——
It is not easy going down. The waves breaking on the deck, along with the driving rain, are making a freshet down the stairs. The sailors who were sleeping in their hammocks push past him on their desperate way up. No one questions him about the forbidden lantern he picked off a hook up top and is taking below-decks.
The animals that are still left are crying out in alarm. Their eyes are wild. It is the noise, the tilting of the ship and the water rushing into their cages and pens. The horse’s eyes are especially strange. Thomas fears he will either break his rope bonds or break his legs as he kicks against the wooden wall. Thomas hurries past. It would only make it worse to untie the beast. There is nowhere he could go. He would only hurt himself more than he is doing now.
“Wrong way, Pichon.” It is Surlaville on his way up, thrusting a boy sailor back.
“Mademoiselle,” Thomas says, “and the others. Still below?”
“Too late,” says Surlaville. “Save yourself.”
Thomas shakes his head. The major squeezes by, a look of contempt on his face.
“Oh,” Thomas calls out to the back of the major’s legs. “The commandant, he may be dead.”
“What!”
“By the pump. At the main mast,” Thomas yells, then swings round to continue down.
The water is sloshing ankle-high in the Sainte-Barbe.
“Oh, thank God, Secretary.” It is one of the Récollets, the one with the especially gaunt face. He steps toward the flickering light Thomas has brought. “Help me, you must help me get him out of here.”
Thomas holds the lantern up and out. The religious who spoke to him retreats to a bunk. He starts to yank on something – a brown-clothed arm. Thomas cannot see a head or face, but it is the other Récollet.
“No!” he hears the unseen face shout. “Punishment comes from God. If this is it, I want to perish here, in my bed.”
“Secretary, you must speak to him. Help me get him out of this place.”
“Not now.” Thomas turns his back to the two religious and goes to the door of the partitioned area.
“Mademoiselle,” he says, knocking loudly. He grabs hold of the latch. “I am coming in.”
The lantern casts its amber glow. He can see her form curled beneath a blanket. Upon the bolster, as the light shifts, is her head. Her blond hair is covered by a maid’s cap.
“Marie-Louise,” he says softly as he bends down. It is the first time he has spoken her Christian names. Her eyes are open. They are the colour of plums in the lantern light. There are tracks of tears on her cheeks.
Thomas sees her lips move but there are no words he can hear. The Récollets are shouting too loudly on the other side of the wooden wall. And then there’s the roar of the winds attacking the ship. “You have to speak up.”
“I don’t know what to do,” she says.
“Yes, I know it is hard. But Marie-Louise, if I might, I am going to put my arms around you. Is that all right?”
She nods.
“I’m going to carry you up on deck. Do you understand?”
“I only have a nightdress on,” she says.
“That’s all right,” he says. “I’ll take one of your blankets to wrap around.”
“Am I going to die?”
Thomas looks into her troubled eyes. “I hope not.”
“I don’t mind,” Thomas thinks he hears Marie-Louise say as he lowers her inside the large coil of rope up on deck closest to the top of the stairs.
“You don’t mind what?”
“Dying.”
“Shush, you’re a child.”
Thomas adjusts her cap. The rain has already soaked her blanket. Her nightdress and skin will be next. But what can he do to help her? There is no shelter. There is nothing to do but to try and outlast the storm. Then they’ll start from there.
“Stay here,” he says. “I’ll be back.”
He goes down on all fours as he sees a great wave coming toward the ship. The vessel bends and dips as spray cascades like a waterfall. The ship rolls front and back, left and right. When it bobs back up to near level Thomas rises to see if Marie-Louise is still where she was. She is. She is wet as if she has been for a swim. But there is a fresh expression on her face. It’s like she is waking up.
Thomas covers his ears. He has to shut out the wail of the wind so he can think.
Marie-Louise is for the moment safe, as safe as anyone can be in this nightmare. He should likely check on the comte. He could crawl there, he could, before the next wave rocks the ship. He just has to do it holding on, holding on to something secure.
Thomas reaches to grab a stick floating by in the skim of seawater washing over the deck. It’s a broken-off fragment of something he does not recognize. If the storm persists, the entire ship will be reduced to that. Flotsam for the sea to play with. He tosses the stick away. Instead, he takes hold of a rope. He can see it is attached to the mainmast thirty feet away. He’ll be able to pull himself along, back to where he last saw the commandant.
Halfway to the mast Thomas stops to look up. There are no longer any sailors caught in the rope web. He doubts any got down alive, not in this shrieking wind and not with this toss of ship. But then, maybe they are the lucky ones. Perhaps it is better to be dashed upon the deck or blown out to the waves than to suffer on and on. When his time comes, he hopes it will be quick.
The remains of a smashed crate sweep by. Thomas looks round. He has to be on the look-out for the brace of barrels he saw earlier careening up and down the deck. To be struck by them would mean being crushed.
He sees something coming from the stern but cannot make out what it is. Then he knows. It’s a body, face to the deck. He thinks he recognizes the red pants as those of the little fellow, Onions, the cook’s helper. The lifeless body shoots across the boards, arms outstretched.
Not far ahead now is the base of the mainmast. Thomas sees the comte is very much alive. He is on his bare knees in his soaked nightshirt. He has his back to Thomas, concentrating on something in front of him.
“Commandant!” yells Thomas from a body length away. The wind is picking up again. He pulls himself closer using the rope. “Comte!”
“Who is there?” Raymond says over his shoulder, unwilling or unable to turn round.
“Pichon!”
“Come.”
Thomas pulls himself the final few feet. He keeps one hand on the rope but with the other taps Raymond on the back. “I’m here. What— Oh Seigneur.”
He sees what it is, no, who it is. The commandant is attending to Surlaville. The major is stretched out, trembling as though freezing cold. There is a long sliver of snapped wood – perhaps from a shattered spar – protruding from his thigh. The major’s eyes are open, but they are staring unblinking at the sky. Around the wooden spear, Surlaville’s blue breeches are stained a purplish red.
“What can we do?” Thomas looks to the comte.
Raymond shakes his head.
“Should we not pull it out?”
Raymond gives Thomas a blank look.
“I think we should.” And with that Thomas takes hold of the wooden shaft. “Here goes.”
Out comes the spear, but at once the seep of blood from the wound becomes a gush. Surlaville’s cry is louder than the wind. Then his whole body twitches and his eyes snap shut.
“You killed him,” says Raymond.
Thomas kicks off his shoes and unfastens his breeches. He stumbles to step out of his wet pants. They are stuck to his legs.
Surlaville’s blood is coming fast.
Thomas’s hands are numb and resist, but he is able to peel off his breeches then spread them as long as they can go. They become a bandage he wraps twice around the gushing thigh. The flow of blood appears to stop.
“Misjudged you,” Raymond says.
&
nbsp; Thomas keeps the pressure on his makeshift tourniquet as he glances at the commandant. Yes, that appears to have been a compliment.
“The surgeon will do better,” Thomas says, “unless he’s dead.” That makes him smile. Thomas Pichon is not dead, not yet. Though who knows how much longer these winds and waves will go on and how much more damage they will inflict.
He must get back to Marie-Louise. See if she is still there, and if so, how she fares.
——
The wind is light. Pleasant. There are long swells coming from the westward. It is the aftermath, two days after the storm.
Thomas watches as a small boat from a brig comes close enough for one of its number to shout up an offer of assistance. The man, the brig’s first officer he explains, says his own vessel is a merchant ship coming from Québec heading for Bordeaux.
Thomas cranes up to look yet again at the havoc over his head. Yes, he can see that even at a fair distance a passing ship would notice that the top of the mizzenmast of the Heureux has snapped off.
The first officer comes aboard, up the rope ladder and then over the side. The captain of the Heureux, with his arm in a sling, is there to meet him, and tell him that sixteen men were lost and another twenty-one injured, himself included. Thomas is standing close enough to hear. He admires the stone-faced matter-of-fact way the two men talk. They are all about what happens next. It is something he would like to learn.
The officer commiserates with a nod, no more than that. He counters, apologetically, that his ship was fortunate. While the storm was sweeping across the Grand Banks, the brig was still in the St. Lawrence River. Nothing more than a few tangled lines and bruises. Then: “Can we help?”
“A couple of barrels of water and one of hard tack would do that,” the captain of the Heureux says.
“They are yours,” the first officer replies with a salute. “I’ll send them over once I am back aboard.”
“That should do it. The pilot says he knows where we are. With what canvas we still have we should be able to sail into Louisbourg tomorrow.”
——
The land is a line, a blue line stretched long and thin. It hovers between two other blues. Pale sky above, dark sea below. Each pitch of the ship brings the line a little closer. An approaching coast begins to take shape.
The clouds are swirls of cream.
A fully defined coast comes into view, finally green, no longer blue. It looks to be an endless forest rising out of jagged rocks. It is more wilderness than Thomas has ever seen. An endless cover, a woodland vast. No wonder people call it a New World. It is both the promise of a fresh beginning and the threat of the unknown.
Thomas returns to the rail. The last session prior to entering Louisbourg harbour is over. Once again, as he has since the storm, the commandant insisted both Thomas and Surlaville meet with him at the same time. “Our dear cousins,” the comte has taken to calling them. Thomas is certain the camaraderie will pass, but he welcomes the generosity of spirit while it lasts. It is so much better than Raymond’s usual way of being in the world.
How much closer to the shoreline the ship is now than it was an hour and a half ago when he went into the comte’s damaged room in the quarterdeck. Damaged, yes, but not ruined as is the stinking Sainte-Barbe. There is still ankle-deep seawater coursing around. The passengers have been sleeping in hammocks between-decks with the sailors since the storm. To be out in the sun, with its warmth on his back, feels good.
“There it is,” Thomas breathes aloud.
On the right as the ship undulates onward he recognizes the landmarks of Louisbourg that he has seen depicted on many maps over the past few months. No more than half a league away is the stone lighthouse on its rocky shore. That means the entrance to the harbour is coming fast. There has been a light there for thirty years, the only such aid to navigation in all of New France. Thomas is glad to see it. Once the Heureux is safely past the lighthouse, through the narrow channel between it and the Island Battery, they will finally be within the anchorage. Fifty days at sea it has been.
Farther away, Thomas can make out the two spires that distinguish the intra muros of the fortified town. If it were a port in France the ship were sailing to, or indeed anywhere in the usual Catholic world, such spires would belong to churches. But not this place. In curious Louisbourg what pricks the sky are steeples of two King’s buildings, a barracks and a hospital. In fact, from what Thomas has read, the town has no church at all, only a few chapels. Furthermore, its residents refuse to pay the tithe. And will not accept secular priests, only regulars. Thomas is more than a little intrigued. Can this overseas colony be a place where Reason finally rules? He will soon find out.
A hand presses on Thomas’s back. He turns round.
“I thought you would be up here, Monsieur Secretary.”
There are flickers of light in Marie-Louise’s eyes. Thomas is pleased to see it. He tenders a formal bow. “Mademoiselle.”
They agreed in a short, snatched conversation yesterday close to their hammocks that it would be inappropriate to continue to use their Christian names in public conversation.
“The place of your birth, is it not?”
“You know it is.”
Thomas holds her gaze. Silently he asks how she is feeling, now that she is so soon to be ashore, on the cusp of a marriage she wishes to avoid.
Mademoiselle shrugs and looks away, toward the lighthouse as the ship angles past. Thomas notices for the first time how little canvas the ship has aloft. Of course, the Heureux must creep into the harbour so it can come to anchor without striking any of the many ships and boats already moored there.
“Life is not easy,” Thomas says at last, “but it can be done.”
“I suppose.”
Thomas looks round then decides he does not care who might see. He reaches around Marie-Louise and gives her a quick hug.
“And what of you, Monsieur Pichon? How will you fare in such a small place, so far from the world you know?”
It is Thomas’s turn to shrug. She is right, what will he do besides toil with his quill for a vain commandant? More importantly, how long will he have to spend in this overseas colony before he receives his next reward, a rung higher back in France?
“Tell me, Mademoiselle, are there women of my great age in your town?”
Marie-Louise’s eyebrows rise. “At your age do men still—” She puts a hand across her mouth.
Thomas exhales and shakes his head. “I am not done yet, my dear.”
A few notes
and acknowledgements
The three individuals to whom this book is dedicated deserve a few additional words. Mary Topshee comes first, as she has done since 1970. I could dedicate all of my books to ma conjointe, but that would be a bit much. Editor Kate Kennedy is pretty close to my north star when it comes to finding my way through the fictional world I aim to create for Thomas Pichon and friends. Mike Hunter, editor-in-chief of Cape Breton University Press, has believed in the Thomas Pichon project since the manuscript for the first novel landed on his desk back in 2011. Together, we have now put out three novels in four years, leaving only one to go to complete the quartet.
In the interval between the publication of The Maze and the finalization of this third novel I gave a number of “History & Fiction” presentations at universities, libraries, museums and community halls around the Maritimes. The subject was primarily the Thomas Pichon project and my transition from historian to novelist. Those talks and the questions and comments from the people who attended helped me clarify what it is that I am aiming to do with these novels. I want to thank the following for their part in organizing those events or for other contributions to advancing the project: Meaghan Beaton, Susan Borgersen, Mark Delaney, Paul Doerr, Wendy Elliott, Margaret Herdman, Beth Keech, Jenna Lahey, Anne Marie Lane Jonah, Jordan LeBlanc, Jackie Logan, Elke Love, Elin
or Maher, Elizabeth Mancke, Susan Marchand-Terrio, Maura McKeogh, Dana Mount, Stephanie Pettigrew, Peter Twohig, Kat Wright Sandy Balcom and Ken Donovan. I fear that list leaves some people out, and for that I apologize.
One of the things I told the audiences at these talks was that although my central character is inspired by an actual historical figure, my Thomas is a fictional character living in a fictional world. Some of what has happened in the first three novels has been guided by what I know to have happened to the historical figure, but a great deal more is simply me exploring a period and the themes that manifest themselves in all historical periods: ambition, longing and betrayal. For instance, I have no idea whether or not the real Thomas Pichon ever went to Bath during the years he lived in England or whether he ever had to deal with highwaymen. No matter, I thought it would be interesting to take my characters on that road trip to open this book, back before the spa town had acquired all of the architectural features it now possesses.
Though most of the women who come into Thomas’s life as lovers in these novels are inventions, a few are not. Marguerite, a character in the first two novels, was based on what little is known of that much older wife of the historical Thomas Pichon. Similarly in Crossings, both Madame de Beaumont and Mademoiselle de Vins were real people whose relationships with the real Thomas Pichon were fairly close to what I present, though I set those events more than twenty years earlier than they occurred in history.
Finally, I’d like to acknowledge some of the authors whose writings on London, Bath, Paris and the French bureaucracy were helpful to me in researching and writing this book: Barry Cunliffe, James Sharpe, John C. Rule and Ben S. Trotter. Gilles Proulx, a former Parks Canada historian, deserves an extra special mention because I relied heavily on his Between France and New France for the final chapter. Merci, Gilles.
Previous Books by A.J.B. Johnston
NOVELS
The Maze, A Thomas Pichon Novel. Sydney: Cape Breton University Press, 2014.
Thomas, A Secret Life. Sydney: Cape Breton University Press, 2012.
Crossings, A Thomas Pichon Novel Page 25