The Plains of Abraham

Chapter 47

Early Saturday morning a squad of martinets woke us. The leader, an imposing man who had to bend at the waist to get through the doorway, held a lantern. He lifted it to Adrienne's face, then to mine.

"We're here for the girl," he said.

His face wore a smirk. I rose and confronted him. "Why?"

"It's her time."

"No!" I pushed Adrienne into a corner and stood in front of her.

"Don't make this harder than it needs to be, Mr. Jordan."

"You're not taking her."

The leader nodded to his subordinates, who pressed in on us. I swung my fist and caught one on the jaw. He went down. I kicked another between the legs and he doubled over, croaking.

The remaining martinets surrounded me. I pleaded with them, "Someone please find my sister. Tell her what's happening."

They clubbed me. I heard the thud, thud, thud of blows raining on me even after I became numb to them, and in the background Adrienne screaming for them to stop.

*

When I came to, I was strapped to a chair, facing a low pyre in the Place de le Lévitique. Adrienne was on the pyre, tied to a stake. A pile of kindling lay at her feet. Father Mitchell gradually came into focus as I regained consciousness. He stood next to Adrienne with a burning torch in his hand.

"Young Jordan has decided to join us," he said. "It's fitting. We couldn't conduct these proceedings without him. They would lack a certain poetry."

"Father Mitchell," I implored, "she's with child."

His eyebrows went up. "One more soul for Heaven."

Behind me were people, hundreds of spectators. Jostling for position. Pressing forward to improve their view. It felt like the entire population of Kebek was present.

A guard bent over me and said, "If you look away, I'm under orders to gouge your eyes out." He held a rusty screwdriver in his right hand. "Please don't make it come to that."

Mitchell ordered the spectators to hush. He waited until the noise died down, then announced:

"Adrienne, Queen of Ellanoy, you have been sentenced to death for complicity in treason and sedition, for blaspheme, and for the sin of being mixed race."

"Burn the sable!" someone shouted from the crowd.

A cheer went up. But there was something odd about it. I knew what Kebekian mobs sounded like, and this one sounded like only half the people were participating. I struggled to rise but my arms and legs were bound to the chair. So I leaned forward and rose to my feet, taking the chair with me.

Guards roughly forced the chair back down.

"Do that again," the lead guard said, "and you lose an eye."

Adrienne watched me from the pyre. She appeared sadder for my impending loss, for my own suffering, than for hers, about to begin. I kept my eyes fixed on her but they were already flooding with tears. I prayed quietly to myself: Dear God, right now would be the perfect moment for Bishop Bennett and his exiles to attack. But I knew the attack wasn't scheduled until the next day. We hold dear the most desperate of hopes when such hopes are all we have left to hold.

Mitchell continued. "Your sentence will now be carried out." He removed a bottle from his robe and sprinkled its contents on Adrienne's head. "I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."

Adrienne shook her head vigorously in an attempt to flick the water off.

Mitchell said, "You may now enter the hereafter with a cleansed soul."

Adrienne smiled at him. "I forgive you."

Mitchell's expression soured. He stuck his torch into the kindling at Adrienne's feet and held it there. At first nothing happened. Then gradually the kindling ignited.

As flames lapped at Adrienne's feet she called out to me. "How beautiful the sun is, that I have you to love for the rest of time."

Mitchell piled more wood on the fire. "You should be grateful to us, girl. We're sending you to God."

Adrienne's clothes caught fire. The flames climbed through the thin fabric like it was paper. She sang my favorite lullaby, the one I taught her in Bounty Rock. She'd chosen it as her death song.

          Sleep, sleep my beloved one
          Close your eyes, your day is done

Her hair caught fire. I lost consciousness and a bucket of water was thrown in my face. "Throw the water at her!" I screamed.

          Morning comes, we'll play again
          Cuddle again, be gay again

Her flesh turned red. It charred and peeled.

          Fill the day with joy and fun

Her flesh melted away. I lost consciousness again. And woke again, this time to the searing pain of my left eye being gouged out. The lead guard held me by the hair with one hand while twisting the screwdriver into my eye socket with the other, making circular motions, scraping the cavity clean. The goo of my ruptured eyeball spilled down my cheek.

The air filled with the acrid aroma of burning flesh. Adrienne's eyes popped out of their sockets, leaving blackened holes staring vacuously. Mitchell added more wood to the fire. It roared and consumed my wife, until all I could see of her was a trembling shimmer behind a wall of flame and soot.

Some of the spectators chanted, "Burn, sable, burn!"

Adrienne's bowels spilled from her disintegrating frame. A glistening, goopy mess that hissed and sputtered as it landed in the coals. Her figure reduced to a charred skeleton, held intact by stubborn tendons and the roasted remnants of other tissues.

The fire subsided. Her jaw rested on her ribs. Brittle tufts of carbonized hair fluttered away from her skull like ash from a scorched bush.

***

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