‘I prefer affection to fighting.’
‘Someday, England and America will be reconciled.’
‘Reunion can start with us!’
Aurora and I had both met Nelson, I on a warship and she in London, and the lady was brimming with gossip about his rumoured infatuation with Emma Hamilton, a one-time adventuress who had married well and was sleeping her way even higher. ‘She’s a beauty with her portraits all over London, and he’s the greatest hero of the age,’ Aurora sighed. ‘It’s magnificent scandal!’ There was envy in her voice.
‘You’ll eclipse her, I’m sure.’
Cecil educated us on fur politics in Canada. The Hudson’s Bay Company operated from its huge namesake in the north and had the advantage of being able to transport its trade goods to the shore of the bay in cargo ships, meaning shorter river distances to trading posts in the Canadian interior. Magnus nodded at this, since his theory was that his Norsemen had used the same route. The Bay Company’s disadvantage was short summers and long winters. The rival North West Company, dominated by Scots who employed French voyageurs in long-distance canoes, operated out of Montreal on an epic, five-thousand-mile water route across the Great Lakes and connecting rivers. Their season was longer, but they were limited to canoes, requiring an immense workforce of two thousand men. And then there was Astor, who had organised trappers on the American side of the border and monopolised the fur trade going to New York via the Mohawk and Hudson rivers.
‘Each route has its advantages and problems, and the sensible thing would be to form an alliance,’ Somerset said. ‘Cooperation always achieves more than competition, don’t you think?’
‘Like us on this boat. You sail me to Mackinac, and I’ll use my letter of introduction from Jefferson to smooth the way with the American garrison. We have a little league of nations here, with you representing England, Magnus Norway, and me America with ties to France.’ I looked at Aurora. ‘Partnership has its pleasures.’
I wished the boat had been bigger so the girl and I could get off by ourselves, but each night she commandeered the captain’s private cabin like a pampered princess while we dozen men slept on deck between the trunks, bags, satchels, and shipments that made up the Somerset luggage. There were Fitch, a cook, a butler, a French Canadian maid who slept in Aurora’s cabin, and a master-of-arms who looked after the assortment of sporting weaponry and swords that Cecil had brought with him. The English lord greeted each dawn with fencing exercises at which he thrust and slashed while balanced on the bowsprit, the captain keeping a wary eye lest the nobleman cut an important line.
Meanwhile, civilisation slipped steadily away.
As we sailed north on the vast freshwater sea that is Lake Huron, the sky seemed to inflate, stretching to ever-emptier horizons. The shoreline, when we could see it, was a flat, unbroken expanse of forest. Not a white village, nor a farm, nor even a lonely cabin broke its endless green face. We once passed an Indian encampment, bark wigwams set on a sandy shore, but spotted only a couple of figures, a wisp of smoke, and a single beached canoe. Another time I saw wolves loping on a sand beach and my throat caught at their easy wildness. Eagles soared overhead, otters splashed in the shallows, but the world seemed emptied of people. The planet had turned back to something infinite, pristine, and yet oddly intimidating. Here, Earth didn’t care. The custodial God of Europe had been displaced by the lonely wind and the spirits of the Indians. So much space, such yawning possibility, everything unrealised! Even in bright sunlight, the great northern forest seemed cold as the stars. Nothing and no one out here had ever heard of the famed Ethan Gage, hero of the pyramids and Acre. I had shrunk to insignificance.
While the crew of the ship regarded this unbroken forest as so expected and monotonous to be beyond comment, Magnus was transfixed by the ceaseless rank of trees. ‘This was the world of the gods who were the first men,’ he said to me as we cruised. ‘This is what it all was once like, Ethan. Great heroes wandered without leaving a mark.’
‘It’s the world of the Potawatomi and the Ottawa,’ I replied. ‘And whatever they are, it’s not gods. You’ve seen a few: poor, diseased, and drunk.’
‘But they remember more than we do,’ he insisted. ‘They’re closer to the source. And we’ve just seen the ones corrupted by our world. Wait until we get to theirs.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Mackinac Island was a green knob between the reflecting blue platters of lake and sky, its American garrison of ninety men guarding the straits that led to Lake Michigan. It represented the edge of the United States. Beyond were only British posts, trappers, and tribes. Our little cutter banged a one-gun salute as we coasted into the island pier, and the fort replied in turn, the bark of its guns flushing great clouds of birds from the forest and then echoing away into emptiness.
The fort was in the shape of a triangle, with three blockhouses and two ramparts for cannon, earth and stone on the water side, and a log stockade facing the land. The high white officers’ quarters, with hipped roof and twin chimneys, was the dominant building. Other cabins and sheds marked out a parade ground. The forest was cut back around the fort to make pasture and cropland, giving the outpost light to breathe.
‘We British moved the post here after Pontiac’s Indians overcame the old French fort of Michilimackinac on the mainland shore,’ said Lord Somerset, pointing. ‘It was a masterful attack, the braves pretending at lacrosse, following the ball through the fort gate and then seizing weapons from their waiting women who had hidden them under their trade blankets. The fort fell in minutes. The new post doesn’t let the Indians land, though in winter you can walk to Mackinac across the ice. With the boundary settled we’ve passed this fort to you Americans, while we build a new one on the Saint Mary’s River, near the rapids that lead to Lake Superior.’
‘Ninety Americans to guard all the Northwest Territory?’
‘In North America, empire hangs by a thread. That’s why our alliance is so valuable, Ethan. We can prevent misunderstandings.’
Here the commandant was a mere lieutenant named Henry Porter, who met us on the dock to escort us up the dirt causeway to the fort gate. He was impressed by my letter from Jefferson – ‘I’d heard there’s a new president, and here he is,’ he marvelled, looking at the signature as if written in the statesman’s blood – and he positively gaped at Aurora in a moony way I found annoying. The lieutenant seemed less plagued than Colonel Stone with duelling and bowling, and in fact his fort felt empty. ‘Half the garrison is off-post at any one time fishing, hunting, cutting wood, or trading with the Indians,’ he said. ‘We’ve room aplenty in the officer’s quarters while you wait for your freight canoes.’
There might be room aplenty, but not enough for Lady Aurora Somerset. She took one look at the spare military cubicles and announced that while her trunks might fit in a closet, she certainly could not. After brisk inspection of every possibility she declared that the top floor of the eastern blockhouse would just barely serve for her privacy and comfort. With inherited authority, she ordered Porter to shove its two six-pounders out of the way, asked for a squad of American infantry to carry in a cornhusk bed with down comforter, declared the ground floor sufficient for her maid, and said she would require a certain number of furs to carpet the rough planking of her new abode to make it habitable.
‘But what if we come under attack?’ the young lieutenant asked, clearly overawed by the imperiousness of the English nobility.