Wicked Woods (8 page)
D'Aulnay rallied every man he could in Port Royal, sailing them across the Bay of Fundy and erecting a hasty fortification on the west side of Saint John Harbour. He set up his cannons and in the process captured a small vessel bearing an important message for Madame La Tour. It read that her husband Charles had been delayed and was not returning to the fort for another month.
This was all the news that D'Aulnay needed to hear. The fort was his, as far as he could see. He ordered Madame La Tour to surrender the fort, but she ran up a red flag of defiance that some say was sewn out of a worn red petticoat. Whether commanding a troupe of actors or a troop of soldiers, Madame La Tour was more than ready for the task. Her troops hurled insults and cannonâades from behind the walls of Fort La Tour, defying D'Aulnay's attempts to overrun the fort. For three days, they maintained their resistance in spite of D'Aulnay's superior numbers.
But on the fourth day, a guard turned traitor and allowed D'Aulnay's forces access to the fort. D'Aulnay took the fort in a day, promising that the forty-five defenders would be spared if they laid down their arms. Yet D'Aulnay proved to be treacherous with his word.
He made Madame La Tour watch as the turncoat guard was forced to hoist and hang each of his fellow defenders at the end of a rope. One by one, her brave soldiers swung and dangled under the New Brunswick sun. D'Aulnay decorated the walls of the fort with corpses of hanged men as Madame La Tour stood by helpâlessly, her hands tied and a noose draped about her own neck. The crows gathered for a feast and a feed âsome say that the crows that live in Saint John today still wait hopefully for a similar mass hanging.
Madame La Tour was allowed to walk freely in the captured fort; however, when D'Aulnay caught her in an attempt to send a message through friendly Natives to her missing husband, he locked her in a cell. Three weeks later, Françoise Marie La Tour was dead. The romantics will tell you she died of a broken heart. Others believe that D'Aulnay poisoned her. Who can know?
Fort La Tour was razed and its exact location lost in the vagaâries of unrecorded history. D'Aulnay, now aware of what dealings Charles La Tour was making in Boston, demanded reparation for the help that Boston had offered. The Boston governor awarded D'Aulnay the gift of a sedan chair that had been captured in a privateer's raid, simply because the governor had no use for such a contraption.
D'Aulnay, however, was satisfied to receive what he saw as an admission of Bostonian guilt. He planned to parlay this admission into a lucrative trading opportunity, but fate intervened. On May 24, 1650, D'Aulnay and his valet tipped their canoe in the basin of Port Royal. They clung to each end of the overturned boat for an hour and a half before succumbing to the chill of the early spring Atlantic. He was buried with all honours and survived by his grieving wife.
This was Charles La Tour's chance. Through a series of political intrigues he seized ownership of Port Royal, and turned D'Aulnay's wife and children out to fend for themselves. Three years following the death of her husband, D'Aulnay's wife agreed to marry Charles La Tour. D'Aulnay's four sons grew up, and served and were killed in the wars of Louis xiv, and his daughters all became nuns. Thus, not a drop of D'Aulnay blood remained in the territory of Acadia. Charles La Tour was the final victor.
Françoise Marie La Tour is believed to have been buried somewhere handy to the ruined fort, however, as the exact location of the fort is a mystery, so is the gravesite. A 1950s archaeological dig on the eastern side of the harbour turned up a handful of cannon barrels, musket balls, and shards of crockâery. The cannons appeared to have been double shot with two balls jammed in against each other, and to have had their fuse holes spiked so as to render them useless. This is an undeniable sign of cannons that have been captured and destroyed, or else destroyed before capture.
Since then there have been several claims, all unsubstantiated, regarding the discovery of Madame La Tour's remains. One man claimed that he found her body bricked up in the cellar of an old house; however, the majority of Saint John's older houses were built upon posts and lacked any form of brickwork in the cellar.
A Saint John shipwright tells of how, during the construction of the shipyards, a woman's body was unearthed. She had long hair and the clothing of a person who was well-to-do, but no signs of identification were present. The workmen who dug up the remains promptly reburied her and never recorded the site of their discovery. It was better, they believed, to let the woman sleep in peace. Old bones rest uneasily and should seldom be disturbed.
Huia Ryder, a New Brunswick historian, reports that at the same time an old man in Saint John swore that he and his family often saw a grey lady walking the shores of the western side of the harbour.
Saint John folk will still tell you of a grey lady who is seen walking the shore near Portland Point on April nights. When approached, she seems to fade away. Some say she runs while others claim that she drifts off like smoke on the breeze.
Is this the ghost of Françoise Marie La Tour? Who knows? I believe that any actress as bold and daring as Madame La Tour would not willingly give up the spotlight, and would seldom miss an opportunity to perform.
KINGSTON
An argument is like a sleeping dog. If you wake it too suddenly, there is just no telling whom it will bite. In the early 1800s, just outside of Kingston, New Brunswick, a pair of neighbourâing farmers named James Rogers and Peregrine White sparked up an arguâment that ultimately ended another man's life.
The two were a pair of lonely and angry men who worked their fields and lived only to fight with each other. Peregrine White was a tall, lanky stick of a man with a temper that snapped given any excuse. He had served with a Loyalist regiment during the Revolutionary War and had returned home to work his farm. It was no secret that Peregrine had a bit of a grudge against those who had not served in the war.
“All fat men, all soft men, sitting at home in the dark like great mucking cheeses,” Peregrine would say of any man who hadn't fought in battle.
James Rogers, on the other hand, was a slow and sluggish kind of man. He was a heavy drinker with a surly disposition and a tenâdency towards brooding. He didn't much care for Peregrine, and Peregrine returned the feeling with compound interest.
It was said that the two men had been keeping a feud simmering for many a year, just out of habit. Some folks blamed the grudge on a mistaken land claim that robbed one or the other of an acre or two of farmland. Other folks swore that the two of them were simâply a pair of irascible, abusive, and absolutely vindictive old coots.
“It's all Peregrine's fault,” Rogers averred. “Never trust a man who stands taller and leaner than his turnip hoe.”
“That fat old tosspot Rogers won't get along with anyone,” Peregrine countered. “He'd as soon start an argument as draw a breath. And you can guarantee that both argument and breath will be equally foul.”
The trouble between the two of them came to a head on the afternoon of Saturday, September 22, 1810, as Peregrine White walked towards the town of Kingston on the long road that snaked its way around James Rogers's property line.
It was a fine, clear day. The weather was suited for grinning or singing or just laying back under the shade of a tall silver birch tree, but Peregrine was carrying a load that was guaranteed to sour any man's disposition. Peregrine was bent under the weight of a long-standing grudge that he'd fed and fattened for far too many years, and he was just aching to let it drop on some unsuspecting person's head.
You see, for Peregrine White, all of life's misfortunes began with someone else. As far as he was concerned there was never anyone else to blame but a neighbour or a stranger or a friend. He had a hard time dealing with anything that remotely resembled personal responsibility.
On this fine Saturday afternoon, Kipper, the small grey terârier who kept the Rogers's farm safe from the depredations of the foxes, coyotes, and a few wandering black squirrels, was vigilantly patrolling his territory. In fact, any creature that was bold enough to cross over the Rogers's property was bound to trigger the barkâing instincts of this mangy grey terrier. Old Kipper yipped and yapped at anyone or anything passing by.
Who really knows why a dog barks? A sight or a sound or a strange scent can set a dog off at any particular moment in time. It's a well-documented fact that dogs will even bark at spirits, and can keep half an eye peeled towards the invisible world. Then too, sometimes a dog will bark at its own tail or a shadow or a tree branch blowing in the breeze. Dogs don't need much of an excuse to throw their two bits into any kind of a situation.
And this afternoon for whatever reason, little Kipper decided to bay and bark at Farmer Peregrine White.
“Bow-wow-wow, yourself,” Peregrine shouted. “Go find your front porch or I'll stone you and feed your scrawny little carcass to my breeding sow.”
With that White stooped and quick as you could say “rock,” he picked up a chunk of New Brunswick granite and nailed the animal square in the side.
“That'll fix you,” Peregrine said.
Kipper yelped like he'd been dropped tail-first onto a hot stove. His panicked yapping brought James Rogers to his front door on the double. He spied old Peregrine stooping for another bit of ammunition to pelt his dog with, and he charged out like a fat, galloping avenger of canine abuse.
“I have you now, White,” Rogers shouted, barrelling down his front path towards a calmly waiting Peregrine White. The man stood there, rock cocked in a blatant raised fist, grinning like he was enjoying himself. Finally, he'd found some fun.
“Come ahead then, Rogers,” Peregrine said. “I'll bash whatâever brains remain in that besotted skull of yours.”
“You don't scare me,” Rogers said, stopping his advance all the same.
“What's it today, Rogers?” Peregrine asked. “Cider or whisky? Or have you saved up enough coppers to buy yourself some wine?”
With that last insult the two old buggers squared off like a pair of duelling gunfighters, showering each other with a deluge of well-flung curses and a spray of incidental spittle. The two men, loud at the quietest of moments, outdid themselves on this afternoon. Little Kipper kept yapping and barking all through the argument. The three of them together raised a clamour that could have easily awoken a dead man's shadow.
Meanwhile, inside the farmhouse, not more than a few metres away from the argument in progress, young Mary Evans, who worked as a server for Rogers, heard the raucous quarrelâling. Mary was busy at the time being amused by her fiancé, William Mascaline.
Mascaline, inspired by a boyfriend's deep need to impress his girlfriend and a sense of honest indignation, ran out into the yard to try and separate the battling codgers. Or rather, he limped out. You see, as a result of a boyhood accident, William Mascaline walked with a pronounced and permanent limp that he was very sensitive about.
“Return to your house, Master Rogers,” Mascaline said, trying his best to remain polite to his fiancé's boss. “And you, Mister White, had best be on your way.”
Unfortunately for Mascaline, old Peregrine was all too ready to take offence and find himself another target to vent his inestiâmable wrath upon. He turned upon Mascaline and tore him up one side and straight down the other. He insulted him in every way imaginable, even going so far as to ape Mascaline's limp in a mean and nasty fashion.
“Stump boy,” Peregrine called him, hobbling along in an exaggerated way. “Humping and stumping, where'd you learn to walk?”
However, Mascaline kept his cool, repeating his advice time and again.
“You really need to go home, Mister White,” he said. “Why waste your day ranting at me and this farmer and this poor little terrier?”
Realizing that his efforts at humiliation were being wasted upon William Mascaline, Peregrine White turned his anger upon young Mary Evans.
“That fiancée of yours, that scullery slattern, that trollop and tray-toter. Do you really think she loves you?” On and on, building like a rolling tidal wave, Peregrine White heaped abuse on Mary.
That did it.
While William Mascaline could let insult after insult slide from his back like rainwater off a mallard's feathers, there was no way in tarnation that he was going to put up with someone insultâing his Mary.
“Mister Peregrine White,” Mascaline said, his voice becomâing low and more menacing. “If you don't leave my sight and my earshot right this minute, I will knock you down with my bare hands.”
“Bravo, bully,” Peregrine taunted, “threatening an old man. What fine manners you show your fiancée.”
Mascaline spat in the dirt.
“That terrier has more manners than you, sir,” Mascaline said, “and he's a fair sight better looking.”