Lukas was true to his word. A small cloth-wrapped bundle appeared between the layers of my folded clothing—for now I had two sets kept in a neat stack under my cot that I could interchange or wear together when it turned cold—and I could tell by the sound without opening it that it held paper. I was pleased to find three small sheets, each about eight inches square, and a vial of ink for which I would have to find a stand before I could uncork it and use it. I would also have to find a large feather to make into a quill, but I had seen Pa do it often.
Donatienne watched me wrapping the papers back into the cloth.
I said, “It is a gift.”
“We are not allowed such gifts.” Donatienne turned to the window. “Marie? I feel you are lying to me.”
“If I had stolen it, why would I let you see it now? It was a gift, I tell you.”
“Then who gave it to you?”
“A man I know.”
She clasped her hands on her mouth. “A man?” She walked around in a small circle, almost as in a dance step. “What man? What did he ask in return? If anyone has done anything to you, Marie, you must tell me at once.”
“All he asked in return is that I tell no one of his plans.”
“Plans for what? Escape?”
I could not defend myself without breaking the promise. “I cannot say.”
“Did you know, Marie, that I am sixteen. Next year they will find someone for me to marry. If I am not in good favor, they may not look for a husband for me. They may think working my life away in a factory is good enough.”
“I promised I would not tell. If you guessed, I could say what it was not, and not break my word.”
“Was it a plan to escape?”
“No,” I said firmly.
“Did he want to kiss you?”
“No. He wants to, to, change to Catholic.”
“He made you promise not to tell that?”
“He was afraid I would tell his family. He wants to become a priest. He may go to divinity school in Paris. He told me.”
“Are you making this up, again?” When I shook my head, Donatienne smiled and smoothed her dress.
“I should not have told you. I am ashamed I did not keep my promise to him. Do you think if a man wants to be a priest, he cannot love a girl?”
“Oh, they cannot marry, but I think some of them may have loved a girl. Maybe they could not win her heart, and so committed themselves to God instead. It’s not unlike some women do, becoming une bonne soeur. Will you let me watch you write in English?”
“To Lady Talbot, Two Crowns Plantation, Island of Jamaica in Her Majesty’s West Indies.” I pressed the sheets under my waistband and in the dark of night when I was sure everyone was asleep, I climbed out the window by Donatienne’s bed and headed straight for the rectory under a half-moon. I held my missal to the moon and whispered, “Get these to my mother, please, sir. I know God is not the man in the moon, but I hope you watch your servant here with that great eye, and take pity upon her.” I recited Salve Regina and Memorare under my breath. I stopped at the moonlit wall of the rectory. The black box awaited my letters. I kissed the paper before raising the lid and laying it inside. Other sheets of paper were in it, all folded and sealed. I stirred mine amongst them, making sure it was not on top. I tucked the vial of ink into the bayberry.
The moon was as high as it would get here, which was not overhead. The evening had a chill and I shivered. The path I had taken was shadowed by buildings and trees. I could go in the window opposite the one I left, and have more moonlight. I was not so much afraid of being seen, as I was afraid—now that my errand was done—of coming upon a bear. Granted, there were two high walls about the place. No bear had ever been inside them, but I felt overcome with guilt, certain of punishment well deserved, and a bear was a memory as stout as a Saracen pirate.
I passed the older girls’ dortoir. White chrysanthemums ringed the well, glowing like a fairy folk’s lantern. Two yew trees stood between me and my room. The shadows beneath them were blacker than the ink staining my fingers. I felt a prickling in my skin and the hair on my arms rose. Something moved in the blackness there. It might be duppies, I told myself. I took one more step and I was sure something was there. I sniffed. Just as I thought to cry out “Bear!” and run away, a human voice groaned. Another human voice laughed, a light, feminine laugh.
I traipsed around the first yew so the people there would be lighted with my back to the moon. A man sighed. People murmured. Scarcely had I reached my new vantage place than I saw two people, lying one upon the other, their skins bare from shoulder to ankle. They both wore shoes. They both had clothing wrapped at their necks, pushed up. In a tangle of legs and arms, they moved as snakes, churning like rippling water. If I moved or made a sound, my presence would be known. Was that why I did not move? Rapt with curiosity, tortured with both my lack of knowledge and the sure awareness that this was something I ought not to see, I froze in place. I fought a terrible need to make water. They made soft noises. I hiccupped.
Lukas jerked his face toward me. “Christ!” he said. The other person rose beneath him, a person with long, very red hair, so red that the moon’s wan light painted it the color of blood. Patience.
“Resolute,” she scolded, her tone both stern and quiet, “what do you mean by standing there watching? At least be decent enough to leave us our dignity.”
“Dignité?” I said.
Lukas’s voice said, “Convince her,” and for a moment I heard scuffling and the drawing on of clothing. Patience appeared and Lukas’s footfalls went away from us. She was panting as if she had run to my side. She smelled musky, as if he had sweated, skin to skin, and she wore his scent like a garment.
I said, “What was that you were doing?”
“Love. Only love.”
“Ah. You stunk like that on the ships.”
“This time is different. This time I chose it.”
My insides felt heavy and hot; my hands and feet bitterly cold. “Chose it? And before you did not?” Memories came to me. The thought of what I had seen just now mingled with my confusion of thinking she had been dancing on deck. The words Donatienne had spoken, that desire was the missing ingredient in creating babies. Payment with cake. Cake and Cora’s words about what the cake had cost.
Patey said, “Lukas is young. We are both young.”
“Lukas wants to become a priest. He is going to Paris to become a pope.”
She laughed so that even in the soft moonlight I heard the derision in her voice. “He told me nothing of that. It will not suit him for long.”
“He made me promise to tell no one for the favor of giving me paper and ink with which to write a letter.”
“A letter? To whom did you send a letter?”
“To Ma. So she could come get us.”
Patience reached up her hand to slap my face but as she did I whirled out of her way. “Stop saying that, Resolute. When will you wake up and realize you cannot do that. Ma will not come. Ma is not alive.”
“Do not say that. I hate you.”
“It is the truth.”
“It is not. She is alive.”
“Do you not remember that night? Do you not remember the men who came through the wall?”
“You are so wicked. I wish you were never my sister. You do not want Ma to find us because you have turned into a doxy.”
“It is near midnight, Ressie. Your bed is that way, mine is this. We should both go to them before I beat you for saying that.”
“When I leave you will go and do that again with him.” Words I barely knew flitted through my imagination. Whore. Slut. Doxy. Tart.
She laid her arm around my shoulders and gave me a squeeze. I twisted away from her and brushed her touch from my shoulder. She said, “Not tonight. You’ve rather interrupted the moment. And he’ll be yours to command now, seeing you know a secret.”
“Are you a doxy?”
She whirled me to face her, hands clenching my shoulde
rs, and before I could move away again, she had slapped my face. “You best keep your judgment until you have had to tread the road upon which I have walked.”
I felt tears going down my throat, but I did not cry before her. I said, “As you say. Is he the reason we did not leave? You wanted to be here with him to do that wiggling? Will we be leaving at the full moon this month?”
“I might leave with Lukas. I might not take you.”
I shoved her with all my strength, wishing I could pummel her into the dirt. I turned and ran toward the wall of my dormitory. As I reached the closest window, I found the shutter latched from the inside. I went to the next, and Patience caught me and turned me around.
She said, “Please, Ressie, please forgive me. I spoke out of passion and not my love for you. Please, Ressie.” The tears flowing from her eyes rained upon my face as she crushed me to her bosom. I cringed at the smell of her. But how could I not hold Patience? How could I reject her?
“Ho. You, there!” said a voice. It was Sister Agathe in nightgown, holding a lantern high. “You girls, there. What are you about?”
Her sight of us, I imagined later, we two clinging together and weeping, was all the explanation Patience or I had to provide for Sister Agathe. We were sisters and met sometimes just to kiss each other and reassure each of our fidelity, I promised her. Sister Agathe wept sympathetic tears, patted both our shoulders, sent Patey home, and hugged me before leading me with the lantern to my bed.
Patience’s handprint—in the morning a crimson stain on my face—was enough to convince Sister Joseph that I had a fever. She left me to bed the whole day. Alone in the dormitory, I wept. “Ma is not dead,” I chanted. I tried to make sense of all the shocking things I had seen mixed with the wrenching fear that Patience would leave me here.
Donatienne brought me broth and bread at noon. “Are you worse?” she asked.
“I do not know,” I said, for I did not. “I am sick unto my soul, friend.”
“I will go to the chapel and pray you a Rosary.”
“A whole Rosary? That is too much. Will you say a Salve Regina right here, so that I may fall asleep hearing it?” I said that, not because the prayers meant much to me; the meaning was in hearing a loving voice say them. I closed my eyes and pretended the voice I heard was Ma. Ma reading me to sleep. Ma singing her old Gaelic poems or her olden charms and prayers. I held Donatienne’s hand and imagined Ma getting my letter, perhaps as soon as next month. Ma was not dead and I might be home by Christ-tide.
CHAPTER 13
November 30, 1730
November came in with All Saints’ Day and went out with gales that lasted a fortnight. We could not have run away had there been a moon, for the winds brought sleet and hail, icing over parts of the fleuve Saint-Laurent as well as the animal troughs on the convent grounds. The wind brought a new plague amongst us, too, that needed no vermin to spread itself among all the children of the convent. La rougeole, the red sickness. We called it measles. I had had it before, but others had not. As I helped tend the many sick children, I realized that I had been away from my home for more than a year and I felt so much more than a single year older.
Baby Ezekiel died. Sickly little James did not. In fact, if he changed at all, once the fever left him, it was that he seemed a little more peaceful than before. Rachael grieved, though she was not ill, for she had had the red sickness as a child. In the weeks before Christmas, she held James and rocked him, even nursed him. Patience spent no time with him at all then. I decided Rachael was not a bad person. I felt pity for her. I began to take her little things as gifts, including my first bit of thread that was fit to weave. I considered it recompense for having stolen her mother’s thread. Only now did I see the value of it and appreciate what labor it took to produce it.
After Christmas rather than Hogmanay we celebrated Mary, Mother of God Day. It was curious to me how that day happened upon the same day as the ancient holy day, but so it fell and I cared not to question it. We had no gifts at all, no games. Just more prayers than normal, more ritual. All our gifts were for the Virgin, who, of course, had no need of them whether she were indeed Queen of Heaven, or simply a woman dead. I felt peevish about being again denied my father’s pleasantries and my mother’s feast.
The days and nights of winter blended into one long, gray funnel of time. I spun linen thread, ever finer, until mine compared with any around. I was the youngest, the sisters declared, to make such thread.
At Michaelmas in 1731, when I turned twelve, I was taken to a new room and introduced to the great loom, a machine of clunking, banging, slamming parts, woven with miles of thread and moving things that seemed enchanted. I was also introduced to Sister Beatrice, the master weaver, and Brother Marcus, who had come to the convent as a captive but stayed when he found the life to his liking. By Good Friday, I had learned how to wind the warping board and had watched them warp a loom three times. Each time I put my hands to it, the thread grew tighter with every wrap, broke, or made sags. I lost count. I dropped pegs. I cursed aloud.
Sister Beatrice threw her hands in the air and left the room. Brother Marcus shook his head and said, “Take it off and start over. Warping the loom is the hardest part of weaving. Yet it is the first thing you must learn. She has little patience left. See if you can learn so that when you are old, you will not have to leave the room in exasperation over a little girl. Peace is in the fabric and fabric must have peace. The loom will not work for you without it. Once you can do this, the rest is more simple. People say one day you will surpass Sister Beatrice, and she knows it. Now, try again.”
Patience was sent back to the kitchen. I stayed at the loom. I seemed to be always growing out of my clothes, and I tied my hair with a kerchief like the older girls and women did, rather than plaiting two braids as the children did. There were days I forgot to look for a moon by which to make our escape. One day we found two girls had run from the convent under cover of night, in a bleak rain, helped out by two men cloaked in black. The nuns shut all dormitories for a whole night and day for prayer, they said, but imprisonment was truer. When the morning came and we went to chapel then to breakfast, we heard the names of the runaways.
I sat with Rachael at times, when my work hours were finished. She confessed to me that she had joined the runaways in meeting her husband and her father at the gate at two in the morning. She had brought with her one bundle. Baby James.
Her husband was incensed that she thought he would replace their son, she said. He told her to leave him at the gate and someone would find him in the morning. She would not, she said. For the sake of her own dead child, she would not abandon this one. Her husband fretted with great words at her, she said, yet given following them or staying behind with this child who so needed her, she believed she had no choice but to return to the convent. I patted her wrist, and to my surprise, she hugged me just for a moment. “You are a kind and loving person, Mistress Johansen,” I said.
April passed, blown out by gales and rain. Then came summer and the flax.
* * *
Life at St. Ursula’s was an unceasing parade of work, prayer, and poverty. My hands chapped and bled in the summers as well as winters. Sister Joseph was kind, as was Donatienne. I longed to go home, although for days at a time I forgot about Jamaica and thought only of warping and weaving and learning my Latin.
In 1732, I turned thirteen years old. That spring mold crawled up the walls inside the convent rooms. Donatienne coughed. A little at first, then a great deal, struggling for breath. I brought her broths and rum toddies from the kitchen. Every two or three weeks, a piece of paper and a small vial of ink appeared in the branches of the yew tree, like a Christmas trinket. I wrote another letter to Ma. I warped the loom. I had nightmares about shuttles flying at me and piercing me like arrows. I dreamed about being caught in the treadles and tangled in thread at the bottom where the weaver worked the hooks with feet tapping a rhythm like a jig. I dreamed the countermarche was a terrible da
nce that required me to keep my feet in perfect time with bobbins that bounced like rubber balls, falling out of their shuttles. The dance proceeded with words rather than music: beams, bars, beaters, heddles and threadles and racks. Tangled in thread, choking, I awoke, thrashing in my blankets, uncovered and cold.
In the morning, I found blood in my bed. I cried out, believing I would die.
After that, Donatienne and I were moved to the women’s dormitory.
In the middle of May, Patience waited on the table where I sat, and said to me she had spent the morning polishing a candlestick, and that it should be shiny by vespers. I waited until our prayers were finished, and met her between the yews. Strange how that place had become a link between us, and I tried always to erase the image of her and Lukas there, though I never saw those trees, whether day or evening, that the image was not first in my thoughts.
“I had a message!” Her face glowed. “From someone who will help us escape.”
“From Ma? Did she get my letters?”
“You will remember him when you see him. He will return in three months.”
“Three months? I want to leave now.” But in truth, Donatienne had just received word that a wedding was being arranged for her, and I did not wish to leave before Donatienne’s wedding. “Is this man sent by Ma?”
“No. Stop being foolish, Resolute.”
“Then how do you trust him?”
“I can trust him.”
“No man can be trusted,” I said, feeling myself far wiser than my sister with my new, matron’s knowledge. I wondered whether it was wise to leave the leaving in her hands. Perhaps she could not choose our best future; perhaps I must choose my own.
Donatienne had met the man that she was to marry once before the wedding date. It had been arranged to take place in June before the flax harvest. His name was Julien Noël; his name was Christmas. Her gown was a simple borrowed frock once used by his sister, her veil a bit of lightweight wool.
I stood at her side, all the time thinking that she would return to the convent, yet at the same time knowing she would not. During her wedding, she coughed and coughed. At least, I thought, watching as Julien prayed the prayers and took the Communion, he did not seem either leering like Rafe MacAlister or mean like Lukas Newham. Julien Noël was but two-and-twenty, and she seventeen. During mass, I thought only of my loneliness. I had turned a woman, but my heart felt like that of a foot-stamping five-year-old.
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