by Janet Lunn
“See here, woman, we got no time for such carryin’ on. Stiffen up!” Tibby’s large mother pushed both Rachael and Mistress Morrissay aside with a sweep of an arm. She stood in front of Charity Yardley, her hands on her hips.
“You can count on Bertha Anderson to give a body what for,” Jem Morrissay said with a chuckle in Phoebe’s ear.
Encouraged by that chuckle, Phoebe turned her head to smile back at him, but as she caught his eye he frowned and shouldered past her to help his mother with Jonah’s grandfather. She felt as though she had been slapped. Jem’s eyes had darkened with scorn. He still doubted her, still believed she had lied to him.
She started after him, then halted abruptly. There was no time for talk. There was Jonah. She ran back across the clearing to reassure the thin little boy, still propped against the pine tree, craning his neck in an effort to catch sight of his grandfather. Tibby was with him. So were Jed, Noah, and the two other small boys she had seen before the accident.
“Phoebe! Phoebe! You got George, you got George!” Jed was doing his best to climb up into the pine tree where George was perched, his tail swinging back and forth ominously.
“You’d best leave him, Jeddy. Jonah, your grandfather is all right. Mistress Morrissay and my aunt Rachael are looking after him. I collect you may be hurt worse than he is. I think someone had better look at your leg. My uncle Josiah has a little knowledge of medicine.”
“There’s no need.” Jonah flushed. “I’ll be right enough.”
“But not right enough for walking this morning.”
“No, Miss.” He paused then went on in a low voice, “and I don’t rightly know what Ma’s going to say, either.”
Phoebe thought about Mistress Yardley and said nothing. She did not know what to do for Jonah. She knew to use puff-ball spores for wounds, feverfew for fevers, jewel weed for ulcers, sweet flag for coughs and the like, but she could not cure his distress. She did not know what to do for herself either. It had seemed simple that moment by Lake Champlain when she had decided to follow Jem, to find his mother and Mistress Anderson. Now she would go with them, and with her aunt and uncle and her cousins, to the British Fort St. John’s in Canada. She would deliver Gideon’s message there. Even though it was too late to save the Andersons and Morrissays and Collivers, it might not be too late to deliver the coded message to General Powell, or to whoever was in charge at Fort St. John’s. She would not break faith with Gideon.
And in Canada she would be safe from the kind of people who had tortured and murdered their neighbours, who so cruelly uprooted families, who had hanged Gideon. But last night. Last night! These people, these refugees who had been treated so badly by the rebels, had looked at her as though they wanted to hang her. How could she travel to Canada with them? Jem had been right when he’d said she must be addled — addled with grief and the stubborn need to deliver Gideon’s message! But if she wanted to reach this fort, even though it might prove as unpromising as Ticonderoga, she had no choice but to travel with people who considered her an enemy.
Not all of them thought she was an enemy, not Aunt Rachael or Uncle Josiah or Jed or Noah. Maybe not Tibby’s mother. And here was this bony, black-haired boy with his large, fierce dark eyes. He couldn’t be more than nine or ten years old. He was hurt, crippled, his mother had said, and she did not want to look after him. But who would look after him? Would he quietly fall by the wayside and die when no one was paying him any attention? Could she leave him to that fate?
“Jonah,” she said, “do you think you might be able to walk if you were to use your crutch for your good leg and lean on me for your poor one — until the poor one is a bit better and your other crutch is mended? You might keep pace with everyone, then, mightn’t you?”
“No, he mightn’t!” cried Tibby, “No, he mightn’t!”
“Why ever not?”
“Can’t lean on you. You gots me to look after.”
“No, I haven’t. You have your mother to look after you.”
“Ain’t my mother. I’m a orphant. Pa got strung up ’n’ Ma died in the fire. Miz Anderson took me up. Me ’n’ Betsy Parker a-cause her pa’s off in the war ’n’ her ma’s dead, too.”
Phoebe sat down. She looked at the hurt, angry bit of a human being standing before her, fists clenched, wispy hair hanging around her thin face, pale eyes full of tears she would not shed.
“I am an orphan, too, Tibby. So I’d be glad to have you come along with me when we start walking.”
On the Move
Aunt Rachael was more than willing to share the family’s breakfast of beans and corn-meal samp with Jonah and Tibby. Not so Jed and Noah. They were happy enough to have Jonah by their fire but objected loudly — and in unison — that “that little girl should go be with her own mama.” And Anne — Anne walked away and refused to eat breakfast “with the traitor clothed like a squaw.” Phoebe was desolate, not only because Anne despised her but because of how she looked. Anne, who had always managed a bit of lace on her white kerchief, a bit of bright ribbon for her hair, had no kerchief tucked into the neck of her blouse; her gown was dirty and there were tears in it. And Anne’s hair, which had always been freshly washed though she had to help herself to the water heated for the laundry to do it, now hung in limp, dirty hanks, and there was no ribbon.
Phoebe looked towards the carts, where her cousin stood facing away from everyone, her back hunched miserably. In that one moment she couldn’t help but think that Anne despised herself, too. The moment passed, but it left a kinder feeling towards her cousin, a feeling of sympathy she hadn’t been able to manage the night before when Rachael had pleaded for it. She turned back to her aunt and uncle and the boys in a better mood. Uncle Josiah had returned from his morning wash in the brook. He smiled vaguely at Phoebe, but did not seem to recognize her. With a pang of horror, she understood what Aunt Rachael had meant when she’d said Uncle Josiah was “badly shaken” by what had happened. He had retreated into himself, where he could not be reached.
She wanted to comfort him, but she couldn’t think how. What she could do, if she meant to make herself useful, to become someone to be trusted, was look after Tibby and Jonah along with Jed and Noah. She left Bartlett and George with the children and went to see Bertha Anderson. She offered to keep Tibby by her throughout the journey to Fort St. John’s.
“Well, I declare I don’t mind if you do.” The big woman’s face eased into an expression that was almost a smile. “Here, then, you’ll need her duds, such as they are, and I expect I’ll need to give you a bit of vittles so’s the mite can eat. Mind, it’s fer Tibby Thayer. I ain’t supplyin’ the what-fers for that Yardley lad I see you took on. Them Green Mountain folk can look after their own.”
As she talked, Bertha Anderson rummaged among the bundles in her ox cart and came up with a small shawl-wrapped parcel, and a tin bucket into which she put a few handfuls of corn-meal. “There. Now you passel that out good ’n’ careful on accounta it’s all I got to give you. And, if you’re some kind of rebel spy, which I suspicion you ain’t on account of your auntie bein’ such a good woman, and you causes harm to that mite, may God Almighty see you gets what’s comin’ to you. I got no special love fer that bothersome Tibby Thayer, it’s true, but her ma ’n’ pa was God-fearin’ folk, rest their souls, and I don’t want to see her bad done by.”
Phoebe mumbled a thank you, took Tibby’s bundle and the tin bucket, and hurried away before Bertha Anderson could give her the other little girl, whose name she thought she remembered as Betsy. It’s a whole village full of names to remember, she thought as she went to find Mistress Yardley.
Charity Yardley, without a word, extracted from the belongings in her cart a pair of breeches, a shirt, one thin wool blanket, and a faded red Monmouth cap. “And he’ll have to make do with the stockings he has because the old man needs the spare pair.” She sniffed. “Oh, I am sore beset.”
Phoebe waited for her to ask how Jonah was, meaning to tell her the boy
was not really injured but that he needed to eat, but his mother turned away, intent on straightening the bundles in her cart, and she did not offer any food. Phoebe was so angry that Jonah’s mother should care so little for him that she was determined she would not ask for any.
“We’ll manage without her,” she muttered to herself as she marched away. “What a horrid woman! What a jest her name is!”
She had just sent the two boys to find their mothers, pulled both Jed and Noah from Bartlett’s back, and given Jonah his spare clothes, explaining to him that she would get his broken crutch later, when a soft voice beside her said, “Forgive me for troubling you. I am Lucy Heaton, and Joseph, my husband, bade me inform everybody that we’re preparing to move soon.”
Lucy Heaton was a small, neat woman with mouse-grey hair tucked under a grey bonnet. She had a grey knitted shawl pinned tightly over a patched grey gown. Phoebe thought of a big-eyed deer mouse she had surprised once in the kitchen dresser at Aunt Rachael’s. And Mistress Heaton’s voice, she thought, was just the sort of soft, quiet voice a deer mouse would have. It sounded furry.
“We have only to figure out which way to go,” said the furry voice. There was a note of humour in it that Phoebe understood better after she had seen who Lucy Heaton’s husband was.
Joseph Heaton was one of the most self-important people she had ever met. He was a short, stout man with a big, jowly face, the man who had pushed his way to the front of the crowd to stop Anne’s cries the evening before. His grey hair was hidden, all but its braided queue, by a large black cocked hat. He had leather breeches, and a grubby vest with a dark flowered pattern on it, a shirt with torn ruffles, and a dirty white linen neckerchief. He’s as pleased with himself as Elihu Pickens, thought Phoebe. I hope he is not as mean.
Phoebe, Jonah, Tibby, Jed and Noah (who had made a grudging peace with Tibby), along with everyone else in camp, had gathered near the path by the four carts. Joseph Heaton was standing a little apart, at the front of the assemblage. Clearly he had undertaken the role of leader. “Without so much as a by-your-leave,” Jem grumbled to his mother. He was standing on the other side of Aunt Rachael with his sister Jeannie on his shoulders. Phoebe heard him plainly and she bit her lip to keep from smiling. Although they had spent only one day together, and in spite of his painful hostility, Jem seemed like someone she’d known for a long time, and his quick temper made her want to laugh.
Joseph Heaton heard him, too, and glared in his direction.
“As we need to move on from here, and as my party got started on this here exodus with a Injun guide — though the varmint up and left us two days since — I got me a good idea of how to git on with it. But if there’s any a you got a better idea” — he glared at Jem again — “I’ll be plum pleased to hear about it.”
People looked at each other questioningly. Phoebe knew that the Morrissays, the Andersons, and the Collivers had all come up from New York only two days before, and not with any knowledge of how to reach Fort St. John’s. The others were all Vermonters, Green Mountain people, but neither had they any knowledge of the more northern parts of this republic. And none of them knew the geography of Canada. They only knew that the river — the one Jem called the Iroquois River but Rachael had told Phoebe was also called the Richelieu — flowed north from Lake Champlain into Canada. And they were almost a hundred miles from its source at the top of Lake Champlain, so Jem had said back where they had met. Her thoughts were interrupted by hearing Jem say her name. She looked at him, startled.
“Phoebe Olcott’s got notions about finding direction.” He shifted uncomfortably and did not look at her.
Joseph Heaton looked at Phoebe. “Wal” — he looked around slowly at everyone else — “I wouldn’t want no rebel spy leadin’ me to Canaday. I can see it sits well enough with some of you” — he looked from Mistress Anderson to Mistress Yardley — “to keep this suspicious person in our amongst, but I ain’t so easy bamboozled ’n’ I aim to keep my eye strict upon her.” He glowered at Jem.
Jem’s mouth was clamped shut. From where she stood, Phoebe could not see his eyes, but she knew they’d be cold and hard. She could guess how it must have galled him to suggest to Joseph Heaton that she knew how to figure out direction, and to have to listen to that tiresome man do his best to humiliate him. Then she realized something else from what was being said. She understood that these people — including Jem — were going to allow her to travel with them to Fort St. John’s. Suddenly they all looked more like friends.
The result of Joseph Heaton’s certainty that he knew which way to go was that, with much bullying and blustering on his part, the children were herded into the carts, the fires quenched, the oxen hitched, the cows slapped on their rumps to get them going, and the company moved off west towards Chimney Point on Lake Champlain the way she and Jem had come, the start of the military road back to the east. Phoebe was scared to tell Joseph Heaton this, but she was more scared when she thought about heading back towards that road, towards rebel settlements or maybe companies of rebel soldiers.
“Do you think, girl,” Master Heaton sneered, “that I don’t know north from west, or where there’s like to be danger?” All the same, he stopped and conferred with Jem and Thomas Bother, “jest to satisfy the whiners.” Jem, who had paid close attention to Phoebe’s lesson the day before in spite of himself, looked for the clues the birds and the moss gave, then realized he was looking towards where he and Phoebe had come into the clearing the evening before. And the company set out once more — to the north.
As they travelled, the cat stayed close to Jonah. In fact, George, who had never shown any affection to anyone, not even to Phoebe, had taken one look at Jonah Yardley, rubbed up against his good leg, and purred loudly. What’s more, he slept curled up against Jonah every night. Bartlett stayed near Phoebe most nights, but he worried her by disappearing for hours during the day, longer hours and more frequently than he had on the journey through the mountains from the east. His presence had made the refugees nervous until they saw how he would roll over for the children and let them ride on his back, then they were even grateful to him. It wasn’t long before everyone began to take him as much for granted as they did George.
What an ill-assorted company they were, the twenty-three Loyalist refugees. The Yardley’s had been well-off shopkeepers in Boston when Charity’s husband had died after being shot by a rebel mob in the first days of the war. She and Aaron, her father-in-law, and Jonah had gone to relatives in western Massachusetts, but the relatives had been, like the Robinson relatives, too frightened to let them stay. More generous than the Robinson relatives, they had given the Yardleys a cart, an ox, a cow, and provisions that they hoped would keep them warm and fed until they reached safety in Canada.
The Yardleys had come upon the Heatons and the Bothers north of Bennington, where both those families had been farmers. Thomas Bother was, like Phoebe’s uncle Josiah, a peace-loving man. He came of Quaker people and had been unwilling to go to war, so he and his wife, Margery, and their eighteen-month-old son, Zeke, had had to leave their farm and all but a few bundles of belongings, and head north. An Abenaki friend of Thomas’s father had agreed to guide the party, but Joseph Heaton had treated him so badly he had quietly taken off the second night out.
And then there were the refugees from New York, the three families Gideon’s message had named. They had all come from just beyond Skenesborough, near Wood Creek, below Lake Champlain. The Andersons had owned a mill, but the other two families were farmers. Peggy Morrissay’s husband, Charles, was fighting in a Loyalist regiment. Abigail Colliver did not know whether her husband, Jethro, was dead or imprisoned. He’d simply disappeared one day. Bertha Anderson had the same conviction about her husband, Septimus, although he, like Charles Morrissay, had left to be a soldier.
Back in Hanover, Phoebe had heard about the feuds between the people from New York, the “Yorkers,” and Vermont’s Green Mountain people, how they had never gotten along well
because the governors of New York and New Hampshire had fought for so many years over that mountainous land that lay between them. While there had never been major battles, there had been skirmishes. Settlers had been run off the land they’d been granted by their province by gangs from the other province, houses had been burned down, people had been beaten. While there had been no actual killing, there were hard feelings. Now, even though the refugee band held common cause, they did not really trust one another. So the families were more than willing to blame one another for whatever went wrong, and after only a week of travelling together, frightened, heartsick, cold, never certain of enough to eat, they were an unhappy lot. By the end of the first week, they had travelled no more than twelve miles, more often through treacherous swamp, dense spruce and hemlock woods, often up hills so steep that the oxen could not pull the heavy carts and goods had to be unloaded and carried. It had snowed and snowed and, for the last two days, there had been such high winds they had been forced to stay camped in the shelter of a pine woods.
On the third morning everyone felt better when the sun rose in a clear sky and the temperature had warmed. Joseph Heaton had just barked out the order to “git a-goin’ now!” when three rebel soldiers burst into the camp. They were dressed in ragged breeches and homespun hunting shirts. One had stockings and shoes, the other two had rags wrapped around their legs, and one had rags for shoes as well. The only way anyone could know they were soldiers — or rebels — was that the youngest, boldest one taunted them, “Come along, you Tory cowards! George Washington’s fighting sojers is needin’ a helpin’ hand.”
At the first sound of the soldiers’ shouts, Jem Morrissay and Thomas Bother ducked behind the carts. Phoebe saw Jem pull his knife from its sheath, and Thomas had his musket at the ready. By the time the soldiers were upon them, Jem and Thomas were nowhere to be seen.
