Savage Liberty

by Eliot Pattison

  “Pardon, monsieur!” the boy cried in fright as he tried to untangle himself. “Pardon, pardon!”

  He groaned as Hayes clamped a hand around his arm. The tinker’s face was so dark that Duncan took several steps toward him; then his eyes cleared and he whispered “Attendez” to the boy. “Attendez, attendez,” he repeated more energetically as he rose and began sorting through the big pack he always carried. Hayes produced a little tin whistle, which he extended to Rebecca’s Indian son. “Pour vous,” he said to the uncertain boy, then blew on it and pushed it into the boy’s hand.

  The boy’s eyes lit with joy as he darted away to show the treasure to his older brother, who himself tentatively approached the tinker. Hayes reached not into his pack, but into his waistcoat, producing a small, multifaceted pewter object. On a flat stone he demonstrated, spinning it like a top until it fell on one of its flat sides. Duncan somehow knew it had belonged to Hayes’s own dead son, and he smiled as the boy ran to show the trophy to his mother. He would probably be the only Abenaki boy in the world with his own dreidel.

  Duncan had stopped breathing as he saw Rebecca’s tall, silent husband approach Hayes with the two boys, as if to reject the gifts. Duncan had been terrified that Mog’s brother would seek to harm the tinker, but the warrior stared uncertainly at Hayes, his own face now clouded with emotion. Then Hayes reached into his pack and produced a long clasp knife, probably one of the most expensive items among his trade goods, and extended it to the man.

  “Pour le voyage,” the tinker declared. “Vous devez la garder en sécurité,” he added. You must keep her safe.

  The warrior accepted the knife only after giving Hayes his own necklace of beads and bear claws. “Elle aura une bonne vie,” he solemnly vowed to Hayes. She will have a good life. Tetwanay had stood nearby, framed by her sons, tears streaming down her face again.

  Now Hayes sat on a nearby boulder, silently watching the refugees leave their failing world for a new world, unknown, rife with danger but unconnected to anything European.

  “The water gates all have marine sentries,” Woolford declared after folding up his little brass telescope. “We should land to the east and go around to the northern gate, as if coming in from fur country.” He turned to Father LaBrosse. “You’re sure we will be welcomed?”

  “The rectory was built for a time when new brethren for the missions arrived almost weekly,” the priest explained. “Now, alas, your King George prohibits the entry of any Jesuits. Many of the rooms have been vacant for years. The vicar general will be happy to have them occupied by friends.”

  LaBrosse, having made certain they could find the side door of the rectory on Bonsecours Street, went directly across the river in a canoe with Noah and Conawago, whose wound was clearly causing him pain. An hour later Wool-ford, donning his officer’s uniform and doing his best to give his Mohawk rangers a martial air, greeted the lethargic guards at the northern gate with a command that brought a surprised salute. No questions were asked as they marched through the tunnel in the high wall, with Duncan, Munro, Hayes, and Will flanked by the rangers as if being escorted on official business.

  The heavy ironbound door, a vestige of days when Montreal was still threatened by Indian attacks, cracked open at Woolford’s first knock. They stepped warily into a dimly lit corridor, and the hands of the Mohawks went to their weapons when it was closed and bolted behind them. The screen on the muted lantern held by their escort eased open, revealing a refined, scholarly looking man in a black cossack robe who towered a handsbreadth over Duncan’s own six feet. He nodded his head, making a strangled, gurgling sound as he smiled, then gestured them down the hallway.

  “Hurons!” Woolford’s Mohawk corporal spat, as if it explained something.

  Duncan gave up trying to puzzle out the statement as they entered a vaulted kitchen chamber where LaBrosse greeted them near a long table where a welcome meal awaited them. The silent friar who had met them proceeded to a sideboard, where he opened the tap on a cask and began filling crockery tankards with cider.

  “Rogers is being held under guard in an old arsenal chamber built into the southern wall,” LeBrosse explained as he sliced a fresh loaf of bread.

  “Along the river?” Duncan asked.

  “The major is regarded with high esteem by the French of this city, who knew him as a skillful but honorable opponent in the war. Sometimes people pass by and throw food up onto his window ledge. My brothers have been allowed to visit, to be sure he is receiving humane treatment.” With those words Duncan had his explanation of how Rogers was getting messages out of his prison.

  The silent friar distributed the cider as their party sat on the long benches at the table, encouraging the Mohawks to try it with a nod and a grunt.

  LaBrosse picked up a slice of the bread for himself. “You’ve met Father Deschamps, then?” he asked between bites, nodding toward the tall friar.

  “A man of few words,” Munro observed.

  “Oh, forgive me. I have known him so long and he is so expressive that I forget sometimes. He went among the Huron as a young missionary. They didn’t like the words of God that came out of his mouth, so they cut off his tongue.” LaBrosse paused to cut a slice of ham for himself. “They kept him as a slave for a dozen years before some voyageurs discovered him and traded some gunpowder for him. He is a most prodigious artist,” LaBrosse added. “He illuminated a Bible in the Algonquin tongue, ironically enough, and now is painting murals on the ceiling of the chapel.”

  The Jesuit assumed his businesslike air again. “Rogers is to be tried in three days. They have already built the gallows on the parade grounds. The army believes in swift justice to traitors once sentence is passed.”

  “Surely there must be some effort to examine the charges against him,” Woolford said. “Colonel Hazlitt of Ticonderoga is the presiding judge. Hazlitt is a reasonable man.”

  The Jesuit sighed. “Conspiracy with the French,” he said in a pained tone. “Attempting to subvert the lands of King George. Such charges are severe. The army brings the charges, the army takes the evidence, the army selects the witnesses. The king is more inclined to set an example than to bother with tedious examinations. We tried to meet with the judge advocate charged with his prosecution but were refused. We tried to find him a barrister, but none will take his case for fear of offending the army. One of the charges is that he met secretly in the wilderness with French officers last August, a charge I am certain is not true.”

  “Certain?” Duncan asked as he studied the adornments on the walls of the room, including a partially burned cross and a crushed crucifix, remembrances of Jesuits who had been martyred in the wilderness.

  “Can you really call a boat on Lake Huron the wilderness? And they weren’t French officers.”

  Woolford lowered his fork. “They were French Jesuits,” he suggested. “Discussing charitable work with tribes, no doubt,” he added when LaBrosse did not disagree.

  “Endeavors on behalf of the needy, yes,” LaBrosse replied in a tight voice. “Neither Robert Rogers nor any of us would ever willingly meet with King Louis’s government.”

  “We are not opponents, Father,” Woolford said. “Can we agree we have two friends we do not want to hang?”

  LaBrosse raised his tankard. “I’m an Old Testament man. Eye for an eye. I think too that those who falsely accuse should be compensated for their sin.”

  Duncan reached into his belt and pushed a slip of paper across to the Jesuit, the image of the Celtic cross from the powder horn at Ticonderoga.

  “Exactly,” LaBrosse said after glancing at the paper. “They must pay.”

  Duncan caught Conawago’s eye, seeing that he shared Duncan’s confusion. “You know this grave?” he asked.

  LaBrosse gave a heavy sigh. “Everyone seems to.” He pulled the paper closer and traced the nimbus, the circle, with a fingertip. “The stone itself was erected by a Scottish noble who came after the war to mark the grave of his son, an officer
who died in the final battles. Perhaps he made the stone too distinctive. For a few years it was used for another noble purpose, you might say.

  “And this week it was marked by the devil’s disciples.” The priest stood. “Follow me, if you would understand.”

  The Jesuit led them to a room up a short flight of stairs, probably once quarters for kitchen staff when the large rectory had been fully occupied. Two beds were in the chamber, each bearing a grievously wounded man, both asleep. LaBrosse pulled away the shutter on the muted lantern on the stand between the beds and gestured to the old native in the bed to his right.

  “Moses has been the caretaker of the cemetery for years, even before the war. He and his wife have faithfully served the Society of Jesus for decades. He helped with the installation of that nimbus cross more than six years ago. Early this week he was disturbed in his sleep in the little cottage by the cemetery by two men digging into the grave. He challenged them, said they were defiling sacred ground, that he would call the watch if they didn’t leave. But they accosted him, beat him with the handles of their spades. One was a soldier, but he carried a little hammer on a leather loop, and he hit Moses repeatedly with its knobbed end, demanding to know where exactly the chest was buried.”

  “Mallory!” Munro spat.

  LaBrosse nodded. “They were not shy about using their names. The big one was a Sergeant Mallory, the other, his superior, is the man who questioned me years ago, the arrogant Mr. Beck.”

  Duncan leaned over the old Iroquois, who had awakened and was making a brave show of smiling despite his obvious pain. “Saguenay,” the old man whispered. “Saguenay, Saguenay.”

  “That’s what they kept saying to him as they beat him,” the priest explained, then pulled back the blanket to expose the man’s foot, which was elevated on a pillow. The bandage around the end was bloody. “Moses professed to know nothing, said there was nothing but a brave soldier and his casket in the grave. When Moses refused to say more, the one called Mallory put Moses’s foot on a stone while Beck held a pistol to his head. Mallory used the spade like a cleaver, slicing off the end of the foot, including all the toes. The scream woke us, and they fled.”

  A terrible weight pressed down on Duncan as he realized he had led Beck to the graveyard by drawing the cross and the fortress on the wall of his cell. Once Beck knew to ask about the fortress and not the cross, he would have quickly learned the image was of Montreal. “What did they find in the grave?”

  “A casket, which the blasphemers opened, only to find the mortal remains of the soldier inside. There had been nothing else there for years.”

  “Meaning there had been something else once,” Woolford observed.

  “Not for years,” LaBrosse repeated, and shrugged, “Yes, apparently the chest had been there, but it was moved years ago. I do not know where it was taken. As I said, it is protected by layers of secrets.” LaBrosse replaced the blanket and took Moses’s hand, murmuring a prayer. “Blessed soul, even when we found him, all Moses said was ‘tell my wife she is safe.’ ” He turned to the second man, a European with a large crucifix hanging from his neck. “And this is Father Andre, who replaced Moses and took the punishment the next night.”

  “They came back?”

  “Three others, all Frenchmen. We hadn’t even had time to fill in the grave, but when they saw the hole, they were furious. One was a rough character, a voyageur with a skinning knife. They toppled the cross itself and dug under it. And when they found nothing . . .” LaBrosse sighed again and gestured at Father Andre, whose haggard face showed that he had been struggling with great pain. Duncan pulled away the sheet. The man’s arm, propped on a rolled blanket, had a loose bandage on it from elbow to wrist, which was seeping blood.

  “The voyageur was called Regis,” Andre explained, then groaned and stiffened.

  “Regis,” LaBrosse continued, “peeled away a wide strip of skin. Andre told them nothing. Indeed, he knew nothing. The night patrol heard his screams, and as they approached, the villains ran. But I know who the other two men were from their descriptions.”

  “The ones who beat you in St. Francis,” Duncan said. “Henri Comtois and Philippe.”

  LaBrosse nodded.

  Duncan examined the terrible wound, which was well cared for, and as they returned to the kitchen, he suggested to LaBrosse that the priests find laudanum for both men.

  “These men must be stopped,” LaBrosse said as they returned to the table.

  Woolford raised the tankard he had left on the table. “We share your ambition,” he confirmed, then leaned forward. “If you know the faces of King Louis’s spies, they should not be difficult to locate.”

  “It’s not King Louis’s spies we need to see first,” Duncan declared. “Tell me, Father, do you have a senior cleric here?”

  “Of course, the Father Provincial presides from here. He is our vicar general for all of Quebec.”

  “Perfect. We must confer with him about a Jesuit apostate.”

  DUNCAN’S CALCULATIONS ABOUT THE JESUITS in Montreal had not been without some risk, but by midmorning the next day everything had fallen into place. LaBrosse had convened an urgent dawn meeting with several members of the province’s mother church, and within an hour a small company of the devout, including converted Mohawks and several tradesmen, had been deployed into Montreal’s streets.

  Tremblay had not only been too arrogant to think about using a false name in Montreal, he had also enjoyed the prestige of having a bodyguard so much that he had kept his escort from St. Francis at his side like a servant. The word of an Abenaki with a faded stripe of war paint on his cheek had spread quickly through the Mohawk residents, and the two had been quickly located at an inn only five blocks away. Tremblay, confronted by two friars and four Mohawk rangers, had peevishly agreed to come to the rectory, leaving a note in French that one of the Mohawks stealthily retrieved.

  Duncan and Conawago, their faces obscured by hooded cassocks supplied by the friars, were waiting in the dusty chamber into which Tremblay and his escort were ushered. Two large tables had been arranged in a T-shape. The man with short-cropped gray hair who sat at the center of the head table, flanked by LaBrosse and Deschamps, gestured Tremblay to the end of the other table and reminded Tremblay that he was the vicar general who received his credentials when the young priest arrived in Quebec the year before.

  “Yes, yes. I haven’t much time,” Tremblay announced, listening with half an ear as he sniffed the contents of a pitcher on the table. He conspicuously straightened his fashionable new waistcoat before he sat. “We have engagements.”

  “We?” the vicar general inquired.

  Tremblay gestured to the brooding Abenaki standing behind him.

  “I see,” the senior Jesuit said, and turned to LaBrosse, who reached into his robe and tossed an object on the table. It was a well-used knife in a moosehide sheath, adorned with a beadwork scene of a warrior carrying a pole of scalps.

  “The owner of this died at St. Francis three days ago,” LaBrosse said, looking up with an expectant expression at the Abenaki, whose eyes grew wide as he recognized Mog’s scalping knife. He began backing away.

  “No!” Tremblay barked at the warrior. “You do not have leave!”

  The Abenaki did not acknowledge Tremblay. He spun about and fled. Corporal Longtree closed the door behind him.

  Tremblay pushed his chair out, as if thinking of leaving himself, but then the chair would move no more as Longtree pressed his foot against it. The arrogance began fading from the young priest’s face.

  “We have much to talk about, Father Tremblay,” the vicar general announced.

  “No, no,” Tremblay said, waving his hands in front of him. “There is a mistake. I am not a priest.”

  “Nonsense. You came to us with a letter from the superior general, dated just before the king revoked his authority. You confirmed what it said in the letter, that you were ordained in Paris. You brought us confirmations from other high-ran
king members of the Curia. You are a priest, for if you are not, you have committed a grave sin before God. Heresy was once punished by burning, though that would seem awkward in Quebec since we have implored our native flock to abandon the practice.” The vicar turned to speak briefly to the two figures beside him, who both nodded solemnly. “The garrote would be more appropriate. The tightened ligature around the neck was first used in ancient Rome, home of our blessed pope, did you know?”

  What little color remained on Tremblay’s countenance completely washed away.

  “More experienced inquisitors than myself have used it to great effect, after all,” the old priest explained in a conversational tone.

  “Inquisitors?” Tremblay gasped.

  “A harsh word, I agree,” the vicar said in his very sincere voice. Duncan had taken a risk in relying on a senior priest he had never met, but after an hour’s private audience with Conawago and Noah, the vicar had enthusiastically accepted his role and was playing his part perfectly.

  Conawago had assured Duncan that they would be in good hands. “Jesuits may be committed to their last drop of blood to the conversion of the unblessed,” the Nipmuc had said, “but there’s nothing they love better than a good chess game.”

  The vicar was playing his part with Shakespearean aplomb. “We in Quebec are seasoned in the trials of this world,” he declared, gesturing at one of the many plaques that hung on the rectory walls. “Alas, we have suffered so many martyrs, we cannot fit all their names on one memorial. We also understand about a crisis of the soul, Father. We would far prefer to focus on redemption for your sin rather than punishment, despite the severity of your act. We have a proven solution to problems like yours,” he declared in a generous tone. “You will go under escort of our Mohawk brethren to one of the missions on the Mississippi. Kaskaskia comes to mind. The king in London has blocked new missionaries from coming from Europe, so it will be a blessing to have someone of your obvious capabilities join our brothers with the tribes.”