Bellewether

  And when Pierre began describing Monsieur Wilde’s older brother, Jean-Philippe knew he was such a man.

  “He lives at Newtown, to the west of here, much closer to New York, and has an orchard there much larger than this one, with slaves to work it. Violet’s mother, Phyllis, she worked in his house,” Pierre said, “from the time that she herself was young. I was not here, of course, in those times, and she was already dead before I came here, but I heard this story, all of it, from Madame Wilde. She told me once that Violet’s mother was the bravest woman she had known. Braver than many men. And so I asked her why, and so she told me, and so now, Marine,” he said, “I will tell you, so you will understand this family.”

  Bending one more branch, he stripped the fruit from it with expert movements. “Violet’s mother, Phyllis, kept the house of Reuben Wilde. And one day he complains she’s tried to poison him, and so he has her put into the gaol; but in a week or so the gaoler and the sheriff of that county come to tell him she is very sick, and he must take her back again. Except then he discovers she is sick because she is with child. With Violet. And she will not tell him who the father is. He beats her, very brutally, and still she will not tell him. So he takes her to the garret, to a very small room, very hot, and there he keeps her, and he starves her and he beats her, and forbids the others in his house from helping her at all. She would have surely died, but for a neighbour who could hear her cries and brought her food when none could see. And then one night this neighbour, she sees Monsieur Wilde—our Monsieur Wilde—has come to fetch two sheep, I think it was, that he was owed for work he had done for his brother, and he’s brought his team of horses and the waggon. And so the neighbour, she helps Phyllis leave the house unseen, and helps her to the waggon where the sheep are, and she hides there and stays hidden all the way here to the cove.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Well, when Monsieur Wilde has stopped his waggon and comes back to get his sheep, there’s Phyllis facing him, and telling him she won’t be taken back—that he will either have to help her, or she’ll walk straight down that path into the water of the cove and drown herself, because she will not bring a child into the world to be raised at the mercy of his brother, in his brother’s house.” He gave a shrug. “And so they helped her.”

  “But his brother surely figured out where she had gone.”

  “Of course. They did not try to keep it secret, for in such a place as this it is not possible to keep a secret. First they told his brother they would pay the price of Phyllis and the unborn child, to keep them here, but Reuben Wilde is not a fool, and knowing that they then would turn around and give her freedom, he instead made an arrangement that pleased nobody but him and kept them under his control: he let them hire her, for a large price that they paid him every year—and Monsieur Wilde still pays this price, and more, for Violet. But she is not free of Reuben Wilde, and he can change at any moment this arrangement, and reclaim her. And if he should die, she will be passed to his son, Silas, who from all I hear is just as evil in his heart. So Madame Wilde, she told me even though he’s of the devil, every day she said a prayer that Reuben Wilde would never die. And so do I,” Pierre concluded, grimly.

  Jean-Philippe stayed silent for some minutes. Then he asked, “How long ago did Phyllis die?”

  “I don’t know. I think Violet had perhaps eleven years, or twelve, so it was maybe seven years ago. She has not had an easy life, that little one. But now at least you know why she is here.”

  “Yes,” Jean-Philippe said. “Thank you.”

  He felt no need to share the reason why he held the views he did about the wrongfulness of slavery, but it made him glad to know that Monsieur Wilde and his family seemed to share that same opinion. He saw their interactions now with more perceptive eyes. He gained new admiration for the quiet strength of Violet as she went about her daily chores. He paused now with new understanding at the simple gravestone marked with one name: Phyllis, standing neatly kept among the others in the clearing in the forest. And he added to his own prayers in the mornings and the evenings the blunt wish that Reuben Wilde, as undeserving as he was, would never die.

  Death had, indeed, seemed very distant to him earlier today.

  It had been one of those October mornings when the sky had spread above him like a perfect jewel, bright blue and cloudless, and the air had held a crisply pleasant chill that made it comfortable to work even in sunshine.

  He had been a child when he had last made cider. He’d forgotten the sharp rush of smells, the sweetness and the almost-rotten richness and the way it lingered everywhere. He had forgotten, too, the way the cider tasted freshly pressed, before it had fermented. Before time had changed its purity to something stronger. Harder.

  “You are like my sons,” Pierre accused him. “You will drink by half more than we put into the barrels.”

  “It is thirsty work,” was Jean-Philippe’s defence, but he obligingly put down the wooden cup he’d used to catch the running cider and moved back to turn the handles that would tighten down the press. From that position he had a clear view of Lydia within her garden, working with an admirably single-minded steadiness.

  She’d changed her hair. She normally pulled all of it straight back and off her face and bound it simply, letting part of its coiled length hang down beneath the plain white muslin of her cap. But on this morning she had not been so severe with it. He liked the fuller, softer waves of brown about her forehead and her temples.

  “So,” he told Pierre, “it would be useful for me, while I’m here, to learn more English, so that in the future I can speak to those I capture.”

  “You are maybe over-confident, Marine, to think you will return to war.”

  “I’ll be exchanged eventually.” With a shrug he said, “So then in English, tell me, how would you tell someone that it’s nice, the way they wear their hair today?”

  Pierre’s glance held amusement. “This is how you deal with men you capture, eh? You compliment their hair? It’s very threatening and very tough, I’m sure it leaves them terrified.”

  He hadn’t had much cause for smiling since coming here, but Jean-Philippe felt his features relaxing now into a genuine smile at the other man’s dry remark, and without meaning to, he looked again towards Lydia.

  And found her looking straight back at him.

  Once he’d been hit an inch under his heart with a bullet—there had been no pain but he’d lost all the wind from his lungs and been knocked right off balance, and what he felt now felt like that. This time, though, despite its swift and sudden strike, the feeling was decidedly more pleasurable. As he sent a nod across the clearing to acknowledge her, his smile of its own volition broadened like a schoolboy’s.

  He was letting down his guard, he knew, allowing the Acadian to witness where his interest—and his weakness—lay, but for some reason, standing in the sunshine with her watching him, he’d ceased to care.

  And it appeared to aid his cause on this occasion, for Pierre said, “Fine, I’ll teach you.”

  Waiting until Monsieur Wilde had gone for a new barrel and was out of earshot, Pierre told the English words to Jean-Philippe and made him speak them back again, correcting him. “Yes,” he said finally, “that’s good. That is right.”

  Jean-Philippe repeated the phrase silently within his mind, in rhythm with his work, until he was distracted by the faintly distant hoofbeats of a fast-approaching rider. Then his instincts overrode all else.

  His hand dropped for his sword before remembering it was not there. Since he’d left off his morning walks in favour of more useful work, he’d found it far too cumbersome to carry, and more commonly than not now left it lying in his chamber near the box that Monsieur Wilde had made him, underneath his bed.

  With one glance he surveyed the clearing, taking note of where the members of the Wilde family were, and calculating just how quickly he could move to cover them and shield them from attack. But when he would have stepped betwee
n Monsieur Wilde and the angle of the clearing leading to the forest road, he heard a brief, untroubled call from Violet in the house, and from the way Lydia rose from working in the garden, turning without fear towards the woods, he knew the rider would be somebody she welcomed.

  “That,” Pierre said, when he asked, “is Monsieur Ryder. He the son of Monsieur Wilde’s sister.”

  So her cousin, then, thought Jean-Philippe as he watched Lydia lean forward and accept a kiss of greeting from the newcomer. The man would be ten years his senior, maybe. Nearing forty. He was ruddy faced with russet-coloured hair and rode a fine-legged mare of dappled grey. “He lives nearby?”

  “At Millbank, yes.”

  He’d brought her what appeared to be a newspaper, and evidently it had been intended for her father because she had folded it into her hands and was now coming over. As she neared the place where they were standing by the cider press a wayward breeze caught one soft strand of her dark hair and lifted it against the lace edge of her cap, reminding him what he had planned to say.

  And when she greeted him, he said it. “It’s nice how you’re wearing your hair today.”

  She thanked him, and Pierre in French said dryly, “So that you can speak to those you capture, was it?”

  Jean-Philippe smiled and with equal good nature returned, “I am practising.”

  Lydia had looked away from them both as she handed her father the newspaper, and after a brief exchange of words started to leave.

  Then she paused. Turning back to Pierre, she said something in quiet tones and her expression was solemn and troubled. He caught the word “sorry” and then the word “family,” and then without meeting his eyes again she walked away.

  Pierre translated.

  And Jean-Philippe, with a weight closing in on his heart, stood as straight and as still as he could while Monsieur Wilde confirmed what he already knew must be so.

  • • •

  He did not drink the toast, but set his cup of wine untouched beside him on the parlour table as he took his seat again and went on reading Captain Wheelock’s letter.

  It said nothing of the battle of Quebec, having been written by the captain some few days before the news had reached this province, but it dealt with something nearly as disquieting.

  De Brassart, sitting in the armchair next to his, assumed the captain’s letter could be only on one subject: their exchange. “For surely in the fight we will have captured English officers who must now be returned. It is regrettable of course that we have lost Quebec, but let them try to hold it through the cold months that are coming—they will die from that as soon as from our guns—and in the spring we’ll strike them hard from Montreal and take the city back. And Montreal, you must admit, is a more lively and diverting place to pass the winter.”

  Jean-Philippe, for his part, was not thinking of diversions. He was thinking of the men whose blood now stained the Heights of Abraham, for from the newspaper’s description of the battle that was where the armies must have met. Reportedly their own side suffered sixteen hundred casualties—three times those of the English—and both generals had been killed. He had not liked the Marquis de Montcalm, but death upon a battlefield was still a death deserving of respect, however little the man might have earned it living.

  “What does Captain Wheelock say?” de Brassart asked.

  “He does not write of an exchange.” That he would write at all was something Jean-Philippe had not expected. When the Wildes’ cousin, Monsieur Ryder—who, Pierre said, also kept the post in this vicinity—had asked for him by name and then produced this sealed and folded letter, tidily addressed in careful handwriting, it had seemed suspect. But as he had read, he’d understood, and had been grateful for the courtesy. “The captain’s in New Jersey. He has traced some number of my men, and writes to tell me where they are, and whether they are well.”

  “I see.” De Brassart, vaguely disappointed, raised his drink. “That’s decent of him.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t look pleased.”

  “My sergeant is in hospital. In New York.”

  “Ah.” De Brassart drank his wine as though digesting that small bit of news. “I shouldn’t worry. I am sure the English will look after him.”

  “The English are the reason he is there. He was attacked.”

  “Well, we were all attacked.”

  Jean-Philippe did not waste breath explaining this attack had happened here, more recently. There was no point discussing things with someone like de Brassart, who stood always at the centre of the world in his own view and measured all events in terms of how they hindered or advanced his needs. The injuries of others would, to him, be of no consequence.

  To such a man, Quebec was nothing but a cold place in a country not his own, and since de Brassart learned of its surrender he’d said nothing to suggest he’d even thought about the starving people now within its walls, who having struggled through the months of English siege were now held hostage in their own homes at the mercy of an occupying English army.

  Jean-Philippe, whose childhood home was not far past Quebec along the St. Charles River, found that he could think of little else. He’d asked de Brassart earlier, when they’d been shown the newspaper account, “Does it say anything about the general hospital? The one outside the walls?” Of course it hadn’t. It had only listed names of the main officers who had been killed or wounded in the battle, nothing more.

  There was no one who could tell him if his sister had received the letter he had written when he’d first arrived, or if she’d brought their mother down to join her in the general hospital, or if they had been overrun by the invading English. All he knew was that Quebec had fallen one full month ago exactly, and in all that time while he’d been unaware, his family had been in harm’s way and suffering he knew not what indignities, and he was here and powerless and able to do nothing that would help them.

  Nothing.

  So instead he gathered his frustration with a purpose and he focused on the one action he could take—the one person he could help.

  He told de Brassart, “You will help me speak to Monsieur Wilde.”

  Their host was understanding, if a little hesitant when asked the question. He replied, and with a shrug de Brassart translated, “He thinks there’s nothing in the terms of our parole that will prevent you going to New York, but if you are to go more than a mile from here the law says you must have somebody with you, and permission from the magistrate. Permission he can get for you, but he does not know who just at this moment can accompany you.”

  Jean-Philippe acknowledged that would be a problem, with the younger son now gone, because the older one would hardly be a candidate—not with his history, and his troubled temperament. And Monsieur Wilde could not take time so easily away from all his work.

  They were all looking at him now. Across the room, where Monsieur Ryder had been playing some strange sort of game with Lydia by passing her his wine cup and receiving it again above the armrests of their chairs, she had now straightened in her seat and was regarding Jean-Philippe directly with what seemed to be a purpose of her own.

  And then she said, “I will.”

  He understood those words, and knew their meaning.

  But to make her purpose still more clear she looked towards her father and she told him, “I will go.”

  De Brassart, unaware no translation was needed, turned the words to French and added, “There, you see? That ends your problem.”

  Jean-Philippe was less convinced. While re-folding his letter on its creases with precision he looked carefully at Lydia and was inclined to think from how she held herself, so resolute, that she had business of her own to see to in New York. And that might prove a problem for them both.

  Charley

  “You’re on a mission,” said Malaika, watching from her front porch as I climbed the long flight of stone steps towards her, “I can tell.”

  Her house was in an older part of Millbank o
n a street that wound uphill along the side of an embankment, with the houses sitting higher up amid the trees, so once you’d reached her sidewalk gate you had to turn and climb again. Her front steps had been landscaped very prettily, but there were twenty-two of them. You had to be intrepid.

  Still, I liked the fact that she was within walking distance. Everything in town was within walking distance, really. I had left the car at home today, enjoying the perfection of the crisp fall afternoon, the sky a clear, pale blue against the mounds of trees with turning leaves that painted all the hillsides shades of gold and russet red.

  Malaika’s lawn was still a vibrant green that nearly matched the shutters of her big white-painted house, its broad porch angled for a stunning view across the road and rooftops to the sunlit park and millpond at the centre of the town.

  The porch had wicker chairs with deep inviting cushions, and I sat and caught my breath and told her, “I’ve been at the library.”

  “Of course you have. How else would you spend Sunday afternoon on a long weekend when your boyfriend’s here?”

  “He isn’t.”

  “What?”

  “He isn’t here. He left last night.” I set my weathered tote bag down and took the glass of water she had poured me from the pitcher on the glass-topped wicker table by her own chair. “And he’s not my boyfriend, anymore.”

  “Oh, Charley. Well then, since you’re walking, let me fix you something stronger.” She stepped inside and came back in a minute with tall glasses of what looked like fruit juice.

  “What’s in this?” I sipped experimentally. It tasted of tequila.

  “Secret recipe.” She settled back. “You need to talk?”

  If she had asked me that five minutes earlier, I might have told her no, that I was fine. But with the comfort of her presence and her front porch and the potent drink, I found myself unloading all the details. “I don’t know,” I said, in summing up, “Maybe I made a big mistake, but—”