“Where are you going?” Marthe shouted.
She turned to answer as theSaint-Jean-Baptistelisted on its side and every board groaned, as if the ship were being torn asunder. Élisabeth lost her grip on the post and was thrown forward. Her head cracked on the wooden beam and she crumpled to the floor. Pain exploded across her skull and at once a heavy fatigue fell upon her. She tried to speak, but her words came out in strange tongues. The last thing she saw before she fainted was an apparition of a nun, in a habit of velvet, dark as night, a crown of antlers rising from her head.
6
Marthe leaned out over the railing, watching the unbroken line of trees. A dark garrison standing against invaders. Below, the river teemed with boats—sloops on business from Québec and barques carrying dry goods, as well as canoes and pinnaces and rowboats—but there was nothing to see onshore but trees.
She shifted uneasily on her feet. “We should be there by now, shouldn’t we?”
Lou frowned. “I don’t like it.”
“We should have stayed in Québec,” said Rose.
Marthe looked back at her friends. It was what they were all thinking.
The Montréalistes had left behind the oceangoingSaint-Jean-Baptiste—and the bulk of the other brides—in Québec and had transferred to a smaller riverboat five days earlier. There was such a heavy summer rainstorm when they arrived that they had rushed from the king’s vessel to the riverboat with barely a chance to bid anyone goodbye, let alone take in the sights of the little town. Now that they were sailing upriver towards Ville-Marie, the wonders of the New World would finally be revealed to them.
Except there was nothing to see at all.
“I’m sure the village will be around the next bend,” Marthe said. Afterall, they had miraculously survived a storm at sea; God would not guide them through such an ordeal only to abandon them in the wilderness weeks later.
Maybe their survival was not due to God’s grace. When Father de Sancy had emerged from his cabin, green with seasickness, he claimed the lion’s share of the credit for their safe deliverance due to his own intercessions with the Holy Virgin. But in the days after the storm, the sailors had whispered about the woman in the velvet dress who could sew sails faster and more urgently than a galloping mare, leaving Marthe to wonder who she was, and what part she had played in their rescue. When the velvet lady had changed ships with them in Québec and boarded the smaller boat for the island of Montréal, Marthe had felt a frisson of excitement. The mysterious woman was travelling with them to the end of the known world.
But the woman’s presence seemed only to add to Élisabeth’s despair.
Most of the girls had put the ordeal of the storm quickly behind them, adding it to their trunk of terrible things to consider later, like the weevils in the ship’s biscuit and the rats scurrying in gloom-soaked corners. Only Élisabeth seemed truly shaken by their near shipwreck. For weeks after she had smashed her head, she could do nothing but lie in their bunk with her arm flung over her eyes. When awake, she assailed Marthe with questions about tempests and witches and demons while Marthe tried to feed her crumbs of hard tack. Marthe began to think that although the red welt on her forehead had faded, she might have been left demented by the blow.
“Perhaps we won’t arrive in Ville-Marie until tomorrow,” Rose said. “Itislate in the day.”
“The captain said we would sleep on land tonight,” Marthe insisted. “I’m going to get Lili. She shouldn’t miss the first sight of the village. We will remember it for the rest of our lives.”
Marthe crept below deck, hardly needing any light to find the corner of the boat where they had been stowed like any other exported good, and not eventhe most precious at that. Élisabeth was sitting near their trunks, scratching the side of the boat with her fingernails.
“We’re almost at Ville-Marie,” Marthe announced. Élisabeth did not answer. She carried on etching a pattern into the wood, a back-and-forth swirl that grew faster with every loop. “Did you hear me?”
Élisabeth did not look up. “Yes. Yes, I heard. Where is the witch?”
Marthe sighed. “I told you already. Father de Sancy found no witches on board. He went ashore at Québec. You saw him go.”
Élisabeth stopped her scratching and rubbed her hand lightly over her brow.
“Does your head hurt still?” Marthe took a step forward to check her sister’s injury. Élisabeth pressed her hand to her forehead, blocking Marthe’s view. Marthe felt a prickle of irritation and took a step back. “Tonight we will be ashore and the nuns will have a cabbage leaf to lay on your crown. That will soothe your pain.”
“I speak of the witch who said our prayers were no use. The one in the velvet dress. Where is she now?”
Marthe bit her lip. She had to get Élisabeth to shore. She was turning in circles, following her mind wherever it led her.
“Come, it’s time,” she said brightly. “I don’t imagine it will be as frantic docking here as it was in Québec, for that was a sight. Girls trying to curl their hair after two months at sea and hitching up their skirts to show off their petticoats. They needn’t have bothered. They had neither linen nor lace worth boasting about.”
Élisabeth looked up at Marthe. “You believe me, don’t you? That woman is a witch.”
Marthe sat down by Élisabeth’s side. She could not deny there was something intriguing about the woman in the velvet dress. The way she carried herself, tall and proud, and how she stood apart from the others, even now whenthere were only thirteen of them travelling upriver. After all those weeks at sea, they did not even know her name.
“I admit there is something magical about her, but if there’s a hedge witch or a sorceress with us in New France, I shall be glad of it,” Marthe reasoned. “We might have need of her magic in the years to come.”
Élisabeth stared at Marthe. “How can you speak of witchcraft so lightly? Does it not fill you with revulsion to think of those evil creatures and…” She dropped her voice, though there was no one nearby. “The things they do with the Devil?”
“I don’t mean evil witches. I mean the cunning folk. Without their help, how else would one cure heartache or remove a wart? Don’t forget you too once paid a sol to a soothsayer to hear your fortune. What was she if not a hedge witch? She did you no harm. Except to tell you that Agathe Prévost would marry before you.”
