The Hollow Tree (23 page)

No one listening made a move or a sound while Phoebe told about George, about Bartlett, about Peter Sauk and his mother and sister and all that happened before she met Jem and discovered that there was no one at Fort Ticonderoga to give Gideon’s message to.

“And so I came along with Jem and you were all there, and now, I guess, I’d best find the fort commander and give him my letter and
learn what he means me to do. I trust I am a refugee, now, too.” Gently she removed Betsy’s hand from her leg where it had been resting all through her story, and stood up to go. Jem was watching her intently, and she wanted to say something to him, something about why she had not felt able to tell him her story when they were coming through the forests together, but she couldn’t seem to form the words.

She hadn’t taken more than a few steps beyond the door when a barely audible voice behind her made her stop. She turned. It was Anne, and Jem was behind her. Anne wore no cloak against the cold, her face was pinched, and her violet eyes were dark with an expression Phoebe didn’t understand.

“Why did you not tell me?” The question was not a reproach. Anne really seemed not to understand. Behind her Jem slipped off into the twilight. Neither girl noticed him leaving.

“I couldn’t. You were so angry. You thought it was my fault. I couldn’t talk to you. You wanted to see me hanged. I was afraid of you.”

“Did … did Gideon’s note say your name?”

“No. No, it didn’t. It said for whoever found it to take it to Elias Brant or—”

“But he was my brother. I should ha ve … I would have taken it and I would have taken you with me!”

“Anne, I … ” Phoebe was stunned. Not once
from the moment she had discovered the tiny silk-wrapped message and Gideon’s note had she thought that she and Anne might have braved the mountains together. She had not thought, either, of what Anne might want or how she might feel. She had been so devastated by everything that had happened that she had thought only about her own feelings, her own fears. In fact, she realized suddenly, she had never considered Anne’s thoughts or feelings about anything. She had always been in too much awe of her. But Gideon had been Anne’s brother, and maybe if she had told Anne about the message, maybe everything would have turned out differently.

She felt her face grow hot. She didn’t know what to say. She put out her hand, drew it back. “I … I’m so sorry,” she mumbled. “I should have told you, but you were so … oh, I should have told you! I’m sorry.”

Anne took Phoebe’s hand. She was trembling. “I … well … I … ” Her voice faded. She stared at Phoebe, her eyes full of tears. “I was mean and spiteful to say those dreadful things,” she whispered, “and … and I … I think maybe I would not have been brave enough to have come with you. No, I don’t think I could do what you did.”

“I couldn’t either,” said Phoebe.

Anne frowned, perplexed. “But you did it.”

“But I couldn’t have if I had had time to think about it first. No, I couldn’t. I am not brave. You know that. How often have you told me!”

“If I told you you weren’t brave, I was wrong. To think I was the one who boasted that I could go off for a soldier. I couldn’t have. I suppose you always knew I couldn’t, didn’t you?”

“No. I always thought you could do anything.”

“And all the time it was you.”

They stood together in the encroaching dark. It had begun to snow and the wind was sharper. The voices of people crossing the compound were so muffled that the two seemed to be completely alone. In a voice so low Phoebe had to strain to hear her, Anne said, “I’m sorry, Phoebe.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” said Phoebe and knew that it didn’t, that the hardness in her heart had softened.

“We’ll be friends again, Phoebe, as we used to be.”

“Yes,” said Phoebe. But she didn’t believe they would be, not as before. She and Anne were family. But friends? Had they ever really been friends? And now? So much had happened. So much had changed. She had changed. Anne had changed. She could not say all that to Anne, not now, when they were both still so hurt by each
other and there was such sadness between them. All the same, when Anne asked, almost timidly, if she might walk to the commander’s office with her, Phoebe said, “Of course,” and waited for Anne to fetch her cloak. Then they walked, arms linked, in the silence of the snow.

By morning the wind had died, it had stopped snowing, and it was bright but bitterly cold. Phoebe stood outside the door of the barracks where she had been directed to settle herself with the Robinson family and the rest of the refugees. She had her hood up and her cloak pulled tightly around her, braving the cold to get away from the foetid air inside. She was wondering sadly if she would ever see her own beloved Connecticut River and her hills again. Would she be able to go home when the war was over? Would any of these refugees be able to go home? Would their homes be there for them?

Her melancholy thoughts were interrupted by the sound of crunching snow. She looked up to see Jem coming towards her from the river. He had his musket over his shoulder and a pack on his back.

“Phoebe,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Yes, well …” His voice trailed off.

Phoebe waited. And waited. “Yes, well, Jem?”

“Phoebe?” He was looking at her so intently
she began to feel uncomfortable. “Come walk with me down to the wharves.” He took her hand and they walked. The only sound was that of their feet on the crisp white snow until they drew near the wharves, where men were busily chopping the ice from the bateau being readied for its journey up the St. Lawrence to Montreal.

“The last trip this winter, be my guess,” said one of them cheerfully. Jem nodded.

“I’m goin’ off on that boat,” he said to Phoebe.

“I thought maybe that was it.”

“I know all the things you’re thinkin’. But I got to get into the war. I got to do my part.”

“Isn’t it enough you came all this way with your mother and Jeannie. Isn’t it?” Phoebe looked at the stubborn set of his chin, the glint of determination that made the bright blue of his eyes almost green. There was nothing she could say to stop him. “Does your mother know?”

“Yes. Phoebe, will you miss me?”

She didn’t want to answer that. She was afraid to miss Jem. She had lost too many people. She didn’t want him to know that the memory of him standing in the dawn light on the mountainside telling her he cared about her had been the one thing that had kept her going all the way to the Richelieu River. But something in the way she looked at him must have told him.

“You will!” he cried, then in a much quieter voice, he said, “Phoebe, I’d ask you to marry me. Right now this minute I would, ’n’ stay here with you — but, Phoebe, my country’s in trouble ’n’ you know I have to go.”

Yes, she knew. Whatever made people want to go to war was powerfully strong. Hadn’t she sent her father off to war? Hadn’t she sent Gideon off to war? She shook her head angrily, shaking free the tears that had come to her eyes.

Jem put his musket on the ground. He took her by the shoulders. “We ain’t married, Phoebe,” he said, “but you got me t’keep whether you wants me or not, even if I ain’t here. But when the war’s over … Phoebe, when the war’s over, if I come back all of a piece … Phoebe will you wait for me to see if I come back all of a piece?”

Phoebe stared at him. He was asking her to marry him.

“I don’t guess I got the right to ask you to wait,” Jem said, “but I’d sure admire for you to. It might not be so long. When General Howe and General Cornwallis gets goin’ good ’n’ proper they’ll have them rebels licked in jig time. But I guess mebbe you don’t …”

“Jem—”

“You don’t have to say,” he interrupted quickly. “You can forget I asked. I got no business asking anyways, after you tramped halfway over the world on accounta that cousin you
cared so much for. I …well … Phoebe, I guess I’d take it kindly if I could go off with your blessin’.”

“Jem—”

“You shouldn’t even have to—”

“Jem, stop! Stop telling me what I shouldn’t or don’t have to do. You asked me something. Now I mean to answer you. Yes, Jem, I will send you away with my blessing. How could I do else? And Jem, yes, I will wait for you.” She said this last so softly Jem had to ask her to say it again.

“Yes, Jem,” Phoebe said loudly and clearly, “I will wait for you to come back from the war because … because I love you. I do, Jem. I do.”

They stood there in the cold, clear morning light, looking at each other. Suddenly Jem looked like a stranger to Phoebe and, at the same time, he looked like the person she knew best in all the world. And she had told him she loved him.

The silence was broken by the shrill blast of the boat whistle.

“I got to go,” said Jem. He pulled Phoebe to him and kissed her quickly and awkwardly on her mouth. “I love you, too,” he whispered. He turned towards the boat. He turned back. They looked at each other, embarrassed. Then Phoebe put her hands up to his face, stood on tiptoe, and kissed him with all her heart. Then she put
her arms around him and held him as though she would never let him go. Jem’s arms went around her and they held each other until he broke free without a word. He picked up his musket and strode off to the boat.

Phoebe swallowed the lump in her throat. “God bless you and keep you, Jem Morrissay!” She called after him.

He raised his arm to let her know he had heard, but he did not look back. Phoebe knew he did not dare. She watched him board the ship and watched while he set his face to the west. She watched the soldiers in charge push off from the dock. She stood with the wind whipping her dark braid back and forth, the tears freezing on her face until the bateau had disappeared up the river.

Her journey was over. Gideon’s message had reached the person to whom it was addressed. Even the coded message. Justus Sherwood had told her that it had to do with troop movements and rebel battle strategies, but he hadn’t been free to tell her more. But he had stayed closeted with the General for hours the next day, and there was much coming and going of officers at the Sherwoods’ house. A number of them stopped to praise her. She had done what she had set out to do, and the problems that had arisen from her impulsive act had been resolved. The past was the past. Whatever the future
would bring she did not fear. She was no longer Anne’s devoted young cousin, Gideon’s little brown mouse, or Peter Sauk’s little grey bird. She belonged to herself now. Phoebe Olcott, a complete person, and she was going to marry Jem Morrissay when he came back from the war.

Epilogue or how it
all turned out

O
n a warm afternoon in early autumn in the year 1784, Phoebe Olcott sat spinning wool outside the door of Peggy and Charles Morrissay’s log cabin on an island off the north shore of Lake Ontario. A large orange cat slept by her feet.

The American Revolution had been over for three years, although the treaty that officially ended the war had been signed only the year before. The British had lost, and the King’s loyal American supporters had not been welcome back in their old homes. Their lands and possessions had been confiscated and their lives threatened.

And so the King had decreed that the Loyalists were to be given land in British North
America. Land was bought for them from the Micmac and Maliseet people in Nova Scotia, and from the Mississauga in Canada. The King’s Mohawk allies who had lost their land in the Mohawk Valley in New York were given large tracts in Canada. Acres were parcelled out to every civilian Loyalist man according to the size of his family, and to every soldier according to his military rank plus the size of his family. Jem Morrissay’s father, Charles, who had been a sergeant in the King’s Royal Regiment of New York, was granted three hundred acres: two hundred for his rank, fifty for his wife, Peggy, and fifty for their daughter, Jeannie.

The new settlements began along the St. Lawrence River west of Montreal, branched up along the Ottawa, and west in the upper country along the north shore of Lake Ontario and its islands, all the way to the Niagara River. The Morrissays had taken their land on one of Lake Ontario’s offshore islands, land that Justus Sherwood in his new job as Crown Surveyor had called “rich and good for meadow and pasture.”

In the spring of 1784, after all those long years in the camps at Sorel and Yamachiche, the refugee Loyalists made their way by land as far as the rapids at Lachine, just west of Montreal, and, from there, by bateau to their new homes. Three thousand of them altogether, a flotilla of
hopeful people, singing as they poled the low boats close to the shore.

Then, on a bright morning in May, when violets and miliums filled the woods with colour, bluebirds and finches filled the air with song, and the scent of spring was everywhere, a collection of refugees stood on the rocky shore of Lake Ontario ready to pull their location tickets from the surveyor’s hat. This had seemed to the Governor of Quebec the fairest way to distribute the land, to parcel it off into lots. Tickets with lot numbers on them were dropped into the hat. A man would step forward and pull a ticket from the hat to learn where his land would be. The Morrissays pulled their ticket and found themselves with their three hundred acres at the southeastern tip of the island, sixty safe miles across the lake from the country that had so recently been their own.