“Ten days, perhaps twelve.” At this Catherine had turned away, busying herself at the dish basin and trying not to think about the lonely days ahead.
“I must tell you, sir,” Andrew added carefully, “that we have no concrete evidence the French are taking part in these disturbances.”
“Only because they’re slippery as eels, the lot of them.” Price clattered his cup down upon the saucer. “The French are our natural enemies.”
“Not here,” Andrew murmured.
“Here, there—it makes no difference. The English have fought the French for nigh on four hundred years. You of all people should know that.”
“I do know it very well, sir.” Andrew had adopted the formal tone he often used around his father-in-law. “I only question it in the very special circumstances of Acadia. The French have lived here on Cobequid Bay for over a century and a half, and in all that time there has never been any conflict between their settlers and ours. Yes, we have battled their fortresses, but the settlers and the villages have remained—”
“Enemies now and enemies for all time,” Price barked. “I can see them now, them and their foppish ways, gathered in some hall and plotting our demise.”
“Sir …” Andrew paused, then said simply, “No doubt there is some truth in what you say.”
“Of course there is.” John Price rose from his chair and headed for the door. “Well, I shall let you get on with your preparations. Good day, daughter. Thank you for the repast.”
When the door had shut behind him, Andrew said quietly, “And his is the opinion of almost every officer in my regiment.”
Catherine turned back, not at the words but the sadness in his tone. “Will there be—war?” She stumbled over the dreaded word.
“There already is. Not here, but in the homelands.” Speaking thusly seemed to tire him. “The latest dispatches are full of new conflicts. France is up to her old tricks, encroaching on British territory, bombarding Gibraltar, making false accusations in the courts of our allies.” Andrew looked at her with helpless eyes. “I had hoped and prayed none of this would touch us. I hope it still.” He shook his head. “I can’t think of a single Frenchman here in Acadia who is an enemy.”
She did not know what to say. The talk of war, even one separated from them by a storm-crossed journey of four long months, troubled her so. Catherine crossed the room and settled into the chair still warm from her father’s presence. She reached out and took her husband’s hand.
When she did not speak, Andrew said softly, “Tell me what you will do when I am away.”
“Miss you,” she said, and felt hollowness creep higher in her chest.
“Tell me,” he said, softer now. “Let me carry with me an image of where you will be and what you will do. It makes the parting go easier.”
She looked at him, smiled into that familiar face, and shook her head. “I will clean up the breakfast dishes and sweep the floors and then watch through the window for you to pass.”
“Ah, good. I shall make it a point for the parade to be as smart and polished as a new penny.”
“I shall go and stand on the porch and wave my handkerchief,” she said. “Even though it will hurt and worry me to see you go, I will give you a smile to carry with you.”
“In my heart,” he said and raised her hand to kiss it gently. “What then?”
“Then I will come back and sit right here to read the Bible.” The words were easily spoken, somehow lightening the burden of her coming sorrow. “I find great comfort in the Book. It tells me that God is here with me when you can’t be. And I will pray for you. At least in this way I am helping to bring you safely home.”
Andrew’s gaze joined hers to look at the Bible by the window. In the gray light of a cloudy morning the leather cover gleamed soft and warm. “I’ve never given much thought to the Book outside Sunday gatherings. The sight of you reading by the fire of an evening …” He hesitated, searching for the right word. “It has warmed me.”
“Me as well.” She had wanted to tell him all that had been growing within her but felt as though it was still too new, too fresh to fit well with words. “I don’t know if I have ever really understood the Book before, not with an open mind and heart.” When that felt inadequate, she added, “Somehow I feel as though I am reading it for us. For our marriage.”
Andrew did not question her as she half expected. Instead he nodded slowly, then said, “Perhaps when things calm during the winter months, we can read it together.”
“I would like that,” she said, her heart full of love for this man. “Very much.”
He nodded again, but his gaze remained absent. “All I really know of the Bible is how it fit into my family’s tradition.”
Catherine waited a moment, then asked, “What was it like inside your family, Andrew?”
“Cold. Especially after my mother died. You know about that, of course.”
She nodded but said nothing. That much Andrew had spoken of. When he was eleven, how his mother had died giving birth to a little girl who also had not survived.
“After Mother passed on, Father retreated even further from me. He lived for his horses and his hounds. I was sent off to boarding school, where I stayed until I reached my seniority. My brother hated my being around. It was one of the defining parts of my life, like the sun rising in the east. He hated me, and I was happier being away. Especially after Mother passed on.”
For the first time Catherine thought she could ask questions. Now it seemed as though there was not so much pain in his eyes and voice. As though within their marriage he felt the same distance from his past as she did from hers. “It must have been hard, though, giving up a castle and all the servants and such a rich life,” she commented.
“I do not miss it a whit, not an instant. A castle is no more than a tomb of many rooms when there is only coldness and anger.”
“Your father must have loved you.”
“Oh, I’m sure he did, in his own way. But Father was as trapped in tradition and as bound by his past as your own father is by his feelings for the French. I hope I am not offending you when I say that, my dear.”
“No. It is true. Sad, but true.”
“Since marrying you I have begun to see how these same chains of tradition have trapped me as well.” Andrew was speaking more slowly now, his brow furrowed with the effort of seeking his way through unfamiliar terrain. “There is so much of my life I never bothered to question until now. For generations beyond count, the younger Harrow sons have all gone into the military. Their portraits decorate the front staircase of Harrow Hall. They make up one of my clearest childhood memories, climbing the stairs at night, followed by the fierce stares of these men, with their medals and their prancing horses.”
Catherine remained caught by two words that she quietly repeated: “Harrow Hall.”
“Of course I attended Eton, and then did a brief stint at Oxford. Every Harrow minor—that’s what the younger sons were called. Harrow minors. We all followed that course, and straight from there into the King’s Own.” His gaze had turned as bleak as his voice. “It is only now, when I sit by the hearth of my own home with my own wife, that I find a need to question this road. One chosen for me by others, long before I had a power of choice of my own.”
His candid speech granted Catherine the chance to say what had long rested in the dark recesses of her own heart. “When I think of your family and all you once had, sometimes I feel so inadequate.” She could not help but glance around their simple little cottage. “I’m just a colonial lass, I was taught by the vicar’s wife, I’ve only been to Halifax twice in my entire life, I’ve never seen England, I don’t—”
“Catherine, my dear sweet angel, look at me.” His eyes were startling in their clarity. Nothing but truth could exist within his gaze when he stared at her as he did now. “I have never felt as complete, nor even dreamed that I could know such happiness, as I do here in the home you have made for us.”
&n
bsp; Catherine carried the warmth of those words with her the rest of the way up the trail. The River Minas was split into a series of streams that she could easily cross. The babbling water seemed to agree that yes, of course, she missed her husband. But she was also happy. There was nothing unusual with feeling the two emotions at the same time, sorrow over his absence yet blissful over how their lives were joining.
The trail meandered through trees as ancient and gnarled as time itself. Roots crabbed about the stony soil, then dug through rocks with stubborn determination. Beyond the old growth there came the sound of a merry waterfall, which invited her to stop for a drink. Then she moved over the final rise and stepped into the meadow. The berry bushes were across the meadow, just where she remembered and just as full as she had imagined.
But to her surprise, there was another figure pulling at the ripe fruit. The same Frenchwoman Catherine recalled from her last visit, the day before her wedding. With Andrew’s words about the Acadia French people in her mind, she walked across the meadow, her hand raised in greeting. The young woman looked kind and lovely. It seemed not only natural to walk toward her, it felt right. Only later did she wonder at her boldness.
“Hello!” She smiled at the way the young woman stood, her openly curious eyes as dark and brilliant as her hair. One hand was poised halfway to the bush, like a blackbird balanced upon the branch, ready to take flight at the first hint of danger.
But Catherine carried no danger with her. Just gladness at seeing another person there, a young woman with the same love of nature and of wild berries as herself. She sought the phrases from the French she had learned in her lessons, worried that in this moment she would find nothing at all to say.
The tall grasses and few remaining autumn flowers swished against her skirt as she drew nearer. She saw that the young woman’s lips were stained with fruit she had been eating as she plucked. Catherine smiled at the sight of that face, full of life and mystery.
Catherine said her first complete sentence to a Frenchwoman. “I desire to bid you good day,” she managed in French, then switched with joyous abandon to English. “Isn’t it a wonderful morning?”
The flashing eyes crinkled in merriment, and the young woman’s delightful laugh, like bells, joined with Catherine’s.
Chapter 8
Some days after her encounter with Catherine in the highland meadow, Louise found herself with her housework done and a yearning for the season’s last fruit. Wondering if the frost had denied her a final picking, she bundled herself into two shawls. The clouds were heavier than Louise had seen in months. They spread flat and featureless just above the hilltops, as though their burdens were too great to hold at accustomed height. The next time the clouds released their load, she knew it would be snow. The past three nights, temperatures had fallen low enough to freeze the ground by morning. Louise stepped carefully over rocks made slick with rain, her breath coming in steamy puffs.
Yet even with winter’s quiet warning at every turn, Louise could not feel disappointment. It had been a good summer. Very good indeed. Despite the rumors of distant conflicts and the constant political worries, she had busied herself with the task of making a cozy home within Henri’s farmhouse, and she usually managed to ignore such talk.
But it was difficult to shut it all out when every trip through the village brought alarming news to her ears. In the leathersmith’s shop, she would hear of more warships arriving at the Halifax harbor. In the chapel gardens, there were rumors of English soldiers camped near one of the few remaining French forts. At a meeting of the clan elders, there was talk of soldiers closing the market road to any French attempting to trade at Annapolis Royal. And on and on it went.
Louise had watched her mother’s reaction to it all and seen that her fuming had done little but silence the men whenever she was around. The men were justly concerned about their families, their livelihoods, even their lives. They could not help but discuss, analyze, and dissect each piece of information that surfaced. And of course the bearer of such items of information always received his moment in the sun. Louise had seen how the man with the latest news could stand for a moment in a light all his own, puffed up with the importance of having something to tell.
As the summer waned, Louise had found it increasingly easy to put the worries out of her mind. Henri helped enormously. Her beloved husband lived to smile, to laugh. To turn her thoughts to more pleasant things. He did not permit these bad tidings any significant place in his world. Or in hers. Her husband. Louise stopped to shift the basket she carried to her other arm. Such a wonderful word. One she had heard all her life, but now one she was beginning to understand.
Now there were so many words like that, ones which had come to hold entirely different new meanings since her wedding. Such as home. Life in Henri’s little cottage was a constant source of joy. The house itself had shouted its forlorn need of a woman’s touch. She had spent most of the summer bringing order to what had before been merely a place for a bachelor to eat and sleep.
She remembered that first time Henri had shown her around the cottage. He had been so worried, so afraid of what she would think. The place had been scrubbed and polished and swept, but all his efforts had only highlighted its bare and tattered state. Henri had apologized continually while she had walked through the three rooms and looked at the plank bed with the corn-husk mattress, the single cracked mug and one set of utensils, the two blackened frying pans. He had been so astonished when she had turned to him and flung her arms around his neck. “What are you on about?” he had cried. She had laughed into his ear and replied, “You have given me a dream come true, a home I can make from beginning to end.”
There also had been the need for a garden. The first one of her own. It had taken time to plant and cultivate. Now she was looking forward to winter. Henri would complete the harvest in a few days, and then he had promised to help her. Together they would finish making the cottage a home. Their home.
Louise held the basket in front of her as she came to the narrowest jink in the trail. The earthen jar she had placed in the basket rolled about the bottom. She had felt a little silly, but the idea of bringing a little gift had seemed right as she was leaving the house, and it seemed right now. Just in case. The lady of the smile. That was how she remembered the pretty Englishwoman. As she crested the first rise, Louise found her heart warming at the memory.
From here the trail ran straight and true along the lower ridgeline, until opening into the meadow. She knew this section well. She had been coming here since she was old enough to walk and hold her father’s hand. And yet she had never been inclined to show it to anyone else. It had been such a surprise to find the woman up there, not once but twice. A stranger, an Englishwoman, in what Louise had come to consider her own private meadow.
But what a smile the woman had given her. “A heart in full bloom”— that was an expression she had often heard her father use. The Englishwoman had been dressed in clothes finer than anything found in Louise’s entire village, finer even than her own wedding dress, and for a walk in the forest. And the way she had walked, so upright and correct, just like all the illustrations she had seen in her father’s tattered journals. Back when she was a child, before the English blockade had closed off news and books and journals and materials from France, Louise had loved to look at the pictures of places and people from far-off lands. Her father had taught her to read from those pages. Now the pictures were yellowed and crinkled from years of use, the sheets torn from the binding and the words almost memorized, yet read over and over nonetheless because there was nothing new. When the Englishwoman had appeared, she had walked forward with the queenly bearing of characters lifted from the pages of Louise’s childhood.
Yet the Englishwoman’s smile had shone with warmth and clarity, as though none of the troubles between their two nations had ever existed and they had been friends for life. The thought stopped Louise just at the point where the trail opened to greet the meadow. Co
uld she ever be friends with an English lady? What would Henri think? What would her father say? How would the villagers treat such news?
Then she stepped through the thicket, and there at the meadow’s edge stood the English lady. Only this time, it was she who stood with hand poised by the berry bushes, eyes wide and startled by Louise’s sudden appearance. And it was her lips which were berry stained.
After a pause, their laughter mingled in merriment over the bushes. “I have seen infants who eat more neatly!” Louise finally was able to gasp out.
“Slowly, please to speak more slowly. My French, it is terriblest in the world.” But her smile was just as sweet, as Louise recalled. “I have more to be placed in my mouth than my basket.”
“And more still upon your face, mad’moiselle.” Louise confidently walked forward, as though they were acquaintances meeting upon the lanes of Minas, rather than strangers separated by a river and language and history and a world of woes. “I am called Louise Robichaud,” she said with a little curtsy.
“My name is Catherine. Catherine Harrow,” she said. “Madame, not mademoiselle.” Catherine responded with her own curtsy and spoke very carefully. Obviously, she was searching hard for the French words. She motioned to the bushes with a berry-stained hand. “The frost has—what you say—finished them.”
“The frost, yes. I feared it would be so.”
“But they are still … tasty.”
Louise nodded, reaching for a berry that she popped into her mouth. “So you are married?”
Catherine’s eyes brightened as she nodded. Again the smile, the sense of sharing more than two strangers should ever reveal to each other. “I am married this summer past.”
“I as well!” Louise smiled at her own memory and said, “I was married upon the most beautiful day in all the year, the first Friday in July.”
Catherine’s eyes widened further. “July, the month after June, yes?”
“Just so, madame. Every summer it is the same.”
The Meeting Place Page 7