm came to where she sat beside Las.h.i.+ and leaned down and said, "This part's joyful. We're celebrating Bishkek's pa.s.sage into the next world."

"Monsieur Shea, please, tell me ... That other time, when we were in the camp of the Shawnee and all the women chose a man to be with, is it ..." She knew herself to be bright red. She could feel the flush, and see her embarra.s.sment reflected in Cormac's wide grin. If only they were not so far north and it were not June, at least it would be dark.

"Not quite the same here. We Potawatomi have our own ways. But don't worry. I'm sure you're going to enjoy everything that comes next." He left her then and she saw him speak a few words to the one they'd told her was the chief, though she could not remember his name. Then the drums became more insistent and she could think of nothing except the way the beat seemed to keep pace with her heart, and how Quent looked as he danced with the others. All the women chanted. "Ahaya, haya, haya..."

Quent watched her moving with the other squaws; they had linked arms with her and she could not avoid it. Her Ups were slightly parted and her eyes shone and he could see from the way her chest rose and fell that she felt the excitement of the others. He was heavy with wanting her, and sick with fear that when the dance ended nothing would be changed. You got to find some way make that little lady know she got her feet solid on the good earth, Master Quent. There was no place on earth more good or more solid than Singing Snow.

The circle moved and he had no choice but to move with it; for a time he had his back to Nicole and the other women. When he next saw her Kekomoson stood in front of her. He was offering her the old clay cooking pots that had belonged to the wife of Bishkek.

Nicole looked up at the chief, trying to look respectful. Doesn't he know I don't understand a word of his language? Surely Las.h.i.+ must tell him. Or Quent or Monsieur Shea. She was enormously relieved when she saw both men coming toward her.

Corm moved faster than Quent. "It's a gift," he told Nicole. "You can't refuse if you want to be polite."

"Oh no, why would I refuse his gift? Tell him I'm honored. Please say these things are beautiful and I am proud to have them." Nicole reached out and took the stack of clay cooking pots. A loud cheer went up from everyone in the village. Then the drams were beating more furiously than before and the chief had dragged her to her feet and was walking her toward Quent.

There were more words she didn't understand, and Quent grinning at her, and finally saying, "Kekomoson wants to know if you wish to give the pots back"

"Oh, no, why should I? Please tell him I'm most grateful for his kindness."

He knew he had to tell her, but just then, the way she looked and how much he wanted her ... I'll explain later, he promised himself. When we're alone. "You have to dance with me now," he said. "That's the way you say thank you for the gift of the pots."

"But I still limp. Besides, I don't know how."

"It's easy, I'll show you."

She held the pots in her arms and he put his hand on her shoulder to lead her to the fire. The drums continued to beat. Corm had picked up two rattles and he shook them in the same rhythm, and the squaws chanted as before. "Ahaya, haya, haya."

"Why is Monsieur Shea circling us like that?"

"It's the way it's done. Come on. Don't think so much. Just move."

She was halting at first, then a bit more sure of herself. He worried that her bad leg would let her down and he put his arm around her waist to support her. "Don't drop the pots, that's very important."

She turned to him and this time her smile was like sunlight and her body moved in unison with his. Quent led her around the fire three more times, then away from the campsite into the woodland beyond. The chant followed them. "Ahaya, haya, haya." Nicole still held the day pots that had belonged to the wife of his manhood father.

"We're married," Quent said.

"What?!"

"The Potawatomi don't make much of weddings. But when a brave chooses a squaw, his mother gives her cooking pots. And if she accepts them, then she's saying yes, she accepts the brave. Those pots belonged to the wife of my manhood father, Bishkek. She's dead as well. So Kekomoson took the pots to keep them until either Corm or I chose a squaw."

"And you told him you chose me."

"Not exactly. Corm did."

"Quent, I ..."

"Stop talking, d.a.m.n you. I have listened to all your talk for months. h.e.l.l, I've listened for years. But the reality is that we're both alive and we're both here and we love each other."

They were sitting beside a stream and he turned to her and put both his arms around her and forced her to lay back with the weight of his body. Nicole knew she should pull away, that he would not force himself on her if she resisted, but for only the length of one kiss ... That could not be such a terrible sin.

Quent loosed the laces of the squaw dress, and felt the soft flesh of her breast against his palm.

"No, my darling. I cannot. It's a sin."

"No, it isn't. I told you. We're married."

The catechism she had learned at maman's knee had spoken of marriage as a sacrament, one that the couple bestowed on each other. The priest was merely a witness. She turned her head to free her mouth from his. "Quentin Hale, will you love me forever? Will I be your wife under G.o.d?"

"Forever and ever," he promised. "Under any G.o.d, Potawatomi or Christian or-"

"Ssh. There is only one G.o.d, my darling. However we choose to wors.h.i.+p. I will be your wife, Quentin Hale. Forever and ever."

"Forever, starting now," he whispered and covered her body with his.

Epilogue.

The World of Tears

1763-1769.

FOR THE FIRST time ever the Anis.h.i.+nabeg united under a single leader. Faced with the broken promises of the English and Jeffrey Amherst's refusal even to supply them with food or tobacco or guns or powder, Pontiac rallied his people in a great effort to bring back the French. He called together a powwow of Ottawa, Chippewa, Huron, and Potawatomi-more than four hundred chiefs and sachems-and they listened to the Ottawa sachem and remembered the words of the prophets who had told them that unless the Real People turned back to their old ways they were doomed, and soon they danced a war dance that was unlike any other. Papankamwa, eesipana, ayaapia, anseepikwa, eeyeelia, pileewa ... So, so, all of us together.

Fires burned and whites died from Niagara in the north to Carolina in the south. Miami joined the rebellion, and Lenape, and Kickapoo and Seneca and Shawnee. So, so, all of us together. Fort Sandusky fell, and Fort Wayne, and Fort Venango and Fort LeBoeuf. After two months, when Fort Edward Augustus in Green Bay was taken, the English had lost every stronghold in the pays d'en haut and the Ohio Country except for Fort Detroit and Fort Pitt, and both were under siege. So, so, all of us together.

Amherst sent a troop of handpicked soldiers including rangers to Pontiac's camp near Fort Detroit, but the Anis.h.i.+nabeg were waiting for them and the creek where the two forces engaged ran red with blood. b.l.o.o.d.y Creek, it was called after that. Cormac Shea, who had been beside Pontiac from the first moment of the great rebellion, was among those who died there, but no one took his scalp. Pontiac brought the body of the metis back to the camp and it was honored and buried, but the Ottawa knew that without his wabnum his war had lost its heart. He offered to treat with the English, but hatred of the red men was now strong in the hearts of Amherst and the others. Pontiac's offer was refused, and the other tribes no longer believed in his leaders.h.i.+p and gradually they deserted. For the red men, life in the sun-coming part of the earth had all but ended. Most moved west, but the Cmokmanuk followed and the Real People began their sad journey over a long trail of tears.

In 1763 the Treaty of Paris was signed and only Louisiana was left to the French. The Jesuits were well established there by then, but one, Louis Roget, went for a walk one day and was found a week later, scalped and missing his heart. So Vaudreuil's curse had borne fruit: Roget had escaped Canada, but he had died a Canadian death.

Vaudreuil himself was imprisoned in the Bastille for a time, but later exonerated.

Bigot was found guilty of fraud and banished from France.

Mere Marie Rose and her four daughters from France, returned to the monastery in Montargis. History forgot them and the Poor Clares dated their origins in Canada to the founding of a monastery in Quebec more than fifty year's later.

Pontiac was killed in 1769 by Peoria Anis.h.i.+nabeg.

In the big house at Shadowbrook there was laughter and birth and death and hope, and bonfires that burned in thanksgiving when word came in high summer of 1776 of the glorious Declaration of Independency p.r.o.nounced in Philadelphia. In July of 1788, confident that the Bill of Rights for which they had so long argued would be added to the proposed doc.u.ment establis.h.i.+ng a union of all the former colonies, the delegates to the a.s.sembly in Poughkeepsie agreed that New York State would ratify the Const.i.tution. The people who tilled the earth, on small farms as well as the huge patents of the north and plantations of the south, would join with the people of the merchant cities from Boston to Savannah. Together they would set out on a great and daring experiment made possible in part by the terrible war they had fought and won twenty-five years before.

The mists of dawn still hung over the Patent when Quentin Hale and Cormac Shea Hale, at twenty-two his eldest son, climbed to the top of Big Two, but by the time they had erected a pole and run up the flag with thirteen stars that Nicole had st.i.tched with such care, the sun had risen on a new and glorious day.

Haya, haya, jayek. So, so, all of us together.

Acknowledgments.

Like every author, I stand on the shoulders of those who have preceded me. I could not have written this book without the a.s.sistance of a great many others, and an abbreviated list appears below. Two, however, were truly stars to navigate by: 1759 The Battle for Canada by Laurier L. Lapierre, McClelland & Stewart, Inc., which provided a wealth of insight and information about Quebec of the time, including the story of a secret Jesuit map of La Traverse in the hands of and ignored by the great Montcalm; and Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 by Fred Anderson, Knopf, which introduced me to the tale of Was.h.i.+ngton in Jumonville's Glen and which brilliantly told the war's story from the other side of the border. Others were The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 by Richard White, Cambridge University Press; Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America by Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Cornell University Press; Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier by James H. Merrell, W.W. Norton & Company (where I learned about bridge persons); Montcalm and Wolfe: The French and Indian War by Francis Parkman, DeCapo Press; A People's Army: Ma.s.sachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years' War by Fred Anderson, University of North Carolina Press, Empire of the Bay: The Company of Adventurers That Seized a Continent by Peter C. Newman, Penguin USA; A Few Acres of Snow: The Saga of the French and Indian Wars by Robert Leckie, John Wiley & Sons; The Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Region of the Great Lakes: As Described by Nicolas Perrot, French Commandant in the Northwest, University of Nebraska Press; Redcoats Along the Hudson: The Struggle for North America 1754-63 by Noel St. John Williams, Bra.s.sey's, Inc.; The Founders of America: How Indians Discovered the Land, Pioneered in It, and Created Great Civilizations by Francis Jennings, W. W. Norton; The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization: British Military Sites from Albany to Crown Point by Daniel K. Richter, University of North Carolina Press; The Great Warpath by David R. Starbuck, University Press of New England; Redcoats, Yankees and Allies: A History of Uniforms by Brenton C. Kemmer, ill.u.s.trated by Joe Lee, Heritage Books; Sons of a Trackless Forest by Mark A. Baker, Baker's Trace Publis.h.i.+ng. (Mark Baker is the re-enactor and student of the period who taught Daniel Day-Lewis how to fire a long gun for the Twentieth Century Fox film, Last of the Mohicans.) The Internet was an indispensable resource. I found there dictionaries of Native American languages, reproductions of maps and doc.u.ments, the wisdom of the nation's many re-enactors of the colonial period (surely one of the great underutilized resources for those seeking authenticity in historical film and fiction), histories of numerous Native American tribes, and countless accounts of the time of the story without which the world within these pages could not have come into being. It would be impossible to list every website I visited, many over and over again, but anyone interested in retracing this path need only put subject headings and keywords into the major search engines and follow the links. Bravo.

Finally, in keeping with the biblical promise that the last shall be first, warmest thanks to my agents, Henry Morrison and Danny Baror, my superb editor, Sydny Miner-who once again has given me back a better book than I gave her-and a special note of thanks to Andree Pages for that rarest of treasures, sensitive and enlightening copyediting.

I am indebted to you all.

About the Author.

Beverly Swerling is the author of the critically acclaimed City of Dreams. A writer, consultant, and an avid amateur historian, she lives in New York City with her husband.

end.