Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner Read Free Book Online

them homesick in their very own kitchen.
    Uncle Jonas’s leaving touched off a devastating wave of emigration among the clan. Within a decade, all the Doucets had vanished from Tête-à-la-Baleine. The elders were dead, the young ones had gone away, and soonall that remained were ghosts, old rumours and a wobbly house on the shore with a one-eyed grandfather inside it.
    Joyce was thus the last of the Doucets in the village. A true descendant of her forebears, she had developed a solitary personality that lent her an air of precocious and troubling maturity. She always seemed distracted, immersed in her thoughts.
    What’s more, she suffered from claustrophobia, a natural condition, no doubt, for someone born into a family that was scattered far and wide across North America. She suffocated in tight spaces—the kitchen, the school, the village, her father’s family—and nothing brought her more relief than to lose herself in her Grandfather Lyzandre’s pirate stories, his bitter tea, and the shaky house where she would once again become the great-great-granddaughter of Herménégilde Doucette. Each night she would demand a story about a different pirate. There in that smoky kitchen, all the Doucets of the seven seas filed past, along with the likes of Samuel Bellamy, Edward Teach, Francis Drake, François L’Ollonais, Benjamin Hornigold, Stede Bonnet and William Kidd.
    Joyce wanted to believe these buccaneers had once haunted the environs of Tête-à-la-Baleine, but Grandfather Lyzandre quickly set her straight: these migratory birds preferred the tropical climes. Indeed, most of them had taken up residence under the sun, in the mythical haven of Providence Island.
    Joyce was perplexed by this place name; she spent every summer on Providence Island and had never noticed anything like a pirate’s haven, nothing but old shingled houses peopled with noisy uncles and cousins.
    Lyzandre Doucet explained that there was another island called Providence, located to the north of Hispaniola Island, in the Caribbean. Actually, it was situated in the middle of the Bahamas, but when it came to accuracy one could not ask too much of Grandfather Lyzandre, who had patched together his erudition from old almanacs and commercial calendars.
    Be that as it may, the pirates had turned this island into an impregnable refuge where they feared no one. They occupied a harbour with two openings, easy to defend and too shallow for the hulking navy vessels. No god or master held sway on Providence Island, which from Joyce’s point of view meant no uncles or cousins, and therefore proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that this was an entirely different island.
    Little by little, the ambition of carrying on the family tradition seeped into her mind. It seemed inappropriate to her that the great-great-granddaughter of Herménégilde Doucette should devote her days to gutting cod and doing science homework. She was destined for a pirate’s life, shiver me timbers!
    This brand new vocation was, however, hampered by the lack of a role model; the Doucet family album included not a single freebooting woman, not one nasty,shaft-wielding matriarch whose skirts might have smelled of gunpowder and Jamaican rum. Not even a two-bit piggy-bank thief. Even Grandfather Lyzandre, with all his encyclopedic knowledge, was unable to recall any piratesses. Piracy was strictly a male affair. Joyce saw this as a grave injustice; why couldn’t girls plunder, live dangerously, bury treasure, mock the law and the gallows?
    So there she stayed, prisoner of a family without fame, a village without roads, a gender without options, a time without hope. Standing on the shore of Providence Island, gripping her binoculars, she watched the freighters sail through the channel. Their cargo was no longer the gold and silver of the East Indies, but wheat, crude oil, and endless rolls of paper on their way to New York, where they would serve to print thousands of kilometres of bad