“I feel perfectly normal,” she insisted at the inn, having her boxes brought to her so she could give Mary her wedding gift, a silver set designed and engraved by the celebrated Quaker Matthew Downs. She had a present for Nan, too, and a new leather-bound account book for her son. All through dinner she acquainted them with civilizing news from the lower Delaware and Schuylkill rivers as well as the latest brought by ships from the motherland. Not till evening when Nan was in bed and the lovers in the parlor did her son have the opportunity to speak alone with her in her room.

“I must tell you something before you have it from Nan or Mary,” he told her.

His mother heard him through in silence.

“Thou meanst this Indian girl claims to be my own granddaughter, Peter?”

“Claimed. Not any more,” he corrected.

“But she’s still here? Wilt let me see her?”

“You have already seen her,” he said, and when she demanded where, “At dinner. She waited on us at the table tonight.”

His mother drew back.

“Didst have to make this girl a servant, Peter?”

“The priest begged me to. He brought her a long way and still had a long way to go.”

“Thou shouldst have thought of the embarrassment and awkwardness of having her in thy house,” she reminded.

“She doesn’t stay in the house, Mother. She’s in the stable.”

“The stable?” his mother repeated slowly. “Dost keep a girl who claims to be thy daughter and a child she says is thy grandson out with the horses?”

His dark weathered face stained.

“I gave her a place in the inn to sleep the first few nights. The priest asked me to. But he didn’t understand the temper of our people. You know this isn’t the city of Philadelphia, where savages are pampered and justified in every crime they commit on the frontier. This is the frontier itself. Mrs. Karricher told me my guests didn’t feel safe or complimented sleeping in the same house as Indians. She said she herself never knew if she’d wake up alive in the morning. She was especially concerned over Mary. She reminded me that this Indian girl we knew nothing about claimed herself to be Mary and would resent her.”

“But how dost thou know she is surely Indian, Son? I have seen Indians on the street in Philadelphia, where as you know they come to see the proprietaries. I didn’t get the impression that an Indian girl waited on us at the table tonight.”

“She doesn’t have to wear leggings and a match-coat to be a squaw, Mother. I’ve kept her in calico so as not to make the guests uneasy. She’s very dark, if you noticed.”

“Thou art dark thyself, Peter.”

He flushed.

“Perhaps, but I don’t go around silent and sullen. And I don’t speak fluent Indian and broken English.”

“Dost not suppose, Peter, thou’d be fluent enough in the Indian tongue if thou’d’st been raised by Indians? As for English, I had a hard enough time making thee speak it correctly as a child and there is no drop of Indian blood in thee so far as I know, although I’ve often wondered whence came thy wild and militant ways.”