Philippe had one of his men pound on the door of Antoinette’s family’s house in the rue aux Chats with the butt of a rifle, crying, “Officer of the king! Officer of the king!”
After expelling Antoinette’s relatives from the house, Philippe questioned her at the table while a clerk wrote down every word that was said on the crackling sheets of paper. The noise the expensive paper made when it was spread out on the table, its thickness and sheen, which made it fit for the king’s own eyes, added to the impressiveness of the interrogation, just as Marie-Dominique had intended that it should.
“Family name, Christian names, parents’ names, grandparents’ names, place and date of birth, civil status?”
Philippe’s uniform and boots, his scowl, his abrupt loud voice, caused the family to see Antoinette’s adventures in London in a different light. By now her sisters and brothers-in-law, to say nothing of her nieces and nephews, were bored by her stories about London and the Hardings; they were tired, especially, of hearing about Fanny. Suddenly it all became fascinating: an agent of the king was interested.
Like an actress playing to the audience standing in the perpetual Norman rain outside the windows, Antoinette related every detail of Fanny’s life that was known to her. She was sure that she knew absolutely everything. After all, the girl had had no friends of her own age; every moment of her life, except when she was sleeping, had been spent in the company of herself, Antoinette, or Henry Harding, or the Jesuit who had baptized, confessed, and tutored her. Fanny might as well have been in a convent; certainly Antoinette had been as assiduous as any houseful of nuns could have been in protecting her from spiritual and corporal pollution, except, of course, that she had given the child a mother’s love.
“Why then did she leave you so cruelly on the quay and sail away in an English ship?” Philippe asked.
“Cruelly, sir? There was no cruelty. Only sorrow. She paid me honorably.”
“Nevertheless she sailed away in the night, a young girl alone, on an English ship. Where was she bound?”
“Who knows?” Antoinette sobbed quietly. “Who knows if she sailed of her own free will? Those were not honest Frenchmen on that ship. Of this you may be sure. Fanny is a daughter of France and a heroine of the true faith. There is no question of her English blood interfering with what she knows in her heart is right.”
“A heroine!” Marie-Dominique said, on reading the transcript of this interview at the next secret meeting of the Spy. “What romance—no wonder she makes such an impression! We must know more. We must know everything!”
Others in Honfleur provided bits of the puzzle—ships’ masters who were friends of Joshua Peters’, old men who knew Fanny’s grandfather and grandmother. The manuscript of the trio sonata written by Giovanni Ravenscroft, an Englishman who had gone to Italy to study composition, was discovered in a trunk that Peters left behind in his lodgings ashore, together with a dozen letters written to Peters by Fanny in excellent Latin. Evidently Peters was bringing the music back from Italy as a gift for Fanny’s eighteenth birthday. Marie-Dominique studied Ravenscroft’s score for any sign that the music was a code, but found nothing beyond the usual opening slow fugue, a fast and a slow movement, and a finale in 12/8 time. The trunk also contained a fine violin signed by Nicolò Amati which Marie-Dominique confiscated as evidence.
“If the Enemy of France turns out not to be an enemy of France,” she said when Philippe protested this corrupt action, “the instrument will, of course, be returned to her.”
From Jesuit gossip, Father Nicolas, who had come to France to report to his superior on the progress of his mission among the Abenakis, discovered Fanny’s connection with the hanged Jesuit Philip Evans. Evans had kept a secret diary, smuggled out of England after his death and stored at the Jesuit college at La Fleché, in which Fanny was clearly recognizable through the descriptions of her birth and the homely details of her religious life and education. Philippe, who, like Philip Evans and Descartes, had studied at La Fleché, consulted the diary in the college library. It contained prayers, observations on the will of God, and a long meditation on the possible meaning of Fanny having been born at London in the same hour (more or less) in which Charles II embraced the Catholic faith on his deathbed.
As he watched the child grow, Evans wondered about the significance of this coincidence—was it the source of Fanny’s musical gift, the reason for her unchildlike calm? The diary contained many original songs, from childish tunes to complicated sinfonie, that Evans had written for Fanny, for whom he appeared to have had an uncle’s warmhearted affection. The diary excited the Saint-Christophes. At their urging, Father Nicolas asked a member of his order who was on his way to England to make inquiries about the destination of the Pamela and the whereabouts of Fanny. The priest sent back a letter describing the Pamela’s voyage to Boston and her subsequent return laden with enormous live lobsters that created a sensation in The Rose Tavern, where they sold for a pound apiece. He added that Fanny had had pneumonia during the voyage and nearly died. She was now living in an English settlement called Alamoth, on the Connecticut River in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
All this information, and more besides—the particulars of the Pamela’s construction and the probable value of her cargoes, the personal history of Henry Harding, including the incomprehensible fact that he appeared to have been an unbeliever who caused his daughter to be raised as a Catholic at the risk of both their lives—was broken down into categories and arranged in the Dossier, which Marie-Dominique bound in ribbons. Grestain was given a much more concise report. Even this digest of the facts fanned his suspicions. How could such an extraordinary person be anything but a spy? No girl of seventeen could have such adventures unless they were arranged by a hidden mastermind.
Philippe, playing Spy, never believed this. Poring over the Dossier, he tried to understand the mind, the emotions, the soul that dwelled within this lovely Enemy of France.
(“You see?” Marie-Dominique said to Fanny. “He was already in love with you. In his eyes you are completely virtuous, you are a mystery to him.”)
The game had uncovered no reliable clue as to her invisible nature. She wrote to the old sea captain about the weather, about her father, whom she appeared to love very deeply, about music. Why did she write in Latin? Her style was clear and logical and so dry that her letters might have been written by a man of her father’s age.
In Antoinette’s stories Philippe encountered Fanny riding through London in the beautiful frocks and fashionable hats of her childhood, at prayer with her hair combed down the back of her nightgown, doing her lessons without being wheedled.
“Not once,” said Antoinette proudly, “did she ever ask me a silly question; she would look, listen, and know.”
On the theory that a father’s bombast always has an effect, good or bad, on his child, Philippe had compiled Henry Harding’s favorite sayings. These seemed to be divided equally between compliments to his daughter’s beauty (“You have the golden skin of Araby”) and warnings about the excesses of religion and the probable non-existence of a Supreme Being.
Philip Evans’ diary was little more than a priest’s inventory of reasons to praise God, but because Evans had been an amateur of drawing as well as a musician, there were sketches of Fanny as a little girl—her small face scowling prettily while she learned music and Latin, her hands on the keyboard of the spinet and the harpsichord, her eyes looking inward as she played the viola, her smiling mouth singing old French songs and new English ones.
These images and accounts of Fanny’s life had one thing in common: in them, Fanny herself never spoke. She was always silent, always alone, a child among adults, a beauty among ordinary faces. Philippe conceived the idea that for all her beauty, knowledge, and goodness, Fanny was somehow not fully … What? Awake, aware, alive? She was a sleepwalker, watching others live while she waited for her own life to begin.
(“Philippe wanted to wake you with a kiss, of course,” Marie-
Dominique told Fanny. “He was helpless. After he saved you from drowning, his fate was sealed. You should have seen his eyes. I thought you had drowned, he was so devastated. The thought of your dying was almost as bad as the reality.”)
When he returned from Honfleur to Boston, Pietro Di Gesù, as Marie-Dominique called Joshua Peters, told Philippe exactly where Fanny had gone.
As soon after his arrival in Canada as possible, Philippe proposed a scouting mission down the Connecticut River.
Grestain readily agreed. The New World was a natural theater for the new war between England and France—the War of the Spanish Succession, in which the Bourbon Louis XIV was claiming the vacant Spanish throne for his second grandson, Philip of Anjou, while Leopold I, the Hapsburg emperor of Austria, claimed it for his second son, the Archduke Charles. Philippe had already distinguished himself in this war by leading a scaling party over the walls of a fortress in the Spanish Netherlands and overcoming the garrison with no loss of French lives. Who knew what this daring young man might accomplish with a few Indians in Massachusetts in a cause that was of intimate dynastic and paternal concern to the king of France?
In the week that he spent in hiding in the woods above Alamoth, studying the fortifications of the town and the habits of its people, Philippe saw any number of ways to convert the village and the idyllic countryside around it into a battleground in a religio-dynastic war that was taking place three thousand miles away.
The military possibilities were obvious, and when Thoughtful provided him with the book containing John Pennock’s secret plan for the defense of Alamoth, he realized that he only had to devise the simplest countermeasures in order to conquer the town.
Talks in His Dreams and Hair, along with Used to be Bear, had accompanied Philippe down the Connecticut in the hope of finding their sister, Squirrel, who had been stolen a few months before by the Englishman they called the fat ghost.
They encountered her and Fanny on the very first morning. The two girls were picking blueberries. The Abenakis called to Thoughtful, using the difficult false warbler song that Philippe had learned from Talks in His Dreams himself when he was a child. When she answered, Fanny turned around and smiled, as beautiful as Philippe remembered.
That night, Thoughtful rendezvoused with the scouting party. Philippe, who knew Thoughtful’s English identity and how much importance that gave her in Alamoth, explained to the Abenakis that she could not be rescued. To do so would betray the existence of the scouting mission to the English and eliminate the possibility of surprise in the attack to come later. Although she had hoped for immediate rescue, Thoughtful understood.
After the other Abenakis had greeted her, rubbing faces and offering food and telling stories, Philippe asked her about Fanny.
Her description of Ash, bathing Fanny’s unconscious body aboard the Pamela and then being possessed by lecherous memories, drove Philippe into a jealous panic.
(“That was why he attacked in winter,” Marie-Dominique told Fanny. “He told Armand it was to surprise the English, but it was really because he could not bear the thought of another man wanting you in that way. You are his bride, Fanny; no one else must even think about you.”)
During the next days, when he wasn’t watching the town, Philippe stalked Fanny. Thoughtful brought her to the woods every day so that Philippe could look at her. He watched her as she picked berries, as she drank from the spring, as she lay on her back and dreamed, as she passed silently through the woods with her skirts pulled up to her thighs. Philippe was an Abenaki when in the forest, but Thoughtful had taught Fanny a great deal about woodcraft, and several times she nearly saw him. On the last day he deliberately left a footprint by the spring, and then called to her. To his astonishment, she faultlessly reproduced the warbler’s call, as if she were reading notes off a staff. He called again, leading her through the woods as he ran toward the hanging rock so that she could see him. Would she know who he was?
Fanny looked across the pillows at Marie-Dominique.
“I knew,” she said.
“Of course you did,” Marie-Dominique said. “It’s all in the cards: a dark woman, a fair soldier, danger, love.”
3
In the village on the Saint Francis River, Philippe went to the village church to pray for the souls of the departed Abenakis. He was deeply religious in a tender hearted soldierly way, and he loved the rude beauty of SaintFrançois-de-Sales, which smelled of pitch and sap and was filled, day and night, with a peculiar smoky light. Long and narrow and somewhat taller than the eye expected it to be, the cruciform structure was made of whipsawed spruce lumber laid over maple beams and joists that were mortised and tenoned and joined by wooden pegs. It was sheathed with gummy hand-split spruce shingles and leaked only when the three or four feet of ice on the roof melted in the spring. When the bell, cast from the bronze of Spanish demiculverin cannon captured at the Battle of Rocroi, rang in the steeple, the timbers of the church quivered sympathetically, setting up a softer counterpoint to the humming of the vibrating bronze.
Stained-glass windows, one at either end of the transept and one in the vault of the apse, depicted Christ’s miracles, the healed lepers and blind men and cripples being portrayed as Algonquian Indians in buckskin and feathers. Along the curving wall of the apse stood figures of the saints, carved in wood and brightly painted, that looked like the fathers and mothers of some of the Abenakis present, in the way that statuary in a provincial cathedral in France will sometimes resemble the long-dead notables of the town.
Because they seldom had money, the Abenakis were in the habit of leaving furs or freshly killed game beside the poor box. Talks in His Dreams had once deposited an entire female moose, the meat butchered and bundled up in the hide, on the floor of the narthex. Philippe had accompanied him on the hunt, in which Talks in His Dreams, famous for this archery, killed seven moose, shooting them through the heart one by one with flint arrows while the others grazed on dreamily like bison, never suspecting that death was lying concealed in the grass a few feet away.
The Abenakis had given Philippe the name Otter because he had dived into the river one day and risen to the surface with a huge spawning salmon in his hand. He had lived among these people for four years, wrestling with Bear, who was the strongest boy of his age, and racing against Sleeping Fox, who was the fastest afoot, and learning, in addition to their language and the use of their arms, three great lessons from the Abenakis: how to listen, how to wait, and always to point with the chin instead of the finger so as not to puncture the spirit of another person.
Because of the power of these lessons, Philippe made no effort to discover why the Abenakis did not remember him or his boyhood name when he returned to the village five years after leaving it for France. Father Nicolas thought that they had not actually forgotten him, but simply did not believe their eyes when he reappeared as a man after having gone away as a boy, because they had never known any living person to come back from France; the Jesuit was not certain that this was the case because he did not ask the Abenakis questions, either.
Philippe’s prayers for the dead—he realized that he had been murmuring their stories as a way of commending their souls to God—were interrupted by a hubbub in the village. Members of the force that raided Alamoth, having followed so many different routes, had been straggling into the village for several days.
Philippe now heard a party coming in. Because what would happen next was no concern of his, he climbed into the belfry to watch. The Indians and their captives were still some distance away, jogging up the Saint Francis River, but the entire population of the village had gone outside to greet them. Ululating calls of welcome and triumph, tuneless and bloodthirsty to the European ear, melodious and jubilant to the Abenaki, filled the winter air. A nimbus of chilled breath lingered over the crowd. Wisps of smoke rose from the wigwams. The many new birchbark canoes built by the women while the men were at war lay upside down on a long rack made of saplings.
The
Abenakis led the captives, half a dozen women and their children and two or three men, out onto the ice of the Saint Francis River and painted their faces vermilion. Meanwhile the Indians on the riverbank, still screeching and beating on drums, formed two parallel lines that defined a pathway between the riverbank and the wigwams. The captives recognized the gauntlet.
Resisting, weeping, trying to shield the children, the English were led one by one by the hand into the gauntlet by the Abenakis who had captured them. The purpose of this gauntlet, as soon became obvious, was not to beat the captives but to permit every Abenaki to touch them; as they passed between the two lines of Indians, each English person was lightly tapped on the shoulder by each Abenaki. Then the Indians formed a circle around the captives, teaching them the words of the song they had been singing by shouting out the words slowly and distinctly:
The men fought like men
the women will be wives to the Abenakis
sisters to the Abenakis, aunts to the Abenakis
the boys will hunt with the Abenakis, ho-ho
The Abenakis then drew the captives into the circle with them, and danced, singing this song over and over again, ho-ho ho-ho ho-ho, for some hours. Two Suns then made a long speech in which he told the story of the Abenakis and how the fish, first the shad and then the salmon, swam up the rivers in the spring, filling the water with their silver bodies from bank to bank. He then gave each captive some wampum. Then they dispersed, being guided by their owners to their respective wigwams. Before they went to sleep, they would be told by their new families that they had been adopted into the tribe and they would be taught the Abenaki words for brother and sister, the form of address the Abenakis used with each other, because it was impolite to speak another person’s name in his presence.
Bride of the Wilderness Page 46