Sophie's Treason. Beverley Boissery

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       They called him The Loon.

       He knew that wasn’t his name. He knew what loons were, remembered watching a pair of them one summer on a lake. Where the lake was, though, he didn’t know. But he did remember being awed by their ability to dive straight into it from the air, and that someone had told him they could dive at least one hundred feet. And he remembered feeling melancholic as he listened to their plaintive cries at sunset.

       It was strange. In his mind’s eye he could see the two loons swimming. He could even recall grinning as he watched their mating dance. But when he tried to think where it had happened, the familiar blackness was like an ocean of darkness in which his mind’s pictures of the loons shone like a sunlit globe. He felt like a disembodied eye that had this one vision. For a while, he wondered if this was how God saw the universe, and if the earth was like that globe.

       Of course, he knew he wasn’t God. Maybe he was in hell, although he’d always thought it must be bright from all the fires, not like this constant darkness. For all he knew, he could be dead and six feet underground.

       Then, he heard soft voices. The women were back. They spoke French as they whispered to each other. A strange kind of French, but French nevertheless. That made no sense either. As he lay quietly, trying to find something to help him understand, he heard someone else enter the space. He recognized the sound of boots on bare floors. The stranger muttered something in English and immediately pain stabbed the Loon’s head, like a pin being jabbed into a pincushion.

       He fought the pain, trying to stay awake to learn something from this Englishman he somehow associated with brutality. He listened while the man questioned the women brusquely, and smiled as they answered more and more slowly while the Englishman sounded ever more impatient. He felt he could see the man’s hand and see a finger punching the air as he spoke, because the jabbing pain in his head became more and more intense.

       Someday, he thought, he’d understand. Someday, he’d answer the Englishman’s questions, and someday, he promised himself, he’d thank the women for their protection.

      CHAPTER ONE

      In December 1838, Montreal was a sullen city. Most residents scurried about their business with grim efficiency. The joie de vivre for which the city was famous seemed a thing of the distant past. Every jail was full to overflowing. People looked at each other carefully, worrying that strangers might be informants. Smiles seemed yet another casualty of the recent rebellion.

      Sophie Mallory was as sullen as the city as she traipsed along Notre-Dame Street with her friend Luc. Sullen, and scared. She couldn’t begin to imagine what trouble she’d be in if her guardian, Lady Theodosia Thornleigh — her father’s fiancée and one of the richest women in England — ever found out. Lady Theo had told her several times that morning that she was not to leave the house. And she had emphasized that Sophie was not to go with Luc.

      But, what choice did she have? Two months earlier, she hadn’t known Luc existed. In the short time she’d known him, he’d become her best friend. She could not possibly have let him face this morning’s ordeal alone.

      She’d met him and his brother Marc at her home in Malloryville, Vermont. For a while, he had been a mystery. She’d see him only in the distance. When her brothers’ children tried to beat her up, Luc stormed to her defence. Her next meeting with him was equally dramatic. She’d come to Lower Canada to visit Edward and Jane Ellice, Lady Theo’s friends from London. They’d had no premonition that a rebellion would break out, much less that they would become the rebels’ prisoners. When Sophie became separated from Lady Theo, Luc rescued her and just before the rebellion ended, he risked capture by coming to tell them the unbelievable news that her papa had been taken prisoner as well. Surprisingly, the British army had captured him, and that made no sense. Her papa was no rebel.

      To help prove this, Lady Theo leased a house in the Montreal suburb of St. Lawrence and, in Sophie’s opinion, began spending almost all her time in lawyers’ offices. Sophie quite liked the house. Not as much as she liked her home in Malloryville, of course, or even the London mansion she’d lived in until six months ago. That had been really grand.

      This Montreal house was relatively new. Ivy had only tangled its branches halfway up the grey stone walls. The house was big, with eight bedrooms. Sophie had chosen one that looked out across snow-covered fields to Mount Royal, the mountain after which Montreal was named. The view helped her feel less homesick. Some mornings, while waiting for hot water to be brought up to her, she lay in bed imagining that she was back in Vermont and looking out on her beloved Mount Donne.

      There was one huge disadvantage to the house, which Sophie realized only gradually. It was isolated, a long twenty-minute walk from the city. She was so grateful that Lady Theo had invited Luc, who was an orphan, to live with them. Without his company, she would not have known what to do with herself.