Bride of New France (23 page)

Laure walks over to where Madeleine lies. “Are you feeling better now that we’re off the boat?”

Madeleine looks up. There is a puzzled frown on her face.
She is awake but doesn’t seem to register her surroundings or recognize Laure. The nurses must have given her some medicine.

Laure sits on the edge of the bed and recounts to Madeleine the details of the welcome ceremony and the loud voice of the colonists as they sang the
Te Deum
. She also tells her about the hill with the cross from the early missionary days of the settlement. The men and women who established Ville-Marie planned to build a holy place. How all you can see are trees and fresh land from the top of the hill. Madeleine’s face relaxes a little at the sound of Laure’s voice. She falls asleep, and Laure continues to speak holding her hand.

After a few minutes, the Soeur hospitalière comes up behind Laure. “You will like it here, I am certain. The people of Ville-Marie live to help one another,” she says.

The nurse is young. She tells Laure that she is from Paris and that when she was a girl she read about Jeanne Mance, one of the first women to tend the sick in Ville-Marie, and wanted to come to Canada. She said she saw the colony in her dreams. Laure thinks that this timid girl would have much in common with Madeleine.

Laure asks the young nurse if she had seen all the trees and the vast river in her vision. If there had been Savage Iroquois. Laure wonders how anyone in Old France could imagine this forlorn country.

The nurse replies that she didn’t see the land at all but knew the name of the place. She saw only the hospital and the sick she was meant to care for.

“I got a sense of the helpful nature of Ville-Marie from my companion today,” Laure says. “The man who brought me here,” she adds.

The girl laughs. “There is no shortage of men looking to do favours for women here.”

The girl is smiling at Laure the way a good officer would have done at the Salpêtrière. It is a look of charity. Laure is starting to think that there is nothing but piousness in this country. The nun on the ship was teaching the sailors and soldiers to leave behind their lewd ways; something about a baptism by sea. The Jesuit in the canoe insisted on the virtue of pushing forward to convert more Savages, and the Governor spoke on the hill about the worthy endeavour of pouring sweat and labour into the colony’s forests to create a new French town.

Laure doesn’t think she is good enough for the designs of these dreamers, especially without Madeleine to tell her when to hold her tongue.

Laure wrings out the wet cloth in the ceramic bowl beside the bed and places it on Madeleine’s forehead. Hours have passed since the welcome ceremony and it is growing dark, but she cannot leave the hospital. What have I done to Madeleine by bringing her here? Laure wonders. Could I not have been content exchanging letters with her from here and hearing about the Salpêtrière as she became an officer? The Salpêtrière rules meant that the Superior would have to read Laure’s letters before they reached Madeleine. But would that really have mattered so much?

Laure kneels beside the hospital bed and says a genuine prayer. It feels like the only thing to do in the empty, silent room. She cannot think of the appropriate Latin words repeated
to her each day at the Salpêtrière, so she speaks in her French voice.

Laure first says to God that she hopes He really has followed them across the Atlantic to Canada. She prays that these priests and nuns are not deluded and being mocked in their Christian faith by some Savage deity with true dominion here. Laure asks for forgiveness that she urged Madeleine to leave the Salpêtrière. She has made Madeleine give up her dreams of being an officer, of reading from prayer books to the girls in the dormitories, only to be here, now, worn out from the long journey across the sea. Laure knows now that if she had prayed more, the way Madeleine did, she never would have written the letter to the King complaining about their food, nor would she have persuaded Madeleine to come with her. Being here with Madeleine so weak is worse than any fate she could have imagined in Paris. Laure makes the sign of the cross and touches Madeleine’s hand.

As if her prayer had an instant effect, Madeleine awakens. Her eyes open and she tries to sit up. She begins to speak, and Laure smiles, elated to hear the familiar voice. But Madeleine doesn’t ask about the hospital in Ville-Marie, or how she got there. She doesn’t seem to be aware at all that they have crossed the sea and landed in the New World. Laure takes Madeleine’s slight shoulders and lifts her so she is propped up and sitting.

Madeleine’s eyes seem to be looking beyond the room around her into her past. She says that the Salpêtrière is the biggest building she has ever seen, greater even than the fort that looks out over the sea at La Rochelle. Some of the women inside the dormitories scream the entire day, but there is no need to be frightened. She says that Madame du Clos is kind and teaches her how to be deft with the sewing needle.

“She is so kind that she coaxes bright flowers of thread from our fingers,” Madeleine says, her eyes growing wide. “You are my best friend and a tough girl. You expect more from this world than it intends to give you and cannot understand a quiet girl like me who does nothing but pray.”

Laure is glad that Madeleine is speaking at last, but she fears she will expend too much effort and so pushes gently against her shoulders. But the small girl resists with remarkable strength.

“I like it when you talk to me during the dining hall prayers, about leaving the hospital, about making a place in the city. I am amazed by all the possibilities you come up with.
Let us be seamstresses
, you say, even though I don’t have the hands for it. You tell me that we will find a small apartment and get hired out as servant girls just like you did as a child in the Enfant-Jésus.”

Laure can see now how absurd it had been to dream of these things. After all, what chance did they ever really have of leaving the Salpêtrière except to be banished across the sea?

“We both know what happens to girls who can’t find work as seamstresses or servant girls. You have watched the arrival of those fallen women and heard about the ones who end up chained in the basement of the hospital. But you don’t worry about that fate. Instead you write a letter to the King, imploring him to give us a better life.”

Finally Madeleine turns her head to look at Laure.

“Like Mary of Egypt, who crossed the Jordan to find glorious rest, I have also found peace across the water. I am happy you brought me here.” Then Madeleine’s eyes grow dull. They remain open but she is staring at the ceiling.

Laure needs for Madeleine to say something more. Even if only to request that they pray together.

Madeleine smiles, and Laure reaches in the air. She doesn’t know how to hold back a soul in flight.

When Laure finally stands, her knees are red and sore from the hard wooden slats of the floor. The same young nurse re-enters the room and lights a candle. She tells Laure in a quiet voice that she will need to make her way over to Marguerite Bourgeoys’ congregation before nightfall.

“The Iroquois wait for sunset and lurk close to our buildings, ready to pounce on us.” She places her hand over Laure’s and pulls the sheet over Madeleine’s face.

The spell is broken. Laure begins to cry. She calls Madeleine’s name over and over again.

    14    

I
n the middle of the night Laure hears someone drop the trunk in the attic room. She closes her eyes again, wanting only to sleep, to forget. But the calming effect of the laudanum is wearing off. Her stomach aches. She remembers screaming in the Hôtel-Dieu throughout the entire night until her throat could produce no more sounds. The following day two sisters came for her and brought her a long way across the trails to this room in the Congrégation Notre-Dame.

Laure feels her hands flutter up from her thighs like birds struggling to fly. She reaches beside her in the darkness for the trunk from Paris. Her fingers touch the sodden wood. She leaves her hand there and dozes again.

The next time Laure awakens, her third day in Ville-Marie is dawning. Girls outside the room are talking about a funeral. They are whispering about the strange girl from Paris who arrived at the congregation yesterday, crazed, from the hospital. Some of them remember Laure from the ship. She is the one who dances, the one who was baptized by the monster, they say. A few of the girls from la Pitié tell the others that in Paris Laure behaved even worse. Laure doesn’t care about their lies.

There is enough dawn light to make out the shape of the trunk beside her on the floor. She gets out of bed and kneels beside it. When she opens the lid, the dank smell of mould rises up from it. The linen handkerchiefs Madame du Clos placed on top of Laure’s belongings are moist and slimy. Laure removes them, along with the other contents from the top of the trunk, some of which have been damaged by sea water.

When she reaches what she is looking for, she is thankful that the paper is still dry. She lifts the heavy package onto the bed and removes from it the gown she carried from Paris. Laure runs her fingers across the fine yellow fabric and over the beadwork, feeling for any damage that might have occurred during the long voyage. She holds it up to the sun coming through the attic window. The dress has survived.