The Meeting Place (33 page)

Marie was silenced as Henri deposited the crying baby into her arms and rushed into the house. Marie turned a panicked, tear-streaked face toward her daughter. Her eyes were caught in the torchlight, two blazing orbs of alarm and dread. “Louise, what are we to do, the soldiers!”

“Calm yourself!” Louise's tone was sharp as her voice rose to be heard above the squalls of the terrified baby. “Don't frighten the child!”

Marie looked at her daughter with eyes that saw nothing but the soldiers and the night. Louise did as Henri had done, coming in close, looming over the shrieking baby, drawing in so tightly she could say in a hoarse whisper, “Be calm and see to the baby.”

“Yes. The child … of course.” Marie looked down at the bundle in her arms, and the action of rocking the baby calmed her before yet another thought of alarm. “But, Louise, the child … your Antoinette—”

Soldiers on horseback raced up, shouting down at them, then turning to call at troops marching up on foot, using pikes and muskets to spur the wailing crowd to greater speed. Louise shouted through the open door, “Henri!”

“All right, we must go.” Henri appeared in the doorway with yet another bundle. Louise's brother Philippe appeared after him, Jacques leaning heavily on his arm.

Then another realization caused Marie to scream, “Eli! He's not back from warning the distant farms! How—”

“Let us hope he does not come back at all,” Henri replied grimly, urging them forward and into the wailing throng. “Let us hope at least one of us has slipped through the English net and escaped into the forest.”

“But my son,” Marie wailed. “What—”

“Marie, enough.” Jacques seemed to straighten at the thought of what Henri had suggested, at least enough to give authority to these few words. “We need strength. We need calm.”

There was little of either as they were herded from the village and across the Minas River ford. All around them rose the wails and cries of a great funeral march, but the soldiers paid them no heed. Louise's frantic glances were enough to show how all her world was being torn asunder, all her friends transformed into strangers by the night and the tempest.

She asked her husband, “Do you see Catherine's husband?”

“Nowhere.” Henri shouted up at the nearest soldier, “Captain Harrow!”

He was answered with a harsh laugh. The horseman, an officer by the looks of glittering gold upon his shoulders, turned and called to a man at the fore. The other officer turned to glare at Henri and said in heavily accented French, “You are friend of Harrow?”

“Friend! Yes, friend!” Louise's heart felt squeezed to painful tightness by the look they gave her husband. But still Henri shouted, “Where is he?”

The two officers called back and forth over the tumult but only in their language. Harrow's name came up, amidst looks of disdain and headshakes. But to Louise and Henri they offered nothing more.

More troops were gathered by the long pier. As they approached, Jacques groaned, “Why must they rush us so?”

“To keep us from fighting back,” Henri said. Even he was puffing from the load and the haste. “And to catch the tide. Look there.”

At the end of the long pier, lit by torches, waited more boats than Louise had ever seen. Narrow coastal barques awaited the people of Minas, they and all the others she could now see streaming down from adjoining trails. A long line of torchlit misery, pushed and prodded and herded toward the pier.

At the entrance to the pier Louise's panic surged like a great incoming wave. She turned and struggled against the flow, even as it tightened about her to begin the long march seaward.

“Louise!”

She flung herself against the people who had once been friends, screaming with an energy that seemed to tear her throat, “My baby!”

“Louise, no!”

A pike was shoved into her face, the spear's point over a foot long and glinting angry yellow in the torchlight. She felt a sudden urge to fling herself upon the point, to halt the tide of sorrow.

“Louise, come, you must come with me. Please.” Henri's voice shook with tremors of one who understood what was passing through her mind. “Please, my love, please, you are my life, come with me now.”

She turned and sagged against him, suddenly so weak she could scarcely place one foot in front of the other. “Oh, Henri, they have my baby.”

Together they joined the long line snaking toward the boats. At the pier's end Henri dropped his heavy burdens into the bottom of the next vessel, groaning as the weight dropped from his shoulders. Through the hollow ache of her sorrow, Louise realized it was the only protest her husband had made that entire night. But the thought was soon swallowed by the silent awareness that filled her being and left her shaking with dread. The boat filled and then pushed off, its place at the pier taken by yet another. There were cries and calls from up and down the pier, and over the water from all the boats. People shouted for loved ones and children and parents, the wails so mixed it was as though one great voice spoke for them all, calling and weeping for what was theirs no longer.

Shadowy skeletons took shape in the first dim light of dawn, and Louise realized they were being taken toward larger seagoing vessels. Their masts cut like giant spears up into the departing night. The oarsmen guided their vessel up close to the side, and those who could were pushed and prodded up the netting. Others were lifted in rope-slings. Louise took the baby from Marie. The baby was wailing still, a fact that had escaped her until that very moment. But as she heard the little one's strident cries, she knew that here was one who needed her desperately.

She found the strength to rock and calm the little one as she was slung into the bosun's chair. She held the rope with one hand and the baby with the other as she was raised to the ship's deck. Once there she allowed Henri to wrap his great strong arms around her and felt his head drop to her shoulder. She heard him murmur, the words swept away in the tumult surrounding them. Yet she knew he was praying. And though the words themselves were lost and gone, the message remained, that and the first fragile flickering of calm.

She looked shoreward and felt her heart rise up in a tide of woe and fear.
Her baby—her frail little Antoinette was still there. Left behind.
Abandoned
.

Gradually the deck went silent. In the first light of dawn there rose a faint tendril of smoke. Then another. And another still. Tiny lights in the distance fueled the gray spirals that steadily rose higher and thicker until all the sky seemed supported by great rising pillars pushing upward.

The smoke of their burning dwellings shouted a silent message to all the gathering. There would be no going back.

Chapter 29

Andrew raced against the night and the wind. He rode as he had never ridden before, pursuing all the unseen forces that were tearing apart his world. The distance which had taken two days to cover at the head of his troops, Andrew now did in the space of one night. One long, dark, harrowing night.

He saw little more of the trail than a long silver streak of reflected moonlight. After an hour and more of spurring his horse and shouting encouragement into the steed's ear, the ribbon stretched out like an endless nightmare, taunting him with the threat that it would never end, that he would never reach his goal. And every thundering hoofbeat pounded in time to the name shouted over and over in his head.
Elspeth
.

Twice he passed French villages, or what remained of them. There was movement at neither, which only spurred him on to greater speed, as though the silence which met him as he looked down upon the dark landscape and shadow-houses only warned him of what he was yet to find at his journey's end.
Elspeth
.

Three times he stopped at waystations for new steeds, twice moving so fast that he had stripped off the blanket and gear from his lathered horse and saddled his new mount before the bleary-eyed keeper had roused himself. The third time, in the gray hour before the dawn, he moved more slowly, his arms and his legs so weary that the saddle threatened to bring him down. The keeper came, took one look at his state, and wordlessly pulled the saddle from his lifeless fingers. Andrew watched and drank pitcher after pitcher of cold rainwater drawn from the corner keg, feeling strength fill him with each draught.
Elspeth
.

He knew he had arrived long before he was able to see the village. The smell of charred cinders drifted in the chill morning mist, stronger and stronger until the stench tore a cry of dismay from his throat. The noise gripped the steed's heart, for the gallant animal thundered down the final slope, took the turning to Minas, and burst from the forest and into the first field—past the first blackened, smoldering house.

Andrew reined his horse, looking frantically about at the desolation and the ruin. It felt as though his own heart were being branded by the sight. He wheeled his horse around and dug his spurs into the animal's ribs. “Hyah!”

There was no sun that day. It dared not show its face upon the sight which greeted Andrew as he raced down the trail and came to the exodus gathered by the mouth of the pier. He felt as though his own worst nightmares, the ones so awful they could not be recalled in the morning's light, all had come to life in the tableau before him. The long pier of Fort Edward was lost beneath a wailing, shouting mass of humanity. At the end of the pier floated a longboat, with another waiting to take its place. A third was rowing out to a lone ship floating in Cobequid Bay. The mist drifted in and out, painting the scene a bleak gray, as though the day itself was shamed by what it saw and wished only to hide it from view. To wash it of substance, to cleanse it from memory.

“Get a move on there!” A lone officer stood waving his sword at the meager throng still standing at the pier's entrance. Andrew turned, and only with effort did he recognize Randolf Stevenage. The captain's voice was as hoarse as the call of morning crows from his long night of deplorable duty. “Sergeant, get those people moving! Use your pikes if you must, man! The ship must make the tide!”

“Aye, aye, sir! You lot, pick up your goods and move off, or you can swim to France!”

Andrew slid from his horse and sprawled in the well-churned mud. His legs simply gave way beneath him. He picked himself up without noticing that he had fallen. Then he spotted a familiar face amidst the final throng. “Vicar!”

“You, there! Harrow! Hold off, man, these Frenchies—”

“Vicar!” Andrew searched his exhausted brain and finally came up with the man's name. “Jean Ricard!”

Up ahead, a skeletal face redrawn by grief and terror turned toward him. With recognition came a shout torn from the pastor's throat. “They have taken all my people!”

“My baby!” Andrew gripped the man's cassock as much to keep from falling as to halt the man's progress. “Where is Elspeth?”

“My flock,” the priest choked. “My children.”

“My
child
,” Andrew said the word a sob. “Where is Elspeth?”

Jean Ricard's eyes were unfocused, staring in terror. “They held some of us as hostages at the fort. Only when the last ship started boarding did they let us come forward.”

“But my baby, Vicar, my child, where is she?”

Jean Ricard lifted a heavy, black-robed arm and pointed out toward the empty waters. “There. With all my flock, all my children. Gone.”

Andrew's hands went so numb he could no longer hold the vicar's cassock. He staggered back in horror, slamming into a soldier, and would have gone down had the man not caught him. It took Andrew a long moment to turn and recognize the insignia upon the man's uniform. “Sergeant, where has the other ship gone?” he gasped out.

“Which one, sir? There's twelve out there gone upon the tide, and this lot here's soon to join 'em.”

“But where, man? Tell me where!”

The sergeant stared at him with consternation. “Sir, my orders—”

“Sergeant! Get that last lot down the pier or you'll be sailing with them.” Stevenage's officer chopped at his horse's reins, making the weary animal snort and dance in Andrew's face, pushing him back. “Stand easy there, you!”

Andrew drew himself up. “Sergeant—”

Stevenage's voice came out a hoarse snarl. “My wife knows all about you and your precious Catherine and your consorting with the enemy!”

“I command—”

“Soon enough you'll be commanding nothing at all!
My
orders come from General Whetlock, and his from Governor Lawrence himself. I told them all along you weren't to be trusted!” But the night had taken a savage toll upon Stevenage. There was no satisfaction in his features, nothing save the scarring remnants of a living nightmare. Another savage chop to the reins. “Move that lot out, Sergeant!”

Andrew stepped around the horse and grabbed the sergeant's stirrup. “Where have the other ships gone?”

“Have you missed the entire night, sir? Each ship is dispatched to a different location. Boston, Washington, Louisiana, all the places along the eastern seaboard where the Acadians will be allowed to join a French community. A third and more back to France itself, and each of those to a different port. Of a truth, nobody's falling over themselves to take them in.”

Andrew released the stirrup. “What?”

“Not even the other ships know where each is assigned to go. It was intentional.” The man's voice roughened. “It's the only way we can ever be sure they'll not gather and attack.”

Andrew's knees gave way then, his strength gone. “No, no, it can't be.”

The sergeant shouted over Andrew, “You there! Halt, or I'll shoot!”

The vicar ignored the warning and dropped into the mud beside Andrew. “You must be our conduit!” he whispered urgently.

The sergeant slipped from his exhausted steed and struggled through the churned muck. “Get down the pier, you!”