The Meeting Place

by T. Davis Bunn

  “Marie, enough.” Jacques seemed to straighten at the thought of what Henri had suggested, at least enough to give authority to these few words. “We need strength. We need calm.”

  There was little of either as they were herded from the village and across the Minas River ford. All around them rose the wails and cries of a great funeral march, but the soldiers paid them no heed. Louise’s frantic glances were enough to show how all her world was being torn asunder, all her friends transformed into strangers by the night and the tempest.

  She asked her husband, “Do you see Catherine’s husband?”

  “Nowhere.” Henri shouted up at the nearest soldier, “Captain Harrow!”

  He was answered with a harsh laugh. The horseman, an officer by the looks of glittering gold upon his shoulders, turned and called to a man at the fore. The other officer turned to glare at Henri and said in heavily accented French, “You are friend of Harrow?”

  “Friend! Yes, friend!” Louise’s heart felt squeezed to painful tightness by the look they gave her husband. But still Henri shouted, “Where is he?”

  The two officers called back and forth over the tumult but only in their language. Harrow’s name came up, amidst looks of disdain and headshakes. But to Louise and Henri they offered nothing more.

  More troops were gathered by the long pier. As they approached, Jacques groaned, “Why must they rush us so?”

  “To keep us from fighting back,” Henri said. Even he was puffing from the load and the haste. “And to catch the tide. Look there.”

  At the end of the long pier, lit by torches, waited more boats than Louise had ever seen. Narrow coastal barques awaited the people of Minas, they and all the others she could now see streaming down from adjoining trails. A long line of torchlit misery, pushed and prodded and herded toward the pier.

  At the entrance to the pier Louise’s panic surged like a great incoming wave. She turned and struggled against the flow, even as it tightened about her to begin the long march seaward.

  “Louise!”

  She flung herself against the people who had once been friends, screaming with an energy that seemed to tear her throat, “My baby!”

  “Louise, no!”

  A pike was shoved into her face, the spear’s point over a foot long and glinting angry yellow in the torchlight. She felt a sudden urge to fling herself upon the point, to halt the tide of sorrow.

  “Louise, come, you must come with me. Please.” Henri’s voice shook with tremors of one who understood what was passing through her mind. “Please, my love, please, you are my life, come with me now.”

  She turned and sagged against him, suddenly so weak she could scarcely place one foot in front of the other. “Oh, Henri, they have my baby.”

  Together they joined the long line snaking toward the boats. At the pier’s end Henri dropped his heavy burdens into the bottom of the next vessel, groaning as the weight dropped from his shoulders. Through the hollow ache of her sorrow, Louise realized it was the only protest her husband had made that entire night. But the thought was soon swallowed by the silent awareness that filled her being and left her shaking with dread. The boat filled and then pushed off, its place at the pier taken by yet another. There were cries and calls from up and down the pier, and over the water from all the boats. People shouted for loved ones and children and parents, the wails so mixed it was as though one great voice spoke for them all, calling and weeping for what was theirs no longer.

  Shadowy skeletons took shape in the first dim light of dawn, and Louise realized they were being taken toward larger seagoing vessels. Their masts cut like giant spears up into the departing night. The oarsmen guided their vessel up close to the side, and those who could were pushed and prodded up the netting. Others were lifted in rope-slings. Louise took the baby from Marie. The baby was wailing still, a fact that had escaped her until that very moment. But as she heard the little one’s strident cries, she knew that here was one who needed her desperately.

  She found the strength to rock and calm the little one as she was slung into the bosun’s chair. She held the rope with one hand and the baby with the other as she was raised to the ship’s deck. Once there she allowed Henri to wrap his great strong arms around her and felt his head drop to her shoulder. She heard him murmur, the words swept away in the tumult surrounding them. Yet she knew he was praying. And though the words themselves were lost and gone, the message remained, that and the first fragile flickering of calm.

  She looked shoreward and felt her heart rise up in a tide of woe and fear. Her baby—her frail little Antoinette was still there. Left behind.Abandoned.

  Gradually the deck went silent. In the first light of dawn there rose a faint tendril of smoke. Then another. And another still. Tiny lights in the distance fueled the gray spirals that steadily rose higher and thicker until all the sky seemed supported by great rising pillars pushing upward.

  The smoke of their burning dwellings shouted a silent message to all the gathering. There would be no going back.

  Chapter 29

  Andrew raced against the night and the wind. He rode as he had never ridden before, pursuing all the unseen forces that were tearing apart his world. The distance which had taken two days to cover at the head of his troops, Andrew now did in the space of one night. One long, dark, harrowing night.

  He saw little more of the trail than a long silver streak of reflected moonlight. After an hour and more of spurring his horse and shouting encouragement into the steed’s ear, the ribbon stretched out like an endless nightmare, taunting him with the threat that it would never end, that he would never reach his goal. And every thundering hoofbeat pounded in time to the name shouted over and over in his head. Elspeth.

  Twice he passed French villages, or what remained of them. There was movement at neither, which only spurred him on to greater speed, as though the silence which met him as he looked down upon the dark landscape and shadow-houses only warned him of what he was yet to find at his journey’s end. Elspeth.

  Three times he stopped at waystations for new steeds, twice moving so fast that he had stripped off the blanket and gear from his lathered horse and saddled his new mount before the bleary-eyed keeper had roused himself. The third time, in the gray hour before the dawn, he moved more slowly, his arms and his legs so weary that the saddle threatened to bring him down. The keeper came, took one look at his state, and wordlessly pulled the saddle from his lifeless fingers. Andrew watched and drank pitcher after pitcher of cold rainwater drawn from the corner keg, feeling strength fill him with each draught. Elspeth.

  He knew he had arrived long before he was able to see the village. The smell of charred cinders drifted in the chill morning mist, stronger and stronger until the stench tore a cry of dismay from his throat. The noise gripped the steed’s heart, for the gallant animal thundered down the final slope, took the turning to Minas, and burst from the forest and into the first field—past the first blackened, smoldering house.

  Andrew reined his horse, looking frantically about at the desolation and the ruin. It felt as though his own heart were being branded by the sight. He wheeled his horse around and dug his spurs into the animal’s ribs. “Hyah!”

  There was no sun that day. It dared not show its face upon the sight which greeted Andrew as he raced down the trail and came to the exodus gathered by the mouth of the pier. He felt as though his own worst nightmares, the ones so awful they could not be recalled in the morning’s light, all had come to life in the tableau before him. The long pier of Fort Edward was lost beneath a wailing, shouting mass of humanity. At the end of the pier floated a longboat, with another waiting to take its place. A third was rowing out to a lone ship floating in Cobequid Bay. The mist drifted in and out, painting the scene a bleak gray, as though the day itself was shamed by what it saw and wished only to hide it from view. To wash it of substance, to cleanse it from memory.

  “Get a move on there!” A lone officer stood waving his sword at the meager thr
ong still standing at the pier’s entrance. Andrew turned, and only with effort did he recognize Randolf Stevenage. The captain’s voice was as hoarse as the call of morning crows from his long night of deplorable duty. “Sergeant, get those people moving! Use your pikes if you must, man! The ship must make the tide!”

  “Aye, aye, sir! You lot, pick up your goods and move off, or you can swim to France!”

  Andrew slid from his horse and sprawled in the well-churned mud. His legs simply gave way beneath him. He picked himself up without noticing that he had fallen. Then he spotted a familiar face amidst the final throng. “Vicar!”

  “You, there! Harrow! Hold off, man, these Frenchies—”

  “Vicar!” Andrew searched his exhausted brain and finally came up with the man’s name. “Jean Ricard!”

  Up ahead, a skeletal face redrawn by grief and terror turned toward him. With recognition came a shout torn from the pastor’s throat. “They have taken all my people!”

  “My baby!” Andrew gripped the man’s cassock as much to keep from falling as to halt the man’s progress. “Where is Elspeth?”

  “My flock,” the priest choked. “My children.”

  “My child,” Andrew said the word a sob. “Where is Elspeth?”

  Jean Ricard’s eyes were unfocused, staring in terror. “They held some of us as hostages at the fort. Only when the last ship started boarding did they let us come forward.”

  “But my baby, Vicar, my child, where is she?”

  Jean Ricard lifted a heavy, black-robed arm and pointed out toward the empty waters. “There. With all my flock, all my children. Gone.”

  Andrew’s hands went so numb he could no longer hold the vicar’s cassock. He staggered back in horror, slamming into a soldier, and would have gone down had the man not caught him. It took Andrew a long moment to turn and recognize the insignia upon the man’s uniform. “Sergeant, where has the other ship gone?” he gasped out.

  “Which one, sir? There’s twelve out there gone upon the tide, and this lot here’s soon to join ’em.”

  “But where, man? Tell me where!”

  The sergeant stared at him with consternation. “Sir, my orders—”

  “Sergeant! Get that last lot down the pier or you’ll be sailing with them.” Stevenage’s officer chopped at his horse’s reins, making the weary animal snort and dance in Andrew’s face, pushing him back. “Stand easy there, you!”

  Andrew drew himself up. “Sergeant—”

  Stevenage’s voice came out a hoarse snarl. “My wife knows all about you and your precious Catherine and your consorting with the enemy!”

  “I command—”

  “Soon enough you’ll be commanding nothing at all! My orders come from General Whetlock, and his from Governor Lawrence himself. I told them all along you weren’t to be trusted!” But the night had taken a savage toll upon Stevenage. There was no satisfaction in his features, nothing save the scarring remnants of a living nightmare. Another savage chop to the reins. “Move that lot out, Sergeant!”

  Andrew stepped around the horse and grabbed the sergeant’s stirrup. “Where have the other ships gone?”

  “Have you missed the entire night, sir? Each ship is dispatched to a different location. Boston, Washington, Louisiana, all the places along the eastern seaboard where the Acadians will be allowed to join a French community. A third and more back to France itself, and each of those to a different port. Of a truth, nobody’s falling over themselves to take them in.”

  Andrew released the stirrup. “What?”

  “Not even the other ships know where each is assigned to go. It was intentional.” The man’s voice roughened. “It’s the only way we can ever be sure they’ll not gather and attack.”

  Andrew’s knees gave way then, his strength gone. “No, no, it can’t be.”

  The sergeant shouted over Andrew, “You there! Halt, or I’ll shoot!”

  The vicar ignored the warning and dropped into the mud beside Andrew. “You must be our conduit!” he whispered urgently.

  The sergeant slipped from his exhausted steed and struggled through the churned muck. “Get down the pier, you!”

  Jean Ricard shook Andrew as hard as his own waning strength allowed. “There is no other way for us to know where we’ve been sent or how we can regather!”

  The sergeant hauled the vicar roughly to his feet. “Enough of that! Get along down the pier or I’ll show you the business end of my pike!”

  Andrew rose because he had to and stepped to the vicar’s other side. “A conduit?” he managed under his breath.

  “Let us write to you, please, I beg you. I will pass the word to any I find, all who can be found, all who will pass on the word as well. It will risk your career, but I beg you—”

  “I have no career. As of this morning I am no longer a part of the British army.”

  The vicar accepted this news with only a nod. There was nothing to be said. Nothing at all. “Will you help?”

  “I will.” They reached the end of the pier. Andrew offered a hand, then as the vicar stood in the boat, Andrew found himself unable to release his grip. “Elspeth is with Louise and Henri. If you—”

  “Enough of this, sir!” The sergeant shoved him roughly back. “All right, that’s the lot!”

  “I will tell them. Of course I will tell them.” The priest’s voice drifted across the water. “I think I overheard that my ship is going to Charleston. It is a port south of here. Do you know it?”

  “The name only.” Andrew kept his hand outstretched, as though to lower it would cut off his last remaining thread of contact to his child. “Charleston!”

  “Tell any who contact you …” The priest stopped then, as though he too was crushed by the weight of loss. “Tell them to pray! To remember to pray for us all!”

  Andrew stood long after the soldiers had left the pier. He watched the longboats deposit their final charges. Then the smaller boats were drawn around to the stern and lashed in tandem behind the larger vessel’s rudder. He watched the sails unfurl and the anchor be hauled in and the ship begin to make its way toward the bay’s mouth, toward the broader reaches of the Bay of Fundy and points south.

  And then it began to rain.

  Chapter 30

  Catherine lifted a weary hand and shaded her eyes from the blaze of the afternoon sun. The late summer day was very hot and dreadfully muggy. The rains that had passed through the day before had saturated the countryside, turning the red clay to a deep boggy mire. Shivers of steam drifted heavenward and slowed the wagon’s already laboring team. Catherine felt dizzy from the heat, the long jarring ride, and the effort of cradling the baby from the worst of the jolts. The wagon bumped and jostled as the slowly plodding mules and big mud-covered wheels churned the clay trail into gumbo with their passing.

  With the rise to the top of each new hill, Catherine strained forward, hoping to catch the first glimpse of something familiar. Some indicator that would confirm they were finally back in their own territory. The homeward journey had seemed to take even longer than the trip out. She pined for home. Back in her own cool cabin. Out of the boiling sun that made her heavy clothes stick to her sides.

  Her eyes lifted to the straining team. Sweat rolled from the mules’ heaving sides. Foam flecked every spot where the harness rubbed. She was sorry for their discomfort along with her own.

  And then she saw the large hemlock that was a familiar landmark. She sat up as high as she could manage, eyes searching the descending hillside. There came a sudden opening in the trees, and down below she spotted the gateway to one French farm. Louise had spoken of the family. The mother had died during the birth of a child. She had been sick with fever, and when the time had come for delivery she did not have the strength to bring another baby into the world. It had happened the previous summer, and Louise’s mother had kept the infant for a few weeks until the father was able to make arrangements with relatives.

  Catherine settled back with a contented sigh. They
would soon be home. Just a few more miles. Surely she could bear that much.

  She shifted in her seat, trying again to find a more restful position. At least the baby seemed to be sleeping comfortably. Catherine bent her head and lifted back the blanket for a peak. The baby was flushed and moist but sleeping well, her breathing much more even and strong. It seemed that the doctor’s medicine was working. Catherine smiled to herself, thinking of Louise. She would be so pleased. Their prayers had indeed been answered.

  It had been a difficult trip—but well worth it. And there had been no questions. For that Catherine was thankful. It was such a shame that the infant might never fully recover, that lovely little Antoinette might remain frail her life long. But at least the child should survive. So long as Louise was careful to give her a good, calm upbringing. Which she surely would. Louise would do her best for this child—of that Catherine was certain.

  She shot a glance at her father alongside her. John Price had remained utterly preoccupied with his work that entire journey. Even now he scarcely seemed aware that she was seated beside him.

  Thoughts of her own healthy baby brought another smile to her lips. Her little Elspeth. How she longed for her. And Andrew. Soon, very soon now she would be home with them once again.

  Catherine replaced the blankets, hoping that the wool’s insulation would keep the worst of the heat off the baby. She shifted her position so that her body made a shadow from the merciless sun.

  The trees dropped away, and again her eyes turned toward the farmstead’s gatepost. She thought of the motherless children. She hoped that by now the man had found another wife, a mother for all the young ones who had seemed to spill out from the door and hang out the windows to check on anyone passing. But she was unable to make out any sign of movement in the fields. She knew the house itself stood beyond a copse of elms, planted as protection against the bitter winter winds and grown tall and hardy over the past four generations. But there was no sign of life there either.