“What do you mean?”
“We cannot chafe alongside each other any longer. It seems I cannot help you. What’s more, you cringe and cower as if you fear that I will hurt you. We must let each other go.”
“But we are married.”
“We have not lain together.” The accusation fell to the ground, weighted with lead. “The church cannot object to an annulment.”
“An annulment?” All at once the demon unfurled his leathery wings. Francoeur wanted to end their marriage? Marcosi grabbed for her heart and clung on, squeezing until she could hardly breathe. “The church will never agree to dissolve—”
“Oh, it will. Only last year a man complained that he was bewitched and could not perform the duties of a husband. His marriage was annulled and he wed someone else within the year.”
She grabbed both of his arms. “No! Francoeur… wait. I love you.”
For a moment, his silence made her hopeful. She stared into his hazel eyes, willing him to feel as she did, willing him to kiss her. But he stood still and soon the cold settled on them, weighing them down. His beard and mustache grew white with frost. She wanted to reach out and put her fingers over his lips and feel the ice melt under their warmth, but she did not dare.
“Goodbye, Élisabeth.”
He shook himself free of her hands and turned away. She stared at his backas he strode down the street. She stood frozen, feeling the life drain from her. The demon let go of her heart and slumped against her rib cage, wings drooping. She could feel the bruise forming where Marcosi had gripped her, purple and tender. When Francoeur was so far away that she could no longer see him, Élisabeth sat down in the road.
Not dutiful, or good.
Barren. Useless.
And forever wayward.
She could not make sense of it all. She curled up into a ball and lay her cheek on the snow, hoping that like the man in the shed, the cold might take her too.
SPRING
34
Not long after Francoeur had left, his snowshoes leaving heart-shaped marks in the path behind him, Élisabeth followed him out of town. When she could no longer see his tracks, she trudged the path she imagined her husband had travelled, and when she reached their house in Côte Saint-François, she let herself in.
He was not at home.
She took the holy water vessel down from the lintel and dropped to her knees in front of the crucifix. She prayed for the Blessed Virgin to take pity on her and send her husband back to her. She recited her rosary and begged God to forgive her sins. She pleaded and bartered and beseeched until her knees ached and her head spun. Only the demon Marcosi answered her prayers.
You heard what Francoeur said. You are a lost cause.
“His anger is misplaced,” she told the demon. “I did my duty by letting the village know about the witch.”
Your duty was to curb your tongue and to lay with your husband. Why did you never do your duty, wayward girl?
“And when he discovered I was barren, Marcosi? What then?”
The church cannot object to an annulment.
They argued like this for days, the demon and the wayward girl. Élisabeth threw herself into her chores to distract herself from the voice in her head, to prove that she was not without use. She baked bread with what was left of their flour. She swept the floors until the wispy branches of the broomstick threatened to score the pine. She wiped every inch of the house free of cobwebs, running her cloth over the log beams that her husband had stripped of bark with his own hands, caressing the places his fingers had been.
Still, Marcosi was relentless.
Your fear of a lancet may have condemned a soul to death.
It was true. Not an hour after she had accused Jeanne Roy, Maman Poulin had scurried to the seminary to tattle to Father de Sancy. Soon the bailiff and the executioner were sent to retrieve the witch. She was found on the river path, heading east with Rose and Lou and their husbands. The bailiff tied her by a rope to the back of a sleigh, like an animal brought to slaughter, making her march back to Ville-Marie on foot. She was blue-lipped and shivering by the time they reached the village. A mob gathered to gawk and jeer. When Father de Sancy declared that the most powerful sorceress in all of Europe stood before them, someone called out that though the witch’s hands were bound, she might yet have the means to summon her master, the Devil. Another in the crowd cried out—beware!—he could smell brimstone. Élisabeth had looked at Jeanne Roy’s face, drawn white with terror, and took no satisfaction in her neighbour’s fate. She had gazed blankly at Maman Poulin, gleeful in the centre of the mob, and turned to leave the village.
Alone at the farmhouse, Élisabeth now stared across the length of their land, down to the river. The snow that had once blanketed the landscape had started to shrink, and the land to thaw, turning to mud. She wondered how long she had been locked in debate with her demon. How many days? She did not mark the passage of time. She wondered what was happening in town.
She wondered if the witch still lived.
