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Diane is the main female character in the novel. She is similar to and a development of Delia Killigrew from The Splendid Spur. Both were convent educated, French speaking and courageous. Both had their lives torn apart by the love of a soldier.
Diane is the heroine of Fort Amity but is not introduced to the reader until Chapter XIII, almost half way through the novel. She had not long left the Ursulines in Quebec and inevitably infatuated by the wounded French trooper, with none of the doubts of Father Launoy. Although infatuated her immediate reaction is entirely practical, to cure his wounds and mend his clothes. Three pages later the reader sees her infatuation turning into love and the man who had loved her, Dominique Guyon, firmly rejected.
It is not until the following chapter, that Diane moves centre stage, changing before the reader’s eyes from an adolescent to a self-possessed young woman. Yet although educated and the daughter of a Seigneur, she feels her potential as a person frustrated by being a woman in a man’s world. Unlike the contented Felicité, who had eight children and is pleased to measure John à Cleeve for a new tunic, Diane rails against her impotence when New France is crumbling.
The reader has to wait until Chapter XV to learn of Diane’s French aristocratic forbears and her Indian blood, her troubled relationship with the entrepreneurial Guyon brothers and of her brother’s moral disintegration at the Intendant Bigot’s Palace in Quebec. The revelation of à Cleeve’s Britishness and the dashing of her romantic dreams, along with the news of the fall of Frontenac, raises Diane to a higher moral level; only for her to disappear from the text until half-way through Chapter XXI.
Some of Q’s female characters – Delia Killigrew from The Splendid Spur, Sophia Runacles from The Blue Pavilions and Ruth Josselin from Lady Good-for-Nothing – suffer a tendency to passivity, reacting to or suffering from events as spectators. This is not totally true of Diane. In Chapter XXI she decides to stand by her father in Fort Amitié, rejects the hand of Dominique Guyon and his offer of escape, and is prepared to die rather than to surrender herself. Diane then goes through the terrifying experience of almost getting killed by the Iroquois Indians, being saved only at the last moment by John à Cleeve. In return she writes to Amherst after the fall of Quebec to exonerate à Cleeve, although making it plain that her desire was for future retirement in a convent (Chapter XXVI).
Diane’s penultimate appearance as a character, other than as a letter writer, comes in Chapter XXV when she and John à Cleeve are in a boat making for Montreal with the British forces. There is a clear implication in the text that she is seeking death, both for herself and for à Cleeve, in a union beyond the grave. This idea is also found in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Dr Richard Quiller Couch, Q’s uncle, would have known Emily’s relations in Penzance. The idea of a union beyond death is not unlikely because it can be found in Q’s short story of 1900, ‘The Mystery of Joseph Laquedem’. In the story, Julia Constantine lifts the body of her lover, Joseph Laquedem, overboard into the waters of the bay so as to be united in death. The story also contains the idea of recurring cycles of time, where history repeats itself until there is deliverance through timeless love. These were not fleeting ideas in Q’s mind because they appear again in his last and unfinished novel Castle Dor. And Castle Dor brings the reader back to the Tristan and Iseult legend which Q alludes to in the preface of the ‘Duchy Edition’ of 1928. In Fort Amity the boat containing Diane and John à Cleeve is careering towards the Roches Fendues and certain death until à Cleeve’s quick reactions prevent catastrophe. Just as à Cleeve saved Diane from death in the flagstaff tower, so he does against her will in the rapids of the St. Lawrence River; but worse, her reaction is a denial of her Catholic faith, union beyond death being a non-Christian idea and one found in certain interpretations of the Tristan material. Suddenly the reader finds him or herself in deep waters indeed.
If Q had wanted to bring the novel to a standard conclusion he would have arranged for the reconciliation of John à Cleeve and Diane des Noel-Tilly at the close of Chapter XXVI, especially if romance was the central theme. The Près-de-Ville scene would then have become irrelevant. However, this does not happen. Diane makes it known in writing that she wishes to retire into seclusion, apparently at the Ursuline convent. This is hardly Tristan and Iseult. Diane’s retirement is a penance for her fall from grace before the Roches Fendues. It was to expiate her own sin, not that of John à Cleeve in his deception at Fort Amity, a sin he had more than expiated in twice saving Diane from death.
We finally meet Diane in Hospitaliere dress outside the temporary mortuary where lies the body of Richard Montgomery. It appears that for 15 years Diane had not been totally secluded but had worked in the service of the suffering and dying. John à Cleeve and Diane meet in St. Louis Street outside of the mortuary door and are reconciled. There are intimations in the Epilogue that John and Diane marry and return to Boisveyrac
(Epilogue II).
This ending stands in marked contrast to the 43 year bleakness of Richard Montgomery’s widow, who watches in empty glory as her husband’s dust in conveyed down the Hudson River to the cenotaph in New York (Epilogue I). The novel ends emphasising the futility of war and violence and the virtue of forgiveness and reconciliation.