Shadowbrook by Beverly Swerling Read Free Book Online Page B

tricorne on. “Good day to you, gentlemen, Esther.
    He and the two boys were halfway to the door when he turned and handed the deerskin pouch full of money to Cormac. “Here, carry this. You may as well be useful for something.”
    When they arrived at the big house, there were only sixteen pounds and five shillings in the pouch, a pound and six shillings shy of the amount Edward Taylor had said belonged to Ephraim Hale.
    Quent knew instantly that John had taken the coins before he gave Cormac the money to carry. He tried to tell his father, but Ephraim wouldn’t listen. And John just laughed when Quent confronted him. His mother was his last hope.
    Quent found her in the little room where they stored the household linen. It was right next to the woodshed where Ephraim had taken Cormac.
    “Cormac didn’t do it,” he blurted out. “He didn’t steal Father’s money, John did. He gave Corm the pouch to hold just so he could get him in trouble when we got home.”
    Lorene was standing with her back to him, holding a stack of carefully folded kitchen cloths to her face.
    “Mama, do you hear me? Please, Mama, you’ve got to—”
    “Hush, Quent. I hear you.” Lorene turned and set the stack of cloths on the table. She was breathing with some difficulty and her cheeks were bright pink. The flush extended down her neck to the exposed skin above her breasts.
    They both heard the sound of Ephraim’s razor strop whistling through the air and thudding softly against flesh. Quent winced. “Mama, Cormac didn’t do it.”
    “Tell your Father.”
    “I did. He won’t listen.”
    She shook her head. “Your Father is … I can’t tell him anything, Quentin. I’m sorry. I … Go away, child. I’m busy.”
    She was folding and unfolding the same square of cloth and her eyes were strangely shiny. The sound of the razor strop was loud in the little room but Lorene shooed him away, her eyes staring at a point somewhere over his head.
    “He knew you didn’t do it and John did,” Quent told Corm later. “That’s why he only gave you six stripes.”
    “If he knew I didn’t do it, then it was wrong to give me any,” Cormac said.
    Quent agreed, but he couldn’t explain Ephraim’s behavior so he didn’t try.
    The next day John was sent to Philadelphia to stay with a Hale cousin for a year and learn something of printing, since Ephraim said he might someday want to open a print shop on the Patent.
    In April four Potawatomi braves appeared and stood waiting at the edge of the long drive that led from the front door to the river landing. “They’ve come for Cormac,” Ephraim said.
    “Not for her?” Lorene asked in a flat, unnatural voice.
    “Not for her,” Ephraim confirmed. “She stays. Cormac spends the winter here with us learning to be white, then he goes back to Singing Snow for the summer and learns to be red.” Ephraim shrugged. “The sachem said they want him to be easy in both worlds. So in the future he can speak for the Potawatomi to the Europeans.”
    “She stays,” Lorene said.
    “Yes, I told you. She stays.” He stroked her cheek with one finger and smiled slightly. “There need be no interruption of our … our mutual interests. No interruption at all.”
    Ephraim Hale strode out of the house to meet the Indians. An hour later they left with Cormac and took Quent along as well.

    Standing in that clearing in the Ohio Country, Quent thought about that day in Do Good. He didn’t know what the Quakers had decided about slaves, but the older he got the more he knew how much he hated the system. And the thing he maybe hated most was the way the slaves he knew went along with it, truly believing they were owned by another human being, and that it was the right and proper way of things.
    No, maybe what he hated most, the thing that two years before had finally driven him away for good, was how John was making it worse. Blaming the slaves for the decreasing profits. Treating them like animals. Worse.