Gun Ball Hill by Ellen Cooney

“They wanted a pilot to steer them up the Kennebec, stopping at forts along the way. They weren’t novices, but they knew what they were in for if they tried it on their own, without a local. So they came out of the woods and threw a coat on his head.

“This was fourteen years ago. They had lumber, furs, rum, corn, guns, dried cod, taken from Maine and bound for English troops in Canada. The war against the French was looking like it wouldn’t be over soon. The Mowlans held on to the illusion that it did not concern them.”

The opening lines from Gun Ball Hill by Ellen Cooney.

At first, the reader may expect that some sort of commercial transaction is being set up, that the mysterious “they” will be hiring someone to act as their pilot. Then the potential business deal suddenly becomes a kidnapping, a shock that foreshadows a larger shock to come at the end of this tour de force opening chapter.

The reference to the Kennebec sets the location in Maine; the references to Maine, Canada, and the French evoke the French and Indian Wars; the references to supplying the troops suggest that “they” are also British soldiers. And the use of “taken from” – as opposed to “bought in” or “shipped through” – does not bode well for the colonists who these soldiers are supposed to be defending. Nor does their abduction of one of those colonists, apparently named Mowlan.

We are told that the incident referred to occurred fourteen years before the present action of the novel, a span of time that will bring us to a period of even worse relations between colonists and soldiers, the eve of the War of Independence.

But Cooney has not jumped those fourteen years for good: she circles back and gradually gives us the full scene of the kidnapping and its effect on Lavinia Mowlan, the abductee’s wife. Cooney tells it in a calm, detached manner, interspersing background information about the Mowlans and their life together, so that the slow revelation of the event itself is terrible and chilling and suggestive of the long, slow, cold anger that Lavinia is left with.

The husband, William, does return, and Cooney suggests the scars that each bears in the aftermath of the incident, bringing their lives and attitudes up to the period of the novel’s main action, and showing how some colonists, at least, could be brought to the brink of revolution.

It’s a terrific book, and the opening chapter is powerful and tragic.