Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  The company murmured its approval.

  “The deeds of brave Frenchmen reassure us that there is nothing to fear,” the governor said. “We are protected by God, by the destiny of France, and by the wisdom of a monarch chosen by God to re-create the army of France into the greatest army ever known, led by sons of France such as Philippe de Saint-Christophe, may his name be remembered for his splendid victory on the Connecticut.”

  The governor read the king’s letter about Philippe and promoted him to the rank of captain. The drums rolled again, the troops presented arms with another crash, the company cheered. Toasts were drunk.

  “No money, no land, no Sieur de Quelquechose, nothing but kind words and a new badge for Philippe; poor Armand,” murmured Marie-Dominique.

  She sat down in the voyeuse chair that Fanny had been saving for her and lifted a glass of wine off a servant’s tray.

  “Philippe doesn’t care,” Marie-Dominique said. “He has what he wants.”

  “Does he?” Fanny said.

  For the first time since the massacre, she permitted herself while waking to remember the scene at Alamoth and the events of the march up the Connecticut.

  “Of course he has what he wants,” Marie-Dominique said. “Glory. Love. Philippe is a Viking.”

  Philippe was surrounded by men who embraced him or pumped his hand, and by women who smiled at him in a particularly feminine way, as if to say: Alas, what happiness the two of us could have known if only we had met in time. The governor himself stood beside Philippe with his hand resting on his shoulder, grinning like a father.

  Philippe’s eyes never left Fanny’s. She looked back at him steadily, as always. Was this really why he had done what he had done? Fanny shifted her gaze and looked from face to face in the pack of males around Philippe. All wore the same half-dreamy, half-bloodthirsty expression. Every one of them knew the story of his bravery. They murmured, they waited, they stood at a respectful distance, sipping their wine, heads at one side, smiling confidentially, waiting for Philippe to say something that only he and they, who could be as brave as he if given the chance, could understand.

  Philippe himself was still looking at Fanny. He smiled, a sudden joyful grin that involved his whole face. He freed himself of the crowd, smiling, answering questions, letting his hand be pressed as he moved toward Fanny.

  He arrived at her side still smiling. The room, crowded with more than two hundred people, had grown very warm. Sweat trickled down the faces of the soldiers in their thick woolen greatcoats and bearskin hats, and nearly everyone else was beginning to display streaks of dampness down the spine and wet black semicircles under the arms. Nobody minded the odor, salty and onionlike; there was nothing unusual about it.

  A new crowd, both men and women, gathered around them. Philippe looked at the circle of rapt faces.

  “Forgive us,” Fanny said, “but we must greet some friends.”

  Philippe followed her out of the grand salon and into the entrance hall.

  “Cloaks,” Fanny said to the servant at the door.

  Outside, Fanny walked quickly, the heels of her slippers sinking into the compacted surface of the snow. The sky was filled with stars—the Little Dipper, the Bear, the Crab, the Giraffe, the Dragon, the Twins, and Cassiopeia, which could not be made to resemble any creature on Earth. The constellations looked more familiar here than in Massachusetts. They looked like the stars over France.

  Wherever they went, Fanny thought, the French took France with them, building French houses, eating French food, wearing French clothes, thinking French thoughts, taking deep satisfaction in French prejudices, regarding the natives as Frenchmen in the rough. They did not think in terms of what already existed in a new world but concentrated instead on transforming it into something that was French and therefore ideal. The English in America, on the other hand, seemed to want to escape from their Englishness. In two or three generations they had changed over to different houses, different clothes, different food, different ideas, even different speech.

  She stopped and faced Philippe.

  “Antoinette—you know her, she was one of your best informants at Honfleur—told me that I am not French and can never be French,” Fanny said. “She was right. All I could think about while the governor read the letter from the king was Betsy.”

  “Betsy?”

  He did not remember the name. It was difficult to see the expression on Philippe’s face in the starlight. “The mother of the child Used to be Bear saved.” “Ah. The woman in the snow.”

  “You actually remember.”

  Philippe took her by the shoulders. He had not put his hands on her since he saved her from drowning. He was as strong now as he had been then. He looked years younger, even, than he was, with the white hair of his wig framing his smooth face with its two neat scars.

  “Oh, yes,” Philippe said. “I remember. The fields of glory. Does this mean that you are English at heart and hate me?”

  “No. I am nothing at heart—not even a rescued Catholic.”

  “Quite suddenly you’re telling me a great deal.”

  “It’s a swap. Did you want to do the things you did in Alamoth?”

  Philippe did not hesitate. “Yes. Certainly. Soldiering is what I do.”

  “It’s what you love.”

  “Yes, but not the only thing. What do you love?” “I don’t know yet.”

  Fanny moved. Philippe did not try to hold on to her. She turned and walked off again. Philippe kept pace, taking one long stride in his boots for every three or four that Fanny took in her slippers. His sword, the same one he had worn in France, clanked in its scabbard and shone dully in the starlight.

  They arrived at the waterfront. It was easier to see here. The black river, still as ice, was dappled with amber light from the stern lanterns of the boats tied up along the wharf. Philippe’s peruke had the effect of isolating his face from the rest of his body, so that the expressions seemed stark and slightly false, like an actor’s caricature of feelings.

  Fanny’s own face was hidden inside the hood of her cloak. Her feet in their thin evening slippers were freezing. The chilled gold chain of the ruby necklace formed a cold ring around her neck. Philippe’s body emitted a little heat. Fanny had noticed this phenomenon during the long run north from Alamoth. At the end of the day, when they slowed down and searched the trees for frozen porcupines, they would sometimes be quite close together, unaware of each other, walking under the trees, staring upward into the branches with all their concentration. Then, sometimes, Fanny felt the warmth of his body as it seeped through his clothes, not enough really to warm the skin, but enough to deceive the nerves momentarily. She felt it now.

  At night on the trail, sleeping between Philippe and Father Nicolas, she had known the difference between them, one male and the other something else, even in her sleep; when the Jesuit rose before dawn to pray, she would sometimes turn over to warm the other side of herself against Philippe. She had not had a single dream in this whole time; only afterward. She would wake up, still feeling what she had felt in the dream, and wonder: How do I know about that?

  The wharf curved with the river, hiding the upstream bank. As Fanny and Philippe walked along it, a glow appeared in the sky, and then they saw a big campfire billowing sparks into the darkness about a mile upriver.

  “The Abenakis,” Philippe said. “Listen.”

  “Why are they here?” Fanny asked.

  “The king sent them gifts. They received them from the governor this afternoon and now they’re singing about the victory. At dawn they’ll go back to the village.”

  The singsong Abenaki chorus came clearly over the water, changing keys and time and pitch in every bar. Automatically Fanny tried to imagine the music—the actual notes on the staff—that the Indians were singing. Of course there were no bars. This was music that had been stored in the brains of the Abenakis, whoever they were, for most of their history, whatever that was. Fanny realized that she could not
understand it as musical notes. It did not matter what the words meant.

  “Do you think it’s possible to understand anything?” she asked Philippe.

  “Oh, yes. Even Alamoth.”

  Philippe had taken off his wig.

  “You should know at least one secret about me,” he said. “I did not come down the Connecticut with these Abenakis for the sake of a French victory. I came for you.”

  They stood five or six paces apart, the light of the Abenaki bonfire behind Philippe, the bulk of the city behind Fanny, the singing growing louder. A big birch-bark canoe was coming over the water surrounded by little bursts of phosphorescence where the paddles bit into the water.

  Fanny said, “You came for me?”

  “Yes,” Philippe said, “because I wanted to know everything.”

  The canoe was quite close now. The paddlers were resting on the thwarts, letting the current carry the boat along. Fanny recognized Two Suns and Thoughtful among them.

  The canoe, the largest one Fanny had ever seen, touched the wharf. Thoughtful and the Abenakis kneeled in the hull, waiting.

  “May I come with you?” Fanny asked.

  Thoughtful pointed to the place where she should sit. Fanny picked up her skirts and stepped down into the canoe. The Abenakis showed no surprise; Philippe made no attempt to stop her.

  “You are leaving Quebec?” he said.

  “Forever,” Fanny replied.

  She settled herself, kneeling in the bow. Philippe put his wig back on his head, fitting it to his crown with the fingertips of both hands. Finally he bowed to her. “Je te rattraperai,” he said—I’ll catch up to you. “Will you? Why?”

  “Because I don’t know everything even now. And I don’t like all this disappearing. First a ship, then a blizzard, now a canoe. What next?”

  The canoe, airy and swift, drifted away from the dock and pivoted, then moved away slowly against the current.

  Two Suns, grunting as he paddled, said something in Abenaki. Thoughtful interpreted.

  “My father says that something is going to happen between you and Philippe,” she said.

  “Does he know how long it will take?” Fanny asked.

  6

  Someone—Ash never knew who—untied him before the night was out. He seized John Pennock’s rapier off its peg by Oliver’s bed and dashed out into the smoldering town. Dozens of people were coughing from the smoke, bodies hung from the trees on the green, corpses and dead animals lay helter-skelter on the snow.

  Ash seized an old man. “Where did they go?”

  “Up the river,” the old man said. “Over the ice.”

  Ash ran down the path to the river. The ice was rough underfoot and the leather soles of his boots slithered with every step, throwing him off balance, but he kept on running north, the rapier in his hand.

  After a while—he had no idea how long he had been running—he saw a flash of reddish light above the riverbank and then the sound of a musket discharging. Immediately there was more shooting and the sound of Indians shrieking and Englishmen cursing. Ash ran faster, coming around a bend in the river, and found himself in the midst of the battle between the miltiamen and the Abenakis.

  He saw Philippe ahead, standing on the ice away from the others. He knew him at once. With a wordless roar, he pointed the sword at Philippe’s heart and ran straight at him. He had taken only a dozen strides when an Abenaki slipped out of the darkness and struck him on the head with a club.

  When he regained consciousness, he found himself back in Alamoth, lying on a pallet in the church with wounded men all around him. He seized a passing woman by the skirt.

  “Where am I wounded?”

  “The head.”

  Ash unwound the crude bandage around his skull. “Examine the wound,” he said, asking questions and directing the woman as she worked.

  “Help me up,” he said when she was through and he had diagnosed himself as having a possible fractured skull. “Now, remain with me. If I faint, place my head low and my legs high and wait by me till I wake, then help me up again.”

  For the next ten hours he set bones, sutured hatchet wounds, amputated mutilated arms and legs, put frostbitten feet to soak in pans of warm water, examined horrifying burns that he had no means of treating.

  One of the women who was assisting him brought in an unconscious castrated boy of sixteen, already half-dead from loss of blood and exposure.

  Ash said, “Are you his mother? Take him out and lay him down again in the snow; it is the best thing for this wound.”

  The dead militia captain in his full boots was already laid out in the snow beside the church, next to the man who had been wounded by the same round from Philippe’s jaeger rifle. After perforating his bowels, the bullet had touched the second man’s spine, paralyzing him; he screamed until dark, then died. It was the burned and the tortured who were the worst.

  Most of the other wounded soldiers were only superficially wounded. Covered with blood to the elbows and spattered with it from head to waist, Ash shouted at them in his terrible voice: “On your feet! You, you, and you—find tools! Cover the windows in the Manor! You—salvage whatever meat you can from those slaughtered cattle outside, then clear away the rest! You—find whatever food is left and take it to the Manor. We must all live there until we can build up the town again.”

  Ash had no clear idea of what had happened during the attack. The men were silent. The women, whispering, told him that not a single Abenaki had died, that every house in Alamoth had been set on fire while they slept, that the muskets loaded with buckshot had been useless.

  “We were betrayed,” they said. “Fanny was a spy—the papist whore. She was a Catholic all the time, sir. We saw her confessing to the Jesuit and eating Communion bread while the boys of Alamoth were hanging in the trees and we were all standing barefoot and naked in the snow and the savages were murdering the cattle.”

  “You must be mistaken,” Ash said.

  “There’s no mistake. The French knew just who she was. And they stole poor Thoughtful Pennock again.”

  Hawkes returned. Ash removed the flint arrowheads from his chest and neck and cleaned and dressed the bayonet wound in his arm.

  Ash had never observed a phenomenon like Hawkes’s layer of lard; once freed by the scalpel and subjected to the pressure of a thumb on either side of the wound, the arrowheads popped out of the yellowish subcutaneous fat, leaving a practically bloodless cavity that soon closed itself. Even during surgery Hawkes did not complain about pain.

  “You saw the captives?”

  “Not close. It was dark.”

  “Did you recognize anyone at all?”

  “The Abenakis built a lean-to for your wife. I heard the baby crying.”

  Ash stopped what he was doing and gripped the ledge of the operating table. His head swam.

  “Will they let them live?”

  Hawkes did not answer at once. Ash opened his eyes. “She’ll live if she can keep up. I saw Fanny carrying the child on her back and helping her.”

  In the late afternoon of the fifth day after the massacre, Ash was examining a boy whose leg had been amputated. The light was uncertain; Ash could not see the patient’s features very clearly. He felt his forehead. The skin was feverish, a normal symptom. But Ash felt something else on the skin. He rotated his palm gently on the forehead, then felt the cheeks. The boy’s face was covered with small hard pimples that felt like shot. Ash fetched a candle, shooing away a woman who wanted to hold it. Then he stripped the boy. There were no pimples on the chest, none in the armpits, none in the groin. The face, the forearms, the feet were covered with them.

  To the boy he said, “Have you any pain apart from the stump?”

  “My back aches,” the boy said.

  “It will soon be better,” Ash said, holding a cup containing a strong dose of opium to his lips.

  The symptoms were unmistakable. The boy had smallpox.

  Ash washed his hands with soap a second
time before touching another patient. He examined them all very thoroughly. Of the fifteen wounded in the church, none but the boy with the amputated leg displayed the symptoms of smallpox. As soon as it was dark, Ash loaded the boy onto a sled and hauled him to the Manor. Then, laying his unconscious body on a rug, he tugged him over the wooden floors to the library and down the steps of the hidden passageway to the hiding room.

  Smallpox had always interested Ash. He believed that it was transmitted by animacules that lived in the pus discharged from the unbilicated vesicles, the pustules, which developed out of the original pimples. The fact that the complete isolation of this patient appeared to have prevented the spread of the disease tended to confirm the theory. Taking great care to avoid contact with his own skin, and washing himself afterward with soap, Ash took scrapings of pus from the boy and studied them under his microscope. Animacules were clearly visible.

  Although he had found nobody except Thomas Sydenham who was willing to listen to him, Ash believed that inoculation, which had been practiced for a long time by the Turks and other peoples in the Orient, could reduce the high rate of mortality and disfigurement associated with smallpox.

  The theory of inoculation held that by deliberately infecting a patient with smallpox, one could induce a milder case than was likely to occur through natural infection. The Chinese had accomplished this by smearing pus from an active case into the nasal membranes of an uninfected person. The Turks had developed a method of scratching the skin and applying crusts scraped from smallpox pustules to the scratches. In both cases, the hoped-for result was a spreading of the disease from the point of inoculation to other parts of the body.

  Usually, though by no means always, the result was a superficial case of smallpox which neither killed nor unduly disfigured the person, and rendered him immune from reinfection for the rest of his life. Sometimes, of course, the case was severe and the patient died just as he would have done if he had contracted the disease in the normal way.

  It was best to collect crusts for inoculation from the running pustules of a victim who had a mild case of smallpox. The boy’s case was not mild, but as it had not killed him, it was clearly not the most severe variety. Ash therefore decided to inoculate himself and observe the result.