The Meeting Place (27 page)

The entire village of Minas was held by stunned silence. The report was so bad, so difficult to accept, that everyone had retreated to shivering clusters, like newly bereaved seeking shelter.

Even Henri had no smile of greeting as he and Louise entered her parents' home. Marie hurried to take the baby into her arms. Jacques sat by the kitchen table, a place where he was spending more and more time these days. Walking tired him so, and the weather had been too blustery most days for him to remain upon their porch. The chair by the kitchen table granted him the sense of being a part of the family and the home, while the cooking fire warmed him.

“The baby is asleep, then?” Jacques greeted them.

“Finally.” Louise did not attempt to hide her weary concern. “After keeping us both up almost all the night.”

Jacques nodded to the gray day outside, a pale noon sun struggling to break through the overcast. “Fort Beausejour has indeed fallen. A carter just came in from Cobequid Town this morning. They are calling it the Velvet Revolution, for scarcely a shot was fired on either side. The French soldiers were so demoralized from the long siege that when they saw the English gathering and priming their long guns, they surrendered.”

“Jacques, please, such talk is not fit for the home,” Marie said from her corner where she rocked the tiny form.

But he paid his wife no mind. “And now there is a rumor that half the remaining forces at Port Royal have been called westward to help defend Quebec against the expected British attack.”

Louise watched as her husband lowered himself into the chair opposite Jacques. Though Henri now carried the title of village elder, he bore a lifetime's habit of following Jacques's lead. The older man held strong ties to the outside world, and many of the village's allies still preferred to speak first with him. With any other new elder, all this might mean trouble. Between Henri and Jacques, it came as naturally as breathing. Henri's brow furrowed with the effort to understand, and he showed no reluctance to ask for guidance. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” Jacques replied quietly, “that we are defenseless. Not just Minas. All of Acadia is now under British control.”

Louise stood by the doorway, feeling utterly apart both from the news and the discussion. Her entire world was held by concern for her ailing baby. There was room for nothing else but Antoinette. When the silence lingered long enough for her to feel she could change the subject, she said, “Catherine and I have arranged to meet this afternoon. I want to go.”

Jacques stared at Henri. Marie looked up from the baby and stared as well. When no one spoke, Louise implored, “I need to know if there is anything she can do to help us. I have to see her, Papa.” She looked to Henri for support.

When Jacques's eyes remained fixed on Henri, he said quietly, “The baby … she is not doing well.”

“I have to try,” Louise begged again.

Jacques turned to look at Louise. The gray light from beyond the window gave his face deep hollows and folds. The skin hung from his chin and neck. Only his voice retained the calm tone of an elder. “You know it is likely that with all this new risk, Captain Harrow will not allow her to come.”

“And if she does? I must be there.”

“Yes.” Jacques nodded once.

Marie broke in. “But what can the Englishwoman do? There is no doctor in Edward!”

Jacques stared at his wife and asked, “Do you have the heart to tell your daughter not to go?”

Marie opened her mouth to speak, but her gaze turned back to the sleeping little form in her arms. She looked up at Louise, and the desperation in her daughter's face reflected in her own. Marie sighed and shook her head.

It was all the accord Louise needed. “Then I must fly. If the baby wakens before I return … I will hurry.”

Chapter 22

Louise raced up the hillside, chased by a whirlwind of doubts and fears. The sky was filled with great sheets of scudding gray clouds shredded by the rising wind. The trees about her waved and called— whether urging her on or warning her back, she did not know. All she could think clearly was,
What if Catherine does not come?

Her mind knew that her mother had spoken the truth. There was no doctor in Edward, not even one in Chelmsford. All the villages of Cobequid Bay, English or French, were limited to the liniments of traveling traders, the herbal lore of generations, and a barber to set the occasional broken bone. But her heart would not listen. Louise could not afford to rely on the facts. Her baby was suffering. In the light of each new dawn, when hope burned strongest and the love welling from her heart made her almost able to
will
her baby to get better, even then she was coming to see that her beloved Antoinette was losing ground.

If only there would be
something
Catherine could do. Some remedy she might recall, passed down in the English village that she had forgotten to mention, something from the dim recesses of the English past that might give her baby strength, and give herself hope.

The wind in the forest now seemed to echo her own inner litany of woe.
What if Catherine does not come?

But when Louise rushed through the final thicket into the meadow, there was Catherine. Her long brown tresses were tossed about by the wind, and her face held a look as stricken and distressed as Louise's own heart.

The dam of Louise's emotions—all the fears and pains and weariness of too many nights spent walking the front room, cradling her fretting baby—all of it came crashing through in a burst of tears and choking sobs as the two women clung together. Louise's heart poured out in her words and her tears, only to be tossed and tumbled about by the same winds that tore at their skirts.

Louise felt the storm was personally attacking her as she returned down the trail. Her skirt snapped about, trapping her legs, hindering her from going where she knew she must. She felt herself to be in a waking nightmare, one in which she struggled to run in a morass intent on sucking her under.

The grass in the field surrounding the little Minas church was shivering and flattened low. She gripped her bonnet with one hand and as much of her dress as she could hold with the other, pinning her shawl in place by keeping the edges under her arm. Louise felt a rush of relief as the vicar appeared in the doorway. His first words were carried off by the wind. As she drew closer he called, “What in heaven's name are you doing out in this storm?”

“I went to see Catherine about the baby,” she gasped out as she rushed through the door and into the alcove's relative calm. She flung off her bonnet and her shawl, crying, “Oh, Vicar, what am I going to do?”

“You are going to come up front with me and sit down and warm yourself and drink a cup of good hot cinnamon tea.” He took her arm in a surprisingly strong grip and led her down the central aisle. “Now, sit yourself right there and tell me what is happening,” he said as he stoked up the wood stove that heated the little chapel for Sunday services.

“Nothing new. Nothing you don't already know. You have heard it from me and from my mother and probably from every other woman in the village.” She watched as he broke a long cinnamon stick in two, set the halves in a pair of cups, and with a fire-blackened cloth lifted the steaming pot from the top of the stove. She took the cup he offered, then stared blankly down at it.

“Now then.” The vicar settled his lean form beside her. The steam from his mug rose and drifted in air untouched by the storm beyond the chapel walls. “Tell me what is on your heart.”

Here and now, within the safety of these secure walls, his comforting presence, she gave voice to the fears which terrified her. “So many babies don't live beyond the first few months. I have known this all my life. I lost a little sister when I was eight. I haven't thought of it in years. Henri lost a brother. Here I've been married to the man for almost two years and only now do I learn that he once had a sibling.”

She looked up then and saw in Jean Ricard's dark gaze the same answer she had tried not to face the night before. “He told me because he wanted to prepare me for what might come. But I couldn't live if I lose my Antoinette! I would rather die with her!”

Instead of the rebuke she expected, rather than chiding her for such thoughts, Jean Ricard gave a solemn nod. “You have given your life to your child. How can you possibly go on if the baby is assigned to the grave?”

The gust of wind shivered the walls about them. Louise felt all the tears remaining in her heart come springing to her eyes. “Yes! How can I live? How is it possible to go on? I can't! My life would end with hers!”

“It is not yet time to speak of death.” The sky beyond the chapel's tiny lead-paned windows had turned dark with twilight. The vicar's face seemed even more lean and craggy than ever. Only his eyes retained their same gentle light, a glow like the coals in the fire behind him. “You will know if such a time comes, and God will supply you with the answers only then. For now it is your fears speaking, and these too you must turn over to God. Rely on His strength. Not on yours. He will see you through. Remember this when you feel attacked in the night by all that is beyond your control. Rely on God's strength. It will come one day, one moment, at a time. Just when you need it.”

They were words she had heard a hundred times before. A thousand. And they answered none of the questions which filled her mind with a storm's chaos. Yet here and now they granted her the stillness of genuine peace, enough so that her tears ceased and her voice quieted. “But what am I to do about my baby?”

The same calm, gentle peace she felt growing within her soul was there in the pastor's voice. “Whatever God shows you to do.”

The storm continued long past dark, its force so great Andrew watched the fire flicker and dance from winds blown down the chimney. He lay in bed without moving, afraid he would disturb Catherine. She had looked rather worn lately. Though caring for him and the child was enough to exhaust anyone, still she insisted upon hearing the growing tide of dire news. And she remained desperately worried over Louise's little Antoinette.

His eyes moved to where their own baby's cradle glowed ruddy and warm in the firelight. He longed to rise and walk over and stare down at his beloved child. Each time he held his daughter it was the first time all over again.

A soft voice said from beside him, “Do you wish to tell me what bothers you so?”

He rolled over in bed. “I thought you were asleep.”

“As you should be.” Catherine turned toward him. “Do you have to go out on patrol again tomorrow?”

“At dawn.” Though their region of Cobequid Bay remained as calm and peaceful as ever, the troop had been on constant alert since the taking of Fort Beausejour.

“Then you should be asleep. You are not resting enough.”

“I was just thinking the same about you.” He stared into Catherine's brown eyes, her gaze softened by love and the fire's glow.

She stroked his face, her hand as soft and warm as her voice. “What is troubling you so?”

“It is so strange,” he said, clasping her hand and drawing it into the space between them. “With all there is to occupy my mind, I cannot stop thinking about little Antoinette.”

Catherine was silent a long moment, then said, “It is a problem of a size and form that we can work with.”

Andrew drew back a fraction. “I don't understand.”

“We are surrounded by forces beyond our control. There is nothing we can do about war in England.”

“We cannot change the way the authorities feel about the French,” Andrew agreed. “We cannot erase centuries of conflict and suspicion.”

“But this baby, this tiny helpless child …” Catherine stopped and swallowed hard. “This one life has form and meaning.”

“It is more than that,” he discovered, his wife's words a mirror to what before had remained beyond reach within himself. “This one family's distress gives a very real face to what all the French must be feeling. I ache for them, for their uncertainty and despair.”