Bride of New France (22 page)

If Madeleine were stronger, Laure would gladly board a ship back to France. But there are no ships in Ville-Marie. Laure swallows hard and thinks that at least it isn’t cold in Canada like the officers at the Salpêtrière said it would be, or like the icebergs they saw at Terre-Neuve seemed to indicate. In fact, the air in Ville-Marie is thick and the sun so hot that Laure feels as if she is standing in front of a bread oven. She wonders if perhaps the boat has veered off course and landed in the French Islands instead.

The captain of their group just laughs at her suggestion. “Women have such a misguided sense of direction. This heat you’re feeling is just the summer season in Canada. Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of winter weather soon.”

Laure wonders what else she has heard about Canada that is untrue.

The only women to greet the new arrivals are a group of religious sisters. Two young Savage girls hover near one of the old women. The girls have on matching dresses, not unlike the one Laure wore for years at the Salpêtrière. The Savage girls have their hair in neat braids like Marie des Neiges at Québec. These must be some of the converts the priest was talking about. Laure stands a little to get a better look at the girls, which sets the canoe rocking. The men on the shore call out
to Laure as she falls back onto her seat. She doesn’t want to appear eager for their attention.

She is thirsty and can feel the film of sweat on her face. Her nose and cheeks have been burned by the sun despite the bonnet. She wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. Her dress is heavy and wet at the hem of her skirt from the water in the bottom of the canoe. A man with rolled-up sleeves and the arms of a blacksmith is wading through the water toward her. Other men follow behind him to help the women get out of the canoes and onto the shore. Laure tells the big man to take Madeleine first. She has to repeat herself for him to understand. There are so many different dialects of French in the colony, those from Normandie, from Picardie and other parts of the kingdom. She cannot tell which this man speaks, only that he is hard to understand. Finally, he lifts Madeleine, still wrapped in the blanket, and carries her to shore. Another man comes for Laure, and before she can protest, she is clinging to his thick neck as he lifts her out of the canoe. Her skirt drags through the water.

“Didn’t they feed you in France? You’re as light as a fox. Won’t make much of a worker over here. And believe me, there’s nothing to do here except work. Cut trees, hunt animals, bake bread. What twenty men used to do in France, one man has to do for himself here.” He sets Laure upright on the shore and walks away.

Laure stands teetering for a moment before dropping to her knees. She looks down at the new earth, her head hanging between her arms, and waits for the ground to stop moving.

She hears another man say: “What did they send us? These are the weakest ones yet. It’ll take more to revive them than the work they’ll do in a lifetime.”

The few military officers and officials of the colony stand to one side, observing the commotion of the canoes’ arrival. Once everyone is on the shore, they begin to unload the supplies. The men seem more interested in these goods than they are in the group of huddled women sent by royal authority to be their wives. They unload the heavy things the men had unpacked each evening and repacked in the morning: iron axe heads for trading with the Savages, guns and munitions for defence against the Iroquois, salt, wheat flour, and burlap bundles of cloth. And of course the girls’ coffers. Soldiers with muskets slung across their chests guard the unloading of the supplies.

After some time, Laure concentrates on standing again. The people and the trees around her seem to be moving toward her. Before she can collapse a second time, two religious women are at her side. They speak in a dialect from the northwest of France as well, but Laure understands most of what they are saying. She asks the women where Madeleine has been taken and tells them that she wants to go to her friend.

“You can see her after the welcome ceremony. The people of Ville-Marie have been waiting all year for your arrival.” The woman’s voice is kind enough.

Laure doesn’t care about the people of Ville-Marie. She just wants to know where they have taken Madeleine. But the nuns lead Laure by the elbows toward the group. Now that she is on the shore, Laure can see that most of the men are older than she is, scorched by the sun and thick with the dirt of years spent in the forest. They are the worst-looking peasants she has ever seen, only they have been bolstered by the fresh air and plentiful food of the New World. The language they speak sounds like the snarl of fighting dogs. She doesn’t want to think which of them is meant to be her husband.

Once the final stores have been removed from the canoes, a man in a black hat trimmed with white feathers addresses the crowd. He is Jean Talon, the Intendant of the colony. He is surrounded by well-outfitted soldiers. Laure strains to make out his voice above the mutterings of the crowd. First he praises the men who defended Ville-Marie over the winter and the spring. They are the Carignan-Salières regiment of soldiers. Since the men’s arrival, he says, the Iroquois have been retreating from the settlement. These soldiers have been given plots of forest land by the King to keep them in the colony at the end of their contracts. Laure and the other women have been brought from France especially to marry these soldiers turned farmers.

The Intendant then says that men of New France who refuse to marry the newly arrived women will have their hunting and fishing privileges revoked. He says that the settlers must show the authorities that they are worthy to enjoy the privileges of titled men.

A groan rises from the crowd: “How can we marry these women? They can hardly stand up. Look at them, not a single bosom or hip between all of them, and they’re expected to produce children. You haven’t brought us helpmates. You’ve given us another burden.”

“You can’t expect to behave like animals, fornicating in the trees with any Savage woman you come across, and still continue to receive the hunting and fishing privileges of royal men.” The official’s voice booms across the assembly, sending an echo of his words into the woods. Laure studies the blackness of the trees, wondering if his speech is directed at some rebellious men who are hiding in the woods. The Intendant turns his back on the crowd and begins to walk inland. The terrain is steep and their goal is a hilltop in the distance.

Laure and the other girls find it hard to keep up, so the Intendant slows his pace. “They’re just a little tired from their long journey,” he says when some of the men start complaining again about the girls. “You weren’t much different when you first arrived off the ship for your soldiering duties. They’ll gain strength quickly enough.”

Although the girls had tried to clean off the worst of the sea voyage back in Québec, they still look like a brigade of beggars, their eyes too wide for their faces, spines bent like old women. The assembly begins to move again. There is a long, steep path that leads up to the hill, and their goal is a cross that has been planted at the top. Laure catches her breath as she tries to climb.

Along the way, a military officer indicates to the girls the various stages of construction of the five or six settlers’ homes they pass. The men behind Laure chuckle at his grandiose description of the shacks. When Laure turns back, one of the men points at a tree and says, “There’s my house right there, just waiting for me to build it.”

Laure realizes that the official’s elaborate speech on the shore was just an exaggeration meant to make the women feel better. She wonders why he bothered trying to impress them, since they have no way of fleeing back to France.

Once they reach the spot atop the hill where the cross is planted, the Jesuit priest and one of the women from the Congrégation Notre-Dame, the religious group that will house the
filles à marier
, begin to sing the familiar
Te Deum
. Laure can’t imagine anyone other than a madwoman singing a
Te Deum
outdoors
in Paris. It is a hymn that belongs inside the heavy stone of churches, a ritual song sung by girls confined in hospitals. Cramped as they were for weeks onboard the ship, when the passengers joined together to pray for a safe journey, it seemed natural to use this song. But now it seems so strange to sing the
Te Deum
while looking out from this hill in Ville-Marie, where there is nothing but sunshine and a vast and empty country of the darkest green below them. How can God even find them in this place to hear their song?

Te Martyrum candidatus laudat exercitus. Te per orbem terrarum sancta confitetur Ecclesia
. The voices of the settlers of Ville-Marie are strong and sound nothing like the feeble efforts of the Salpêtrière
bons pauvres
. Despite the victorious way they sing this miserable song, their voices are almost drowned out by the twittering of the forest birds all around them.

The moment the ceremony is complete, Laure approaches one of the men to ask where she can find the hospital. Later, when she thinks back on this moment, Laure wishes she had chosen someone else to ask. The man she approaches is pudgy, with small eyes. He is dressed as badly as all the others. His stout homeliness makes Laure think he is harmless. He is standing talking with some men and looks surprised to see Laure walking toward him. A look of importance comes across his features as he excuses himself from the men. For a moment, he stands beside Laure, his hands on his hips, surveying the settlement below as if the whole scene belongs to him.

He introduces himself as Mathurin, a Carignan-Salières soldier recently granted a tract of land beyond the settlement. He says that he has built a fine house on his land. Laure ignores this information and asks him where she can find the Hôtel-Dieu. He tells her that he can bring her to it, but insists on
holding her arm. The sister of the congregation nods her head at him, indicating to Laure that he is trustworthy at least.

“Even for short distances a woman walking alone needs to be careful,” he says as they head down the steep incline back to the water. “The Savages are faster than wolves and can capture you in the space of a breath.”

“Faster than wolves?” Laure is growing tired of the way the men exaggerate to impress the women.

“Yes. They brought our regiment in all the way from France to fight them. One thousand men to protect the colony.” He sticks out his chest as if he alone were responsible for all the guns and cannons of Old France.

“Well, I haven’t yet seen a single one of these Iroquois enemies since I arrived, so you must be doing a fine job.”

“
Was
doing a fine job. I’m a farming man now. That’s the end of the soldiering for me. All I need now is a wife to work by my side.” He turns his pink face to Laure and smiles. His teeth are as rotten as his words.

She wants to push his hand off her arm. Barely in Ville-Marie an hour and already she has her first suitor. She would rather have married sixteen-year-old Luc Aubin at the Salpêtrière than this man. Even the red-headed
quartier-marin
would have been a better choice.

The Hôtel-Dieu is the largest stone building near the water on rue Saint-Paul. Mathurin says that it is part of the original settlement from twenty years ago and one of the first places to be built in Ville-Marie. At the door, they are greeted by a young woman in a bright white habit. Laure feels her chest constrict. She forgets for a moment that she is in the middle of the forest. Instead she is standing in the sun on the
parvis
of Notre-Dame in Paris. She is surrounded by beggars and priests. She hears the
ringing of bells. Women in white habits carry sheets from the river to replace the soiled ones on the rows of beds. The river is dirty and narrow enough to build footbridges across it. The ancient city centre is alive with the pleas of beggars and the horse hooves of the noblemen. The church at her back contains the souls of ancient spirits. Mireille is reaching for her with swollen fingers. It is too late.

Mathurin lifts his cap from his head when he sees the young girl at the door. Laure thanks him for the escort, assuring him that she will not need his company inside the hospital. She is relieved that Madeleine has been brought indoors. The Hôtel-Dieu in Ville-Marie actually looks like a hospital, not like the crowded Hôtel-Dieu of Paris, but a rudimentary and clean country hospital. Unlike the modest wooden houses of Ville-Marie, the Hôtel-Dieu is a sturdy stone construction.

Laure enquires as to Madeleine’s whereabouts, and the young girl leads her into the cool entrance and up a spiral oak staircase. Laure smells herbs and tinctures as they pass the pharmacy. The room at the top of the stairs is large and bright. The windows are open and the air is gentle and soft. Madeleine is lying in her own bed. Two other girls from the crossing were also brought in exhausted by the sun and the arduous canoe journey. But, unlike Madeleine, they are sitting up chatting, restored by a few hours of rest and medicine. There are even several empty beds in the room. For the first time Laure feels hope that their lives will be favourable in the colony. Surely Madeleine will be healed in this room.