by Carmel Bird
He smiled, and I smiled, and I felt the corners of my mouth lifting in joy and pleasure and trust. And a week or so later, as if in a dream I found myself floating, with Golden in my arms, drifting, flying past Alice on her doorway guard-chair, out of the prison, past doors and gates and sad bad people, out into a bleak wide courtyard where a car was waiting. A man called Vincent then drove Father Fox and me away, away up the magic carpet road of Hobart Town. Out the window I saw rows and rows of houses and gardens and streets with shops and banks and busy people. The driver is also a painter and they call him van Gogh because his name is Vincent. I wrote on my notepad asking Father Fox whether he painted sunflowers and he laughed out loud and said sometimes he did.
Then Father Fox asked me what I would like to eat—what do you fancy?—and I thought for a long time and then I wrote down fried mushrooms and fresh coriander and a cup of peppermint tea. And Vincent said he knew where you could get that, and we drove to a house somewhere and some Catholic nuns were there and they prepared the sweetest and most refreshing meal I can ever recall. Golden woke up and played with her lamb and the nuns played with her and nobody asked any questions and it was warm and I was in a dream. It was like a miracle. The house had a smooth tiled floor that gleamed dark red, and a cool green cloister, almost white, icy yet inviting, suggesting prayer and joy and medieval paintings. There was a garden with a statue. Nobody expected me to speak, and I felt so very safe and comfortable. We had strawberries.
Father Fox explained to me that he had devised a plan so that he would be responsible for me for at least two years, in hiding. In hiding. I was not sure I liked the sound of that, but he said it was the only way of ensuring safety for myself and Golden. He told me afterwards that much had depended on my responses to the gifts he brought me in the plastic bag. He said he needed to know whether I would give an indication of being able to adjust to life outside the institution, life outside Skye, life in the ordinary world. He said he watched my reactions, and he decided I could be relied upon to recover and to live with ordinary people. It would not be safe for me, he said, to be freely living in the world until much later, until the emotions surrounding the fire had faded. There were people, he told me, who wished to hunt me down and hurt me, hurt me and Golden. I understood that. He would take us where we would be safe. Perhaps it was not so strange that I was able to place so much trust in him, since the beliefs of the Catholic Church had always had a place in the beliefs of the people of Skye. Minerva Hinshelwood Mean brought the flowers and prayers and candles and saints of the Church with her when she married Magnus Mean in the sad little Presbyterian ceremony at Stanley. How odd that must have seemed to her. How brave they all were then.
I have a new name now, and Golden has a new name. I am known as Claudina and she is Stella. It was strangely easy for me to make this transition emotionally, and Father Fox organised all the papers with—I don’t know—lawyers and police. The name of ‘Mean’ however was something we also had to discard. Searching for a family name, a new family name is really rather strange. Father Fox and I opened the phone book at random and the funny thing was that the first name I found was Fox. I wrote down on the pad that it was obviously an impossible name for us to have, but Father Fox laughed and said perhaps it was wise not to argue with coincidence and destiny. ‘Two new little Foxes,’ he said, ‘I like that.’ He did look most delighted by the idea, and so it came to be. Then I grew nervous and I looked again at the first names. Is Claudina not secret enough, I wondered, since there are Claudinas in the family, but Father Fox said he thought it would suffice. Golden likes being called Stella. Or perhaps she does not really notice very much, being a carefree child much like any other child. I do not know. But the name Claudina links me in a most beautiful way to my own necklace, the Claudina necklace that has been in the family forever and forever. The necklace binds me directly to the first Minerva, and it reminds me every day and every night of my family. My poor lost family. I pray for them in hope. Stella is also bound to Niña by the twisted sinew bracelet she wears on her wrist. Perhaps I should remove this bracelet from her, but I have been unable to do this. Perhaps I will live to regret my hesitation. I am physically marked as a member of the family, for on my left shoulder I bear a small tattoo of a blue swallow—Caleb marked all his girls in this way and, on his own shoulder, he has the bluebird too. Only two tattoos remain on this earth, his and mine. Father Fox said it is possible to get tattoos removed, but I do not wish to do that.
So we are now Claudina and Stella Fox, and we will receive new ‘birth certificates’. It seems to me that they would be sort of forgeries. I know so little about these things. How strange it is to have new identities, yet I am able to accept it quite smoothly, as a natural event. Father Fox has said that it will be better if Stella never knows who she really is, who she was, who she used to be. In this way she will resemble the Baby Niña of long long ago. Niña never knew who she was, and we never knew who she was, yet she is one of my own ancestors. The event that cut her off from her past was the wreck of the Iris. Stella’s breaking moment is the fire in the Meeting Hall. One by water, one by fire. I think a great deal about Stella and the fire and how that is a vast secret for a mother to keep from her child. But it is a secret I must keep. My mind races on to imagine how it might be in, perhaps, twenty years time, how Stella could read an account in a book or an old newspaper of the holocaust at Skye, and how she might think about it and talk about it, and how I would need to remain silent, protecting her from the truth. I am not sure how I would do that. Then there is also the fear that perhaps she does recall, deep in her childish memory, the events of the night of the fire. I must trust in the future to take care of itself.
Less and less Caleb inhabits my dreams. Perhaps he lives in Stella’s dreams, and will she know him? Shall he call to her in her dreams, telling her where she has come from, what she has known? Did Niña find her father and her mother in her dreams; did the old woman Niña visit the gardens and beaches of her babyhood as she slept in the wooden house on the west side of Skye, beneath her wandering homeless moonbird quilt? As the dead sleep among the stars, do they dream of me and Stella Fox? Do they know us? Do the dead know us now?
Stella and I both had our hair cut very short by one of the nuns in the house where we ate the strawberries. Stella looks very sweet and pretty, but I feel that I look strange. I gaze in the mirror and I almost do not know myself. Perhaps that is a fortunate thing. We recently came to live in the wilderness with Gilia and Michael Vilez who are very kind good people. Michael is a doctor who has retired from his work, and Gilia is his wife. They live now in a remote place in the southwest of Tasmania, I do not know the precise location. Gilia and Michael call it Transylvania, and I believed that to be a joke until Gilia showed me an old map where the word ‘Transylvania’ was written. I have disappeared from the world, and I know not where I am. I might be in Transylvania. I think of the verse in Revelation where it says: ‘And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.’ That is a very long time.
I am dependent upon Father Fox, and upon Gilia and Michael for everything. Will this be forever? Forever is a very long time. Not forever. Not forever. For one thousand two hundred and threescore days. I believe that stretch of time will be my destiny, my time in the Tasmanian wilderness will come to an end and Stella and I will go out into a new life. I have almost forgotten that I am mute. I wonder how people manage to live in the world when they are silent, not deaf, but choked with too much knowledge.
As much to lull myself as to entertain Stella, as much to help myself to forget Caleb as to fill Stella’s little life with happiness, I ask Gilia to sing nursery rhymes and hymns to us, and to tell us the stories from Hans Christian Andersen and from the Brothers Grimm. Over and over again we have listened to The Steadfast Tin Soldier, and I am unable to understand why we love that one so much. It is about the one toy soldi
er who was different from all the rest because he was missing one leg. The paper ballerina he fell in love with was beautiful, and he thought she had only one leg too, but he was mistaken. And they ended up together, the tin soldier and the ballerina, in the cold ashes of the hearth. His little tin heart was welded to the jewel from the ballerina’s crown.
‘Shall I tell you about the paper ballerina, Stella?’ Gilia says, and she reads the story all over again, and Stella and I listen, enthralled. Gilia and Michael must be saints, I believe, they are so good and patient. May God hold us in the hollow of His hand.
CHAPTER TWELVE
God Sees the Red Umbrella
‘Always carry or wear a waterproof coat and strong clothing to prevent cuts from sharp or jagged rocks.’
WESTCOTT, SYNNOT AND POWELL, Life on the Rocky Shores of South-East Australia
It was February fifth, 1851, the day Minerva and Magnus and Niña found a haven on Puddingstone Island. Magnus had removed his heavy sodden jacket and placed it on a rock in the hope that it would dry. Minerva tied her trailing, bedraggled nightgown in two knots at either side. Barefoot and in long full white linen pantaloons she resembled a long-haired dancing sailor boy. If they didn’t die from dehydration and starvation, they could die from a chill, from exposure. In hope and excitement they examined the objects thrown up from the sea. Minerva drew Niña close—lone, serene Madonna and child. The storm died down in the night, and in the middle of the morning, there was a faint warmth and a strange stillness in the air. A great flock of bronze-blue-purple butterflies appeared above the island in a silent cloud; they wheeled and swiftly disappeared. They moved at great silvery phosphorescent speed, flying like twisting thistledown. Minerva stared after them, as if longing for the freedom of their air, dreaming of her own lost world, desiring the possibilities of flight. These are the Blotched Blues of family legend-in-the-making.
‘I looked up and saw them, blue, flying like thistledown, glinting in the sun, rushing off as fast as they came,’ she would say. And the many things that were in the bag and the trunk and the box are listed in the legend, like a list of gifts in a fairytale. If subsequent generations of storytellers have added to the contents, so be it.
Magnus and Minerva pulled the leather bag, large, thick, from where it was lodged between rocks. If there was no food in the bag, then they may at least resort to eating the bag itself. The contents were dry. Magnus took them out slowly, one by one, and laid them on the speckled surface of the rock. Minerva sat by, cradling Niña against her breast. From a hollow in the rock she would take up a little water, warm it in her own mouth, then spit it onto her fingers, and give her fingers to the baby to suck. Or she would dribble the liquid from her own mouth into the baby’s. As she did this she watched the treasure emerge as if from a magician’s bag. Four gold sovereigns, a silver pocket watch stopped at ten minutes past ten, a small pair of lady’s scissors, an oval hand mirror made from ivory, an ivory comb, a silver snuffbox, a gold necklace with an amethyst pendant, a small pair of white kid gloves. Minerva was longing to find something to eat or drink, and she felt a kind of hysteria rising inside her while these charming useless reminders of another life, a life so recently and suddenly dissolved, appeared in the light, and lay like dead things from another world, another time. Nothing was identified by an owner’s mark or name. Perhaps the greatest treasure in this bag was the rough woollen shawl, pale celestial blue. Minerva seized upon it; it was the baby’s salvation—well, half of it anyway. Warmth, but not food. Minerva gently wrapped Niña in the shawl. Niña stirred and murmured in alarm as the cold air bit her flesh, and again as the soft dry cloth embraced her. Then suddenly she opened her mouth wide and a frightful scream flew forth, and she screamed and screamed and screamed as she had not screamed before, her mouth wide and red, its tissues vibrating in a terrifying and monstrous throaty dance.
Scratched onto the lid of the tin trunk were the words: ‘Barnaby Coppin, Hobart Town.’ Magnus smashed the lock with a stone and opened the trunk. Inside lay, wrapped in a shroud of brown linen, twenty-four iron umbrella frames. He counted them out in amazement. Two green linen umbrellas. Two brown and white gingham umbrellas. Magnus pulled them all out, and they counted them as they went, as if doing an inventory for a shop. They began to laugh, with a kind of hysterical laughter at the absurdity of what was before them. A pink silk parasol with lime-green fringe and bamboo frame. A scarlet leather umbrella on the apex of which was a many-petalled red leather rose. The trunk was watertight and so everything was dry, the linen shroud a marvellous dry treasure. It could be a blanket, a sail, a shelter, a tent. Magnus opened the red leather umbrella and ran with it to plant it in a crevice, as high up on the island as he could. It stood there, a scarlet toadstool among the grey-green silent tattered windswept dreams of the lichen and the grasses and the pig-face.
‘Who would see it?’ Minerva asked, with a gesture not of hope but of helplessness and near despair.
‘God sees it,’ Magnus said unblinking. ‘Somebody will see it. If God sees it, somebody will come. God sees it.’
Because his speech was the speech of a highlander who had also lived in Glasgow, and because Minerva’s English was something she first learnt from her English governess in Peru, they did not always understand each other. But when Magnus said God could see the red umbrella, Minerva understood him perfectly. Their Gods were different but the same. Fate had brought the three of them to the island. Had they come there to die? Would it perhaps have been better to have drowned with Edward and all the others? This dreadful, dreadful thought was enough to pull Minerva’s spirit down.
The bag of the unknown woman with its remnants of a lady’s life; Barnaby Coppin’s umbrellas; then the box. This was the most valuable of the three things salvaged from the wreck, thrown up by the ocean that gives and takes. Three gifts from the sea—one object each for Magnus, Minerva and the baby. Minerva’s spirits rose again, and Magnus sighed and nodded as if in a kind of blessing, for within the opened box they found blessed food and drink. His most earnest prayers, so far, had been answered. Hope rose in his breast as he prayed now for rescue.
The box was stamped with the name: Rosa Hoffmann.
‘We can thank the Lord for Rosa Hoffmann,’ Magnus said solemnly. Minerva glanced at him. His plain Scottish Protestant way of looking at things was utterly foreign to her. He spoke only of God and the Lord, while Minerva’s lips were busy with soft and loud invocations of the saints and the Infant Jesus.
It seemed that Rosa Hoffmann was a meticulous and forward-thinking woman. The box contained, wrapped in a white silk cloth, sewn into an oil cloth, a tin of tea leaves, a stone jar of honey, one of raspberry vinegar, one of treacle, an apothecary’s jar containing syrup of muskmelon seeds, Middlewood’s Royal Abyssinian Flower Soap, a glass bottle of dark port wine, two wax candles, a bag of flour, a small green bottle of olive oil, a box of salt, a jar of calendula balm. A small bottle of ink. Four quills. An empty journal. A green flask of smelling salts. A hunting knife. A bottle of vetiver water. A mahogany box marked ‘Parker of Holborn’ containing a pair of pocket pistols. A few cups and plates of blue and white china, the dark blue patterns bleeding into the white. Glass phials containing seeds, marked: calendula, opium, foxglove, tansy, marigold, lavender, lettuce, cabbage, carrot, comfrey, mustard, dandelion, turnip.
Three books—an English translation of the story The Deserted House by E.T.A Hoffmann, The Mabinogion bound in brown leather, and a small fat blue volume of the Nursery and Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm, storybooks from a life already far, far away. Each book contained small black etchings that illustrated the stories, adding a dimension of mystery, magic, menace. The inscription in the book of fairytaless read, in a round and confident hand: ‘For my dearest Rosa, on your thirteenth birthday, may life smile upon you, From your loving Mama.’ Again the shipwrecked travellers set out all the objects on the rock. The sight of everything sent Minerva into a mood of bewilderment and confusion. Here were
so many reminders of civilised life, but without shelter and the society of others many of these things would be ludicrous and useless on this lump of rock in the middle of the nowhere sea. Magnus said nothing. With gentle warm fingers Minerva smoothed the calendula ointment on Niña’s round forehead, and on her bunched-up hands. The ointment and the stroking had the effect of calming the baby’s cries. She wiped some honey on her finger and put it in the baby’s mouth. Then Magnus found the last object in the box, a slender blue bottle of laudanum. This was the most useful and beautiful object of all, a bottle of forgetfulness, the greatest gift for the pain of memory, the terror of despair, a possible cordial for the baby.
These things, these discoveries in the containers sent up by fate to the shore of Puddingstone Island, Minerva later recalled and recorded in her journal. Perhaps she forgot some things; perhaps she put in things that were not there, things she imagined, things she wished for.
Thank God for poor Rosa Hoffmann, lying on the ocean floor off Puddingstone Island, trapped in a tangle of broken timbers, wrapped in the arms of a flesh-eating octopus. Perhaps part of her life had been smiled upon, for a time. If only she had thought to include a tinderbox in her luggage, for the castaways, her inheritors, had no fire. But each one sipped a little of the laudanum, soother of pain and anxiety. And the baby fell into a still, sweet slumber in Minerva’s arms. Then the silence enveloped the three of them, a silence deep with terrible possibilities and some faint shimmer of hope.