The Hollow Tree (24 page)

Among their neighbours were the people whom Peggy Morrissay had spent the war years with. Bertha Anderson, her son Johnny, and Betsy Parker were there. Bertha’s husband, Septimus, had been killed fighting with Colonel Simcoe, but Johnny was now thirteen, old enough and strong enough to help chop down trees and build a cabin with his mother. Betsy was the same age, old enough and strong enough to do almost all the heavy work Johnny could do, as well as cook and spin and weave.

Lucy and Joseph Heaton, and Abigail Colliver, her husband, Jethro, who had miraculously survived months in the mine-shaft prison at Simsbury in Connecticut and another six years fighting with Butler’s Rangers, their two children, Sam and Arnold, had land within ten miles along the shore from the Morrissays. Charity and Jonah Yardley (who still had George, now a fifteen-year-old cat) were only a few miles inland — old Aaron Yardley had died only the year before at Sorel. Margery and Thomas Bother and their five children were near neighbours. Their baby Zeke was now eight years old, and Tom, the infant born on the trail, was six. Peter Sauk and his family were to live on the Mohawk reserved lands only twenty-five miles away. Peter had come once to Fort Sorel to reassure himself that Phoebe had survived her journey, and again, at the end of the war, to tell her where he would settle.

The only family from those bad days in the wilderness journey that had not come to settle on the Lake Ontario island was the Robinson family. Only the year before, Anne had married a British soldier and gone to live in England. Five years earlier Aunt Rachael had been befriended by a French widow in Sorel Village and had decided to stay with Madame Boulanger. “The children,” she had told Phoebe, “have come to feel at home here. They speak as much
French as English. I do not want to shift them again.”

Phoebe hadn’t liked leaving Aunt Rachael or the children, but it had been almost a relief to say goodbye to Anne. They had not been unkind to each other over the years in the refugee camp, but Phoebe had been wrong when she had thought Anne might have changed. Anne had remained as self-centred and full of romantic dreams as ever. Phoebe had felt sad to see her go off to London to a life that she knew was not going to be as grand as Anne envisioned. Billy Watson, the sergeant she had married, was a handsome man, but only a sergeant, not a man to provide the silks and satins and diamond buckles Anne still dreamed of. Phoebe had kept her reservations to herself, though. She had embraced her cousin and had seen her off with prayers and good wishes.

Phoebe had not wanted to stay in Sorel with Aunt Rachael. She had no desire to go home either, although she thought she would have been allowed because of her father having been a rebel. But she would not have felt at home in Hanover or in Orland Village anymore. Her friends were here in Canada. This was home now. So she had decided to go to Lake Ontario country with Jem’s mother and father.

Jem had not come back from the war. His mother, his father, and Jeannie had all mourned for him. Friends had been sympathetic, but
Phoebe had not mourned. She had not believed he was dead. “He’ll come, you will see,” she had said confidently. “He asked me to wait for him. I’ll wait.”

People had whispered. She’d heard them. “Poor soul,” they’d said, “she’s like to be one of them that waits and waits all her life long, spinning and weaving for other folks’ children.” They’d shaken their heads sadly when Phoebe refused “that nice corporal Ben Larkin” who’d wanted to marry her, and despaired for her when she’d packed up her spare gown and shift, all she owned beside the one she wore (the deerskin leggings and tunic had long since been worn to shreds and used to stuff chinks in the walls of the barracks). She had said her farewells to friends who had decided to stay on the Richelieu River or go away to the west, on the Niagara River. She had promised to send news often to Rachael and the children and gone to homestead with the Morrissays. She had taken with her the chest Rachael had brought from Orland Village, the one that had belonged to her grandmother. “You’ll have something of us with you always,” Aunt Rachael had said.

All this Phoebe was thinking about as she sat spinning in the warm sun that autumn afternoon, listening to the jays and crows, loving the spicy scent of wild rose-hips as it wafted towards her on every breeze.

“There,” she said, “you are almost ready for the loom.” She chuckled. “Phoebe Olcott, did you really think that hank of wool was set to tell you it was pleased? What are you coming to, talking to yourself like this? Are you …?” her voice trailed off. Her foot slowed on the treadle, her hand let go of the spindle. She had become aware that she was being watched.

She looked up to see a man standing at the edge of the clearing. He was a young man, hat-less, his reddish-blond hair tied back, his red-bearded face so gaunt the bones would have been all you could see but for the blue of his eyes. He was dressed in fringed deerskin leggings and shirt, and he had a musket over one shoulder. He was leaning on a stick. He said nothing; he did not stir for what seemed a very long while. Then he raised an eyebrow and one corner of his mouth turned up.

Phoebe sighed. “Jem,” she said.

“I’m all of a piece, Phoebe, exceptin’ for a bit of a left-over limp. I was took prisoner. They only just let us free. Did you wait?”

“I have another cat. He’s one of George’s kittens. But no bear, Jem.”

“Well, then, I reckon us three better find us a passel of land to build on.” Jem moved from his spot by the trees.

Phoebe took a deep, shaky breath. She grinned at him. She put her foot back on the
treadle, her hand on the spindle. “Now,” she said, “you must wait for me — until I finish spinning this hank of wool for your mother.”

Jem stepped back and propped himself against a tree. “I’ll wait,” he said.

Phoebe and Jem were married the next time the travelling preacher came their way. Jem was granted his soldier’s land only a few miles from his mother’s and father’s, and there he and Phoebe cleared land and built their first log house. A few years later they sold it and bought land on a small bay at the west end of the island, land that Jem had discovered during a time he had gone with young Sam Colliver to help set up a mill on a nearby creek. Others besides Sam were setting up along that creek. Bertha Anderson’s son John and his new wife, Lydia, Jonah Yardley, and young Tom Bother were among them.

“I’d like to call our bay Hawthorn Bay,” Jem told Phoebe, “because it’s ringed around with hawthorn trees ’n’ my old gran told me once them trees mean good fortune.”

Phoebe needed no persuading. From the moment she saw the bay glistening under a spring sun, and the little hawthorns covered with white blossoms, she had a deep sense of belonging.

“We will be well here,” she said. “And our children and our children’s children. We will all be well here. There will be peace in this country.”

The Root Cellar
WINNER OF THE CLA CHILDREN’S
BOOK OF THE YEAR

I
t looked like an ordinary root cellar, the kind of place where you’d store canned goods, and winter vegetables. If twelve-year-old Rose hadn’t been so unhappy in her new home, she probably never would have fled down the stairs to the dark cellar. And if she hadn’t, she never would have climbed up into another century, the world of the 1860s, and the chaos of the American Civil War. There she makes her first friends—and they desperately need her help!

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ISBN : O-7704-2885-I

Shadow in Hawthorn Bay
WINNER OF THE CLA CHILDREN’S
BOOK OF THE YEAR
and
THE CANADIAN YOUNG ADULT BOOK AWARD

B
orn in the same week in the Highlands of Scotland, Mary Urquhart and her cousin Duncan had always been united by a wild joy for the land and for each other. Mary knows that Duncan’s heart is always with her, even after he has left to seek his fortune in the raw wilderness of Upper Canada. Four years after he has left, Mary hears Duncan’s cry for help across the great distance that separates them. Now, equipped with her strange gift of “second sight,” Mary knows that she must leave behind all that is dear and safe and cross the ocean alone to find him.

SEAL BOOKS
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ISBN: O-7704-2886-X