The Hollow Tree (21 page)

“As you see.” He smiled. He turned to his wife, “Sarah, I think the child needs to sit down and could perhaps do with a sup of tea and a bite to eat. Come, Mistress Olcott. Yes, my wife is right. Any message to General Powell comes to me first. After a bit of sustenance, you will tell me your story. It can wait that long, I feel sure.” Justus Sherwood spoke like a man used to having his wishes obeyed.

Phoebe realized then that she did feel faint and that she was hungry, but she couldn’t eat, she couldn’t wait a single moment longer. She sat down on the edge of the settle that stood at right angles to the fireplace in the front room of the little house. Captain Sherwood sat himself in the ladder-back chair across from her.

Phoebe leaned forward on the settle and
took the by-now threadbare pocket from her sleeve. With a hand that shook, she unfolded the sheet of onion-skin paper that she had found in the hollow tree and gave it to him. She told him her story from the time she had found it — though she did not tell him about Gideon’s visit to Polly Grantham. As briefly as possible she recounted her journey over the mountains, about meeting Jem and discovering that Fort Ticonderoga was deserted, about travelling with the Loyalist refugees. Then, looking steadfastly down on her tightly clasped hands, she told him about the capture of Japhet Oram, about setting him free and then running away. When she had finished, she leaned back again and closed her eyes. She felt, rather than saw, Sarah Sherwood come and sit beside her.

“You have had an ordeal,” she said softly, “but you are among friends here.”

“Oh, but” — Phoebe swallowed hard — “there is something else. My father was a rebel. He … he was killed in battle in Boston two years ago. I do not turn away from his memory. I know he believed he did what was right — and I love him for that. I do not feel dishonoured by his embracing that cause. It was not mine, no cause is mine, I think, but I … I think you will not wish to number one such as I among your friends.”

Sarah put an arm around her. “Justus was
once one of Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys — the same Green Mountain Boys who have now taken so much from us Loyalists in the name of liberty for their Vermont Republic. He changed his thinking. But Justus’s uncles are passionate rebels, while Ethan Allen’s own brother has been known to work for the British. The Wallbridge family, all but Elijah, are rebels — yet Elijah is with us. It is so in all the King’s American colonies. We are as divided as a family of quarrelsome goats.

“There was a time” — she sighed deeply — “when we thought the rebellion would not last longer than a few months. Then we would all go home and make peace with our old neighbours. Now we can see that the war will not be soon over and, should the rebels win, we may never go home. Providence alone knows what will become of us.”

Captain Sherwood came and took Phoebe’s hand. “I knew your Gideon Robinson,” he told her. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, did you?” Phoebe looked up into his compassionate eyes. “Was he … was he …?” Her throat was so thick with tears she couldn’t go on.

“He was a good soldier.”

Neither of them said any more. But Phoebe couldn’t help wondering if Justus Sherwood was thinking, too, that it wasn’t good soldiering of
Gideon to be home in Orland Village when he should have been miles away, heading towards Lake Champlain.

“Now,” Sarah Sherwood said, “it is time to remember you are not the wild forest creature you resemble. It is time for a bath, a proper meal, and time to lose these leggings and put on a gown again.”

“First,” Justus Sherwood said, “I believe this young woman will wish to know we’ve received a report that the friends with whom she travelled so long are safe — they have arrived in Fort Sorel on the St. Lawrence River.”

Phoebe leapt to her feet, exhaustion forgotten for the moment. “Aunt Rachael? Is Jem — is my aunt there? Is Anne? — Are they …?”

“It appears that a certain Farmer Heaton,” continued the Captain, “seems to believe you are a dangerous rebel spy. I took his story to General Powell, but neither the general nor I was convinced that a young girl freeing a handsome youth meant she was a spy.”

“Well, I am not!”

“No,” the Captain agreed. “Furthermore, not all in Farmer Heaton’s party felt as he did. A young man named Morrissay seemed prepared to do battle with all comers in defence of you.”

“Oh,” said Phoebe, “does Jem really …?” Her heart felt suddenly too full of gladness to say any more.

“You are an astonishing young woman, Phoebe Olcott” — Captain Sherwood smiled at her — “Were you a soldier under my command, I would be much inclined to recommend you for a promotion for bravery in carrying out the mission of a dead comrade. But, as I cannot do that, I will see to it that you are well fed, and clothed as well as this impoverished establishment can afford, and send you north to Fort Sorel by the earliest conveyance moving in that direction. Fort Sorel is where refugee families must wait the war out and you will be with your family there.

“I will inform General Powell of your adventure and of your steadfast courage in seeing your cousin’s mission accomplished. I will give him the message you carried so faithfully.” He took Phoebe’s hand again and shook it, put on his coat, and went out.

Phoebe sat down on the settle, suddenly aware of how very tired she was. She had finally reached the end of the journey that had started at the hollow tree. She had done for Gideon what she had set out to do. She knew now that she had done it for herself, too, and for her father and for all that he had cherished — loyalty, trust, the keeping of promises. How very much she had learned from her quiet scholarly father! She felt, too, that with the telling of Japhet Oram’s escape, she had laid a fear to rest
— the Sherwoods had not turned against her. But even if they had done, she knew that if she could go back to that moment when she had cut his bonds from him she would do it again.

The next few hours were completely blissful. While Sarah Sherwood nursed her two-week-old infant in the front room, a servant girl brought a large tin tub into the kitchen and set it in front of the dancing flames in the big fireplace. She filled it with steaming water and set a screen around it. She gave Phoebe a cloth and a large slice of strong soap, and Phoebe scrubbed her body and her hair free of two months of dirt. Looking at the bath water afterwards, she decided that the Sherwoods, if they had a mind to, could grow cabbages in it, it was so thick and black. It was the first spark of humour she had felt since the night she had fled the camp.

Sarah Sherwood gave her one of her own shifts and an old wool gown. It had once been blue, she told Phoebe, but it had been washed so often it was now the soft blue-grey colour of a nuthatch’s wing. It smelled of the wild thyme it had been laid away in.

At Sarah Sherwood’s bidding, she sat down at the deal table in the middle of the warm kitchen and ate a meal of roasted pork and potatoes and sauerkraut. She thought she had never said a blessing before a meal with more gratitude in her heart.

Will you Wait?

T
he journey from the rapids at Chambly to Fort Sorel on the St. Lawrence seemed like a holiday to Phoebe. She hadn’t minded the twelve-mile trip from Fort St. John’s to Chambly, riding pillion behind one of the soldiers on his horse, but the trip on the big, flat-bottomed bateau down the Richelieu River was a joy.

It was a clear December day. The sky was bright blue and cloudless. A few small birds fluttered in the bare branches of the towering hardwood trees along the shore. The wind was cold, but Phoebe was warm. Sarah Sherwood had given her an old but still serviceable hooded brown wool cloak to cover her tunic and leggings. She had given her the shift and the blue gown, too, but Phoebe had wanted to wear Katsi’tsiénhawe’s clothes. She had washed them and spent painstaking hours mending them
because they felt like a talisman, a safe conduct from Peter Sauk and his family. So, while she had accepted the gown gratefully, she had worn the deerskin clothes despite Sarah Sherwood’s disapproval. Mary Maracle had made her a new pair of moccasins.

Now, wrapped warmly in the cloak, the hood pulled up around her face, Phoebe stood at the railing of the boat and gazed at the country around her with keen pleasure, lazily aware that she did not have to keep all her senses alert for signs of danger. She paid scant attention to the soldiers talking among themselves. The Richelieu, slow moving through this low land, was a beautiful river, although, she thought, not as beautiful as her own Connecticut, fast flowing through the high hills. It was frozen over now, except for a channel barely wide enough for the boat. The boat’s captain said that a few more bitter-cold days would close the river for the winter.

He told her that people had been settled along this river for a long time and pointed out well-established French villages on either shore. Smoke rose from chimneys, and she could distinctly hear the creaking of mill wheels, the jingling of sleigh bells, the neighing of horses, the lowing of cattle, and the sound of human voices over the water. She wondered what it might be like to live in a place where generations of one’s
own people had lived, where the forest had been shoved back, leaving no trace of itself, where the land had been tilled for so long it only waited for the farmer every spring to make it ready for a new crop. She could see, in the frozen fields, the stubble of last summer’s Indian corn.

She thought about the French people who lived on these farms, in these villages, who had lost their war and now had to be loyal to the English king across the ocean, a king who didn’t even speak their language. Loyal. That word that caused so much trouble. Loyal. How could people feel loyal to a king they didn’t know, who lived in a far-off country, even when he did speak their language? Wasn’t it more important to be loyal to what was right or to those people you knew and cared about? What was the good of killing people or being hateful to them because someone you didn’t know was doing something hateful to someone else you didn’t know? She grieved for her father dying in Boston for his strong belief in an idea of freedom, and Gideon for a king over in England. She grieved for Deborah Williams driven from her home, for Aunt Rachael and Uncle Josiah, for Jem, whose own father had gone off to fight in the Royal Yorkers and might be alive or dead, and for Tibby Thayer.

“It’s true what I said to Jem,” she whispered fiercely to herself. “It really is true. I don’t care,
I cannot care who wins this war.” But she realized she did care about the war’s refugees — those refugees she had travelled with for so many weeks. Had they all survived? Would they despise her? Would Jem — in spite of what Captain Sherwood had told her and what Jem himself had said on that hillside by the waterfall? Aunt Rachael, she felt sure, would never turn away from her, nor Uncle Josiah, though he was all but witless now. She did not think about Anne.

She brought her thoughts back to the river billowing up around the sides of the boat. It was mid afternoon. The boat was nearing Fort Sorel, where the Richelieu flowed into the St. Lawrence. That great river glittering under the sun, the ice, tossed up on shore by the wind and the moving water, looked from a distance the way Phoebe had always imagined castles to look.

“It must be as big as the ocean!” Phoebe stared at the expanse of it in amazement. She realized she had spoken aloud when a voice responded.

“Not here, Mistress.” One of the soldiers had come to stand beside her. “Northeast of here she gets even wider, and on up by Quebec she gets salty and then she’s more like the ocean. It’s mighty fine up there, where the wind sings loud and high through the big pines and along the rocky shore.”

There was a wistful note in his voice that caused Phoebe to turn and look at him more closely. He was thin and young with straw-white hair. He was dressed like so many of the Loyalist soldiers she had seen at Fort St. John’s, in a patched dark blue uniform coat and shabby linen leggings that had likely been buff-coloured but were a sort of nondescript tan now.

“Do you come from near the ocean?” she asked.

“Yup. I come from Maine ’n’ I’d give three years of my life and a good bull calf to be back there now.”

“Why aren’t you?”

The soldier sighed. His shoulders slumped.

“I’m sorry.” Impulsively Phoebe put her hand on his arm. “But I don’t understand what snags so many men and boys into going to war. I really don’t.”

The soldier sighed again. “I reckon fer me ’twas when the mob stripped the clothes off old Obadiah Hanks and slathered him with hot pine pitch and rolled him in chicken feathers, then rode him around on a fence rail ’til he screamed. He hadn’t done nothin’ but call them a clutch of rowdies and roughnecks. That set my blood a-boilin’ and I lit into Billy Pierce, and it wan’t but a sneeze-up afore the whole clanjamfry of ’em was after me. I lit outta there lickety-split. I was set to hide in the woods fer a time and then
go on home, but I was so riled, I up and took myself up to the St. Lawrence River and marched all the way to the British holdings at Three Rivers here in Canada and,” he finished on a low, sad note, “I joined up with ’em.”