Anne-Marie de Parthenay

New France

The trip home was largely uneventful. It took an extra week to return to Quebéc, since they were traveling up-river. Thankfully, however, it was not as painfully silent as it had been on the way there. Ezekiel had warmed to Anne-Marie’s presence, and took it upon himself to impart his many years of knowledge and sage wisdom upon her. He never did this in a straightforward manner, however, being the unusual man that he was. Instead, he would inundate her with stories and parables, using each one to teach her some sort of lesson.

“When I was around your age,” he began one morning, for example. “I was made to help the older men hunt for food for the village. One day I went out with my bow and arrow. My father was ill, and my brother had gone to court a girl in another village, so I had to find dinner for the family by myself. It was a big responsibility, and I was determined to meet it. I would not let my parents or my sister go hungry. So I went out into the woods, and fortune was with me that day—I discovered a rabbit caught in a trap I had laid the day before. Only, when it came time to kill the creature, I found my knife hand trembling. I remember kneeling over the creature, seeing the fear in its eyes. It was so terrified to die. I felt a great guilt wash over me, and in the end I could not bring myself to kill it. It was such a soft creature, I thought, so innocent. It was a mother perhaps, or a father, with its own family to feed. How could I end its life just to feed myself?”

The man was quiet for a moment, his dark eyes casting a pensive look across the water.

“And so I freed the rabbit from the trap,” he said. “And it ran off into the brush. I continued my hunt, though I no longer knew what I was hunting for. About an hour later, I stumbled across a gray snake. Its abdomen was distended halfway down its length, some round meal protruding from it. Upon seeing the size of it, I knew in my heart it was the rabbit I freed before. The sight of it whipped me into a tremendous fury, and I beat the snake to death with a stick. But it wasn’t enough for me–I took my hunting knife, and slit the snake’s belly open, trying to free the rabbit from that fate. It was too late–the rabbit was already dead. My family went hungry that night, and I have remembered the lesson ever since.”

Anne-Marie thought about the story. As usual, it did not make complete sense to her.

“But what is the lesson?” She asked. Ezekiel’s parables were often cryptic and open-ended, and Anne-Marie, being a rather literal and direct person, often needed them spelled out for her.

“That good intentions do not equate to good outcomes,” Ezekiel replied. “When you take an action, only God knows what the result of it will be. Even if you believe yourself to be just, that does not mean your actions will bring justice. I wanted to save the rabbit from death, so I set it free. But in the end, two of God’s creatures lay dead rather than one, and I was unable to feed my family. Sometimes, good actions create good in the world, making it a better place for everyone. And sometimes, despite our best wishes and hopes, they make the world worse. Does that make sense?”

“I think so,” Anne-Marie said, but it didn’t really, not completely. Instead, her mind wrestled with another issue. Anytime Ezekiel told her one of these stories, Anne-Marie could not help but feel a little ashamed. She was almost a woman, and this man felt the need to tell her bedtime stories. Why was it that everyone who met her treated her like a hapless baby lamb? Was she so clearly aimless, so pathetic, that any passerby stranger could tell she had never been given a lick of guidance? Everyone she had ever known had babied her—her maids, her brother, even Jeannine, in her own strange way. Was she that naive? And if she was, what in the world was she supposed to do about it?

Despite struggling with that question over the weeks on the river, Anne-Marie never found an answer. Instead she found an empty home waiting for her, and a madwoman with a heart filled with hatred. La Madame’s condition had worsened, it seemed. What’s worse, Anne-Marie learned that Le Vicomte had dismissed the staff before he left to the front. That left the two women in the house alone. La Madame did not ask Anne-Marie where she’d been all this time—she was hardly lucid most days now, her speech slurred and nonsensical. She slept most of the day and night, her consciousness like a flickering candle in the wind.

What had not dulled, however, was her animosity towards Anne-Marie. La Madame perceived her adoptive daughter as she always had—invader, usurper, harlot. Every waking hour was spent attacking Anne-Marie with whatever she could find. Anne-Marie quickly hid all the sharp utensils—the knives, the scissors, even the forks. La Madame adapted, then, grabbing whatever was within reach and flinging it at her daughter, or trying to bash her with something large, like a chair or vase, screaming wildly as she did so. Anne-Marie would lock herself in her chambers as La Madame shrieked at her from the outside, slamming the wooden door with her fists like an ape.

After a week of defending herself against endless assaults, Anne-Marie could do it no longer. She had grown dark bags under her eyes from all the restless nights, lying awake in fear of being attacked. She had cried every day and night since her return, her heart weak from fear and despair. Jeannine did not come knocking, and there was no sign of Dr. Gusteau. With the staff gone, and Chrétien on the savage front, there was no one. For the first time she could remember, Anne-Marie was truly alone.

So she left. After all, if she was alone, there was nothing keeping her in that house. Le Vicomte had kept her there before, against her own will, and he was out fighting. Part of her wanted to stay, if only because it meant she could see her brother again. But she was not about to endure however many weeks and months of that hell just for a chance that Chrétien would survive the war. She fled, taking only a single bag with her favorite clothes and jewelry, which she would likely have to sell for some money.

Originally, she thought of running from Quebéc entirely, finding somewhere to live out in the country. Only, she realized she had no idea how to survive in the wilderness, and there were many dangers that awaited a young girl living in the wild alone. But she could not stay in the city—even if one of the other noble women took her in, they would relinquish her to Le Vicomte as soon as he returned, and she would be a prisoner again. So, perhaps predictably, she found herself in the doorway of Ezekiel’s hut, in the slum outside the city.

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“What are you doing here?” Ezekiel asked.

“Please,” Anne-Marie pleaded, tears forming in her eyes. “I can’t go home. It’s not safe—she’s not well. She’s tried to kill me more times than I can count. I’m sorry—I know it’s not fair to abuse your generosity. I just don’t know where else I can go.”

Ezekiel looked into the hut, and sighed.

“There’s not enough room for you,” he said. “But we will make do. You’re welcome to stay here, on one condition.”

“Of course. Anything.”

“Under my roof, you’re part of my family. Everyone in the family has a duty to help provide. You’ll work with my daughters to help bring in some money.”

“Of course. I also brought these.”

Anne-Marie produced a few necklaces from her bag.

“I was going to sell them,” she said. “They’re worth a good amount—more than enough to cover my stay.”

“How did you get these?” Ezekiel asked her.

“What?”

“Did you buy them yourself?”

“No… I mean, my adoptive mother bought them for me about a year ago, for my birthday.”

“So you didn’t earn them.”

“I… I don’t know. I supposed I didn’t.”

Ezekiel took his hand, and closed Anne-Marie’s around the jewelry.

“Do you think I make my daughters work just to earn money?” He asked. “No. It’s to teach them responsibility, independence, pride in what they do. You have none of these things. You are spoiled, and naive—the lessons labor will provide you will be worth more than any money you make from it. These jewels we will not sell, not until you’ve earned the right to sell them.”

“I… I understand. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry. We will still put them to good use. Choose three of the nicest among them, as gifts—two for my daughters, and one for my wife. That should help smooth over things when we tell them you’ll be staying here. You should know they are not as hospitable as I am.”

As Anne-Marie soon learned, that statement could not have been more true. The women of Ezekiel’s family treated her with a terrible coldness the first two weeks of her stay. The gifts of necklaces had gone over well, but the grace it had granted her was fleeting. It didn’t help, of course, that Ezekiel was the only one among them who spoke French, which meant the girls didn’t understand a word of anything Anne-Marie spoke, and she of course couldn’t make out anything they said, either. Not that they spoke to her—in fact, in the beginning, they completely ignored her, speaking to each other in their own tongue like she wasn’t even there.

Over the next few days, Anne-Marie became accustomed to the day-to-day of her new lifestyle. Ezekiel’s wife and daughters crafted little tribal trinkets and oddities to sell to Frenchmen in the market, or anyone looking for a souvenir from the New World. Each morning, Ezekiel would take what they had made into the city, while the women worked tirelessly throughout the day to make enough for tomorrow. Ezekiel instructed them to teach Anne-Marie how to make each of the crafts, but they didn’t. Instead they ignored her as they worked, sometimes silently, sometimes having private conversations in the Huron tongue with one another. She tried watching their process to learn it, and even offered to help, but it was clear they didn’t want her. It made her feel horrible, like she was a burden to everyone else. But what could she do if they were determined to alienate her?

Ezekiel’s daughters (she finally learned their names after the first week—Adah and Delilah) eventually warmed to her. Anne-Marie had given them two of her nice dresses, and besides, it was always exciting to get an older sister. But their mother was different. Anne-Marie hardly blamed the woman for her animosity—she was there upon her first visit here, after all, when she and Jeannine had beaten and bruised Ezekiel for sport. The memory of it still filled Anne-Marie with guilt, and though Ezekiel had forgiven her, it was clear his wife did not. Even the girls would not speak to Anne-Marie when their mother was present, as if she had forbidden them from interacting with her. It wouldn’t exactly be a surprise. Still, Anne-Marie was determined to atone for what she’d done, and earn her way back into the woman’s graces. For now, that meant staying out of the way, and trying to help in whatever ways she could find.

At night, Anne-Marie slept on the floor. The others slept on elevated benches lining the walls of the hut, but as Ezekiel said, there wasn’t enough room for her. Needless to say, New World winter nights were cold ones, and the floor was the coldest place to sleep. A fire crackled in the middle of the hut, but Anne-Marie could not sleep too close to it, afraid that she would roll into it and catch fire while asleep. The only space for her was by the door, where the wind came in from, chilling her to her bones. Sometimes, the sound of her teeth chattering was so loud that it kept her awake, and she had never felt this cold before.

It was not all bad news—Ezekiel’s wife had woven a blanket for her to sleep with. Anne-Marie was surprised at the gesture from a woman who so clearly hated her, but she wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Perhaps it was the woman’s way of accepting her. Perhaps she just didn’t want to see the poor girl freeze to death in the night, even if that girl had brutally kicked her husband not two months before. Whatever the reason, Anne-Marie was thankful for it, and it filled her with some hope that their relationship could be mended, that she could be forgiven for the horrible thing she’d done.

Tonight, Anne-Marie watched the starry sky through the smoke-hole in the center of the hut. She thought about what her brother had said about the Hurons. He told her they lived in huts like this ever since they were driven from their homelands, afraid to build their usual longhouses in any land that was not their own. Her heart ached just thinking about it—to be a people lost, unable to bear with those unexpected changes for fear that things might never change back.

The more she thought about it, the more she realized she felt the same as the Hurons. She had no home, not anymore, driven from comfort and shelter by threat of violence and death. In some ways, she never really had a home to begin with. Even the castle Parthenay, which she had looked back upon with a reverent nostalgia, had turned sour and black after she learned of her father’s true nature. No, there was no home for her or her brother. They would each have to find their own in this messy and unforgiving world, where boys as young as he would fight and die in war, where girls as young as she would be preyed upon by men. Anne-Marie was just glad to be free from that for now, even if she did have to sleep on the floor every night.

As Anne-Marie settled into another shivering half-sleep, she began to pray. She prayed Ezekiel’s wife would forgive her, and that she’d be given the chance to earn her keep. She prayed that Le Vicomte would never find her, that she’d never have to return to that awful place again. And of course, she prayed for the end of winter, for the safe return of her brother, and for an end to the frigid nights spent on the cold, hard ground.