Watching French Peter and Benjamin walking away again over the pasture, Lydia said gently to her father, “That was less than kind. You know he loves New York.”
“I know. And if I thought he’d stay there I would send him there tomorrow and let William set him up in business. But a father knows the nature of his sons.” His eyes were wise. “When Joseph was but small I knew he’d follow me into my trade and be a carpenter. Like me, he finds his happiness in building things. William now, and Daniel, they were merchants from the cradle. What they crave are profits and the power that those profits bring. But Benjamin—” He looked across, as Lydia was looking, to where Benjamin was striding through the pasture, once more scattering the sheep. “What he wants is adventure. And his spirit and his recklessness will carry him to places far beyond New York, I fear, and far more dangerous.” He seemed to stop himself from saying more. Crossing to his tools he took the shovel in his hands, preparing to get back to work.
She followed his example, picking up the empty dinner pail. She wondered if he knew her nature also, but she did not ask. Instead she asked him, “Father?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think General Wolfe will take Quebec?”
He dug the shovel hard into the ground and metal scraped on stone. “I hope he does, for I am ready to be done with all this fighting.”
She was minded to agree. Except an hour ago Quebec, to her, had been another distant city full of faceless enemies, and now when she imagined it, instead of walls and guns she saw two women seeking safety in the hospital—a young nun and her mother.
Wars lay easier upon the conscience, Lydia decided, when you could not see the faces of the people you were fighting. And it was vastly easier to hate a man when you’d not learned his Christian name, or pried into his private thoughts and learned that he was human.
Jean-Philippe
It was difficult, he thought, to not admire the man.
Whatever might be broken in this family, Monsieur Wilde appeared unbowed by it. He was a large man, broad through chest and shoulders, and might easily have ruled his home by discipline and force, yet even a stranger could see that his children respected him not out of fear, but affection.
Jean-Philippe was not surprised. He’d watched the family closely since the day of his arrival and the more he’d seen of Monsieur Wilde these past few weeks, the more he’d found to like.
The two of them were very often up at the same hour, both rising earlier than others in the house, and every morning Jean-Philippe observed the older man would wash his hands and face and neck and do a thing that proved that, while he did not seem to go to church on Sundays, he was still a man of faith. He prayed.
“Amen” was the same word in any language. Monsieur Wilde said it quietly to end whatever brief and private lines he spoke before he faced the day. And then he worked.
In finer weather he’d be out the best part of the day and take his dinner in the field, but when it rained or blustered, Monsieur Wilde worked at carpentry. It was his trade, apparently, and he was skilled.
He’d built two shelves into the walls of the chamber that Jean-Philippe and de Brassart shared, so they would have more room to place their things, and he’d set pegs into the wall so they could better hang their clothes, and after that he’d made them narrow wooden chests to slide beneath their beds, with hinged lids that could lock, so their possessions could be stored with more security than simply in their haversacks and packs.
When Jean-Philippe had tried to pay him for this with some of the money they’d been given for that purpose, Monsieur Wilde had smiled and waved it to the side and not accepted it, but Jean-Philippe had stubbornly refused to take the charity. At last he’d cut a piece from his tobacco and held that out to the older man, who’d smiled again and taken it and clapped him on the shoulder with a friendly hand before he’d walked away.
An easy man to like.
Some part of that, Jean-Philippe knew, was nostalgia, for there was a quality about Monsieur Wilde that reminded him of other days, when he was but a boy of ten. Then, too, he had been far from home and hadn’t known the language of the people who surrounded him.
That had been seventeen years ago, and the narrow-shouldered boy in his first uniform, who hadn’t yet killed anything more deadly than a rabbit, seemed a very long way distant from the man he had become, yet he remembered his first summer’s voyage westward from Quebec—the wideness of the water where the river met the lake; the deep green pathways of the endless forest, and the men who moved within it.
He’d felt sure he’d never lose his fear of them or understand them, but his uncle had assured him that he would.
His uncle had spent years among the Seneca himself—had been adopted by them when he had been cut off from his fellow soldiers on a raid and captured, and had passed three years among them. Rumour was he’d found a wife who’d borne his son before she and the infant both had died of smallpox, but his uncle never spoke of that. He did, though, hold the Seneca in high esteem, and when he’d taken Jean-Philippe into his care as a cadet within the service of the Troupes de la Marine, the first thing he had done was to present his nephew to those of his once-adopted family who roamed freely past the western limits of the maps along the wild frontier.
“I have no son,” he’d said to Jean-Philippe, and something in his tone had made the boy believe perhaps the rumours had been true. “I have no son, but you are of my blood, my sister’s child, and if you treat these people with respect and have the wit to learn from them, then what regard they have for me may, by extension, pass to you.”
And so it had. When those Seneca had travelled from their summer village to the one they used in winter, they had stopped first at the fort and, by arrangement with his uncle, taken Jean-Philippe along. He’d viewed it as a great adventure—but by spring he’d come to know it was in fact a privilege, and his childish prejudice had given way to steadfast admiration and to gratitude. In that single winter he’d learned many things, and most of those he’d learned from the young man who’d been his older “brother” in the family he had lived with. Broad through chest and shoulders, with a power tamped by patience and good humour, that young man had taught Jean-Philippe by simply doing things that drew the boy’s attention; drew him close enough so that the skill, once demonstrated, could be copied.
It was the same technique, he’d noticed, that Monsieur Wilde used with both his sons—or tried to use, for neither son showed any interest.
The younger of them had an energy that made him too impatient to observe and learn from anyone, nor did he have the nature of a farmer or a carpenter. The words that Jean-Philippe’s uncle had once said of him would fit this younger man as well: This one will never settle long enough to be a man of leisure. Although whether he, like Jean-Philippe, was born to be a soldier was unclear. He had the boldness, but a soldier needed discipline.