Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  “Above all, one must live for oneself,” Marie-Dominique repeated over and over; this was her maxim. “Others will not go to the trouble of looking after someone else’s pleasure.” Marie-Dominique had been the youngest child in the large Saint-Christophe family, in which many children died. In the end only she and Edwige and Philippe remained alive. Marie-Dominique was five years younger than Philippe, who was himself five years younger than Edwige.

  The two girls were greatly attached to Philippe. By way of their mother they were distantly related to the Bourbons, and through their father to a hero of France who, though bleeding to death himself, stripped off his own armor and carried his wounded king, Philippe VI, across the River Maye after the French had lost the Battle of Crécy and some twenty thousand men-at-arms to English archers. The king made his rescuer a member of the nobility as Sieur de Saint-Christophe, an obscure but fertile estate at the edge of the Marais, the great swamp near the mouth of the Seine. The heir to this estate was always christened Philippe.

  “The men of our family were probably larger in 1346, as the Viking blood was less mixed with the French,”

  Marie-Dominique said, “but all the same, it’s a wonder they didn’t both drown. One can see our Philippe doing the same sort of thing, can’t one?”

  The family was not well-off. The conquest of Normandy by Henry V had deprived them of most of their lands, and ancestors who inherited the original Saint-Christophe’s quality of blind loyalty had fought on the wrong side in most internal French wars. Somehow Louis XIV had heard about the heroism of the original Saint-Christophe at Crécy nearly 350 years before and appointed the present head of the family, Philippe’s father, to a post in the army as a belated royal reminder to less audacious Frenchmen of how kings once were loved in France.

  That action led to a meeting between the Sieur de Saint-Christophe and the Comte de Vallier and eventually to the successive marriages between him and the Saint-Christophe daughters. Because both families were members of the noblesse d’epée, the ancient branch of the French aristocracy that had won its titles through feats of arms, the match was suitable if not particularly advantageous to either.

  In some generations, Marie-Dominique said, it was enough to hold one’s own—except that the Saint-Christophes, in the same generation as herself and Edwige, had brought forth Philippe, the precise individual that thirty generations of breeding had been designed to produce.

  Everyone in the family recognized Philippe’s uniqueness. Almost from birth, he could do anything—ride, shoot, run, leap, make anyone fall in love with him. Yet he was quiet, modest, and loving, a mysterious mixture of soldierly and saintly qualities. When Edwige, at the age of seventeen, married Armand de Grestain and went with him to New France, she took Philippe along. Their father agreed with Grestain that it would be a good thing for the boy to live for a while in the wilderness, so that he would understand with his entrails as well as his mind and heart what wonders the French had wrought.

  Philippe was twelve, already a cadet, and Grestain sent him to serve in the small garrison at Chambly on the Richelieu River. There he met Father Nicolas Laux, who acted as his tutor as well as his confessor. From boys in the Indian villages, including Used to be Bear, he learned woodcraft and the tongue-twisting, mind-bending dialect of Algonquian spoken by the Abenakis. He was already a first-class archer and a quick, aggressive wrestler. A coureur des bois who had killed seventeen Iroquois and possessed the wonderful name Aurélien Veron taught Philippe to shoot. He was too young to accompany the first expedition to Alamoth, but he had watched the captives come back and heard the Abenakis’ stories about the raid.

  Father Nicolas perfected his Latin by dictating accounts in that language of the atrocities committed by the Iroquois against the French. Father Nicolas himself had been hung by his feet from the beams of his church by Iroquois who then set the church on fire. One of the Indians, evidently a secret Christian, gave the little Jesuit a knife at the last minute and so he was able to escape and flee down the Saint Lawrence to Montreal.

  When Edwige was raped and murdered by the Iroquois at La Chine, where she happened to be visiting a friend, and her baby was carried away, Philippe was allowed by his brother-in-law to join the party of soldiers and Abenakis who were sent in pursuit. At campsite after campsite they found the flayed corpses of French men, women, and children, more than a hundred in all, tied to stakes, pegged to the ground, flayed and hung from the trees like wild game. Any number of the slaughtered children might have been Philippe’s small nephew; it was impossible to identify people of any age whose skin had been completely removed. It was August, and as the French proceeded through the forest, they came to know when they were approaching a place where the Iroquois had amused themselves by the loud buzzing of the flies.

  “Philippe cannot bear the sound of flies buzzing to this day,” Marie-Dominique told Fanny. “Of course he hates the English, too, who sent the Iroquois to attack La Chine, and that is why it was so disturbing to him, that day in Honfleur, to realize that the angel of the fishes might be an English girl. How could there be an English angel? Then, of course, we learned the truth through espionage.”

  Through espionage, the Grestains also knew about Fanny’s musicality and took advantage of it. They possessed the usual keyboard instruments, and also a very fine violin signed inside the body by the same Italian, Nicolò Amati of Cremona, who had made Fanny’s viola d’amore. When there was company in the Hôtel de Vallier Fanny played and sang. The French loved Fanchon’s old songs and even Armand sang along with Fanny, damp-eyed and homesick, on the tenderest lines, such as Vivray-je toujours en soucy and Coulez dans une paix profonde, coulez moments delicieux.

  Even soupirants dressed well in Quebec, and after the drab butternut hues of Puritan Boston and Alamoth, the sight of iridescent silk gowns and swelling bosoms, with beauty spots pasted onto the swell, and powdered wigs in the reception rooms of the Hôtel de Vallier made Fanny remember the theater in Drury Lane. Owing to Grestain’s meager hospitality, the French were never drunk, but they would have looked to Edward Ash as though they ought to be. Thanks to Marie-Dominique’s seamstress, Fanny was dressed very much like the others, of course, except that no one had ever seen a necklace like hers.

  The governor had an ear for Italian music and a knowledge of Italian musical instruments, and when he came to the Hôtel de Vallier he wanted to hear Corelli played on the Amati. Fanny played the violin parts of all the music she had memorized. Because Henry had ordered so much music from Italy, the governor, Philippe de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil, listened not only to Corelli but also to Vitali, Landi, Stradella, Cavalli, and others.

  He wanted to hear more. Fanny’s arms were tired and the tips of her fingers were swollen.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know any more, Excellency,” she said.

  “Tell his excellency about the porcupines, Fanny,” said Marie-Dominique.

  “I know all about the porcupines,” the governor said. “Surely you have music written down on paper.”

  “Of course we do, my dear marquis,” said Grestain, who was always eager to accommodate Rigaud because he was his superior in noble as well as administrative rank. “A whole drawerful of it. Give it to the young lady, madame, if you please.”

  Marie-Dominique called the servant, who brought a stack of music to Fanny on a silver tray. She took the piece from the top, a trio sonata in manuscript. She had never seen this music before, but reading as she played, she went through the 166 bars of two slow movements and two quick ones while Marie-Dominique turned the pages. It sounded vaguely like Corelli.

  As soon as she was finished, Marie-Dominique whisked the pages away as if to protect her from requests for yet another encore. There was something written at the bottom of the last page, and as the manuscript was not signed and Fanny had never before heard or seen the music, she took it back out of Marie-Dominique’s hand. She had to tug to retrieve it.

  “Marvelous,” the governor was sa
ying heartily. “What music is that?”

  Fanny read the inscription. Written in English in a large youthful hand, it read: “To H. Harding, Gentleman, this poor composition, written by his generous commission in honor of his daughter’s birthday, from his most grateful and admiring friend, Giovanni Ravenscroft.”

  “Marie-Dominique,” Fanny said. “What is this?”

  “Espionage,” Marie-Dominique whispered, smiling brightly. She pulled the score gently from Fanny’s hand and gave it to the governor.

  “Here, Excellency,” she said, “perhaps you’d like to run your eye over the score.”

  2

  “Listen,” Fanny said to Marie-Dominique on the morning after the musical soiree, “I want to know how you happen to possess a musical score that belonged to my father.”

  Marie-Dominique was still in bed with her hair inside her nightcap and the pages of the long letter she was writing to someone in France scattered on the coverlet.

  “It’s very important to write amusing things to people at court when you’re out of sight in Canada,” she said. “That way everyone laughs at your jokes, even when you’re not at Versailles, and tells them to the king, and when you come back they think you’re amusing no matter what you say. I’m just writing about your porcupines—it takes days to get it right.”

  Fanny was not distracted. “I want to know everything,” she said.

  “Everything?” Marie-Dominique said. “That’s quite a lot. The violin belongs to you too.”

  “The violin? What else?”

  “Philippe should tell you the rest. He’s the one who took the game so seriously.”

  “The game? What game?”

  “The family game,” Marie-Dominique said. “It’s called Spy. Philippe will kill me for telling you, but I owe something to my own sex, and you won’t stand a chance against him when you’re lovers unless you know how to play.”

  The wind shook the windows in Marie-Dominique’s bedchamber. She opened the feather bed.

  “Get in,” she said. “You’ll freeze if you stay out there.”

  At the time that Fanny went to Honfleur in search of the Pamela and Philippe saw her for the first time, Marie-Dominique was a bride of eighteen for whom time was passing very slowly.

  “I became pregnant at once, on the first night—so much for Armand,” she said to Fanny as they lay side by side under the feather bed. “There were only five people in all of Normandy with whom Armand would dine, and they all had very old wives who drove me mad with advice and tales of deformed babies and dead mothers. If Philippe hadn’t been living with us as Armand’s adjutant, I would have gone mad.”

  The Saint-Christophe children had always played games, with Edwige and Marie-Dominique seeing the chance for amusement and concocting the situations, and Philippe, with his charm and his physical prowess and his male freedom, acting them out.

  “The best game was Spy,” Marie-Dominique said. “We invented it when Armand came to inspect Edwige before he married her.”

  They did not like Grestain and told their parents so; their parents, called Sieur-et-Dame by their children, replied that they, the children, knew nothing about Grestain.

  “Very well,” said Edwige to her siblings, “we’ll find out all about him; I doubt that Sieur-et-Dame know as much about this fellow as they should.”

  Spy was invented on the spot. To play it, one needed an Enemy of France, a Plot, and, of course, a Spy. Grestain became the first Enemy of France; the Plot was his suit for Edwige’s hand. The Spy, always referred to in the singular in order to confuse the enemy, was in fact the three children, together with their network of agents and collaborators.

  “You can’t imagine the fun,” Marie-Dominique said, “secretly observing the Enemy of France, reading his mail, suborning his servants, questioning his friends, inquiring into his finances, and putting everything into a dossier from which his true intentions could be deduced at secret meetings.”

  From Grestain’s manservant, who kept his master’s accounts, Philippe discovered that Edwige’s suitor was a miser for the best of all possible reasons—he had no money. From his letters, stolen by Edwige’s maid, they learned that he had an Italian mistress called Luisa d’ Onofria, Marchesa di Mazzatenta, with whom he engaged in practices that involved the use of a velvet bastinado.

  “It was I who found out that his hair was gray under his wig and that he had no back teeth on either side of his mouth,” Marie-Dominique said.

  “How?” asked Fanny.

  “By sitting on his lap and wiggling.”

  “If he can’t chew his meat, maybe he’ll choke to death and leave you everything,” Marie-Dominique said to Edwige; this was before they knew Grestain’s exact financial position. The precise value of his estate and many other things came to light as the game was played out.

  Once the skin of Grestain’s haughty personage was pricked, it hemorrhaged secrets. They discovered that they could trade small secrets for large ones: telling a man something he did not know was a sure means of stimulating him to show you how much more he had to betray than you could ever hope to know. In the end, Edwige not only knew exactly what she was getting into by marrying her decrepit fiancé, but she possessed a great deal of useful information with which to astonish and confound her husband as the need arose in the future.

  These same facts, refreshed by a new game, were equally useful to Marie-Dominique ten years afterward when she, in her turn, married Grestain. The motto of the game, also the password used by the spies and their most trusted confederates, was Cogito, ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am”—the famous statement of René Descartes.

  When, after encountering Fanny on the quay at Honfleur, Armand de Grestain and Philippe came home to dinner, they could speak of nothing else: her simplicity, her lack of artifice, the light of intelligence and the shadow of melancholy in her eyes, the golden skin—especially the golden skin. It was evident that this astonishing creature was not in the least aware of her own beauty; perhaps the English, with their taste for pallor and yellow hair, did not realize how extraordinary she was.

  “I suppose you scowled at her like a toad, Philippe—you always do when you see a pretty girl,” Marie-Dominique said.

  “Scowl? She’s an angel.”

  “But she speaks French in a very common way, like a scullery maid,” Grestain said. “It gives the whole thing away—don’t you agree, Philippe? She had an English father and she asked to be taken to an English ship. Why is she in Honfleur just as we are getting ready to sail for Canada? It’s all very suspicious.”

  Marie-Dominique, who had quickly become bored by this rapturous discussion of a foreigner who was of no possible interest to anyone in France no matter how pretty she was, suddenly became animated.

  “My dear husband,” she said, “you don’t think this angel of Philippe’s is a spy, a beautiful English spy?”

  “One never knows,” Grestain said solemnly, as if he had had this thought about Fanny from the start.

  “A spy?” Philippe said. “She can’t be more than seventeen.”

  “That’s exactly what the English would expect the stupid French to think if they sent a beautiful virgin to murder France,” Grestain said. “Jamais trop jeunes et jamais trop belles pour etre perfides, ces anglaises”—the English are never too young or too beautiful for perfidy.

  Next morning, Philippe told them about Montagu’s attempt to rape Fanny, and how she had thrown herself into the harbor rather than submit.

  “And you saved the virgin’s life?” Marie-Dominique asked.

  “I helped her to swim back to the ship,” Philippe said.

  “Then she will always love you,” Marie-Dominique said.

  “Nonsense,” said Grestain.

  When the courier brought him the morning report from the Lieutenance, Grestain learned that the Pamela had sailed without clearance on the night tide. At breakfast, he ordered Philippe, as his adjutant, to find out everything possible about the Eng
lish girl.

  “Everything, Count?” Philippe addressed his brother-in-law by his title when they were discussing official matters.

  “Everything; spare no effort. The master of that vessel knows my mind about our voyage to Canada. It would be very convenient for a British man-o’-war to hide among the icebergs and drown the captain-general of New France.”

  Grestain, agitated, gulped down an unchewed piece of bread and went into a paroxysm of coughing. A servant, stationed behind his chair in case this should happen, as it often did, brusquely stood Grestain on his feet and repeatedly bent him over at the waist like a jointed doll until he expelled the bread from his windpipe. Afterward Grestain sprawled in his chair with his head against the backrest, sipping watered wine from a cup held by the footman.

  “The English would love to kill me,” he gasped.

  “Cogito, ergo sum,” Marie-Dominique said to Philippe, eyes shining with interest for the first time in months.

  Marie-Dominique sent a servant into town at once to buy a quire of the best paper for the Dossier. She cut it into quarters herself, making one hundred normal pages out of twenty-five big ones.

  “We know the Plot—to hide among the icebergs and sink the captain-general of New France to the bottom of the sea,” Marie-Dominique said, folding and splitting the sheets with a paper knife. “We know the Enemy of France—the Angel of the Icebergs. What is the first question to be asked?”

  “Is she acting alone or is she a cat’s-paw?” said Philippe. “Exactly.”

  From the captain and crew of the packet boat, the Spy learned that Fanny had traveled in the company of a Frenchwoman who had given everyone to understand that the girl’s father had died in tragic circumstances. They all remembered that the woman had been happy and the girl had been sad. Some thought that the girl had taken a chill. No one had doubted that she was French. From the waterfront porters, who remembered Fanny as vividly as Philippe, and for the same reasons, it was learned that Fanny had come ashore with Antoinette, from whom she had parted after a tearful scene and the gift of a purse.