eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
“Based on the poem of the same name by Longfellow, Evangeline tells the story of the Great Upheaval, the forcible removal of the French Catholic Acadians from their lands in present-day Nova Scotia by the British. . . . Life is breathed into this tragic historical event by showing how it affected the lives of individuals, most particularly Evangeline and Gabriel, young lovers separated on the night before their wedding” (Historical Novel Society).
Heartbroken but determined, Evangeline—along with illegal trapper Bernard Arseneau and priest Felician Abadie—sets out on a ten-year journey to the French-Spanish colony of Louisiana to seek her long-lost love. Evangeline’s epic quest to find Gabriel brings her and her companions across North America’s colonial wilderness, through the French and Indian War, and into New Orleans’ rebellion against Spanish rule. The influence of Evangeline can still be found at every stop of her epic journey.
“Majestic and stately as Conrad Richter’s Awakening Land Trilogy, Evangeline is a big book from a big mind.” —Katharine Weber, author of Still Life with Monkey
“A historical romance written in unadorned prose, Farmer’s Evangeline will satisfy readers who allow themselves to swoon, who enjoy sentimentality . . . A kind of fiction that’s underrepresented in U.S. bookstores.”—ForeWord Magazine
“Farmer does a yeoman’s job in setting the poem in prose . . . It’s a grand tale told by a wonderful storyteller.” —Owen Sound Sun Times
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781590205587 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ABRAMS, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 380 |
| Sales rank: | 480,361 |
| File size: | 956 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Gaspereau River 1755
* * *
From the mountain's top the rainy mists of the morning roll away, and afar we behold the landscape below us.
THE TORCH FLASHED ACROSS THE RIVER'S SURFACE AND drew the dark-eyed, shimmering prey, their instinctive bodies twisting and darting toward the luminous deceit. Evangeline leaned toward Gabriel, her free hand outstretched for balance, the pine pitch hissing as it cast its halo around his feet. They balanced on posts, surplus from a past season's dike building that had been sunk beyond the barriers so fisherman could tie off their small boats. After several years, the moorings jutted at rude angles from the soft bottom, but they had chosen these tenuous perches to show off for each other. If they did misstep, the water was only knee-deep.
Gabriel thrust, and withdrew the spear. The scales of the small salmon glistened like metal as he freed it from the iron point and flipped it to shore where it lay, silently gasping on the dark riverbank. After he added several more, Evangeline let their torch slip into the Gaspereau, and they sat beside their catch, talking quietly and watching the few other torches flicker until the sky softened into dawn.
Home for Evangeline was the top of the hill, but Gabriel had a long walk back to the Habitant, where he might still arrive in time for the day's work at his father's smithy. There would be no sleep for Gabriel, but she could expect a few restful hours.
Grand Pre woke early and noisily on summer mornings. The spear fishermen trudging home passed farmers headed toward the water to check on stock left overnight to graze. The cattle were unmarked, but each man knew his own and his neighbor's. Children hurried through milking and wood gathering to free themselves to spend the afternoon on a river. A skiff was beached on the gray mudflat of the Minas, landlocked by the ebb tide. A man sat in the boat, sewing a linen patch onto the canvas sail. As he worked, the man looked out to sea, worried over what he might find there.
"Evangeline," Benedict said that morning. "When did you get in last night?"
Benedict had been leaning against the doorjamb, prodding her awake with his cane, but he pretended innocence when she sat up.
"Just a little before dawn. "
"My neglect has reached new limits. Your mother and I were never allowed to stay out so late before we married."
"Well, I brought home fish for lunch."
"That's my girl. How is Gabriel?"
"He's doing wonderfully."
"I'm sure that he is. Let's get a taste of your cooking before you start wasting it on someone else."
Evangeline had waited half the summer to model her wedding dress for Sofia, but, tired as she was that afternoon, quickly lost patience with the older woman's careful measurements and was anxious to be finished by the time the heavy silk settled about her shoulders.
"Your mother's dress deserves a bit more respect than that," Sofia protested. "I certainly didn't have anything so fine to wear when I married Jacques."
Evangeline smoothed the long stomacher and took a deep breath before explaining herself.
"I was fishing with Gabriel last night." And, in response to Sofia's disapproving look, "I only held the torch, he did the spearing."
"They'll just be the grilse now."
"Yes, they were. But it was fine. I hadn't seen him for days."
"You're going to see plenty of him soon enough."
"Not for months yet, Sofia. And I'm not sure that I ever love Gabriel more than when I see his face by torchlight."
The older woman's brows wrinkled. "You'd be better served following that branch to the trunk."
Evangeline considered Basil, Gabriel's father, and the little hairs that grew off the tops of his ears, and bushed out of his meaty nostrils. She realized that she did not consider Basil Lajeunesse to be an attractive man.
"That doesn't matter," Evangeline said, gaining force as she continued. "When Gabriel gets old and fat and hairy, we'll just douse the lights."
Sofia grunted quietly as she eyed the intricate knotwork around the neckline. "It's a bit more skin than is currently the fashion," she said with a disapproving glance at Evangeline's bare shoulders.
"I'll be lucky if I can just keep it on," Evangeline said.
"Yes, I imagine a full-figured woman once looked good in this dress." Sofia fingered the stitches running the length of the embroidered corset. "These could have been for your mother. I met her when she was wearing this dress," Sofia said familiarly. "You've heard me say it before, but you're fortunate to have taken after her so."
"You leave my poor father alone," Evangeline retorted cheerfully, but Sofia continued her fiddling in silence.
"Do you know why wedding dresses are white?" Evangeline asked.
"Because the dresses would be passed down and the dyes would have faded over time," Sofia guessed.
Evangeline shook her head. "White was the color of joy in ancient Greece. And then it was the color associated with Hymen, the Roman goddess of fertility and marriage."
"Is that so," Sofia said distractedly, as she bunched the right sleeve around a blue ribbon.
Evangeline looked at the remaining mess of silken ribbons, blue for purity and green for her youth, which lay in the light dust atop a carefully made bed.
Youth had deserted the Melansons' house years before, when Sofia and Jacques sent their five children to stay with relations on Ile Saint Jean. Evangeline was only ten when they left, and remembered little of them besides one of the girls cutting her hair. The parents remained behind in Grand Pre, minding their store as their children raised families in the north. Evangeline realized guiltily that Sofia had not had the pleasure of altering her daughters' dresses for their weddings, and she turned to her friend.
The movement surprised Sofia, and she pricked Evangeline in the side with a needle.
"It's supposed to be good luck for a bride's dress to be torn by her seamstress," the older woman said with a smile.
Evangeline smiled back as she took the girdle off the bed and tied it around her waist. It was bound with the same blue ribbons Sofia knotted at her sleeves. Her mother might have made those knots, Evangeline reflected, and she left them tied as they were.
Evangeline reached next for the delicately embroidered pockets, and heard a crackling as she tied them at her waist. She withdrew a letter from the righthand pocket. Her name was on the outside of the envelope. A letter from her mother, fifteen years dead.
There were three other letters penned by her mother that Benedict had given her when she turned twelve, when she was old enough not to be confused that her mother wouldn't be following after. She had them memorized, and now looked more at the penmanship than the words.
"I thought I had gotten them all already," Evangeline said out loud, but without explanation as she sat heavily on the bed next to the ribbons.
"It's from your mother?" Sofia guessed.
Evangeline nodded wordlessly.
Sofia looked around the quiet bedroom as though she had forgotten something, and then moved to the door. "I'll set out the milk for supper, dear, while you read."
Evangeline had removed the letter from the unsealed envelope before Sofia was out of the room.
Evangeline,
I won't see you wear this dress. Rest assured that my sorrow is relieved by the thought of you swimming in our river, walking the headlands. The apple shoots outside our window must be bearing fruit. I wish only that I could have seen the boy who merits your stepping into my old gown. But, enough.
Perhaps the finest aspect of being born in Acadia is that you are free to choose your husband, and I struggle to conjure a more momentous occasion, an imagining made more difficult with you still writhing in your crib. And do not mistake, though I did not choose your father, his strengths far outstrip his weaknesses. And if his memory (which in our time was fastidious of its details) has not failed him, I imagine he has imparted some of my family's history, while no doubt bending your ear as regards his piratical antecedents. Even so, I hope that you will bear through my telling, for it concerns the dress you are soon to wear, and might even provide you with some inspiration as your new life commences.
This dress was made for Francoise-Marie Jacquelin, when she married your forebear, Charles de La Tour. And though we don't share her blood, as Madame La Tour was childless, she is deserving of our respect (beyond her rich fashion), as she was a brave woman who fought at her husband's side for possession of what would become our Acadia. I should say that she did more than just fight at his side, as she was in command of their garrison when it surrendered to the La Tours' rival, Charles de Menou d'Aulnay, who betrayed the terms of the surrender and executed the defenders. Being of noble blood, Madame La Tour was spared from hanging, but she was poisoned weeks later while still in D'Aulnay's dungeon.
Vengeance found D'Aulnay a few years later, when he drowned mysteriously in the Dauphin. His widow, Jeanne Motin de Reux, was evicted from Port Royal by Emmanuel Le Borgne, a merchant her husband died in the debt of, and, looking for a way to reclaim her lands, she and La Tour (who had ceded his claims after his wife's death) arranged a marriage that must have seemed unlikely, as, scant years earlier, Jeanne's husband had killed Charles' wife while their families were at war. Charles must have valued the union, because he allowed dispossessed Jeanne to wear his widow's dress. They had been married less than a year when Acadia was occupied by English colonials who, by virtue of friendships he had made in Boston while fighting D'Aulnay, allowed the newly married couple to remain in Acadia, where they had five children.
The dress then passed to Jeanne's daughter, Marie, who wore it in another political marriage to a former enemy, Le Borgne's son, Emmanuel, who was considerably older than your great- grandmother when they were married in 1674. So clearly I remember seeing that date scrawled on the cross atop my grandmother's grave. My grandmother passed the dress down to her eldest, also named Marie, when mother arranged her daughter's marriage to Alexandre Gautier. The marriage was not for political reasons, but for livres, as Emmanuel had spent his declining years drinking and ignoring his family's condition. Thankfully your father ignored the bottle instead of me. The Gautiers owned the mills and farms of Belisle (shrewdly erected at the Dauphin's head of navigation), and even though my father was the fifth son, he had lived his life as a wealthy man. He was nearly two decades older than my mother, who was surpassing beautiful.
Despite the circumstantial nature of their marriage, my mother spoke kindly of my father, though I do not remember him well, for he was old when I was born in 1696, and died when I was five. It is with such painful awareness that I inscribe these words, certain in the knowledge that God will also gather me to His embrace before I have had a proper chance to gather you in mine.
But, rather than mistake the everlasting joy that you have brought into my life, I kiss your cheek, run my fingers through your fine hair, and find the strength to finish my story. It was while growing up in the sawing and heaving at Belisle that I met your father (who knows his family's history better than I, suffice to say that it is a wandering tale). Benedict's precociousness had already won him captaincy of one of our schooners that made frequent trips to the fortress at Louisbourg, a common enough occurrence around Belisle, but an illegal one. Despite our difference in age and background, he asked for my hand when I was only fourteen. My mother refused him, but he remained in my family's employ, and rose in its esteem, until Queen Anne's War finally ended. I remember the last years of the war vividly, as we briefly sheltered distant relations, the Duviviers, who commanded a rabble fighting to wrest Port Royal back from the English. There were hundreds of men encamped around our home for nearly a month, eating our food and drinking all night. It was little surprise to me when they proved unable to take the fort, and returned to Louisbourg in defeat.
The redcoats paid us special attention after that, making frequent inspections of the estate, in which they never seized a person, but always livestock, or a shipload of timber from upriver. The English waited only until the end of the war to take possession of our home, leaving my family to join its kin in France, Quebec, and Louisbourg. As my mother (who was still a young woman thinking of other husbands) prepared for her future in Paris, your father saw his opportunity, and again asked for my hand. Though I was less than excited about the arrangement, as I also wished to see Paris and know something of the world, my mother agreed and Benedict and I moved here to the Minas. My dowry was the lands around you, and together we built the home that your father will raise you in alone.
And I wore the dress, which held the letter you now hold in your grown hands, when I married your father in rustic Saint Charles, here in the Minas. And I hope that you find the same strength in the fine white silk that I did. It is our inheritance, and our reminder, of the world that bludgeons itself, ignorant of the peace your father and I have found here in Grand Pre, where tax collectors, and not soldiers, are the only mark of empire (and may it ever be so).
I have already mentioned the trading by which your father earned his bread, and find no shame in it. More than from any other source, we come from men and women of commerce. Unlike the farmers that have surrounded our family for more than a century, we have concerned ourselves with fur.
Remember then, that Acadia runs deeper in your blood than it does in the farms that even now seem so ancient compared to your cheerful innocence. And though you should never forget that Jeanne's is the blood in your veins, remember also the woman whose dress you wear. She was a particular heroine of mine during the many years when I doubted that I would know the pleasure of your birth. Take her courage as example, and take our story as proof that you will need it.
Your loving mother,
Emmeline
Evangeline considered whether this letter had been written before or after the ones she had already received, which held more tender remarks and comments on her infant growth. The letter with the dress must have preceded the others, Evangeline surmised, in the days after her birth when her mother had planned ahead against a distant wedding that she would not live to see. More yearning emotion cracked through the regal ease of those already read letters, as her mother sickened. The cause had remained mysterious, a wasting illness that seemed rooted in mythical times, when deaths were fated rather than accidental.
The letter certainly offered encouragement and blessing to marry with her heart, though, arriving as she stood already in the wedding dress, the wisdom might have been late received if Benedict had not staunchly echoed the same sentiment throughout her life.
"Marry for love," her father had said recently, "and if you're lucky, you'll be as fortunate as I was, and find a partner who is your better. There isn't a thing in the world that I could do as well as your mother."
"You've always told me that survival is a skill," Evangeline demurred.
Her father had smiled at that. "A meager one it seems. You're pleasant enough, child, but many is the time I've thought that life without her isn't worth keeping."
Fifty-three when she was born, her father had never mentioned finding another woman, or at least, never considered it openly. "I remember her too well," he might say if the subject came up among strangers. "I'm just waiting for my daughter to get old enough so that I can marry one of her friends," was his oft-repeated joke among the men who were regular guests at the Bellefontaine house.
"What friends?" Evangeline might return, if there weren't many visitors.
Her father would be dead before the children she would bear Gabriel were old enough to remember him. It was not so galling with Emmeline. All Evangeline had to know her mother by were her letters, isolated pleasures she would pass along to her children to glean what they could of this corner of their family. But Benedict would be but a shadow flitting across the periphery of her children's memories. When her firstborn daughter changed her family name from Lajeunesse, she would receive this dress and letter from Emmeline just as Evangeline had. And while the La Tours and Gautiers would descend through her offspring, sadly and irrevocably the name of Bellefontaine would be smothered in her.
The letters and the dress were her mother's legacy. She would be Benedict's.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Evangeline"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Ben Farmer.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Gaspereau River 1755,
New France 1755,
Gaspereau River 1755,
Grand Pre 1755,
Habitant River 1755,
Grand Pre 1755,
Grand Pre 1755,
South Carolina 1756,
Baltimore 1758,
New Orleans 1760,
Louisiana 1763,
Baltimore 1766,
Maryland 1767,
Louisiana 1766,
Maryland 1768,
Louisiana 1768,
Ohio River 1768,
Mississippi River 1768,
Louisiana 1769,