Order of Good Cheer (35 page)

First, his woman, the savage he has so famously befriended — François struggles to say the name — anyway, she has been here, to bring him —

“Ndene,” Lucien says, softly, and he feels an ache of another kind.

— to bring him some medicine. She was not allowed through the gate, at Poutrincourt's instructions, and then the apothecary d'Amboise claimed he wanted first to study the medicine, and he burned and breathed some of it and mixed some with snow and with ice, and also mixed it with his own remedies and cures. It is said, and here François leans in closer and speaks lower, that the apothecary was making letters and words and shapes with the roots and herbs, and speaking over it, and “to
all appearances, experimenting in Darkness.” When discovered, he made as if he would perhaps throw it all out, but Monsieur Champlain simply took it away from the apothecary, who has been ever more and more strange, and told Bonneville to see if it would taste well in a soup.

“The mapmaker said it was powders and ashes all amix. He says he doesn't know if your woman's dried things are in there or not. But he also put it in some special wine-drink for a feast, and you are drinking it now. Whatever it might be.”

Lucien pulls back from the cup but it is too dark to see into it. He returns his lips to the reed and sucks harder, with a new hunger, and he thinks,
Ndene
. And, yes, the wine tastes both good and bad as medicines do.

“This was two days ago,” says François. “You have been sleeping a lot. Which I have heard might be for the good.”

It is the only good.

“And then this morning the strangest event of all. Some savage boys came upon the apothecary in the snow. Seated in the snow.” He waits as if for Lucien's response, and none comes. “He was waiting, only that. He was up to nothing else. He was not asleep. He had placed himself in back, up near the trees, away from public view. At the edge of the graveyard.”

“We have a graveyard?”

“East of the storehouse.” François points east. He holds his arm up while he speaks. He seems reluctant to say more, but appears to know how it is that a sick man needs any detail about his future, whether it entails health or the other. “Not truly a graveyard. The ground is frozen, of course. So, at this point, the men, the three who . . .”

“They lie waiting in the snow.”

“For spring, yes. And then”— François's tone gains assurance, as if filled with happy news —“they will be given proper burial,
deep and safe in the ground. And already they have good crosses marking where they are. And they are guarded, dawn and dusk.”

“Guarded?”

Lucien smiles gently in asking this but François has closed his eyes and shakes his head. He has said too much and will not consider Lucien's question, the answer to which involves wild beasts nosing frozen bodies and ripping them to pieces. Lucien touches François on the arm by way of apology, and to ask him to please continue his story, which he does.

“In any case, there in the snow the apothecary sits, choosing where he did as if perhaps to sit bedside with them still, or perhaps feeling remorse that he had not cured them. Who can say? But he was sitting in the snow, resembling a stump, indeed he wore some new snow on his shoulders, and he was almost dead, but healthy otherwise — that is, his own choice sat him down and not some accident. Some say he was that far out of his head and was choosing this way to die.”

“Is he”— Lucien gestures with a loose wrist to indicate his own body —“is he sick?”

“With scurve, no. At least, there is no appearance of it. Monsieur Champlain has let it be known that, exactly this time after Yule last winter, on St-Croix, one man made himself drown, by taking a canoe far out into the bay and tipping it.”

“Yes . . .”

François speaks more quickly. “It is a secret to which he has held firm, until now. I believe he is concerned for all of us, and wants us to be alert to any urges.”

“Yes . . .”

“The apothecary is confined to his rooms, where he was given the full taste of Monsieur Poutrincourt's anger. We could all hear the shouting. The window glass shook in the Sieur's wind.”

“I think I heard it too. A curious . . . cure.”

“He is not in good spirits. He is well angered, red with it. His . . . Well, his boy has died, you see, and —”

“I think I knew that.” Did he? For hadn't that particular moaning note, that lighter and less manly tune, issuing there from the corner, ceased?

“— and as you know, some men's sadness burns, and shows itself in fighting.”

“Yes . . .”

“And so, Lucien?”

“Yes?”

“You should know that the Sieur is also most angered at you.”

Lucien nods once, merely. The Sieur is but a small part of that which is angered at him.

“You must know that, should you become better, still you might not be free.”

Lucien smiles darkly at this. He thinks,
None of you are free
.

François says that he should be going, calls him “friend,” and squeezes his shoulder. He takes Lucien's cup, which is empty, which Lucien has sucked dry with a hope so tired that it can hardly be called hope.

Standing, François lingers, tells him how he feels guilt to announce this, but that they will be having this grand party, a feast, tomorrow evening at supper, involving great food and a butt of the superior wine, and also surprises, and an entertainment. Not for the nobles only, but for all of the men, even some savages. François promises to sing so heartily that Lucien will hear it from here.

“François . . .”

Lucien spoke, but too softly, to the rough carpenter's back, and the man keeps walking until he is gone. He wanted to ask if the surgeon has cut into any of the men who have died. He heard
the surgeon Guillaume speaking of this early in autumn, when the scurve was still but a rumour, was a subject that aroused debate and interest, and the man had said that, like the surgeon at St-Croix had done, he too would cut into the sore legs and the loose faces of the newly dead, so to explore the ill humour to its source. Guillaume had heard that the blood is black in the legs but didn't believe this, and in any case his desire is to seek out the source of the disease and, once finding it, intuit its cure. Guillaume, from Honfleur, Lucien doesn't like. He is a man who almost never talks, and his face looks always hungry with something secretive. Lucien has seen him cut apart a pig, with brow knit, adjudging the mixture of fat and table meat. With that same temperament of face he will dissect a man, looking — for what?

Lucien wanted to tell his friend François not to let that stupid man come near his legs.

Lucien wonders if he will see his St-Malo home again. Then he wonders at his certainty, for he knows now that he won't.

AND SO THE FESTIVE
night arrives!

It begins with the mapmaker Samuel Champlain shouting, “
Please! To your feet!
” and, to a man, those assembled are excitable, smiling with rumours, made young simply because something new, something they don't yet know about, is unfolding, breaking their habits in half, and Samuel sees this and is glad, because this is truly all he wanted. And now, as men finish rising and silence is once more gained, Ricou takes his fiddle to the peak of a haunting solemnity, and Membertou's young niece, no more than nine years old, and looking even younger in height, wearing someone's elegant blue linen tunic, eyes focused on her freight and tongue protruding with effort, bears the first dish into the dining hall, a platter heavy with the comically homely nose of a moose, upright with nostrils attempting to sniff the better odours of heaven. The roomful of men — even the nobles — had been restive and eager, waiting to learn the nature of this evening and its celebration, and because the appearance of the girl is a surprise, and her load a humorous one, and the music so bright behind her, the room bursts into laughter and applause. There is perhaps some nervousness too, for though none have eaten moose nose themselves, they are aware that savages enjoy it, and now they have come to understand that, tonight, so will they.

While jugs of hypocras are passed and emptied, Samuel directs the platter of moose nose be placed centre table and then
he calls Monsieur Lescarbot forward. When the poet is standing quizzical in front of him, Samuel addresses the roomful of men, which includes, in the corner, Membertou and his main family.

“My good Sieur, and gentlemen all,” shouts Samuel, “on this night we gather at the warm hearth of King Henri”— Samuel gestures at the blaze; the room is jammed with bodies and it grows quickly too hot —“far from our home. But we celebrate, tonight, our new home, and our own good company, and the good cheer that God provides”— he gestures both to the brimming jugs of superior Bordeaux wine and to the table that now bears other dishes too, namely root vegetables, the tureen of stew juices from the moose's cooking, and the salted eggs from the great sturgeon —“in such bounty. And, so, in the spirit that 'tis a sin not to enjoy His available feast, I do proclaim a new order of fellowship, commencing tonight but continuing through each night until the coming of the first green of spring, and I call our fellowship . . . the Order of Good Cheer.”

The dining hall shakes with affirmative bellowing and goblets are thrust high with such lack of care that hypocras breaches many a rim, and Samuel catches sight of Membertou's sons shrinking back in possible dismay, for of course they have not minded a word of his speech and are dreadfully surprised. At the height of cheering, men fling open the several parchment windows, for it has got thick and hot, and the effect of casting open the frames is a not unpleasant though rather immodest one of lending their shouts beyond l'Habitation to all the ears of New France. Then a breeze carries some coolness in, and the room is at once smarter for it.

“Fellows!” The men are so eagerly in accord that their silence is instant. “Given that I, your humble son of Brouage, Samuel Champlain, am steward of this first night, I would now like to
confer upon
tomorrow
eve's steward, this collar of the Order of Good Cheer.”

Amid more lusty cheering, Samuel removes from his own throat the loose, red-ruffled collar, with its three dangling bronze amulets, lifts it high, pauses long enough to catch Monsieur Lescarbot's eye, waits for the man to dip his head, and then drapes it on. And the hall finds yet another full lung for shouting its approval.

It still feels right to have done this, that is, to choose a successor now, for the next night, though this one has yet even to begin. What he wants is for the men to know that it is not this night only, and not the next night only, but rather a feast that does not stop. A state of lifted humour, of thanks and of appreciation, ongoing in its effect. As well, he hopes this gives spirit to the others, most of them savages, and their women and children, who did not fit in this night's shoulder-against-shoulder dining hall, that they may well take their turn here tomorrow, or the next night.

In bestowing the collar on his nemesis Marc Lescarbot, he does it as much to challenge an enemy as to offer a wreath of forgiveness to a friend. And he sees from the gleam in the lawyer's eye that it is taken more as a challenge. Also, indeed, the lawyer no doubt knows that accepting the collar — and how could he refuse! — means that tomorrow morning, instead of nursing hypocras' head with the rest of them, he needs must be up planning, rehearsing, and procuring new and better cheer. As for tonight, Samuel already has the lawyer's promise that later, before the course of sweets, he will recite several of his poems, one of them lengthy, making pretty about wine and venison and flowers — so Lescarbot will have to look farther for his main entertainment for tomorrow. (Perhaps he will hasten to resurrect his Neptune play!) Nor can Lescarbot call upon Poutrincourt to
play his flute, for the Sieur is already doing so tonight, before the meat course; nor can he ask Ricou to compose yet another three-part song to be sung, for that is commencing now.

It is a beautiful tune! Ricou has begun with a trill of fiddle and, when he stops and tucks it under his arm, both Branchaud and the pilot Champdoré step up beside him and they three sing a simple melody but in three different voices, or keys — Samuel is not adept at music — one voice feminine, another middling, and Champdoré's a deep bass, and they do not hurry to reach the next note but linger, and then bend the note so that it rises rather than stops, and the effect is lovely — though not so lovely that the men fail to notice the evening's pièce de résistance: the grand sturgeon-fish, longer than a man and near as thick, lying on a plank fresh milled from a grand birch, borne now to table by Bonneville the cook and two others. Though the fish is no secret to anyone, for it has spent two full days hanging in the smokehouse, to be peered at by yet another small crowd whenever the door was opened to add more wood, and perhaps they have heard his own rumours of the fish's excellence, for he has tasted it prepared this way in Hochelaga, and he let slip out that in the mouth it will feel more like pudding than like flesh; and indeed this is the same beast from which an entire cask of sleek beige eggs has been scooped and pickled; still the sight of it now resting freshly and well cooked upon the table is enough to bring the men once more to their feet, and they applaud yet again — not so much a bellowing this time, but rather a reverent murmuring, and hands well struck and at length, and, in some cases, noble rings rapped earnestly against pewter.

HE HEARS THEM
. Mouth limp and half open, lying only on his back, tits up, he hears them down those impossible stairs and across the courtyard and through the open windows of the dining hall. Singing, shouting. He can hear individual speeches bellowed, sometimes even some of the words. He can hear the trained, blade-sharp tone of the lawyer proudly giving dramatic voice to one of his own poetic compositions.