A standalone novel
Saint John, New Brunswick, 1971. Four fifteen-year-olds set out to find what became of Pierre Bennart — a deckhand who walked away from a 1604 expedition carrying a locked case, and was never seen again.
Two stories run side by side, three hundred and sixty-seven years apart, toward the same place.
Finished — seeking a publisherHear the opening · Prologue
The first three minutes of the prologue. Starts at 1.25×.
Nobody here is the clever one who solves it. They are four different ways of being right, and each of them is wrong at least once.
Evidence and the record. She keeps the notebook — and she knows what a plan is worth before anyone tells her.
The material and moral realist. Lumber yard, hockey. He builds the bridge, and is right twice out loud.
Reads rooms, evasions and social danger. A violent home. She is the one who acts.
Separates record from inference, and draws coastlines. Finishing things is not his habit.
The book runs two timelines three hundred and sixty-seven years apart, and brings them to the same place on the same page.
September 1971 – summer 1973
They start with a question nobody in Saint John has asked properly in three centuries, and they are not the only ones asking it. Gerald MacAllister — sixty-five, retired, a genuine scholar — has been on it for twenty years. Five interludes follow him.
Twenty-two chapters, over two school years and the summer between them.
June 1604
Pierre Bennart leaves the expedition carrying something he was not meant to carry, and goes up a river nobody has charted. Three 1604 sections cut into the modern story.
The lower Saint John River, from the harbour up through the Reversing Falls.
The river and the Falls are exactly where the map puts them. The book’s closing note — A Note on What’s True — sets out which parts of the story are not.
The same passage the recording covers. It stops where the first scene does.
Prologue · June 1604
Pierre Bennart sat alone in the dark belly of the Don de Dieu and hated every plank of her.
Rain came down the hatchway in ropes. Above him boots pounded the deck and men bellowed into the wind; down here there was only the groan of wet timber and the sea against the hull. Two months. Two months of rotten biscuit and black water, of hauling rope until his hands split and sleeping where the bilge could reach him — and this was where it had led: a drowned coast at the edge of the world, with a storm trying to finish what the crossing had started.
He had believed every word, once.
Champlain had come down the quay at Honfleur in a good coat, talking about the New World as though he owned it and only needed help carrying it home. Riches for every man who sailed, glory enough to spill over onto deckhands. Pierre had signed that same afternoon, and half the men aboard had signed on the strength of that voice. Two months had shown him what the voice was worth: the great man dined aft and drew his charts, and if a crewman coughed blood or lost a finger to a frozen line, it went into no notebook anywhere. To Samuel de Champlain, a crew was cargo that loaded itself.
His mother had believed the promises too. That was the blade of it. She had pressed her locket into his hand on that same quay — small, gold, older than she was — and told him to come home rich or come home anyway. He crossed the estuary to Le Havre the next morning, where the ships lay. A thousand leagues later, the locket was all of it he had left.
He fastened it around his neck and thought about the case.
He'd watched it come aboard that last morning at Le Havre — a royal messenger in the King's colours, an escort with pikes, a locked case passed into Champlain's own hands with nothing said above a murmur. It had gone straight to the great cabin and stayed there, spoken of only in the careful voice of officers who knew better than to ask.
A man didn't guard an empty box like that.
Gold, maybe. Papers worth more than gold. It hardly mattered. Whatever the King had trusted to Champlain, a man who lost it would answer to the King for it. Let the great man sail home and explain the empty space under his bunk. And if it bought a new life for a deckhand far from here, that was only the wage Pierre had been promised in the first place.
The ship pitched and threw him against the bulkhead. Lightning came white through the deck seams; for half a heartbeat the hold stood up around him, barrels straining at their lashings, and then it was black again. On deck someone was screaming orders — Gravé Du Pont, his voice torn ragged by the wind.
Secure the masts! Batten the hatches! Hold fast!
Every hand aboard was up there now, or wanted there. No one was thinking about the great cabin. No one was thinking about Pierre at all.
He got to his feet and pulled his seabag out from under the hammock.
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The Boar’s Head Blade is finished and not published. Before it goes any further I send it to a small number of readers who will tell me the truth about it. Ask below — or just leave an address and I will write when there is news.