The Displaced

by Frieda Watt

  “I guess it really started during the mutiny. He would send me short notes, like the ones he sent you, but the purpose of mine was always to ensure that my mother and I were all right. When I could, I would send Pierre with food. I knew the mutineers were starving him.” She sighed. “My parents and I came back to Louisbourg in June of last year. We were on the first boat that came from France. Nic was here with the rest of the garrison that had survived Boston. We ended up talking. It sounds silly, I know, but he told me about the mutiny and Boston, things he hasn’t told anyone else about.”

  Marie was silent. Nic refused to tell anyone about the New England prison. He needed someone to talk to, someone who could listen without judgement. She wasn’t that person. It was some relief to know that Elise had filled that void.

  “He’s not the idiot he was in school,” Elise grinned. “He is loyal and responsible. More loyal than I ever realized.”

  Marie smiled. “I’m glad you found each other.” She really meant it, even if it was a shock.

  “My mother isn’t happy about the marriage, though. She always had higher ambitions for me than my being a military wife like herself. But I don’t care.” Elise was growing braver as she spoke. “It’s not the love story that you have with Pierre, and please don’t judge me for that, but we’ll be happy and stable. Nic has just bought us our own small house, and I’ll take care of him.”

  “I know you will,” Marie said quietly. “I just never expected this.”

  “When he came back from Boston, he said he realized how fragile life is. He said he’d always had feelings for me but never knew how to express them. He figured I was too proper to waste my time with him.”

  That sounded a bit more like her brother, but it would take Marie a while to overcome the shock. “When is the wedding?”

  Elise shrugged. “I was waiting to hear when yours would be. Yours will be a farewell of sorts as well as a wedding. I didn’t want to eclipse your day.”

  Marie suddenly felt guilty for doubting Elise’s friendship. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “I know, but I wanted to. You’ll really be my sister after this.”

  Marie nodded. “If you really want to spend the rest of your life cleaning up after my brother, you may need to come visit from time to time, for your own sanity.”

  “He’s not that bad.”

  “He once didn’t wash his face for three months.”

  Elise laughed. “I won’t let him in bed unless he does!”

  “Could we get married on the same day?” Marie asked. “But I’m afraid mine won’t be the fancy affair you may want.”

  “That’s what you think,” Elise grinned.

  For hours, the two young women stayed up talking about their futures as the fire glowed low in the hearth. Only as the sky lightened did they succumb to some much-needed sleep.

  ***

  The girls awoke late the next morning and went down to the kitchen for a breakfast of brown bread and milk. They had the place to themselves, since Elise’s mother had left long before to sell her bread at the marketplace. But suddenly, as Marie was thinking of how long it would take to sew herself a wedding dress and whether she really wanted to attempt it, Nic burst into the room without even knocking on the back door.

  His dark eyes were wild with emotion, his chest heaving as if he’d just run a mile.

  “Darling, what is it?” Elise stood up. Marie tried to keep her face expressionless at the word “darling.” She didn’t succeed.

  But Nic wasn’t looking at Elise; he was speaking directly to his sister. “You need to come with me.”

  Marie looked at him, concerned. “What happened?” Did Nic know something about Annette’s condition that she didn’t know?

  Nic didn’t stop to explain but grabbed his sister’s hand and dragged her from the house. Elise followed uncertainly behind.

  “What’s going on?” Marie asked over and over again as Nic pulled her through the streets. He didn’t stop until they’d reached the Thibaults’ house. It looked cheery with spring flowers planted out front—quite the opposite to Nic’s mood—but Marie couldn’t understand why they were there.

  Nic opened the door without knocking and ushered Marie and Elise inside. Augustus was waiting in the parlour for them looking distinctly worn, his shoulders slumped, a rum in his hand despite the early hour.

  He looked up as Nic and Marie entered. He drained the remainder of his glass without making eye contact with either of them.

  “What’s going on?” Marie asked again, panic beginning to rise in her chest.

  Augustus stayed silent and refilled his glass. She had never seen him look so miserable.

  “Pierre was arrested last night,” Nic said, stepping closer to his sister. “For desertion.”

  Marie backed away from him. What he was saying didn’t make sense. “What are you talking about? He’s not in the army.” She could hear Nic’s knuckles pop as he cracked them. She looked wildly at Augustus, hoping he would contradict the story, but he stared, broken-hearted, at the floor.

  “Last night, two officers came here,” Nic continued. “They had papers saying he was a part of the army stationed in Montreal and that he had been reported missing. They arrested him before he could board a boat out of the colony.”

  It had to be a joke. Marie looked around the room, waiting for someone to shout, “Just kidding!” But no one did, and the pain in Nic’s eyes was too real.

  The room began to spin around her. “But he’s never been anywhere near the army.”

  Augustus made a noise somewhere between a grunt of assertion and a sob.

  Nic nodded. “I know.” He laid a hand on Marie’s arm, but she pulled it away, refusing to believe him.

  “They’ll sort it out,” Marie said, regaining a measure of confidence. “Renault can vouch for him. He can explain where he’s been, that he was never in the army. They can check with the garrison in Montreal; none of them will ever have heard of him.” It was all like a bad dream. A mistake had been made, but it could be sorted out.

  Nic just shook his head. “I don’t know if they’ll wait that long,” he said quietly. “These things are usually handled with a lot of speed. Wherever they got those papers, they were official.”

  Marie collapsed into a chair beside the fireplace. She was dimly aware of Augustus staring at her through his own haze of pain. “What do they do to deserters?”

  Nic didn’t look at her but fiddled with the dust on top of the oak mantle.

  “Answer me!” She shouted, but she already knew the answer.

  “They might send him to the West Indies, but usually deserters are shot.”

  Marie tried to gasp for air, but her lungs weren’t working. She heard a terrible sound, like the shriek of a wounded animal, and realized the noise was coming from her. Nic ran over and put his arms under her before she collapsed in a dead faint.

  PART THREE:

  LOUISBOURG 1750

  Chapter 7

  AUGUSTUS LEFT THE MORNING AFTER PIERRE’S ARREST. He’d tracked his son’s whereabouts to the Implacable, a ship headed for Montreal. Pierre had been alive when the ship left Louisbourg, and Augustus hoped to meet the vessel in Montreal and deal with the situation.

  The Implacable had indeed made it to Montreal, but there was no trace of Pierre being on board. The ship’s logs had no record of him, and those could not be viewed a second time because after spending only a day in port, the Implacable had set off for the West Indies. None of the harbour officials had heard of Pierre either. With so many people coming ashore, one man would not be remembered, and there was no mention of Pierre in any of their official logs. The army, unsurprisingly, reported knowing no one by the name of Thibault, and the prison in Montreal also had no record of him. After going through all of these possibilities, there had been no one left for Augustus to interrogate.

  Dominique Renault arrived in Montreal from Quebec, as did Tomas. They’d found no record of the ship stopp
ing in Quebec or anywhere else along her journey from Louisbourg to Montreal. Nonetheless, Jean began to search the capital, searching through his connections with the seedy underside of the city, but no one had seen or heard of a blond giant walking among them.

  Renault scoured Montreal, combing the prison and checking with all his contacts. Renault knew every law enforcement supervisor in the colony, but no amount of pressure gave him any answers. With the military, police, and shipyards searched—and everywhere in between—Augustus and his brother and nephews were running out of options.

  Augustus returned to Louisbourg in July, exhausted and broken. Cut off as the fortress was, it would never give him the answers he sought.

  “He can’t have just disappeared,” Marie insisted. She and Nic had gone to Augustus’s house the day Pierre’s father returned to hear the news, good or bad. It couldn’t have been worse.

  Augustus sighed. He seemed to have aged ten years. Since he’d left Montreal, he hadn’t shaved or changed his clothes much. He’d lost weight, and his hair and beard were wild against his pale face. “There’s no trace of him anywhere.” The man ran his hands across his haggard face and took a deep drink from the whisky bottle in his hand. “Renault will keep looking, keep an eye out for any developments. I don’t know what he’ll find, though.”

  “But he has to be somewhere!” Marie yelled. She’d been going in circles for close to an hour, refusing to accept that no one knew where Pierre was.

  Nic tugged on her arm. “Thank you for telling us, Monsieur Thibault.” He bowed formally to the merchant and unceremoniously pulled Marie from the house.

  Once outside, Marie yanked her arm free and rounded on her brother. “What did you do that for? He’s given up. We can’t just give up, not when Pierre’s still missing.”

  Nic sighed and kept walking away from the house. The streets were teeming with people carrying out the regular business of the day. The noise from the reconstruction of the walls made eavesdropping impossible. “There’s nothing anyone can do now,” Nic said in exasperation.

  “You’re giving up too?” Marie felt completely betrayed.

  “Look,” Nic said, steering her around two young workers carrying a pallet of bricks toward the walls. “We know that Pierre got on the ship, but there’s no evidence of where or if he ever got off the boat.”

  “You think he’s heading to the West Indies?”

  “Possibly.” Nic kicked a stone lying in the middle of the road. “It makes more sense than keeping him in Montreal or Quebec.”

  “Why?” Marie’s nerves were raw and she was trying to keep her emotions under control, but she could feel the tears pricking at her eyes.

  “He worked there for five years. He knows Renault, Bigot, all the men in the Superior Council. He’s known by most of the high-ranking officials in the colony. He would have had no problem proving he wasn’t a deserter or even a member of the army for that matter. This wasn’t a mistake.”

  “Of course it was,” Marie countered angrily. “He was never in the army.”

  “I know that, but the paperwork was all there. I saw it. Whoever drew it up knew what they were doing. Someone wanted him arrested and disposed of. Someone with enough clout to do it.” He gave her a significant look.

  “He doesn’t have any enemies.”

  Nic cracked his knuckles. “Yes, he did. He was the assistant to the Procurator General.”

  Marie winced at the past tense. Nic spotted her reaction and quickly squeezed her shoulder.

  “In the five years that Pierre was in Quebec, he personally reviewed the cases of nine people who were executed. And there were many others thrown into prison for all sorts of things: theft, assault, conspiracy, corruption.”

  Marie was silent while she thought this over.

  “No one ever thinks they deserve what they get. You think I’ll ever thank Father Allard for pointing out the error of my ways when he strapped me? Of course not. People blame the justice system for ruining their lives.”

  They walked on in silence. Marie didn’t want to believe her twin and she said so. Nic seemed to be expecting that.

  “I know it’s hard to hear, but you need to start thinking about that as a possibility. If it was a mistake, someone would have found him by now.”

  “You think he’s dead then?” Marie glanced at a hog being led through the streets.

  “I think there’s a chance that he’s at the bottom of the Saint-Laurent, thrown overboard before they reached land.” Marie folded her arms tightly across her chest. “I’m sorry. That came out badly. But you need to consider all the options.”

  “But if he’s still alive?” It felt like a blatant betrayal to simply abandon the search.

  “I don’t know, Marie. I don’t know. The West Indies are an option but only one of a few. He wouldn’t be able to escape indentured servitude.” He glanced at her. “But if he’s still alive, he’ll find a way to contact you. He’s never been one to care about the rules.”

  The ghost of a smile crossed her lips.

  They reached the large oak door at the front of the manor house. Marie didn’t want to go in. She felt imprisoned and ignored in the large home. To her surprise, Annette and Claude were both deeply affected by Pierre’s disappearance. Marie understood Annette’s sorrow but she was shocked at Claude’s grief. Marie had expected him to be relieved that he no longer had to deal with Pierre. His anger, already always just underneath the surface, was increasing too, and that was another surprise. The result of their shared grief was that neither of Marie’s guardians seemed aware that she was carrying her own impossible burden—that she had just lost Pierre to an uncertain and likely horrifying fate. Nic wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly for a moment. She couldn’t remember a time when they had ever shown affection like this before.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said softly. “I don’t know how we’re going to move on, but we must.”

  Marie didn’t share his optimism. She felt as if the sun had fallen out of the sky, never to return. For the next two days, she stayed in her room, not talking to anyone and refusing food. She thought the grief would crush her permanently. She felt entirely empty, as if her insides had been replaced by a void.

  Annette had come in once to see her but was so upset herself that she was no comfort to Marie. Since Pierre’s disappearance, her headaches had become an almost daily occurrence and she was constantly close to tears. Whenever she pulled herself out of bed, she just made things worse, spreading her anxiety wherever she went. Marie couldn’t stand it. It was her mother’s death all over again.

  Madame Badeau came up to visit Marie on the evening of the second day after Augustus’s return. The bedroom was in a state of turmoil. She’d begun packing for her move to Quebec, and a trunk stood open with dresses and keepsakes neatly folded inside. The two long lists Marie had made still sat on her writing desk, both untouched since the news had broken.

  Marie herself lay on her bed, her back to the door, ignoring the world. Madame Badeau sighed and settled herself on the edge of the bed. The frame creaked loudly as her considerable weight was added to the mattress. Marie remained motionless.

  “You can’t stay in here forever.” Stony silence filled the room. “I had to get one of the servants to tend to the garden, and she doesn’t know anything about plants.”

  The fact that the maid was in the process of killing the garden didn’t really concern Marie, but she realized Madame Badeau wasn’t going to leave until she said something. She rolled over, her face red and swollen from crying. She said nothing and avoided Madame Badeau’s inquiring eyes.

  The housekeeper put her considerable hand on Marie’s shoulder. “I know it seems dark now, but it will pass eventually.”

  Marie looked up at the kind, round face. She suddenly realized that she didn’t know very much about Madame Badeau’s life. The woman knew everything about the lives of her employers and their household, but Marie, at least, knew very little about her.
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  Madame Badeau smiled sadly. “I came here to the fortress as a young bride. My husband and I were married in Normandy two weeks before we set sail. He was a cooper, just finished articling. This was back when the fortress was still being established and they needed all the tradesmen they could get. Someone had to make the barrels to keep the supplies of cod liver oil moving.”

  She looked off into the distance, remembering a happier time. “Life was good here, at least for the first few months. But Félix caught a high fever during that first winter. He had never experienced such bitter cold. None of us had. He died within a fortnight.”

  Madame Badeau stroked the loose hairs away from Marie’s face. “Broken hearts do heal; it just takes time.”

  They were both quiet, lost in thought.

  “I can unpack for you if it’s too painful.” Madame Badeau’s deep voice was soft with tenderness.

  “I just wish I knew for sure. There’s a part of me that still hopes he’s alive.” Marie felt silly admitting it out loud, but she knew Madame Badeau wouldn’t laugh. She couldn’t understand how she was expected to “move on” if Pierre was still somewhere on earth.

  “I know.” Madame Badeau stood up, making the whole bed shift. “You don’t have to forget him, and you don’t have to find someone else. I never did. It didn’t seem fair to always compare someone to the man of my heart. Annette will want you to, but I’ll put her in her place. Meanwhile, lying around here isn’t going to solve your problems.”

  Marie sat up slowly. She had been so focused on what had been taken from her that the possibility that marriage was still expected of her was terrifying.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready to live again,” she said slowly.

  “It’s not about being ready; it’s about doing, and the sooner, the better.” Madame Badeau headed for the door. “Also, Elise has postponed her wedding. She knew how distraught both you and Nic are. But at some point, you need to reach out to her, even though it will hurt.” The housekeeper exited the room, her wide hips swinging.