The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor by Sally Armstrong Page B

man’s language as well.
    M ARIE STANDS by the fire with Josef, who is three, and Marc, who is four, and watches the English arriving in the camp. Chief Julian comes forward to give greetings. He knew well enoughhow to be a friend to strangers and draw advantage from them. The old commodore was no exception, though he is less a stranger than most English.
    Marie does not wish to offend the woman who appears to belong to the commodore, and she is careful not to allow her inspection to become a stare. But it was impossible not to marvel at so strange a shape. The woman is an odd creature. How had she grown so tall? And though the skins of the English were often pale—paler even than that of her Acadian husband, André—they were never in Marie’s experience as pale as this, and the hair colour was—it was unnatural.
    Yet for all that, the woman behaves just as women among the People were expected to behave. In the presence of Chief Julian, she speaks not a word, though her voice had echoed up the gully as she’d approached. Now the commodore and the chief walk aside to speak alone, and the red-haired woman stands among a crowd of strangers. Marie stoops to stoke the fire for tea and drops her berries and leaves in the kettle propped on stones in its midst. She probes the sand with a stick to check if her bannock is ready.
    A
bois brule
—married to a white man—she prides herself on baking better bannock than her sisters. Not that
les Acadiens
had eaten the bannock, of course. The Scots—a kind of English—had passed that good food to the People many years before. Indeed, her own grandmother had baked bannock. But it was a white man’s food nonetheless, and André Landry was a white man and that made her bannock better. She straightens up to call at Josef, who was about to plunge himself straight into the fire.
    “Get back!” she says. “Or you will burn up like the devil!”
    She speaks in Mi’kmaq. The children understand French well, but it had come to her with difficulty and more so because André spoke the language of the People. Since they had hid
les
Acadiens
from the British soldiers for twenty years, many of the People who did not speak French before now spoke it well. This was the wisdom of Chief Julian, who had seen that the French would return some day in numbers. Already there were signs that this was so. There were no English here in the land of the People, only some Scots and French from across the water and a few of the old
Acadiens
returned. And the commodore, of course, and his men. But they were not ordinary English.
    The red-haired woman waits awkwardly and Marie glances at her belly. Was this the way with such long English women, that their bellies stood out a little beneath their dresses? Or could she be with child, the commodore’s child perhaps? Who would know about this? Marie wondered.
    “Here,” she says to the woman, her voice low, as it always was when she spoke French. “Here is food.” She begins to poke at the ashes with a burnt stick.
    The English woman draws close. “Do you speak French?” she asks in that language but also softly.
    “A little, from my husband,” says Marie. “And you? Do you speak French too?”
    “Yes, a little.”
    “Josef!” she calls. “Come back or I will tie you!”
    “Are these your children?” the red-haired woman asks.
    “Yes. And my husband is
un Acadien.”
    “How beautiful they are! You married a man who was not one of your own.”
    Marie smiles shyly. “I married the man I loved.”
    “Yes,” says the white woman. “Yes.”
    Marie uses two sticks to pluck the bannock from the coals and shakes the sand from the flattened bread. She gives a piece to each of her children, and a piece to the woman.
    They chew a minute in silence while Marie wrestles with the propriety of her thoughts.
    “May I touch your hair?” she finally whispers.
    “Of course.”
    “It’s real?” asks Marie.
    “Yes, of course it is.” She leans forward