Captain Wheelock took his time.
“You are like myself, I think,” he said. “A man who values honour.” Rising from his chair, he moved to stand beside the window. “I have been led round the world for these twenty years past by a passion for doing what seems to me right. I’ve followed this passion to the detriment of my fortune and I believe to the hindrance of my promotion, yet it endures,” he explained, “and obliges me sometimes to go beyond prudence, and even politeness.”
It was a curious speech. Jean-Philippe tried to reason where it might be leading.
“Forgive me,” Captain Wheelock said, “for I know what I’m going to ask is well beyond politeness, and you’re not obliged to answer, but when you were on Long Island, did you enter into any understanding with Miss Wilde?”
He felt his features turn to stone. He did not answer.
Captain Wheelock said again, “Forgive me. I ask this because she has written a letter.” He drew it out now from his pocket. “A personal letter. To you.”
“You have opened it.”
“We are at war.”
Jean-Philippe held his hand out. He opened the letter. “It’s written in English.”
“Yes, but I had my—that is, I had Miss de Joncourt translate it. Below the original. There.”
He read her words, turned into French for him. And for a moment he felt he had ceased to breathe.
Wheelock was talking. “The thing is, I’ve just had a letter myself today, from General Amherst. Your Marquis de Vaudreuil has signed a surrender at Montreal.”
Jean-Philippe’s head came up. “What?”
“Montreal has been taken. Vaudreuil has surrendered. Your colony’s no longer French, it is British. Your Troupes de la Marine will soon be disbanded, no doubt,” Wheelock told him, “and you’ll be exchanged with the rest of the prisoners, and sent to France.”
Jean-Philippe frowned. “To France?”
“Yes.” The captain’s eyes held a faint bitterness. “I have my orders. No prisoners are to be sent back to Canada now. Not even those who have farms there, and family there—children, and elderly parents, and wives. Doesn’t matter. The men who are here go to France. No exceptions.”
“But this is—”
“Unjust?” Wheelock offered. “Yes. Wrong? Absolutely. But those are my orders. They’re very clear. Only those men who took oaths of allegiance to King George before word of Montreal’s fall reached New York are permitted to travel to Canada, as British subjects.” He stopped then, and looked very steadily at Jean-Philippe. “Do you understand?”
“I serve my own king.”
“That’s your choice,” said Wheelock. “An honourable choice. And I’m sure, once in France, you can make a new life, and I’ll wish you the best of it.”
Jean-Philippe looked down again at the letter he held. Read her words for a third time.
The captain said, “But, if you have entered an understanding with Miss Wilde, and wish to uphold that, there’s honour in that, too, Lieutenant.” He smiled with the eyes of a man who had finally found love himself, and knew its worth in a changeable world. “There will be an express on the road as we speak, bringing news to New York of the Marquis de Vaudreuil’s surrender, and once that arrives, I can’t help you.”
He looked down at the papers in his hands. Some men get wives while others get the battlefield, Bonneau had said. Now, which will you discard?
And in the end, for Jean-Philippe, it was an easy choice to make.
? ? ?
There was a woman in the water.
He had seen her when he’d come around the headland. He was walking, relishing the freedom of the forest and the road that was his own to walk alone now, if he wanted to. The sun was high and falling warm across the bright September sky and he was thinking it would soon be time to gather corn and start the harvest in the orchard, when the wind had blown the branches at his shoulder and they’d parted on a view down to the water of the bay.
And he had seen her, standing in her yellow gown, some little distance from the shore.
Now every time the trees grew thin, he looked for her, and felt a growing sense of peace.
Her head was turned halfway to him as though she somehow sensed that he was near. She’d gathered up her skirts above the waterline. She stood more still and for a longer time than any woman he could call to memory, as though she were fixed in place by some force yet invisible, within that clear blue water.
By the fifth time he caught sight of her, he knew that he was nearly home.
And had you asked, she’d written him, my answer then and always would be yes. For I will not believe there is no future for us. I cannot believe it, when my heart wants nothing more than to be yours. This war will end, and all the things that now divide us will be gone, and I will set my hopes upon that day and wait for your return.
And she had signed it with, Your Lydia.
His Lydia. His, now.
He had not far to go. Already he could see the lighter greens that marked the clearing’s edge, and he could hear the steady swing of Monsieur Wilde’s axe.
Except as he stepped from the path into the clearing, he discovered his mistake. Because it wasn’t Monsieur Wilde. It was Joseph.
Face-to-face they stood, and nothing moved.
Or so it seemed.
Then Joseph’s hand tightened its grip upon the axe. And Jean-Philippe reached, very slowly, for his sword.
He drew it, just as slowly, cautiously, until the silver caught the sun along the etched words that reminded him to never draw that blade without good cause.
And then he turned the hilt away from him, and bowed his head, and with the blade flat in his hand he held it out, and offered it to Joseph.
Charley
“But no, it did not happen in the way you say.” My elegant French visitor was smiling at the thought.
We were sitting on the bottom two steps of the dog-leg staircase in the downstairs entry hall, the front door of the old house standing open to the softness of the cooling afternoon.
She’d seen the sword. And I’d brought out the drawing, done supposedly by Lydia, that showed the men at work upon the Bellewether, and I’d just finished telling her the story of the officer and Lydia, as I’d heard it from Frank.
“He did not die,” she told me. “I don’t know where that began, but it’s a fairy tale. They lived a long and happy life together, Lydia and Jean-Philippe.”
That was his name, I’d learned: Lieutenant Jean-Philippe de Sabran de la Noye.
“La Noye,” she told me, “was the seigneurie, you understand. The family farm estate along the St. Charles River, near the city of Quebec. It’s still there, you can go and visit. They have weddings there now. Wine tastings. It stayed within the family many years, but now it’s school teachers who own it. A young couple. Very nice. After the Seven Years’ War, many of the buildings there were burned and left in ruins by the British, but when Jean-Philippe and Lydia moved up to take it over, they built everything back as it was. You know, the big stone house, the barns. The whole estate is beautiful. I have a drawing of that house by Lydia, as well.”
I blinked, and held our drawing up to her. “So this was done by Lydia? You’ve seen more drawings by her?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, her style is very recognizable, when you have seen enough of her work,” she assured me. “And particularly in the portraits.”
“Portraits?” I was happy I was sitting down, because I felt my knees begin to buckle. “Whose portraits?”
“Oh, everyone. Her children, Jean-Philippe, his sister, and I think her brothers. Many people. She was really very talented.”
“I don’t suppose,” I said, “that I could pay to have some copies made of those?”
She smiled again, and gave my arm a pat. “I’ll send the real ones to you. You should have them. One I gave last Christmas to my nephew’s son, because he always loved it since he was a little boy, but all the others, and the hat, I think that you should have them.”