Sorceress Read online

  Aunt M pointed to Lake Champlain, a narrow twisted shape, a blue patch on the map. Agnes felt the swiftness of the river under her. She was taking a gut-wrenching terror ride down to the lake, which was no longer called Champlain but Bitawbagw, the Door to the Country. She felt almost sick as the swell and movement of the waves caused the canoe to tip and yaw.

  Then she was no longer in the craft, but soaring up and up, as the sun set, turning the water to a sheet of red. She was looking down now at the thin line of craft turning for the north: frail and tiny, like little leaf boats made by children, on the great expanse of water.

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  30

  Mary: Missisquoi – the Place of the Flint

  The Abenaki village that the French called Missisquoi had grown into a town, the population swollen by bands fleeing, like us, from the war in the south. The Indian peoples are generous and have a tradition of giving and sharing, helping each other in time of trouble. The Abenaki had extended the hand of friendship to any who wanted to grasp it, and now smoke curled up from myriad cooking fires and hung in the still air, swathed above a sprawling encampment made up of people from many different nations.

  I was at a loss to see where we would fit ourselves among this great multitude, but we discovered Pennacook who had come before us and found haven with them.

  There were others here besides the native people. Frenchmen. I found them very different from my own countrymen.

  Sparks Fire asked me, ‘How different?’

  I told him, ‘As different as Pennacook from Iroquois.’

  The first I encountered were called in their own language coureurs des bois. They were trappers and fur traders, and could be mistaken at first glance for the people with whom they did business. Their skin was burnt dark and they wore their hair long. They dressed in breech clout and buckskin. Only their boots and beards marked them apart from those they called les sauvages. Indian men always wore moccasins and plucked the hair from their faces, they considered beards to be ugly. These coureurs des bois differed in another way. Indian men bathe every day, even in winter, breaking ice on lake or river, scrubbing their bodies with sand or grit, whereas many of the traders stank mightily.

  Some of their kind were excellent men who truly admired, shared and sought to follow an Indian way of life. But others misunderstood what they saw, taking long flowing hair and freedom in dress as an excuse to give themselves over to unkempt filthiness. They attributed the freedom of young girls to bestow favours on whom they chose as moral laxity and were also free with strong liquor, drinking to excess themselves and encouraging it in others. Some of the Indians liked to drink; they said it brought their visions nearer. Anything seen in that way would be false and worthless, but that did little to dissuade those who had already developed a taste for French brandy.

  These men were different from any I had encountered before, white or Indian. I went out of my way to avoid them, but Ephraim quickly became enamoured. He loved to hear their talk, what he could follow of it. They had journeyed farther than any white man into the deep interior of the continent and would talk long of what they had found there: lakes as great as seas, thunderous waterfalls, endless prairies and wide rivers which they said led all the way to the western ocean. It was in Ephraim’s heart, even then, to become one of them. I did not prevent him from going to their camp but it meant that sometimes I had to go in search of him.

  It was on just such an errand that I first encountered the one they called Le Frenais. I found Ephraim down by the lake sitting outside one of their drinking dens. I called him to me and he rose obediently; then one of their number lurched between us. He was a man new come to the camp, and had been celebrating his return from the wilderness, as many of his kind did, with drinking to excess and making free with any woman who came within his compass.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked in turn.

  At this he staggered, taken aback by my insolence.

  ‘C’m here, you savage ... ’

  He went to make a grab for me but was held back by one of his circle. The men around him were from different tribes. There were some from New England among the French and Abenaki.

  ‘She’s Yenguese.’ The man who held his arm spoke Algonquin and looked to be from the south. Pocumtuck maybe, or Nashua. ‘She travels with a Pennacook band.’

  ‘Captive?’ He shook off the hand and turned to me.

  ‘I am not captive.’ I spoke in the common tongue. I had no French then.

  ‘Who is your master? What does he want for you? I’d take you and the boy together. I could use a woman like you. The boy too. The English pay well for the return of captives.’

  ‘I am not a captive,’ I said again. ‘Neither is the boy. There is no price on us.’

  ‘I’ve got plenty.’ He swayed in front of me. ‘Pelts, guns, gold.’

  ‘Nothing. I have said.’

  ‘Even cheaper.’

  He laughed and leered and made to maul me then, as he was accustomed to do with other native women. I pushed him away. He was so drunk that he lost his balance. He slipped in the mud and went down on his bony backside, knobbled knees bent like a colt’s, breech flap knocked aside to show the length of his white skinny thighs. His descent and landing occasioned much laughter among his companions. They made no move to help him as he struggled to rise and he failed to get a purchase, sliding farther in the mud. The more he fell about, the louder they laughed until he cursed all around him, and then he turned his curses on me.

  I looked down at him. ‘Be careful whom you curse,’ I said in English. ‘Lest it come back as three.’

  In my mind, I saw him as a pig. He made to stand but I spun him over on all fours, making him shuffle and snuffle in the filthy ground. All around him the laughter redoubled, until the Indians were wiping tears away. When he went to stand again, I saw him as a dog. He rose on his hind legs, hands bent like paws and let out a series of barks and then a stream of high-pitched yelps.

  Frantic, he looked at me, the fog clearing from his drink-bleared eyes, replaced by fear and panic. He looked about, eyes wide, pleading for help. All around men backed away from him. The mirth around him died and all eyes turned to me. I heard ‘Jongleuse’, their word for sorceress, although I didn’t know the meaning then. None of the native men would look me in the eye, and one of them crossed himself.

  I turned Le Frenais on to his back again and allowed one of his party to help him upright. He reeled away, helped by his friends, and I went back to my own fire.

  This encounter troubled me. I knew that I had made an enemy, but Le Frenais was forced from my mind as winter tightened its grip. There were too many people crowded all together. Already sickness was stalking the camp, striking down native and white alike. I was a healer, and my skills were in demand.

  One of the first to suffer was the priest. The Blackrobe. He was a Jesuit, a member of the Society of Jesus whose mission it was to convert the heathen. They were named for the long black cassocks and hooded cloaks that they wore. Abstemious and celibate, fastidious in their habits, devout to the point of martyrdom, these Frenchmen were as unlike to Le Frenais and his sort as bear is to wolf.

  This man had come by canoe from Mount Royale, struggling up from the lake with his world strapped to his back. He had set up altar and tabernacle to serve those who were already of the Catholic faith and in hope of converting those who kept to their own belief. He had built a small chapel, distinguished from the other dwellings by two staves lashed together to form a cross.

  I don’t know how many souls he saved, but he was tolerated. In that he fared better than those of his kind who had tried to spread their faith in England. My grandmother had told me of the fate of a Jesuit harboured at a local manor house. When his presence was discovered he had been dragged from his hiding place and hanged.

  I avoided him. I had reason to dislike priests of any stripe. But White Deer had kin among the Abenaki and some of them were of the Catholi
c faith. They came to me because they despaired of him. He was sick, but would not allow them to treat him, and he would not eat the food they brought to him. He feared sorcery, no doubt, but all they intended was a herbal concoction for his symptoms. They thought that he might pay attention to me since I was Yenguese, from across the sea.

  I did not share their conviction that he would listen; nevertheless I agreed to visit him.

  He was propped up on a rough pallet, writing and sketching in a little book he kept continually by him.

  He was new out of France, by all accounts. Since landing here, he had grown a beard in an attempt to give himself gravity but the sparse dark down did little to disguise his youth. I judged him to be still in his twenties and he was handsome, although sickness had paled his face to parchment. His brown eyes were sunken, the skin around them grey and thin, but they glittered bright when he saw me. I put this down to the fever that wasted his body, not realising the zeal that fuelled his purpose.

  I told him who I was and why I had come.

  ‘I have heard of you.’ He propped himself up on one elbow and regarded me with a look that mixed curiosity and puzzlement. He spoke in English, but slowly as if each word was recalled from distant memory.

  Although the house was made of bark in the way of the Abenaki, it was full of furnishings from France. A table, a carved casket, a metal bowl and drinking cups, an altar cloth richly embroidered. I stood for a moment and gazed around. I had not seen such things for a long time; they were familiar, yet strange to my view. The effect was odd, as if one world was wrapped within another.

  ‘I hear that you are sick.’ I came up to him as he lay back on the bed.

  ‘I am treating myself.’ He indicated the lancet and bowl on the table. He was weakening his body still further by bleeding.

  ‘Killing yourself, more like. You would be better to take the remedies that the women offer you.’

  ‘I do not trust their remedies and I have no appetite for their food. It disgusts me.’

  ‘Their remedies are as sovereign as any you would find in Paris. As for food, I will prepare that myself – if you promise to eat it.’

  I treated his illness and prepared food for him. His name was Luc Duval. He came from Normandy and was from a wealthy family, but he had always wanted to go into the church. He had found his vocation, inspired by one of his boyhood tutors who had been a Jesuit. This man had spent time in England as a Catholic missionary. Luc had learned English from him and was eager to learn more; in return he taught me some French. He was also striving to learn the common language of the tribes. We floundered to find meaning together, sometimes speaking in three tongues at once, but as time passed we became more fluent and at ease with each other.

  As his strength returned, so did his curiosity. He wanted to know about my life and how I came to be here. He wanted to know how I fell among savages.

  ‘I do not find them savage,’ I replied.

  ‘I have heard much of their barbarity, their rites and their cruelty.’

  ‘Our own rites might seem strange to other eyes. Already they mistrust baptism.’

  ‘Why? It is their way to salvation.’

  ‘They call it water magic, and they associate it with death, because that is when they see the rite performed most often.’

  He frowned, unable to understand such misinterpretation of what was for him truth without question.

  ‘What of their cruelty?’

  I looked at him. Who were we to speak of cruelty? How were they more cruel than we were to each other, to our enemies? Even as we spoke, Metacom’s head rotted on a pike at Plymouth. In his country or mine, how many had suffered? How many had died? Slaughtered in the streets, burned at stakes, hanged, drawn and quartered, racked and tortured, branded with irons, flogged with whips?

  ‘Savagery is everywhere,’ I said.

  ‘They live in squalor. How could you choose to live among them?’

  ‘I have not found that so.’

  ‘The discomfort, the smoke ... ’

  I laughed, remembering my grandmother’s cottage with one room and one bed between us. ‘I was not high-born like you. My home held few comforts and was far from free of smoke. Why did you come here, if you find the life so uncongenial?’

  ‘I came because it was my duty,’ he said simply. ‘I am not afraid to die. I follow in the footsteps of martyrs. I take as my example Father Jogues, who was killed by the Iroquois and Father Gerard, my superior, who suffered mightily at the hands of a Mohawk band. Only out of affliction can come true glory. Only through suffering can we know the agony of Christ on the cross.’

  I had no reply to that. What he was saying was stranger by far than any beliefs I had come across among the Indians. No wonder they treated the Blackrobes with suspicion.

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  His return to health brought back his zeal.

  ‘I came to baptise, to save souls, to bring them to God, but everywhere I am resisted, even though the church is salvation. The pathway to heaven!’

  I tried to explain that a Christian heaven meant leaving kin and comrades, not just on this earth, but for eternity. He could not see how lonely that would be, why after death, most would choose to take the long road west.

  ‘I make slow progress. It is true. Perhaps they cannot understand my message.’ He suddenly looked at me. ‘But you ... ’

  His glance was shy, but that did not disguise the gleam of fire in his eyes. I was as lost as any he deemed heathen. He was a zealot, every bit as convinced of his rightness as Reverend Johnson, or Cornwell, or any of the Puritans I had known. I was not about to swap one tyranny for another.

  ‘I am not of your religion, nor ever will be. Your energies are wasted on me.’

  From that time on I was no longer so easy in his company; but the more I avoided him, the more he came after me. One day he caught me by the lake.

  ‘Mary, I must speak with you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Why do you no longer come to me?’

  ‘You are recovered. You no longer need me.’

  ‘I thought we were friends.’

  ‘Friends do not seek to look into each other’s souls.’

  ‘What if they fear that one whom they have come to hold in high regard is in danger of being lost for ever?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You are named for the Holy Mother. Why would you deny her name and take another? It is not just that you are Protestant; I fear that you have slipped into even greater error. I know that you are respected among these people, but I thought that you were revered for your healing skills. But now I learn that it is more than that. They see you as a medicine woman, a sorceress. Even the French here share in this belief. This very day one among the coureurs des bois came asking me to hear his confession and to lift a curse he says you put on him.’

  He meant Le Frenais. In life he kept away from me but in dreams he had begun to haunt me.

  ‘Such a thing is repugnant.’ Duval’s face twisted in quick disgust. ‘Horrible.’

  ‘Then do not listen.’

  ‘You do not deny it?’ He looked on me with horror.

  ‘What is there to deny? What I believe is my business.’

  ‘I will pray for you.’

  ‘You will not be the first to have done so.’

  ‘I see that prayer will not be enough.’ The sadness in his eyes did not quench the zeal. Despite his youth, his belief was absolute and his purpose was of steel. ‘I will not let this happen. I will save you. I will instruct you ... ’

  I did not want to be saved. I just wanted to get away from him. Where once I had found him stimulating company, now he troubled me.

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  My dreams were full of unease. Sometimes Le Frenais fled from me across a field of howling whiteness. Sometimes a great bird flew above me, overshadowing me, turning all to blackness. Sometimes my path was gathered round with mist and barred by a great palisade of spikes many feet high. I asked Sparks
Fire what he thought these dreams might mean, but he was irritable, restless. He suffered badly from the aching sickness and his strength was further sapped by pain from an old break in his right thigh where the bones had not knitted well together.

  I thought I would be safer in the wilderness. I thought to go with Black Fox and Naugatuck on their winter hunt, but there is no swerving destiny. It was clear that Sparks Fire would not stand a winter in the forest. His bad leg would make him more burden than help, and besides, his people needed him here. Then White Deer came shyly and told me that she was with child. Whatever my doubts, I would have to lay my fears aside and think of other people, but when Black Fox and Naugatuck went to their winter camp, I begged them to take Ephraim with them. I did not want him getting into mischief or falling into bad habits. He still visited the French traders, despite my prohibition. For many of them drink offered a ready escape from the idleness and boredom of a winter camp. They would be happy enough for Ephraim to join them, even though he was only a boy.

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  I thought to avoid trouble. I kept to my own paths well away from the little bark-clad chapel and the fetid lakeside hovels, but one afternoon, near the time of the shortest days when night was falling quickly, my way took me near to the shore. The figure of a man loomed out of the gathering darkness and suddenly Le Frenais was there.

  I went to step round him, but he blocked my way. I could smell the liquor on his breath and his blue eyes barely focused, but he moved quickly for a man the worse for drink.

  ‘Touch me and it will be the worse for you.’

  He leered at me, showing brown and broken teeth.

  ‘I will teach you a lesson. Come here, witch!’

  I could see from his eyes what he intended, and that he’d had this in mind for some time. He was a weak and despicable creature, but he was a man, and he knew the best way to avenge himself on a woman.

  There was no one about to help me; even if there had been, I doubted that any would have come to my aid. I slipped from his grasp and fled, knowing what he would do if he caught me. I ran towards the lake which was a field of ice now, many feet thick. Night was falling, and with it snow was coming, a great grey bank of it blowing down from the top of the lake with astounding quickness. I could almost believe that Hobbomok, dark spirit of the deep waters, of the night, of the north-east wind, was swooping down towards us in a great storm of snow.