“How nice!” she said. “If I had straight hair, then it wouldn’t tangle, and there’d be no need to cut it off, like this.” She bent her head and shook it, so that her curls danced. They seemed to have a look of softness, but there was no way of being sure. “I have a brother, too,” she added. “An Indian.”

I looked at her hard, but she seemed serious. I was at a loss how to reply.

“His name is Joseph,” she went on. “Two months ago he came to visit me. He brought me a young fawn, a basket of cranberries, and a lump of maple sugar bigger than my head. Madame St. Auge would not allow me to speak with him until he had washed his face. It was painted black around the eyes and mouth, and red elsewhere. It was different from the way he used to paint himself, but not better, I think.”

Nathaniel looked impatiently over his shoulder, at which she widened her eyes at me, and made a slight mouth, as if she regretted disturbing him.

“He’s not really your brother,” I protested. “How could you have an Indian for a brother!”

“Yes, he is really my brother. His name is Phipps, like mine. Joseph Phipps. What is strange about my brother becoming an Indian, any more than for a Frenchman to become a Canadian?”

She looked at me inquiringly, so I admitted there was something in what she said. She nodded, and her curls bobbed. “We were captured at the same time, Joseph and I, and my mother too—all of us, at the siege of Fort William Henry, where my father was killed. He was an officer of the English army. My mother was sold to a French gentleman in Quebec. He was kind, so he gave the Indians a little more than they asked, and I was thrown in for good measure. I was small, three years old, only; and so not worth much. Joseph was never sold. He remained in St. Francis and became an Indian. He has done well at it. When he came to see me, he had forty brooches in his shirt, and ten bracelets on each arm: also a robe of black squirrel skins.”

I thought she might be laughing at me: yet her eyes held nothing save a sort of kindness, as though she talked for the purpose of keeping me amused.

“Where is your mother?” I asked.

She fingered her gray dress, pleating it carefully. “She died. That was how it happened I was placed in a convent in Montreal by my dear aunt. It was the same convent which she had attended, as a young lady. The nuns were sweet to me: very kind: like mothers, almost.”

There was something heart-wrenching about the manner in which she tried to conceal her feelings by creasing that coarse gray cloth.

I cleared my throat. “So you enjoyed being in the convent?”