Cherished

by Elizabeth Thornton

  At length, Sara said, “This is like a nightmare. I keep hoping that soon I shall wake up. I don’t know what to think, who to trust.”

  They had come to a thicket of wild raspberries, and Emily picked at them, not even aware of what she was doing. A mosquito whined close to her ear. Nearby, perched on the branches of a stand of birch tree, a small flock of grackles were inquisitively watching the proceedings.

  Sara walked on and spoke as though to herself. “Hester is not plagued with doubts. Leon is not English, ergo, Leon must be guilty. And the evidence against him is pretty strong.”

  Emily bit down on her lip and her eyelashes blinked rapidly. She could not find her voice.

  “It’s no use telling Hester that I’ve known Leon since I was a babe in arms.” Sara’s eyes lifted to Emily’s and there was the hint of a smile in them. “You hated him then.”

  “I…I pretended to.”

  “Then I was right all along? You love Leon?”

  “Is it so obvious?”

  “Good God, no! Hester thinks you are secretly in love with William Addison. For a time I thought so, too. We debated the point last night. I don’t think I persuaded her.”

  “But that’s absurd! William is a friend, nothing more.” Even as Emily said the words, her conscience pricked her. She knew perfectly well that William himself believed that she was partial to him.

  “Do you know what I think?” Sara’s thoughts had returned to the awful possibility that someone wanted to murder her. She breathed deeply. “I think that this is all a misunderstanding. Yes, that’s what it is, a colossal misunderstanding, or someone’s idea of a practical joke. Otherwise…”

  She was on the point of bursting into tears when the crack of a pistol shot froze her like a statue. The grackles rose from their perches as one, croaking their displeasure. Emily let out a cry and took off in the direction of camp. Sara was right behind her. When they came within sight of it, the spectacle that met their eyes brought them to a standstill.

  Hester stood in the center of a group of wild-eyed, shouting voyageurs. With her arms folded and head held high, she gave the impression of serene indifference. James Fraser wielded a pistol. He was yelling out orders. By degrees, the voyageurs’ tempers calmed and they moved off muttering among themselves. Leon and a few of the men were examining the canoes.

  “No harm done!” he called out.

  “James? Hester? What is it?”

  It was Sara who voiced the questions. Emily was limp with relief. When she had heard the report of the pistol, she half expected to find the camp overcome by soldiers.

  James was practically spitting fire. “Try anything like that again, your ladyship,” he yelled down at Hester, “and you will find yourself trussed like a chicken for the remainder of the voyage—that’s if my men don’t take it into their heads to drown you first.”

  Hester was not intimidated. “My good man,” she told him reasonably, “you cannot fault a prisoner for trying to escape.”

  “You weren’t trying to escape,” he roared. “You were trying to disable our canoes. Do you know what happens in the wilderness when you deprive a man of his means of transportation? We could all have perished, and no one might ever have found our remains.”

  When he had moved away to join Leon at the canoes, Hester rounded on her two companions. “If you had only been here to help me, I might have succeeded.”

  Sara took offense at Hester’s imperious tone. “And what good would that have done, pray tell?”

  “It would have delayed us, then would have afforded Peter and William the chance to catch up with us. Sara, anyone would think that you didn’t wish to be rescued!” and she, too, stalked off, leaving each girl to her own widely disparate thoughts.

  That evening, when it was time to retire, Emily found herself in a quandary. She wasn’t sure whether or not she would be welcome in her husband’s bed. She hoped that Leon would come to fetch her. He never appeared.

  With as much confidence as she could manage, she said her good-nights and picked her way to where the small canoe was lying on its side, conscious with every faltering step of Hester’s gaze searing into her back.

  “Leon?”

  There was no answer. In the morning, when she awakened, she might have believed that she had slept alone, if Leon’s blanket had not been warm to her touch. She buried her face in it and the scent of it, Leon’s scent, twisted something deep inside her. She wasn’t afraid of him, oh, God, she wasn’t afraid of him! If only she could make him believe it.

  They were one day out from Ste. Marie when the smaller craft developed a leak.

  “The men will remain behind to repair it,” Leon told the ladies. “They will catch up to us before long. These small canoes can travel twice as fast as the big Montrealers, especially when they carry no load.”

  Not thirty minutes after the Montreal canoe had taken to the waters of Lake Huron under full sail, the small canoe was launched without benefit of repair. Franchot was in charge and feeling all the weight of his responsibility. His orders were explicit. The canoe was to be concealed in one of the small inlets which fed into the lake. There, he and his men would wait it out. If their pursuers were hot on their trail, and he prayed to the Blessed Virgin that they were not, they must be delayed until Mr. Fraser was alerted of their presence.

  Franchot was no coward. He was an experienced voyageur and not unused to the fierce competition in his trade. Disputes among rivals were frequently settled at knife point and more often than not with firing pieces. This was different. They were pitting themselves against redcoats. Redcoats! He could be hanged for treason! The British believed themselves to be masters of the Canadas. They regarded the French as ignorant peasants who should bow down and kiss their boots for the benefits that had come to them under British dominion.

  He spat into the water. He wasn’t thinking, as he so often did, that the British were foreigners whose language was barbaric. He wasn’t thinking that he owed the company his loyalty for putting bread on his table. He was thinking that it was too long since he had been in the thick of a good fight, and he would back his voyageurs any day against all comers.

  The house in the wilderness seemed to Emily something out of a picture book. At first sight, as they approached from Lake Huron, she was half persuaded that it was a mirage. They had been traveling for nigh on two weeks at a grueling pace. In that time, they had not come across a single habitation. The only evidence that others had made the journey before them were the rows of crude wooden crosses on the shores of the various waterways they traversed, crosses which marked the graves of fur traders who had succumbed to the perils of the voyage. Rapids, portages, accidents and sickness—all had taken their toll. That their own little brigade had come through unscathed was taken by the superstitious voyageurs as a mark of divine favor. The presence of the ladies, notwithstanding Hester, was now regarded as a lucky charm.

  As they drew closer to shore, Emily observed what she had not seen before. The stone mansion overlooked a cluster of crude log dwellings. They had arrived at Ste. Marie.

  “This is incredible!” breathed Emily. The sight of fenced gardens, cultivated fields, and horses in paddocks in the virgin wilderness only added to her sense of unreality.

  Sara scarcely heard her. “How did such a house come to be here?”

  Recalling something Leon had once told her, Emily replied, “This must be James’s home. I know a little about it. His father built the house for his mother on the occasion of their marriage.”

  Hester’s tone was dry. “It’s a nice little house, but it’s scarcely Osterley or Syon, or even Rivard Abbey.”

  Sara could not help turning her head to peek up at James. Seeing that look, James let out a long sigh. He was home. Very soon, Sara would meet the members of his family, and though he would have denied it with his dying breath, he wanted to make a good impression on her. He caught Leon’s eye and knew that he had betrayed himself. It was Leon who looked away.


  Before the canoe had touched the dock, a bell was heralding their arrival. People set down their tools and hastened to the water’s edge. The inhabitants of the small settlement greeted them with an exuberance which was almost excessive. The voyageurs, who had taken the time that morning to shave and deck themselves out in their gayest apparel, cheered as much as anyone. Later, Emily would discover that they had good reason to cheer. The arrival of a fur brigade was traditionally marked by an impromptu celebration. There would be music and dancing and not least a respite from the predictable pea soup and bannock.

  Sara clutched Emily’s sleeve. “Look!” she breathed.

  Emily obediently allowed her gaze to wander over the spectators on the dock. And then she understood Sara’s astonishment. Ladies Emily, Sara, and Hester were the only white women present.

  It was like no dance the ladies had ever attended. For one thing, it was held in a barn, and for another, the dances, if they could be called dances, were wild and unruly. For all that, they enjoyed themselves immensely. Even Hester had mellowed, and Emily knew why. They were no longer decked out in their deerskin robes, but in the borrowed finery of James’s mother and two of his sisters. The gowns were a trifle old-fashioned but they would pass muster at a pinch. Surprisingly, at least to Emily’s way of thinking, many of the Indian women present wore gowns which were almost indistinguishable from her own. It was Leon who explained it to her.

  “Those are the wives and daughters of men of some substance, retired company men or agents. Out here, when an Indian woman marries a white man, she adopts his ways.”

  It was all very interesting, and at some other time, Emily might have wished to pursue the subject. For the present, she had other things on her mind.

  “That Indian girl,” she said, “the one who was once Sara’s maid? Have you spoken to her?”

  “Tomorrow is soon enough. She doesn’t live right here in Ste. Marie. Doucette has a cabin a half-day’s distance from the settlement.”

  Breathing deeply, Emily touched one finger to the back of his hand. “With all my heart, I pray that she can help you prove your innocence,” she said.

  A muscle clenched in his cheek and his eyes burned into hers. “If she were to swear that it was Benson or Addison, would you believe her…an Indian girl?” Her answer was too slow in coming for his liking. Excusing himself, he went in search of the restorative which he knew the voyageurs had concealed behind the outside privy.

  Sara contrived things so that she could have a few words in private with James. The heat in the barn was too much for her, she told him. The screech of the fiddles and the foot-stomping were beginning to make her head spin Trying to contain his smile, he led her outside. It was still light, though the sun was fast disappearing behind the tops of the pine trees. He directed her steps to one of the paddocks where a mare was grazing with her foal.

  “Do you know,” she said, swatting at her bare arm, “I had never met with mosquitoes until I came into Canada?” She was nervous, and babbling to cover it.

  “I know. Nor bears, nor wolves, nor porcupines, nor beaver.”

  He had taken the words right out of her mouth, putting a stop to her babbling, but he had done it with a smile. The constraint between them gradually relaxed.

  In a more natural tone, she said, “Your house is charming, James, as is your family.”

  “Charming” was not exactly what she was thinking. “Astonishing” would not have been too strong a word. James’s mother was retiring. Mrs. Fraser was not fluent in English and said very little. Her children were protective of her, and Sara had found that touching. Their warmth, their family affection, had completely won her over. In some ways, they were almost as English as she. The house they lived in, their garments, their manners and modes, right down to the ritual dispensing of tea, was as English as anything to be found in the whole of Canada.

  She was coming to see that James had deliberately misled her. The error might have been hers originally, but he had done nothing to correct it, and much to fan her imagination. He wasn’t a savage. He was as cultured and as educated as anyone of her acquaintance, as were his brothers and sisters. She wasn’t angry with him. She was ashamed of herself. She had deserved to be taken down a peg or two.

  “Tell me about your family, James,” she said. “I think you mentioned other brothers, other sisters.”

  “There’s not much to tell. All the men in my family, as you may understand, are involved in the fur trade. And the girls,” he shrugged negligently, “they marry into it. For our kind, there isn’t much else.”

  “Your kind?”

  “You know what I mean. I am a half-breed, Sara. Your people view us with suspicion. It doesn’t matter that we went to school in England. We may be as rich as Croesus. We are still not accepted, not unless we are willing to pass ourselves off as whites. I could do it if I had reason to.” He let that last remark sink in before continuing. “But you met my sisters, Charlotte and Margaret. There is too much of the Indian in their features. In white society, they would meet with nothing but contempt—or worse.”

  Sara thought of the young girls whose manners and deportment far surpassed hers at the same age. Shaking her head, she said, “But in York you were accepted. There wasn’t a door closed to you.”

  “True—up to a point. But it’s a fine point. Parents of eligible daughters are careful to keep me at a distance.”

  She was afraid to answer him in the same serious vein, not because she did not feel for him, but because she felt too much. “Pooh!” she said. “When have you ever cared for eligible girls? James, you are a flirt! You would run a mile if some eligible girl set her sights on you.”

  He wasn’t teasing her when he said, very softly, “Not if that girl were you.”

  Heat raced along her skin. She could hardly breathe for the lump in her throat. Her eyes grew very bright and her lower lip trembled. “James…” she got out hoarsely. “I brought you out here so that we could say our farewells, not so that you could make love to me. Tomorrow or the next day, you go to Fort William and we go across the border to America.

  “I want you to know, that…that I will never forget you. I should like us to part as friends.”

  He clasped the proffered hand and debated with himself whether or not he should draw her into his arms and kiss her the way he wanted to, and in debating it, the moment was lost. “Sara,” he said, “tell me the truth! If you were free, would you come to me? Damnation! What do I care whether or not you are free? This doesn’t have to be farewell. Not if we don’t want it to be.”

  Before she could give him her answer, they were hailed by two of James’s brothers. Knowing that she had lost command of herself, with head down, Sara picked up her skirts and made for the barn.

  “What do you want?” asked James without a pretense of civility when his brothers came up to him.

  At twenty, Matthew was head of the house in James’s absence. “Ma sent us out to keep an eye on you,” he drawled in a baiting way. “We are chaperones, James. How does that strike your fancy?”

  James’s chin jutted out. “Peeping Toms, more like.”

  Matthew’s chin bore a remarkable resemblance to his older brother’s. “That ain’t polite, James.” He poked him on the chest, none too gently. “In point of fact, I would have to say that your manners are deplorable, just like you.”

  James straightened. “Try and improve them. I dare you.”

  Nathan, a youth of fifteen summers and the baby of the family, never knew when his brothers were serious or funning. He was taking no chances. To distract then, he asked quickly, “Why was the lady crying, James?”

  “Sara was crying?” James didn’t look as chastened as Nathan thought he should.

  Conversation came to an abrupt end when Matthew’s head went down and he charged, taking James by surprise, tumbling him to the grass. “You are getting to be an old man,” he grunted, trying to dislodge his brother’s stranglehold. “Give it up before I hurt
you.”

  “Ma! Come quick! They are at it again!” bellowed Nathan.

  James was laughing. A shadow fell across the wrestlers and both men stilled.

  James blinked. “Who is it?” he asked.

  Leon answered him in a laconic way. “Word arrived not five minutes ago from Franchot. Benson and company will be here by morning.”

  “Good,” said James. “I’m spoiling for a fight.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “How long will it take to repair?”

  Under the major’s watchful eye, the guide ran his hands over the beam of the upturned canoe. The damage was severe but not beyond fixing. Gaboury judged it the merest ill luck that the canoe had foundered on a submerged rock just as they were launching it. Not that Gaboury would say as much to the major. He knew Benson to be a hard man. With the major, failure was never an act of God. Someone must be held culpable. Gaboury respected the major, but he did not like him.

  Peter tried not to let his impatience show. Gaboury wasn’t an enlisted man. He wasn’t used to jumping when his superiors barked out an order. “Mr. Gaboury,” he said, “how long will the repair take? One hour? Two hours?”

  The guide spat on the ground. “Be ready to leave when the sun is high,” he said, and pointed overhead.

  With these few words, Gaboury turned to two of his own men, young voyageurs but experienced men in spite of their paucity of years, and in a manner that the major could only admire, he barked out his own orders. They jumped to it. Before long, a fire was got going and pitch was simmering in a black pot. Linen rags were carefully laid out and strips of bark culled from a nearby stand of birch.

  “Check your powder. Check your firing pieces.” The major went from soldier to soldier, issuing instructions which were, by and large, redundant. These were not raw recruits. A few of the men were soaked through, having tumbled into the water when the canoe foundered. To a man, however, they knew that the first order of business for a soldier was to see to his weapons.