He was tall for a Mohawk, five feet and about ten inches, with the taut musculature of a man some years younger than his sixty or so years. The brown in his eyes had faded down the years, and his long hair, now gathered into a single pony tail, was streaked with grey. In another age he might have been proclaimed Chief amongst his people; instead he was an Elder of his clan, one of a handful of men who spoke for the Mohawk in the councils of the Iroquois Nation.
Knowing that Abe wanted to seek her father’s counsel Kate had led her cousins away demanding they catch some fish to ‘earn your keep’.
The two men stood alone in the sepulchral quiet stillness of the woods, listening to the slow rushing of the river down the flanks of the island in the stream.
“I don’t want to live a lie anymore,” Abe explained hesitantly. “But…”
“What about your doctoral degree?”
“That’s just a piece of paper, I…”
The old man knew where this was heading. The kids wanted to be properly married, to live as man and wife and if he understood anything about his daughter – she was a force of nature like her late mother – Kate ached to start having babies.
“You don’t have to ask my permission,” Tsiokwaris observed neutrally, “to take Kate away from here.”
“No…”
“You’ve talked about this?”
Abe nodded.
“If we go far enough west, into the outlying territories, or perhaps right the way over to Vancouver, well,” he shrugged helplessly, “we could live together openly. Without fear.”
“Without fear,” the old man echoed. “There’s a lot of frontier country between here and the West Coast?”
“We’d cross into Canada and take passage on the Dominion Trans-Continental Railway all the way from Ottawa to Vancouver. The other possibility is maybe going into practice at Winnipeg or Calgary, either way there’s hardly any of this Getrennte Entwicklung nonsense north of the border.”
The colonial settlement with the French and the native populations north of the St Lawrence and the Great Lakes was the consequence of an entirely different approach to that taken in New England. 1776 was one of those years that had a lot to answer for! Whereas, the British had wrested Quebec from the French only a few years before the rebellion they had not attempted to inflict a single colonial model on the whole vast, then largely unexplored country. The French in Canada had been assimilated into the Empire with their culture and traditions intact; in New England the ‘English’ way had been the only way and the ruthless brutality of the retribution meted out to traitors and to whole colonies had been every bit as savage as that suffered by the Scottish clans after the Jacobite rising of 1745. North of the St Lawrence River slavery had never been enshrined in daily life, nor the inflexible missionary Christianity of the first East Coast colonies.
There had been less poison in the system north of the border, less colony versus colony competition, thus, Canada was a nation in the making within the Empire while New England remained, and probably would be ever more, a collection of – albeit peaceably – warring colonies.
Canada was no kind of Heaven on Earth; but there was no law prohibiting marriage across racial, ethnic or religious divides and if he and Kate might have trouble finding a Christian communion which would marry them in the sight of Colonial Law, any magistrate or registrar could perform the ceremony and thereafter, Kate would be as respectable as any lady living in a great mansion or carried everywhere in a gilded carriage.
In Canada their children would be born legitimately.
Tsiokwaris’s brows knitted for a moment and his eyes darkened.
He and Abe had talked of this day many times but still he ached for the coming loss of his daughter and his second son. He had suspected that this might be the parting of the ways; that within days Tekonwenaharake would be gone, her voice travelling through the wind of different lands.
When he and his ‘son’ had last spoken the discussion had been whether to leave this year or next; in his heart the old Mohawk had known the time was now it was just that he had not, nor would he ever, really come to terms with it.
The two men halted, faced each other.
“Does Isaac know?”
Abe shook his head.
“He’s under Sarah’s thumb and he’s an awful liar.”
The old man said nothing but he gave Abe a very odd look, one full of irony and oddly, gentle amusement.
“What did I say?”
Tsiokwaris shook his head.
“Nothing. Have you figured out what you’ll do for money until you get settled where you’re going?”
Abe nodded.
The Mohawk chuckled almost but not quite under his breath.
Isaac Fielding’s son would have worked out everything. Life father like son. His old friend’s other sons could have been any man’s; Abe could only have been Isaac’s boy. They were too alike; which was probably why they had become a little distant in recent times. He wondered if the boy realised that his common law step mother was not what she seemed to be?
On balance, no, he decided.
But there was no need to burden Abe with that as well, he had quite enough to worry about as it was.
Tsiokwaris walked on.
O, me oh my…
What would we all be without our secrets?
Chapter 12
Brooklyn Admiralty Dockyard, Wallabout Bay, King’s County
Thirty-four-year old Victoria Fielding Watson sat in the crowded temporary scaffold-seating within less than twenty feet of the King and Queen. Notwithstanding she was seven months pregnant with her third child she had jumped to her feet with everybody else when the Royal couple had ascended to the launching platform – a stage erected under the bow of Yard Job Number 309, it was bad luck to say the name of a ship on launch day until the moment before the traditional bottle was cracked on her plates – and ecstatically clapped and cheered. She had been quite hot and bothered by the time she resumed her seat with the other ‘senior wives’.
Vicky was fifteen to twenty years younger than the majority of the women around her. John Watson, her husband had lost his first wife in the influenza pandemic of 1958-59; and by all accounts buried himself in his work for over a decade before her arrival on the scene. A lot of the other dockyard wives had regarded Vicky as a gold-digger, although she had never been that. The fact of the matter was that she had liked – and felt a little sorry for John – from the first morning she walked into his office to take dictation. His long-time secretary, a formidable spinster who had been at Wallabout Bay for over forty years had finally retired, and Vicky was one of several ‘temps’ sent up to the ‘First Floor’ from whence the big men of the Yard ruled like not so minor princes and potentates.
John was under-manager of Slipways 3 and 4 at the time. For the last two years he had been Director of Operations for Small Ship Construction. This title was a misnomer because in Wallabout Bay terms ‘small ship’ simply meant any vessel ‘small enough’ to be safely launched from a slipway into the waters of the East River. The two big fleet carriers – Ulysses and Perseus – were, at nearly a thousand feet long and well over forty-thousand tons, being constructed in dry docks; but anything under six or seven hundred feet long and weighing in at less than twenty thousand tons still qualified as ‘small’, such was the scale of things in the great yards.