Page 7 of The Autumn Wife
Mother Superior paused in dappled light on the middle path. “Some of the beans are ripe, and I’m told the blackberry bushes should be pushing early fruit.” The nun turned a merry eye toward her. “I confess I’m craving Sister Anne’s blackberry crisp. It’s been two years since I’ve tasted her version. That’s how long I’ve been away from here, trying to getroyal and ecclesiastical approval for our little congregation.”
“Sister Anne told me how grateful she is that you have returned.” Cecile debated whether to tell the Reverend Mother that it was the news of the nun’s arrival that had birthed Cecile’s unlikely plan. She quickly decided against it. The better tactic would be to put Mother Superior in a generous mood before asking for two tremendous favors. “Your arrival brought great luck, Mother, since you’ve found a master mason to be your overseer.”
“Yes, and only days after the former overseer departed. Proof of a prayer answered.” The corn being too green, the nun turned her attention to the bean pods dangling from vines. “That chapel has been nearly twenty years in the making, you know. Only by the grace of God has it gotten this far. In France, I was compelled to make a promise to my superiors that it will be completed in time to be consecrated in the spring, so there’s much work to be done.” As the sister snapped off a bean pod at the stem, Cecile wasn’t sure whether the nun was talking to her or herself. “Yet how is it to be finished, I wonder, if I keep losing skilled laborers to much larger projects in Quebec? Which is a long way of saying, Madame Tremblay, that, before meeting your Monsieur Martin—”
My Monsieur Martin?
“—I was in terrible, desperate straits.” Mother Superior snapped off another bulging pod and tossed it in Cecile’s basket. “As, I suspect you are, too.”
The nun’s look pierced right through her. The nuncouldn’tknow the extent of Cecile’s desperation. The Reverend Mother was the holiest of holy women, but surely the sister couldn’t discern, just with a look, all the sins that had driven Cecile to this convent today.
“My dear lady, you’ve gone ashen.” The nun plunged a hand into a pocket of her skirts. “When was the last time you ate?”
Cecile had eaten sagamité with dried blueberries at the Girards’ this morning, before she and Etienne had climbed into the canoe, but she couldn’t remember tasting a thing. “It’s just the heat, I think.”
“This July has been stifling. God help the laborers outside.” The nun tilted her head in the general direction of muffled clanging and shouts. “They’ve been working all day under that burning sky. Here, this might help.” The nun lifted her hand. Something small and amber gleamed in her palm. “These sweets are the best medicine, no matter what the ailment.”
Cecile took the offering, a boiled maple syrup candy.
“I keep a bag of them in my office, my little indulgence.” The nun wrinkled her nose over a puckish grin. “The flood of papers always on that desk stirs up dust, and that makes me cough.”
Cecile weighed the candy gleaming between her fingertips and found herself thrust back to a chilly October day in the open market of Montreal just after she was married. She had raced to the blanket of a Huron trader, drawn by the irresistible scent of maple…only to be yanked away by her cursing husband, who smelled like he’d spent her dowry on sour wine.
“Taste it.” The nun jerked her chin to the candy. “It’ll do you good. Maybe even loosen whatever confession you’ve got bottled up inside you.”
Color rising, Cecile slipped the sweet between her lips. As the smooth flavor blossomed, a prickling began behind her eyes. She’d spent so many years in isolation. Kindness from strangers was an unfamiliar thing. And how would Cecile thank this kind nun for her compassion? With a mangled story of half-truths and lies.
To think she had once been an honest woman.
“My husband abandoned me and Etienne.” She spoke around the lump of candy, then tucked it between cheek and tooth to melt on its own. “The last time I saw Eduard was more than eighteen months ago, when he set off into the wilderness on a trading trip.”
“I see.” The nun slid her piercing gaze away, turning back to the bean vine to inspect more pods for ripeness. “Your husband is a woods runner, then.”
Acid splashed up to her mouth. She sucked harder on the candy to douse the burn. Woods runners were known to be ungovernable and freedom-loving. Yet Cecile had been sent to these settlements by the King of France himself—along with hundreds of other King’s Girls—to marry the very kind of men who didn’t want to marry in the first place.
Keep with the story.
“Usually,” Cecile continued as a drop of sweat slid down her temple, “my husband would return home in late spring or early summer. But he has not made an appearance.”
A river of lines deepened on the nun’s brow. “Surely you know that woods runners will stay abroad if they haven’t gathered enough furs to make the venture profitable. His long absence is hardly proof of abandonment—”
“I have reason to believe otherwise.”
“Oh?”
She forced the well-practiced words to her lips. “My husband had many creditors. Several were owed such large amounts that they pooled their resources and sent a search party to find him. The search party traveled two months west, as far as Chequamegon Bay, on the far end of a lake so enormous it’s like an inland sea.”
“It’s a vast wilderness, my dear.” The nun shrugged. “He could still be hiding.”
“He’s not hiding.”
The cords of her throat drew taut. She sucked deeply on the maple candy, shuddering at her own audacity. She slid her gaze down from the wary perusal of the nun, only for it to fall upon the wooden cross around the sister’s neck.
I am going to hell.
“When the search party returned,” she continued, pushing through her well-rehearsed story, “the creditors descended upon my home in Trois-Rivières.” A tremor rattled through her as she remembered how two of Eduard’s furious partners had burst through the door of her one-room cabin, bristling with weapons, smelling like bears. “They told me they were within the law to seize everything my husband owned in order to pay his long-overdue debts…including what he owed gambling. They confiscated our chickens and our house and our land.”
The nun tossed more beans in Cecile’s basket as she let loose a grunt of disapproval.
