Shadowbrook (61 page)

He had worked entirely in secret. Philippe knew the redcoats would confiscate his crayons and his sketchpad if they saw him, so he had waited until he was back in his rectory and alone and sketched from memory. The métis was the first person besides himself who had looked at these drawings. In the cold white light of the moon they were more terrible than they would seem in sunlight. The anguish on the faces of the
habitants
… Philippe had not realized he’d captured it so well. But yes, it was exactly how he remembered it being in Halifax.

In his pictures the women were all to one side, some with children clinging to their skirts, the men to the other. Redcoats stood between them with bayonets fixed to their muskets. “They said they would not separate families,” Philippe said softly, “but they lied. Yesterday, when the ships left, many families were no longer together. See,” he pointed a trembling finger at one sketch of a women kneeling beside a soldier who had a small boy by the arm. “That is Madame Trumante, and the child is her son Rafael. They were my parishioners here. She is a widow and the boy is four years old. She begged to be allowed to keep him with her, but they were put on different ships. No one knows if they were going to the same place.”

“Yesterday, you say? The ships left yesterday?”

“Two of them. We are told there are more coming.”

“Then everyone is not yet gone.” Corm stopped looking at the drawings and grabbed the priest’s arm. “That’s right, isn’t it? Some of the Acadians are still here.”

“Oh, a good many of them, Monsieur Shea. Some are still at the citadel. Others hide in their root cellars and barns and even in the forests. The redcoats keep looking, but they cannot find everyone.”

“Marni, Mademoiselle Benoit, do you know if she is hid—”

“Mademoiselle Benoit? Oh no, monsieur. She left yesterday. I thought you knew.”

“You’re sure? How can you be sure? Maybe she got away.” He’d told her to wait for him, that he’d come back for her. Marni must have known he’d keep his word. “Marni wouldn’t be easy to force onto any damned ship.”

“It was not a question of forcing her, Monsieur Shea. Look” Philippe found the sketch of Marni he’d done right after he was made to leave Halifax. As soon as he’d come back here, hers was the first face he’d drawn. In his picture Marni was alone, wrapped in her cloak and standing on the ramparts of the citadel, with her back to the others, the miserable
habitants
begging not to be deported. Marni was looking out to sea and smiling. “Mademoiselle Benoit was, I think, happy to go. She did not like l’Acadie, Monsieur Shea. I believe you knew that.”

Corm spent another week searching the entire peninsula, but the Jesuit had told the truth. He wouldn’t find her because she hadn’t waited to be found. Marni was gone. Corm headed south for the Ohio Country.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 15, 1755
NEW YORK CITY

The acting governor of New York—the only governor, since the Englishman appointed to the task two years before had never troubled himself to come to the province—poured another glass of malmsey for his guest. “I am not entirely surprised by your report. I had heard much the same.”

Quent had just completed a detailed description of the string of stupidities that had led to the massacre at the Monongahela. It was thirsty work and he was glad of the wine. He raised the glass in the direction of his host, then sipped. The malmsey was sweet and strong and very smooth. “Not the Canaries, I think,” he said, “From Madeira?”

James De Lancey nodded. “You’re a remarkable man, sir. You sit in my study in buckskins and moccasins, and I have it on good authority that you can paint yourself up to look like a savage and howl with the best of ’em. Indeed, that you
regularly do so. But you can tell the difference between malmsey from one part of the Spanish Empire and another. Exactly what sort of man are you, Quentin Hale?”

“Many sorts,” Quent said. “I believe it’s called being an American.”

De Lancey smiled. “Entirely true. It is something London has difficulty with, that we are true Englishmen, but Americans all the same.”

“Apparently London has difficulty understanding many things in the current situation. How to defeat the French, for one.”

“So it seems.” De Lancey turned his head. Rain sheeted down beyond the window of the governor’s mansion on the Broad Way. Be snow soon enough. “It’s over for this year, at least. All Braddock’s grand plans. Poor sod.”

“I was never sure if the plans were his or made by his masters in London. In any case, whoever came up with those notions had no idea what our forests are like. Or the way the Indians who fight against us will—” Quent broke off. De Lancey knew what to expect, even if London didn’t. The governor needed no further details. But Quent didn’t feel he’d given Edward Braddock his due. “The general may have been ignorant of warfare in America, but he had as much courage as any colonial. Or any brave, come to that. I counted at least four horses shot out from under him that day. He never hesitated about getting up on another.”

“And that young Virginian colonel,” De Lancey asked. “What’s his name?”

“George Washington. He’s brave enough as well. Too brave, if the truth be told, still young and impetuous. But he’s got a gift for leadership. Be a fine soldier some day.”

“And will he,” De Lancey asked, “make these same sorts of mistakes? The ones you accuse us all of—”

“I understood the plan was General Braddock’s.”

“Yes. It was. But he called all the governors together. Told us what he intended, asked our opinions.” De Lancey shrugged. “Eventually we agreed.”

“The general was accustomed to getting his way.”

“But we”—De Lancey broke off long enough to fill their glasses a third time—“we were quite willing to give it to him. It’s what we seem to do best, Mr. Hale. What London tells us to do.”

“Then London must be informed that there’s a better way.”

“Exactly what are you proposing, Mr. Hale?”

“Quent, please.” It was the second time he’d said that. He didn’t think it likely James De Lancey would take him up on the offer. Not the sort of man to be on a first-name basis, even when he was invited. “I’m proposing that we get together enough of our American woodsmen to become rangers, fighting scouts if you will. Link them up with our redcoats and let the rangers use their specialized local knowledge to direct the attack on the French.” God, it didn’t sound very impressive.
Not here in this elegant room. Not the way it had back on the Ile d’Orléans when he told Corm.

“That would require a great many woodsmen, Mr. Hale. I don’t think—”

“I’m not saying the woodsmen could do it alone. But London’s going to send more troops, aren’t they? In the spring?” Quent leaned forward, trying to read the answer in De Lancey’s face. If he were wrong about parliament’s plans, nothing else mattered. His convincing Corm to try and enlist Pontiac in the cause, coming here, the whole thing was a wasted exercise. He hadn’t yet gotten to the main thrust of his proposal, but there was no point in pursuing it if he were wrong about what they were intending in London. “After what happened on the Monongahela, surely they—”

“I’m not privy to London’s plans, Mr. Hale. I doubt any of the governors are.”

You’re lying, you white-wigged fop, sitting there in your blue damask coat and your white satin breeches, with a ruby ring on one hand and an emerald on the other. You could be in any drawing room in London; would rather be, I warrant You know damned well what your masters have in mind. “But you have an idea, Governor, some inkling …” Despite his certainty, sweat was starting to make rivulets down Quent’s back. If London didn’t value the colonies here as he assumed they must, if he’d been wrong about that … “Not privy to the details, perhaps. But you’re bound to have an idea.”

“I have a number of ideas,” the governor admitted. “And you, I think, have a few as well. More than just these … what did you call them?”

“Rangers. American woodsmen who’ll travel with the troops, and teach the soldiers how to fight Indian style.”

“We have our Indians just as the French have theirs, do we not? The Iroquois and such like? Aren’t they—”

“General Braddock saw little value in Indian allies and as a result he had few. A man with a different attitude could get more. Some Iroquois, no doubt, the Delaware and Shawnee. But that’s not the same as what I’m proposing. The Indians—any Indians—have a different perspective from our own. They have no concept of taking territory or holding it. It’s about captives for them.”

“And scalps,” De Lancey said, his distaste showing on his face.

“Yes,” Quent admitted. Whites took scalps as well, for bounty if not for honor, but he didn’t bother to say so. “Look, we do things differently. That doesn’t make us wrong and them right, or vice versa. But in a fight like this, against the French and purely for territory, it means the help we can get from the Indians is limited Thing is, the way our side is fighting isn’t very useful either. Form up in two straight lines, shoot over each other’s heads, keep up a volley so intense no enemy can resist it. Never run. Never break ranks. Not until the officer gives the command. That style of warfare won’t work here, however many troops London sends.”

“That style of warfare has served Britain well for more than a century, Mr. Hale. Why should they leam new tricks now?”

“Because this is America.”

And that, De Lancey knew, was true. He was silent for a few moments. “Rangers,” he repeated finally. “American colonials, most of them unable to read or write, common men with common notions, made superior to British officers.” In practical authority if not in rank. And never in rank, the governor was sure of that. One of the great grievances of colonial troops asked to serve with British regulars was that the most junior red-coated officer automatically outranked the most senior colonial. De Lancey took a sip of his wine, keeping his sights on his visitor, staring at him over the rim of the glass.

“Call them special forces on special assignment. London must at least consider the plan. Look what the traditional methods have gotten them. Not a single success. Just dead—”

De Lancey raised a forestalling hand and set the wineglass on the table, then took a lace-edged pocket cloth from the sleeve of his ruffled shirt. “Let us give ourselves what credit we’re due.” Dabbing at his Ups between the words. “We’ve pretty much driven the French out of l’Acadie.”

“Not much of a return for so much loss.”

The governor shrugged. “Something. And done without your rangers, if I may say so. More malmsey, Mr. Hale?”

“No, thank you. Look, they took Beauséjour by a freak, a once-in-a-lifetime accident.” De Lancey looked as if he hadn’t heard the story so Quent told him about the officers all having loose bowels and being in the latrine when the cannonball landed. “Something about a bad chicken. How many bad chickens do you think we can get the French officers to eat, Governor?”

De Lancey was smiling. “It’s an amusing tale, sir, whether or not it’s true. But say it is; say Beauséjour is not proof that the traditional means of warfare will succeed here. How do you propose convincing our colonial woodsmen to fight with the redcoats? That doesn’t sound to me as if it would be a popular notion.”

“It might not be, unless you could promise them that when they had defeated the French they would be free of any Indian attacks, that they and their families and their farms would not be harried by any red men ever again.”

De Lancey put down his glass and sat forward, peering into his visitor’s face. “In Christ’s name, sir, how could you promise that?”

Quent felt his excitement start to build. He had De Lancey’s full attention at last. “Because, sir, I can deliver an agreement with the Indians to share this land in peace. Once we throw the French out, they have Canada, and we have these English colonies.”

There it was, in the open, the thing that Cormac Shea had been agitating for
since boyhood, that a few other visionaries had suggested from time to time, that Quent had always known to be the only way his two worlds could coexist if somehow it could be made to happen. It was the first time he’d said it to someone he didn’t already know to be convinced, and the earth, he noted, had not opened up and swallowed either of them.

De Lancey sat back and sipped his wine and studied his visitor. Quent watched him and waited. One of the logs on the fire bled a trickle of pitch. Leaping tongues of flame shot toward the chimney.

“If anyone else had brought me such a notion …” De Lancey’s voice was low, the bluster and the false bonhomie both gone, “a notion that depends on getting a dozen different Indian tribes to agree to a single course of action … anyone else I’d have put out of my house as a madman. But Uko Nyakwai … Yes, perhaps.”

“It’s a workable plan,” Quent said. “Maybe the only workable plan.”

“Your friend, the métis with the Irish name, he’s in this with you, I expect.”

“Cormac Shea. You’re well-informed, Governor. Not many people realize we’re friends. Quite a few assume we’re enemies.”

“I would have said more than friends. I would have said almost brothers.”

“As I said, sir, you’re well-informed.”

De Lancey shrugged. “The Hale Patent may seem to be its own kingdom, Mr. Hale, but it is in the Province of New York It is my duty to know what goes on in New York.”

How much gossip had he heard, Quent wondered. Tales of the two squaws, Pohantis and Shoshanaya. And he’d know Lorene Hale was a Devrey, with powerful relations here in New York City. Likely he knew about John as well and what sort of a master of the Hale Patent John was turning out to be.

De Lancey chose that moment to say, “I am remiss, sir. I have neglected to offer my condolences on the recent death of your father.”

“A year now,” Quent said. “But I thank you for your kindness. Governor, the business at hand … If I can deliver such a promise from the red men—alliance at best, neutrality at the least—until the French are defeated. Then what?”

“All the red men. That’s what you said.”

“Enough as will make the scheme work,” Quent promised. The
Anishinabeg
who were longtime French allies, the Huron and the Abenaki and the Potawatomi among them, would be the easiest to convince. If they believed that once Onontio was defeated all Canada would be theirs as it had been before the Europeans arrived, they were sure to fall into line. As for the Ohio Country, he could convince Shingas and Scarouady. Hell, they were longing to be convinced. Most of the other chiefs—Mingo, Delaware, Shawnee—would come round after they did.