Free Flint and Feather by Charlotte Gray Page A

grandchildren, and he was always happy to take Pauline’s hand and walk down to the river with her. If she pressed him, he would tell her stories out of his own past and the Iroquois legends that his mother had told him. But Pauline was still too young to pay much attention, particularly if Chips had raced off into the undergrowth after a squirrel.
    The Johnsons enjoyed a standard of living that was unusually high amongst both Indians and settlers. They were sufficiently well-off to employ two or three servants when Pauline was young, so the children were expected to perform only “character-training” chores. A quarter of a century after she left Chiefswood, Pauline remembered that, for thirty minutes each morning before lessons with the governess, Eva had to clean the oil lamps, and that she had to sweep the stairs. “How endless those stairs were!” she recalled. “I can count them yet—nineteen horrors, with mahogany coloured velvet carpet, so difficult to
    John “Smoke” Johnson, Pauline’s grandfather, passed on the Iroquois legends he had learnt as a child.
    dust, a strip of linen in the centre, so gloriously easy to slide over, and broad, polished brass rods, perfect demons for holding the ‘fluff’ from the velvet.” The little girl would frequently give up around the tenth stair and wait with a woebegone face, hoping that Milly the nurse or Jane the cook would relieve her of the stiff brush and finish the job. But her mother rarely let her get away with such behaviour: finishing the job was “something whereby you can help Milly and Jane.” Noblesse oblige required Pauline to reach the bottom stair.
    Except for that one morning chore, the children were free to roamover the Chiefswood grounds, exploring the ravines, gathering morel mushrooms and picking anemones, violets and tiger lilies. In the spring, they watched a tenant farmer plough and plant the land between the house and the road. In the summer, they were enthusiastic spectators for the pickup lacrosse games that boys from the reserve organized on the grassy flats near the river. In the fall, they gathered butternuts, walnuts and hickory nuts. In the winter, they helped their father cut ice from the river. The two girls took turns riding Marengo, a little black pony that their father had named after Napoleon’s favourite horse.
    In family photographs, the Johnsons appear the epitome of Victorian respectability as they sit, straight and silent, before the lens. Small boys all over the British Empire played with drums similar to the one on which Allen Johnson’s feet rest. The pattern for Eva’s dress, with pretty bows on the sleeves, probably came from an illustration in a British magazine. In their black button boots and starched petticoats, the children could be the offspring of any moderately prosperous churchgoing family in Montreal, Manchester or Melbourne. The olive skin and dark eyes suggest a different parentage, but it is a subtle difference. The boys’ hair is brown, not black, and only Allen has inherited his father’s swarthiness.
    The two Johnson boys were good athletes, the stars of local lacrosse teams. But there were no such physical outlets for the girls; even the newly popular game of tennis, considered a suitable activity for ladies, was banned from Chiefswood by Emily Johnson. Emily passed on to her daughters her own phobia about social intimacy. Visitors were never allowed to kiss the little girls; by the time she was three, Pauline had learned to bestow only distant handshakes on boys and men. Since kissing games were popular in this period, Pauline was quickly branded as standoffish. In later years she recalled an incident in the summer that she was eight, when some children from Brantford came to visit a Chiefswood neighbour:
A laughing-eyed boy of nine or ten suddenly developed a teasing tendency. “I’ll kiss all you girls and make you cry!” he shouted, waving his arms like a windmill, and rushing toward the