Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  The Judd boy was still gasping for air. Solitude, strapped to Fanny’s back as usual, was beginning to wake up and cry. Fanny jiggled her shoulders, rocking the papoose frame, and the child quieted.

  “Let Hepzibah carry her,” Rose said. She adjusted Solitude’s swaddling, gently pinched her nose, and swung the papoose frame onto Hepzibah’s broad back. Fanny had never before seen Rose touch a child.

  After they had rested for a few minutes, Rose ordered the others to move on. They staggered forward, groaning, but they obeyed without complaint. If they had been Rose’s servants before she killed the Abenakis, they were her slaves now. Only slaves or sleepwalkers would have consented to push on. Except for the two hours’ sleep they had had before Rose woke them, the women had been walking or running for nearly sixteen hours.

  While they were stumbling out of earshot, Rose held Fanny’s hands. Her eyes were fixed on the papoose frame as it bobbed away into the darkness on Hepzibah’s back. She uttered two or three long sighs.

  “How mysterious God’s ways can be,” Rose said at last. She was speaking in the tone of voice used by Ash when he talked about God’s will. “To think that Edward’s child has been left in our care and Betsy is dead, and my poor husband is gone, and all impediments have been removed to what must be, and yet … It is cruel, Fanny, cruel.”

  A gust of wind jostled them. Rose lost her balance, took three or four quick sidewise steps, and then recovered herself. Fanny spoke to her as calmly as she could.

  “What do you mean, Rose, your husband is gone, and all impediments have been removed to what must be? What must be?”

  “Edward loves me,” Rose said.

  The words came out one at a time. Rose was gasping for breath. Even though they were no longer running, the mere act of breathing inside this maelstrom of snow was difficult.

  Fanny’s voice was unsteady. “Ash loves you?” she said.

  The moon was behind Fanny, shining onto Rose’s face.

  “Oh, yes,” Rose said. “He has loved me from the start—lucky for you, or you would have died on the ship. That’s why he prays the way he does. I am the passion of his life. He’s constantly asking God to be freed from it. He prayed for release on the ship, and all these months I have heard him through the floor of my bedchamber when he prayed in the library at Rose Manor. His prayers were never answered.”

  Rose gave Fanny a look of intimacy. “Poor Betsy, poor Oliver. But they’re gone. Edward’s state was often … noticeable when we were in the same room together. On board ship it was embarrassing. Didn’t you ever notice how he kept his eyes on you all the time when we were together? That was because he was fighting the temptation to look at me. I supposed he thought your innocence would purify his thoughts.”

  By now they had fallen many paces behind the others. It was nearly impossible to see or hear. Fanny placed her mouth close to Rose’s ear.

  “How do you know these things?” she asked. “I know what I know,” Rose replied.

  She gave Fanny a brilliant smile and started off after the others with her easy, athletic stride. She looked back once and beckoned Fanny to follow. Fanny began to run in Rose’s tracks. The course of the Naquag was very steep here and rocks lay beneath the snow. The others, trudging on, were nearly out of sight. Totsie tripped and sprawled on her face.

  Rose’s slim figure, the fur cape swirling around the hips, glided through the eddying snow. What if they follow us? Fanny slowed her pace to a walk. What if Philippe did follow? What would his fate be then—death in the mud, death by fire, death by examination for witchcraft, death because a Gypsy prophesied sexual union with a bear, death because Rose, instead of God, had heard someone’s prayers?

  Fanny stopped in her tracks. She could not go on; she could not go back. Rose had nearly caught up with the others. She ran through their struggling ranks and took the lead. As Fanny watched, standing quite still, their indistinct forms moved farther and farther away. A gust of wind filled the air with snow and Fanny lost sight of them. When the wind died, they had vanished into the storm—scrubbed out like chalk figures in a cartoon.

  Fanny turned around and began to jog rhythmically in the other direction, toward Canada, straining her eyes to see the footprints she had made only minutes before, and which were now being obliterated by the wind.

  IV

  THE WILDERNESS

  1

  Philippe’s sister Marie-Dominique, Countess of Varier, told fortunes with tarot cards. Seated at a marquetry writing table, called a bureau Mazarin, in the Hôtel de Vallier, her husband’s house in Quebec, she shuffled the deck, turned up the Knight of Cups, the Star, and the Four of Wands, and said, “You will marry a brilliant man for love, but your love will be the great secret of your lives, so you will never suffer for it.”

  “Never suffer for love?” Fanny said.

  “Hardly. The cards only say you will not suffer for having loved. As indicated by the Knight of Cups, the card of gentle spies, others won’t make jokes about six months of love not being worth a lifetime of reproach, because you will be so clever that they will never suspect that you are madly in love with your own husband, and he with you. You and he will be very discreet, very correct when in the presence of others, hiding your passion, like lovers instead of spouses.”

  Marie-Dominique turned up another card, the Nine of Swords, which can mean doubt, desolation, or the death of a loved one.

  “Never mind about that one,” she said. “It’s time to practice what we’ll say tonight to dazzle the gentlemen. We’ll tell them about the porcupines, I think.”

  On their march south to raid Alamoth, the Abenakis had killed dozens of porcupines and hung them in trees along the Connecticut as emergency rations for the retreat to Canada. Fanny, Philippe, and Father Nicolas had survived on these frozen porcupines during their long march back to Canada.

  “The governor adores the story about the porcupines,” Marie-Dominique said. “It’s wonderful to watch him as he imagines you, the prettiest girl ever seen in New France, climbing the tree, skinning the horrible pricky little beast, roasting it over a fire, eating it so delicately with those little white teeth. One can see his appetites improving by the minute.”

  Marie-Dominique, indeed all the French, never stopped telling Fanny how pretty she was. As soon as she arrived, after sailing up the broad unfrozen Saint Lawrence River aboard a patrol boat of the French Navy, Marie-Dominique has asked her if she had any money.

  “Fifty English pounds,” Fanny replied.

  “Wonderful,” said Marie-Dominique. “We’ll give ten to the dressmaker.”

  Very soon afterward Fanny possessed morning dresses for walking and riding in carriages through the narrow streets of the steep little city, afternoon dresses for calling and receiving visitors, and evening gowns that exposed her shoulders and bosom.

  “It’s true,” Marie-Dominique said, clasping the ruby necklace around Fanny’s throat. “You do have the golden skin of Araby!”

  Like her brother and Father Nicolas, and, it seemed, the entire city of Quebec, Marie-Dominique knew the basic facts of Fanny’s life.

  “How do you know these things?” Fanny asked.

  “From the Spy,” Marie-Dominique replied. “The Spy fell deeper and deeper in love with you as each secret of your life was revealed. You cannot imagine his joy as he learned that you are the granddaughter of Captain Harris, who fought against the English Protestants and married Liliane l’Ecossaise, that you are an orphan, Catholic, that you possess a beautiful singing voice and play both keyboard and strings, that you were secretly educated by a Jesuit and speak Latin and Greek, that your baptismal name is Genevieve, that the madman who tried to drown you in Honfleur also tore down your father’s house with a span of oxen, that you own a ship.… The ship was the best part.”

  “But who is this spy?”

  “Someone my husband commissioned to find out everything about you after he saw you on the quay in Honfleur. ‘The miracle of the fishes,�
� Armand called it—this angel in mourning appearing out of the Channel mists with the morning catch, speaking French like a servant girl. Was this an English plot, was the angel an English spy?”

  “What nonsense.”

  “So the Spy found out,” Marie-Dominique said. “But one cannot be too careful about the English; even their virgins are treacherous, my husband says.”

  Marie-Dominique, who was only a year older than Fanny, was the second Saint-Christophe sister to have married Armand de Grestain, count of Vallier, captain-general of New France. He was twenty-five years older than she; after six months of marriage, she was in the sixth month of pregnancy.

  Her sister, Edwige, the first countess, had been tortured to death by the Iroquois at La Chine together with her two-year-old son. (Because the body of Grestain’s heir was never found, a legend arose that a French nobleman was living, unsuspected and unsuspecting, among the Iroquois; Eleazer Williams, the redeemed English captive who later represented himself to the world as “the lost dauphin of France,” may have based his imposture on this fable.)

  “Armand hates the English,” Marie-Dominique told Fanny.

  “I thought every Frenchman did.”

  “They do. But what the English did to Edwige and her son made things worse for Armand. He was already enraged because nearly the entire male line of the Grestain family were slaughtered by lowborn English axmen at the Battle of Agincourt.”

  “But that happened nearly three hundred years ago.”

  “Nevertheless, Armand says it was a cowardly act. The Grestains were stuck in the mud in their suits of armor and were unable to defend themselves.”

  On Fanny’s arrival in Quebec, after she had escaped from the English murderess and walked all night through a blizzard to find Philippe and then marched with him and Father Nicolas Laux across three hundred miles of wilderness, sleeping in the snow and subsisting on porcupines, Grestain had instructed everyone in his household and every officer on his staff to watch her with the greatest care, as she was probably an English spy.

  “But we already know everything about her,” Marie-Dominique said.

  “One never knows everything about the English.”

  “My dear husband, she is a Catholic and part French.”

  “Ainsi que Henri Cinq,” Grestain replied—just like Henry V of England, the victor of Agincourt.

  Fanny lived with the Grestains in the drafty timber-and-stone Hôtel de Vallier on the heights above the Saint Lawrence. She paid for her food and lodging at the rate of a shilling a month. Normally Philippe also lived at the Hôtel de Vallier, but without charge because he was Marie-Dominique’s brother and because he had no money beyond his army pay as an officer of artillery. Now he was absent, waiting for the last Abenaki to return to the village on the Saint Francis River before he came back to Quebec.

  “He has a great sense of duty to the Indians,” Marie-Dominique told Fanny. “He grew up among them.” “Grew up among them?”

  “Yes, like an Indian boy, shooting arrows and living in the woods. Surely you noticed that he is just like an Abenaki when he is on a campaign against the English.”

  “I saw many similarities,” Fanny said.

  The Hôtel de Vallier, though it was by no means grand enough to be called an hôtel in Paris, was three times as large as an ordinary Quebecois house. It was old by North American standards, having been built half a century earlier. Because the Normans who settled Quebec did not at first understand the climate, it was built like a Norman house, according to the method called colombage pierotte, in which the walls were formed by filling wooden frames with loose stone cemented with lime mortar. It was soon discovered that lime mortar dissolved under the assault of Canadian rain, snow, and wind. To keep out the elements, later occupants sheathed such houses with lumber, covering even the chimneys with broad pine boards.

  The expense of sheathing had been so great in the case of the Hôtel de Vallier that Grestain had declared that they could not entertain any person of less than noble rank, unless he was a member of the Sovereign Council of New France, for the remainder of their time in Canada. Being able to make this decision on economic grounds was a great comfort to Armand de Grestain: because Quebec was an outpost of empire, people who were eligible to dine with the Comte de Vallier here would have snatched off their hats in France as he passed by; Armand de Grestain never gave the impression that he had forgotten this fact. The governor and the intendant, as the treasurer of the colony was called, and the bishop came to dine once a month.

  Otherwise, no stranger consumed food in the HÔtel de Vallier. Those who were not fed by the Grestains were known as les soupirants, the sighing ones.

  When the servant passed among them at a soiree with tiny glasses and a decanter on a tray, he would ask, “Desirez-vous une larme de vin?”—will you have a tear of wine?

  The soupirants’ decanter contained a discreetly watered mixture of the leftover wines that had been decanted for the governor, the intendant, and the bishop.

  Armand de Grestain believed that Fanny should marry a prominent man of the colony—though not, of course, a nobleman—as quickly as possible. Because he was clearly her protector, he reasoned that any dowry should come to him.

  “I quite understand, of course, that you are, for the moment, without substantial funds,” Grestain said to her, “although you seem to be able to wear charming gowns and a fortune in rubies around your neck. You will wish to write a letter to the man Pietro di Gesú, instructing him to call at Quebec in the Pamela. You will then be in a position to arrange a suitable marriage. Perhaps we can arrange something between us as well—a cargo of furs, perhaps, in exchange for silk and scent and that excellent coffee. There is never enough silk or coffee in New France.”

  Fanny’s accent, which had offended Grestain on the quay at Honfleur, was less noticeable, if no less grating, in Quebec. Champlain himself had sailed from Honfleur, and the province had largely been settled by Normans, most of whom sounded a great deal like Antoinette. That was exactly why Grestain thought that Fanny’s speech was an impediment to a good marriage.

  “But you must teach this girl to speak!” Armand said to Marie-Dominique.

  “Nonsense, it’s the best thing about her: that hair, that skin, that ravishing figure, those rubies, and then she speaks. If we were living at court, everyone would be trying to sound just like her.”

  Marie-Dominique was a tall, very thin young woman, almost skeletal, with long limbs and the greenish complexion and languid gestures of an anemic. She was as intelligent as her brother and resembled him physically: the Viking blood showed in her height, her eyes, her symmetrical face, her tawny hair. She was far more talkative than Philippe; Fanny required no spy to find out the details of Marie-Dominique’s life or the history of her family. She was six months pregnant and ate horse liver and fried blood, which she detested, for breakfast to make blood for the fetus. She hoped for a boy, and then for another boy a year afterward; no girls. She wished to fulfill her obligation to perpetuate the male line of the Grestains as quickly as possible.

  “Canada is a good place to have my babies, one cannot go out while it is happening no matter where one is, so one might as well be in the wilderness,” she said. “Afterward, when Armand has defeated the English in America and made enough money to uphold his position, we will all go back to France while I am still young and live at court. Armand, of course, will be quite old by then.”

  “Leaving me in Quebec?”

  “You must be wherever Philippe is. It’s clear that you two love each other, and of course Armand is right about the desirability of finding you a husband. The sooner you’re married, the sooner the two of you can become lovers.”

  “I thought your cards said that I was going to marry a brilliant man for love and live happily ever after.”

  “Yes, but there’s no reason why you should not love two men at the same time—one brilliant, the other beautiful and brave as a lion.”

  �
�What will the two of them think of that arrangement?”

  “What an idea! Men do not think as long as they get what they want,” Marie-Dominique said. “One must be absolutely selfish, always doing the thing that makes one happiest, or else one will make everyone else very unhappy.”

  “If the object is to sleep with someone you love, then why not simply marry for love?” Fanny asked.

  “Because then one would have had to sleep with the same man for the rest of one’s life, and that would make the poor fellow very unhappy.”

  “Life was simpler before you read the cards.”

  “If you want life to be simple you should go back to the English.”

  Marie-Dominique had a perfectly composed French mind. In her view, the French had arranged their nation and their culture perfectly in order to let every person of suitable birth realize the possibilities of his or her life to the fullest. Her education, like that of most French people, was based on memorization, so that when she came to the end of her lessons at the age of sixteen she quite naturally believed that she knew everything. There was the church, unquestioned in its authority to teach and forgive; the king, unparalleled in his competence to punish and reward; the family, unquestioning in its loyalty to its members and more important by far than anything else; and the English, the Germans, the Dutch, the Spanish, and the other enemies of the French, unspeakable in their un-Frenchness.

  One did one’s duty, which only occasionally required serious sacrifices, such as being hacked to death by the English, and was otherwise free to advance one’s interests, acquire new privileges, get money, possess beautiful things, promote the marriages and careers of one’s children, humble one’s rivals, judge the worth of everything under the sun with absolute certainty, enjoy the company of one’s friends, appease one’s appetites, fall in love repeatedly. In a life properly lived, all these things occurred all the time, so that the mind was fully occupied in plotting to make them happen and the body was fulfilled as a result of their having happened.