"Who would have believed," he said in a wondering tone, "that it would take so long?" He looked at her, and she felt as though his burning black gaze seared her with its passion. "And yet, in the eye of God, a day is the same as a century. You see, Madame, why it is I can't stop this now. For their sake, all those relatives in some future time, it must go on. It is my destiny."
Paige had no answer.
Today, Gigette told the women proudly that Louis was praying for the men engaged in battle, that he'd begun long before daybreak. He stood in front of the church in the cold, sleeting rain, a short distance away from the house where the women worked, his arms spread wide in the shape of a cross, his face lifted to the gray and lowering sky. He stood unmoving hour after hour, and when his arms tired and threatened to drop, friends came forward to hold them up for him.
The guns boomed and the cannons roared hour after hour. Louis Riel prayed, and the women used what little stores they had left to prepare a kind of stew while they waited.
Late in the afternoon, two wounded men were brought into the room Paige had set up as a surgery. The women gathered around to help, but also to hear the news of the battle. The wounds were not life threatening—one man had a bullet in his shoulder, the other in his thigh.
"Gabriel set the grass on fire; you should have seen the Anglais run when the smoke and flames came at them," one of the men reported, trying to chuckle even as Paige cut away the tattered skin around his wound. "It was a great victory," he gasped, his face chalky. "Gabriel had only a hundred and fifty soldiers, and there were hundreds of the Anglais, and still we won."
One of the men who'd carried the injured took up the story. "Gabriel told us to go under cover of the smoke and pick up ammunition and arms they left in their flight. We shouted and sang, so they would think there were many more of us than there were."
"How many of our men died?" Madeleine was the only one brave enough to ask the question, and the room was silent with dread as the men looked at one another and then away.
"Five, at last count."
"Who?" The whispered question came from Amelie, recently married to the boy she loved. She pressed a trembling hand over her mouth, her eyes huge with terror. "Please, who?"
"I think Isadore Theilbault was the only one from Batoche."
Isadore was a bachelor, and Paige saw the guilty relief on the faces of the women. "One was Indian, and two were Métis from Montana. The other was the old man, Armand LeClerc."
"Armand?" The suture she was holding slipped from Paige's fingers. She knew it was partly Armand's fault that she'd been abducted and brought here, but she couldn't bring herself to blame the old man. She could only remember how kind he'd been to her when she first arrived at Battleford, and how he'd planted and tended her garden, her flowers, all summer long.
Tears blurred her eyes and she swiped them away with her sleeve so she could see to sew up the incision she'd made to remove the bullet.
"May God bless and keep them all," Madeleine murmured, crossing herself. The other women followed suit.
When the tired soldiers came back to the village later that night, they were exultant. The women distributed the meager food, and Paige treated minor injuries, but no more bullet wounds.
"I attribute our success to Riel's prayers," Dumont shouted to the excited crowd that gathered outside the house that night.
Paige was inside, kneeling on the rug and gratefully sorting through a leather bag that held an assortment of medical supplies. The Métis men had found it on the battlefield, abandoned by a fleeing medical officer, and brought it back to her.
She turned and looked up with a smile at Madeleine. The other woman had brought her a chunk of fresh bread and a plate of stew.
"Thanks, Madeleine, but I'm not hungry." The pesky nausea that had troubled her for so long now made her stomach ache. Paige knew she'd lost weight the last while.
"You must force yourself to eat," Madeleine scolded. "How can you hope to bear a healthy child unless you eat? You know as well as I that the sickness will pass soon now, but you must keep up your strength."
Paige gaped at her in amazement. "A child? Oh, Madeleine, but I'm not preg—" The denial died in her throat, and she stared at the Métis woman, the medical part of her mind going over the symptoms that had troubled her ever since she'd first arrived at Batoche.
Nausea, fatigue, sore breasts, dizziness, bloating, bouts of crying. She hadn't had a period since December, but she'd never been regular anyway, so she'd put it down to the excitement of her marriage, and then to the trauma of being abducted.
Pregnant. It couldn't be. Other possibilities, grim and dire, flitted through her mind, but she rejected them one by one. None of them fit except—
She stammered, "I can't—I mean, there's just no way I could be."
But the doctors had never said it was impossible, had they?
They'd used phrases like "highly unlikely," and "very little possibility." She'd never bothered with birth control, but she'd never had much reason to back in the nineties. Her sexual encounters had been few and very far between.
Until Myles.
Her heart began to thunder and her hands moved to her abdomen. In spite of her thinness, there was a definite swelling there.
She began to shake uncontrollably. She got to her feet, and instantly felt dizzy. The world began to turn dark, and she felt Madeleine grab her, guide her to a chair, force her head down between her knees.
Paige slumped, boneless, while the world turned topsy-turvy around her. Gradually the faintness passed and she looked up at Madeleine.
The other woman was standing over her, supporting her, stroking her hair, her smile warm and her expression tender. "You really did not know, Madame Paige? And you a docteur?"
Paige's tears began slowly, gathering and slipping one by one down her cheeks. Madeleine reached into her bosom and withdrew the snowy handkerchief that was always hiding there, reaching over to wipe Paige's face with gentle strokes.
"You do not wish it to be, this child?" There was sadness in Madeleine's voice, a frown on her dark face. She drew up a chair and sat down, then took both Paige's hands in hers and held them.
"Oh, yes, I do, that's not it at all. Oh, Madeleine, I do, I do want this, more than I can tell you. See, I lost a baby, long ago, before—long before I came here to this time, and I thought—the doctors all told me that I couldn't have another."
Madeleine smiled and gave her philosophical shrug. "So, the docteurs, even in your time, they do not always know everything."
Paige tried for a shaky smile. "That's certainly true."
"I, too, lost my babies." Madeleine's voice was soft. "Two babies, each of them lived no more than a day." She opened a tiny locket that she always wore, and showed Paige a few strands of fine hair. "This is all I have of them." She closed the locket again and tucked it inside the neckline of her dress.
Paige reached out and squeezed the work worn, callused hand. "It's so painful, losing a child. I can't even imagine how hard it would be, losing two."
Madeleine nodded. "Gabriel and I, we both wanted children so much. But it is God's will."
"I wish I could be as philosophical as you are about death."
"Each of us comes to it in our own way, in our own time." Madeleine smiled at her. "But this is no time for you to be thinking of death. This enfant will be fine, I feel it in my bones."
"I certainly hope your bones are right." Paige drew a deep, shaky breath, trying to curb the anxiety that was building in her.
She wasn't about to tell Madeleine how unlikely it was that the baby would survive. She was far too good an obstetrician to fool herself.
The stark truth was that there was a very real possibility that this pregnancy would mean her own death as well as the child's—because of the complications of her first delivery, the birth would have to be cesarean section, and, if she came through this rebellion alive, Myles would have to perform it.
She'd hemorrhaged the
first time, needing blood transfusions. Even with the most modern of facilities, her baby had died.
What possible chance of survival did either of them have in this place and time, when cesarean section was practically unheard of, and blood transfusions not yet dreamed of, except by her?
Overwhelmed, terrified, she curled forward, her hands cradling the tiny life she and Myles had created, the life she would give anything in her power to save—even at the cost of her own.
A baby. She and Myles had started a new life with their love for one another. She longed as never before for her husband, to share this miracle with him, whatever the outcome. Her need for him became a kind of agony.
"Myles," she moaned aloud. "Oh, Myles, I need you now, I need you so terribly."
"Shhh." Madeleine stroked her hair, drawing Paige's head down to rest in her lap. "Soon now, this war will be over. The Métis won today, a great victory. They will win again, and the Anglais will retreat. The government will recognize our people, and there will be peace."
Her voice took on the note of tenderness and pride it always held when she spoke of her husband. "Gabriel has told me this. He has also promised me no harm will come to you. You are a hostage; always the Métis take hostages in their wars, as a means of bargaining. But you will be returned safely to Battleford, to your husband, as soon as this final battle is won. Gabriel has given his word." Madeleine was wrong. Paige thought of the final, bloody battle to be fought here at Batoche, the one she remembered from the history books, and a cold foreboding made her shudder. There was a good chance they'd all die in this battle of Batoche. The Métis would lose, Riel would hang for his dreams, Gabriel would flee to the United States— she racked her brains, trying to remember if she'd ever read what had become of Madeleine, but no memory surfaced. She had to try to stop this, Paige thought frantically. She'd once told Myles that history couldn't be changed, but maybe she'd been wrong. She had to make one last effort at convincing Louis Riel he must surrender now, before that final, bloody defeat that history decreed.
She raised her head from Madeleine's lap and got to her feet.
"I have to talk to Louis right now."
Madeleine looked at her, frowning. "He is out there with the people; he is still making speeches."
"I'll wait."
There had to be a way to make him see reason. She simply had to get back to Battleford alive.
She talked to Riel that night, quietly at first, relating again exactly what she remembered from the history books about the Batoche battle, the bloodshed, the final surrender of the Métis.
Riel had remained unmoved. "We must go on," was all he would say.
She lost her temper finally and screamed at him that he would be hanged if he went on with the rebellion. He looked at her then and smiled, the sad, accepting smile of a martyr.
"Of course I will be hanged, Madame," he said as though he were speaking to a child.
"Well, great, go ahead and commit suicide if that's your choice," she raged. "Just don't take the rest of us with you. You may want to die, but you have no right to make these women and children suffer because of your mad schemes. You have two children of your own, Gigette will have your third at any time, you must evacuate the town now, send the women and children away someplace safe."
He simply closed his eyes and began to pray, his response to almost everything. She felt like hitting him over the head with something heavy.
Louis Riel, she reminded herself too late, was mentally ill, probably schizophrenic. Reason simply didn't work with him.
Seventeen days later, frightened half to death and crouched on a cold dirt floor beside a suffering Gigette, Paige thought despairingly of the things she'd told Riel that night, wondering what else she might have said to make him see reason.
Probably nothing, she concluded in despair.
After her appeal to Riel, twelve days passed in ominous silence at Batoche.
The Métis celebrated, certain that they'd vanquished the enemy. Then the scouts came running with the news that the English general was advancing on the village with 850 soldiers.
Gabriel mustered his army of 250, a pitiful collection of old men, boys, Indians, and his faithful buffalo hunters. Short of ammunition, but wise in the tricks of plains warfare, Dumont had miraculously repulsed the invading army for two days now. His men resorted to firing horseshoe nails and even stones from their muskets.
The women and children, Paige among them, were sent to hide in sand caves along the banks of the wide Saskatchewan River.
At night when the guns were silent, many of the women and all of the older children crept out to collect spent bullets on the battlefield, spending the midnight hours crouched over smoking fires, melting the metal into balls for their husband's muskets the next day.
Hungry, coughing endlessly, never complaining, they worked through the cold nights in spite of their pain and fatigue.
Paige could have wept at their bravery, except that her tears had dried up. Once again, she was numb, her emotions locked away in some safe place where tragedy couldn't touch them.
In the small, damp cave on the banks of the river, on the third morning of the siege, Gigette Riel went into labor.
Now and Then: Chapter Twenty-One
It was now past midnight. The pains had been coming at two-minute intervals for more than eight hours, and at last Paige felt Gigette was about to deliver.
She and Madeleine were alone with her. The other women had taken the children to sleep in a second, larger cave a short distance away after making what meager preparations they could for the birth. A small fire burned in one corner of the cave, and the smoke was nearly choking Paige. Shadows flickered like eerie ghosts on the walls, and from somewhere nearby, coyotes howled.
"Push, Gigette." Madeleine held the young woman's hands, and Paige crouched at the foot of the pallet, between her legs.
"I can't." The soft denial was followed by a moan as another pain began.
"I can see your baby's head, you should see all this lovely dark hair he has, one more good push and he'll be here," Paige pleaded. "Come on, Gigette." She raised her voice and ordered in a stern tone, "One good push, right now."
A sense of unreality filled Paige. Lord, what was she doing, delivering a baby in a cave? This girl belonged in a hospital, she couldn't draw a deep enough breath to push, she'd coughed up quantities of blood in between contractions, her heartbeat was so erratic Paige was terrified she was going to die during the delivery. Gigette's agonizing moan rose in volume and slowly became a scream.
"Push, that's good, great, again, Gigette, push."
The baby's head appeared, the small body slowly rotated into position, and with the next contraction, the tiny girl was propelled into Paige's waiting hands.
She didn't cry, and Paige worked over her with the familiar desperate intensity, blowing breath into the fragile body, elated when at last the infant gave a weak, wavering cry.
But all Paige's efforts were useless, after all, because within two hours of her birth, Riel's baby died.
For long hours after that, shivering in the damp chill of the early morning hours, Paige fought to keep Marguerite from accompanying her daughter.
Shortly after daybreak, she was reasonably sure that Gigette would live, but the sight of the baby's body, lying on a blanket on the ground in the dimly lit cave, tore her heart in pieces. She felt utterly defeated, drained of every bit of energy and hope.
Madeleine had washed the tiny girl and wrapped her in a clean, soft square of flannel.
"I wish I could have saved her," Paige whispered to Madeleine as they cleaned up as best they could. "There should have been something I could have done to save her."
Madeleine shook her head. "Hush," she ordered sternly. "You are not God. You did the best you could, the best that anyone could have done; that is all any of us can ask of ourselves."
She gave the baby to the mother, and Madeleine reached out a hand and gently stroked the tiny l
ifeless bundle Gigette cradled against her chest. Gigette's slow, exhausted tears dripped down on the small, still face.
As always, memories of her own baby girl, long ago and far away, came rushing into Paige's mind, and for a moment it felt as if the agony of her loss were fresh and new as she looked at Gigette's baby.
She knew that Madeleine too was grieving silently for her little lost children, but strangely, neither of them cried.
Perhaps, Paige thought in wonder, they'd each cried long and hard enough. Maybe now something in each of them realized the wounds had healed, that only scar tissue remained.
For the first time, Paige felt she wasn't alone in her grief. When her own child had died, and later each time she'd lost a baby, she'd always felt isolated, guilty, terribly alone.
Here, in this dismal cave, there was comfort. She felt the solace of unity, and it was healing.
Outside the cave, the sound of the river was steady and somehow soothing. The guns' intermittent bursts seemed unimportant and far away, part of a violent male universe of war and bloodshed.
For these few moments, here in a dismal cave, women were united in a ritual older even than war, of birth and death and sorrow and, finally, acceptance.
After a time, Madeleine took the baby's body and laid it on a blanket in a corner. She stirred up the small fire and boiled some water. She made tea, and the three women drank it.
There was absolutely nothing to do but wait for the battle to be finished. On her pallet, Gigette fell into a deep, exhausted slumber, and Paige and Madeleine talked softly, easily, women's talk about their families, their friends, their lives, words that brought smiles to their faces, and took them away from the harsh reality of the cave and the battle and the dead baby.
At dusk that day, Gabriel slipped through the narrow opening at the mouth of the cave, carrying a bag of provisions and some blankets. Madeleine spoke to him in French in a quiet voice and gestured at the baby's body, and he shook his head and crossed himself, holding out his arms. Madeleine moved close to him. He clasped her tight, patting her back with his hand in a clumsy gesture of solace and affection.
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