Anxious Hearts (2 page)

Gabriel’s failure as an artist wasn’t for lack of trying. Gabriel had spent hours, days, years watching Evangeline, his bewitcher, and equal hours, days, years trying to draw her. Another eye might call his drawings fair, even beautiful, but not Gabriel. He knew they were poor. Empty. Anemic representations of the exquisite Evangeline.

Gabriel took a deep, silent breath. Perhaps he just didn’t have enough skill yet. After all, no one ever showed him how to use charcoal from a dead fire to draw on sheets of birchbark. He’d discovered that himself. No one showed him the tricks of light and shape and how to convey them. But he knew. Still, he could not capture Evangeline. Nothing he created could approach her beauty.

Practice, he said to himself. This is your life’s work. There is nothing else. There is
no one
else.

Gabriel and Evangeline were betrothed sixteen months now, just long enough for him to follow the custom of the Cadians and build her a home, a strong house of stone and wood aside an orchard of twelve saplings, eight apple and four pear, and a small outbuilding for goats and chickens and cider making.

Evangeline’s beauty and intelligence were known throughout the Cadian lands. Her hand was coveted by every bachelor on the shores of Glosekap Bay. But Gabriel, with
persistence and hopefulness and true love, had won her over all the others.

She had chosen
him
.

She does not yet belong to me, Gabriel reminded himself. Not yet. That will come tomorrow, when she becomes my wife.

Gabriel and Evangeline had played together as children, archery and footraces and blindman’s bluff, as had all the children in the harborside village of Pré-du-sel. But the fastest and strongest among them were Gabriel and Evangeline. And their fathers, both widowers, were old friends.

In the years when she grew taller and he broader, their paths diverged. He took to the arts of tanning and carpentry and blacksmithing, she to the arts of spinning and farming and cider pressing. Her life was on the farm, where she cared for her aging father. His life was in the village, where he fanned the fire in his father’s blacksmith shop. The games and races were left to the younger ones. Seasons went by, one following the last, the next ever approaching, and the space between the two motherless children expanded.

But in his fifteenth year, three summers ago, Gabriel saw that Evangeline, once just a playmate and companion, had transformed into a vibrant beauty.

One of those love-struck mornings, in the misty darkness
of the pre-dawn hours, Gabriel hiked to the top of Evangeline’s bec. At sunrise, the mist became a drizzle and forced him to find shelter under the hang of a boulder at the edge of her apple orchard, where he curled up and, weary from the walk and the early hour, promptly fell asleep.

At midmorning, he was jostled awake with a violent prod.

“Attend!” he gasped, opening his eyes and tensing his muscles.

A blurry figure was standing over him, wrapped in a cloud of golden pink mist and pressing the blade of a garden hoe to his throat.

“What is your purpose here?” the figure demanded.

Gabriel blinked through the haze to see that his attacker was his Evangeline, his desired, illuminated with an angel’s glow. “My beloved,” he said, squinting up at the vision of her, straining to bring her into focus.

“What?” she said.

“Evangeline Bellefontaine,” he said, surprised that the words rose so easily from his lips, even in this awkward pose. His eyes traveled across her freckled cheek to rest on the tensed ridge of her lovely jaw.

Evangeline pressed the blade of her hoe more forcefully against his neck, and her tone dropped lower. “What are you doing here, Gabriel Lajeunesse?” Evangeline said, her
untamed hair dropping in heavy black waves from her perfect head. “Why are you in my father’s orchard?” She tightened her grip on the hoe’s handle.

“I fell asleep,” Gabriel said without breathing, because he had seen the dog, the snarling, angry dog with curly black fur, at Evangeline’s feet.

“Easy, Poc,” she said to the dog. “Don’t bite him. Not yet.”

Gabriel exhaled. “I’m sorry,” he said, or at least meant to say.

“You were stealing apples.”

“I was stealing nothing,” Gabriel said. He paused, then continued. “I am here only to breathe the ocean air that feeds your lungs while you sleep, only to receive the sounds of this windy bec that fill your ears by day.” He pointed toward the stone and log home beyond the orchard, Evangeline’s home, and the ocean beyond. “That I might know this place. That I might know you.” He slowly rose to his elbows. “Forgive me,” he said.

“Your words are foolish,” she said, “but they are more considered than some.” For a desperately short moment, hope washed through Gabriel. “But if you were not stealing, then you were spying,” Evangeline said. She studied his face for a moment. “Your eyes tell me you are not a danger, only a nuisance.” She stepped back and tucked the hoe under
her arm. “A poetic nuisance, perhaps. But you must leave at once.” Gabriel scrambled to his feet.

“I was not spying, Mademoiselle Bellefontaine,” Gabriel said boldly. He smoothed his felt jacket and tried in vain to slick down a curled cowlick. He turned toward the path he’d hiked up.

“You’ll never get home that way,” she said. “The path you followed here will be impassable after this morning’s rain. But if you do a task for me, I’ll show you a better way.”

“Anything,” Gabriel answered.

And she asked him to stack firewood, and he did, great piles of it. And she fed him porridge and honey and cider. “You must never spy again,” she said.

“I will prove my sincerity to you,” he answered. “I will dedicate my life, long or short, pleasant or tragic, to this task alone.”

Gabriel knew his words were grandiose, and he honored them.

It took months, years. It took bushels of pears and cords of wood and gifts of tobacco and brandy for her father, the farmer Monsieur Bellefontaine. It required assisting with the goats and gardens, and it took scaring off a pair of lynxes who cornered Poc behind Evangeline’s compost pile. It took love poems whispered in the garden. But Gabriel’s persistence,
fueled by his soul-filling desire, won Evangeline’s heart and her father’s favor, above all other suitors in Pré-du-sel, including Jean-Baptiste Leblanc, the notary’s son.

Gabriel turned his attention back to Evangeline, now scattering seed for the hens. He pulled another sheet of birchbark from the pocket of his felt jacket, spun his charcoal stick in his fingers, and started again. His hand re-created her wavy, obsidian hair, curls straining against the confines of her braid, sometimes escaping across her upper back. Dark eyebrows, animated islands in the liquid light that cascaded over her pale, freckled skin. Blue-black eyes set wide across her visage, framed by smudges of cedar ash as was the fashion. Her lips, her lips, red and curved, the way Evangeline chewed on them whenever she concentrated, as she did now, tending her fowl. Gabriel bit his own lip to share the sensation. He studied her breasts, the smooth rounds of them, carefully concealed under her ocean-blue kirtle of felt, which was laced over a roughly woven linen-cloth shirt and extended into dual panels—tails, she called them—that billowed around her hips and over her lean, muscular legs, clad in deerskin to her ankles. Gabriel imagined the feel of her ankles, powerful and delicate at once, of her calves, her thighs. His breath caught as her kirtle-tails rolled and waved in the breeze,
swaying like the ocean a thousand feet below the crest of this bec, the restless ocean that jovially tossed frothy waves skyward to catch the white-gold light of the afternoon sun as the unyielding and rambunctious tide turned back toward Glosekap Bay. The tide kept time in Cadia, and even so far above the water, Gabriel could hear the tide changing.

Gabriel knew he should go. He wasn’t supposed to be here in the first place. He would see Evangeline later tonight for the signing of the contract, and then, after tomorrow, they would be together, always, forever, and his ever-tossed heart would be peaceful at last. But Gabriel had meager faith in tomorrow. Life had taught him well: Tomorrow doesn’t exist until it arrives.

Evangeline turned toward Gabriel, looking down, not seeing him, eyes fixed on her task. At her heels scuttled Poc, the mutt, scattering dust and leaves, and growling to keep the lordly turkey away from the hen seed. She smiled at Poc and took his jaw in her hands. A wave of envy passed through Gabriel’s stomach and wedged itself in his throat, and he forced his feet still to keep from rushing to her.

Gabriel lost his balance and, stepping back, snapped a twig under his moccasin. Evangeline spun around, squinting into the wood beyond the mossy stone walls surrounding her father’s small farmyard and into the murmuring pines
beyond. Gabriel froze, his ruddy green hunting tunic and brown skin fading into his sylvan hiding place, the living woods where the tips of the leaves were just starting to assume their rich autumn hues of scarlet and amber. The shadows were long now, orange and pink and gold as sunset approached, and though Gabriel was certain she’d seen him, Evangeline turned back to her charges, unalarmed.

“Eat, my girls,” she said in a musical whisper. “Eat and lay. We’ll need eggs for strength tomorrow. For strength and feasting.” The chickens clucked in eloquent recognition of Evangeline’s gentle command. Even they were devoted to her.

Just then, a voice called out, “Sunshine!” Gabriel recognized Benedict Bellefontaine’s voice, coming from inside the house.

Gabriel studied the house and its hulking chimney. Except for the short summer season, life around Glosekap Bay was a constant struggle against cold, different kinds of cold, sometimes an ocean-wet whisper of coolness, sometimes a delicate sting of frost, sometimes a crackling seizure of ice. The fireplace was the largest and most important feature in every dwelling. Now in Second Summer, the days were warm again, but the nights grew ever longer. Gabriel smelled the afternoon and knew, or feared, that this winter would be as
long and inclement as last year’s. In generations past, the Ab’naki elders had taught the Cadians to read the fur of the foxes, and this season the fur was thick. Gabriel hoped the fireplace in the home he’d built for Evangeline would suffice in the cold, hungry winter ahead.

But today was not cold, it was warm, and the bec was bathed in golden vapors, the magical light of deep afternoon, and winter seemed distant. Gabriel’s thoughts converged on tonight. Monsieur Bellefontaine had invited Basil and Gabriel to sign the documents of betrothal. It would be the first time he stepped into her home.

Gabriel closed his eyes and imagined what he’d see. He’d painted the picture in his mind innumerable times: a single room, protected from the offshore gales by boulders on the windward side, with two pine-shuttered windows facing away from the ocean, away from the northeasterly storms that blew across the bec in the coldest months, sparely furnished with a deep, comfortable ladder-back chair for Monsieur Bellefontaine and a bench and long table for Evangeline and their guests. A dirt floor, packed solidly, swept and decorated each morning with a new border pattern traced with a swirl of Evangeline’s pointed broomstick.

Benedict Bellefontaine had lived seventy winters, which made Evangeline’s father older than nearly all the men in
the Cadian settlements around Glosekap Bay, and certainly older than Gabriel’s father. Monsieur Bellefontaine’s voice was indeed that of an old man, labored and graveled, and his brittle body bent heavily whenever he walked, which was less and less frequently as the seasons passed. He enjoyed the kindness of fellow Cadians from the village, Gabriel first among them, to help him with the planting and harvest, but he relied on Evangeline, his only family, to care for him and his home. And Evangeline loved her father fiercely. She kept the house, and him, as a mother keeps a cub. Gabriel knew she was torn at the thought of leaving her father alone. But Monsieur Bellefontaine had insisted that it was time.

He called out again. “Sunshine!”

“Coming, Father,” Evangeline said softly. She gathered a basket of apples she’d picked up from the ground in the orchard that stretched from the back of the house into the meadow beyond. She draped her cornflower cloak over her arm. “Poc,” she said. “Come. Let’s press these apples into cider. Tomorrow we will marry our beloved Gabriel.”

Evangeline stepped into the small log house, glancing back into the woods to where Gabriel stood unseen. “Tomorrow, everything becomes new,” she said.

And—could it be? She smiled before pulling the Dutch door closed. Gabriel listened for the latch.

Tomorrow! Gabriel looked at the sky. The clouds over Glosekap Bay blushed golden pink, signifying imminent sunset. It was late. Soon twilight would descend. And there was much to do.

“I love you, my angel Evangeline,” Gabriel whispered, but only the moss between the stones heard him. “I love you. No matter what happens.”

He tucked his sketchbook into his foresleeve, securing it with a length of fabric, and turned into the woods.

eva

Mr. Lejeune? Mr. Lejeune!” Mr. Denis doesn’t yell, exactly, but his voice gets stern as he walks toward Gabe, who is still slouched over his notebook, still writing. “May we be so bold as to request your participation in today’s recitation?” Mr. Denis always uses as many words as possible because he likes to remind anyone who’s listening that he knows more words than they do. He obviously doesn’t care that it’s torture for everyone else.