Chapter Two

October 1748
Eleven Years Ago

“That’s it! That’s my house!” Heedless of rocking the canoe, Catherine pointed to the dock stretching out into the river, beckoning her to come home. Autumn had touched the trees with fire, and the sight of it set her joy ablaze. Had it only been two years since she had seen this place? It felt like five. Or ten.

Behind her, Monsieur Bonneville grunted as he pulled on the paddle. “Congratulations. And do you suppose your papa will be pleased to see you? To hear that you have been expelled from Madame’s school?”

Without turning to face him, she could see his small, close-set eyes and the one long black eyebrow above them, which the students called his pet caterpillar. A chill tickled her skin, but only briefly. It was time for her to be home. King George’s War was over now, and there was no more danger of border raids between native allies of the French and English. Papa would be surprised to see her, but he would recover. She’d been gone so long, and he hadn’t written to her or visited, not even to mark her thirteenth year. Or her fourteenth. Was it possible that he had even missed news of the peace treaty, secluded as he was in the woods? She had clamored for every scrap of information to be had inside Montreal’s walls. In any case, surely by now he’d had time to miss her.

“My Catherine,” he would say when he saw her. “Daughter. How you’ve grown. Enough learning to be a proper lady. The war is over, the danger is past. I need you home with me.”

Catherine grinned with anticipation. She didn’t even care that river water soaked her silly slippered feet and her gown. Aside from the shoes, she could tolerate the clothing now, petticoats and corset and all. How changed she was, at least on the outside.

Madame Bonneville’s School for Young Ladies had made certain of that straightaway. Catherine could still feel the stinging humiliation of being stripped naked by Madame Bonneville and her spinster sister on her first day at the school. They weighed her, measured her, took note of her in ways that made her burn with shame. Then came the scalding hot bath, the scrubbing with sand and soap. It was as if they meant to take her golden skin away so that it could grow back pale and fair. With her own hair piled high and powdered white, Madame cut off Catherine’s braid and flung it to the floor as though it were a snake. “Only savages grow their hair to their knees.”

Catherine knew exactly what they were doing. Hadn’t she seen the same thing done before at Kahnawake, when a white person was adopted into the clan? The terrified white girl had been stripped of her British gown and underpinnings, then scrubbed in the river to wash all the white away. When she emerged, it was as a Mohawk. She was dressed in deerskin and adopted as one of the People.

Catherine looked down at the silk gown she wore. She’d been scrubbed that day two years ago and countless days since. She had watched her deerskin and stroud burn. She was layered with French undergarments, and her hair had been pinned, not braided. But she had not become one of them.

The canoe slowed its glide, and she looked up, heartened to be so near home. Kneeling in the bottom of the vessel, she reached out and grabbed a piling, pulling the canoe close before leaping out onto the dock. The sodden slippers she let fall from her feet and into the water, where they floated like pale green leaves before sinking beneath the surface. She was home at last. She was free.

Catherine took off running toward the riverbank, leaving Monsieur Bonneville in her wake. The land greeted her with the moldering smell of autumn. Before she even had the chance to shout Papa’s name, there he was.

He was so still as she ran to greet him. His face held no recognition.

Leaves shook on their branches all around her, waving their colors like banners. Her lips curved in what she hoped was a winsome smile, waiting with trapped breath for the moment he would see her for who she was. She was his, and his alone. He was her papa.

He frowned.

She faltered. “You are surprised,” she said at last, excusing his disappointing reaction.

His fist clenched as he took her in from hatless head to the toes peeking from under her hem. “You aren’t wearing shoes.”

Curling her toes, Catherine bit her lip, her pulse skipping beats. She wanted love, she wanted joy. She needed to belong to someone again. Bewildered, she said, “It is me, Papa. Catherine Stands-Apart.”

His hand came across her mouth so fast, she heard the strike before she tasted blood. Her mistake: speaking her Mohawk name.

“What is the meaning of this?” He projected his shout beyond her, and she realized Bonneville was finally near.

“Monsieur.” Bonneville dropped a bag of Catherine’s clothing on the ground. “Your daughter has run away from the school three times now. Once, we pulled her from the port before she attempted to swim. This last time, we chased her on horseback all the way to Lachine and caught her just as she was about to steal a canoe.”

“I was going to return it later!” she protested.

Monsieur Bonneville ignored her. “As you are aware, the third time results in permanent expulsion, without refund of fees already paid. I am here to deliver your daughter back into your keeping.”

“You what?” A hint of rum rode Papa’s breath. So that was why he had struck her. It was the drink that did it, not him.

Catherine licked the corner of her swelling lip. “If you knew what it was like, you would have come for me yourself. Besides, the war is over! They signed a treaty for peace. New France and New England won’t be raiding anymore!”

Papa jabbed a finger at Bonneville. “We had an understanding. We signed papers. You were to train the Mohawk out of her until she was as civilized as any of your pureblood French girls. Did you forget the sum that would have been your reward? As you have utterly failed, you will take her back and keep her until you succeed.”

Catherine stared at him in disbelief. It was the war that had compelled Papa to send her away, nothing more. He had sent her inside the walled city of Montreal to keep her safe. And now the war had ended. There was no more reason to stay in that place, where she felt crammed into a shape that did not fit.

“Oh no.” Bonneville waggled his eyebrow. “Catherine has caused more than enough trouble to prove it cannot be done. We are casting our pearls before swine, monsieur, when we attempt to refine a half-breed. Not only has she thrice run away and been caught, but her health is not up to standard, either. She sank very low this past winter with tuberculosis, costing us more for her medical care than anticipated. We are through with this project. Good day to you.” Without a glance at Catherine, he retreated back toward the dock.

Stunned, Catherine grasped her father’s hand. She’d heard wrong. He would explain it when he was calm. Sober. “Papa,” she whispered, “I can help at home . . . at the trading post . . .”

He yanked his hand from hers. “Then do so.” He turned from her and walked away.

The wilted lace at her elbows moved in the wind, but she did not feel it brush her skin. She felt nothing. She was so full to the brim with emptiness, she feared she would choke.

Papa disappeared with a bottle, and Catherine wondered if she had driven him to drink. She would just have to make her presence worthwhile for him, because there was no question of leaving again. There was nowhere else she belonged.

She rubbed a linseed oil–soaked rag over the tea table in the parlor, drawing satisfaction from the polished result. Whatever Papa said, he did need help here. The house was filthy. And how had he been eating when she was not here to prepare the food?

“I saw him hit you.” English words.

Dropping her rag, she turned to find a young man in the doorway. Thin as a bean, with large brown eyes and sunny blond hair tailed at his neck. Cheekbones pushed beneath his skin. He looked older than her, but not by much. He had fifteen summers, if she didn’t miss her guess.

Pointing to her lip, he approached her. His movements were graceless as he scooped up her rag, wadding it in his fist and transferring it back and forth between his hands. His palms grew greasy with oil and dust, but he didn’t seem to mind. The earnestness in his expression reached out to her.

Catherine wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. Papa would be repentant tomorrow. “It’s nothing.” The English language was the one useful thing she had studied in Montreal.

“He shouldn’t have done that.” He extended the rag, and she sensed he was offering more than just her dusting cloth.

She took it. “Who are you?”

Curling up on just one side, his smile was tentative but warm. “I’m Samuel Crane. I didn’t mean to startle you, and I didn’t mean to spy. Duval can be difficult to ignore. We so seldom get visitors here, even to trade, and when I saw you—” A lump shifted in his throat. “He shouldn’t have done that,” he said again.

Heat pricked her cheeks and neck. “But why are you here?”

“Same as you, I guess.” A shrug lifted his shoulders. His toe scuffed at the fringe of the Persian rug on which he stood.

“You’re British,” she guessed.

He nodded. So this was what the enemy looked like. But no, now they were at peace once more.

“How came you to be here?” she tried again.

“It’s a common tale.” But his resistance to share it proved fleeting, and he told her that Kahnawake Mohawk had raided his family’s Massachusetts home during the war, along with several of his neighbors’. “The war that just ended with a treaty that returned all conquered land to its original owners,” he added. “The war that accomplished nothing for either France or England.” The bitterness in his tone was undeniable. The raids she’d been cosseted away from had turned Samuel’s life inside out.

“Go on.” Suddenly exhausted, she sat on the needlework-cushioned chair, wiped the rag over the Vincennes porcelain tea set in the middle of the table, and invited him to sit next to her.

He folded his long limbs beneath the scalloped table and ran a hand over his hair. Sawdust came away on his fingers. He picked up a cup and cradled it in his hands, his attention fixed upon it as he told the rest of his story in lukewarm tones. She suspected agony rode beneath the surface.

His parents had been killed in the raid. Samuel was captured and marched to Montreal. His brother, Joel, older by four years, had been at a neighbor’s home during the raid. The captives had been split into small groups for the march north, and Samuel never saw Joel, had no idea where he was now, if he had even survived.

If Joel had been seen by the Mohawk raiders, Catherine suspected he had been killed on sight. Men usually were. The fact that they had kept Samuel alive meant they saw something in him that made him valuable. Sometimes all it took was personal bravery.

“I was almost adopted into the Kahnawake people, but Monsieur Duval ransomed me before that could happen. He learned I was a carpenter’s apprentice and found it worth his while to put my skills to use here. I cook some, too, and do whatever he bids. It’s been two years. Six more to go before he will set me free.”

So that was how Papa had survived her absence. He’d replaced her with a boy who could do much more than she. Doubt screwed tight inside her chest. Papa’s need for her wasn’t what she thought. Yet she could hardly blame Samuel Crane for that. And after all, she was still Gabriel Duval’s daughter. Nothing would change that.

The thoughts loosed her compassion for Samuel. “I’m so sorry,” she told him. “You must miss home terribly.” That, she understood.

He rattled the teacup back onto its saucer and glanced at the case clock ticking in the corner of the room. “No more than you, I suppose.”

Utterly confused, Catherine searched his eyes. Had Papa already told him that Kahnawake was her home for the first ten years of her life? Or perhaps she’d misheard him, and he’d merely said that she had missed the home she’d now come back to. “What do you mean?”

Samuel kneaded his hands together. “I thought—I thought Duval ransomed you, too. You speak English, you’re cleaning his house—”

“No, no, I am his daughter.”

A hint of laughter lit his face.

The hair on the back of her neck stood up. “Did he never mention me?”

Samuel’s eyebrows shot high. “Duval never mentioned having a child at all. I assumed he was an old bachelor. Are you really—”

“Yes, I am his.” Hurt and shame sharpened her tongue.

“I didn’t know.” Samuel dropped his gaze. “I saw him hit you. Fathers don’t hit their daughters.”

Catherine pushed back from the table, and Samuel rose just as quickly.

“I would be your friend, just the same,” he said, pleading. “I meant no offense. Please don’t go. Can’t we be friends, you and I? Or are you not staying?”

“I am staying.”

“Good.” His shoulders relaxed. “What is your name?”

She could not believe that in two years’ time, Papa had never said it. Sighing, she told Samuel her name was Marie-Catherine Stands-Apart, daughter of Agnesse Strong Wind as much as of Gabriel Duval. She was born of the People who had raided his family’s home. He took this in with interest but laid no blame upon her for what the Kahnawake raiders had done. It was a credit to his character.

He laid his hands on the back of her chair. “Tell me more.”

Though the gesture surprised her, she allowed him to seat her and watched as he built a fire in the parlor’s hearth. As the flames snapped and popped, the chill fled the room, and Catherine explained to Samuel Crane who she was beyond her names, desperate to be known. In the telling of her tale, perhaps he would come to understand who Gabriel Duval was, too. He had been a loving papa, once. A father who didn’t hit his daughter. He would gentle toward her again.

When she was born, she told Samuel, Papa had called her Marie-Catherine, and her mother named her Stands-Apart, even though Catherine found herself mostly standing in the middle, keeping the peace between parents who often argued. Until she couldn’t.

As Samuel tossed a pine knot into the fire, Catherine marveled that she was sharing so much with someone she’d just met. But after two years of being shamed for who she was, voicing her past felt like gulping spring water while half dead of thirst.

“One year, Papa returned from a trapping trip with one hand gone from an accident with a steel trap. It didn’t heal right, so more of his arm had to be taken by a surgeon’s knife. He didn’t go trapping or hunting after that, but he didn’t feel welcome in my mother’s house, either.” Pausing, she looked up to read Samuel’s face. “Do I bore you?”

“Not a bit.” He urged her to continue. His attention quenched something inside her that had shriveled during her years at school.

Catherine’s petticoats and skirt clung to her ankles, still wet and cold from the river. Burying her toes into the rug, she looked through the window at a willow tree. The wind moaned through it, stripping bright leaves from its branches. “I was ten when my parents divorced. I didn’t understand why or what it meant. All I knew was that Papa was being sent out of the village alone and that he couldn’t even hunt his own food. My mother died before a full year passed, so I decided to go live with him rather than move with my siblings into the longhouse of my aunts. He needed me.”

The case clock chimed, but Catherine barely heard it. “It’s less than two miles from here to the Mohawk village of Kahnawake, so I often went alone to visit my siblings. My little brother was always happy to greet me, but my sister only showed me her back.”

Samuel rubbed a smudge of dirt from his thumb. “Why?”

“She thought I should have stayed. She said I could not have both Papa and her, too, and that I’d made my choice.” Catherine ended her tale by explaining where she’d been these last two years and why. “Now I’m home at last. For good.”

Samuel’s unaffected manner put her at ease. “I’m glad of it. It’s been lonesome here. Do you know, this is the longest conversation I’ve had in two years?”

She answered his cautious smile with her own. “I should finish cleaning now.” She made to stand, and he came immediately to pull out her chair for her. “Such a gentleman, monsieur,” Catherine teased.

“Oui, oui, mademoiselle,” he countered with a grin, and pretended to doff a hat. “Welcome home, Catie. I’m glad you’re here.”

“Catie?” she repeated.

“Do you mind if I call you that? It suits.”

She didn’t mind at all.