Then I was rolling from her furious push, landing with a thump on a wolverine pelt on the floor.
‘Every bedmate!’
I peeked above the mattress. ‘That’s not what I meant. We just don’t know each other well yet.’
So she attacked me with a pillow, breasts heaving, and it was such a wondrous sight that if she’d smothered me then and there, I would have died happy. Blazes!
But at length she was spent, flopping on the bed, her rump graceful as a snow drift, her lips ripe and pouted. ‘I thought you loved me and would share everything.’
‘I have shared all I am capable of this evening, believe me.’
‘Pah.’
‘I am entirely boring, I know. I go where greater men direct me, a simple savant with some slight knowledge of electricity. To find Venus on the edge of the wilderness is a greater discovery than any elephant.’
She rolled onto her back, her gaze lazy, and blessed my compliment with a slight smile. ‘So you think I’m pretty?’
‘I think if you were painted, it would set off such frenzy that there would be a riot. If you were sculpted, it would cause a new religion. I think you are manufactured of moonbeam, and fired by the sun.’
‘Fancy words, Yankee Doodle.’
‘But so true they should be chiselled into the stone of Westminster.’
She laughed. ‘What a flatterer you are! But you are a scamp not to trust me. I don’t think you can go in my cousin’s canoes after all.’
This was worrisome, since our only transportation off this island was with the British. ‘But we will be useful!’
‘How?’
I looked at my longrifle, which had found itself onto the plank floor in all our manoeuvring. ‘I can shoot that, too.’ I gave my most fetching smile. ‘We’ll practise together.’
She shook her head. ‘What an ungrateful rascal you are.’
‘Not ungrateful, believe me.’
Now the look was hard. ‘All right then, you and your hairy Norwegian can come with us to Grand Portage, but in a separate canoe, and when you look at me across the water, when I’m beneath my parasol, I will not deign to return your glance because I am a great lady of England and you are a directionless adventurer who will not share any confidences.’
‘I am a victim of your beauty.’
She wriggled back to rest herself more upright against the pillows. ‘You will be punished for your secrecy, at camp, by my indifference. You must attend to me or I will persuade Cecil to leave you behind for the Indians. They eat their enemies, I’ve heard. But we will have no more intimacy there until you demonstrate your trust by confiding in me. Until you reform, this is the last time you can gaze upon my body.’
‘Aurora, I believe we are already the deepest of friends.’
‘So prove it. Again.’ She parted her thighs. ‘And again. And then maybe someday I will take pity on you – if it suits me, and if you have earned it.’
I gulped and nodded, summoning new enthusiasm.
It’s a challenge being a diplomat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A North West Company freight brigade of six canoes fetched us from Mackinac Island on its way to Lake Superior. Each vessel, improbably made of nothing but birch bark, wood strips, and roots used for twine, was thirty-five feet long, carried sixty 90-pound packs of trade goods, and had a guide at the bow, a steersman at the stern, and eight paddlers as driven as galley slaves. In the segregation of labour that had followed the British conquest of Canada, all the labourers were French Canadian, while four of the canoes each carried either a Scot, an Englishman, or a German Jew as bourgeois, or gentleman fur partner or clerk, who rode amidships like a little sultan. The other two would carry the Somersets, Magnus, and me. We could hear the paddlers’ song in French as the flotilla neared the island, the lilting melody floating over the blue water in time to the dip of the paddles:
C’est l’aviron qui nous mène
M’en revenant de la jolie Rochelle
J’ai rencontré trois jolies demoiselles.
C’est l’aviron qui nous mène, qui nous mène,
C’est l’aviron qui nous mène en haut.
It is the paddle that brings us
Riding along the road from Rochelle city
I met three girls and all of them were pretty.
It is the paddle that brings us, that brings us,
It is the paddle that brings us up there.
The verses set the time for the stroke. We would journey on a tide of French folk song.
Our course would first pass the new British post of Fort Saint Joseph being constructed at the north end of Lake Huron, and then through the thirty-mile-long Sault Ste Marie, or the ‘Saint Mary Jump’ of rapids that led to Lake Superior. Then we would hug the northern shore of that inland sea until we reached Grand Portage at its western end.
As promised, Aurora and her cousin took a canoe different from that of Magnus and me, the woman seating herself primly on one of her trunks and holding a parasol as shade. The year had warmed now and the forests had erupted in full leaf and flower, but no public warmth emanated from Aurora, who looked steadfastly away. I tolerated this coolness because the inevitable end would be so sweet, and because it saved me from having to pay court to her whims or explain our tryst to others. I could pretend nothing had happened! I knew she’d reheat quickly enough once she missed my prowess.
Like most men, I have an optimistic appraisal of my own charm.
Cecil, after greeting the other bourgeois, took up position in a second canoe, natty as ever in fawn-coloured coat, high marching boots, and beaver-skin top hat. He carried a fowling piece on his lap to plunk at birds, and a popular novel in his pocket to pass the time. He seemed so at home in this wild country that I suspected his fine manners coated a core of experienced steel.
The voyageurs wore buckskin leggings, loose white shirts, bright caps, and, if needed, blanket coats called capots. Physically they tended to be short-legged and broad-shouldered, almost like muscular dwarves bred to the canoe. Here was our transport west! The canoe we would ride glided in and the bowman who commanded – wiry, tanned, with impish dark eyes and a jaunty red cap – bounded onto the island’s dock to block us before we could board. While the Somersets had been catered to, this captain put hands to his hips and dubiously eyed us like specimens of flotsam.
‘Mon dieu, an ox and a donkey! And I am supposed to paddle your weight to Grand Portage, I suppose?’
Magnus squinted. ‘No little man needs to paddle me.’
‘Little man?’ He stood up on his toes, thrusting his nose in my companion’s face. ‘Little man? I am Pierre Radisson, a North Man with three winters at the posts and the guide of this master canoe! The Scots pay me a full nineteen English pounds a year! I can stroke twenty hours in a single day without complaining and travel a hundred miles before sleeping! Little man? None know the rapids like the great Pierre! None can portage faster than I, or drink more, or dance more splendidly, or jump higher, or run faster, or more quickly win an Indian bride! Little man?’ He crowded into Magnus, the crown of his head at the Norwegian’s collarbone. ‘I can swim, shoot, trap, chop, and fuck better than the likes of a clumsy oaf like you, eat my own weight, and find my way from Montreal to Athabasca with my eyes closed, cyclops giant!’
Bloodhammer was finally forced to take a step back. ‘I just meant a Norwegian pulls his own oar.’