Blood Brothers in Louisbourg

by Philip Roy

  I ran over to the Native and tried to raise him but he was too heavy for me and I was too weak. At least I could see that he was alive and that he was real, not a ghost at all. I wished I could have helped him, but Celestine was screaming for me to come.

  “Good luck, my friend!” I said to him, squeezed his hand and ran away.

  —

  The acting Governor surrendered after the night of terror. There were few people willing to stay in the fortress any longer, especially as there were no signs of ships coming from France. The English had created an effective blockade, and so even if ships did arrive from France they would not have been able to enter the harbour. M. Duchambon held out as long as he felt was diplomatically necessary. Then we were put on board the English navy’s finest ship, in all manner of comfort, and carried back to France, via England.

  —

  It was a surprisingly pleasant voyage. The ship cut through choppy waves as it cleared the harbour and headed northeast into the Atlantic. Strong winds carried us in an arc all the way to England. It was a large ship with fine windows and comfortable berths. M. Anglaise, Celestine and myself were given cabins. We would be taken to England first, and from there given in exchange for English nobility held in France. I found the ship very comfortable, the food decent enough and the company of the captain, in particular, quite agreeable. He was well educated, fluent in the French language, highly opinionated and fond of the music of Handel.

  M. Anglaise also found our accommodation and treatment very acceptable. He had expected nothing less. Celestine, on the other hand, was in a dark mood the entire first week. She seemed to resent that her father and I were enjoying the Captain’s company so much.

  “How can you talk to him so?” she asked bitterly.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Why not?”

  “Because they are evil,” she said under her breath. “They killed our people. They killed your father for Heaven’s sake! I hate the English!”

  I didn’t know what to say. I knew there were good and bad people on both sides. I believed that the person most responsible for the death of the people at Louisburg was the one who had started it all in the first place – the King.

  But I was sorry my father had died. I wished I didn’t have to bring this news home to my mother. Something else was starting to bother me too, though I sensed this was just the beginning of coming to grips with my father’s death. I realized that I had never played the violoncello for him. He had always been away or too busy. Now, I would never have the chance. I couldn’t help but wonder: if he had heard me play, would it have made any difference? Would it have changed anything? Would he have recognized in my love for music something akin to his love for weapons and war? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the thought haunted me because now, I would never know. Death was final.

  I had been deeply impressed by his courage in battle. I wished I could have told him that. It was something he had that I didn’t have. We might have had a conversation about it, I thought. And then I wondered about his body. The soldiers’ bodies had been left on the field. M. Anglaise told me that the English would bury them. It was part of the etiquette of war. The captain assured me this was true. That helped, although not being there to witness it bothered me. I felt I should have been there when my father’s bones were laid in the ground.

  There were so many other things I would have liked to discuss with him. Would he have liked that? Would he have respected me when I was older? I wished I knew. People have said that we carry regret not for what we have done, but for what we have failed to do. I never shed a tear on the day my father died. Now, on our way back home, in the privacy of my own cabin, my tears began to fall. But they were not tears for all that had happened. They were tears for what might have and now never could.

  After a week at sea, Celestine’s mood began to lift. We brought out the violoncello when the captain learned that we could play. The bridge had been destroyed on our flight from the residence so he had the ship’s carpenter fashion a new one. The irony of this Atlantic crossing, compared with my first one, was not lost on me as I rosined up the bow and entertained our host with the music of Bach and Handel. After much coaxing, Celestine also agreed to play, to her father’s great pleasure. I was surprised to see that she had taken off my mother’s pendant and was wearing a necklace made of a bear claw, wild but pretty. As I passed the violoncello to her she put something into my hand and whispered, “I think this belongs to you more than me.”

  In my hand I found my mother’s pendant. I stared pleadingly into Celestine’s eyes, begging to know how she knew that. How could she know? Had she known all along? She dropped her eyes and turned her face away. “Thank you,” I whispered. She nodded without looking at me.

  “Such exquisite playing on my ship this evening,” said the captain. Then, eyeing the bear-claw necklace, he said, “What a fine piece of Native jewellery.”

  He turned to me. “Tell me, Jacques. You have spent a whole year in the New World. Would you describe it as a savage place?”

  I thought about it. “I suppose so, sir, though the worst savagery I have witnessed here is the savagery of war, and I do believe that we brought it with us.”

  “Indeed.”

  As Celestine began to play, I thought of my ghost. I wondered where he was now. What was he thinking about? Had he seen us leave? Did he know we would never come back? Had he chance to speak with Celestine before the end? How I wished I knew. And would I ever see him again? No. I knew I wouldn’t. I was going home and I would never come back.

  Epilogue

  The deer stood alone in the clearing, a buck with an imposing set of antlers. He sniffed the air, suspicious of something. Two-feathers reached for an arrow. Behind him, five little heads crouched. Having practised invisibility in the fortress, they were learning invisibility in the woods.

  “Now,” whispered Two-feathers, “we apologize to the deer and thank him for giving us his life.”

  The children nodded in agreement. Then one of them said, “But he hasn’t given us his life yet. Why are we thanking him for it already?”

  “Because he is going to,” whispered Two-feathers.

  “How do you know?” asked the child.

  “Because I am going to shoot him now.”

  But when Two-feathers looked up, the buck was gone. It took two more hours to track him again. This time the children agreed not to say anything but to make their prayers silently in their heads. As they furrowed their brows and concentrated hard, Two-feathers fitted his arrow and let it fly. The arrow pierced the front left flank of the buck and he dropped to his knees. A second arrow immediately followed and brought the buck down. Two-feathers shot a third into the neck. Too many times he had seen a fallen deer rise to its feet and bolt. Running over, he stabbed the heart to make certain the suffering was over. Then he dropped his head in gratitude. The children came and admired the deer.

  “He is so beautiful.”

  “It is sad that he had to die.”

  “It is not sad,” said Two-feathers. “We all die. Then we live as spirits. Then we are always happy. So it is not sad to die.”

  “Tell us more about the spirits,” said the children.

  “Tonight, while we eat our supper I will begin to tell you about them.”

  He hung the buck from a tree and let the children watch as he skinned it. The hide, he explained, would make very comfortable clothing for the fall. They would all need some. He also took the antlers and pieces of bone for making needles and various other tools. He cut as much meat as he felt they could eat, and some to carry, then burned the carcass in a fire, intending to place the bones in the river the next morning. The children watched everything with fascination.

  When they returned to their teepee it was dark. The children huddled together in the bearskin as Two-feathers began to roast their supper over the
fire. The boy with the black case opened it and pulled out a smooth wooden instrument with strings. He also took out a stick tied with horsehair. Two-feathers watched curiously as the boy twisted one end of the stick and fitted the instrument between his chin and shoulder. He raised his arm and laid the stick across the strings. Tapping his foot three or four times, he slipped the stick back and forth and the instrument began to sing. Two-feathers stood up. He was amazed. This was the music he had heard trading parties and soldiers play in the woods. It was wonderful. On and on the boy played, with a skill that impressed Two-feathers greatly. The children smiled and sang along, and eventually they got up and danced.

  “What is it called?” Two-feathers asked them.

  “A fiddle,” said the children.

  “How do you play it?”

  The boy handed the fiddle to Two-feathers and showed him how to hold it and how to draw the bow across the strings. But the sound he produced was weak and scratchy. The children laughed. Two-feathers smiled and handed the instrument back. “I will hunt,” he said to the boy, “and you will play. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” said the boy.

  After they ate, the children sat around the fire and listened as Two-feathers explained how all of the animals and plants had spirits. Even the rivers had spirits, he said, and the wind and the rain. There were spirits everywhere, all of the time. They were always there and you could talk to them. But you had to learn to be very, very quiet if you wanted to hear them talking back. There were many things that he could teach them himself, such as how to hunt and cook, how to sew and fashion baskets and canoes, how to build shelters and survive in the winter. But there were many more things that only the spirits could teach them, and for that they would have to learn to listen, each in his or her own way.

  The children listened carefully because Two-feathers only spoke when he had something interesting to say. But one question would always lead to another. There was one thing in particular the children wanted to know. The oldest put it into words.

  “Two-feathers, if we are not French, and we are not Mi’kmaq, then who are we?”

  Two-feathers took a stick out of the fire and pointed to two stars in the sky. “We are some of both,” he said, “and we are neither.” Then he pointed to a third star burning brightly. “We are something new.”

  The End

  Acknowledgements

  I have received so much support and good advice on the writing of this book from family and friends. In particular I want to acknowledge my mother, Ellen; my daughter, Julia; and sons, Peter and Thomas. I also want to mention Lydia Race, who has been such an enthusiastic reader of the story; and greatest friends, Chris, Natasha and Chiara, who put a smile on everything. I would like to acknowledge my friends, Diana, Maria and Sammy; Dale and Jake; Hugh; my dear Zaan; and my darling Leila (and Fritzi). Mike Hunter at CBU has given terrific guidance, and I am indebted to the sharp eye and critical pen of Kate Kennedy.

  An Acadian-Mi’kmaw Background

  Ten generations ago, my ancestor, Jean Roy du Laliberté, sailed from St. Malo, France, to the land that would eventually become Nova Scotia. At Cap-Sable, the most southwestern tip of the peninsula, he married Marie (Christine) Aubois (Dubois), a woman of Maliseet blood, or, as she is listed in the historical record, “Amérindienne.” Their marriage was registered on the 3rd of March, 1706. They were no spring chickens; he was fifty-five and she was forty-one. In fact, Marie had borne nine children by then, though one of them had died. It was common for a marriage to be registered years after it actually took place. It was also common for a French soldier to take a wife from the Mi’kmaq, or neighboring Maliseet people. It gave them considerable advantage in the New World.

  It is difficult to imagine any physical likeness to Jean or Marie after so many generations – the blood has been thinned by some fiercely individualistic Scottish and Irish farmers – yet the heritage is there; the name is there. If you go back a generation or two in family photos, you see Métis blood in the faces there.

  It seems that the older we get the more interest we take in people who came before us – they walked the same soil, climbed the same hills, trekked through the same woods and stared at the ocean from the same beaches. Did they ever wonder about us, as we might wonder about those who will come after us? Perhaps they did from time to time, though they must have been preoccupied with the business of survival, and they must have been very tough because this was a rugged place before there were roads and railways, electricity and modern medicine. Now, we have the leisure to look back and study them, write about them, dramatize them – yet behind the dramas that we create are individuals who really stood here in this place and made a claim upon it. The longer one contemplates this, the more remarkable it becomes.

  My mother’s people were Scottish and Irish. Her paternal ancestors made the trip from Scotland in the 1780s aboard the Hector, a rather small, fat, aged sailing ship that has been replicated and sits in the water as a museum in Pictou Harbour, Nova Scotia. My mother’s people –staunch Catholics – settled in the Protestant community of Pictou, where they adopted the Protestant faith just long enough to get the wherewithal to move to Cape Breton, reclaiming their Catholicism and setting roots. My grandfather, Joe (Big Joe) MacDonald, heralds from Troy, Cape Breton.

  In my research for this novel I came upon an interesting item in J. S. McLennan’s celebrated book Louisbourg: From its Foundations to its Fall. Among the ships McLennan lists as having supported the 1745 siege of Louisbourg is the Hector. She was a much younger ship then. A generation after helping defeat the French and allies – my father’s ancestors – she would carry my mother’s people to the same land. This is exactly the kind of coincidental historical fact that tweaks my imagination. Come to think of it, there’s probably a whole novel in that.

  P.R.

  About the Author

  Philip Roy was born and raised in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. He studied music with Sister Rodriquez Steele and Professor James Hargreaves and aspired to a career as a pianist. After graduating from high school, he left Antigonish to work and travel. As a young man, he returned to the study of piano with Oriole Aitchison in Halifax, where he also began composing music. After getting married, Philip moved to Ontario and devoted his time to raising his children, later returning to school and degrees in history at University of Waterloo and McMaster University. Master’s degrees in hand, he moved to the island of Saipan in Micronesia, where he taught English and history in a high school for two years. Following that, he returned to Canada and settled for a time in Ontario, teaching piano.

  The lure of his home province eventually brought Philip back to Nova Scotia, where he began writing young adult novels and stories for children. In 2008, his first novel, Submarine Outlaw, was published by Ronsdale Press of Vancouver. The fifth book in the series, Outlaw in India, will be released at the same time as Blood Brothers in Louisbourg. Philip currently lives in Halifax, where he continues to write novels and compose music.