Still Life

‘Starting in the morning. And getting colder.’

The two men sat silently for a moment or two.

‘That’s Jane’s home.’ Ben pointed to a small stone cottage off to the left. ‘And that place beside it belongs to Peter and Clara.’ Gamache shifted his gaze. Their home was slightly larger than Jane’s and while hers was made of fieldstone, theirs was red brick, in the style known as Loyalist. A simple wooden veranda ran along the front of the home and held two wicker rocking chairs. A front door was flanked by windows and upstairs he could see two more windows, with shutters painted a warm and deep blue. The pretty front garden was planted with roses and perennials and fruit trees. Probably crab apple, thought Gamache. A stand of trees, mostly maple, separated Jane Neal and the Morrows. Though more than the trees separated them now.

‘My place is over there.’ Ben nodded at a charming old white clapboard home, with a veranda below and three dormers above. ‘But I guess that place up there is also mine.’ Ben waved vaguely into the sky. Gamache thought it possible Ben was speaking metaphorically, or even meteorologically. Then his eyes dropped from the puffy clouds and landed on the roof of a home on the side of the hill leading out of Three Pines.

‘Been in my family for generations. My mother lived there.’

Gamache didn’t quite know what to say. He’d seen homes like that before. Many times. They were what he’d heard referred to during his time at Christ’s College, Cambridge as Victorian piles. Quite descriptive, he’d always thought. And Quebec, notably Montreal, boasted its share of piles, built by the Scottish robber barons, of railway, booze and banking money. They were held together with hubris, a short-term binder at best since many of them had long ago been torn down or donated to McGill University, which needed another Victorian monstrosity like it needed the Ebola virus. Ben was looking at the home with great affection.

‘Will you move to the big house?’

‘Oh yes. But it needs some work. Parts of it are straight out of a horror movie. Gruesome.’

Ben remembered telling Clara about the time he and Peter had played war in the basement as kids and had come across the snake’s nest. He’d never seen a person turn green, but Clara had.

‘Is the village named after those trees?’ Gamache looked at the cluster on the green.

‘You don’t know the story? Those pines aren’t the originals, of course. They’re only sixty years old. My mother helped plant them when she was a kid. But there have been pines here since the village was founded, more than two hundred years ago. And always in a group of three. Three Pines.’

‘But why?’ Gamache leaned forward, curious.

‘It’s a code. For the United Empire Loyalists. They settled all the land around here, except for the Abenaki, of course.’ In a sentence, Gamache noticed, Ben had dismissed a thousand years of native habitation. ‘But we’re only a couple of kilometers from the border with the States. When the people loyal to the crown during and after the War of Independence were fleeing, they had no way of knowing when they were safe. So a code was designed. Three pines in a cluster meant the loyalists would be welcome.’

‘Mon Dieu, c’est incroyable. So elegant. So simple,’ said Gamache, genuinely impressed. ‘But why haven’t I heard of this? I’m a student of Quebec history myself, and yet this is completely unknown to me.’

‘Perhaps the English want to keep it a secret, in case we need it again.’ Ben at least had the grace to blush as he said this. Gamache turned in his seat and looked at the tall man, slumping as was his nature, his long sensitive fingers loosely holding the leash of a dog who couldn’t possibly leave him.

‘Are you serious?’

‘The last sovereignty referendum was perilously close, as you know. And the campaign was ugly at times. It’s not always comfortable being a minority in your own country,’ said Ben.

‘I appreciate that, but even if Quebec separates from Canada, surely you wouldn’t feel threatened? You know your rights would be protected.’

‘Do I? Do I have the right to put up a sign in my own language? Or work only in English? No. The language police would get me. The Office de la Langue Française. I’m discriminated against. Even the Supreme Court agrees. I want to speak English, Chief Inspector.’

‘You are speaking English. And so am I. And so are all my officers. Like it or not, Mr Hadley, the English are respected in Quebec.’

‘Not always, and not by everyone.’

‘True. Not everyone respects police officers either. That’s just life ’.