by Carla Kelly
“Pierre, have you been here all this time? Oh, I do wish you understood English.”
He opened his eyes to see Pierre standing close to the bed, giving him a worried look that made Jean sigh inside. I don’t want to think of war at all, he told himself, then felt ashamed because after all, Pierre was his powder monkey and he was Capitain Hubert to the little fellow.
“He is so quiet that I sometimes forget where he is,” Meri said.
You learn that in a prison hulk, Jean thought.
She sat Pierre down and wiped off her fork. “Here you are, Pierre. I can eat later. I know I can trust you two, so I will go below. I wish you understood me.”
“You may eat the kind lady’s food,” Jean said in French.
Silent as usual, Pierre ate with no hesitation.
“Wait, please,” Jean said as Madame Six picked up her son and turned to the door. “Let me tell you why I speak English.”
“Does it matter, really?” she asked.
It did matter all of a sudden. He, Jean Hubert – adept liar, scrounger, meddler, because life in a prison hulk had made him that way – wanted to tell as much truth as he could.
“Please.”
“Very well.” Up went the baby to her shoulder as she gave Jean her full attention.
“My mother died when I was about Pierre’s age,” he began. “Papa owned a hotel in Cherbourg near the beach.” He smiled at the memory; couldn’t help himself. “Papa had visions of grandeur. Much of our trade was English visitors – this was before the Reign of Terror, of course – and he knew we should all learn English.” He shuddered elaborately. “He found a perfect dragon of an Englishwoman and she became our teacher.”
“A dragon?”
“Poor Papa.” Jean described the terror they all felt when Papa married Millicent Nash, and how she became a tyrant, forcing English down their throats, and turning preening, grandiose Papa into a meek little fellow who let her run the hotel as she wanted.
“I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Six said, and he knew she meant it. “But…but… at least you learned English.” It was her turn to chuckle. “Able says my destiny is to be forever trying to make the best of a wretched situation.”
“That is hardly a crime.”
“No, it isn’t. He teases me a lot…” She stopped and her face reddened.
“Come now, Mrs. Six, how bad can this be?” Why did he want to know more about the Sixes?
Again, that little laugh. “He teases me, then he turns around, bends over and tells me I can thrash him, if I feel like it.”
They laughed together, which made Pierre look up in surprise, startled at a pleasantry.
“I envy you your good fortune, madame,” Jean said simply, then steered the conversation back to its logical course. “Of my siblings, I alone had the epiphany, in the midst of our linguistic misery, that if I paid attention, I would learn a valuable skill. So it has proved. Anyway, it has landed me here, because I speak English and taught art, in English, to a scheming child.”
“I had no idea that the hulk’s officers were allowed to keep their families on board.”
“Some do, some don’t.” He had said enough about Ianthe Faulke. Just thinking of her reminded him too forcefully of Captain Faulke. “That is my story.”
“What happened to your father? Your brothers and sisters?”
Should he tell her? Why not? Nothing was normal about his situation. “Two brothers, one sister. Papa dropped dead one day and Madame Millicent turned us out. My older sister was already married. She died on the guillotine. My older brothers? One is dead, the other in Canada somewhere. That is what war can do. I ran away to sea.”
“So did my husband,” Madame Six said. “One too many beatings in the workhouse.”
He stared at her in amazement. “Your…your husband was a workhouse child, too?”
She nodded. “The sixth illegitimate baby born in 1775, and Durable because he was found naked in February in Scotland. And that is his story. Perhaps we have both told enough truth for now, Monsieur Hubert.”
She looked at Pierre and gestured for him to pick up his dishes. “Would you please tell him to follow me with his dishes? He has kitchen duties.”
“I can and will. Would you allow Pierre to come back up here for a brief time? I was his captain on the Calais and I would like to know how he is faring.”
“Certainly. I have no fear leaving you by yourself, sir,” she said. “You are a gentleman and you have given your parole, or will, as soon as Sir B arranges it.”
He had no intention of leaping out a window and escaping, when she closed the door. “You have it, Madame Six.”
After she left, he considered the matter. Even if he had wanted to escape, she had declared him a gentleman and bound him to St. Brendan’s, wherever that would lead. In this time of revolution, world war, and stomach-churning turmoil, there were worse fates than a parole to teach at a boys’ school.
He dozed while waiting for Pierre to return, content to enjoy the half-sleep that comes with a full belly and no one after him for punishment or worse. The hulks in the harbor seemed worlds away.
“Capitain? Capitain?”
Pierre stood beside his bed. Taking a page from Madame Six’s book, Jean sat up, held open his arms, and allowed Pierre to tumble into his embrace. The lad wasn’t more than ten, and this was no time for naval discipline.
“Pierre, what happened to you?” he asked, when the boy wiped his eyes on the sheet. “We learned that the keg escape had been successful, but heard nothing more. Tell me.”
He allowed the child a moment to compose himself, but no reminder of duty could wipe away the fright in the child’s eyes.
“It went as we had planned, Capitain Hubert,” he said. “Gunner Remillard crawled out of his keg and pried the lid from mine. He helped me out and…and he ran away!”
Jean saw all the fright of a child finding himself in a strange place where no one spoke his language and everyone was an enemy. “Just left you there? Abandoned you?”
Pierre nodded as his tears fell. “I didn’t know what to do or where to go, sir, and I was hungry.”
“Go on. You’re here, so your fortunes must have changed.”
“They did after a while, sir. It was raining, so I found a building with a side door unlocked. I hid under the stairs. There was a pile of rags.”
Who runs off and leaves a child like that? Jean asked himself. I thought Remillard was a better man.
“And then?” he asked gently.
“I heard workers in the morning. I went upstairs and everywhere there was sawdust and boards. I found a broom and started sweeping.” He said the last with quiet pride.
“I’d say you were resourceful,” Jean said.
“I was only doing what you used to tell us on the Calais, sir.”
“Moi?”
“Certainement, capitain.” Pierre chuckled, the bleakness of his expression gone. “Don’t you recall how you stalked the deck, ordering us to find something to do when we had finished our work? ‘There is always something else,’ you said.”
“So I did,” Jean replied, surprised how easily his days commanding a ship of France had retreated from his mind. Or maybe it wasn’t a surprise. Looming over every victory, large or small, was the shame of capture. Who wants to remember that?
The little boy seated on his bed didn’t need to know how beaten down his captain was. Better to preserve some dignity, after all. “They let you stay? No one asked any questions?”
“No. They really did need someone to sweep,” he said with the kind of shrug no Englishman could imitate. “They shared their lunches with me, and gave me a blanket. I don’t think they knew or maybe cared where I slept, as long as I was there in the morning to sweep. I met John Mark, and then Madame and Professeu
r Six came once, I suppose to find out what they do there.”
“Is it a factory?”
“Oui!” Pierre exclaimed, his eyes bright. “They are getting ready to make metal block pulleys. You know, we have wooden ones.”
Jean knew block pulleys. What ship moved across the waters without them?
“It’s a wonderful place! Soon they will turn out enough pulleys for every ship in England.” Pierre laughed. “Maybe ours, too, if we could steal the building.”
“And ship it home,” Jean joked in turn.
Pierre’s face fell. “Should I be sweeping in a building making something that will cause hardship for la belle France?”
“We won’t worry about it now,” Jean told him. He indicated the glass and empty desert plate. “Return these to the kitchen. And now you sleep here?”
“Oui, since I ran with John Mark when the dock men were drowning those men from the Captivity,” Pierre said. He shivered. From his expression, he had shouldered responsibilities too large for a child’s shoulders. “I sleep below, off the kitchen. In the mornings, I help Betsy with whatever she needs, then I walk with John Mark after luncheon to the block factory. Smitty escorts us, because Maman…pardonnez moi…Madame Six… wants us to be safe.” He thought a moment, perhaps grappling with an idea bigger than he had considered before. “Is that what mothers do?”
“It is, lad,” Jean said, remembering the sweetness of his own mother.
After Pierre left, Jean lay back again, exhausted. He had nearly drifted off when Pierre returned. “I thought you were below for the night,” he said.
O dieu, what a look in your eyes, Jean thought in sudden alarm. “What is the matter?”
His expression apprehensive, where it had been cheerful enough when he left, Pierre handed Jean a small piece of paper, scarcely larger than a postage stamp, but creased and folded many times.
Silently, Jean unfolded the tiny paper, squinting close to read the words. Watch for a citizen who will make the wharf blossom with orange flowers, he read. It made no sense. Maybe he was tired. “I don’t understand.” He held it out to Pierre, who backed away. “Where did you get this?”
Biting his lip, Pierre rubbed his upper arm. He took a deep breath, came close again and whispered, as though the room was full of eavesdroppers. “The valet of the crippled man.”
“Yes, I think Master Six said he was French. Gervaise?”
“Oui,” Pierre said, his voice even softer. “He grabbed me by the arm in the hall, made me take the paper, and ordered me to ask you, ‘Are you the one?’” He rubbed his arm. “He wasn’t very nice.”
“The one what?”
They looked at each other and shrugged. Pierre spoke first. “Sir, I am going to sit on the stairs until I am certain that Gervaise has left with the one-legged man.”
“Do that.”
He read the tiny note again after Pierre let himself out of the room. Orange blossoms? A wharf? It made no sense.
Jean pulled the coverlets to his neck and stared at the ceiling. You are going to sign the parole, teach at this school and sit out the war, he reminded his brain.
Blast and damn, why did other side of his brain, the uncomfortable side, warn him that he might be in the middle of something bigger than he intended? I should have left that pile of dead men alone, he thought, and swallowed the note.
— Chapter Twenty-seven —
If Grace Croker was happy, everyone at St. Brendan’s was happy, or so Able had quickly divined last year when she began her tenure as an unpaid instructor at St. Brendan’s. Now she was paid, thanks to the generosity of Trinity House, and she seemed to find a colleague in the French prisoner.
True, the man had signed a parole. True also, he had some skills as a teacher. True again, once he had food and better clothing, he was a handsome fellow, if thin. Able would not have thought Grace Croker, self-admitted spinster, to be susceptible to a handsome face. She said she was thirty-five, after all.
He had broached the matter to his wise wife a week later, as they were preparing for bed. She plopped down on the bed and stared at him. “Durable Six, why would you ever think that because a woman is thirty-five that she doesn’t admire a handsome man?”
“I don’t know,” he had to admit. “She has told me several times she is a confirmed spinster.”
Meri patted the bed and he sat down. To his surprise and delight, she turned his face toward her with both hands, put her lips close to his, and said, “My love, just because a woman says something like that, don’t think for a minute she means it.”
It is so easy to kiss you, he thought as he did precisely that. All the ideas scrambling about in his head slid away as he pulled her down with him and had his way. Or maybe it was her way. He neither knew nor cared.
After a massively pleasant interlude, he helped her hunt for her disappearing nightgown, then continued his line of thought as she put it on and cuddled close. “You have also told me that our Grace Croker is in love with Sir B.”
His wife kindly spelled out the difference between admiring a handsome face, and feeling something special for the man she loved. He took the natural step.
“Are you admitting that you don’t mind ogling a handsome bloke?”
Meri made herself comfortable. “Certainly,” she said, with no embarrassment. “Don’t tell me you’ve never admired a pretty face and well-turned ankle besides mine?”
In his usual split second recall, he considered other women he had bedded in earlier years, and shook his head. None of them held a candle to Meridee Six. And since their wedding? No one looked as good to him as his wife, not even a fleeting glimpse.
“At the risk of having you call me a great prevaricator, no. Should I be embarrassed?” he asked her.
His wife rose up on her elbow. “Able, you’re the rarest man in the world,” she said softly.
“You already knew that,” he replied, touched. Any other woman would have run screaming into the night at his weirdness. Meri had embraced it.
The next day, Able added that thought about his wife to the many in his brain as he crossed the street with the usual little lodgers and Jean Hubert, who looked particularly natty in his washed and pressed shirt and trousers. The French did have a certain flair with clothing, Able had to admit.
After their initial wariness, and after Able and Headmaster Croker had explained the nature of a parole, St. Brendan’s students took to Jean Hubert’s casual approach to education. To an older boy’s belligerent comment, “Why do we need to know how to draw anyway?” Jean had a ready answer.
“I asked him, ‘Suppose you, as first mate, are sending a boat of marines to take a seaport?’” he told Grace and Able in the few minutes they carved out during lunch each day when they sat together. “’If you can draw some terrain and buildings, does this improve their chances?’ He seemed to think it might, and we continued,” Jean said, and returned to his sandwich. “I like this teaching.”
Nothing seemed to disturb him, but then, Able reasoned, how could anything greatly perturb a man who had suffered incarceration on a prison hulk, or spent the better part of a day hiding under dead bodies?
Smitty began escorting John Mark to the block pulley factory, with Pierre the little ghost tagging along to continue his sweeping. The lad hurried from class at the end of each day to escort them home. He did it with no complaint, and Able relaxed, knowing he could depend on the boy who looked villainous, but who, Able was coming to realize, had a heart of oak.
Able asked Smitty to be alert for shady characters, which made Smitty smile. “Master, pardon me, but you and I know that everyone on the Portsmouth docks looks shady.”
Able couldn’t help laughing. “Well, then, extra shady.” He took a second to ruffle through the files in his mind. “Consider this: John Mark told me that Mrs. Six took her embroi
dery scissors to her attacker’s face. Time may pass, but it will leave a scar.”
“Aye, sir. I will try to find the shadiest one of all.”
After dinner at the end of the week, Smitty took Able aside to show him the roster he had drawn up of lads to stand the watch behind St. Brendan’s, along the sea wall. “Sir, perhaps two younger lads can take the First Watch, and two upperclassmen the Middle Watch, which requires more discipline to stay awake. What should I do about the Morning Watch?”
“That’s a puzzle. How can lads make breakfast and early class, if they’re standing that morning watch?” Able looked at the paper, neatly organized into columns. “Well done, Smitty.”
“Monsieur Hubert helped me with this part last night before lights out,” Smitty said. He smiled one of his rare smiles and pointed to the leaping dolphins at the top of the roster. “He drew this one and I drew the others.”
“Those Frenchies have a certain élan we will never possess,” Able said in grudging approval. “I see your difficulty with the Morning Watch. I’ll think about it.” He tapped the paper. “Good work, Smitty. I’m impressed.”
“No, you can’t praise the lads too much,” he told his wife that afternoon. “I complimented Smitty and he practically wiggled like a puppy. Smitty. My thug.”
“Stop calling him that,” she said. “He’s a dear boy.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Smitty solved the problem of that early-morning watch. On Saturday when Able and that week’s particular yacht crew returned to St. Brendan’s, Meridee met him at the door, and pulled him to the kitchen.
“Able, Smitty has the perfect early morning watch!” She handed him a biscuit topped with crunchy things, which told him where she had been. Ezekiel Bartleby always insisted that she drop by the bakery on Saturdays for leftovers, even though all parties concerned knew they weren’t left over from the week, but were newly baked. It was everyone’s little fiction.