A small white hand shot out and grasped his wrist. “What do you intend to do with me?” she asked, suddenly afraid.
“You and I have unfinished business to discuss, haven’t we?”
As quickly as it had come, the fear vanished and was instantly replaced by a glint of the fire and the undiluted hatred she had flashed across the cabin just before the bullet struck his thigh.
“For example, why have you been trying to kill me?” he asked.
“You murdered my lover,” she said, spitting out the words.
“For that, I am truly sorry. I have been sorry every day since. But you know, as I do, that your lover had two pistols trained on me, one of which he fired while preparing to finish me off with the other.”
“You were going to burn down-” She didn’t complete the sentence. Her face crumpled. She dropped her head into her hands and wept.
Marc went to the kitchen, where Mrs. Standish had left a big kettle simmering on the wood-stove, and made tea. He filled two mugs and went back into the parlour.
Isabelle LaCroix had drawn her knees up and was resting her chin on them, with a woollen afghan wrapped around her legs. She had stopped crying. She took the mug of tea from Marc without looking at him, and sipped at it.
“I think it would be good for you if you just told me about it,” he said gently.
For a minute he thought she had decided to say nothing more, simply curl up inside herself as she had tried to do with her body in the snowbank. But after a while she started to talk, slowly and hesitantly at first, but soon with vigour and purpose. “My Pierre is dead, and I have ruined what was left of my life. In the cabin, I thought you were dead, too. If not, I would have done something terrible then and there. But his mama and I rushed over to him. You shot his voice away. He was trying to tell me he loved me, but you shot all the words away.”
“Tell me, please: did they burn down the house?”
The question seemed to startle her, interrupting the necessary flow of her own memories. “No,” she said. “They didn’t. I don’t know why. It’s still there. At least it was the day I left.”
Perhaps I was never meant to burn down houses, Marc thought.
“After they put Pierre into the ground, I went up to Sorel. I heard the stories of the hero of St. Denis. I found out who he was.”
“And you came, on your own, to Montreal? To find him and-?”
She looked over at Marc as if to say there was nothing unusual or surprising about what she had set out to do. “It was easy to get a job as an aide at the hospital. They paid us almost nothing, because we were French. At first they didn’t think you would live. Then you woke up. I tried to keep out of your sight until-”
“Until you got your chance. Then one night while I was still helpless, you tried to drive a bayonet through my chest.”
She looked at him again, but there was no hatred in her eyes now, just bewilderment, as if she had been living a nightmare and unexpectedly been awakened from it.
“Yes, but it was dark, and I was very afraid. The knife stuck in the wood. I couldn’t get it out right away. When I did, I dropped it and then just turned and ran. I never came back. I told the big nurse I was sick. After a couple of days she sent me away, without my pay.”
“And you need to tell me all this now.”
“What does it matter? My life is over. What was left after Pierre died is now gone.” She gave him a look that was half pleading and half rueful. “You should’ve left me to freeze.”
“But how did you get all the way to Toronto, all these weeks later? You could not have been the one who shot at me near the river at Cornwall.”
“I went back home. I took my dowry, and I came back to Montreal. My parents begged me not to go. The priest railed against me. Pierre’s mama got down on her knees. But I had no life except to kill the one who killed my lover, then join him.”
“In purgatory?”
“In Hell,” she hissed, and the effort caused her to slump back against the embroidered pillows. Marc held the mug for her, and she drank.
“So you got a pistol?”
“No. I hooked up with a group of patriotes from Lachine. After that awful day up at St. Eustache, that was their only way of fighting back. We knew all about you. When you left the city, we were right behind you.”
“So it was they who set up the barricade, hoping I might wander a few steps too far from safety?”
“And you did, didn’t you? But it was snowing. The men were afraid of that officer in the fancy uniform. When the first shot missed, they ran straight back to the river.”
“But you didn’t.” It wasn’t a question.
“They would not go farther into English territory. I thanked them and went on alone.”
“But you are a woman and French-speaking. How could you survive and keep track of my movements?”
“I had money. And in the back concessions along the big river all the way to Gananoque, there are many French farms and woodlots. We have no difficulty recognizing one another.”
“But how could you explain being there on your own, an unmarried young woman?”
“I gave a story about cousins in Belle Rivière.”
“But you had no idea where I’d be.”
“I kept ahead-walking, hiring rides, keeping away from the main road. I got to Prescott, found a Quebec family about half a mile away from the inn, and waited. When the coach came, I hid in the woods behind and watched for you. I saw you in the room on the end. I borrowed a knife from the people who put me up, and after dark I climbed up there-I used to walk the ridgepole on our barn when I was twelve-and I went in and killed you.”
“And immediately killed yourself.”
She was not certain how she should take this remark. “When I thought you were dead, I did not feel as I expected to.”
“Elated, you mean. Fulfilled. Righteous.”
“No, I felt hollow inside. Sad. Ashamed. I’d spent half my dowry, and I was alone among strangers.”
“You must have seen me alive afterwards?”
“Not really. I went back to the place where I’d been staying. I had to return the knife. They were very poor. One of the boys there delivered meat to the hotel kitchen. He came home that afternoon to tell us a soldier had been shot behind the inn. ‘You mean stabbed,’ I said. ‘No,’ he said, ‘shot with a pistol. An older fellow in the Glengarry militia.’ ‘You mean the army lieutenant,’ I said. ‘Oh, no,” he said, ‘that fellow wasn’t in his tunic, but he was alive and helping the doctor with the body.’”
“But if you felt so badly after you thought you’d killed me, why did you continue to follow me?”
She looked up at him as if he might be the one to answer that bewildering question. “I don’t know. I knew I had no more heart to kill. But I couldn’t go home, could I? And I felt connected to you somehow. But I did promise myself that if I saw you come home here and be happy, with-”
“With my own beloved?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I thought then the courage to avenge Pierre might come back to me.”
“When did you get here?”
“Yesterday. But I only had a little money left. I suddenly realized I had nowhere to go and nothing to go back to. I was feeling sick, a deep pain in my stomach. I’d forgotten to eat for two days. I took a room for the night in some shanty on the edge of town. But I went out in the cold yesterday afternoon, and I waited by the road to the fort. You didn’t come with the other two soldiers. I walked back into town. I saw you go into this house with the lady who looked after me earlier.”
“Where you are safe.”
She began to weep again, the soft, persistent, purgative weeping of women everywhere.
“You followed me from here this morning?”
“Yes. I saw you looking up at that empty apartment, and I thought ‘Your woman is dead or gone.’ I tried to be glad.”
“Then you must have seen that fellow try to kill me in the alley?”
“I saw him turn in there waving a big club. A policeman was passing by the end of the lane. I went up to him and motioned for him to go into the alley. Then I left, and ran.”