Henri appeared beside Louise as she packed, and struggled against a rising chaos of woe and panic. “You are ready?”
“I think … Y-yes, I have—”
“All right. Hurry now, take the baby, we must go and see to Jacques and Marie.”
“But my home!” Louise wailed. “Henri, our baby, we can’t leave until Catherine returns!”
Henri’s grip upon her arm tightened. “Hush, you can hear the horses and the soldiers. The British are here, Louise. They are here.”
She saw the sorrow, the tense helplessness in his eyes. Beyond their window came the resonant sound of a trumpet, a signal both to the soldiers and to herself. “Yes.” It was all the speech she was capable of. “Yes.”
“All right.” He shouldered the massive pack. “Give me the baby. Take the food. Good. We are off.”
As they scurried up the lane toward her parents’ home, there was time for one backward glance. Just one. A fleeting glimpse of all that was being torn from her life and her heart and her arms. Then a squad of five horsemen swept around the corner, the great beasts snorting and blowing and their sweat-streaked bodies cutting off her vision. She cried aloud, reaching back to what was there no longer.
Henri had no free hand. Instead he maneuvered behind her and shepherded her forward, saying simply, “We must help Papa Jacques.”
The horsemen shouted words she did not understand, but their meaning was clear enough. Torches and swords waved in the night, urging them to greater speed. The baby awoke with a start at the thundering hooves and shouting men, and added her frightened cry to the tumult.
“Jacques! Jacques! My home, my things, my life!” Her mother’s voice cut through the hue and cry, the angry flow of harsh English commands, the tramping of frenzied horses. Marie’s calm was gone, vanished like smoke in the rising night wind. She appeared on the porch, disheveled and screaming and waving her arms, “Henri! Henri! What am I to do? The soldiers, they are—”
Marie was silenced as Henri deposited the crying baby into her arms and rushed into the house. Marie turned a panicked, tear-streaked face toward her daughter. Her eyes were caught in the torchlight, two blazing orbs of alarm and dread. “Louise, what are we to do, the soldiers!”
“Calm yourself!” Louise’s tone was sharp as her voice rose to be heard above the squalls of the terrified baby. “Don’t frighten the child!”
Marie looked at her daughter with eyes that saw nothing but the soldiers and the night. Louise did as Henri had done, coming in close, looming over the shrieking baby, drawing in so tightly she could say in a hoarse whisper, “Be calm and see to the baby.”
“Yes. The child … of course.” Marie looked down at the bundle in her arms, and the action of rocking the baby calmed her before yet another thought of alarm. “But, Louise, the child … your Antoinette—”
Soldiers on horseback raced up, shouting down at them, then turning to call at troops marching up on foot, using pikes and muskets to spur the wailing crowd to greater speed. Louise shouted through the open door, “Henri!”
“All right, we must go.” Henri appeared in the doorway with yet another bundle. Louise’s brother Philippe appeared after him, Jacques leaning heavily on his arm.
Then another realization caused Marie to scream, “Eli! He’s not back from warning the distant farms! How—”
“Let us hope he does not come back at all,” Henri replied grimly, urging them forward and into the wailing throng. “Let us hope at least one of us has slipped through the English net and escaped into the forest.”
“But my son,” Marie wailed. “What—”
“Marie, enough.” Jacques seemed to straighten at the thought of what Henri had suggested, at least enough to give authority to these few words. “We need strength. We need calm.”
There was little of either as they were herded from the village and across the Minas River ford. All around them rose the wails and cries of a great funeral march, but the soldiers paid them no heed. Louise’s frantic glances were enough to show how all her world was being torn asunder, all her friends transformed into strangers by the night and the tempest.
She asked her husband, “Do you see Catherine’s husband?”
“Nowhere.” Henri shouted up at the nearest soldier, “Captain Harrow!”
He was answered with a harsh laugh. The horseman, an officer by the looks of glittering gold upon his shoulders, turned and called to a man at the fore. The other officer turned to glare at Henri and said in heavily accented French, “You are friend of Harrow?”
“Friend! Yes, friend!” Louise’s heart felt squeezed to painful tightness by the look they gave her husband. But still Henri shouted, “Where is he?”
The two officers called back and forth over the tumult but only in their language. Harrow’s name came up, amidst looks of disdain and headshakes. But to Louise and Henri they offered nothing more.
More troops were gathered by the long pier. As they approached, Jacques groaned, “Why must they rush us so?”
“To keep us from fighting back,” Henri said. Even he was puffing from the load and the haste. “And to catch the tide. Look there.”
At the end of the long pier, lit by torches, waited more boats than Louise had ever seen. Narrow coastal barques awaited the people of Minas, they and all the others she could now see streaming down from adjoining trails. A long line of torchlit misery, pushed and prodded and herded toward the pier.
At the entrance to the pier Louise’s panic surged like a great incoming wave. She turned and struggled against the flow, even as it tightened about her to begin the long march seaward.
“Louise!”
She flung herself against the people who had once been friends, screaming with an energy that seemed to tear her throat, “My baby!”
“Louise, no!”
A pike was shoved into her face, the spear’s point over a foot long and glinting angry yellow in the torchlight. She felt a sudden urge to fling herself upon the point, to halt the tide of sorrow.
“Louise, come, you must come with me. Please.” Henri’s voice shook with tremors of one who understood what was passing through her mind. “Please, my love, please, you are my life, come with me now.”
She turned and sagged against him, suddenly so weak she could scarcely place one foot in front of the other. “Oh, Henri, they have my baby.”
Together they joined the long line snaking toward the boats. At the pier’s end Henri dropped his heavy burdens into the bottom of the next vessel, groaning as the weight dropped from his shoulders. Through the hollow ache of her sorrow, Louise realized it was the only protest her husband had made that entire night. But the thought was soon swallowed by the silent awareness that filled her being and left her shaking with dread. The boat filled and then pushed off, its place at the pier taken by yet another. There were cries and calls from up and down the pier, and over the water from all the boats. People shouted for loved ones and children and parents, the wails so mixed it was as though one great voice spoke for them all, calling and weeping for what was theirs no longer.
Shadowy skeletons took shape in the first dim light of dawn, and Louise realized they were being taken toward larger seagoing vessels. Their masts cut like giant spears up into the departing night. The oarsmen guided their vessel up close to the side, and those who could were pushed and prodded up the netting. Others were lifted in rope-slings. Louise took the baby from Marie. The baby was wailing still, a fact that had escaped her until that very moment. But as she heard the little one’s strident cries, she knew that here was one who needed her desperately.
She found the strength to rock and calm the little one as she was slung into the bosun’s chair. She held the rope with one hand and the baby with the other as she was raised to the ship’s deck. Once there she allowed Henri to wrap his great strong arms around her and felt his head drop to her shoulder. She heard him murmur, the words swept away in the tumult surrounding them. Yet she knew he was praying. And though the words themselves were lost and gone, the message remained, that and the first fragile flickering of calm.
She looked shoreward and felt her heart rise up in a tide of woe and fear. Her baby—her frail little Antoinette was still there. Left behind.Abandoned.
Gradually the deck went silent. In the first light of dawn there rose a faint tendril of smoke. Then another. And another still. Tiny lights in the distance fueled the gray spirals that steadily rose higher and thicker until all the sky seemed supported by great rising pillars pushing upward.
The smoke of their burning dwellings shouted a silent message to all the gathering. There would be no going back.