How much, I asked myself, could I tell Ellen, even if she relented? Marie de Sabrevois was using her: of that I was certain. What else she was trying to do, there was no way of knowing.… A hellcat, Cap Huff had called her. There was nothing, he had said, she wouldn’t do.

The house was dark and silent. I turned and took my bearings from the stars: then stumbled back around the shoulder of the limestone mountain.

XXVII

THE sun, striking down on the deck and sides of the sloop row-galley on the following afternoon, made her into an oven hot enough to bake beans; and I, helping to fit lockers in her powder-magazine, was more than half blinded by sweat. When I climbed on deck to clear the caked sawdust from my throat, the first person I saw, standing disconsolately among the litter of chips and shavings that surrounded the gundelo on the adjoining stocks, was the stooped, slick-haired woman I had last seen sitting across the table from Ellen Phipps.

Distress was so marked, both in her attitude and the expression of her face, that I went straight to her. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Is anything wrong with Ellen?”

She eyed me doubtfully. “By your looks you’re related to Nathaniel Merrill.”

“I’m his brother. What’s wrong?”

“If you know where he is, you better find him. Ellen’s gone.”

“Gone? When did she go?”

She shook her head. “Some time between sun-up and dinner. That heathen brother of hers, he was around, half naked; and pretty soon they went off together, same as always, and they never come back.”

I would have spoken, but she forestalled me. “When she wasn’t back for dinner, I looked in her room. She tooken a dress with her, and the moccasins she made, and some night things. She ain’t coming back: that’s certain!”

Assuming a confidence I was far from feeling, I assured her Ellen was in good hands and would come to no harm. When the woman trudged away, stoop-backed from her labors and apparently not even aware of the hammering and shouting and half-built vessels that surrounded her, I went in search of Nathaniel on the run. He was, I knew, squaring timbers for the last gundelo to be laid down, because I had heard him complaining to Verrieul that he was doing it with a felling axe, and that it was hell’s own job, which was not far from the truth.

From the defiant look on his face, when I found him, I could see he knew what had happened.

“Come down to the edge of the lake,” I said. “I want to talk to you.”