So she understood Cull and sensed that she knew Marano’s soul at least, but who was Marté?
She had watched him brazenly even, after her mother had turned away in disgust during their previous encounters with him. She sensed that he delighted in that reaction, the way many men and some women watched for a subtle sign of fear or respect or surprise when they exposed their tattoos or when the soldiers wore their medals or when some of the hired hands who came to the farm showed her notches on their belts.
It meant something to many people to be distinguishable, she had concluded. She understood that. The one time she had experimented with makeup, it had given her a sudden hope that she might be pretty after all.
Her mother had cautioned her about that conceit. Emmy never wore makeup and told Sarah that she likely never would have to do so either to be a comely woman, especially here in the Northwest where there were few females, pretty or plain.
“The power to manage one’s relationships resides inside, not outside,” Emmy had told her, and if a person worked on that, practiced finding an unflappable balance while keeping one’s senses alert, nothing could ever take that away. Certainly no man, no woman, and not the passing of time or inevitability of infirmity.
But Marté was too obvious, Sarah thought.
He was so pathetically transparent in his greed that it would seem almost comical to her, if he were not such a very desperate man. She didn’t understand him.
How did he get the way he was? Somewhere, sometime in his life, probably early on, something horrible must have happened to him, she decided.
Instead of scars like the ones Cull had on his back, perhaps they were the ones that grow deep in a person’s belly. Marté likely had been defined by the fearful memories of whatever that experience was and had never gotten over it, had never found the courage to go beyond the adaptations he had crafted to survive, so that his cowardice was firmly ensconced into his soul and bearing.
As she watched him, Sarah wondered whether Marté’s facial definition and his crouched posture were the result of a carry he had initiated at the same time and whether it had just gotten worse with each passing day—that hunch to his back that made him appear even smaller, that forced smile that only came out on the sides of his mouth, a smirk that betrayed his contempt for others.
She wondered if people instinctively guarded themselves, prejudicially and unfairly and without provocation, against men like Marté with body and extreme facial characteristics—an unfortunate “physiognomy,” as her mother had called it. As exaggerated as Marté’s features and expressions were, Sarah concluded that most likely the little man repeatedly had been rejected in his life.
She wondered if that distrust by others had compelled Marté into some pathetic pattern of behavior, one in which he would come back over and over for approval from others, just to be pushed away each time—each rejection reaffirming his fears about himself, reinforcing his self-loathing, so that he eventually gave up on himself. Gave up on his soul. Was that what he was about, she wondered?
She would have to study him more.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Marté, Cull and Emmy
In the hour preceding total darkness, Cull had skinned and quartered the grizzly.
“Mus bin fi’teen hunded pouns, all tol,” he said, stretching the skin onto a makeshift rack.
He held out a long strip of bear backstrap to Emmy and Sarah and leered with a jack-o-lantern grin when Sarah grimaced and then shuddered.
“Sted it eat yo, yo eaten’ it,” he said, and then put the strip of flesh into his mouth.
Marté smiled at Sarah’s reaction.
Jojo knew of Rene Marté. The trapper had established himself in the Nuxalt and the Skeena River area as an opportunistic intermediary between white non-English speaking traders and various coastal tribes, including the Kwakiutl and, it was rumored, the more predatory of the northern raiders.
Somewhere, in the past few years, Jojo surmised, Marté had picked up Eben Cull as a running companion. Although Jojo had never seen that grim giant before, he had heard of him and knew he was a cold murderer with a reputation that seemed a fitting complement to that of the unctuous Frenchman.
The Brits were without warrant for him and, as thinly garrisoned as they were, had no time to hunt Cull in any case. They simply ignored the rumors.
No citizens would have been bold enough to bring any concerns forward because the frontier had just too many similar denizens, and the consequences of exercising one’s citizenship were precarious. Most knew that murderers like Cull and Marté were swift to deliver preemptive violence, and everyone knew about revenge as a prime motivator for those who lived on the periphery.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Emmy realized to be in the debt of these men for the rescue from the bear was a horrible conundrum that further complicated her quest. Both she and Jojo knew their lives were in danger, particularly if it was true that Marté and Cull were slavers.
Enslavement was far worse than death, she had decided long ago.
That night she insisted that Jojo sleep in the same tent with the trading goods and with her and Sarah.
But only Sarah slept.
Jojo kept his muskets fully cocked, and Emmy loaded the pepperbox’s six barrels and capped the primers on the weapon’s nipples.
Emmy hadn’t lain this close to any man other than her husbands, and she would have been embarrassed in other circumstances. But she knew there was imminent danger from the new visitors, so she huddled close to Jojo and Sarah all night.
The warmth and their weapons helped, and Emmy nodded off.
In those few minutes, she plunged
