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"Boo!"
"Ahahaha!"
"Boo!"
"Ahaha!"
François and Marguerite were playing quietly in the sitting room, watched over by Onatah, whose fond gaze never seemed to tire of these little moments. Her husband could not spend as much time as he would have liked with their youngest child, so he made the most of every opportunity to create precious memories with her.
He left Montrouge early in the morning to take up his duties at the fort and did not return until his obligations had been fulfilled. Sometimes, he came home only after Onatah had put Marguerite to bed.
So whenever he had the chance, he made the most of it.
"Boo!"
The little girl burst into laughter once more.
It was a pure, innocent laugh, one of those little bursts of joy that made anyone who heard it want to smile.
François hid his face behind his hands again, waited a few seconds, then suddenly spread them apart, pulling another silly face. Marguerite never took her eyes off him.
"Boo!"
This time, Marguerite did not laugh.
She gave a slight start, her mouth falling open, and stared at her father with wide, astonished eyes.
"You frightened her," Onatah remarked in a mock-reproachful tone.
François smiled at the child.
"Well?"
The baby, who was now eight months old, remained silent for a second. Then her eyes turned into two little crescents of delight. A mischievous smile appeared on her tiny lips.
"What a chipie," the Major murmured, having traded his uniform for more comfortable clothes.
"She certainly is," the beautiful Mohawk woman confirmed, sitting on a chair placed near the fireplace so she could enjoy its warmth.
The word was one of those peculiar expressions François had brought back from his former life. He used it regularly when talking about their daughter. It had thus become a word that belonged to the two of them alone.
To an adult, the term could describe someone troublesome or unpleasant, particularly a woman with a difficult temperament. But when applied to a little girl, it took on an entirely different meaning. It became something sweet and affectionate.
And Marguerite seemed to deserve the title entirely.
"Just look at that little face," François sighed. "She's going to spend her whole life playing tricks on us."
"She has already started, you know."
They resumed their game for a few more minutes, until Onatah declared that it was time to settle down and get ready for bed.
François did not protest.
He neither consulted his pocket watch nor tried to bargain for a few extra minutes. The two adults were perfectly capable of discussing things and sometimes bickering like children themselves, but when Onatah decided that the children should go to sleep, the discussion was generally over.
That was simply how their marriage worked.
In their children's eyes, their parents always seemed to agree.
The reality, of course, was quite different. They did not agree on everything, but they took care not to let it show.
Pierre's education was probably the best example.
After very lengthy discussions, they had jointly decided that he would go to Montreal to further his studies under the Jesuits.
François considered this education important for his son's future, and that was the argument he had put forward. Onatah, for her part, was far from enthusiastic about the idea of seeing her son leave his family for several years.
Like any mother, she wanted to keep her children close to her for as long as possible.
The stay was supposed to last only four years, but they both knew it might be just the beginning. The older Pierre grew, the greater the likelihood that their eldest son would eventually leave Montrouge for good to pursue his career. He might remain in the colony, or he might go to France.
François had briefly mentioned the latter possibility one evening in September. He had merely suggested that if their son ever developed an interest in commerce, he could be sent to Martin or one of his relatives to learn the trade.
Onatah had sulked for three days, and François had not brought it up with her again since.
The Mohawk woman closed her book and placed it on the plain little table within arm's reach of the fireplace. She rose slowly.
Marguerite immediately followed her with her eyes. The moment her mother leaned toward her, the little girl's face lit up. She raised her arms, somewhat clumsily, and wrapped them around her mother's neck. Then she buried her face against her.
The baby made a cute little sound, shaking her head from side to side.
"What are you doing?"
The little girl seemed intent on attacking her mother. Onatah let out a small, theatrical cry.
"Ah! I'm under attack!"
"Ahahaha!"
She tickled the child's sides, right where she was most sensitive.
Marguerite burst into laughter.
"Mium mium mium mium!"
Onatah buried her face in her daughter's neck in turn and planted a series of little kisses there. She caught the lobe of Marguerite's right ear between her lips, and the little girl's laughter grew even louder.
"Onatah… I thought it was time to calm down."
She turned towards her husband.
François was watching her intently, as though trying to etch this moment into his memory forever. There was amusement in his eyes.
Of course, it was not really a reproach. He knew how difficult it was to resist the urge to play with Marguerite whenever she was in a cheerful mood.
The child laughed all the time, and that little melody had become a source of happiness for the entire household. It was like a drug.
"Hmm… I know."
She drew her face away and looked her daughter straight in the eyes.
"Right. Now, let's settle down. It's time for sleepy-byes."
Marguerite did not understand a word. She tried to grab her mother's lips, then a long lock of her hair. At that age, anything that came within reach of her tiny hands became a toy in her eyes. She was also very fond of noses.
One day, François had been lying on his back on the bearskin spread out in front of the fireplace, with his daughter resting on his chest. She had tried to grab his nose, and one of her fingers had slipped into a nostril. Since her nails were rather long at the time, she had scratched him quite badly. It had hurt, and François had bled a little.
Onatah turned towards her husband and shifted Marguerite, who was still in her arms, so that she was facing him. The moment she saw her father's face, an enormous, proud smile spread across her rosy lips.
"Goodnight, Papa!" Onatah said on her daughter's behalf.
She took one of the little girl's hands and gently waved it.
François returned the gesture.
"Goodnight, my darling! Sweet dreams!"
Marguerite yawned.
"Oh, yes… You're tired. Come on, off we go!"
Onatah made her way towards the wooden staircase and disappeared upstairs with Marguerite, leaving François alone on the bearskin. His fingers sank deep into the thick, warm fur of the beast that had been dead for years.
"Ahhh."
He let out a long sigh, and after a few moments, decided to get up. He walked over to an imposing piece of furniture, so heavy that the manor itself seemed to have been built around it. He opened a drawer and took out a long, finely carved wooden case. With almost ceremonial care, he opened it and removed a long pipe.
François then took out a second box, smaller and unadorned. It contained his tobacco.
The latter was, of course, nothing like the blends he had been accustomed to in his former life. There were no artificial flavourings here, nor any complicated preparations involving ingredients that had no business being in a cigarette.
There was nothing but dried, crumbled tobacco leaves. The only addition was a few sumac leaves, treated in the same way to make the smoke lighter and give it a faint aroma.
François prepared his pipe in silence, with the same confidence he would have shown when loading a musket. Then he left the room, carrying nothing but a small twig with a glowing red tip.
It was only once he was outside that he lit his pipe.
Standing beneath the awning that sheltered the manor's entrance from the weather, his gaze lost in the distance, he brought the mouthpiece to his lips and drew his first puff.
At once, the taste of fragrant smoke filled his mouth.
Before him, the rain formed something like a curtain. It streamed down the little roof protecting the manor's entrance and fell to the ground barely four centimeters from the first wooden step.
The air was cool, carrying the pleasant smell of wet earth. The sound of the rain was so soothing that François could have sat there for hours.
He leaned his back against a sturdy post and remained motionless for a long while.
A pipe was never smoked in a hurry. Even among Europeans, tobacco was far too precious to be consumed without being savoured.
From where he stood, the fort was out of sight. Its massive, forbidding silhouette was hidden by the trees on his estate. Their branches had yet to regain their foliage, although spring was very near, but there were enough of them to form a wooden barrier around the manor.
François drew another puff of smoke.
He held it in his lungs for a few seconds, then exhaled slowly. The bluish-grey cloud lingered before his face for a moment before the wind carried it away.
He remained there for several minutes, thinking of nothing in particular.
At last, he turned his pipe upside down and gently shook it, tapping the bowl with the tip of his index finger to let the ashes fall out. He then used the same twig he had lit his pipe with to remove the remaining tobacco from the bowl.
When he went back inside, the warmth of the manor felt all the more pleasant. This little ritual helped him fall asleep more easily.
As he passed the staircase, he heard a door close. He did not stop, but continued towards the large cabinet in the sitting room.
"Has she fallen asleep?" he asked as he put his things back in their proper places.
"Yes. She was really tired."
Onatah came closer and nestled against him. Just as Marguerite had done with her a little earlier, the beautiful Iroquois woman buried her face in François's coat. She could hear the steady beating of his heart with perfect clarity.
She whispered:
"I don't want you to leave…"
François did not answer immediately.
He placed a comforting hand on her back.
"I'm not leaving until next week."
"Next week… tomorrow… It's all the same."
He felt his wife's arms tighten around him, so he kissed the crown of her head.
"I have no choice. Those are my orders."
"…"
"You know that," he continued gently. "A soldier, whatever his rank, never gets to do as he pleases. Only what he must. Whatever his regiment, whatever corps he belongs to, that constraint remains the same."
Onatah remained silent.
François gently stroked his wife's long hair and added:
"At least, they aren't sending me to the East Indies. I'm only going to accompany your father and the other Haudenosaunee representatives. And the representatives of the other nations. It will only last a few months."
Onatah discreetly bit her lower lip.
She had suspected that her husband would receive such orders one day. She had simply hoped that day would come later.
"You're going to miss Pierre's departure," she finally whispered, her voice trembling. "He'll be terribly disappointed… and sad."
This time, it was François's turn to remain silent.
He was perfectly aware of it.
Had it not been for the letter containing his assignment orders, he would have been the one to accompany their son to Montreal. He would have held his hand on the way to the college and, before the establishment's imposing gates, given him his final advice and a few words of encouragement.
But he would not be able to do any of that, because by then he would already be far away. Perhaps he would even have reached France.
"I'll ask Yann to accompany him. Or Tayohseron. The two of them get along very well. I'll go and see him when I return."
Onatah raised her head slightly, visibly displeased.
"That's not the point, François. He really wanted you to be there with him that day."
François lowered his eyes. He could find nothing to say. Perhaps because there simply was no good answer.
Apologizing would have served no purpose. Onatah knew perfectly well that he had done nothing wrong. And he knew that she knew it.
That was precisely what made things so much harder.
The orders had come from Versailles, and he had to obey.
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The week passed as quickly as a single day.
In the end, François was able to spend only a few hours with his children, and barely any more time with his wife.
Unfortunately, he had been unable to finish writing the story he had been working on since autumn for Madame de la Ferté-Imbault. Between his duties, preparations for his departure, and the time he had set aside for his family, he had made little progress over the past few weeks.
According to the outline he had drawn up, he still had about ten chapters left to write.
It had all begun nearly a year earlier, when he received a letter from Marie-Thérèse de la Ferté-Imbault. It was so elegantly written, with such refined vocabulary, that it had taken him three readings to truly understand it. She had asked whether he had any other stories he might share with her and her friends. Perhaps something in the same spirit as Titanic, which, he had no idea how, had somehow found its way into her hands.
After the customary pleasantries, François had replied by asking her to clarify what she was looking for. He did not want to embark on writing a tale without knowing what she actually had in mind.
His wording, however, had given their correspondence the impression that he regarded her request as a commission.
Marie-Thérèse de la Ferté-Imbault had hastened to dispel this misunderstanding in her reply of September 17.
She was neither a librarian, nor a theatre director, nor a purveyor of plots, she had explained with a touch of irony. She had no intention whatsoever of putting him to work on an imagination assembly line.
Nevertheless, she had taken care to explain what she did not wish to read: a philosophical treatise disguised as a novel, but rather characters tested by their feelings; thwarted love, certainly, but not necessarily because of a difference in fortune. Above all, she did not want two innocent people persecuted by a world made up entirely of fools, nor a tragic story whose sole purpose was to make readers weep and feign profundity.
François had given her reply a great deal of thought. Then he had begun to write. Not a Disney adaptation transposed to the eighteenth century, but an original work.
The story of a fictional knight from the Hundred Years' War, Hugues de Beaumont, eldest son of the Lord of Beaumont and a loyal servant of King Charles VII, whose life was violently turned upside down when royal agents came to arrest him for treason in his family castle, before numerous witnesses.
He was accused of selling weapons and information to the English and the Burgundians.
The accusation was terrible. His head was at stake.
And yet neither his father, nor his younger brother, nor even his pregnant wife made any attempt to save him. As though speaking a single word in his favour, or visiting him during his imprisonment, would have been enough to implicate them as well.
On a stormy day, Hugues de Beaumont was beheaded.
But his story did not end there, for in the very next instant, he awoke in 1770, in the ruined courtyard of an abandoned castle, surrounded by half-collapsed walls overrun with vegetation.
There were no guards or jailers to prevent him from leaving. So he walked. For a long time. Until fate led him to the road where Julie de La Roche-Belcombe, a young woman of noble birth, was travelling in a carriage attacked by highwaymen.
Hugues, guided by nothing but his courage, did not hesitate. He threw himself into the fight and saved her, defeating every one of his adversaries with such strength and determination that she was left utterly astonished.
Grateful, Julie offered him her help.
It was thanks to her that Hugues discovered he had been transported into the future by a supernatural phenomenon, but also learned the extent of the changes that had gradually transformed French society. Some struck him as marvellous, while others filled him with profound unease.
Little by little, Julie herself came to believe that this man, with his strange manners, his language, and his knowledge of another age, had truly come from the past.
Despite her beauty and noble birth, she had never agreed to marry. François had also portrayed her as a highly educated and active young woman, qualities that would surely appeal to the women reading the novel.
Julie had rejected all her suitors, judging them unworthy of her. Hugues, however, seemed to possess every quality she had ever sought in a husband. Despite their differences, a romance began to blossom between them.
With her help, Hugues uncovered the terrible truth about the crimes of which he had been accused: they had all, in fact, been committed by his younger brother, Gontran.
The truth had eventually come to light, but many years after Hugues's execution. Gontran had himself been arrested and executed.
As for the old Lord of Beaumont, consumed by shame and remorse for having abandoned his eldest son, he died soon afterwards, his heart heavy with sorrow.
But perhaps the most painful revelation concerned Marjorie, Hugues's wife. After her first husband's death, she had married Gontran, the very man who had brought about his condemnation. The child she had been carrying when Hugues was arrested was, in fact, the product of her relationship with his younger brother.
In this dark tale, only one person had truly believed in the knight's innocence.
Anne-Marie de Saint-Croix.
It was only then that he learned the truth.
A childhood friend from whom Hugues had grown distant, convinced that she hated him for a reason he had never understood. She had been the only one to defend him, and she had continued to do so even years after his execution.
François had reached that point in the story.
The rest was relatively clear in his mind: Hugues and Julie, both aware that they did not belong to the same era and that an injustice committed in the past had to be set right, would have to part ways, allowing him to write a scene rich in emotion.
Hugues would have to return to Beaumont Castle shortly before the date of his arrest. Armed with the information he had acquired in the future thanks to Julie's help, he would expose his brother and provide all the evidence necessary to have him arrested.
Upon seeing her lover taken into custody, Marjorie would lose her composure and accidentally reveal her own guilt, allowing Hugues to have their marriage annulled.
The brave knight would finally be able to take his life back into his own hands and marry Anne-Marie de Sainte-Croix, the only person who had believed in his innocence even when everyone else had abandoned him.
But François did not want to end his story with that single victory.
When Madame de la Ferté-Imbault believed the tale to be over, she would discover one final scene set in 1770.
Julie de La Roche-Belcombe, now alone, would be unable to understand the sadness that had come over her. That is, until she met a charming young man who introduced himself as Jacques de Beaumont.
A distant descendant of Hugues and Anne-Marie.
Fortunately, the voyage would give him ample time to finish his manuscript. He had no idea whether the noble lady would enjoy his story, but so far, he had taken genuine pleasure in writing it. It was a tale entirely of his own creation, and he was immensely proud of it.
Marie-Thérèse de la Ferté-Imbault had asked for a romance, and he had written her a genuine adventure combining time travel, betrayal, detective work, justice, and love. There was even a little philosophy.
He could even begin working on his next project: a book intended to present New France, its inhabitants, and the diversity of their customs as accurately as possible. Between the outward and return voyages, he would have ample opportunity to ask the members of the delegation any questions that came to mind.
However, since the delegation did not represent all the peoples of the colony, he would have to continue his research after his return, a task that could take years.