But that had been before Oswego, and before the laughter in their house had died and she had died along with it, and now no matter how the gauntlets fell and hard words with them, she would not be coming back to keep things tidy anymore.
A chilling wave slapped cold at Lydia’s bare leg and caught the hemline of her shift and so she gathered up the linen folds more tightly in her hands, still standing firm against the tide’s insistence she return to shore.
They looked to her now, and she knew it.
“You are so like Mother,” Benjamin would say—sometimes in praise, sometimes in irritation—and she knew that he and Joseph and their father and her older brothers looked to her to steady them. And so she tried.
But some days, such as this one, it felt too much of a burden to be shouldered, and she feared that she would stumble if she did not find her balance.
“I am trying,” she said quietly, though none stood by to hear her, for she knew her mother’s grave amid the trees above the cove would have been echoing all morning with the angry voices warring in the house, and with the hard and ringing sounds of Joseph’s axe as he released that anger into action, stubbornly retreating, as he did these days, to silence.
There was no one there to give her any answer.
She stood her ground and raised her face, and waited for the storm.
Jean-Philippe
There was a woman in the water.
He had seen her for the first time when the waggon’s nearside wheels had caught another rut along the road as they came round the headland, and the jolt had been enough to shift him from his frowning contemplation of the trees, and in that moment he had glimpsed the cool blue of what looked to be a bay.
The woman wore a yellow gown, and stood some little distance from the shore. That had seemed strange enough to warrant his attention.
Of the three men in the waggon, it appeared he was the only one who’d noticed her at all.
The heavy-shouldered driver who was now to be their gaoler—or their “host,” by the polite terms of this war—had for some time now been in conversation with the other officer, de Brassart, who seemed able to speak comfortably in English.
Jean-Philippe, who knew no English save for “Lay your weapons on the ground” and “Do not move” and knowing neither phrase would be of use in present circumstances, had found these few hours of their journey nothing but a waste of time.
He’d occupied himself in the beginning with a study of the man who had collected them. The English magistrate who’d been in charge of them at first had introduced the man as “Monsieur Wilde,” a man of reputation in this colony. A man to be respected.
He was older, and the hair beneath his hat showed thickly white, his face more lined than Jean-Philippe’s own father’s, though his strong frame looked to be more powerful.
Whatever work he did, he used his hands. They had the calluses and strong veins of a man who did not use them just to hold a pen or glass of wine. And there was something in the man’s straightforward, level gaze that Jean-Philippe suspected might be honesty.
Which made a striking contrast to de Brassart.
In their time at Fort Niagara he had seen de Brassart many times, but never once in battle. Such a man knew well the ways to keep behind the men in his command so that he never shared their danger, while yet standing so his shadow blotted out their claim to any part of victory. A man who used his charm the way another man might use his sword, and with as deadly an effect.
In his years of military service, Jean-Philippe had learned the workings of a man like that so thoroughly de Brassart did not hold his interest long, and when the day’s heat had begun to hang more thickly in the forest his attention had begun to drift among the shaded places on the narrow road between the trees.
Until those trees had parted, and he’d seen the woman in the water.
Now each time the trees grew thin, he looked for her, first idly then with growing curiosity.
Each glimpse, however brief, gave him a chance to add new details to his former observations.
She was slender. She had gathered up her skirts above the waterline. Her hair—what little he could see of it beneath her plain white cap—was dark. She might have been the age, he thought, of any of his sisters; he was too far off to tell.
She stood more still and for a longer time than any woman he could call to memory, as though she were fixed in place by some force yet invisible, within that clear blue water.
By the fifth time he caught sight of her, he had begun to envy her that stillness. He had never learned the way of it, himself.
“This one,” he still recalled his uncle saying to his father once, “will never settle long enough to be a man of leisure. He was born to be a soldier.” And like that, his course in life had been decided. In the year of his tenth birthday he’d been taken on as a cadet within his uncle’s company, where many of the officers were, like himself, Canadian. “We are not like the officers in Old France,” he’d been warned. “There, men can pay to buy advancement through the ranks. Here, you must earn it. You must prove that you deserve to be promoted, on your merit.”
He had proven it. His rise had been a steady one, helped by the European wars that cast their ripples over here and by the hard campaigns along the changeable frontiers that gave him countless opportunities to show his worth. He’d made full ensign by eighteen and now, at twenty-seven, he’d been two years a lieutenant in command of his own men, and in that time he could not call to mind a single day—not one—in which he’d had no task to focus on, no work to do, no orders needing action.
Until this day.
The English had removed him from his men. They’d had no right to. In the journey down from Fort Niagara to New York his English captors, holding to the terms of the surrender, kept the officers together with their men. But once he’d signed the paper giving his parole of honour at New York, the English all at once had broken faith, forgetting both the laws of war and their own word, and sent his men in one direction and him in another, over all of his objections. Not that any of his arguments had been of use. The only man within that room, besides his fellow prisoners, who’d understood a word he’d said had been an English captain who did not have the authority to alter what was ordered, but who’d merely passed him to the keeping of a New York magistrate, who in his turn had brought him, with de Brassart, to this wild part of Long Island and this morning had delivered them into the care of Monsieur Wilde.
De Brassart was using his charm to his benefit, but Jean-Philippe felt no call to be charming. He felt like a bundle of pelts being traded from one person on to the next without having a say in the matter or knowing his end destination. Uncertainty, he’d learned to deal with. Life was an uncertain thing. But he had never done well when deprived of all control.
He had kept what he could of it. Worn his full uniform, even the long white wool justacorps, though if he’d been on patrol in this heat he’d have shed that fine coat first of all and gone just in his long-sleeved blue waistcoat. He’d shaved and he’d tied back his hair and he’d fitted his hat on as smartly as if he had been on parade, for wherever he ended up next he’d be damned if they’d see him dishevelled. Nor would he allow them to break what control he yet had over his own emotions and drive him to anger.
The woman in the water was a welcome point to focus on at first.
But he could sense the subtle changes in the air within the woods and in the chatter of the birds that were the herald of a turning of the weather, and beyond the bay, above the strip of mainland, he saw darker clouds begin to roll and gather in a coming storm.
The woman stood unmoving.
Someone needed to call out to her, to warn her that the water was no safe place to be standing when the weather turned, but Jean-Philippe from his position knew he could do nothing.