“I like the sound of that.” I pictured Charles raising his children far from the horrors he’d witnessed in his youth, contributing his skills to the adoptive land that had granted them safety. Happiness—the kind that had felt elusive for weeks—began to bloom in my spirit. Part of me wanted to tamp it down. But we’d found Adeline’s family, connecting her in spirit to a brother who’d lived on, had children of his own, and founded his future in a country she’d rejected out of love for her students.
“Charles lived,” I said. I laughed and shook my head in amazement at our discovery.
“Freedom-giving,” Grant said.
“Pardon me?”
“It’s how Adeline described the laughter of her students. Freedom-giving.”
She was right. It was. And guilt-inducing too.
Grant must have seen my countenance change. “Hey, that’s supposed to be a good thing.”
My smile felt forced now. “I know.”
He cocked his head, but remained silent.
“It feels disloyal sometimes.”
“Laughing?”
“Just being lighthearted.”
“Because . . . ?”
“I don’t know.” It was an honest answer. I knew Patrick would want me to laugh. I knew it was the equivalent of thumbing my nose at the perpetrators’ attempts to eradicate joy. But that I would be the one laughing—that I would be the one who ran out of the Bataclan’s side door and lived while so many others died inside . . . It felt an insult to their memory to laugh and be carefree.
“Canterbury tomorrow?” Grant asked, shifting my attention back to the present.
My eyes met his. “Just . . . because?”
“Seems like the logical next step, given that Charles and Isabelle settled there.” He frowned. “Adeline believed that Julie would survive . . . I just don’t think we can stop looking for her yet.”
His doggedness was comforting. “So you still think we can find her?”
“I do. I don’t really know how, but . . . I feel like we need to keep trying.”
I knew the anticipation on my face reflected Grant’s. And in my mind I heard Patrick say, “Grab a shovel and believe in gold!”
TWENTY-TWO
WE DROPPED MONA AND CONNOR OFF AT HOWLETTS Wild Animal Park the next morning and left the car in the parking lot so Grant and I could take the bus into Canterbury without worrying about traffic in the city. They’d spend a few hours with the exotic animals of Howletts, then join us in town a bit later.
Grant and I boarded Coach 5 headed for Canterbury and found seats at the very front upstairs. We were silent as the bus turned onto the motorway, content to watch the rural scenery rushing by. We entered the city from the north, and I found myself straining to take it all in—the contrast of modern structures and historic landmarks, of traditional sobriety and multicultural community. When our bus turned the last corner before the stop nearest the cathedral, the close-up view of its spires and buttresses took my breath away.
“Wow,” Grant said beside me.
“Wow,” I concurred.
We hurried down narrow stairs to exit the bus and walked the short distance between the stop and the cathedral’s entrance, which was under an archway in its surrounding wall.
Grant asked for two tickets and handed over the payment. “Is there any chance we could see the Huguenot chantry?” he said through the small opening in the glass.
We’d done some reading about it the night before. There was a small chapel tucked away in the cathedral’s crypt, where Canterbury’s Huguenots had worshipped after their escape from France.
The ticket seller behind the glass, an efficient young man who’d barely made eye contact, gave us a long-suffering look. “The chapel’s not part of the cathedral tour,” he said.
I stepped forward. “It’s just that we’re doing research on a specific family that came over from France during the persecution, and we’re hoping there might be a connection.”
“I’m sorry,” the man behind the window said. “It’s off-limits to tourists.” He stared at us with resolve, and I felt my hopes deflate.
“Are you sure you can’t make an exception?” Grant asked.
A wiry woman well past retirement age who had been standing nearby restocking supplies of pamphlets and maps leaned in to address us through the hole in the glass partition.
Her warm voice and friendly expression were a welcome departure from the young man’s contention. “There is information about the chapel in the visitor’s center just to the right when you pass through this arch,” she said, smiling kindness at us. I glanced at her name tag. It said Nelly D.
“That’s the best we can do,” the young man said.
The woman patted his shoulder. “Arthur, luv, would you be a dear and tell Sue that Alan won’t be in today? She’ll need to sort out the breaks to make sure we’re fully staffed.”
He seemed displeased with the suggestion but got up anyway, leaving his chair empty for Nelly to occupy. Once he’d left the office, she leaned in, her expression conspiratorial. “Research, you say?”
“I—” I glanced at Grant, who gave me a nod. “Yes. Yes, research.”
“For a book perhaps?”
This time Grant shrugged when I looked his way. “Sure. I’m mean, yes. It’s for a book.”
She softened visibly when Grant smiled at her. “And you’ll both want to see the chapel?”
He leaned in. “If that’s possible.”
She tore two tickets from the pad in front of her, assuming an enigmatic expression. “Well, we usually don’t allow visitors into the chantry other than two hours on Sunday afternoons but . . .” She looked directly from Grant to me, emphasizing her next words. “But since you’re doing official research for a book you’re writing, I think we can make an exception just this once.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, pleased and surprised by her willingness to bend the rules for us.
“I’ll call for a verger to meet you at the chapel entrance in thirty minutes. Can you make it there by then?”
“I—yes! Of course.”
Grant leaned in again. “You’ve been a godsend, Nelly. Thank you so much.”
She blushed when he used her name and waved away his thanks. “Nothing at all, luv. We make exceptions for authors wanting to shine a light on the history of the cathedral.” Handing us our tickets, she added, “The verger will be waiting for you. To the right when you enter the crypt. Look for a sign above the door that says Église Protestante Française.”
Grant seemed surprised. “That sounds like an authentic French accent,” he said.
Nelly tapped her name tag and smiled. “The D stands for Durand, luv.” She pointed at the line growing behind us. “If there’s nothing else I can do for you . . .”
“You’ve been more than helpful,” I said. “Thank you—thank you so much.”
“Lovely. Now hurry up and get to the visitor’s center for the information they can provide you, and give yourselves some time in the cathedral too. Might as well see it all as you’ve come from so far!” She turned her attention to the people in line behind us as Arthur reentered the office.
We hurried off, feeling elated and just a bit guilty.
“You realize we’re going to have to write a book now, right?” Grant said.
“Small price to pay.”
I had to pause as we entered the cathedral. The grandeur of its vaulted nave was arresting—the sheer height and heft of its elements a gravity-defying feat. The silence of the tourists who had come to visit that day reminded me of the sanctity of the space.
We wandered slowly down a side aisle, past rows of chairs framed by graceful arches, stopping to read the plaques under the sculptures of centuries-old tombs and paintings depicting the history of the church.
After a while, Grant realized how much time had passed and whispered that we needed to get to the crypt. We went down several steps into the dark grayness of a space devoid of the art and
artifice we’d seen above and found Nelly standing by an arched door under the wooden sign that read Église Protestante Française.
“I was beginning to despair,” she said in lieu of greeting, a broad smile on her face.
“Nelly! What happened to the verger you were sending?”
She leaned in. “I decided to send myself, don’t you know.” She unlocked the door and ushered us in. “Welcome to the Black Prince’s Chantry.”
The first item that caught my attention was a small, colorfully painted pipe organ by the door, but as I turned to survey the space, I found myriad details begging for exploration—inscriptions on the walls in the same Old French we’d spent hours translating, the Huguenot cross on the bright-blue pulpit cloth, the open Bible on a wooden table in an alcove beneath a window.
Nelly must have seen my eyes darting around the room. “It’s rather a lot to take in, isn’t it? Such a small space holding so much of our history.”
Grant had found some printed pages on a sideboard and was leafing through them. “There are still services?”
“Every Sunday afternoon. Nothing like they used to be, of course, but still mostly descendants of the Strangers, as our ancestors called them.”
“I expected it to be bigger,” I said, taking in the smallness of the space and remembering the number of Protestants who’d chosen to flee to England. “There had to be more Huguenots than these pews could fit.”
“Oh, there were! Probably two thousand of them worshipped in the cathedral by the end of the 1500s—most of them Walloons who fled the Netherlands during the Inquisition. The French Huguenots came later and added to their numbers. They met in the crypt back then, but even that was likely too small! With the Edict of Nantes making things a bit better for Protestants of France, and with assimilation, of course, their numbers began to fall in the decades that followed, but when the Edict was revoked, a new wave of refugees made their way here, and service attendance surged again.”
“So . . .” I was confused. “This chapel . . . ?”
“It’s only held the Huguenot church since the end of the 1800s. They met in the crypt for quite some time, then were forced to relocate to the south aisle when their attendance dwindled, and finally to this chantry.”
“So if the Huguenots we’re researching had been in Canterbury at the end of the seventeenth century?” Grant prompted.
Nelly pointed over her shoulder. “They would have met out there. But there are items here that would have been in the crypt when your Huguenots came to services.”
“If they did,” I interjected.
“You’re not sure?”
“We know Charles and his family lived in town, but have no evidence that they came to services here.”
“If they were Protestants and lived here, they likely did. They would have seen those boards,” she said, pointing to the walls on either side of an alcove. “That’s the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed, and across from that, the Ten Commandments. The only French version I know of in this country.”
Grant and I wandered closer to the boards where gold lettering stood out against a dark, painted background.
“These date back to the seventeenth century?” I asked Nelly.
“Right around there, I think.” Waving a hand, she added, “I’ll let you take a look around.”
From the boards, we walked over to a list of former pastors carved into a stone plate on the wall. I scanned it quickly, hoping for something to connect this church to Charles. When I found nothing there, I turned my attention to a sculpted Huguenot cross hanging in an alcove.
Grant caught me twisting it on its hook to check the back side of the piece. “Looking for CSF?” he asked, right behind me.
I nodded. The carpenter’s mark on the bottom of Adeline’s sewing box continued to mystify me, and my mind seemed to be constantly scanning for the three letters—in lists of genealogies, historical documents, and handcrafted crosses hanging on chantry walls. The letters couldn’t be Charles’s initials or they’d have ended with a B, so who was it that he’d honored with the last gift he gave his sister? I shook my head and sighed. “Maybe we’re not meant to figure it all out.”
Nelly sat in a pew by the door as we walked the perimeter of the room, taking in the details of a space rich with history. There was a large portrait of Gaspard de Coligny on one wall, a general whose life span preceded Adeline’s. Near the door was a verse from Ecclesiastes. Nelly saw me looking at it. “Probably here well before your family arrived,” she said. “It’s original to the chapel.”
We lingered a few minutes longer. I marveled at the juxtaposition of old and new—service schedules printed on dog-eared paper hanging next to verses hand-painted in flowing calligraphy centuries before. It was all fascinating, but my spirits sank as nothing seemed to point toward the family that had sent us on our impromptu trip to England.
Perhaps sensing my discouragement, Nelly patted the spot next to her on the pew. “Come—tell me what exactly has you so interested in the Huguenots of Canterbury.”
I moved to sit beside her, and Grant settled on the pew in front of us. He turned toward us and I felt his eyes on me, his silence indicating that this story was mine to tell.
“We’re trying to trace the family of a woman called Adeline Baillard—Ballard,” I corrected myself. “We think she died in 1695.” I told her the rest of the story in broad strokes, starting with the sewing box that had sent us on our search. “I think part of me hoped we’d enter the chapel and find a bust of Charles Ballard sitting on a stack of documents pointing us to the sister we’ve lost track of, but . . .”
“Aren’t you the epitome of optimism,” Nelly said.
“I’m actually not.” I felt frustration swell inside me. Frustration at myself. At having found nothing. At having hoped we would.
“We uncovered some details in Rochester yesterday,” Grant said into the silence. “They led us to believe that Charles and his family settled here after crossing the Channel, but there was nothing about a sister in his will. We’re still hoping to track her down.”
Nelly sat with her lips pursed for a moment. “It’s a puzzler, for sure,” she murmured.
“We don’t even know precise dates,” he said. “They left home in June 1695, but we have no idea when they made it to the coast. All we know is that the three of them traveled together and that Charles’s wife was expecting their first child. We assume they headed for Calais, then Dover, but we have no proof of that.”
“Or Sandwich. It was a common arrival port back then.” Nelly sat thoughtfully for a while. “That’s not a lot to go on, is it? But—if you don’t mind, I’d like to pass the information you’ve given me on to a few friends and see what they can uncover. We Huguenot enthusiasts tend to be a well-connected group. It’s a bit of a shot in the dark, of course, but what have you to lose by enlisting strangers’ help?”
“Nelly . . .” I was so taken aback by her offer to assist us that I didn’t know what to say. “Are you sure?”
“I’m absolutely sure. Life around here tends to get dull as ditch water at this time of year, and I could use a bit of a mystery to perk things up.”
“We’d love for you to help,” Grant said.
“Give me your contact information and I’ll follow up here while you continue with your research. Of course, with the secrecy and violence surrounding that period of history, you’ll likely find holes in the story big enough to drive a lorry through, but there’s always a way, don’t you reckon? There’s always a way.”
“I hope there is,” Grant said.
Nelly pulled a notepad and pen out of her purse and started scribbling. “Let me just write down a few things while they’re on the tip of my mind. Baillard, right? Then Ballard?”
We filled her in on the pertinent details again. When we were finished, I reached into my purse so I could write down her contact information and felt the plastic sheath surrounding our Bible pages. “I forgot I brought these with us,” I sa
id, pulling the documents from my purse. They were pressed between two layers of cardboard for protection.
Nelly’s eyes grew wide as I uncovered them and handed them to her. “These were in the sewing box too.”
“Just these three?”
“We learned that some churches split up their Bible among families when they disbanded,” Grant said.
“And then distributed the pages among their members,” Nelly filled in, turning Adeline’s over in her hands, a mystified expression on her face. “I’ve heard of the tradition,” she said.
I felt a flutter in my stomach. “You have?”
“I wonder if searching for other orphaned pages might give you some direction.”
“We did that before we left France,” Grant said. “Hoping to find the ones the Baillard parents took with them to the caves. We didn’t find anything.”
“But we searched for them in French,” I said to him. “Using French key words. It never occurred to us to do a search for the same kind of pages in England—in English.”
“If all the children were given their share, those belonging to Charles and his sister Julie might still be out there just waiting to be discovered,” Nelly said, a gleam of intrigue in her eyes.
Grant and I looked at each other. “If we can find some more of these pages . . . ,” he began.
“They might point us to Julie,” I concluded.
“There you go then! Something for the lot of you to investigate while I do a little digging of my own.” Nelly handed Adeline’s pages back to me.
“We’ll look into it,” I said, excitement—maybe hope—stirring again.
Grant gave Nelly his phone number and email address, then warmly shook her hand, thanking her for her help.
“And whether you find your missing girl or not,” she added, “you simply mustn’t leave the country without trying fish and chips. And a cream tea too!”
“We’ll try to fit those in,” I said, laughing.
“Both should come with a doctor’s warning, but you’re young enough to indulge without risk.” She said indulge with so much drama that I laughed again.
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