There was a slight bend up ahead. He put his paddle in the water to make sure the canoe handled the turn properly. That’s when he saw her.
Marni was by herself, crouching in the shallows by the bank. Her pale skin was more gold than he remembered, tanned by the sun of this place, and she’d woven her wheaten into a single braid that hung down over one shoulder. She had a basket under her arm, and it looked like she was washing whatever was in it in the water of the bayou. She looked up, startled when the prow of the canoe breached her vision.
“Pierre? C’es toi? Je n’ai pas pensé que—Oh.” It was a sound between a gasp and a sigh, as if the air had been forced out of her chest by a great weight. “Oh.”
“Hello, Marni.” Corm used the paddle to move the canoe toward the shore.
“Oh.” Then she simply stared.
There was a rope coiled in the bottom of the canoe. He picked it up and gestured toward one of the tall trees on the shore. “Aide-moi.”
She didn’t say anything, but after a time, when he thought he could hear his heart beating, or maybe hers, she nodded and stood up. She’d hiked the skirt of her dress up almost to her waist and her long legs were bare. He could see the droplets of water pearling on her thighs. They were almost the same color gold as her face. Did she go naked in this place? Like a squaw.
Marni left her basket on the shore and approached the canoe and stretched out her hand to take the rope. Their fingers touched when he gave her one end. She made that same breathy sound then quickly turned away and waded ashore. Corm fed her the slack and she looped the line around an overhanging branch and made it fast. He climbed out of the canoe and went ashore. “Aren’t you going to say anything to me? Not even, ‘Hello, Cormac’?”
“I …” She stopped, ran her tongue over her lips. “I didn’t …”
“You didn’t expect ever to see me again.”
“Not just that. I didn’t think you were real. Not until I touched your hand.”
He looked around at the landscape that was so different from the one where they’d been together. “It’s hard to know what’s real in this place.”
“How did you find me?”
“An old woman in my Potawatomi village—”
“Singing Snow?”
“Yes, Singing Snow.” He had forgotten how much he’d told her during those long winter nights when the whole world contained only the two of them. “Shabnokis. She told me the woman I was looking for ate kokotni, alligator. Had to be here.”
“I never ate an aliigator.”
“She didn’t mean ‘ate’ exactly. It was just a way of telling me where you were.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” Marni’s question startled him. He wasn’t sure exactly what she was asking. “I went to see her about something else, then she—”
“I meant why were you looking for me. Why now? It’s almost four years.”
“I never stopped looking.”
Marni shook her head. “Don’t lie. I waited. You didn’t come.”
“Yes, I did. The embers of your house were still warm when I got there. I found the curé, Monsieur Faucon the black robe. He had made a drawing of you standing on the ramparts at Halifax waiting for the British ship. He said he’d seen you just a couple of days before, but that you’d already left. In his picture, you were smiling.”
“I hated l’Acadie. You knew that.”
“Hated it so much you couldn’t wait another few weeks? I told you I would return. Why didn’t you trust me?”
“It had been six months since the banishing started. I knew you’d have heard about it. I figured if you were going to come, you’d have come by then.”
“You figured wrong.”
She turned away without answering, yanking down her dress so the skirt covered her legs. She picked up her basket. “Come to the house,” she said. “I’ll make you something to eat, then you must go.”
“Just like that? After I’ve come all this—”
Marni strode off, not listening to him. “Are you coming?” she called back. Corm followed her.
The house wasn’t far, but he’d never have seen it. It was tucked cleverly into the trees, and the clearing that served as a garden was in the rear. It wouldn’t be visible from the bayou unless you knew it was there.
Marni stopped before she opened the door. “How did you find me here?”
“I asked some Choctaw.” He reached out and touched her plait with one finger. “When I described the color of your hair, they knew exactly who I meant. Besides, they said there aren’t many white women around here.”
“A few whores,” Marni said. “Over by Bayou Septembre. They service the fishermen.”
She started to push open the door. Corm stopped her. “Is Pierre, a fisherman?”
“Non,” she said. “Pas un pêcheur. Pierre traps. Snakes mostly. Just now he has gone to Nouvelle Orléans to sell his skins. Of course, the war…”
She broke off, catching her lower lip in her teeth. He had seen that gesture a hundred times in his dreams. “Marni, I…”
“It was the war you expected, wasn’t it? The reason you could not stay with me but had to—”
A voice from inside the house stopped her words. “Maman! C’es toi?”
There were two little girls. Twins, Marni said. “Yvette and Cécüe.” Neither looked anything like her, nor did they look as young as they must be if—“Do not look so startled,” she murmured. “They are five. Their mother died when they were born. They were eighteen months old when I came.”
The one called Yvette took the basket from Marni’s hands and squealed with delight. “So many, Maman! We will have a feast.”
“Yes, a feast. This is Monsieur Shea. He is a friend from l’Acadie. He will eat with us. Go, get things ready. Vite!”
The children prepared the table. Marni made a kind of corn gruel cooked with some of the saladings from the garden out back, and boiled the creatures she had been gathering from the bayou when he first saw her. “Les écrevises.” She held up one that had turned bright red now that it was cooked and showed him how to strip away the shell. “It is the tails you eat. They are very good.”
Corm agreed that they were, but he could force down only a few, and a little of the gruel. His stomach was cold and knotted. The laughter of the little girls, the way they clung to her and the way she looked at them … He was not afraid of Pierre, the trapper of snakes. Not of any man. But Yvette and Cécile terrified him.
Marni looked at his half-eaten plate before she cleared it. “They will sleep soon. Then we will talk.”
At dusk, when the twins were settled in their bed, Marni led him back to the bayou. They sat with their backs against one of the trees, some ways distant from the water. “It is not safe at night,” she said. “That is when the alligators hunt.”
“What kind of a place is this? How did you get here?” He was asking a great deal more. They both knew that.
“The bayou, all Louisiana, is a forgotten place,” she told him. “The people who come here, they are forgotten people. France has, I think, less interest in them than they had in the people of l’Acadie, and that is certainly very little. The women are whores, mostly. The men are usually former prisoners who were sent here because no one knew what else to do with them. There are not enough whites to be a threat, so there is little trouble with the Indians.”
“This Pierre, he was a prisoner?”
Marni shook her head. “No, a settler. One of the few. His wife was pregnant with the girls when they made the crossing. It was very hard. Then, to bear two …”
“They are not your responsibility.” He knew how stupid the words were as soon as he spoke them, but he could not call them back.
“You know that is not true. A Choctaw squaw was their wet nurse for the first year. They were still babies when Pierre brought me here. I am the only mother they know.”
“How did you meet him?”
“The ship brought me first
to Providence from Halifax. I was sent to live with a woman who thought I was her slave. Fortunately I had taken money sewn into the hems of my cloaks when I left the farm. I used none of it to buy food or blankets on the ship. The others did, but not me.”
He did not ask how she had managed instead. Better not to know.
“I left Providence after two weeks. Eventually I got to Charleston.”
“I looked for you there. Two years ago I was in Carolina looking for you. I had heard some of the Acadians were there.”
“Two years ago I had already left. I met Pierre in Charleston. He had hoped to sell his skins for better money, but the war had dried up trade even there. He brought me here.”
“And in return you agreed to raise his children.”
“It was not like that.”
“This Pierre, do you—” Corm broke off. He did not want to know if she loved the snake trapper. “When you are together,” he said instead, his voice a fierce whisper, “is it like it was with you and me?”
“No, it is not.” Spoken softly, the words bearing no weight of inference. “It is different.” She lay beneath Pierre without moving, simply permitting him the freedom of her body. He asked for nothing more and she gave nothing more. So it had been with Jean, the first one, and the others, the men on the journey without whom she would not have survived. Only Cormac had been different. That is why when she saw him floating toward her on the bayou she had thought she was seeing a ghost. Because of all the fevered dreams, and the times after Pierre rolled off her when she shoved the bedclothes in her mouth to keep from wailing aloud her grief. “Pierre is my husband,” she said. “We were married by a priest in Nouvelle Orléans before we came here.”
“I thought you didn’t go to church.” It was the only thing he could find to say. Her words were like knives cutting his flesh, but there was too much Anishinabeg in him for him to allow the pain to show.
“Cormac Shea, listen to me.” She turned toward him, putting her hand on his arm, the first time she’d voluntarily touched him since he appeared. “I had two choices, wife or whore. I chose wife. Pierre is a good man. The children love me and I love them.”
“We could have had chi—”
“No, we could not. After you left, I prayed I was with child. I never pray, but I did then. I wanted something of you to be growing in my belly more than I have ever wanted anything in my life. It did not happen. Not then. Not before then. And it has not happened since. I am barren. Yvette and Cécille, they are a gift to me, from the Virgin perhaps. They are the only children I will ever have.”
There was just enough light left for him to see the tears streaming down her face. He touched them. She put her hand over his scar. They stayed like that a long few moments. Finally she said, “Take me. Then go.”
FRIDAY, JUNE 20, 1759
QUéBEC LOWER TOWN
As soon as the river was free of ice, Père Antoine adopted the custom of walking every day along the top of the cliffs. His destination was always the same, the place below the town where, to take the south channel and approach the harbor of Québec, a ship must pass between Ile d’Orléans and Ile Madame, the place of La Traverse. Why were there no new batteries on little Ile Madame? He was not a military man, but surely anyone could see that it was the perfect place for cannon to guard the channel. Why not at least some naval ships to patrol the river at this spot? Because they think it is impassible for warships, that without a local pilot no ship can navigate La Traverse, and that even with one, anything larger than a hundred tons is disallowed. But Montcalm knows better since I sent him the chart. Why is nothing happening?
Today is Friday. I am to hear the nuns’ confessions. I will have an answer.
The Delegate of the Franciscan Minister General ran back toward the Lower Town, brown robe flapping about his ankles.
“Bless me, mon Père, for my sins are many.” Nicole made the sign of the cross. “Twice this week I—”
“Why did you lie to me? Do you not know that by doing so you imperil your immortal soul?”
Père Antoine did not look at her, but his fury was evident even without the punishment of his burning gaze. Nicole made another hurried sign of the cross. Holy Spirit help me to find the right words. “Never, mon Père. About anything. I have never come into the confessional and lied to—”
“Ha! You think to trip me up by clever expressions and twisted arguments. I did not say you lied in confession. You lied when you told me you saw le marquis de Montcalm. You never met him. What did you do with the thing I gave you to give to him? Did you perhaps throw it in the river at Montréal and think no one would ever—”
“Mon Père, on my soul, on the souls of my dead parents, I gave the little tube directly into the hands of Monsieur le marquis. I saw him open it and study the—” She broke off. That was the one thing she had never admitted, how much she knew of what she had brought to Montréal.
“You are convicted out of your own mouth, Soeur Stephane. A busy man like monsieur le marquis, he would not keep you with him while he opened the thing I sent. He would go at once to a private room. You would be sent from his presence.” Père Antoine wanted to weep. It had been a huge mistake not to go himself to Montréal. He had allowed his fear of being seen and outfoxed by Louis Roget to cause him to make an enormous mistake. That he had made such an error in such circumstances was unthinkable. Worse, unforgivable. “For your penance, Soeur Stephane, you will take the discipline every night for a month alone in your cell. You will recite ten times the Miserere, and during the entire duration you will not cease to lash yourself and beg God and His Holy Mother and all the Saints to intercede for New France and make up what your cowardice—”
“I will do everything you say, mon Père, for I am certainly a sinner and deserve this penance. But I swear to you that in this matter I do not lie. I gave the thing you sent to monsieur le marquis. I saw him open it and study it. He had insisted that I stay and he had opened a bottle of wine. A Lafite Forty-nine. It was the most delicious wine I have ever tasted. Monsieur le marquis also told me about his estate in Provence. It is called Candiac and there he grows olives and almonds, but no grapes. He told me how they send the almonds to Montargis to be covered in sugar and how—”
“Mon Dieu! It is not possible.”
“But it is possible, mon Père. It is true. I swear to you, I—”
Behind the grille of the confessional Nicole saw the priest put his hand to his forehead. “I know,” he whispered. “How would you know such things if the marquis had not himself told them to you? And here in the confessional … I think you would not lie here, ma Soeur. It is the explanation I prefer, but it is not, I think, possible.”
“I would not take an oath and break it, mon Père.” Nicole shifted her weight slightly. Even for her, thin as she was, the confessional was so narrow that just entering it was a penance. Every one of her sisters was plump and round. So was Dear Abbess. How did they manage to be so on such a stingy diet? “Prefer to what, mon Père?”
“To the notion that knowing what he knows,” the priest whispered, “Montcalm does nothing. It means he does not want to do anything.”
Still worse was the news Antoine heard when he had finished confessing the Poor Clares and went out into the street. Tall ships flying the Cross of St. George had been spotted downriver of the Ile d’Orléans. The fleet stretched as far down the St. Lawrence as anyone could see.
“Tant pis, mon Père,” one of the fisherman told him, almost chuckling, but not, Antoine thought, with humor. “Cela ne fait rien. They will stay until it gets cold and the ice threatens and they must turn around and go home. They cannot pass La Traverse.” The man turned his head and hacked a globule of yellow phlegm into the gutter. His cheeks were sunken and his eyes red-rimmed. Three consecutive harvests had failed in Canada, and still Bigot fattened the quail for his table on pure wheat. In the town the habitants were rationed to four thin slices a day of bread that was three-quarters pea flour. “Le bon Dieu
protects us, non? Isn’t that what you priests always say? And if we die? What of it? Heaven is waiting, non?”
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 25, 1759
DOWNRIVER OF ILE D’ORLéANS
He was General Wolfe now, the hero of Louisbourg. A major general only in America and a brigadier general elsewhere, to avoid giving offense to all those officers so much older than he. But most important, he was the man Pitt had selected to lead the attack on Québec, even after the new general insisted on the unheard-of privilege of choosing his own staff for the expedition. Cock-of-the-walk, Quent thought, watching Wolfe standing at the forward end of HMS Richmond’s fo’c’sle, glass to his eye. He can’t help it. The haughtiness is bred into him.
Sometimes the slight figure turned right, toward the shore of the mighty citadel itself—Quent had no glass, but as far as he could tell the sheer cliffs were unbroken and unscalable. More often Wolfe looked straight ahead, studying the turbulent waters of La Traverse, blocking the only way to bring the fleet within shelling distance of the town. Wolfe snapped the glass dosed and turned to Admiral Saunders, in command of this mission as long as it was afloat. “So, sir? What plan?”
The cluster of officers standing near the two men didn’t actually press forward, but you could feel their intensity. They’re listening with both ears, Quent thought. Hell, so am I. In Christ’s name, what does he mean to do? If we bring that pilot we captured up here in chains, and expect he’ll—
“I don’t trust the Canadian pilot,” Saunders said “And I expect you don’t either, General.”
“The pilot has every reason to guide us well, Admiral. If we founder, he goes down with the rest of us.”
“Is there then no chance,” Saunders asked softly, “that he’s a patriot?”
“He’s a Canadian,” Wolfe said, as if that settled the matter.
And you, Quent thought, are an arrogant fool. Never mind that I’m here at your personal request. If it weren’t that Nicole were here, I wouldn’t be either. He dropped his glance, hoping his disgust wasn’t evident in his face. One of the men standing beside him cleared his throat. Quietly at first, then with more force. The admiral turned his head. “Yes, Cooke? You’ve something to add?”
Shadowbrook Page 58
