D
UYCINCK WHINEDâOH, DID HE WHINE!âall the way up the Hudson. It was Marchâstill mostly winter in New York. The river was full of floating ice. The little Dutchman predicted a blizzard that would leave us frozen to death somewhere along the Mohawk. If the weather did not get us, the French and Indians would finish us off.
“You females are
ignorant
. You think you can disregard politics,” Duycinck said. “I've heard my master talking to Governor Nicolls. There's dirty work afoot in the north. The French in Canada are determined to run the English out of the fur game, if they have to kill every trader in the province. I don't want my scalp drying on some Ottawa lodgepole. Or Seneca, for that matter. I don't trust your wonderful tribe. Didn't they slaughter your parents?”
Tears welled in Clara's eyes. I told Duycinck to shut up. At Albany we hired wharfmen to unload our trading goods and took rooms at the Crown Tavern on State Street. It was where Clara and I had spent the night with our parents on our journey to the Mohawk fifteen years ago. Clara trembled and wondered if there was some place else we could sleep.
I shook my head. “It's better to face it all. We're going to stop on the way up the Mohawk and walk through the ruins of the house, if they still exist.”
“No!” Clara said. “That place is certain to be haunted. The way they diedâ”
The innkeeper, a squat pug-nosed Dutchman wearing a greasy grey wig, interrupted us: “Slaves sleep in the cellar. Ten pence a night.”
“Miss Flowers is as free as you areâor I am,” I said. “She'll sleep upstairs with me.”
I brandished Clara's manumission certificate in the man's fat face. The innkeeper was still reluctant, but when I flung two Spanish dollars in front of him, he gave us the rooms. After a dinner in the smoky taproom that mixed pork with roasted potatoes in a puddle of grease on our plates, I asked the innkeeper where we could hire bateaumen for a trip up the Mohawk.
“No one's going up the Mohawk alone these days,” he said. “No one
who wants to keep his scalp on his head. Traders band together, twenty or thirty to a group.”
“See what I told you?” Duycinck whined.
“We're going up the Mohawk,” I said. “We've got five hundred pounds of trading goods sitting on the town wharf.”
“I'll buy them from you for two hundred pounds,” the innkeeper said.
“Go to hell,” I said.
In the morning I strode down to the waterfront and sent Duycinck scampering through the alehouses and brothels that clustered there, spreading the word that someone was ready to pay double wages for a trip up the Mohawk to Oswego. Eventually a dozen boatmen came shambling into the chilly morning, blinking blearily at this strange apparition in skirts, talking confidently about how much money she planned to make in the fur trade.
The last bateauman to arrive was preceded by a capering Duycinck. “I've found him. I've found the lad. God knows he don't look like much but I've found him.”
It was Malcolm Stapleton. He wore buckskin breeches and a shirt that had not seen a laundry in a year at least. It was smeared and splotched with grease and grime; not a little dirt was also on his face. He stood there, patently bewildered by the sight of me and Clara.
“I'll hire the worst scum in Albany before I hire you,” I said.
“Catalyntieâ” Clara said.
“I'm in charge of this expedition,” I said.
“But you promised his father.”
“I promised to give him a message. Which I will do, forthwith. For some unknown reason, your father wishes to see you before he dies.”
“Is he ill?”
“He doesn't look well. But that may be simply the effects of living with your mother.”
“She's my stepmother!” Malcolm roared.
“Whatever the reason, he wants to see you. If you need money for your journey downriver I'll lend it to you.”
Malcolm barely listened to me. He was gazing mournfully at Clara. “You're ⦠well?” he said.
“I'm well,” she said.
“I was sure you were dead. I never tried to find out. I was afraid if I heard the worst, I'd sink to the bottom of a bottle and never come up.”
“Do you want to borrow some money?” I asked.
“No,” Malcolm said and shambled back down the wharf into the narrow alleys that led to State Street.
“Malcolm!” Clara raced after him, ignoring my call. She caught up to
him as he was turning into an alehouse. An ugly red-faced woman sat at a table, slurping liquor from a mug. “Malkie!” she chortled.
For Clara, it was a vision of the way the Evil Brother was devouring the lost warrior. Malcolm's soul had been far more damaged than her woman's body by the debacle of their aborted child in Hampden Hall.
Clara dragged Malcolm back into the street. “What happened to us was terrible,” she said. “But I want you to know I forgave you long ago. In my heart you're still the warrior, the soldier I dreamt of lovingâand I still love.”
Malcolm turned away, as if the mere sight of her was unbearable. “I should have brought you up the Mohawk and lived where there are no laws. I was a coward.”
“That's impossible ⦠you ⦠a coward,” Clara said. “There's no man who could make you a coward. You were overwhelmed by your god, speaking in your father's voice. I think he's a false god. But he was still ⦠god. Perhaps a face of god. I begin to think he wears many faces, just as men do.”
Malcolm listened mutely, understanding but not understanding. The words did not touch his heart. He was still irretrievably lost to the world of the spirit, to meaning, hope, love.
“Clara!” I stood at the head of the narrow lane, determined not to let Malcolm seduce her again. “I've hired the bateaumen. We leave in an hour.”
“Where are you going?” Malcolm asked.
He shook his head angrily when Clara told him our plans. “You'd better select the right men. Otherwise you may never be heard from again.”
“What do you mean?”
“There's a dirty game being played along the Mohawk,” he said. “Some people in Albany are in it.”
His words were almost an echo of what Duycinck had said to us coming up the Hudson. Perhaps that made me more inclined to ignore them. “Clara!” I called. “We mustn't waste a momentâ”
I wanted to reach the Indian country as soon as possible to meet the hunters as they returned with their furs from their winter of trapping in the woods. Back at the Crown Tavern, as we packed our clothes and Duycinck railed at me for dismissing Malcolm Stapleton, Clara wondered if we should take his warning seriously.
“I have an answer to that,” I said. From my trunk I drew three pistols. I gave one to Clara, one to Duycinck, and kept one for myself.
“You expect me to shoot someone?” Clara said, fingering the carved stock, the stubby ugly barrel.
“I expect you to try, if it comes to that,” I said.
In an hour we were jolting overland to Schenectady in wagons with our trading goods and bateaumen. By afternoon we were heading up the Mohawk in a bateau manned by six oarsmen. As we struggled against the swift current, the bateaumen began talking in a language we did not understand.
“What are they saying?” Clara asked me in Seneca.
“I don't know. It's French,” I said, suddenly regretting my failure to study the language more diligently during my time in Madame Ardsley's finishing school with my Van Vorst cousins.
I asked our boss boatman, a thickset Dutchman named de Groot, why they were speaking French. “We go up the lake to Quebec as often as we go up the Mohawk to Oswego,” he said.
“The lake” was the Lake of the Sacrament,
29
the long narrow inland sea north of Albany that stretched almost to the Canadian border. “I thought trade with the French was forbidden by law,” I said.
“North of Albany, nothing is forbidden,” de Groot said. “Their money is as good as yours.”
They went back to talking French, leaving me with a growing suspicion that they were saying things they did not want us to hear for the worst possible reasons.
When they hauled ashore to cook an early supper and answer nature's calls, Duycinck, who had been riding in the prow of the bateau, strolled over to me and Clara and said in a low voice: “My French isn't very good, but I heard enough to tell you thisâthey're going to cut my throat tonight and throw me into the river. They plan to enjoy you and Clara for a whileâand do the same thing with you. Then they're off to Montreal with your trading goods. They'll come back to Albany with a story about an Indian raid. You couldn't have found a worse set of villains if you advertised for them.”
“That's why I gave you a pistol,” I said, struggling to control my pounding heart. “We'll fight them.”
“Have you ever tried to shoot a man with a pistol? You can't do it at more than ten feet. A musket can kill you from fifty yards.”
“Then they'll kill me,” I said. “I'll die here if that's my fate. But I won't give up those goods! My life is in those goods!”
“Don't be ridiculous,” Duycinck growled. “You can always buy more goods. You're a bloody heiress. If you want to live, we've got to disappear into the woods.”
I shook my head. “I'll die here. Before I go back to New York and listen to them laugh at me for a fool.”
“Talk to her,” Duycinck said to Clara. “I'm running at first dark. If
you want my company, come along. I've got a compass. We can get back to Albany in a day or two.”
“Damn you for a cowardly son of a bitch!” I said.
The little Dutchman was hurt. “Adam's not a coward,” he said. “He'll fight as bravely as the next man if he thinks he's got a chance of winning. But one crookback and two women armed with pistols against seven brutes armed with muskets is not what he computes as a chance.”
He strolled off to snatch a piece of venison from the fire. “He's right,” Clara said. “It makes no sense for us to die here.”
“It makes sense to me,” I said.
“Then I'll die with you,” Clara said. “I owe you my life. You can have it nowâor any time in the future.”
I gazed at Clara through a blur of bitter tears. Duycinck was right. The pistols were useless. “We'll go back to Albany and find some honest men,” I said. “I can'tâI won'tâlet them rob me as if I were a child.”
“Do you want some dinner?” de Groot called. Now there was no mistaking the malice in his leering smile.
“Pray to the Master of Life,” Clara whispered. “Nothing else will save us.”
I was too angry to pray. While we ate, more French flew between de Groot and the other boatmen and rage condensed like a chunk of ice in my body. As our escorts chomped on their venison and bread, I conceived a plan. I would not flee into the woods like a frightened rabbit. I would take a witness back to Albany with me.
Among the goods piled in the center of the bateau was a canoe, which we planned to use to travel down Lake Ontario to visit the village of Shining Creek, after we finished our trading at Oswego. I drew Duycinck aside and told him what I wanted to do with it. He called it madness at first but finally agreed to my plan. A canoe ride back to Albany was far more appealing than an overland trek.
As twilight deepened and the boatmen busied themselves setting up tents, I ordered the youngest of them, a short, button-nosed boy of sixteen or so named Brunck, to unlash the canoe. I said Clara and I disliked venison and wanted to fish for supper in the middle of the river. Brunck told us we could catch more fish in the shallows by the shore. The sneer on his face bespoke his contempt for female stupidity.
“Unlash it anyway,” I said.
He muttered something in Dutch about the canoe soon changing owners. The moment he got the craft in the water, I drew my pistol and put it to his head. “Get in,” I said. “Don't make a sound, if you don't want a bullet in your skull.”
The terrified Brunck cowered in the bottom of the canoe. Duycinck and Clara sprang into the craft and I shoved it into the current. Within
minutes we had vanished downstream in the gathering darkness, Brunck in front paddling literally for his life, with my gun at his back, and Clara wielding the other paddle in the rear.
We reached Schenectady by midnight, snatched a few hours' sleep and hired a wagon to take us to Albany in the dawn. At 9:00 A.M. I paraded the sullen Brunck up State Street to the courthouse at gunpoint while dozens of Albanyans gaped. I demanded to see a magistrate. In ten minutes we were standing before a thin-lipped older man named Oloff Van Sluyden.
Judge Van Sluyden's eyes were not friendly from the moment he saw us. When he heard my name, he grew visibly hostile. He listened with barely concealed contempt to my story of premeditated murder and theft and asked young Brunck in Dutch: “Is there a word of truth to this?”