Free Shadowbrook by Beverly Swerling

family ties and obligations that Pontbriand had gone against the advice of the Jesuits and allowed the nuns to make their foundation in Québec, and permitted Père Antoine to accompany them as chaplain. And it was those five nuns who would see to it that Franciscans, not black gowns, brought the Holy Gospel to the Ohio Country. Who better than the simple sons of Blessed Francis to speak to the primitive hearts and souls of the Indians?
    The priest looked once more at the hovel that had become the Monastery of the Poor Clares of Québec. Much of the mortar in the stone foundation had rotted and fallen out. The bell tower, hastily erected just before the nuns came, was crooked, and barely large enough to contain a single bell. When the nuns saw it they were delighted. Just like San Damiano, they said, the ruin where Francis put Clare when she became the first nun of the Seraphic Order.
    Those five women assailing heaven on behalf of the Order of Friars Minor would prevail. Nothing was more certain. They were not the first consecrated women in Québec. There were the Ursulines, who schooled girls of the best families in their large and beautiful convent on the Rue des Jardins, and the Augustines Hospitalières caring for the sick poor in the Hôtel-Dieu, as well as a breakaway group of the same congregation who had built another, grander hospital, the Hôpital Général, in the Upper Town. But women whose vows bound them to give their lives to constant prayer, fasting, and penance … in all the vastness of New France there was nothing to compare to his five Poor Clares. Soon to be six. Just yesterday Mère Marie Rose had said that sometime in the near future she expected a postulant to join the order. The first since they’d arrived in Canada the previous spring.
    A new postulant was an omen, a sign from God that the prayers and penances of the Franciscans in Québec were accepted. Père Antoine was so sure of this he had already sent word to a house of the order two thousand miles south in Havana. They were to prepare to send him friars to be missionaries—God willing, perhaps martyrs—among the heathens in the Ohio Country.
    Above his head the bells of the cathedral tolled the midnight hour. Père Antoine looked toward the hovel-turned-monastery and, as he expected, saw the tiny lights of five candles flicker past the window. The Poor Clares had interrupted the six hours of sleep they were permitted out of each twenty-four. They were on their way to chant Matins, the first prayer of the new day. After an hour they would return to their straw pallets on wooden planks and rest until four, when they would rise to chant Lauds and begin another day of fasting and prayer and labor.
    Thanks be to God, the seeds were planted. They would be watered with martyrs’ blood.

    “
Ici—
over here.”
    Stewart turned toward the voice. “Glad to see you, laddie. Crossed my mind you might o’ gone.”
    “And why would I do that, Hamish Stewart? Did I not tell you I would wait?”
    “Aye, you told me.” Stewart squinted at the line looped around the bollard at the edge of the stone dock, holding the wee boat—a dory they called ‘em in these parts—close in and steady so as he could jump aboard. Looked secure enough, though he could never get over his suspicion o’ these Canadians. Or the feeling that in this place, wherever he went at whatever hour, he was always being watched.
    Stewart put a booted foot on the dory’s gunnel. The Frenchman, Dandon, watched the maneuver with a smile bordering on a smirk. A wave lapped the little boat and she drifted a bit seaward. Dandon slackened his grip on the line. The gap between Stewart’s legs widened. The Frenchman chuckled. “You must make up your mind,
mon ami,
the sea or the shore.” Stewart struggled to maintain his balance, and finally, at the last second, threw his weight forward and lurched rather than jumped into the dory. Dandon laughed again. “Not so bad, eh? Once you