The Mohawk dangled the silver rosary that Hawkes had taken off the skeleton of the first Jesuit in the big pine tree above the falls of the Connecticut. It had been in the wallet with the coins.
“Are you giving us this also?” he asked.
“No,” Hawkes said, taking it back. “It’s a present for my future wife.”
11
There were no canoes on the bank when Fanny and Philippe arrived at the Abenaki village on the Saint Francis River, and only Thoughtful met them at the landing.
“Everyone has gone to the forest,” she said. “There’s a sick white person here.”
The Abenakis, like the Mohawks and many other woodland Indians, had seen whole villages die of measles and smallpox. They were terrified of any sickness carried by whites.
“Sick with what?” Philippe said.
Thoughtful directed her answer to Fanny. “A fever. It’s Ash’s child, the one you birthed. Ash came on the Pamela to ransom the people from Alamoth.”
“And brought the child with him?”
“They say he loves it too much to be separated from it. He carries it around with him on his back like a woman, singing to it.”
Two Suns and Hair were already paddling upriver, away from the pestilence. Philippe watched them for a moment, then got back into the canoe he and Fanny had arrived in and paddled after them.
Ash and Solitude were staying in Father Nicolas’ wigwam. When Fanny arrived, the Jesuit was seated outside his wigwam, listening to a voice that came from inside. It was lower than Fanny remembered, as if the speaker was exhausted, but it was unmistakable.
Father Nicolas hurried down the path, gesturing.
“He is in great distress,” he said. “He seems unable to think or act. Or pray. He speaks about you.”
Fanny drew in her breath.
“What sickness is it?”
“A fever. It’s not clear. But the Abenakis are afraid and the nurse is frightened to let the child suckle.” “What nurse?”
“The Englishwoman we knew on the trail, the one whose little boy had whooping cough. The madwoman hung him up in a tree and left him while they were running away in the blizzard, she says.”
“Ask Mr. Ash to come outside,” Fanny said.
Father Nicolas called to Ash through the wall of the wigwam. After a moment he came out, the same gaunt gray man, but with deep smallpox scars in his gray skin. It was noon. Ash squinted into the light as he came out of the dim interior of the wigwam. He did not recognize Fanny. She was burned darker by the sun and dressed in skins with her hair in a braid, and she had changed in other ways. He looked at her without curiosity for an instant. Then she moved and he saw who she was. He took a step backward, as if he had been pushed.
“Is it safe for me to come inside?” Fanny asked.
“Safe?”
“I’m pregnant.”
Ash blinked. “There is always a risk, but you can wash. I have soap.”
Solitude started to cry, a shrill high-pitched wail that was full of pain and fear. Ash lifted the flap on the door of the wigwam. The baby’s cries grew frantic as light poured inside. Doubling his long body, Ash stooped and entered, carefully closing the flap behind him.
Father Nicolas gave Fanny a look filled with sympathy. “You realize what child this is?” he said.
“Yes. Have you seen her? Is there any rash, any pimpling?”
“No. She’s a pale thing like her father. The skin is clear.”
Fanny went inside. Ash knelt by a cot, gazing down at Solitude, whose shrieks once again grew louder as the flap was lifted and a bar of light flashed into the wigwam. Ash crooned and covered the child’s eyes with his hands.
“She cannot look at the light,” he said.
Jean Judd, the nurse, cowered at the other side of the lodge. Like Ash, she looked incuriously at Fanny without seeming to know her.
Fanny kneeled opposite Ash and spoke his name. The wigwam was crowded with Father Nicolas’ religious objects: a painting of Christ, a half-finished log sculpture of a long-faced saint that Fanny supposed was Saint Francis of Sales, painted saints carved out of pine, rude crucifixes. Father Nicolas was the artist; the painted windows in the church, showing Abenaki warriors as the Apostles, were his work. Ash seemed to be oblivious of the popish articles all around him.
“What is wrong with the child?” Fanny asked. “I can’t make sense of the symptoms,” Ash said. “Is there any rash, any token?”
“Only fever,” Ash said listlessly, “and the fear of light.”
Fanny feared for her baby, but it was clear that Ash was not himself. He took no interest in the clinical aspects of his child’s case. He seemed merely to be waiting for Solitude to die.
“Let me see,” Fanny said. “Guide me.”
She opened the child’s blankets. She looked at once at the groin for the nutmeg tokens of plague. They were not there. The fever was not severe. The lymph nodes were enlarged. The pupils were contracted. The child had retracted its neck into its shoulders. Every muscle was tense, the trunk was slightly bowed already. The sensitivity to light was a symptom of many illnesses.
“Say something,” Fanny said to Ash. “Anything.” She spoke in French.
“She is very sick,” he whispered.
“Speak as loudly as you can.”
The command was so strange that Ash obeyed it without thought. “Pourquoi?”
Solitude screamed in agony at the sound of his voice.
“She also fears noise,” Fanny said. “Had you noted that?”
Ash shook his head. Fanny waited until Solitude grew quieter, then bent the child’s knees back against her chest. Solitude shrieked again.
“The hamstrings are painful,” Ash said, showing interest for the first time. “What do we see?”
Fanny listed the symptoms. Ash nodded after every observation that she made; he himself had already observed each of them, but he had not been able to admit their meaning.
“You’ve seen this in children before,” Fanny said. “Have I? What is it, then?”
“According to what you taught me, meningitis.”
Ash looked at her with disbelieving eyes. “No. It cannot be.”
“Anything can be,” Fanny said.
Ash’s expression grew wild. Tears streamed from his eyes. He fell back on his haunches and began to sob quietly.
“Come, Jean,” Fanny said in English. “This child must have a warm bath now, and another every day at this time. Keep her wrapped as you bathe her, washing only one part at a time so as not to chill her. When she cries, put a cold cloth on her head; she has a headache. Don’t let the light in, don’t make any noise. Both are very bad for her.”
“And who are you, Indian, to know so much?” Jean asked.
“Do as she says,” Ash said.
“Has she made water?” Fanny asked.
“No, she’s dry all day.”
“She must.”
Fanny searched among the bottles in Father Nicolas’ paintbox until she found turpentine. She held the bottle under the screaming child’s nose and let it inhale the fumes. A few moments later, Solitude urinated.
Ash watched these procedures helplessly, as though he had never before observed a medical treatment.
Ash had loved his daughter with an overwhelming love from the instant that Rose placed her in his arms on the day of her return from the wilderness. All the tenderness he had never felt before, all the earthly happiness that he had believed to be an illusion, welled up in his heart at the sight of her. He did not connect this phenomenon to Betsy, whose death among the Indians had meant nothing to him compared to the capture of Fanny; yet when holding Solitude in his arms, he felt himself in the presence of the young, merry Betsy, and even of the infant’s dead brothers and sisters. This love had grown stronger as the child grew older. Solitude was nine months old; she knew her father; she turned toward his voice when he spoke her name; she spoke words.
“He spent every minute with her i
n Alamoth,” Jean Judd told Fanny, “rocking her, carrying her on his back all through the town, singing her to sleep. People laughed to see a man so moonstruck over a babe.”
He slept in the same room with Solitude, and when she woke, he carried her to Jean, picking his way through the dark Manor among the sleeping figures, and then listening to the sound of suckling.
Finally he had brought her to Canada with him aboard the Pamela when Oliver sent him off with a box full of gold to ransom the Alamoth captives. He had brought Jean along to feed the child.
Fanny remained with Solitude during the day, bathing her to reduce the fever and keep her clean. At night, while Ash and Jean looked after the child, she returned to Two Suns’s wigwam.
Philippe had not returned.
“He is waiting for Two Suns to say it is all right to go fight the English,” Thoughtful said. “If Snow doesn’t die I think they’ll go.” She called the child by the Abenaki name that Used to be Bear had given her.
Solitude was now at her worst—convulsive, violent, delirious if a child of her age could be said to be delirious. Ash sat dumbly by her side, awaiting the end.
“Will she live?” Father Nicolas asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Will Ash accept help?”
“You mean your prayers? I don’t think so. He’s a very strong Protestant.”
“I mean more than prayers. This child has already died once. Surely God does not mean to take her after what happened in the snow.”
Father Nicolas opened the vault in the altar and took out the relic of Saint Francis of Sales that was the church’s greatest possession. He brought it into the wigwam in its locked case.
Ash picked up the relic from its velvet bed and turned it between his fingertips.
“It is the second phalange of the left index finger,” he said. “A knuckle bone.”
“It is more than that, my friend. Permit me.”
Father Nicolas touched the child’s forehead with the relic, making the sign of the cross. Ash watched but did not interfere.
“We shall see what God decides,” Father Nicolas said. “Do you know of the miracle of the snow, when your daughter was dead and woke up again?”
“Miracle?” Ash said. “Temperature of the body, circulation of the blood.”
But in the morning, Solitude was better. A day later she began to suckle again.
Ash brought her out into the sunlight. She did not cry. He sang to her, softly at first, and finally in his full voice, which brought the Abenakis out of their houses to see what was happening. The noise did not trouble Solitude.
“Was she cured by a piece of bone and the sign of the cross?” Ash asked Fanny.
“Father Nicolas will say so.”
“And what do you say?” Ash was looking at Fanny with his old intensity now.
Fanny looked at the child in Ash’s arms. “There are no miracles,” she said.
“Perhaps not,” Ash said. “I came here with money to ransom everyone—English pounds, gold louis, pieces of eight. But no one will come home. They are happy here. Thoughtful wouldn’t sign the paper giving her back her inheritance.”
Ash told her what had happened to Oliver and Rose. “The child’s name is Olivia,” he said. “She is quite dark, darker than you.”
“She would be,” Fanny said. “Will you go back to Alamoth?”
Ash was looking beyond her. Fanny turned around and saw that Philippe had come back. Behind him a mob of painted warriors were coming ashore in canoes. He was walking toward them across the village, dressed for the forest. He carried his jaeger rifle.
“I wish to say this to you before I go,” Ash said. “I cared nothing about the others who were captured, not even my wife. You were all I thought about.”
He was speaking to Fanny’s back, and at first he was not sure that she had heard him. Then she turned around so that he could see her face.
“For the rest of your life you must think about something else, Edward,” she said.
Ash smiled. “That is what I have always striven for. Here, hold Solitude for a moment.”
Philippe was advancing across the beaten floor of the village. Fanny took the baby into her arms. It looked up at her with Betsy’s eyes, calm and mild.
“War,” Ash said, gazing at Philippe. “It is a very odd world that God has made. Here comes your husband, a man who burned an English town and stole its people and inflicted unspeakable suffering on them, and they speak of him half a year afterward as if he were a god. They can’t pronounce his name, of course, so they have their own name for him. ‘Will Christopher come again?’ they asked. ‘Be good or Christopher will come,’ they tell the children. He made them love him for his cruelty. What do you call him?”
“Philippe.”
“And do you love him for the same reasons as the others?”
Instead of answering—she did not want to talk about love with Ash, or about Philippe—Fanny made as if to give Solitude back to him.
“No,” Ash said. “Hold her a moment longer. You are the only woman I ever wanted to bear my child, I dreamed of it, and—how odd—you’ve given me this child’s life twice.”
Philippe arrived beside them. Ash took his daughter out of Fanny’s arms.
“I was just thanking your wife for all that she has done to save me from a loss I could not have borne,” Ash said in his flawless French. “I thank you, too, sir.”
Philippe bowed.
Without looking at Fanny again, Ash walked away through the village.
“Come,” Philippe said. “We have a little while before I go.”
12
The Pamela, so long awaited, had sailed down the Saint Lawrence in ballast, her hold filled with rocks from Massachusetts. Joshua Peters explained that he had discharged his cargo in Boston and had been unable to find another one in that city. In the hold were a few sacks of corn, a few kegs of rum and Canary wine, a dozen bolts of common cloth, and some wool blankets suitable for trade with the Indians.
“These are gifts for natives, not a serious cargo,” Grestain said when he came aboard to inspect the hold.
“I didn’t come to Canada to trade, but to bring Mr. Ash to see the governor about ransoming English captives and to consult with my owner.”
“What about the famous lobsters?” Grestain asked. “The lobsters were a great deal of trouble,” Joshua replied.
“But profitable.”
“Not so very.”
“What can that Genoese of yours be thinking of?” Grestain asked Fanny. “Who ever heard of sailing hundreds of miles in a ship filled with rocks? Does he think he can get something for nothing in Quebec—furs, no doubt—and sail away never to come back? When I told him that this was a typical bit of Genoese trickery, do you know that he said? He said, ‘I remind you, Count, that it was the Genoese crossbowmen who took the first storm of arrows from the English longbows at Crécy while the French knights in their tin suits crouched behind us!’ Crouched behind them! Crouched!”
Grestain choked on his watered wine. The servant pounded on his back while the Indians watched impassively.
“Fanny will go down to the ship and speak to the master tomorrow, Count,” Marie-Dominique said. “But as you can see, she has had a difficult journey and must rest.”
Later, while Fanny lay soaking in the big tin tub that the servants brought into her room, Marie-Dominique came in to read her fortune. She looked down at Fanny’s body with the bold appreciation of a man.
“Lucky Philippe,” she said. “When is your child due?” “In March.”
Marie-Dominique smiled, having won the point. “I’ll show you mine after your bath. He isn’t bad for a Grestain, in fact he’s quite sturdy, like Sieur. I’ve given him up to a wet nurse so that I can conceive again as quickly as possible, though I must say it’s taking a long while this time. The next one I’ll nurse until he’s five.”
Marie-Dominique laid out the tarot cards, still chattering.
; “Remember what the cards told you—the only way to keep love secret is to pretend that it’s the farthest thing from your mind,” she said. “My husband thinks that Philippe married you for your ship. If he finds out that there is love between you he’ll try to take advantage of the fact. He’ll keep on sending Philippe off to kill Englishmen until you bribe him by giving him the ship.”
Marie-Dominique tapped the table with the edge of the tarot deck. “Even the cards say so,” she said. “Look: the Emperor reversed, then the Tower, then the Fool coming up one after the other. What can it mean?”
The cards meant injury in battle and the loss of inheritance; catastrophe and bankruptcy; ruin caused by the folly of another. Marie-Dominique did not explain all that.
“Be careful of money, be careful of fools,” she told Fanny. “Keep love a secret.”
When Fanny went down to the wharf the following morning, still dressed in her Indian clothes, she found Joshua waiting for her on the deck of the Pamela. He led Fanny over the deck toward his cabin.
“No, not there,” she said. “I’d like to see the hold with all those famous rocks in it.”
At the bottom of the ladder, the smell of coffee was a little fainter than Fanny remembered (the Pamela herself seemed to be somewhat smaller after only a year), but the open space between the ribs of the ship with its kegs and crates and coils of rope, and the splinters of dust-filled light standing still while the hull rocked in the tide, were just the same.
“Before anything,” Joshua said, “we must go over the accounts.”
Joshua gave her a leather bag containing six hundred pounds, her share of the vessel’s profits over the past year. They had had good luck with a cargo of Madeira wine and with another of Venetian glass. Nine hundred lobsters survived the ocean voyage; Praise God Adkins had sold them all to the Rose Tavern for nine shillings each. After expenses the profit had been less than two hundred pounds, and every man in the crew had had his fingers pinched by live lobsters while removing the dead ones from the vats. The smell had been awful.
Bride of the Wilderness Page 52