The Space Between Words

by Michele Phoenix

  “Yes—the Ballards or Baillards. They were Huguenots, and most likely left from Calais at the end of the 1600s.”

  “And what makes you think they used Calais?” Corb asked with overt derision.

  I looked at Grant and saw a glint in his eyes. “It’s the shortest distance between land masses,” he explained. “So it seemed to make sense that—”

  “Make sense? Of course it makes sense.” Corb reached for a pipe and took his time lighting it. “King knew it too. Calais was crawling with his goons, all liquored up to hunt the fugitives.”

  I cleared my throat. “So . . . where do you think they would have sailed from?”

  “Cherbourg, most likely. Less risk.” He sat back and inhaled from his pipe, letting the smoke out slowly, his eyes on me, then on Grant, then back on me again. After what felt like an interminable pause, he said, “Nelly told me about the family. Brother and sister from the Vivarais region.”

  “And a wife,” I interjected. “She would have been pregnant.”

  “You going to do the talking or am I?” He waved his pipe at me, eyebrows raised.

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t be sorry, be quiet!”

  “Nelly warned us about you,” Grant said, his voice low and measured. I looked at him and saw a muscle twitching in his jaw. “All we came for is answers. If you can help us find some, great. But if you don’t have anything for us, we’ll let you get back to whatever we interrupted.”

  “Look at you,” Corb sneered. “Fancy peacock preening for his mate.”

  Grant stood and held a hand out to me. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  I was about to get up, somewhat relieved to be leaving so soon, when Corb let out a laugh so loud that both Grant and I jumped. “Sit down!” he bellowed, slapping his leg and reaching for a half-dozen books stacked by his chair. “You Americans and your namby-pamby feelings. Wouldn’t have opened the door if I didn’t have something for you. Now sit down and cork it so I can tell you what I’ve found.”

  He tossed a leather-bound book at Grant and another one at me. We went back to our designated chairs with them and waited for Corb to continue. “Found your Charles bloke’s name on a ship manifest from December 14, 1695.”

  “How did you get ship manifests from that far back?” I said, then kicked myself for speaking out of turn.

  Corb leaned forward. “Ever heard of the Internet?”

  I sat back and said nothing. From the corner of my eye, I could see Grant grinning.

  “That book there is the actual captain’s log,” he said, pointing at the one Grant held.

  I was dumbfounded. “The captain who brought them over to—?”

  His glare stopped me short. “Lucky thing for you he was the talkative type. Got a transcript here, too, if you don’t like his chicken scratch.” He flipped through the printed pages he held. “December 14—says a family of three approached him through the usual connections.” He looked up. “They had runners back then. Whole network of allies.” Looking back down at the notes, he continued. “Says it was a couple and a brother wanting to get across to Portsmouth.”

  Grant leaned forward. “It would have been a sister.”

  “Unless the sister was dressed as a boy,” Corb said slowly, as if talking to a child.

  Grant frowned. “What are you saying?”

  The older man leaned back and took a long drag from his pipe, then he tilted his head and blew the smoke straight up. “I’m saying a boy getting caught by the goons was one thing, but a girl . . .”

  He didn’t need to elaborate more. I’d read enough about the atrocities perpetrated against the Huguenots to understand why Julie might have wanted to wear men’s clothes.

  “So they’re in here?” Grant asked, holding up the log.

  Corb ignored his question. “Where you staying?”

  “The Castle Hotel.”

  “Take that,” he said, pointing at Grant’s book. “Start on the date I told you.” Then he turned on me. “And you take that one. You’ll find they supplement each other.” He handed me the transcripts. “Here. You’ll likely do better with the sissified English.”

  I wasn’t sure whether he was being kind or insulting. “I . . . thank you.”

  “Get them back here by the same time tomorrow, or I’ll come to the hotel and get them myself, you hear? Just push ’em through the slot in the door so we don’t have to do all this again.”

  “And if we have questions?”

  He just stared at me.

  “We’ll try not to have questions,” I amended.

  “Get outta here, the lot o’ you! And don’t you make me come after those logs!” I could have sworn I heard a smile in his voice.

  Grant and I hurried up the steps, down the hall, through the door, and made it back to our hotel in record time.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  WE DIDN’T START ON THE PROJECT UNTIL AFTER DINNER, and what we found kept us up most of the night. We read every word—even the accounts that had nothing to do with Charles and Julie—drawn in by the storytelling of a captain who’d risked everything to help the Huguenot refugees he ferried out of harm’s way.

  The transcripts Corb had given us were incomplete, so we had to go back to the originals again and again to piece together the missing elements of the story we uncovered. It left us burdened with more questions.

  Connor took one look at us the next morning and said, “Do you need to take a nap?”

  “That obvious?” Grant asked.

  Mona walked into the breakfast room behind her son. She saw the page markers sticking out of Corb’s old logs and squinted at us, probably trying to gauge whether we’d found something or not. “Any luck?”

  Grant and I looked at each other. Then he pushed the book Corb had given him across the table.

  “So this is what a captain’s log looks like,” Mona said, picking it up.

  Grant nodded. “More like a blow-by-blow account of everything he witnessed as the go-to Huguenot smuggler of Cherbourg.”

  We spent breakfast filling her in on what we’d uncovered. Charles Baillard and his family had found their way to Captain Jonathan Fletcher several months after they’d left the South of France.

  “No way of knowing what took them so long,” Grant said. “Illness. Weather conditions. Maybe they just took long breaks as they trekked across the country.”

  Fletcher had described them as gaunt—Isabelle sickly but brave. He referred to the third member of Charles’s entourage as Jules, which supported Corb’s suspicion that Julie had been traveling as a boy.

  The captain’s logs alluded to heightened scrutiny at the time the family reached Cherbourg, and we knew from what we’d read in the Rochester museum’s resources that the king had ordered extraordinary measures to keep the Huguenots from fleeing. His dragoons had gone from searching random vessels to slashing into bundles of fabric and boxes of vegetables with their swords and fumigating entire holds where they thought escapees were hiding. If they found fugitives alive, they dragged them through town and made examples of them by torturing them in public squares or sending them off to the gallows. The dead were left hanging in the sun to decompose—a warning not to help the heretics in any way.

  Still, Fletcher told Huguenot sympathizers on land that he’d get the Baillard family to Portsmouth if they could find a way to sneak them on board.

  “With Cherbourg’s port under heavy surveillance, they couldn’t risk the family walking to the boat—even under cover of darkness,” Grant said. “So they loaded them into empty wine casks in a town not far from the port and had them brought to the ship on a horse-drawn cart.”

  “The way Captain Fletcher tells it,” I continued, “Isabelle got violently ill after deckhands rolled the casks onto the ship and into its hold. The only way for them to breathe was through a straw they could push through a small hole in the barrel, and the sicker she became, the more untenable it got. Fletcher could hear them screaming to each othe
r as several dragoons approached the ship, then he heard Charles trying to kick his way out of his cask, presumably to help Isabelle out of hers.”

  “Did they get in trouble?” Connor asked, bread crumbs and Nutella stretching from his mouth across both cheeks.

  “Should we . . . continue later?” Grant looked at Mona.

  She pulled a phone from her pocket, brought up an app, and handed the phone to her son. “Why don’t you go sit over there and make like an angry bird?” she said.

  Surprised by the rare permission to use her phone, Connor scrambled off his chair and crawled into a window seat on the far side of the dining room. He hunched over the phone and started a game. “No sound insulation needed,” Mona said. “Please—continue.”

  I motioned for Grant to take over. “Fletcher rushed down to the hold as the dragoons were preparing to board the ship. Found Isabelle slumped on the floor and Charles trying to pry the top off Julie’s cask, but it was stuck and there just wasn’t time to get her out before the soldiers got to them. Fletcher distracted the dragoons by putting up a bit of resistance when they found him in the hold, while Charles and Isabelle took advantage of the diversion to make it up to the deck unnoticed. His best guess is that they somehow slipped overboard while the dragoons were roughing him up, then either found their way to shore or died trying—in either case, there wasn’t anything he could do. So he headed for Plymouth, never knowing what became of them.”

  “Wait—Plymouth?” Mona asked. “Weren’t they supposed to sail to Portsmouth?”

  “That’s where it gets confusing,” I said. “Portsmouth is where Fletcher had promised to take them, but he described letting Julie out of her cask in the Plymouth port.”

  “Why would he change the itinerary?”

  Grant sighed and leaned forward to gather our logs and transcripts into a stack. “He mentioned a storm—it could have been that. Or maybe he knew something we don’t and decided to take Julie to a safer location. Or maybe it was just a change of plans. We didn’t find anything that hinted at a reason.”

  Mona shook her head. “So this—what was she? Twelve years old?”

  “Probably thirteen by then,” I said.

  “This thirteen-year-old gets loaded into a ship’s hold, hears her brother kicking his way out of a wine cask and freeing his wife, crosses the Channel in a sealed container with just a straw for air, and lands on the other side in the wrong place with no idea whether Charles and Isabelle are alive or dead and joining her or not?”

  “Pretty grim, right?” Grant said.

  I tried not to picture the teenager crawling out of that cask on foreign soil, staring into the faces of strangers and coming to grips with being stranded alone.

  “Is that it?” Mona asked, appalled. “That’s all we know? She got off the ship in the middle of the night and . . . what?”

  Grant glanced at me. “There’s just a bit more.”

  “Fletcher found a refugee family that was headed from Plymouth toward London and asked them to take her along.”

  “A refugee family.” Mona seemed as troubled by the saga as Grant and I had been. “He just . . . found somebody to take her and went on with his life?”

  I rubbed my hands over my face and tried to make sense of the myriad details I’d absorbed during the night. “The captain sounds like a good man,” I finally said. Tentatively. Hopefully. “I don’t think he would have just . . . abandoned her. And he calls the family who took her ‘refugees,’ so maybe they were Huguenots too. French people who knew what she’d been through, who spoke her language . . .” I tried to conjure up what we couldn’t know of Julie’s fate. “Maybe the family took her to Portsmouth to meet up with Charles and Isabelle.”

  Mona shook her head. “But we don’t know when they finally made it across. It could have been months later.”

  Grant reached for the second book we’d spent the night scrutinizing. “Actually, we might,” he said. “A Captain Paul Robinson. Short on words and details, but we think we’ve figured out why Corb gave us this log too.”

  “Charles and Isabelle?”

  “He doesn’t use names,” I said. “But he talks about a couple from the Vivarais with a newborn baby that he took across to Portsmouth about five weeks after Julie made the trip.”

  “Except that she went to Plymouth,” Mona stated. There were tears in her eyes, the uncertainty of Julie’s fate wounding her mother’s heart.

  “Right,” Grant said. He leaned back in his chair and scratched his head, frustration in the gesture. “All we can know for sure is that Charles and Isabelle made it to Canterbury. We have ample evidence of that. But Julie . . .” He let his voice trail off, looking from Mona to me. “And since there was no mention of her in Charles’s will—”

  “That doesn’t mean she didn’t survive!” Mona interrupted Grant, perhaps more forcefully than she’d intended.

  Connor’s head snapped up. “Hey! Hey! Hey!” All three adults turned toward him and he wagged a finger at us. “No fighting!”

  There was a moment of silence as we realized we were being chastised by a child. “We’re not fighting, kiddo,” Grant finally said. “Just talking about serious things.”

  “Like lightsabers?” Connor asked.

  I looked at Mona. She looked at me. “Sure,” she said with a laugh. “Serious things like lightsabers.”

  That seemed to placate him, and he went back to his game.

  “I don’t mean to be a pessimist,” Grant said, speaking softly enough that we wouldn’t disturb Connor again.

  I sighed. “I know.”

  “Even if Charles and Isabelle had tracked Fletcher down after they made the crossing, he’d have had no way of knowing where the refugee family that took Julie finally put down roots. Charles himself had intended to settle in London but ended up raising his family in Canterbury. It’s just . . . unlikely—no matter how you look at it—that they would have found her again.”

  “She made it to England,” Mona said. “Maybe we just need to be satisfied with that. She got away from France, away from the dragoons. She could have had a good life here, right? Even without her brother?”

  “I just keep picturing her on that dock.” There had been no description of Julie in Adeline’s memoir, yet I could see her face as clearly as if she were sitting in that room with us. I stopped my train of thought before it led me into sordid scenarios. I strove for certainty and said, “Someone took care of her. That family stepped up and made sure she was all right.”

  “Like the angel on the tomb in Pastor Ken’s cemetery,” Mona said. “Right there with them, leading the refugees to freedom.”

  I looked at Grant and saw the disappointment on his face. This moment felt hollow and emptied of redemption. All we’d gained for our efforts were more unanswerable questions and a tattered kind of hope.

  “You didn’t have to come,” Grant said as we walked down High Street to Corb’s home.

  “I’m just here for the brawn in case our friend gets out of hand.”

  Grant laughed. “We’re shoving these books through the slot in his door and running away like we lit a bag of poop on fire.”

  I stopped, hands on hips, and tried for a disapproving look. “You’ve done that, haven’t you?”

  Grant stopped too. “What’s the statute of limitations on having been a teenager?”

  I swatted his arm and he grinned. “We may need those martial arts in a minute,” he mumbled.

  When we got to Corb’s home, Grant pushed the first book through the hole in the door. I wasn’t sure which of us jumped higher when it opened unexpectedly and Captain Corb bellowed, “Thought you’d get away, did you?”

  I nearly laughed out loud at the look on Grant’s face. “We’re just doing what you told us to,” he said, sounding for all the world like a teenager caught red-handed.

  “Figured I’d spare myself bending down to pick ’em up,” Corb said, motioning for us to hand over our books. I found him less intimidating stan
ding in the light of day. “You find what you were looking for?”

  “We found enough,” Grant said.

  “And?”

  “They got separated—the brother and his wife from the sister—but at least they made it here.”

  “I’m hoping someone took her in,” I said, wanting to convince myself that she hadn’t been left to fend for herself.

  Corb pursed his lips. “Wasn’t just the captains who were good to the Frenchies in those days. Common folk were too. Took in the refugees and gave ’em places to live and food to eat. Work too. No doubt about it, your girl got helped.” For a moment, he looked kind despite his gruff, off-putting way.

  “So you think she was okay?” I asked as if he could know the answer.

  Corb raised an arm and, in a voice so sonorous that it reverberated down the street, declared, “Valor is strength, not of legs and arms, but of heart and soul.” He took a step back and closed the door.

  We walked most of the way back to the hotel in silence. “You think that was a quote?” I said when we were nearly there.

  “The bit about valor?”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t know, but . . .” He stopped, his hands deep in his pockets, and hung his head. I’d come to recognize it as a thinking posture for Grant, so I stood by and gave him time. When he looked up, I saw conviction in his face. “Julie had valor,” he said. “Courage. Or as Corb put it, ‘strength of heart and soul.’ Look at the family she came from—what they went through.” He hunched a shoulder. “She was a Baillard,” he said. “Valor is what they lived by. I think she found her way to a good life.”

  I felt hope try to breathe.

  TWENTY-NINE

  WITH ONE DAY REMAINING IN OUR ENGLISH VACATION, we left early the next morning for Bristol, which Mona had discovered was Blackbeard’s birthplace. We all agreed that a quick venture east would be our final gift to Connor on a trip that had, to his detriment, been mostly adult-driven.

  We joined a tour of Blackbeard’s favorite haunts, led by one Pirate Pete fully decked out in corsair gear, and while Grant and Connor stuck close to the guide, Mona and I darted in and out of shops, buying souvenirs we’d take home to France.