The Spoils of Sin by Rebecca Tope Read Free Book Online Page A

She married him in ’37 and died a year later. It all began to fail after that. Lee moved north and took a second wife. He made a name for himself, but few speak well of him.’
    â€˜Did the Indians become good Christians?’
    â€˜Scarcely a one.’ He laughed. ‘All those braves required from the white men then was liquor and muskets, and good horses. For their spiritual needs, they felt quite satisfied with their totems and dances. Back in the thirties, the understanding between the races was limited to fur trading and scouting. The missionaries believed themselves to be making progress when they inveigled the Indian children into their school and gave them intensive religious instruction. The little ones then returned to their wigwams and informed their elders of the New Jerusalem and the fires of hell.’ Noah laughed. ‘I often wonder how those conversations might have gone, and what the braves and squaws made of these strange new stories. There were the Indian wives, too, of course, who came in useful as translators between their kin and their white husbands.’
    Fanny was reminded of the mixed marriages she had seen at several forts along the migration trail, as well as the obvious lack of Christianity in any form amongst any of the natives she had observed since leaving Rhode Island.
    â€˜Is it different now for the missionaries?’ she asked.
    â€˜Somewhat. They concentrate rather more on the migrants, now they are arriving here in such numbers. The Indians have become wary and elusive. They can see the future, and it frightens them. Month by month, we take more and more from them – land, beasts, their very freedom.’
    â€˜Gold too?’ asked Fanny, having heard talk in recent days of wondrous discoveries away to the south.
    â€˜If gold exists, the white man will be sure to seize every ounce of it.’
    â€˜The Mission,’ she prompted him, returning to the topic that had caught her interest. ‘That woman who died. Is she buried here?’
    â€˜Indeed she is. At the Mission Cemetery. Her biography is writ on the stone above the grave. Sailed from Boston July ’36, arrived here June ’37, it says. Makes you wonder about that sea voyage, don’t it.’
    Fanny quailed at the thought of so long a time aboard a ship, tossed on the limitless waters of the ocean, prone to sickness and thirst and constant terror. By comparison, her own months on the overland trail appeared like an easy stroll. ‘Poor woman!’ she sighed.
    Then Noah’s eye fell on Carola’s much-read book by Maria Monk. ‘You allow this garbage under your roof?’ he demanded, his face growing red. ‘This filthy pack of lies!’ He took it up and shook it, as if killing a rat.
    Fanny said nothing, too shocked to protest. The man began to rage against the poison contained in the pages, the power of the printed word to corrupt and deceive, until she began to see his fury as close to comical. ‘Sir, I beg you,’ she finally managed. ‘Why take such umbrage against it? What harm does it do?’
    â€˜Are you wilfully blind?’ He almost snarled at her. ‘This is a deliberate piece of libellous mischief against the Roman Catholics.’
    â€˜Are you one such, then?’
    â€˜I am not. But I defend their right to equal respect. Such calumny against their priests is insupportable.’
    â€˜I must inform you, then, that both Carlotta and I were born into the Catholic faith. We have no doubt that the book describes true events. You, as a man and a Protestant, will never have looked into the eyes of a priest and seen the darker depths that we have seen. They are required to be celibate, while being given admittance to a nunnery filled with young girls. The result, while shameful, is hardly to be wondered at. The real shame, I believe, is in a system that requires them to behave against nature. They are given absolute power over