Shadowbrook (14 page)

Nicole blushed at his praise and managed a prim nod. “Where has Monsieur Shea gone? Who was that man?”

“His name is Mikamayalo. He’s a Twightwee, what whites call Miami.”

“How did he find us here, in these … these abominations.” She pushed the reeds away from her as she spoke, staying close to Hale’s back and the path he cut for her through the whiplike vegetation.

“Indians are used to seeing things,” Quent spoke in an easy, normal voice, not the hushed tones of exaggerated caution. “Mikamayalo had word we were coming.”

“How? Who could have told him?”

“Other Indians. They have many ways of communicating.” He didn’t add that a brave or two moving on their own, without a woman, would have left them behind long since. “Mikamayalo had a message for Corm. An old friend in the town wants to see him.”

“Who is he, this old friend?”

“Not a he, a she.”

“A woman?”

He chuckled. “Mostly if you’re a she, you’re a woman, right?”

“Do not make fun of me.”

“Don’t take well to a bit of teasing, do you?” He kept his tone light, but there was a small knot of anger in his belly. How come she cared so much where Corm went and what he did? “Listen, if you’ll just stop talking and keep walking we’ll be out of these reeds in less than an hour.”

“And then?”

“Then we’ll be in Albany. Or near enough as makes no difference.”

In the days when the Dutch ruled Nieuw Netherland, the outpost some hundred and sixty miles up Hudson’s River from Nieuw Amsterdam was called Fort Orange and was largely a trading post dealing with local Indians. The settlement that grew up around it was known as Beverwyck In 1664, when the English took control of Nieuw Netherland, Nieuw Amsterdam became New York, and Fort Orange and Beverwyck became Albany. A palisade of rough-cut logs still surrounded the city, which was little more than three hundred or so wooden dwellings tightly wedged on a grid of about a dozen streets—only two of them of any width—and many narrow, crooked lanes, most butting up to the shoreline of Hudson’s River. Fort Orange had been constructed of logs and positioned close to the river; it had fallen into ruin. The redcoats were garrisoned at the newly built Fort Frederick, a stone redoubt two thirds of the way up the city’s highest hill. The inns and drinking houses were well below the fort, concentrated as they had always been around the intersections of Green and Beaver streets with the broad road known as Market Street that fronted on the river.

A dozen ships—cutters and sloops and schooners—rode at anchor a short distance from the riverbank. “So many boats,” Nicole said, looking back over her shoulder as Quent led her toward a taproom with a sign that pictured a horse’s head, “for this place.”

“Don’t be so sniffy. This place, as you call it, is breadbasket to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. At least the farms around it are. Without what we grow in this part of the world the Islands would starve. Without the river, how would the crops get to the buyers?”

Nicole wrinkled her nose. “Even so, it smells.”

“That’s not the river, it’s the town. And only because it’s high summer,” Quent said, laughing. “Anyway, we won’t be here long.”

She smelled like the woods. He was astounded at the changes the six weeks of their journey had produced in her. She’d taken to washing herself in the brooks and streams the way he and Corm did, insisting they stand guard with their backs to her. He couldn’t imagine another white woman doing that. And she’d begun rubbing her body with wild herbs, squaw—fashion. How else would she smell of peppermint and thyme the way she did? Like Shoshanaya.

He wondered if the Shawnee women had shown her how to bathe and perfume herself, and if she did it because she was now Corm’s woman. He’d seen them come back from the woods together the night of the Shawnee dance. Nicole and Corm had spent little time alone together since. Soon it might be different.

The big house on North Pearl Street was sturdily built of stone and white pine shingles, as befit the wealth and station of the man called John Lydius. It had been erected gable end to the street, in the old Dutch fashion. A few steps above ground level there was a deep front porch with long benches built on either side. Cormac Shea had been to the Lydius house many times, and this was the first occasion on which he found it guarded by Miami braves who stood rigid either side of the front door.

Mikamayalo stepped forward and spoke a few words. Ceremony, the proper way of doing things, was of great importance to the Miami. Corm knew that. He waited respectfully, asking no questions, taking his cue from the braves. After a moment one of them opened the door and motioned Corm and Mikamayalo inside.

Another brave in the wide front hall demanded Corm’s weapons. Unhesitatingly Corm slipped the long gun off his shoulder and stood it against the wall. The brave waited. Corm took his tomahawk from his waist and lay it on the table.
“Maalhsi,”
the brave said, using the Miami word for knife. Corm slipped his from his belt and left it with the other things. Satisfied, the brave nodded and motioned Corm deeper into the house. This time he went alone. Mikamayalo murmured something to the guard and slipped back out the door. Corm didn’t catch what had been said. The Miami language was very close to Potawatomi, Shawnee, and the other Algonkian tongues of the
pays d’en haut.
Too close. Corm could understand most of it without effort so he had never taken the time to learn it properly.

He felt naked without his weapons, but he had guessed it would be like this. No one treated their chiefs with more deference than the Crane People. To enter
the presence of one of them bearing arms of any sort would be a gross discourtesy. Moreover, if Mikamayalo’s story was accurate, he had been sent for by none other than Memetosia, grandfather of the mighty war sachem Memeskia. It was Memeskia who in recent years had renounced exclusive trading agreements with the French, forged alliances with Britain, and invited other tribes living below the lakes of the
pays d’en haut
to join him. The French saw Memeskia’s action as a threat to their claims on the Ohio Country. Two years ago they and their Ottawa and Ojibwe allies had attacked Memeskia’s village of Pickawillany, completely destroying it and slaughtering or capturing every inhabitant.

Among Memeskia’s clan the wounds would still be raw, and the Potawatomi were brothers to the Ottawa and the Ojibwe. Once all three had been known as the Fire Nation. So why send for Cormac Shea? More important, why would an old chief like Memetosia, who should have been waiting out his time to die in some peaceful village of his own people, have come to Albany in the first place? If he hadn’t, if Mikamayalo was lying, Corm was walking into a trap. He never remembered this house being so dark or so silent.

Genevieve Lydius was a métisse like himself, half French and half Piankashaw Indian. Her husband, John, was French speaking, but of Walloon descent and a Protestant. When he was banished from New France it was on the charge of being a British spy. Corm had no idea if that was true, but Lydius had become one of Albany’s wealthiest traders. He’d had frequent dealings with Ephraim Hale, and maintained a trading post with the Indians on land he rented from Ephraim up in the part of the Patent known as the Great Carrying Place. Cormac knew Lydius used it for smuggling guns to the Indians in Canada; so did Ephraim, but he preferred to turn a blind eye. When Cormac was a boy, John and Genevieve Lydius had been regular visitors to Shadowbrook.
“Alors,”
she’d said one day when she came upon Corm heading for the realm of Kitchen Hannah and her fresh-baked gingerbread,
“le petit métis.”
The little half-breed.
“Moi, je suis la grande métisse.
You must come and see me when you are next in the town.”

He’d be grateful to see her now. It would convince him he wasn’t about to plunge into a bear pit.

The house was big and sprawling. John and Genevieve had eight children and at least twice as many grandchildren. Usually you heard young voices and innocent laughter the moment you walked in the door; today there was only silence. He walked on a few steps, his heart beating a bit faster as the darkness became more intense. Damn fool he’d been. He should have insisted on keeping at least his knife.

“Cormac.
Ici.”
The words were a soft whisper, but he recognized Genevieve’s voice and turned in the direction it had come from. He could just make her out in the gloom. She was standing in front of a pair of heavily carved double doors.
Genevieve Lydius was a big woman, stately, with no sign of gray in her black hair. Flanked by two Miami braves, she might easily have been a queen.

Cormac’s eyes had grown accustomed to the dimness and he could see that both braves carried muskets. That made at least five armed Miami in the house. What if instead of being here to protect their chief, they’d taken Genevieve captive for some reason? His mind was racing faster than his heart. His long gun was equal to five muskets, but it was three rooms away, guarded by yet another Miami. Then Genevieve came forward and greeted him with a kiss on both cheeks and Corm felt his tension drain away. He would have smelled fear on her and there was none. She would not willingly conspire against him. Genevieve would never be his enemy.

“I am glad you have come at last, Cormac. Memetosia is very ill. There may not be much time.” She nodded toward the pair of doors.

“It’s true then? He is here? The house was so quiet, so dark. I was worried. The children—”

“We have sent them all away. Memetosia is too ill for the noise.”

Cormac glanced at the braves guarding the double doors. They stared straight ahead, seemingly uninterested in the conversation. Cormac knew that at least one of them would be listening carefully to every word. “Why is the honored Miami chief in Albany?”

“There was a meeting. Governor De Lancey from New York City and many other important men. They called it the Albany Congress.”

“White men.
Cmokmanuk,”
Corm said, not quite believing that a congress in Albany was an explanation for Memetosia’s presence.

“Yes, but a number of the chiefs as well. My revered uncle, even Thoyanoguen of the Kahniankehaka.” What she didn’t say was that they were there because there was a scheme to sell land some ways to the west. The Iroquois who ruled in the Ohio Country had long before given the areas known as Wyomink and Shamokin to the Delaware, but just this week at Albany they had sold that same land to the British. John wasn’t in Albany now because he was trying to get control of that land on the Susquehanna River on behalf of businessmen from Connecticut. She would tell Cormac nothing of those dealings. It would only anger him. “Mr. Franklin of Philadelphia proposed a way for the colonies to band together to protect themselves. A Plan of Union.”

“A union of English whites to protect themselves from French whites.” For over a hundred years the various tribes had been trying to survive by playing off one group of white men against the other and finding a place for themselves in the space between. Still the numbers of Real People grew ever smaller, and their way of life ever more threatened.

Genevieve shrugged. “Of course from the French. They are the enemy of the
moment. At least here in Albany. Anyway, it does not matter. The assemblies in each colony must approve this so-called Plan of Union. It will come to nothing.”

Men’s inconsistencies did not trouble her overmuch. She was married to a man who called himself English when it suited him and French when it did not. Half French she might be, and half Indian, but her job was to protect her family and her blood kin. “Memetosia is so old and so revered he can do as he likes. He wanted to come, so he came.”

“It won’t help them. Not any of the tribes,” Cormac said glumly. “In the end it doesn’t matter whether they side with the French or the English, the Real People are doomed unless—”

“Cormac, I know what you think. And you know my opinion.” Genevieve stifled an impatient sigh. How often had she heard him say that the
Anishinabeg
must find a way to preserve their way of life, but be at peace with the whites? All the while he was growing up he’d been telling her the same thing, and she’d given him the same answer:
You are filled with elaborate plans for the whole world. Better to make a plan for yourself. We cannot win this fight, Cormac Shea. The Real People cannot win. We are too busy fighting among ourselves to fight the whites. Find a way to survive and prosper. Let the white half of you take command and let the rest of it go.