Part 7 (1/2)
MONDAY, JULY 13, 1754.
NEW YORK PROVINCE.
The reeds that grew beside this stretch of Hudson's River were taller than Nicole's head, taller than either of the men. They parted with soft, sighing sounds as the party of three moved through them, then closed as if they had never been disturbed.
It had been three weeks since the night beside the Shawnee fire. The journey by canoe had been infinitely easier for Nicole, but the boat had been abandoned the day before and left well hidden on the riverbank.
”Not a good idea for us to announce our arrival by paddling alongside the Albany town wharves,” Quent said. When Nicole asked why, he hesitated, then grinned. She liked his grin. It made him look like a mischievous small boy. ”Can't say I'm certain of the answer to that,” he admitted. ”But it's not the way Corm and I do things.”
She understood what he was saying. Stealth was bred into them; it was how they survived. Anyway, she didn't mind giving up the canoe as much as she'd thought she might. The paths here were well marked and a bit wider than in the Ohio Country. The trek had been easier than she'd expected until they got to these dreadful reeds.
She was in her usual place, between the two men. The sun was not yet directly overhead, but already perspiration poured off her and the buckskins of the men were dark with sweat. She could smell their ripe, musky odor mixing with the fetid heat rising off the marsh. When evening came all three of them would strip off their clothes and bathe in the river, then eat and sleep. It was the prize, the goal that made her able to put one foot in front of the other.
A reed swiped her cheek and Nicole knew from the sting that she had been cut. She wiped away the blood and the sweat with a corner of her torn and shabby skirt. Then Monsieur Shea, who was in the lead, stopped walking and Monsieur Hale put a hand on her shoulder. They waited like that for a few heartbeats. By now she knew better than to ask what or why. Nicole held her breath.
Another man appeared, an Indian, dark-skinned and flat-faced, with flared nostrils. He wore buckskins and had a tomahawk at his waist. His hair was black and coa.r.s.e and worn loose to his shoulders. What looked to be the tail feathers of some bird hung from his ears, and his face was covered with the strange markings Nicole had been told were called tattoos. She had become adept at reading the reactions of her two companions. She knew at once the newcomer was not an enemy.
The three men spoke for a moment or two in that rapid, guttural language she didn't understand. The Indian kept staring at Nicole and jerking his head to indicate a spot somewhere to his right. Eventually Cormac Shea and the stranger took a few steps in that direction, disappearing into the all-concealing reeds.
”He doesn't like speaking of important things in front of a squaw,” Quent said.
”But I do not understand a word of his language.”
Quent shrugged. ”He doesn't know that. Wait here. If you don't want to be lost in these reeds forever, don't take a step in any direction.” He followed after the other two. Nicole had no idea where they had gone. The tall reeds had an eerie way of distorting any sense of direction. She could, however, hear the low murmur of their voices.
A few moments later Quent reappeared at her side. He was alone. ”We're going on. Cormac has to see someone. He'll catch up with us later.”
”I wouldn't have been lost forever if I'd moved,” she said. ”You'd have found me.”
”I expect so.”
”Then why did you say it?”
”To make you behave.”
”I am not a child. You must stop treating me as if I have no understanding and no intelligence.”
”You're right. I won't do it anymore. This journey,” he added, ”it can't have been easy for a white woman who's never been in the wilderness. You've done well.”
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 b.u.t.ting up to the sh.o.r.eline 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 s.h.i.+ps-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 was.h.i.+ng 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-fas.h.i.+on. 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 st.u.r.dily built of stone and white pine s.h.i.+ngles, 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 fas.h.i.+on. 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 metisse 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 pet.i.t metis.” The little half-breed. ”Moi, je suis la grande metisse. 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. d.a.m.n fool he'd been. He should have insisted on keeping at least his knife.