It was a curious speech. Jean-Philippe tried to reason where it might be leading.
“Forgive me,” Captain Wheelock said, “for I know what I’m going to ask is well beyond politeness, and you’re not obliged to answer, but when you were on Long Island, did you enter into any understanding with Miss Wilde?”
He felt his features turn to stone. He did not answer.
Captain Wheelock said again, “Forgive me. I ask this because she has written a letter.” He drew it out now from his pocket. “A personal letter. To you.”
“You have opened it.”
“We are at war.”
Jean-Philippe held his hand out. He opened the letter. “It’s written in English.”
“Yes, but I had my—that is, I had Miss de Joncourt translate it. Below the original. There.”
He read her words, turned into French for him. And for a moment he felt he had ceased to breathe.
Wheelock was talking. “The thing is, I’ve just had a letter myself today, from General Amherst. Your Marquis de Vaudreuil has signed a surrender at Montreal.”
Jean-Philippe’s head came up. “What?”
“Montreal has been taken. Vaudreuil has surrendered. Your colony’s no longer French, it is British. Your Troupes de la Marine will soon be disbanded, no doubt,” Wheelock told him, “and you’ll be exchanged with the rest of the prisoners, and sent to France.”
Jean-Philippe frowned. “To France?”
“Yes.” The captain’s eyes held a faint bitterness. “I have my orders. No prisoners are to be sent back to Canada now. Not even those who have farms there, and family there—children, and elderly parents, and wives. Doesn’t matter. The men who are here go to France. No exceptions.”
“But this is—”
“Unjust?” Wheelock offered. “Yes. Wrong? Absolutely. But those are my orders. They’re very clear. Only those men who took oaths of allegiance to King George before word of Montreal’s fall reached New York are permitted to travel to Canada, as British subjects.” He stopped then, and looked very steadily at Jean-Philippe. “Do you understand?”
“I serve my own king.”
“That’s your choice,” said Wheelock. “An honourable choice. And I’m sure, once in France, you can make a new life, and I’ll wish you the best of it.”
Jean-Philippe looked down again at the letter he held. Read her words for a third time.
The captain said, “But, if you have entered an understanding with Miss Wilde, and wish to uphold that, there’s honour in that, too, Lieutenant.” He smiled with the eyes of a man who had finally found love himself, and knew its worth in a changeable world. “There will be an express on the road as we speak, bringing news to New York of the Marquis de Vaudreuil’s surrender, and once that arrives, I can’t help you.”
He looked down at the papers in his hands. Some men get wives while others get the battlefield, Bonneau had said. Now, which will you discard?
And in the end, for Jean-Philippe, it was an easy choice to make.
• • •
There was a woman in the water.
He had seen her when he’d come around the headland. He was walking, relishing the freedom of the forest and the road that was his own to walk alone now, if he wanted to. The sun was high and falling warm across the bright September sky and he was thinking it would soon be time to gather corn and start the harvest in the orchard, when the wind had blown the branches at his shoulder and they’d parted on a view down to the water of the bay.
And he had seen her, standing in her yellow gown, some little distance from the shore.
Now every time the trees grew thin, he looked for her, and felt a growing sense of peace.
Her head was turned halfway to him as though she somehow sensed that he was near. She’d gathered up her skirts above the waterline. She stood more still and for a longer time than any woman he could call to memory, as though she were fixed in place by some force yet invisible, within that clear blue water.
By the fifth time he caught sight of her, he knew that he was nearly home.
And had you asked, she’d written him, my answer then and always would be yes. For I will not believe there is no future for us. I cannot believe it, when my heart wants nothing more than to be yours. This war will end, and all the things that now divide us will be gone, and I will set my hopes upon that day and wait for your return.
And she had signed it with, Your Lydia.
His Lydia. His, now.
He had not far to go. Already he could see the lighter greens that marked the clearing’s edge, and he could hear the steady swing of Monsieur Wilde’s axe.
Except as he stepped from the path into the clearing, he discovered his mistake. Because it wasn’t Monsieur Wilde. It was Joseph.
Face-to-face they stood, and nothing moved.
Or so it seemed.
Then Joseph’s hand tightened its grip upon the axe. And Jean-Philippe reached, very slowly, for his sword.
He drew it, just as slowly, cautiously, until the silver caught the sun along the etched words that reminded him to never draw that blade without good cause.
And then he turned the hilt away from him, and bowed his head, and with the blade flat in his hand he held it out, and offered it to Joseph.
Charley
“But no, it did not happen in the way you say.” My elegant French visitor was smiling at the thought.
We were sitting on the bottom two steps of the dog-leg staircase in the downstairs entry hall, the front door of the old house standing open to the softness of the cooling afternoon.
She’d seen the sword. And I’d brought out the drawing, done supposedly by Lydia, that showed the men at work upon the Bellewether, and I’d just finished telling her the story of the officer and Lydia, as I’d heard it from Frank.
“He did not die,” she told me. “I don’t know where that began, but it’s a fairy tale. They lived a long and happy life together, Lydia and Jean-Philippe.”
That was his name, I’d learned: Lieutenant Jean-Philippe de Sabran de la Noye.
“La Noye,” she told me, “was the seigneurie, you understand. The family farm estate along the St. Charles River, near the city of Quebec. It’s still there, you can go and visit. They have weddings there now. Wine tastings. It stayed within the family many years, but now it’s school teachers who own it. A young couple. Very nice. After the Seven Years’ War, many of the buildings there were burned and left in ruins by the British, but when Jean-Philippe and Lydia moved up to take it over, they built everything back as it was. You know, the big stone house, the barns. The whole estate is beautiful. I have a drawing of that house by Lydia, as well.”
I blinked, and held our drawing up to her. “So this was done by Lydia? You’ve seen more drawings by her?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, her style is very recognizable, when you have seen enough of her work,” she assured me. “And particularly in the portraits.”
“Portraits?” I was happy I was sitting down, because I felt my knees begin to buckle. “Whose portraits?”
“Oh, everyone. Her children, Jean-Philippe, his sister, and I think her brothers. Many people. She was really very talented.”
“I don’t suppose,” I said, “that I could pay to have some copies made of those?”
She smiled again, and gave my arm a pat. “I’ll send the real ones to you. You should have them. One I gave last Christmas to my nephew’s son, because he always loved it since he was a little boy, but all the others, and the hat, I think that you should have them.”
I was starting to feel light-headed. “The hat?”
She laughed. “I’ll send it to you. Every family needs its own historian, someone to guard the stories, yes? Or else they will be lost. But now I’m eighty-six,” she said, “and have no children of my own, so someone else must guard the pieces I have gathered.” She looked up, towards the newly restored ceiling and the beautifully replastered walls, and told me, “This is nice. It’s very good, what you ha
ve done here, with this house. The love of Lydia and Jean-Philippe, this is where it began, so it is right that what remains of them returns here.”
• • •
“Eighty-six,” said Rachel. “Wow.”
I looked around from where I sat, beside Sam on my brother’s porch, and asked her, “Really? That’s your takeaway from everything I just got finished telling you?”
“Of course. The woman’s eighty-six and French and still flies over every year from Paris. That’s the life I want.”
I admitted she had made it look pretty fabulous. “But I don’t think I’ll look that good at eighty-six.”
“Sure you will,” Rachel said. “Sam loves to keep old things looking like new.”
“Ha ha.”
Sam stretched his legs out, feet propped on the porch railing, and said, “It’s true.”
“Partly true,” I corrected him, as Rachel left us alone. He was proving my point, moving one foot just slightly to test how far the railing wobbled. I said, “You like fixing things. Broken things.”
I hadn’t meant for the tone to creep into my voice, but it did, and he heard it. “Hey.”
“No, it’s okay. It’s just . . .”
“What?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s what you do, I know. Just like the houses. You fix things. And people. And beagles.” I couldn’t help smiling a little because he was pushing his boot on the railing again, nonchalantly. “I guess I’m messed up enough that I’ll stay interesting.”
“You think I’m with you because you need fixing?” He looked at me, serious. “Charley, I’m with you because when I came down that staircase last summer and saw you, it messed me up. I haven’t been the same since. Okay?”
He had the best eyes. “Okay.”
“Now, come here.”
And of course that was when the porch railing decided to fall off entirely, right to the gravel. Of course I looked up and saw my parents’ car pulling in at the front, unannounced, unexpected.
Sam grinned. Held my face in his hands. Held my gaze. “Breathe,” he told me. And kissed me.
And that, as it turned out, made everything right.
Postern
Some houses seem to want to hold their secrets. The Wilde House seemed to have decided that the time had come to let them go.
One morning Willie, working on the massive kitchen hearth, pulled out a flintlock pistol, in four pieces, from a hollow in the stones. “There’ll be a story goes with that, I’m sure,” he said, and Lara’s youngest boys had started coming up with story possibilities.
“I bet it was a bank robber.”
“I bet it was a rogue assassin.”
“Rogue assassin?”
“Yeah. He had a job to do here in the house, and when he finished he broke up the gun so nobody could trace it to him.”
Willie looked at me and winked. “That’s how it starts,” he told me.
I’d decided that I liked the story of the French soldier and Lydia much better now I knew they both survived and had a happy-ever-after ending.
And when the box from France arrived, it felt like Christmas morning.
It came wrapped up like a sculpture, thickly padded, but when all the packing layers had been peeled away they left a simple deal-box, three feet long by two by one and made of pine, with old forged hinges neatly inset so they would be more secure, and iron loops that once had held a lock.
There was a note to say the box itself had been made here for Jean-Philippe when he’d arrived, so he would have a place to keep his things, and that he’d liked it so much he had kept it all his life, and it had been passed down the family as a relic of their ancestor’s captivity.
And in the box, she’d sent the promised treasures.
A cocked tricorn hat of black wool felt with trim that had once been bright gilt. A square of faded yellow silk, much treasured from the look of it. And under those, shielded between sheets of acid-free cardboard, protected by Mylar, she’d sent us the drawings by Lydia Wilde.
I’d hoped there might be a self-portrait. There wasn’t.
But there were the drawings she’d done of her husband, and they were worth all of the rest. I could see why she’d fallen in love with him. Not just his looks, but the warmth of his eyes and the way that he seemed to be smiling privately, only for her.
There were two drawings of a much older man, kind-eyed and heavy-jawed, who had been labelled as Zebulon Wilde. And labelled or not, there was no way I could miss Benjamin—I’d seen enough of his portraits in oils to be able to know him as soon as I saw his face. Benjamin Wilde as a teenager was my particular favourite, because of the flow of his hair and the glint in his eye that seemed ready to take on the world.
There was also a young man resembling Benjamin but with more serious eyes, and I’d guessed his identity even before I had read the name: Joseph. The brother who’d taken the blame for a murder that never occurred. We could fix that.
I had plans to have quality copies made of these Wilde portraits; to frame them and hang them throughout the house, telling the stories of those who had lived here and helping them come back to life for our visitors.
So it was almost a mystical moment when, out of the bundle of drawings, I lifted the portraits of Phyllis and Violet.
Two drawings of each of them, beautifully rendered—rare representations of African American women of Benjamin Wilde’s time.
And then, at the bottom, below several drawings of children, was Patience Wilde. Lydia’s mother. Her eyes seemed to follow me, smiling, no matter which angle I viewed her from.
“Maybe,” I said to Sam, later that afternoon, “Lydia looked like her mother.”
He agreed it was possible. “Where am I putting this chair?”
We were starting to furnish the keeping room, now that the walls had been panelled and plastered and painted the soft grey-green colour they had been in Benjamin’s day.
Sam was holding the Spanish chair, carefully, waiting for me to direct him.
I said, “By the fireplace, right there. It’s a nice, cozy spot for it.”
He set it down.
As we stood watching, the chair began moving of its own accord. Sliding over the planks of the floor on a perfect diagonal, it came to a stop by the large window right at the front of the room, before pivoting slightly to rest at an angle.
I looked at Sam and he looked back at me. I’d expected him to look incredulous, even alarmed, but he didn’t. In fact, he appeared to be taking it all in stride.
“Well,” he said, “I guess that’s where she wants it.”
“Where who wants it?”
“You know. Our resident ghost.”
“He’s a man.”
Sam said, “Nah, she’s a woman. I’ve seen her.”
“You’ve seen her? When?”
“Couple of times. Just her shape, not her face, but she’s clearly a woman.” When he looked at my face, he asked, “What?”
It was such a relief to be able to tell him the things that had happened to me in this house, without worrying whether he’d think I was crazy. I couldn’t help adding, “But you’re awfully calm about this, for a guy who can’t watch scary movies.”
He shrugged. “She’s not trying to hurt anyone. She’s a comfortable ghost, if you know what I mean.”
It was not a bad word for her: comfortable. Really, the things she had done were designed to protect me, to show me my way in the dark, help me find things, remind me I ought to be patient. Unless . . .
“Oh,” I said.
“What?”
“Sam, I think I know who she is.” All the pieces began to connect, and the final one fell into place with the sermon. The one in the Tillotson book in my office: The patience of God. Not advice, but a name.
Her name.
“I think it’s Patience Wilde.” Setting the record straight. Righting old wrongs. Bringing all of her family together.
The wind gently rattled the window glass next to
the Spanish chair, and the old house seemed to settle around us at last with a human-like sigh of contentment.
And all down the path to the cove and the bay, and across the bright waters of Long Island Sound, every whisper fell silent.
The Wildes had come home.
About the Characters
Nearly all my novels have their roots in some small episode of history, but it isn’t often that the history is my own.
Having been born into a family of amateur genealogists, I’ve always known that one branch of my ancestors, the Halletts, had settled on Long Island in the mid-seventeenth century, at Hallett’s Cove, eventually establishing themselves at Hellgate and at Newtown, where during the Seven Years’ War they had taken in French officers on their parole of honour.
But it wasn’t until I read Thomas M. Truxes’s absorbing history book, Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), that I gained a full appreciation for the intrigue of the times.
As always with my novels, I’ve mixed characters who really lived with ones that I’ve invented. And when writing real-life characters, I’ve tried wherever possible to use their own words as I found them in my research documents, and use those sources to establish dates and times of things that happened.
George Spencer, for example, and his treatment by the mob in New York City, is recorded down to the route and time of day, and I’ve changed none of it, choosing to weave my fictional characters into the tapestry of what actually happened.
The Wilde family is fictional, a blending of my own ancestors with their Long Island neighbours, the Lawrences, whose real-life privateering schooner, Tartar, in combination with the New York sloop Harlequin, inspired my fictional Bellewether.