Selfsame

By Melissa Conway

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Melissa Conway

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This is a work of fiction. The Haudenosaunee village in this story is a made-up place, and the colonial village is based very loosely on Pine Plains, New York. All characters are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Prologue

New York Colony, 1764

“Tell me the story, Grandmother.”

The old woman compressed her lips and sighed out her nose, but she placed the candlestick on the mantel and sat in the spindly wooden chair next to Enid’s bed. She settled the folds of her shawl around her and took a shallow breath that rattled a little in her throat. The story had been told so many times the words came easily, even without using her native Mahican tongue. She’d learned a smattering of German from the Moravian missionaries who’d come to her village when Enid’s mother was just a baby. They’d baptized the old woman with the name Elizabeth in 1743, and later she’d learned English from her son-in-law, an emigrant from Ulster, so her accent was an odd mixture of Mahican, German and Irish.