“She’s pretty, is she not?” The big Acadian had come to stand beside his shoulder.
Jean-Philippe, for one unsettled moment, thought he might have dropped his guard and so betrayed his thoughts, but when he swiftly turned from his appraisal of the figure in the yellow gown, he saw he need not worry.
Boudreau’s focus was on something else entirely as he went on, “Despite all that, you can still see the lines of her, the beauty of her, yes? There was no faster ship in New York’s harbour.”
It was coming on to dinnertime. They’d walked back from the orchard not along the lane but by the forest path, where it was shaded still and cool. And where the path had turned to follow close along the clifftop and the trees had thinned to give them a clear view down to the cove, they’d stopped and Jean-Philippe had studied the small group of people gathered now beside the broken ship.
He could not count the times he’d stood like this, concealed on higher ground, and looked down on an adversary, measuring their strength before a battle. And their weaknesses.
He watched for interactions, always. Sought to learn who truly held command, and in this instance it was clear that of the seven men upon the beach the one in charge was Monsieur Wilde, for even though he had stepped back behind the younger man in grey, the others there all looked to him while speaking, as though seeking his approval.
The man in grey would be the eldest son, the one who’d come this morning, for in build and stance he was the younger image of his father. And his brothers had now fallen into their role as subordinates to him, although the youngest had not shaken off his restlessness and gazed, not at the ship before him, but towards the tall masts of the Spanish ship now riding to her anchor in the bay.
The middle brother had, to Jean-Philippe’s surprise, a woman with him—young, fair-haired, and dressed in blue.
At first he’d wondered if she was the eldest brother’s wife, but it was obvious her whole attention was upon the troubled one, and any man who held himself as proudly as Monsieur Wilde’s eldest son would never have stood by and let his wife show such great favour to another without trying to reclaim it for himself. And a few more minutes’ observation had left Jean-Philippe convinced the woman dressed in blue must be the daughter of the other older man who was now standing talking to the Spanish captain, who, in turn, was standing close to Lydia.
Too close.
“Yes, very pretty,” Jean-Philippe replied, in level tones. “But tell me, who are those two people there, the woman and the older man?”
Boudreau said, “The Fishers. Mr. Fisher keeps the big store at Cross Harbor, with his children. That’s his eldest daughter, Sarah.”
“And what is she to the middle son?”
“She was—she is—his fiancée, though whether they will marry now is something God alone can know.”
“Why?” Jean-Philippe looked down more closely at the young blond woman in the blue gown, with her feelings for the troubled son so obvious in how she held herself so close beside him; how she watched him. “Tell me, what was it that happened to him?”
Boudreau hesitated, shifting where he stood as though uncomfortable, and Jean-Philippe looked back at him.
“You told me I had much to learn about this family,” was his challenge. “Teach me, then.” He made a guess. “He has seen battle, that one, yes? And he did not cope well with it?”
It was the right approach to take to make Boudreau begin to speak, his tone and stance defensive. “Joseph was not sent up to Chouaguen to fight. He was a peaceful man and not a soldier.” With a frown he added, “So I think there is no shame that he has struggled with it afterwards. Were you there?”
“At Chouaguen? No.” That would be three years ago. That summer he’d been sent with a detachment of his men to the Ohio Valley. “No, I was not there.” He’d heard the stories, though. He always heard the stories.
It had been a famous victory, the attack upon Chouaguen—“Oswego,” as the English called it. Since he was a boy that fort had stood upon the south shore of the lake—begun in wood and fortified in stone, an English blight upon their territory. It could not be allowed to stand, and his superiors, Monsieurs Coulon de Villiers and de Rigaud, deserved to bear the honour of attacking it, together with Montcalm. While he disliked Montcalm, he could not fault that victory. The campaign had been well planned, well executed, and a great success.
But from his own experience he also knew that battles did not end with the surrender of a fort. For common soldiers and civilians, the most dangerous of times came in the aftermath of that capitulation, when storerooms were plundered and liquor was drunk and the victors and their native allies, who held to their own rules of war, took control.
So it had been, according to the tales he’d heard, at Fort Chouaguen.
He looked now at the middle Wilde son—Joseph—and asked quietly, “What was he, then, if not a soldier?”
Boudreau paused again, as though he still did not feel comfortable with this discussion, but at length he said, “He was a shipbuilder.”
This made good sense to Jean-Philippe and fit with what he had observed, although it went a step beyond his own suspicion that the young man had once been a carpenter. A shipbuilder had skills that were more specialized.
Boudreau went on: “He worked at the same shipyard as the son of Mr. Fisher, and the two of them were friends, like this.” The big man held two fingers up, pressed close together. “This is what I’m told, you understand, by Madame Wilde, for I did not come here myself until just before Joseph went to Chouaguen. I saw him only two times before he and his friend, Moses Fisher, went north to that place.” He shrugged. “These were difficult times for this family. For the Fishers also, because they were intertwined—the Fisher girl, there, being Joseph’s fiancée, and Moses Fisher having asked Miss Lydia to marry him, it made their leaving very sad. And then of course, when Joseph came back as he did, that was more sad.”
“And Moses Fisher?” Jean-Philippe imagined he already knew the answer but he asked the question anyway, aware his tone had hardened. He had not thought he could feel so deep a jealousy for someone he’d just heard of. But he did.
Boudreau sighed heavily. “Well, he did not come back at all. And that was very terrible, because it was while Joseph was beside him that his friend was killed, and he was there to witness it, and that I think is what has left him broken most of all.”
Jean-Philippe, his thoughtful gaze upon the straight back of the woman in the yellow gown who stood so still upon the beach below them, could not help but wonder whether Joseph was the only one who’d been left broken by the death of Moses Fisher.
Joseph Wilde was moving. He had stepped away from Sarah Fisher and the others and was now approaching the careened ship.
Jean-Philippe, observing this, asked, “What was he like, when you saw him those two times, before Chouaguen?”
“Who, Joseph?” Boudreau shrugged again. “A quiet man, but happier. Then, he could laugh. They all could. But they had her then as well, you understand. Their mother,” he explained, when Jean-Philippe glanced briefly over, questioning. “May God be with her,” Boudreau said, and crossed himself with deep respect.
“She has not been dead long?”
“Only a year. There was a storm. A tree fell. For a time it seemed she might recover, but . . .” The big man’s voice trailed off in sadness, then he simply said, “God takes those souls he loves the best.”
Jean-Philippe was less convinced of that. He’d seen men die who would not have been greatly loved by God, but he did not share his opinions, knowing Boudreau had just lost a child.
On the half-moon curve of beach, the mood had shifted. There was tension now—he saw it clearly in the way they all were standing.
Joseph Wilde had raised his hand to touch and test the boards of the ship’s hull.