“That’s… not… true.”
“Perhaps not. It’s possible that you miscarried because the baby was not meant to live. It’s possible that you feel possessed by a demon because you have been hysterical with grief since you lost your child or gripped with shame for your acts of fornication. It is possible that you suffer from melancholy due to an imbalance of the biles in your body. Any of these are better theories than that of a witch bearing a grudge against your beauty coming into a tavern to lay a curse on you. That’s the dull-witted thinking of a peasant. And that, I am afraid, is the onlyrealcurse you bear.”
Élisabeth clenched her fists to stop her body from trembling, striking them against her own hips. She seethed. Jeanne Roy was not only a witch, but a thief and a liar. A lying witch who refused to help her. Tears blurred her eyes, and instead of Jeanne Roy in front of her she saw the Winter Witch, cursing and taunting and thwarting her. She could no longer keep the demon down. When she spoke next it was with Marcosi’s forked tongue.
“I have a few notions about you, Jeanne Roy, or whatever your name is. Would you like to hear them?”
The witch crossed her arms. “I am certain to be amused.”
“You were not meant to be on that ship. You had no trunk. No letter of good conduct. You snuck on board as a stowaway becauseyouare one of the Norman witches that Father de Sancy hunts.”
“Can you prove it?”
“No, not until I discover your real name and see if it is the same as that of the witch queen that Father de Sancy seeks. For your name is not Jeanne, that is for certain. And Roy?King?It’s so obvious now. The king saved you from the stake and so you took his name.”
Jeanne Roy’s eyes glittered like ice. “And what if I am one of those falsely accused women from Rouen? Those women of learning, or desperation, or both. I have served my sentence. I have left France—banished as the king decreed—to live my life in exile. Father de Sancy has no cause to arrest me.”
“Unless you are accused of witchcraft again,” the demon said quietly.
“Do not threaten me, Élisabeth,” Jeanne Roy snapped. “I am not the only one who owns a scandalous past.”
“Then help me be rid of this curse,” Élisabeth cried, sinking to her knees again. “Why won’t you help me? I will keep your secret, and once I am cured you will never hear from me again.”
“The only thing you need curing of is stupidity, and I have no herbs or tinctures for that,” Jeanne spat.
A strangled cry burst from Élisabeth’s lips. “You have potions. I can see them, there! And there’s a book of spells on your table. Youarea witch! Why won’t you use your power to help me?”
“I am not a witch! That is no grimoire! That is my journal. I am a student of science. I have trained with the greatest accoucheurs in Europe. I have studied midwifery and medicine in Paris—I have done what no other woman has done. I will not be thwarted by a fool with a grudge. Not again.”
Jeanne Roy laid her hands on Élisabeth’s shoulders and pushed her out of her hut. She stumbled outside, wide-eyed and gasping as the witch slammed the door shut.
“Jeanne! Let me in,” she cried, banging on the door. There was no sound from within. Élisabeth took a step back and looked wildly around. The demon Marcosi, spared execution, began to chuckle. She stumbled away from the cabin, started to make her way through the woods, but the branches of the baretrees grasped for her. She ran, jagged as a hare, too overcome with despair to relinquish any speed, too distraught to shield her face from scratching twigs.
It could not be true. It could not be.
For if witchcraft did not exist, then every choice she had ever made since the night in the tavern was without purpose, or reason.
WINTER
23
A dropped spoon is a sure sign of visitors coming, and if it falls face down, they’ll be bringing bad tidings. Élisabeth looked at the back of the wooden spoon on the floor and the pork dripping spattered across the pine boards. She braced herself for the worst.
The sky was the same colour as the snow on the ground, a bruised white that made it difficult to tell where the horizon began and ended. The visitors’ red woollen hats made them visible on the river path long before their ox-drawn sled pulled up to the house. One very tall, one short and barrel-chested, she recognized the grim faces of the two Carignan-Salières soldiers who had married Rose and Lou. Élisabeth wondered how bad the news would be. In her womb, the demon Marcosi sat up on his hind legs, ears flat against his head, and waited.
They had had visitors enough in the two months since she had been wed, but the untamed demon inside her had made it impossible for her to exchange anything more than greetings with the well-intentioned neighbours who had come to call. In the first weeks of her marriage, she had curtseyed and said good day to a dozen of them, but with Marcosi strutting around unfettered as a cockerel after Jeanne Roy’s rejection, Élisabeth was tongue-tied and awkward.Jeanne’s voice tormented her still, as sure as if her words were shards of glass stuck in her palm.
Consider, just consider, that witchcraft does not exist.
Is it possible that Rémy poisoned your drink to make you miscarry?
Had he come up with a way to be rid of that which bound him to you?
She could neither join in the neighbours’ admiration of the crucifix Francoeur had newly hung above their hearth, nor weigh their advice about storing straw in the rafters and putting aside salted fish and peas in the cellar. She could not unstick herself from her own thoughts, and soon enough the visitors stopped coming, amid whispers that Élisabeth was odd, or at the very least dull, and quite likely simple.
Her husband was undeterred. He had insisted she would find companionship among the wives living in Côte Saint-François. At first, he had suggested Jeanne Roy come to dine, but when Élisabeth blanched and begged Francoeur not to invite her into their home, he retreated. Then on Saint Martin’s Day he brought her with him to pay the rents. The Sulpicians did not have a manor house in the seigneurie, so the habitants met their landlords at one of the neighbour’s houses. Élisabeth thought the man called Dufossé boorish, and his wife, Hélène, an unfortunate creature ducking and cringing at her husband’s every glance. The only moment of kinship Élisabeth felt with the woman was when they realized that they had travelled to New France on the same ship, a few years apart.
Finding her tongue, Élisabeth mumbled, “I suffered the entire journey.”
