River City (20 page)
Love, for Champlain, who was bereft in the New World while his child-bride awaited his return to the old, had proven difficult to negotiate. While his sweet Hélène might be little more than a girl, she was strong-willed, and had defiantly proclaimed that she would never cross the Atlantic to the land of the Indians and of the bear and moose. “I’m such a small woman,” she had pointed out to her husband, “the mosquitoes you speak about might suck my blood dry.” Hoping to persuade her otherwise, Champlain had a home constructed at Quebec, a log cabin large enough not only for a wife but for the expansion of a family, and on voyages back to Paris he would again petition her to join him. She would have none of that idea, preferring to pine for him by the Seine than lie by his side, fearing that at any moment they might both be eaten by monstrous bears. Each time he returned to his beloved Quebec, Champlain remained alone.
“Sam,” Brulé whispered to him around the campfire one night, as he had done previously from time to time, “if you want a Huron or an Algonquin for your evening, inquire of me. I will speak to the young women. I know a few who are curious, even for someone like yourself.”
“Like myself?”
“Old.”
Brulé was initiating him into life beyond the island of Montreal. Champlain had seen Lake Huron, and like any European was astounded that such a body of fresh water could exist. An ocean! Of fresh water! With his help, Champlain further developed the fur trade, and Jesuit priests now dwelled among the Huron, converting them to Christianity and to the benefits of commerce. This was Brulé’s world, Champlain saw, and his excursions there confirmed that he himself was not the man for the task. The men, Indians and French both, were too rugged for him. They’d fight and debauch and paddle for days, kill a deer, cook it, eat it and paddle for days again, as though the physical effort was no more troublesome than breathing. The wilderness impressed the younger men, with their tempestuous natures, and also the serene priests, with their sage resolve and solitary devotion. Champlain, once the mariner, and warrior, and adventurer, would satisfy himself with building a community and developing the fiscal and social infrastructure to make the colony viable. The great adventuring, the fighting, the boundless exploring of a land that seemed only to grow the more it was mapped, all of that would be left to this new breed of man, the wild ones who were calling themselves
coureurs de bois
—runners of the woods—while he brought over men and women from France and saw that, while some joined the wild men of the woods, others formed the basis for a civilized community, devoted to the Church, to the planting of crops, to the raising of French families in the New World. The years went by in this way, and Champlain took pride in his success, and the small outposts at Montreal, Trois-Rivières and Quebec—and the northerly fur-trading post where so many of the woodsmen congregated, Tadoussac—prospered in their way.
Until the world abruptly changed.
Out of the mists on a chilly morning, while the campfires of Quebec quietly exhaled gentle smoke, a shipload of bold men from England, on their own initiative and in the service of no nation—pirates—sailed into the port and disembarked in a fury. They demanded the surrender of the hamlet. Brulé was not present, for he had gone north to carouse with the wild men of Tadoussac, as was his wont, and neither was Champlain, who was down
at Montreal trading with the Indians, his usual habit. Not in the practice of defending themselves, the inhabitants saw no option other than to surrender, so Quebec fell to the group led by the notorious Kirke brothers. The brothers themselves moved into Champlain’s home and confiscated the remarkably valuable dagger they found there, a treasure unexpected in this frontier, embedded as it was with diamonds and gold.
Hearing the news, Champlain sailed from Montreal to Quebec, fearing that all was lost, but secretly hoping that Brulé and the Huron could mount an attack and chase the pirates off. When he arrived and walked the muddy track up to his home, he opened the door to find Thomas Kirke with his feet up on his dinner table. “This is my home!” the Frenchman insisted.
“Once. Not now. Everything belongs to me. Thanks for taking good care of it before I got here. Now, shove off back to France and take your pissed-over peasants with you. I’ve had enough of them.”
Champlain’s dream had reached its end. He fumed, he raged, but the counsel that he received from friends reiterated the same point of view. All he might do for the good of New France was to return to Paris and beseech the king to send an army. Otherwise, the Kirke brothers now ruled.
Champlain sailed north, first to Tadoussac to pick up Brulé.
“We must return to France, to speak to the king.”
“France?” Brulé responded. “King?”
“Yes! France. The king. Quebec has fallen to the pirates!”
The younger man pulled at his beard and threw the blade of his knife into the soil between his feet. He picked it up and tossed it into the ground again.
“Étienne,” Champlain implored him, dismayed by the man’s reluctance. “We must return to France. Most families from Quebec are with me. The others we’ll collect on a second voyage if we don’t return with an army. We’re going home.”
“Home?” Brulé inquired.
“Yes! Home. To France.”
The woodsman pulled at his beard again. Around him were the trappers and traders who travelled the rivers and lived most of their lives in the forests among the Indians, or alone among the animals.
“In France, who will the king blame for this defeat?”
“I have my responsibilities here—”
“And I have mine. Who will be blamed?”
Champlain did not respond.
“I will not hang in France, Samuel. I will live out my days here.
This
is my country now. This is my world. Not France.”
Champlain stared at his old friend, who returned the gaze without relenting. “You betray me.”
“The king will say that, too. Why should I owe the king the satisfaction of hanging me for not defending Quebec? I don’t know the king. I’m staying here.”
As though equal in consequence to the fall of Quebec to the brothers Kirke, Brulé’s betrayal tormented him on the anguishing voyage home. He was met in Paris by his long-suffering wife, who cheerfully showed him the country home she would now appreciate that he provide for them. In due course, he had an audience with the king. Champlain did not blame Brulé for the state of affairs, but the king himself asked about “our French woodsmen? Where were they when these English
pirates
sailed into our French harbour?”
“Absent,” Champlain admitted. “As was I.” He wanted to explain that the distances were great in the New World, that neighbours lived days, and often weeks, apart. He held his tongue, not knowing whether his own neck would be stretched as a result of this circumstance. In the end, he did survive to settle with Hélène, who was not so young now in 1629, for in the end the king just didn’t care so much that New France had been lost.
“One less problem,” the king had determined. “At least I’ll save money.”
Three years after that conversation, Champlain was planting his back garden when Réal de Montfort, an old friend who had been with him for five years in New France as a fur trader, rode a horse up to his country estate. “What news?” Champlain asked, for clearly the man was agitated.
“The dagger! Cartier’s! The king’s dowry!” Montfort cried, then slipped down from his nag.
“Make sense, monsieur. What are you saying?”
Montfort caught his breath, and did his best to calm himself. “The Kirke Brothers—!”
“Are they dead? Tell me they are dead! The Huron have their scalps!”
“No.” “No?”
“No! The brothers, they gave the Cartier Dagger to Charles I of England. I have only learned of this now, but they did it, apparently, years ago, to curry the king’s favour, to ask for his protection in case you returned with soldiers.”
“I heard that rumour. It’s of no consequence. I’d rather have it in a king’s hands then in the grip of those pirates.”
“Well, it’s in a king’s hands now! The king of France!”
“What? How can this be?”
“The dowry, Sam! The dowry!”
Champlain was infuriated with the slow pace of information. He dropped his gardening spade to the earth and threatened to extract shears lying on a cart. “Explain yourself, man, or I’ll demonstrate how Iroquois take scalps!”
Montfort took a deep breath. “Charles I still owes half his wife’s dowry to our king. To pay the dowry, he returned the Cartier Dagger.”
“This is good news,” Champlain conceded. He would travel no more across the seas, but this exchange of gifts among royalty seemed to turn a page on his life.
“It was not the only payment made.”
“What else?”
“Charles I—”
“Yes.”
“—king of England—”
“Montfort, I know who he is! Go on!”
“Has bequeathed all of New France—Canada—”
“Yes?”
“—back to France. Canada belongs to France once more.”
Champlain reeled. This was a joy he had not expected in his impending old age. His friend caught him, and helped him sit upon the edge of the cart, to catch his balance. All his days in the New World seemed to run through his mind, the smell of the woods and the drift of the clouds upon mountainsides, the surge of the spring run-off on the rivers, a light fall of snow, the snapping
cold in the dark of winter. He remembered so well the men and women there, native and French alike, and he knew the names of every man and woman who had remained behind, the scant few, most of them still waiting to be evacuated, yet they had been abandoned by their king. He remembered Étienne Brulé also, who would be hearing this news in a few months’ time, who would stand on the rock overlooking Quebec as the Kirke brothers departed with their last cache of furs, to sail away, back to England. He imagined that sight. Brulé had betrayed him, but he was glad now that Brulé was there to see that sight, to be his eyes.
Not for the first time, a wedding between royal families had altered the course of history. While one king did not comprehend what he had given away, and the other did not value what he had received, Samuel de Champlain, having never been an especially devout man, grasped that the hand of God had intervened on behalf of the French, on behalf of those who would struggle for the viability of the New World.
He made two fists, and pounded his chest, fiercely, three times, as if to beat the breath out of himself. “Yes,” he said quietly, intently, and he looked to the heavens, although his eyes were tightly closed. “Yes. Thank God.”
W
ITH A HEAD FULL OF DETAILS AND WORRIES, CAPTAIN
Armand Touton assumed he would automatically wake up early. He set no alarm. His body possessed an alternative plan, and so, on the morning after the riot, he slept in late, unable to rouse himself until five minutes before noon.
He took out his upset on his wife. When she had finally had enough of his sleepy grumpiness, she slapped down a breakfast plate of fried eggs and beans in front of him on the kitchen table and warned, “Oaf. Be quiet. Do I look like a mind reader? Why would I wake you up early if you don’t ask me?”
Touton settled into his food, then kicked the dog out of the house for panting.
“What’s the matter with you? We’re not the ones rioting! But keep it up, Armand. Soon, we might be.”
Grunting token concurrence, he swept up the runny yolk of his eggs onto a slice of whole-wheat bread, then piled beans onto that. The food revived him, and Marie-Céleste returned to the table with her coffee. She was a handsome woman, with green eyes and wavy black hair that crossed her forehead and fell almost to her shoulders in curls. Although slight, she had shoulders that were broad for her size and a strong, upright posture he’d admired from the moment of their first encounter.
“Sorry,” he demurred. “A coroner was killed last night. Gunned down. I’ve mentioned Roger Clément to you? I have? Also dead.”
“So it’s not only the riot,” she noted sadly.
“You see? I haven’t mentioned the Richard riot yet! Already I forgot! For all I know, downtown Montreal has burnt to the ground!”
“The Rocket was on the radio,” she told him. “He made an appeal.”
“What did he say?”
She sipped her noon tea while waiting for her soup to warm. “He asked people to stop rioting, what else? He wants people to be nice.”
The Rocket on the radio was the best possible strategy, but Touton was impressed that someone had seen to it. For an official to have taken the initiative proved that the situation was dire.
“Probably Drapeau put him up to it. How did he sound?”
“Shaken.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Aren’t we all? I’m sure he didn’t sleep last night. His words will have an effect. People will listen.”
Sipping coffee, the detective considered this development. “I’ll have to go in.”
“This is why I let you sleep. I’ve ironed a clean shirt. So you see, the rumour is not true.”
Confused, Touton asked, “What rumour?”
“The one that says I’m the worst wife east of St. Laurent.”
Touton smiled, rose and took her into his arms. They kissed. They had been married only two years, and both were delighted with their union, despite the policeman’s all-night hours and a frustrating failure to procreate.
Outside, the puppy was yapping.
“May Toot please come back inside? He has no clue what he’s done wrong.”
As he dressed, the poodle jumped around Touton’s heels and bit into his discarded slippers, trying to convince him that playtime had arrived. The detective laughed at him and fell into an all-out tug-of-war, fighting to get his slipper back. He growled as loudly, but only half as happily, as the dog.
His office set up the meeting, and Touton went straight downtown, to the Sherbrooke Street apartment of Clarence Campbell.
On the way, he surveyed damage from the night before and tried to assess the mood of those herding together. Windows were boarded up, some because they’d been smashed and the premises looted, others because the proprietors feared that their businesses might be next. Banks were patrolled by armed guards. At most busy intersections, policemen put on a show of force. Quite a number of cops had been out all night and had not gone home yet, which was also true of roving bands of youths and men. The rioting had stopped, a combination of weariness, dawn and the Rocket’s radio directive. A number of rowdies still hung around in case something started up again.