by Frieda Watt
The old man pointed to a nearby inn and winked. “My brother’s daughter runs that place. You’ll be safe there.” He puffed out his thin chest proudly.
Marie nodded, even though she would have preferred a different place based on this one’s outward hygiene. The grubby windows and piles of discarded trash around the entrance did nothing to add to its charm. But she wasn’t about to insult Bernard after all he had done for her.
“Thank you,” she said, turning to the elderly man.
He bowed his already bent frame and kissed her hand. “It was me pleasure, my dear. Not every day does an old man like me gets such an adventure. But I really must get Saul home to his family before he leaves without me.”
Marie smiled. “Good luck.”
Bernard nodded. “Yer need it more than me now. Things will work out.” He turned and was swallowed up by the crowd.
Marie watched him leave and then entered the inn.
***
She ended up spending a week in Miquelon before she was able to board a Quebec-bound ship that was willing to take her.
Her first impression of the inn had been correct. Le Roi was cozy and served excellent food, but the accommodations left much to be desired. Upon first entering her room, she’d stripped the bed and slept wrapped in her cloak. Every day before she crawled in, she would do her best to rid the mattress of any unwelcome bedmates.
She slept for two days straight. Two glorious days when she hadn’t been continually tormented by thoughts of Pierre and all those she had left behind. When she finally woke up, she ate a huge amount of food—an embarrassing amount of food. Surprisingly, it all stayed down.
“So you do actually want me to eat?” she asked her belly at the end of the third day. She was lying in bed, trying to keep from thinking about Pierre. “Maybe we’ll actually get through this.” There was no response, not that she’d expected one. It was still too early to feel any movement from the child she was carrying.
The landlady may have been Bernard’s niece, but she seemed incredibly suspicious of Marie. This, along with the fact that Marie didn’t want to explain why she urgently needed to get to Quebec, meant that the stern woman was of no help in recommending anyone who could take her there. Frustrated, Marie left the inn during the day to search for a ship’s captain who would take on a lone French woman.
It was a frightening search. Few boats were even willing to make the journey to the capital. The tiny island was relatively untouched by the war, and the seamen sailing from there didn’t want to be involved with a woman who had just come from Louisbourg. It was too much of a risk, taking on a passenger tainted by the war. Who knew what her real mission was? Finally, when she had exhausted almost the entire harbour, she met a captain willing to allow her onto his boat. It had cost her a great deal and Marie knew that Pierre would never have agreed to the sum, but she was desperate to get to the capital.
The Archille was a large fishing boat, big enough to employ several men. It had come from Bordeaux and was resting in Miquelon before moving on to Quebec. Marie’s stomach had been churning all day but had so far behaved. She’d been able to keep her breakfast down and was optimistic that the trend might continue until she set foot on the massive deck of the Archille. The smell of masses of unwashed bodies crammed into the vessel overwhelmed her as she stepped onto the gently bobbing boat. Marie put a hand on the railing to try to steady herself. Meanwhile, the sailors were eyeing her with curiosity—a woman travelling alone. And this time, there was no Bernard to explain the situation or protect her. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up as the vessel pulled away from shore.
Captain Étienne Gauthier was a burly man, his face weathered from years of working out in the sun and wind. He smiled good-naturedly at Marie, flashing a mouth of missing teeth. He had a jovial personality and a booming laugh, and Marie liked him despite the amount she’d paid to board his ship.
Gauthier had been Captain of the Archille for ten years. Born in rural France, he’d stumbled onto a ship at the age of ten and never left the seafaring life. He’d seen many things, including the inside of a British prison. Not surprisingly, he hated the British, and that made him sympathize with Marie’s plight. Feeling desperate for a means of travel, Marie had confided in him about the information she carried. It was a foolish decision, but it had brought her the results she wanted.
Captain Gauthier studied Marie shrewdly for a moment before approaching her. He offered his hand. “Welcome aboard, Madame. If you need anything during your voyage, please do not hesitate to ask.”
Marie nodded, trying not to faint as the ship pulled up its anchor and moved out into open water. The familiar feeling that existed during the short boat ride here was growing in her abdomen. Not now, she pleaded inwardly.
Captain Gauthier was leading her to her accommodations, and he was saying something, but she didn’t hear him as she rushed to the starboard side and threw up into the ocean.
***
Pierre leaned against the rough wooden post that was holding the tent up. His ankle was chained to the post, but he wouldn’t have tried to run even if he hadn’t been in restraints. He was sitting in the centre of the British camps, facing the fortress. For some reason, his captors were keeping him alive, but he knew that if he was caught trying to escape, they wouldn’t hesitate to put a bullet in his brain. The soldiers knew he’d been travelling with another person, and his refusal to tell them anything was how he’d ended up here.
The canvas sides of the tent snapped in the wind. It had been eight days since his capture on the dark road. He had refused to say anything—not his name, where he was from, or how he had come to be in the woods. One of the soldiers had eventually hit him with the butt of a musket in a fit of frustration. Pierre lost consciousness and woke up with a terrible headache, his cheek pressed flat into the mud with several irate British soldiers standing over him.
Once he’d been brought back to Louisbourg, he’d received several blows that reopened the gash in his side, but eventually they gave him up as a lost cause and left him alone.
He leaned against the tent pole and dozed while the world moved around him. He thought of Marie, relieved that she had escaped. He knew that much, but how far had she been able to travel? He felt a sickening swoop of pain at the thought of her alone and pregnant in the wilderness, fighting her way toward Quebec. His job was to protect her and he had failed. Keep her safe, he prayed. I don’t care what happens to me, just keep her safe.
Eventually, a physician had come to see him. It was pronounced that he wasn’t about to die, so the British could go on ignoring him. Near sunset, while the cannonballs and mortars still rained down on the fortress, a group of men passed by the entrance to the tent. It took him a moment to understand why the short boy in the middle looked familiar.
“Gérard!” he roared, fighting to get to his feet. “Gérard, you coward!”
The teen looked terrified when he realized who was shouting. Now that Pierre looked more closely, he recognized the people with the boy—other members of the Louisbourg garrison who had clearly deserted in exchange for their lives. Pierre staggered to his feet. The world spun, but he didn’t care. He was so angry he could barely see straight. He pulled against the ropes holding him in place and continued to scream. Men were running toward him, trying to hold him back and calm him down, but he fought against them. Finally, he’d been tackled to the ground before losing consciousness.
Pierre had woken up chained to the tent and had spent the last week there with minimal food and no company. He swung between furious anger and despair, with nothing to distract him from his thoughts. He was completely powerless against the destruction raining down around him.
A British soldier who spoke fluent French had been brought, somewhat reluctantly, to try to pry information from Pierre about conditions inside the fortress. Pierre didn’t understand why he was bothering with him. Clearly, there were deserters around who would be more than capable of explain
ing how bad things were.
He spent his time trying to figure out a way to get out of his situation. He assumed that he was being kept alive to be used as a bargaining chip when Drucour finally surrendered the fortress. His explosion at the deserters solidified the suspicion that he was an escaped citizen. However, the British would be in for a rude surprise when they found out their prisoner was also a murderer. Pierre was at a loss to see how this wouldn’t end up with him at the end of a rope.
The flaps of the tent opened, and a new soldier entered. He was younger than Pierre, tall and lanky, with sandy hair that fell across his face. His eyes widened in horrified shock as he recognized the prisoner. For a moment, Pierre was thrown back in time, thousands of miles away to when he had been a prisoner in Montreal. He forgot he was on the sunlit plains of Île-Royale, facing the fortress and surrounded by the ocean. He could feel the suffocating darkness as he and all the other forgotten men tried to find hope to live one more day.
He gazed back passively, though he too felt the jolt of recognition. He remembered John Anderson as a scared fifteen-year-old boy, thrown in prison for theft. Though his father was someone of importance in Virginia, he could do nothing to arrange the release of his son. The boy had been caught shortly after the war’s conclusion when Canadians were feeling particularly hostile toward the British. The teen had arrived in Montreal on an Acadian’s boat with others who still considered themselves French. He hadn’t actually stolen the bread. That was someone else in his party. However, Anderson had been thrown in prison and left there for two years to learn a lesson. Upon his release, he’d been sent to the British army.
Pierre and Anderson had shared a cell with several undesirable prisoners. Fights sometimes broke out, and the guards did little to stop them. One night, a Frenchman took offence to something Anderson had said and attacked him with a sharpened bit of metal, stabbing the young man down the left side of his face. Pierre had pulled the enraged Frenchman off the boy, pinning the snarling offender to the floor until the guards decided to intervene.
The attacker was taken away, and they never saw him again. Anderson hadn’t lost his eye, but it was a close call. Most of the left side of his face was twisted with scar tissue. From that time on, there had been a cautious camaraderie between the two.
“When did you get out?” Pierre asked with as much disdain as he could muster. Anderson might have been a friend once upon a time, but his presence in this situation was more unnerving than Pierre cared to admit.
The British man licked his lips nervously. “Just a few days after you. My father was eventually able to sway the government to negotiate me out of prison.” He smiled nervously. “Did they let you out of the army?”
Pierre suddenly regretted having shared his life story with Anderson. It had seemed like a good idea at the time—during the freezing, dark nights in the dungeon at the bottom of the prison. “What do you want, Anderson?”
Anderson cleared his throat nervously. “I haven’t told anyone who you are. As far as I know, the deserters haven’t said anything either. You’re still an enigma.”
This was a pleasant surprise, but Pierre tried to hide his reaction.
“Also,” Anderson continued, “there were scouts sent out to try to find the woman you were with when they captured you.”
Pierre’s head snapped up. No one had asked him about Marie since he’d arrived back at the fortress. He had hoped they’d forgotten about her.
“They haven’t found her,” Anderson said hastily, correctly interpreting the look on Pierre’s face. “There’s no body, no trace of her whereabouts. The only thing the scouts could find was that a boat left from Baie des Espagnols but that it was gone a few days. The fisherman who operates it says he was taking his elderly grandfather out for a ride on the ocean. The scouts believed him, but that’s also roughly the amount of time it would take to get to Miquelon and back. She got off the island.”
Pierre stared at the canvas wall without seeing it. If what Anderson said was true, and he had no reason to think it wasn’t, Marie had made it off the island safely. He tried his best to hide the relief that was suddenly erupting in his chest.
Anderson studied Pierre carefully. “Is she that girl you wouldn’t stop talking about?”
Pierre was surprised that Anderson would remember that piece of information. “Yes.”
Anderson nodded. “I thought she might be. I figured you’d want to know. I would if it was me.” He stood awkwardly for a moment before turning and exiting from the tent.
Chapter 17
THE ROCKING OF THE BOAT DIDN’T HELP the morning sickness. Instead of being nauseated in the morning, Marie now felt dizzy and ill for most the day. The ship’s surgeon had been called, but having very little experience with expectant mothers, he gave up in frustration after she didn’t get her sea legs after a few days. She’d been on the ship for over a month now and still didn’t have them. By the Captain’s orders, no one asked her any questions, but odd and appraising looks followed her wherever she went.
She spent most of her days locked up in her cabin with the windows thrown open, trying to avoid the smells of the rest of the ship. The problem with being in the cabin, however, was that there was nothing there to distract her from the constant thoughts that churned around in her head. The more she thought, the more likely it seemed that Pierre was dead. If the British hadn’t killed him in the field, they would have taken him back to Louisbourg. He would be recognized and probably executed for Claude’s murder.
She felt completely empty. She shouldn’t have left him. If she’d stayed by his side, she could possibly have changed the outcome. How, she didn’t know, but she would have tried something.
For the first week on the ship, she hadn’t moved from her bed at all, other than for the occasional bite to eat. It hadn’t seemed important. The leather bundle was hidden under her pillow, but she didn’t even care about it any longer. Nothing seemed important: Louisbourg, the British invasion, life. She was so ill that her lack of activity hardly mattered. Her time on the Françoise had not been an anomaly. She couldn’t keep any solid food down, and what broth and water she was able to consume didn’t fare much better.
Before leaving Miquelon, she’d procured a small bag of dried mint leaves. She found that if she put some of those into copious amounts of boiled water with a large amount of sugar, her stomach would settle enough that she could keep things down. However, it wasn’t enough to keep her nourished. She was losing weight at a remarkable speed and was becoming very weak. To improve her health to some extent, she tried, once a day, to lie in the warm sun on the deck. Usually, someone would help her get out of her cabin and walk along the rolling deck to a spot near the rail where she could curl up in a quilt.
As much as the trip made her head spin, she tried to find joy by watching the long, thin strips of farmland pass by. It was nearing the end of August, the 20th, to be exact. The harvest was beginning and the fields were filled with golden wheat. Despite the war, the river was filled with voyageurs in canoes, fishing boats, and massive merchant vessels travelling along the rushing currents. The Saint-Laurent was safe in this location.
A shadow fell across her face, blocking the welcome heat from the sun. She looked up to see Captain Gauthier smiling genially at her. “How are you feeling today?” he asked, completely unaffected by the movement of the waves. Not for the first time, Marie felt a pang of envy. She smiled as graciously as she could. “About as well as I have been.” It was her standard answer. In truth, she felt terrible and was beginning to worry about the long-term effects of the morning sickness on both her and the child. Her dress was becoming roomy despite the hard lump that was growing in her middle. Once she arrived in Quebec, she still had to survive the winter, and Gauthier had promised her that Quebec and the rest of the colony were already suffering from food shortages.
Captain Gauthier laughed. “I am forever grateful I wasn’t born a woman. My wife had seven children. I don’t know h
ow she did it.”
“Did she have a choice in the matter?” Marie asked, still feeling grumpy.
Gauthier paused for a moment. Then his booming laugh filled the deck. He slapped the railing he was leaning against in amusement.
Marie closed her eyes and breathed deeply through her mouth. They were nearing the end of their journey, but she felt as if it would be a never-ending purgatory.
“Do you have any ideas about what you’ll do once we reach shore?” Gauthier asked conversationally.
Marie opened her eyes a fraction of an inch and shook her head. He’d been enraged when he’d learned of Pierre’s capture by the British but had refrained from speaking about it further. Sensing her fragile state, he usually kept their conversations to tales of his adventures on the high seas.
“I have family there. My husband’s family is there as well,” she sighed. “I’ll be fine.” She turned her face back to the passing shore and took a sip of tea to prevent further questions.
Gauthier turned and followed her gaze. “No matter how many times I travel this river, I’m always amazed by the beauty of it.”
Marie nodded, only half listening.
“We should be at Quebec in a week.”
Marie’s eyes snapped open. “Only a week?”
Captain Gauthier smiled. “Just as well. I’m not sure you’d survive if it was much longer.”
***
The harbour of Louisbourg had less than a handful of warships standing between it and the might of the British navy. Then, on July 21st the British sent volleys from the lighthouse and had struck three ships that burned for most of the day. That evening, as the light of the sun sank below the Atlantic, L’Enterprenant, a seventy-four-gun ship, exploded. Pierre had heard the terrible sound of the wooden body breaking outward over the regular commotion of war.
