Excerpt One
Prologue
Thursday, September 4
1806
Thursday, September 4
1806
Janie Benjamin strolled happily along King Street, Niagara Town. In years past, her father drove the wagon home from the schoolmaster’s door, but now at seventeen she thought it more grown-up to walk. Besides, dark-haired Alexander Lockwood was escorting her. That wasn’t how Alexander would describe what he did; no, he’d just say it was more convenient to stable his horse at the Benjamin’s, and then walk to school and back with Janie. Alexander carried their books as the sun slanted down toward five o’clock.
The plank sidewalk along King ended at Gage, but there were still three more blocks to the John Street corner. The last finger on Janie’s left hand held the smallest finger on Alexander’s right as they stepped down onto the narrow, grass-lined path. Neighbours might sniff disapprovingly at public displays of affection, but only the most sharp-eyed villager would notice that the black school girl and her white companion were holding hands. As they came to a puddle, Alexander and Janie each stepped wide but held on, one to the other: their hands linked over the water. Alexander smiled as they nudged closer.
“You’ll come out early, then, on Sunday?” he asked.
“About ten, but you mustn’t plague me when I get there. Your mother and Miriam and I will have lots to do.”
“Maybe I can plague you after dinner,” Alexander whispered.
“Really! What a pestiferous nuisance you are, Alexander Lockwood.”
The lot at Centre Street was double length, two acres of soaring oaks and maples where children imagined themselves deep in Indian country. A black squirrel scolded from high above.
“We could cut through here,” Alexander suggested. He bumped gently against Janie’s hip to guide her onto the woodlot path.
“Not today, Alex,” she decided quickly.
“But it’s such a beautiful woods,” he teased.
When Alexander said that something was beautiful, Janie heard a special message. She remembered the spring when they were both thirteen, on a bright morning, sitting in this very wood among white and red trilliums, reading from a history of British monarchs. As they sat face to face, their knees almost touching, she would read a paragraph aloud and then pass the book to Alexander to scan the next. After reading one passage, Janie looked up to find him staring at her budding breasts. Through the winter, woollen sweaters and jackets had concealed what Alexander now found so fascinating.
“You’re worse than Jeremy Roberts,” Janie had scolded. She crossed her arms to conceal the objects of his attention.
“You’ll be such a beautiful woman, just like your mother,” Alexander declared.
Janie brought up her arm for a roundhouse punch, aiming to bloody the miscreant’s nose for the third or fourth time in their young lives. But instead of leaning back to dodge, Alexander rocked in closer. His lips brushed her cheek as her arm swung behind his head. For half an instant Janie considered what he’d said, and then she turned to kiss him. Alexander had leaned to her lips, even as her long, slim black fingers settled upon his shoulder.
After a time, Alexander stood. Then he reached down with both hands to lift her up.
Janie remembered how at thirteen she had loomed over him; now Alexander could kiss her brow, and often did, without tilting his head.
“Afternoon, children.”
Janie’s father lounged on the front porch swing reading the Upper Canada Gazette.
“Father!”
“All right then, how about...Hello, Mr. Lockwood? Hello, Miss Benjamin.”
“Oh, Papa!” Janie groaned as she stomped inside.
Alexander called out, but when she didn’t return he balanced her schoolbooks on the porch rail and sat on the swing beside Mr. Benjamin.
“Dad asks you all to come to Sunday dinner. Ruth’s bringing her new baby.”
“And what does your Mother say?” Mr. Benjamin asked with a laugh.
“Mom hopes Janie will come by early to help cook.”
“Tell your folks we’ll be there about noon. Did you ask Janie?”
“Yes. She’ll come.”
“That’s fine then, Alex.”
The Benjamin and Lockwood families had been fast friends since fleeing the American Revolution, a quarter century ago.
Alexander leaned forward to peer past Mr. Benjamin, hoping Janie might stop pouting long enough to say goodbye. Then he sighed and slumped back against the swing.
“Alex, your horse is in the barn.”
“Yes, I know, Mr. Benjamin.”
“I mean, it’s time to go home now.”
“Oh. Yes, Sir.”
Alexander stood just as Mrs. Benjamin emerged in a long, flour-dusted apron.
“We’ll see you Sunday, Alex,” Sarah Benjamin said. Then she reached out to pat his shoulder as he said goodbye.
*****
On Sunday morning, Alexander watched for Janie from his front porch. Across the lane, just beyond the milking barn, was the apple orchard where he and his father had spent the last three days propping up fruit-heavy branches. The pear and peach harvest were long finished, but the apples still had a few weeks to run. Alexander’s older sister, Ruth, carrying her week-old daughter, sat on the porch lounge and draped a shawl over her bosom.
“What do you think of your niece?” Captain William Mayne asked Alexander.
“Hard to believe she’ll be like those two someday,” Alexander said nodding toward his two young nephews romping in the barnyard.
Uncle Will agreed. “She’s sweet, but awfully small. I have to tickle her to keep her awake.”
“Will,” Ruth said, as she opened her dress beneath the shawl. “Duty calls.”
Alexander watched as Uncle Will rubbed the sole of one tiny foot.
*****
Eight years earlier, in the fall of 1794, Ruth had decided she must take pity upon the utterly smitten Captain William Mayne. She was a farm girl with straw-blonde hair, who danced like an angel at Niagara’s subscription balls. In her mother’s opinion, Ruth did not possess a serious mind. But the death of the family’s older son changed the Lockwoods in many ways. He had died fighting, with the Indian Nations, against a Yankee army at Fallen Timbers. The parents, Lois and Asa, were devastated, and younger sister Miriam fell into a year-long depression. Ruth herself realised the obvious truth; she loved a soldier, and it was cruel to deny him any longer. Shortly after the terrible news, she announced they would marry as soon as possible – that she’d not chance losing Captain Mayne without first giving him a son. Lois was amazed at how quickly her daughter had matured, and overrode any qualms her husband Asa harboured about the marriage.
In their grief the family tended to overlook its youngest, Alexander, but Captain Mayne saw that Alexander was forlorn. It was Mayne who filled the sudden gap in the boy’s life. Together, they tramped the ramparts of Fort George. It was Mayne who
brought home a regimental drum on which Alexander practised all through one winter, and a bugle the following spring. Asa found the well-remembered drumming barely tolerable, but he could not abide the strangled bugling. Asa banished his son and the bugle to the attic, then quickly to the barn, where the livestock were panic-stricken, and then finally to the root-cellar beneath the summer kitchen, with the heavy plank door shut tight.
Mayne, now Uncle Will, insisted that education was the stuff from which military officers were made. For indeed, at an early point, Alexander decided he would be a soldier – like his father, like Uncle Will, like his vanished big brother.
“But your brother wasn’t a soldier,” Janie said gently one day when they were small. “My daddy says he was a fur trader, and that he lived with the Nations.”
Janie was right, he realised. The lives of Uncle Will and Alexander’s deceased brother had mixed together in his mind. But as a child he had told Janie indignantly, “Momma says he fought to protect his friends. That’s what a soldier does! That’s what I’m going to do!”
*****
That Sunday afternoon, Ruth and Captain Mayne seemed to have forgotten that seventeen-year-old Alexander stood beside the open farmhouse door.
"That’s all she’ll take,” Ruth said as she rearranged her dress and patted her infant daughter on the back. “How in the world can we tell Mother we’ll be leaving soon?”
“I have to go home, Ruth,” Mayne said. “Napoleon will surely invade England in the spring.”
“This is home, William. And the fleet will never let him across the Channel.”
“You and the children could stay...”
“No!”
Mayne leaned closer to brush a finger across his daughter’s cheek. The tiny creature blew milky bubbles, and then relaxed into sleep on Ruth’s shoulder.
“You’re right, darling,” Mayne said. “How could I ever leave you here?”
“Indeed. So we’ll all stay.”
Her husband shook his head sadly. “Ruth, you agreed when I asked for the transfer. I can’t hide in this Upper Canada backwater any longer.”
Ruth stood, only to see Alexander standing open-mouthed at the door. Fixing her younger brother with a steadfast gaze, Ruth approached him to balance her sleeping daughter along Alexander’s arm. Nestling the little one’s feet in his left hand, she drew his right hand securely onto the baby’s chest. “A useful skill even for a soldier,” she declared, “but I’ll be the one to tell Mother about leaving, when the time comes.”
A few minutes later, Janie drove a gig up the farm lane. She wore a full-length apron over a fine, cream-coloured, linen dress that she and Miriam had sewn, and as she stepped down she untied her white bonnet. Her black, tightly woven hair glistened in the morning sunshine. With a glowing smile, she embraced Mrs. Lockwood who came from the summer kitchen.
“My folks won’t be along for a while, Mrs. Lockwood. Matthew’s still asleep.”
“Let your brother sleep,” she laughed. “Miriam’s only just got the roast in the oven. You and I still have to bake a couple of pies, pick the beans and clean the sweet corn.”
Janie darted over to kiss the baby in Alexander’s arms. With a bright smile and a meaningful glance, she then pecked Alexander’s cheek before rushing after Mrs. Lockwood.
“And don’t you take that as encouragement, young man,” Mrs. Lockwood admonished her son. “We’ve all got too much to do this morning for any foolishness.”
As Alexander guided Janie’s horse to the barn, the lowing of impatient milk-cows reminded him that his mother was right.
The Departure
Monday, October 27, 1806
“We’ll leave in a fortnight. It’s the last ship before winter,” Captain Mayne said as he finished his announcement to the Lockwood family in the front parlour.
In tears, Miriam retreated to the second floor sewing room. Asa gathered his grandsons for a walk along the river, while Ruth and her mother wept in each other’s arms in the winter kitchen. Mayne and Alexander sat abandoned by the hearth.
"That went down well,” Mayne said as he filled his pipe.
“About as expected,” Alexander allowed.
“Before we leave, Alex, I’d do something for you – if you wish it.”
Alexander leaned forward in the armchair at Uncle Will’s words.
“You remember I mentioned the Canadian Fencibles? Well...they’re recruiting.”
“That’s the British regiment for service in the Canadas?” Alexander asked.
“That’s it. The muster is in Trois Rivieres. Ruth and I will be passing through on our way to Quebec City.”
“Please take me, Uncle Will. You taught me the drills and all the signals. I’ve always wanted to be a soldier.”
“A soldier, yes – but I was thinking you might purchase an ensign’s commission.”
“How much would that cost?”
“Four hundred pounds.”
“Uncle Will! I don’t have it. I don’t have four pounds. Even if Father sold the farm...but where would they live if he did that? I’ll join as a private.”
“You have a reasonable education, Alex. You’d be wasted in the ranks.”
“But then...how?”
“Ruth and I will be selling our property here in Niagara. There will be enough and a little more.”
Alexander grasped Uncle Will’s hand in gratitude.
“But maybe we should wait until tomorrow to break this news to your parents.”
*****
Janie and Alexander sat on the dusty sleigh bench in the Benjamin stable.
“You’re leaving in three days?” Janie was furious, wounded.
“Uncle Will wouldn’t take me to Trois Rivieres without Father’s permission. I’ve only just talked him round.”
“And me! Why tell me so late?” Tears streamed down her face.
“I’ve come to ask you to wait.”
“Wait? My God, Alex, there’s no need to wait! We love each other. All you have to do is ask Papa.”
“Janie, we can’t marry right now; an ensign can’t support a wife. But in a year or two...”
“Alex, look at me!” Janie shouted. “Think of what you’re saying! A black woman can’t be an officer’s wife.”
On Monday, November 10, HMS Toronto set sail from Niagara Town with Alexander Lockwood aboard.
The plank sidewalk along King ended at Gage, but there were still three more blocks to the John Street corner. The last finger on Janie’s left hand held the smallest finger on Alexander’s right as they stepped down onto the narrow, grass-lined path. Neighbours might sniff disapprovingly at public displays of affection, but only the most sharp-eyed villager would notice that the black school girl and her white companion were holding hands. As they came to a puddle, Alexander and Janie each stepped wide but held on, one to the other: their hands linked over the water. Alexander smiled as they nudged closer.
“You’ll come out early, then, on Sunday?” he asked.
“About ten, but you mustn’t plague me when I get there. Your mother and Miriam and I will have lots to do.”
“Maybe I can plague you after dinner,” Alexander whispered.
“Really! What a pestiferous nuisance you are, Alexander Lockwood.”
The lot at Centre Street was double length, two acres of soaring oaks and maples where children imagined themselves deep in Indian country. A black squirrel scolded from high above.
“We could cut through here,” Alexander suggested. He bumped gently against Janie’s hip to guide her onto the woodlot path.
“Not today, Alex,” she decided quickly.
“But it’s such a beautiful woods,” he teased.
When Alexander said that something was beautiful, Janie heard a special message. She remembered the spring when they were both thirteen, on a bright morning, sitting in this very wood among white and red trilliums, reading from a history of British monarchs. As they sat face to face, their knees almost touching, she would read a paragraph aloud and then pass the book to Alexander to scan the next. After reading one passage, Janie looked up to find him staring at her budding breasts. Through the winter, woollen sweaters and jackets had concealed what Alexander now found so fascinating.
“You’re worse than Jeremy Roberts,” Janie had scolded. She crossed her arms to conceal the objects of his attention.
“You’ll be such a beautiful woman, just like your mother,” Alexander declared.
Janie brought up her arm for a roundhouse punch, aiming to bloody the miscreant’s nose for the third or fourth time in their young lives. But instead of leaning back to dodge, Alexander rocked in closer. His lips brushed her cheek as her arm swung behind his head. For half an instant Janie considered what he’d said, and then she turned to kiss him. Alexander had leaned to her lips, even as her long, slim black fingers settled upon his shoulder.
After a time, Alexander stood. Then he reached down with both hands to lift her up.
Janie remembered how at thirteen she had loomed over him; now Alexander could kiss her brow, and often did, without tilting his head.
“Afternoon, children.”
Janie’s father lounged on the front porch swing reading the Upper Canada Gazette.
“Father!”
“All right then, how about...Hello, Mr. Lockwood? Hello, Miss Benjamin.”
“Oh, Papa!” Janie groaned as she stomped inside.
Alexander called out, but when she didn’t return he balanced her schoolbooks on the porch rail and sat on the swing beside Mr. Benjamin.
“Dad asks you all to come to Sunday dinner. Ruth’s bringing her new baby.”
“And what does your Mother say?” Mr. Benjamin asked with a laugh.
“Mom hopes Janie will come by early to help cook.”
“Tell your folks we’ll be there about noon. Did you ask Janie?”
“Yes. She’ll come.”
“That’s fine then, Alex.”
The Benjamin and Lockwood families had been fast friends since fleeing the American Revolution, a quarter century ago.
Alexander leaned forward to peer past Mr. Benjamin, hoping Janie might stop pouting long enough to say goodbye. Then he sighed and slumped back against the swing.
“Alex, your horse is in the barn.”
“Yes, I know, Mr. Benjamin.”
“I mean, it’s time to go home now.”
“Oh. Yes, Sir.”
Alexander stood just as Mrs. Benjamin emerged in a long, flour-dusted apron.
“We’ll see you Sunday, Alex,” Sarah Benjamin said. Then she reached out to pat his shoulder as he said goodbye.
*****
On Sunday morning, Alexander watched for Janie from his front porch. Across the lane, just beyond the milking barn, was the apple orchard where he and his father had spent the last three days propping up fruit-heavy branches. The pear and peach harvest were long finished, but the apples still had a few weeks to run. Alexander’s older sister, Ruth, carrying her week-old daughter, sat on the porch lounge and draped a shawl over her bosom.
“What do you think of your niece?” Captain William Mayne asked Alexander.
“Hard to believe she’ll be like those two someday,” Alexander said nodding toward his two young nephews romping in the barnyard.
Uncle Will agreed. “She’s sweet, but awfully small. I have to tickle her to keep her awake.”
“Will,” Ruth said, as she opened her dress beneath the shawl. “Duty calls.”
Alexander watched as Uncle Will rubbed the sole of one tiny foot.
*****
Eight years earlier, in the fall of 1794, Ruth had decided she must take pity upon the utterly smitten Captain William Mayne. She was a farm girl with straw-blonde hair, who danced like an angel at Niagara’s subscription balls. In her mother’s opinion, Ruth did not possess a serious mind. But the death of the family’s older son changed the Lockwoods in many ways. He had died fighting, with the Indian Nations, against a Yankee army at Fallen Timbers. The parents, Lois and Asa, were devastated, and younger sister Miriam fell into a year-long depression. Ruth herself realised the obvious truth; she loved a soldier, and it was cruel to deny him any longer. Shortly after the terrible news, she announced they would marry as soon as possible – that she’d not chance losing Captain Mayne without first giving him a son. Lois was amazed at how quickly her daughter had matured, and overrode any qualms her husband Asa harboured about the marriage.
In their grief the family tended to overlook its youngest, Alexander, but Captain Mayne saw that Alexander was forlorn. It was Mayne who filled the sudden gap in the boy’s life. Together, they tramped the ramparts of Fort George. It was Mayne who
brought home a regimental drum on which Alexander practised all through one winter, and a bugle the following spring. Asa found the well-remembered drumming barely tolerable, but he could not abide the strangled bugling. Asa banished his son and the bugle to the attic, then quickly to the barn, where the livestock were panic-stricken, and then finally to the root-cellar beneath the summer kitchen, with the heavy plank door shut tight.
Mayne, now Uncle Will, insisted that education was the stuff from which military officers were made. For indeed, at an early point, Alexander decided he would be a soldier – like his father, like Uncle Will, like his vanished big brother.
“But your brother wasn’t a soldier,” Janie said gently one day when they were small. “My daddy says he was a fur trader, and that he lived with the Nations.”
Janie was right, he realised. The lives of Uncle Will and Alexander’s deceased brother had mixed together in his mind. But as a child he had told Janie indignantly, “Momma says he fought to protect his friends. That’s what a soldier does! That’s what I’m going to do!”
*****
That Sunday afternoon, Ruth and Captain Mayne seemed to have forgotten that seventeen-year-old Alexander stood beside the open farmhouse door.
"That’s all she’ll take,” Ruth said as she rearranged her dress and patted her infant daughter on the back. “How in the world can we tell Mother we’ll be leaving soon?”
“I have to go home, Ruth,” Mayne said. “Napoleon will surely invade England in the spring.”
“This is home, William. And the fleet will never let him across the Channel.”
“You and the children could stay...”
“No!”
Mayne leaned closer to brush a finger across his daughter’s cheek. The tiny creature blew milky bubbles, and then relaxed into sleep on Ruth’s shoulder.
“You’re right, darling,” Mayne said. “How could I ever leave you here?”
“Indeed. So we’ll all stay.”
Her husband shook his head sadly. “Ruth, you agreed when I asked for the transfer. I can’t hide in this Upper Canada backwater any longer.”
Ruth stood, only to see Alexander standing open-mouthed at the door. Fixing her younger brother with a steadfast gaze, Ruth approached him to balance her sleeping daughter along Alexander’s arm. Nestling the little one’s feet in his left hand, she drew his right hand securely onto the baby’s chest. “A useful skill even for a soldier,” she declared, “but I’ll be the one to tell Mother about leaving, when the time comes.”
A few minutes later, Janie drove a gig up the farm lane. She wore a full-length apron over a fine, cream-coloured, linen dress that she and Miriam had sewn, and as she stepped down she untied her white bonnet. Her black, tightly woven hair glistened in the morning sunshine. With a glowing smile, she embraced Mrs. Lockwood who came from the summer kitchen.
“My folks won’t be along for a while, Mrs. Lockwood. Matthew’s still asleep.”
“Let your brother sleep,” she laughed. “Miriam’s only just got the roast in the oven. You and I still have to bake a couple of pies, pick the beans and clean the sweet corn.”
Janie darted over to kiss the baby in Alexander’s arms. With a bright smile and a meaningful glance, she then pecked Alexander’s cheek before rushing after Mrs. Lockwood.
“And don’t you take that as encouragement, young man,” Mrs. Lockwood admonished her son. “We’ve all got too much to do this morning for any foolishness.”
As Alexander guided Janie’s horse to the barn, the lowing of impatient milk-cows reminded him that his mother was right.
The Departure
Monday, October 27, 1806
“We’ll leave in a fortnight. It’s the last ship before winter,” Captain Mayne said as he finished his announcement to the Lockwood family in the front parlour.
In tears, Miriam retreated to the second floor sewing room. Asa gathered his grandsons for a walk along the river, while Ruth and her mother wept in each other’s arms in the winter kitchen. Mayne and Alexander sat abandoned by the hearth.
"That went down well,” Mayne said as he filled his pipe.
“About as expected,” Alexander allowed.
“Before we leave, Alex, I’d do something for you – if you wish it.”
Alexander leaned forward in the armchair at Uncle Will’s words.
“You remember I mentioned the Canadian Fencibles? Well...they’re recruiting.”
“That’s the British regiment for service in the Canadas?” Alexander asked.
“That’s it. The muster is in Trois Rivieres. Ruth and I will be passing through on our way to Quebec City.”
“Please take me, Uncle Will. You taught me the drills and all the signals. I’ve always wanted to be a soldier.”
“A soldier, yes – but I was thinking you might purchase an ensign’s commission.”
“How much would that cost?”
“Four hundred pounds.”
“Uncle Will! I don’t have it. I don’t have four pounds. Even if Father sold the farm...but where would they live if he did that? I’ll join as a private.”
“You have a reasonable education, Alex. You’d be wasted in the ranks.”
“But then...how?”
“Ruth and I will be selling our property here in Niagara. There will be enough and a little more.”
Alexander grasped Uncle Will’s hand in gratitude.
“But maybe we should wait until tomorrow to break this news to your parents.”
*****
Janie and Alexander sat on the dusty sleigh bench in the Benjamin stable.
“You’re leaving in three days?” Janie was furious, wounded.
“Uncle Will wouldn’t take me to Trois Rivieres without Father’s permission. I’ve only just talked him round.”
“And me! Why tell me so late?” Tears streamed down her face.
“I’ve come to ask you to wait.”
“Wait? My God, Alex, there’s no need to wait! We love each other. All you have to do is ask Papa.”
“Janie, we can’t marry right now; an ensign can’t support a wife. But in a year or two...”
“Alex, look at me!” Janie shouted. “Think of what you’re saying! A black woman can’t be an officer’s wife.”
On Monday, November 10, HMS Toronto set sail from Niagara Town with Alexander Lockwood aboard.
