Between Two Shores

by Jocelyn Green

  “Not eating?” he asked.

  “This is for you,” she assured them.

  For the last two years, the fields around Montreal had been blighted black. This year, the grain was ripe but the barns were still empty, as all the farmers held muskets, not scythes. So while she had no desire to deal with hungry men, she had learned to keep her own wits and composure whether the emptiness in her gut scraped dull or sharp.

  “The forts along the Great Lakes must still be in French control,” she ventured once the men had eaten.

  Emile mopped his face with the end of his faded red sash. “As far as we know. If the British take them, we’ll just go farther north or west to trap.”

  “In that case, you won’t bring your furs here anymore. You’ll need a closer outlet. In fact, I’m surprised you came this summer at all, since you must have known Louisbourg was taken by the British and Quebec is under siege.” New France was hemmed in from the east. Even if the Montreal merchants were not serving in the militia, they may not have come to Lachine for the annual fur trade anyway, because they had no way to export their furs from the coastal cities to Europe. No doubt this was why only Denis’s team of coureurs des bois had come.

  “But here you are, just the same,” he said. “Still trading with the Dutch in Albany? Isn’t that the headquarters of the British army now?”

  “It is. So we trade with the merchants at Schenectady, on the Mohawk River, twenty miles north of Albany.” Even during times of peace, trade with Albany was forbidden for French-Canadian citizens, but the government turned a blind eye to Kahnawake Mohawks engaged in it. Since Catherine was half of each, arrest seemed half a risk, depending on how authorities wanted to view her. The three French sisters who ran the post before Catherine’s father took it over had been deported back to France.

  “And how do the French soldiers at Fort St. Louis feel about your smuggling goods to and from the enemy?” Emile asked.

  She smiled. “The soldiers garrisoned at the edge of Kahnawake wouldn’t agree with me, I’m afraid, but I don’t consider the British, and certainly not my business partners in New York, the enemy.”

  Emile’s laughter suggested he didn’t agree with her either, but these men would not report her, for they were also breaking the law by not fighting.

  Just as Catherine lived between Kahnawake and Montreal, between Mohawk culture and French, she lived and worked between two sides of a war. She remained neutral, uninterested in choosing sides. Successful trades happened because they needed each other. She sent fur to New England, and her porters returned with British trade goods: linens and kettles in peacetime, good rope and muskets in war. Ironic, perhaps, but a good trade nonetheless.

  A sticky breeze that smelled of coming rain stirred the lace at Catherine’s elbows. “This is not the first war my trade has weathered, and it won’t be the last. My porters are very discreet and adjust their routes to avoid the dangerous areas along the way. They are the best.”

  “Better than us?” Denis teased.

  She laughed. “You are the very best for coming this far when you must have known there would be few merchants left in the market.”

  “All I need is one merchant, ma chère, to make it worth my while. And that one merchant is you. Come now, mademoiselle, and make me glad we came to see you.”

  She could afford to, and proved it with rum and coin.

  Denis and Emile were happy with the payment, and Stephen and Philippe did not mask their surprise. They didn’t know, she guessed, that the Dutch merchants paid twice as much for her furs than what she could get anywhere else.

  Catherine smiled at the confusion on their faces. “You haven’t fleeced me, I assure you. The British have given up their own trapping, content to obtain furs through trade with New France. The war only makes them scarce and thus more valuable.”

  Thunder rumbled in the distance as the men loaded a dozen ninety-pound bales of fur into her flat-bottomed bateau. Satisfaction brimmed just beneath her calm. She was sure her father would be pleased. That was, whenever he decided to come home.

  By the time Catherine arrived at her own dock, the threat of rain had blown past with no more than a few sprinkles escaping the clouds. The air was a thick, damp blanket about her as she secured the bateau. Their other vessel, a birchbark canoe, remained tethered on the opposite side of the dock.

  The chemise beneath her bodice stuck to her skin as she climbed onto the dock and eyed the bales of fur in the bateau. They would need to be taken into the storeroom of the trading post before nightfall. If Gabriel returned by then, he could manage the task. With a tumpline strapped around his brow, the weight of the bale would be carried on his back. If he didn’t do it, she would wait until the cool of the evening and take care of it herself.

  Purple pickerelweed waved to her where the river met the shore. She snapped seeds from the blooms and ate them as she passed, walking up the riverbank toward their two-story fieldstone house. Behind it was a smokehouse, long empty, and a wooden shed full of tools grown rusty with age. The trading post stood apart from the house by twenty yards or so, a one-story building with two rooms: a public room in front for trading, and a storeroom in the back. A wide creek flowed behind it. Bees hummed among goldenrod and black-eyed Susans, which added sunshine to the grey stones.

  Stepping inside the post, which smelled of animal skins and pipe tobacco, Catherine found Thankful at a puncheon table at the back of the trading room, driving an awl into leather for a pair of moccasins. Bright Star sat across from her, sorting beads by color into glass jars. The two women were bent over their work, one head crowned with a plain white cap, the other uncovered, dark hair parted neatly down the middle of her scalp and plaited into braids that shone with bear grease.

  Catherine’s pleasure at seeing Bright Star turned to caution as she gauged the weather in the room, for Bright Star was one who brought it with her. Removing her hat, Catherine inhaled the smell of her sister’s presence and the uncertainty that always came with it.

  “What is it like in New York?” The question from Thankful stayed Catherine where she stood. As Bright Star talked about her trading trips, Thankful’s hands slowed in her work. The young woman had never asked to return to the British colonies herself, content with stories of the land that had once been her home. Her blond hair, blue eyes, and fair skin hinted at Dutch ancestry, but none of her blood family was alive to ask.

  Catherine approached them. “Time for another trip to Schenectady,” she announced with a smile. “You were right, Bright Star. The coureurs des bois came to Lachine.”

  Bright Star’s countenance clouded. “You are surprised?”

  “Not at all.” Catherine waved her sister’s defensiveness away with forced nonchalance.

  “You have pelts, then.” Thankful’s voice lilted as she pulled sinew through the soft leather, binding a tight seam. The young woman had seen sixteen summers, and she’d been sewing for at least half of them. Her long tapered fingers seemed made for needle and thread.

  “A dozen bales of them. If the porters are ready soon, we have time to make one last trip for the season.” It would take nearly a month to complete the journey.

  Bright Star rose from the table. “I need some time to prepare. After three sleeps, I’ll be ready and will return with help.” She paused. “Gabriel was pleased, I assume.”

  “I’m sure he will be, yes.” Catherine smoothed a wrinkle from her skirt, feeling like a child again beneath her sister’s stony gaze.

  “He was not with you,” Bright Star said. “He left you alone to deal with four rough men.”

  “He didn’t think they were com—”

  “He didn’t believe me.” Bright Star spoke low. “He never believes me. No wonder you doubt me, too.”

  “I don’t doubt you.”

  Bright Star held her tongue until the silence between them crackled with tension. At length, Bright Star broke it. “So what did he do instead, while you waited and then made the trade
for him?”

  Thankful bent over her work with greater concentration.

  “I’m not his keeper, Bright Star. As you are not mine.” Catherine had meant the statement to be a release, but as soon as the words slipped out, she could see she had chosen them poorly. Frustrated, she made an awkward attempt to close the matter. “Thank you for your help here today.” She hung her hat on a peg on the wall.

  Feeling Bright Star watching her, Catherine moved to the secretary that held the ledger book to record the day’s transaction. As she flipped to the correct page, her thumb grazed over records of previous items traded to and from Mohawk, French, and British agents. When she spotted entries for scalps, she swallowed hard and thanked God that practice had grown rare. Enemies were more valuable alive now, except to the Mohawk warriors who prized the scalps and kept them as proof of their victories.

  Movement caught her eye, and she looked up to peer out the window. Through leaded panes, she watched two blurry figures lash their canoe to a piling at the dock opposite her bateau full of fur. Her pulse quickened. They’d followed her from Lachine. They knew she was without a male chaperone and had come to steal the small fortune she’d left unguarded. Her father would—

  They didn’t even peek inside her bateau. Forms small in the distance, they marched from the riverbank toward the post, though it had already closed for the day. Slowly, Catherine exhaled.

  “Soldiers?” Thankful guessed. “Do they know? Are they here to arrest you?” Though Thankful was now a grown woman, sometimes Catherine wondered if she was still prone to her childhood fear of being abandoned.

  “More likely they need something we have, which puts us at an advantage,” Catherine responded. “Any problem can be solved with fairness, neutrality to all parties, and the right transaction. True in trade, true in life. And true in war.”

  Bright Star’s molasses eyes sparked. “They do not walk like men who have come to accuse.” Her hand went to the hunting knife that hung around her neck, its beaded leather sheath a burst of color against the stroud tunic she wore layered over a deerskin skirt. “No one is getting arrested today.”

  Catherine adjusted her fichu. “We’ve nothing to hide. You don’t need to stay,” she told Bright Star. “You may go home if you’d rather.”

  Bright Star shook her head, and the shining silver hoops dangling from her ears bounced against her jaw. “Not yet. Your father hasn’t returned from Montreal.” She spoke as if Gabriel Duval were not her father, too. As if Bright Star had not been born of the same union between a French trapper and a Mohawk beauty.

  The door banged open, and the two men clomped through it, bringing the sharp odor of sweat and damp wool with them. A warm gust of wind swirled in, a maple leaf scraping across the floor before they wedged the door shut again.

  “Here to trade, messieurs?” Catherine’s tone was even as she appraised them. The younger man was clearly Canadian militia, wearing his own clothes from the toque slouched on his head to his moccasins. The elder, a professional soldier, wore a grey-white justaucorps with blue turnback cuffs adorned with six buttons each. Beneath that, his jacket was blue and his breeches grey-white. White stockings and the silver buckles on his shoes caught what little light there was in the post. In both men, their eyes looked too large for their faces.

  They were hungry. So was she. So was nearly everyone in the whole of New France.

  The elder soldier removed his black tricorne hat trimmed with gold braid, revealing black hair fading to grey and queued in the back. “Bonjour. Do you live in that house?” He pointed to the home she shared with Thankful and Gabriel.

  Her eyes narrowed as she observed the bedrolls and packs on the soldiers’ backs. “If you have something to trade, let us do business. Otherwise I suggest you take your leave before night falls.” She crossed her arms. An unladylike gesture, to be sure, but she’d rather be seen as the proprietor than a lady just now.

  “You misunderstand,” the officer replied. His lips were thin beyond detection, his mouth a moving slit in his face as he spoke. “I’m Captain Pierre Moreau, Régiment Royal-Roussillon, and this is Private Gaspard Fontaine, militia. And you are?”

  “Marie-Catherine Duval. This is Bright Star.”

  Private Fontaine removed his hat and brushed a hand over his rusty hair. Younger than Moreau by at least twenty years, his upturned nose lent an even more childish air. “And the blond beauty?” His straight, small teeth could not quite be called white. “What’s the matter, too shy?”

  “I’m Thankful Winslet.” Crossing her ankles, she offered a polite nod. “Pleased to meet you.”

  Moreau’s eyebrow flicked. “Thankful. That’s a Puritan name, isn’t it? British. Do you know what the penalty is for harboring the enemy?”

  Speaking in flawless French, Thankful’s voice remained steady as she pulled her needle through the soft leather. “I am no enemy, Captain. My family was taken from our New Hampshire home by Abenaki Indians when I was seven years old. My parents did not survive the march.”

  Moreau frowned. “The Abenaki are French allies, as are the Mohawk. So you have more reason to resent us than most, n’est-ce pas?”

  “I was ransomed.”

  “I don’t understand.” Impatience strained the officer’s voice.

  Catherine lifted a rumpled bolt of British stroud from a shelf and unwound a few yards of fabric before smoothing it. “The government in New France has inspired many raids on British colonies. The Indians capture any number of British civilians to bring back north with them. Many times, they will keep women and children to adopt into their own families, usually to replace loved ones they recently lost to battle or disease.”

  She paused, rewrapping the fabric around the bolt and tucking it back onto the shelf. With a tug, she pulled another bolt free and repeated the process. “But some captives are sold to Frenchmen or -women. This is what we call ‘ransom.’ Once a captive is ransomed, he or she stays and works in that location like an indentured servant for several years, until the money spent on the ransom is considered paid off by labor. At the end of that time, the ransomed captive is usually free to leave New France.” With a shove, she wedged the bolt back onto the shelf.

  Moreau looked down his hawklike nose at Thankful. “You’ve been here for more than six years. Why are you still here, when you could go?”

  “There is nothing for me in the British colonies now,” the young woman answered.

  Fontaine hooked his thumbs through the straps on his shoulders. “But—were you not christened with a Catholic name once you were baptized into the Catholic faith?”

  Catherine bit the inside of her cheek. The truth was that the girl remained Protestant, though that was illegal in New France, and Thankful’s conscience did not allow her to lie.

  “We have many names,” Bright Star said, likely surprising the Frenchmen with her mastery of their language. All three women spoke English just as well, but there was no need to divulge that right now. “I was named Thérèse when I was baptized by the Jesuits, but I prefer the name my mother gave me on the night of my birth: Bright Star.”

  “What does it matter what we are called, when God alone can judge the heart?” Catherine asked. “So she wishes to be called Thankful, the name her parents gave her. It is all she has left of them. It is a good name. Show me the man who would deny her that, and I will show you one who grasps for what is not his to take.”

  The quiet that followed her speech stretched into a long, airless moment. Fontaine’s mouth pulled to one side, and Moreau thrust his chin forward, but neither proved willing to speak his mind.

  Finally, Thankful cleared her throat, a smile on her lips. “Call me Mademoiselle Winslet, if it please you. That is, should you have need to call me at all, which I don’t suppose you will.”

  Captain Moreau’s chest lifted as he pushed his shoulders back. “That all depends on who lives in that house.” He fished a limp document from his waistcoat and marched to the counter, where he drop
ped it on one side of a scale. “We’re here under orders. We are to be billeted here.”

  Glancing at Thankful, Catherine moved to the counter and parsed the script on the paper. “Why here?” she asked. “If it’s Montreal you wish to defend, you’d be better off crossing the river again to stay within its walls.” It was a city of women, children, and old men now, for every able-bodied man had been called away to defend Quebec.

  Moreau drummed his fingers on the counter, a signet ring catching the light. “Our objective is not to defend the city.”

  “The river, then,” Catherine guessed, though the rapids between here and Montreal’s main port were too dangerous for most British vessels to attempt. “The St. Lawrence is already guarded by the garrison at Fort St. Louis, not two miles from here, adjacent to Kahnawake. Surely those barracks would better suit you.”

  “Already full,” the private replied, his attention drifting to the muskets and powder horns hanging on the wall behind the counter. He carried no weapon of his own. Militiamen never did. They were handed what they needed just before an expedition and gave it back right after.

  Captain Moreau cleared his throat. “There are three hundred of us recently detached from our units to come here, and the fort is overcrowded as it is. We’re here to oversee the wheat harvest on the farms of the Montreal Plain. It is said it will amount to more than one and a half million minots of wheat.” That was almost two and a half million bushels.

  “And who is to harvest the wheat?” Bright Star asked. “All the Canadian farmers are serving in the militia and are miles away from their crops.” The only people who had no trouble bringing in their harvests were the Indian villagers, where the women tended the crops.

  “You see the problem.” Fontaine scratched the side of his nose. “Quebec has farmers but no food. Montreal has food but no farmers. So we must—you must—harvest the wheat yourselves. All women, children, and elderly. We are here to supervise the harvest in the neighboring farms. And we are to be billeted at that house for as long as it takes to send the wheat up to Quebec.”