A Medieval European woman is stranded on an island on the outer edges of Nova Scotia. How is she to survive?
That’s the premise of this book by Allegra Goodman, although it takes an awful long time to get there.
It starts when our young heroine, Marguerite, is an orphaned young girl. She’s the heir to a fortune, but because she’s so young when her parents die, her guardian gets to “manage” her fortune for her. He promptly wastes her money on his own ventures, only to lose a substantial amount and have to rent out her house to *gasp* merchants!
For a moment it looks like he might have to marry her off to get more money, but when it turns out she’s too young, that plan gets the ax and he ends up taking her with him on his next trip to the new world.
On the way she ends up falling in love with his second in command. They think they’re being sneaky, but her guardian finds out and banishes them, along with Marguerite’s maid, to a deserted island.
From then almost to the rest of the book is a story of survival. She and her lover live as husband and wife, and it’s not long before she gets pregnant.
Her lover gets sick and dies before she can give birth and she becomes so depressed she stops hunting, which means she has nothing to eat, which causes the baby to starve to death.
From then on it’s just her and her maid. She suddenly becomes determined to survive, but her maid cuts her hand and it gets infected, leading to her demise.
About two years after she was first left on the island some fishermen row ashore. She knows it’s a risk to trust them, but she was only left with so much ammo for her gun, and without ammo, she’ll starve, so she takes a chance, telling them she’s a nun to try to protect herself.
It works, but she has to tread carefully when she gets home because her psychotic guardian is favored at court.
This book did such a good job of making the villains easy to hate and the heroes easy to love. I hated her guardian so much that listening to the author’s note gave me a bit of satisfaction to know he was stabbed to death shortly after the story concluded.
I had no idea this book was based on a true story until I listened to the author’s note. Of course, given the fact she’s an unmarried woman in medieval France, the record of her adventures is scarce, giving the author a lot of free range to write whatever struck her fancy.
It turns out the Queen of France at the time really did write about Marguerite’s adventures, but they’re hilariously off base and I appreciate that Goodman managed to work that atrocity into her own narrative.
This is a very well written story of a woman wronged and I’m so glad I read it!