The Space Between Words

by Michele Phoenix

  I was speechless for a moment. When Grant finally looked at me, eyebrow raised in question, I stammered, “I’m sorry, I’m . . . I’ve got to admit that of all the scenarios I’d imagined, Fred leaving her and Connor to become a masseur on a cruise ship never crossed my mind!”

  Grant laughed. “And the kicker is that it was Fred who talked her into buying the property in Balazuc and converting it into a B&B. Told her he’d do the hard labor, she’d do the hosting, and they’d make a mint in no time flat.”

  “But—what kind of handyman was he? I mean, I can see someone like you taking on the building remodel, but a guy whose new dream is a career in massage therapy doesn’t strike me as the Bob the Builder type.”

  “Exactly.”

  I shook my head. “Poor Mona.”

  “Yes. And poor Connor. I didn’t fly over intending to stay this long, but . . . when I saw what still needed to be done and how much Connor was struggling . . .”

  “You decided to stay.”

  “I did. And now I’m trying to decide when to leave.”

  That took me aback. “You’re leaving?”

  “At some point,” he said, a bit of frustration creeping into his voice. “The fact is, if I stay in Balazuc until the construction is finished—converting the barn, finishing the manor house—there’s no telling how long I’ll be there.”

  “Mona’s been talking about developing a brocante during tourist season, too, so . . .”

  “Please—don’t even let her contemplate that option!” He chuckled and leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. Then he turned his head and looked at me, as if weighing what he’d say next. “Mona needed my help—that much is true. But I needed to get away more than she needed me. And now . . .” He looked forward again. “Now I have to figure out when it’s time to go back and start living differently.”

  After the silence grew uncomfortable again, I asked, a bit reluctantly, “Differently?” When he pinched his lips and looked off thoughtfully, I added, “No need to answer. Really. We should probably be getting back to the farm anyway, now that the sun has gone behind the hills.”

  I was just pushing off the bench when he said, “I had a really good thing going back home. Great life, good friends, steady income. My college buddy started a flipping business on a whim a few years ago and recruited me as a partner. Turns out we were good at making money. Jack was the brains behind the operation—CEO, CFO, and promoter-in-chief. And I was the project manager. A dozen people reported to me on any given day—carpenters, roof layers, painters, tilers . . . a well-oiled machine that eventually got us all kinds of attention. Headlines, sponsorship offers, inquiries from reality shows.”

  “Sounds . . . great?” I couldn’t figure out why he’d leave it all for France.

  “It was—for a while.”

  “And then?”

  Grant hung his head for a moment. “At some point, Jack started asking me to cut corners. It was pretty harmless at first. Mostly cosmetic—overcharging for low-quality paint and cheaper windows. Billing for high-end floors and installing something inferior. Typical stuff in that line of work. Then he insisted that we skimp on more important things. HVAC. Structural. Electrical. If it increased our bottom line, Jack didn’t overanalyze it. And me? I did what he asked, kept my mouth shut, and tried not to listen to my gut.”

  Grant stood and took a couple steps to the edge of the outcropping, stretching his back, then standing there, hands on hips, looking out. I saw the carriage of his shoulders harden as he stood in front of me admitting to a level of complacency that seemed completely out of step with what I knew of him.

  “There were threats of lawsuits,” he continued. “Just a handful of them from disgruntled buyers. But Jack had a crack legal team, and they shut them down pretty fast. The fact is, those people were right to want to sue. I knew they were, but . . . Jack was a friend. And the income was great. The exposure too. And . . .” He smiled self-deprecatingly. “And my girlfriend at the time—Audrey—she really liked the perks of dating ‘that guy from TV.’”

  He turned to look at me then, frustration in the tightness of his jaw. “I let it go on way too long. I guess I liked the perks of it too.” He went silent for a moment.

  “But you did eventually quit, right? To help Mona with the B&B.”

  “Yeah, I quit. But only after a substandard wiring installation in one of our houses caused a fire that landed a nine-year-old girl in the burn unit.”

  “Oh, Grant . . .”

  Frustration turned to anger. He shoved his hands into his pockets and turned toward the distant hills. “We knew the electrical was bad—it dated back nearly fifty years to when the house was built—but we weren’t making a whole lot of profit on that particular flip, and Jack figured if the buyers didn’t know about the problem . . .”

  Silence stretched for a few moments more. Then Grant looked at me and said, “After the girl’s parents went public, Jack’s shysters cried defamation. Said the homeowners had known about the issue and opted not to have us fix it. They were just speaking up now because they saw money to be made—you know the drill. When they denied it, it became our word versus theirs. Nasty stuff all played out in public . . . while their daughter lay in a hospital bed with burns over 20 percent of her body.”

  His smile was completely devoid of humor. “Great stuff, right? Respectable behavior from someone who’s always claimed to look out for the little guy.”

  “It just—it doesn’t seem like you.”

  He answered my statement with a look that said it all. Regret and self-disgust. He walked back to the bench and lowered himself slowly. “So . . . I told the investigators what I knew to be true, then I went to Jack’s office and quit. And about a week later, Audrey quit me. So when Mona called to tell me about Fred, I saw the B&B as the perfect way to escape my old life. I flew to France to redeem myself one eighteenth-century structure at a time.”

  He blew out a breath and stared at the reddened sky. “So I might be doing a good deed by helping my sister,” he said, “but a knight in shining armor I’m not.”

  “And yet you’re riding a horse over the Downs.” I hoped my smile communicated that I wasn’t judging him.

  He got up and stepped toward our horses, releasing their reins and handing Kimble’s to me. “The reason I want to go home, probably in a couple of months, is to prove to myself that I can do things right the next time around.” He cupped his hands under my knee to help me into the saddle.

  I hesitated. “Thanks for telling me about . . . about what happened. You didn’t have to put up with my prying.”

  He looked up at me, his expression unguarded. “It was hardly prying. Besides, we’re friends, right? Friends know.”

  I remembered Mona’s admonition and felt a wall come up as my own qualms intensified. “More like treasure-hunting partners,” I said, a bit too eager to reduce our connection to a project.

  He frowned and hesitated. “Sure.”

  We rode mostly in silence on the way back to the Old Schoolhouse, Grant no doubt rehashing the mistakes of his past and me trying to understand why my final words had left me feeling so unsettled.

  TWENTY-ONE

  CONNOR WAS NOT IMPRESSED WITH THE FULL ENGLISH breakfast Renée served us the next morning.

  “I want Cheerios!” he proclaimed loud enough for the neighbors to hear.

  Mona tried to convince him that there were some things on the plate in front of him that he liked, but he wouldn’t back down. So while the rest of us devoured the eggs, bacon, sausage, baked tomatoes, and fried toast Renée had made for us, Connor ate a bowl of cereal. By the end of breakfast, I wished I’d done the same.

  We left for Rochester and its Huguenot Museum—the only one in England—shortly after we’d finished eating, armed with Mona’s GPS and a quick lesson from Renée on the myriad rules for navigating English traffic circles. The driving got a bit more tricky as we exited large motorways and drove into the city. Twice, Grant inst
inctively pulled into the right lane as he turned onto a new road, and twice he was brought back on track by Mona mumbling a tense, “Left rudder, left rudder” from the backseat.

  As we circled the center of the historic district looking for parking, we passed between Rochester’s cathedral and its castle, eliciting an avalanche of questions and exclamations from the five-year-old in the back seat. Mona decided to take Connor on a tour of the castle while Grant and I did our thing in the Huguenot Museum. Though I agreed that our research would be more efficient unimpeded by a little boy’s attention span, I still felt a bit uncomfortable walking off alone with Grant.

  We’d made a request to use the archive room and its resources a few days before, but it still took us a while to find someone who would guide us downstairs to it.

  “We’ve brought in some books you may find helpful, given the subject and era of your search,” a young man named Peter told us as he ushered us into a blue-walled room where two desks sat under a frosted-glass window. “We don’t allow our historic manuscripts to be touched, but they’ve all been scanned. Here’s a list of the ones our curator suggested.” He handed Grant a sheet of paper with handwritten notes on it and pointed at the laptop on each desk. “You can access them from our archives. And once you’re into the collection, of course, you might find something else that catches your eye. All the documents are searchable by key word or topic.”

  When Peter had left and we sat at the side-by-side desks with our laptops open to a welcome page, neither of us moved.

  “I’m not sure how to start,” I finally whispered, daunted by the stacks of books and the online resources we had to peruse.

  “Maybe one of us should take the books and the other the scanned archives,” Grant said just as quietly.

  “I’ll take online.”

  “Then I’ll take the books.”

  “You think we need to be whispering?” I asked, giggling a bit at the notion of two adults in a closed space speaking as if someone were eavesdropping.

  “Probably not,” Grant whispered again. Then he cleared his throat and said in a full voice, “Probably not.”

  I cringed. “Let’s keep whispering.”

  “Agreed.”

  He reached for the top book on the desk, and I logged into the catalogue of documents that dated back to 1695 and the five years following.

  We spent nearly two hours skimming huge amounts of information, sometimes pausing long enough to fill the other in on what we were learning. We were allowed only a pencil in the archive room—no photographs or duplications permitted—so the research had to be done in real time, not taken home.

  “Listen to this,” Grant said, holding up a book that covered the exodus of nearly a hundred thousand Huguenots to England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “They fled from every major city along the Channel coast—Calais, Dunkerque, Cherbourg—some dressed as soldiers or clergy to ensure safe passage. And King Louis XIV posted guards everywhere he thought he could catch the Huguenots trying to escape. Bridges, passages through the mountains, ports.”

  “Ports?”

  His expression was somber as he returned my look. He glanced down at the book again, summarizing what he saw. “He ordered his men to . . .” I saw a muscle twitch in his jaw. “They fumigated the holds of ships where they suspected people were hiding. Burned or sank others. Tortured captains who were sympathetic to the Protestants until they were sure they weren’t ferrying anyone to safety.”

  I shook my head, trying not to imagine what the hidden Huguenots might have endured. “Even if Charles, Isabelle, and Julie made it to the coast—even if they made it onto a boat bound for England . . .”

  “There’s no guarantee they actually made it here,” Grant concluded. He blew out a breath and looked up at me. “Find anything on your end?”

  “Nothing worthwhile. A couple of Baillards in the last wills and testaments, but they came from another region of France. Maybe distant relatives, but not the family we’re looking for.” I felt frustration growing. “How do we even know if they listed their real names? They might have traveled and settled under assumed identities just to be safe.”

  “Did you search for Gatigny?” Grant asked.

  I threw up my hands. “Gatigny! Why wasn’t that the first word I looked for?”

  “Because you’re hunting for people, not places,” Grant said.

  I turned back to the laptop and entered Gatigny into its search field. When the next page came up, it showed hits in four documents.

  “Grant,” I whispered, a flutter of excitement rippling through my chest.

  “We’re back to whispering?”

  I looked at him and felt myself smile again. “Four hits!” I said more loudly. “For Gatigny. I have four hits.”

  His eyes got wider, and he rolled his chair closer to mine so he could see the screen. “Well, click on one of them!” he said, his voice tight with anticipation.

  I clicked on the first link and found the highlighted Gatigny in the translation of a document describing the region around Privas at the time of its siege.

  “Nothing there.”

  Clicking out of the first link, I selected the second one and opened it. This time it was a genealogy that referenced Gatigny in the thirteenth century, well before Adeline’s time.

  “Come on,” I muttered as I moved the cursor back to the list and clicked on the next link. The first words I saw were: “son of Pierre and Constance of Gatigny France.” Both of us froze.

  Then Grant leaned back in his chair and let out a “Yes!” that might have been heard in the museum upstairs. “Open it! Open it!” he said, sounding for all the world like his five-year-old nephew.

  I used the mouse to open the document wider and scrolled to its first line.

  In the name of God, Amen, the Fourteenth day of April in the year of our Lord 1735 I Charles Ballard of Canterbury in the County of Kent son of Pierre and Constance of Gatigny France

  My breath caught. “No way . . .”

  “It’s Ballard instead of Baillard, but . . . son of Pierre and Constance.” He shook his head, incredulous. “We found him,” Grant said.

  I pointed at the year the will was written. “If he was thirteen at the Revocation, and he was, what, twenty-three when they fled . . .”

  Grant did the mental calculation more quickly than I could have. “He would have been fifty-five when he wrote his will. Probably a ripe old age in those days.”

  “We found him,” I said, repeating Grant’s words from moments before. I leaned over so I could see the screen more clearly, now that Grant had swiveled it a bit away from me. “Keep reading,” I said, surprised by the excitement in my voice.

  Grant heard it too. He turned his head and smiled, the glint of victory in his eyes. Leaning in as I was, our faces were close, but the proximity didn’t matter in that moment. I smiled back and nudged him with my shoulder. “Keep reading,” I said again.

  His smile deepened as he turned back to the screen and started to read out loud, stumbling a bit over spellings and sentence structures dating back nearly three hundred years.

  I Charles Ballard of Canterbury in the County of Kent, son of Pierre and Constance of Gatigny France, Carpenter, being sicke and weake in Body, but of Sound minde and perfect memory (praised bee God for the same) doo Make, Nominate, Constitute, and Ordaine, this my last Will and Testament in manner and forme following.

  First and Principally, I comend my Soule into the hands of God my maker, hoping through the Merits of Christ my Redeemer, to receive full Pardon of all my Sins and to Inherrit Everlasting Life after death.

  I give and bequeath unto my wife Isabelle Ballard the sum of Thirty Pounds

  I give to my Daughter Jane Burnell wife of James Burnell of Rye in the County of Sussex the sum of Fourty shillings

  All the Rest of my personall Estate whatsoever I give and Bequeath to my Loving Sonne Christopher Ballard of Hawkhurst in the County of Kent whom I doo make full and Sole E
xecutor of this my last Will and Testament, and Doo hereby Revoke Disanull, and utterly make void all former Wills, and Testaments, by mee made, and this and noo other to Stand, for my last Will and Testament.

  “A daughter in Sussex and a son in Kent,” Grant said when we’d sat in silence for a few moments.

  “But no mention of Julie.”

  He looked back over the text and shook his head. “No mention of Julie.”

  We searched a bit more for her name, now spelling it Ballard, and found nothing in the museum’s archives. There was no evidence that Julie had ever lived in England.

  Charles’s line was easier to trace. There were censuses indicating that his son’s ancestors had stayed in Kent—though their numbers seemed to dwindle steadily until the mid-1900s. His daughter and her husband had sailed across the Atlantic to settle in the New World and put down their roots in New Rochelle, in the modern state of New York.

  As intriguing as those branches of Charles’s lineage were, it was uncovering Julie’s fate that felt most urgent to me. I suspected, from Grant’s stubborn searches, that he felt the same way.

  “She may have died in the crossing,” I said. “Or before they even got to Calais.”

  “Or she could have made it here and just died before her brother did.”

  “But she was ten years younger.”

  “And living in a time when the flu or even childbirth were life-threatening things.”

  “There’d still be a trace of her, wouldn’t there?”

  I watched as Grant moved the mouse over yet another document. When he opened it, we found it had nothing to do with our Baillard family.

  “Strange that he changed the spelling of Baillard to Ballard,” Grant said.

  “It might have been easier to pronounce in English.”

  “Charles Ballard, the Canterbury carpenter.” His mind seemed to be skipping from one detail to another as quickly as mine was.