There was considerable consternation among the distaff members of the establishment when the patient rose from his near-death bed, donned that reverence-inducing uniform, and asked Maisie ever so nicely if she would mind walking over to the livery stables at Government House and engaging a one-horse cutter to take him to the garrison. Maisie did not mind in the least.
Half an hour later the transportation arrived in front of the widow’s porch. Marc was feeling so wonderfully recovered that he dismissed the driver with a shilling and took the reins himself. He wanted to be entirely alone as he drove the cutter south to Front Street and swung west until he reached the snow-packed path that wound its way through pretty stands of evergreen and wide stretches of marsh-ice towards Fort York. There was still an hour of brilliant light left before the sun would sink southwesterly over the vast lake.
When Marc had first arrived here, like most newcomers he had found that the brooding, primeval forests seemed to push all thought inward on itself while the freshwater seas without horizons sucked it outward to endless emptiness. But now, feeling almost native, he found a lonely drive like this—under vacant skies and over blank tundra, where snow alone defined the landscape—most conducive to serious meditation. And he had much to think about. Relieved at last of the burden of being stalked, Mark was free to reflect on what it was he was going to say to Colonel Margison.
* * *
“This is a decision, Lieutenant, that should not be taken hastily, especially so soon after your first engagement and an injury such as you received in the line of duty.”
They were closeted in Colonel George Margison’s study. Whiskey and cigars having been aborted by mutual consent, the two men, who knew each other well, sat down opposite each other and without ceremony began to talk seriously about the matter at hand.
“I agree, sir. But during the many weeks of my convalescence in Montreal, I had nothing else to do but think.”
“Very true. And I have also known you to be a very thoughtful, highly intelligent and supremely rational officer. But that is precisely my point: you have the potential to be a true leader in Her Majesty’s army. Your ability, diligence, and devotion to duty have already won you one promotion, and I have little doubt that your heroic actions at St. Denis will see you made captain. Courage and presence of mind under fire and impeccable judgement—that is a rare combination. I am simply asking you, Marc, not to throw away the nearly five years of your life that you have dedicated to a military career, a career for which, in my humble opinion, God appears to have moulded you.”
“I do appreciate the confidence you have shown in me, sir. But it is precisely because I have doubts that I can live up to the demands of being an officer that I am giving serious consideration to leaving this profession.”
“You are referring to the grim business of ordering soldiers into situations where they are likely to be killed or maimed in front of you or beside you. But that is a common reaction during any first engagement. If you didn’t have doubts, you wouldn’t be human—or an effective officer.”
“I believe I can cope with that aspect of warfare, sir, especially if I am willing to expose myself to the same dangers.”
“As you amply demonstrated at St. Denis.”
Marc hesitated, searching for the right words to continue. “At first I had great difficulty convincing myself that a ragtag collection of farmers and tradesmen was actually an enemy army like the French regulars. But when they started pointing muskets at us and one of our gunners collapsed beside me with a hole in his chest, then I had no qualms about what I was expected to do at St. Denis.”
“What continues to trouble you, then?” The colonel seemed genuinely puzzled.
“It was the next week, when we returned and found no opposition. I presumed we would be asked to occupy the town, secure it, and re-establish the Queen’s law.”
“And you were not?”
“We were. But in addition we were ordered to raze the homes and destroy or confiscate all the property of any known rebels. As we knew little about any of them, beyond their leaders, Nelson and Papineau, we had to rely on vengeance-seeking loyalists pointing the finger at anyone they might have a grudge against.”
“Yes, that is standard procedure after a victory, though in most cases we are looking at military stores and potential fortifications. In a civil conflict, it is more likely to be houses and barns.”
“I found it deeply disturbing to burn the barns and seize the cattle of starving citizens, many of them women and children.”
“Nevertheless, you did execute your duty, son. Remember that. You were gravely wounded while preparing to clear a rebel residence prior to torching it. And even though you found your orders to be morally distasteful and perhaps inherently unjust, you were, in fact, carrying them out, to the letter.”
Marc had no reply because, as he had confessed to James Durfee, only his being shot had forestalled his having to make the decision to obey or ignore those orders. He did not know, then or now, what he would have done if Sergeant Ogletree had raised the torch and prepared to burn down that cabin.
“Hear me out on this, Marc. Please. You are still a long way from recovery from your injuries and subsequent illness. Decisions made immediately after a battle or the trauma of a wound are rarely sound ones. I am ordering you to take at least another month’s leave before returning to active duty. Get yourself married. Invite me to the wedding. Discuss your future with Beth and with an old hand like Major Jenkin, who will be back here in a week. Then come and see me, and we’ll have this talk again.”
“You are very kind, sir.”
“And should you then choose to leave, I can arrange for you to be invalided out at half pay.”
“No, sir. That’s generous of you—considering the bit of a limp I have—but I would feel right about it only if I were simply to resign my commission. I have recently come into some money, so I don’t really need a pension.”
“Having money doesn’t mean you have to give it away,” the colonel said with a wry smile.
“But I feel I must do the honourable thing.”
“Why does that not surprise me?” The colonel rose and shook Marc’s hand.
At the door he smiled and said, “And try to stay out of alleys, Lieutenant.”
* * *
The sun was just going down as Marc approached the western outskirts of the city. A garish vermilion light was washing across the wind-sculpted drifts that rolled pleasingly down to the lakeshore. Marc had the sensation of gliding weightless in a benign dream: for a few blissful moments he was without thought of any kind.
Then the cutter hit a rut, and Marc had to pull the horse sharply to the left to avoid tipping over. It was this sudden movement that allowed him to spot the rumpled outline of something in the snow beside the path, nearly obscured by a pair of drifts hemming it in. Marc stopped the cutter, got out, and walked back a few yards.
At first he thought it might be a dead deer, trapped in the snow and starving. A brief afternoon flurry had obscured the edges of whatever it was, leaving only the brown oblong of an animal’s belly—or was it a cloth coat? He hurried up to it and began brushing the loose snow away. Animal or human, it was not moving. He ran his ungloved fingers across the exposed surface. It was cloth. Someone had crawled under a large woollen overcoat, or been left there. With a single thrust Marc pulled the coat up and tossed it aside. Below, encased in snow except where the coat had provided cover, lay a tiny human figure in homespun trousers, macintosh, and tuque, curled or clenched in the fetal position.
Gently, Marc rolled the body face up. It was a young woman. Her eyes were closed, and the skin on her cheeks cold. Marc placed two fingers to her throat. Nothing. He tried another spot and found a faint pulse. She was alive, barely.
To her credit the Widow Standish, as curious as any cat, asked no questions when Marc carried the half-frozen body of a young woman into her parlour and begged her to do whatever she could for her while he went
in search of a doctor. However, by the time Dr. Angus Withers arrived an hour later, there was nothing for him to diagnose or treat. A series of increasingly warm baths had revived the patient and restored a healthy heartbeat. She had even taken a few tablespoons of chicken broth before falling into a recuperative sleep on the sofa near the fireplace in the parlour. Miraculously, the only frostbite was on each of her exposed cheeks and the tip of her nose. A pair of mukluks, fur mittens, and the tuque had protected the other extremities. Maisie had already administered the appropriate ointment.
“I don’t think she could have been in that snowbank for more than three or four hours,” the doctor opined at the door. “But contrary to popular opinion, snow can be a kind of insulation. They tell me the Esquimaux live comfortably in snow-houses.”
Marc thanked Angus and went into the living-room. There was something familiar about the woman, and he wanted to be present when she woke up. “I’ll keep watch, Mrs. Standish. You and Maisie have had enough nursing for one day.”
“Very well, sir,” the widow replied, not quite sure if she ought to leave a man as handsome as Marc alone in a room with a female creature of unknown pedigree. But her reverence for the tunic won out. “Maisie and me’ll just be next door.”
“She’ll need to be moved to one of your guest-rooms, ma’am. I’ll pay for her board.”
“You’re the only guest we got at the moment. There’s plenty of space.”
“Thank you. By the way, did she say anything to you while you were helping bring her back?”
“Oh, yes, sir. Mind you, her voice was pretty weak, but she did talk.”
“And?”
“We didn’t catch a word of it. It was pure gibberish!”
* * *
Marc had dozed off. Supper had come and gone, and still the stranger slept, breathing deeply, her youthful body very much concerned to restore itself whatever the rest of her might wish. Mrs. Standish and Maisie had gone to bed. When Marc awoke from his pleasant cat-nap, the clock in the corner said 9:35. The fire had died down, but its embers still radiated a glowing heat. Three candle-lamps provided ample illumination. Marc pulled his chair up beside the sofa and examined the countenance of the sleeper.
She had thick black hair that, when fluffed out, would cascade in waves about her diminutive, heart-shaped face and caress her shoulders. Her facial features were similarly tiny, but beautifully proportioned. Even with the paleness that must have been the consequence of her brush with death, her complexion was dark. Her eyes, when they chose to reveal themselves, would be dark as well.
What on earth had she been doing out there at the edge of town? Had he passed her unknowingly on his way out to the fort? From her clothing, now tucked safely away, it was clear she was not impoverished. Two shillings had been discovered in her coat pocket. She was well fed and healthy looking: a young female in her prime. Yet she had not accidentally tumbled into those drifts. Her coat had been deliberately removed—by her or someone else—and she had curled herself up under it. To rest? Or to die?
Without warning the eyelids fluttered up, and a pair of black eyes peeped out—surprised, puzzled, wary—but very much alive. Marc stared. The eyes he was scrutinizing, and beginning to recognize, likewise began to focus in on the face before them.
“Isabelle LaCroix, n’est-ce pas?” he asked, hoping that his English-accented continental French would be understood.
Fear and astonishment contended in the look she gave him. “How do you know my name?” she asked in her own joual.
“Now we know each other’s name. It’s time, don’t you think?”
She hardly dared to take her gaze off him, but did manage to glance about once or twice. “How did I get in this place?”
“I found you in a snowbank.”
Tears overwhelmed her for several minutes. Marc offered her his handkerchief, which she refused with a curt nod. “What right had you to save me from what I wished to do?”
“I had no idea who you were when I put you into my sleigh and brought you here to my landlady’s house. It was Mrs. Standish and Maisie who brought you back to the living, not me.”
She looked down at Maisie’s flowered bathrobe. “I have no need to live.”
“I thought it was God’s prerogative to decide that sort of thing.”
She peered up through her tear-filled eyes and said, coldly, “There is no God.”
“I’ll make us some tea,” Marc said, starting to get up.
A small white hand shot out and grasped his wrist. “What do you intend to do with me?” she asked, suddenly afraid.
“You and I have unfinished business to discuss, haven’t we?”
As quickly as it had come, the fear vanished and was instantly replaced by a glint of the fire and the undiluted hatred she had flashed across the cabin just before the bullet struck his thigh.
“For example, why have you been trying to kill me?” he asked.
“You murdered my lover,” she said, spitting out the words.
“For that, I am truly sorry. I have been sorry every day since. But you know, as I do, that your lover had two pistols trained on me, one of which he fired while preparing to finish me off with the other.”
“You were going to burn down—” She didn’t complete the sentence. Her face crumpled. She dropped her head into her hands and wept.
Marc went to the kitchen, where Mrs. Standish had left a big kettle simmering on the wood-stove, and made tea. He filled two mugs and went back into the parlour.
Isabelle LaCroix had drawn her knees up and was resting her chin on them, with a woollen afghan wrapped around her legs. She had stopped crying. She took the mug of tea from Marc without looking at him, and sipped at it.
“I think it would be good for you if you just told me about it,” he said gently.
For a minute he thought she had decided to say nothing more, simply curl up inside herself as she had tried to do with her body in the snowbank. But after a while she started to talk, slowly and hesitantly at first, but soon with vigour and purpose. “My Pierre is dead, and I have ruined what was left of my life. In the cabin, I thought you were dead, too. If not, I would have done something terrible then and there. But his mama and I rushed over to him. You shot his voice away. He was trying to tell me he loved me, but you shot all the words away.”
“Tell me, please: did they burn down the house?”
The question seemed to startle her, interrupting the necessary flow of her own memories. “No,” she said. “They didn’t. I don’t know why. It’s still there. At least it was the day I left.”
Perhaps I was never meant to burn down houses, Marc thought.
“After they put Pierre into the ground, I went up to Sorel. I heard the stories of the hero of St. Denis. I found out who he was.”
“And you came, on your own, to Montreal? To find him and—?”
She looked over at Marc as if to say there was nothing unusual or surprising about what she had set out to do. “It was easy to get a job as an aide at the hospital. They paid us almost nothing, because we were French. At first they didn’t think you would live. Then you woke up. I tried to keep out of your sight until—”
“Until you got your chance. Then one night while I was still helpless, you tried to drive a bayonet through my chest.”
She looked at him again, but there was no hatred in her eyes now, just bewilderment, as if she had been living a nightmare and unexpectedly been awakened from it.
“Yes, but it was dark, and I was very afraid. The knife stuck in the wood. I couldn’t get it out right away. When I did, I dropped it and then just turned and ran. I never came back. I told the big nurse I was sick. After a couple of days she sent me away, without my pay.”
“And you need to tell me all this now.”
“What does it matter? My life is over. What was left after Pierre died is now gone.” She gave him a look that was half pleading and half rueful. “You should’ve left me to freeze.”
“But
how did you get all the way to Toronto, all these weeks later? You could not have been the one who shot at me near the river at Cornwall.”
“I went back home. I took my dowry, and I came back to Montreal. My parents begged me not to go. The priest railed against me. Pierre’s mama got down on her knees. But I had no life except to kill the one who killed my lover, then join him.”
“In purgatory?”
“In Hell,” she hissed, and the effort caused her to slump back against the embroidered pillows. Marc held the mug for her, and she drank.
“So you got a pistol?”
“No. I hooked up with a group of patriotes from Lachine. After that awful day up at St. Eustache, that was their only way of fighting back. We knew all about you. When you left the city, we were right behind you.”
“So it was they who set up the barricade, hoping I might wander a few steps too far from safety?”
“And you did, didn’t you? But it was snowing. The men were afraid of that officer in the fancy uniform. When the first shot missed, they ran straight back to the river.”
“But you didn’t.” It wasn’t a question.
“They would not go farther into English territory. I thanked them and went on alone.”
“But you are a woman and French-speaking. How could you survive and keep track of my movements?”
“I had money. And in the back concessions along the big river all the way to Gananoque, there are many French farms and woodlots. We have no difficulty recognizing one another.”
“But how could you explain being there on your own, an unmarried young woman?”
“I gave a story about cousins in Belle Rivière.”
Dubious Allegiance Page 24
