Heaven in His Arms Read Online Free PDF Page A

the bowl of the pipe. "That's treason."
    Andre snorted. "Is this the same man who traded brandy with the Ottawas despite the threat of excommunication?"
    "Treason can get you hanged.'''
    "Only if I'm caught."
    "Think, Andre. For once use your head and not your impulses." Philippe tapped the ash out of his pipe on the side of the desk, already pocked with dents. "Smuggling to the English the amount of furs you intended to collect is unreasonable . . . impossible. And what of the string of trading posts, hmm? If you refuse this edict, that dream of yours will crumble before the foundation has even been set.... By God, where are you going?"
    Andre slammed open the door without a pause. He had to get away from these walls, this roof; he needed a good long suck of brandy. "Find a way out, Philippe. I won't marry."
    No, no no, he thought as he plunged out into the muddy street. He wouldn't marry.
    Never, ever again.
    ***
    Genevieve gripped the weathered railing of the ship's prow as the vessel sailed deeper into the channel of the St. Lawrence River. On the northern coast, a pewter wall of rock heaved up from the lip of the river, its rough surface pitted with gnarled spruce trees and streaked with scrawny tufts of grass that clung along the sheltered clefts of the naked stone. On the southern shore, luxuriant blue-green forests bristled to the very edge of the horizon, seeping the fragrance of pine sap and moist, mulchy earth into the air.
    Genevieve tightened her one-handed grip on her mantle as the chill September wind whistled through her bones. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed a flap of a gray habit—one of the Ursulines who'd accompanied them across the sea. Lurking in the shadows and watching me, no doubt, Genevieve thought, suppressing a shiver. Eager to drag me down to that death-hold with the other girls, stuff noxious ointments in me, and make me cough my life into a dirty linen.
    No, no. Not me. She pressed her belly against the railing—for support, she told herself. The river rocked differently than the open sea, but her legs had not yet learned the movement; that's why her head was swimming so much, that's why nausea heaved in her throat. But she couldn't show one flicker of weakness now, not when the fulfillment of her dreams loomed just beyond the next shimmering curve. Genevieve had suffered the long, hard voyage, not succumbing to the shipboard fever that had claimed a dozen girls' lives and lingered, even now, in the stinking ship's hold below. She'd survived, yes, again she'd survived.
    Hot exhilaration rushed through her blood, ebbing away the wind's chill. A hoarse giggle escaped her raw throat. It was over; she had won. With stiff, shaking fingers, she tore off the headrail that enveloped her head and let a gust send the cloth to the sky. The wind yanked at her loosely bound hair, tugging it free to rise weightless in a cloud around her face, sweeping clear the black clouds of memory.
    Genevieve Lalande did not perch here, watching the cold blue sky of this New World melt into an evening gold. The shadow called Genevieve had died at Le Havre. Now she was Marie Suzanne Duplessis. Now she would have a roof above her head instead of the sky, a house to call her own, a fertile place in which to settle and set down deep roots. A shaky laugh rippled out as no more than a breath. Out, a husband, too, something she'd never imagined in her lifetime. And a family. Someone to love who'd be all her own, children to raise in a civilized place.
    Oui , civilized. Her gaze drank in the whole of the country, the endless forests not yet tamed by plow or sickle, the deep silence broken only by the caws of the cliff swallows wheeling above the ship. She had dreamed it would be like this, but she never allowed herself to believe her fantasies. In Paris, even in Normandy, she had never seen so much uninhabited, uncultivated land.
    A woman could hide in such a place forever.
    Oh, the girls were so full of children's