Stars Across the Ocean

by Kimberley Freeman

  I didn’t know then that dreaming about someone you have lost is very common, and not to do with ghosts at all. Then, I was even a little convinced that Uncle Oswald was making a connection from the other side. ‘I am glad you are having sweet dreams.’

  ‘See? You know the right thing to say. Not like that awful Doctor Mortensen who is convinced I have lost my mind. I have not!’ She refilled her own cup. ‘Madame Azhkenazy may be a Russian, but she is not a crook. She is helping me contact Oswald. He is still around, you know. I can feel him.’

  I didn’t know how to respond. I knew, of course, that many people were interested in spiritualism. And I knew that my vicar back in Hatby was very opposed to such practices. But all I could see was that my aunt, whom I’d expected to find horizontal with grief, was her usual bright self. ‘If Madame Azhkenazy is providing you comfort,’ I said, ‘then I am glad she is helping you.’

  She reached out to pat my hand. Her skin was thin and pale. I could see the veins blue beneath the surface.

  ‘She does look rather fearsome, though,’ I continued.

  ‘Oh, do not be frightened of her, my dear. She will not harm you in any way. But you must understand that she has seen things that none of us shall ever see, and we should be horribly changed and fearsome ourselves if we had. I doubt that talking with the dead is a pleasant pastime, and she has rather a lurid history herself.’ Harriet launched into a summary of Madame Azhkenazy’s background as a poor child from Novgorod who was ostracised for having visions. While she spoke, my breakfast arrived and extreme hunger made me graceless, but Harriet either didn’t notice or didn’t care. I always had such an appetite in summer. Perhaps it was due to the long days of rambling outside getting, as my mother cautioned me on the rare occasions she noticed me, ‘ruined with freckles’.

  ‘Now, you must forgive me,’ Harriet said at length. ‘I have the drapers coming in this morning to take measurements for the drawing room and the bedrooms. I am rather bored of the curtains we have now and I intend to have them all in shades of green. It was Oswald’s favourite colour, you know. Can you entertain yourself?’

  ‘Gladly,’ I said. ‘I’ll take a walk.’

  ‘Good girl. There’s a lovely old well down past the church. All sorts of superstitions attached to it, but such a pretty place. They call it the Hawthorn Well, and the old pagans used to worship there. You’ll miss it if you don’t know to look for it. You’ll see the procession of hazel trees in the near corner of the churchyard. They say if you drop a buttercup in the well, it will show you the face of the man you’ll marry.’ Again, her voice caught and she seemed shaken by something deep within.

  ‘That sounds like a very silly superstition, aunt,’ I said to her.

  Her smile was restored. ‘Yes. It is. I never liked buttercups anyway. Common as muck, they are. You’ll do better than buttercups, my Little Sparrow.’

  She rang the bell for the maid to clear away, and we went our separate ways.

  •

  What a warm, cloudless day it was. The sun was in the leaves and the birds all sang as though they knew what was going to happen, whom I was going to meet.

  I followed the road down towards the millstream, then took the path along beside it. The rushing water emptied into a pool between the trees, where ducks swam and dragonflies darted. I kept following the trickle through the woods, and up to a tree-lined gully where a row of giant sycamore trees bent their branches to the ground. On the other side of the gully, farmland opened out and sheep grazed up a green hill. I was invigorated by the clear weather and decided to walk up the hill to see what was on the other side.

  I didn’t realise until I was halfway up that I’d underestimated how steep the hill was, nor how hot it would make me. My legs were burning when I finally reached the summit, and there was no shade. I sat down on the far side of the hill, from where I could see all the way to the next village, nestled in a wooded valley, and a carriage travelling on a distant ridge. The only sound was the shushing of the breeze and a buzzing bumblebee at a patch of wildflowers.

  Such quiet bliss. But I was so warm!

  So, I retraced my steps back down and followed the signs to the churchyard, meaning to find the Hawthorn Well. By the time I got to the churchyard, though, I was sticky and red-faced and hot. The sun was moving towards noon in the sky, and all I wanted was to get somewhere cool and have a drink of water.

  And that is why I went into the church that day. Outside, a cart sat beside the path and an unhitched horse wandered about the grass siding, nibbling on long tender grass. The Church of St Thomas was more than five hundred years old, and was in the process of having all the old box pews removed and bench pews fitted. I knew this, because last time Aunt Harriet and I spoke, she had told me about how she’d led the Parish Society’s fundraising efforts. Inside, I was unsurprised to see long planks of timber stacked up against the walls, and find a large section of the nave empty of seats: just a bare stone floor. I relished the cool as I closed the bright sunshine out behind me. In the chancel was a man with his back to me, doing something near the altar. I presumed it to be the vicar, who Harriet had told me was a young man with thick hair, as this man appeared to be.

  I called out, ‘Excuse me, Vicar, could I trouble you for a drink of water?’

  He turned, and I saw immediately that he was not a vicar. He wore brown pants, a pale blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and a dirty apron. Behind him was a saw-horse, and a collection of tools.

  ‘I am sorry—’ I started, at precisely the same time he said, ‘I am no vicar.’

  ‘I can see that,’ I said, then wondered if I sounded as though I was judging him. I thought about telling him that Aunt Harriet thought the vicar quite a silly young man and there was no shame in being identified as different from him.

  But he smiled and said, ‘I can still fetch you a drink of water.’ His accent was French, only slightly, as though he had been in England many years.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It’s a terribly hot day.’

  ‘I went to the pump just half an hour ago,’ he said. I watched him as he moved to the south aisle to a tall pail. Hung on the side was a tin cup, which he dipped in the water and then brought back for me.

  It was cool in my hands, and the water tasted sweeter than water had ever tasted. Now he was close, I could see his face more clearly. He had wide, flat cheeks and chestnut sideburns at odds with his dark curls. His nose was straight, but not thin, his nostrils slightly flared. His mouth was full and wide. He had a day or two’s worth of beard stubble. It was his eyes that I would remember later, though. They were a shade between green and grey, with heavy lids that folded to an exotic angle at the outside corner, and thick black lashes. I became aware I was staring and handed him back his cup. ‘Merci,’ I said.

  He responded with a long line of French that I hadn’t a hope of understanding and I laughed lightly and shook my head. ‘I have the French of a schoolgirl, a careless one at that.’

  ‘Well. Lucky my English is so good.’

  I stood there, smiling at him, with him smiling back at me, and it might have gone on like that for quite a while had not the real vicar appeared then to interrupt us.

  ‘May I help?’

  His words broke the spell. How Aunt Harriet had ever thought the vicar young was beyond my understanding, but then she was sixty, so perhaps anyone below that age was young to her. He was a steel-haired middle-aged man with a limp. He peered at me, then at the carpenter, and back again at me suspiciously.

  I introduced myself and told him I was Harriet’s niece, and his suspicion melted away on hearing my aunt’s name. The carpenter had moved back to his saw-horse and I made five minutes of polite conversation with the vicar, my eyes sliding back to the carpenter a few times, before finally having the courage to say, ‘Your man there provided me with a drink when I came in.’

  ‘Emile? Did he?’

  Emile.

  ‘He’s a fine man as well a
s a fine carpenter, then,’ the vicar continued. ‘And now, I’m sure your aunt must be expecting you home for lunch.’

  I understood the vicar was stopping me from being alone with Emile again, and this thought both annoyed and chastened me. I nodded. ‘Good day, then.’ I called out, ‘Thank you again, Emile.’

  He lifted a hand but didn’t turn around. ‘Good day, my lady.’

  I left the church, and returned to the bright street.

  •

  I suppose you think me a silly young fool, so perhaps it will surprise you to know that that day, when I met Emile, I was not young by anyone’s definition. At six-and-twenty, I was in danger of being thought ‘left on the shelf’, but the truth was that my parents were prevaricating over which of their daughters – my sister or me – should marry Mr Ernest Shawe (who, it should be remarked, never struck me as earnest but was always very sure of himself), and Mr Shawe’s regular journeys to the Far East for trade meant that a deal had taken a long time to strike. Of course, my sister and I both knew that, had Mr Shawe been keen on either of us, it would have been decided a long time ago. Moreover, there was another fellow waiting in the wings, a Mr Wilburforce Peacock, who was nearly forty; and I had been threatened with him too. I did realise, of course, that I would become either Mrs Shawe or Mrs Peacock in the next year or so. I knew and accepted my fate, as all women of my breeding do because they must. But perhaps knowledge and acceptance in the mind do not translate to knowledge and acceptance in the body, and it seemed to be my body that had the strongest reaction to Emile the carpenter. Indeed, it barely let me sleep that night. A restlessness infected all my muscles. I could not be comfortable. I tossed and turned, and whenever I dozed off, I thought of him again and it was like tasting something sweet and cool.

  The next morning, Harriet and I agreed over breakfast that we would take a picnic lunch to the Hawthorn Well at noon. I spent the morning in my room reading with Basil on my lap, and went downstairs only when I heard the doorbell ring. Aunt Harriet had not said anything about expecting visitors, especially this close to our planned departure. I paused at the bottom of the stairs and listened into the entranceway.

  ‘Madame is not expecting you,’ Jones was saying.

  ‘She will see me,’ a voice said in return, and I recognised the accent as Madame Azhkenazy’s.

  Jones was silent a half a moment, then said, ‘Do come in,’ and led her to the drawing room.

  Curious, I followed in their wake. I arrived at the drawing room just as Jones was leaving, closing the door.

  ‘Madame Azhkenazy?’ I asked.

  Jones’s mouth pulled into a tight line. ‘She has been turning up unannounced rather a lot of late.’

  ‘She gives my aunt comfort,’ I said reassuringly.

  ‘Your aunt gives her money,’ Jones countered, then realised she had said too much and bowed her head. ‘Sorry, ma’am,’ she muttered and slipped past me.

  I opened the door to the drawing room. The curtains had been taken down and the sun dazzled through the window panes. Aunt Harriet sat on the sofa. I had her profile. Madame Azhkenazy kneeled on the floor in front of her, and held her hands.

  ‘Aunt?’ I said, interrupting them.

  Madame Azhkenazy leapt up, her hands still around Harriet’s, and gave me her chilling stare, but this time I didn’t flinch from it.

  ‘Oh, there you are, Little Sparrow,’ Harriet said. ‘Madame Azhkenazy had a prophetic dream last night and she has come to tell me about it. Would you mind if I skipped our picnic?’

  I thought about saying yes, I would mind. I thought about dragging her out of Madame Azhkenazy’s clawed fingers, but then I changed my mind. Harriet trusted her, and Harriet certainly had plenty of money. She would hardly be ruined by a fortune teller.

  ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘I hope you gain some comfort from your … friend.’ I nodded at Madame Azhkenazy and offered her a smile; she blinked back at me warily. She must have been quite beautiful as a young woman, with her thick straight hair and her round cheeks. ‘Good day to you both.’

  I left the drawing room and was crossing the entranceway to go back upstairs when Toby emerged from below stairs with a basket. ‘Here you are, ma’am. Your picnic.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘We aren’t going. Can you—’ I was going to ask him to save it for the next day, but then I said, ‘Actually, I will take it, thank you, Toby. I’ll go by myself.’

  He smiled and offered me the basket. ‘Splendid idea, ma’am. It’s not a day for being inside.’

  So, I struck out on my own to find the Hawthorn Well, the basket over my right arm. I walked up the street towards the church, wondering if Emile was in there today, wondering if he had slept poorly last night thinking of me, then telling myself not to be such a ninny. For all I knew he was married, or not interested in red-faced, sweaty blonde women who mistook him for the vicar. I kept my head down as I walked past his horse and cart, past the church, and through the arch into the churchyard. It was walled by grey stone, with a large yew tree in its centre. A wooded slope came up on my right and I walked right past it, forgetting that Harriet had said the well was hidden. I walked instead to the far side of the churchyard and back, and was about to let myself through the gate on the north side and out into the fields when a voice behind me called my name.

  I turned. It was Emile, in his shirt sleeves and apron, waving to me from the gate through to the church. I waved back, then stood awkwardly, wondering what to do next. He seemed to be doing the same.

  I took the first step, and when he saw me move towards him, he also uprooted himself and we met under the yew tree.

  ‘Good afternoon, Emile.’

  ‘And to you, ma’am. What brings you back to the church today?’

  ‘I’m looking for the Hawthorn Well,’ I said. ‘My aunt says it’s a lovely place for a summer picnic.’

  ‘It’s back that way.’ He inclined his head. ‘Would you like me to show you?’

  ‘I would like that very much,’ I said. ‘Kindly lead the way.’

  He turned and I followed him, stealing glances at his strong shoulders and back. ‘You must look for the hazel trees,’ he said, as we approached the wooded slope. I peered at the profusion of leaves and branches in front of me, and discerned the round hazel leaves. Two tall trees, their foliage almost grown together, stood side by side. He parted the leaves and I stepped between them, and found myself in a dark procession of hazels, even spaced and overgrown, leading down a slope for thirty yards.

  ‘Down there,’ he said.

  When we emerged on the other side, we stood in a walled space, paved with ancient stones that surrounded a bubbling spring.

  I think I might have gasped with delight. ‘This is beautiful,’ I said, placing the basket on the ground and kneeling on the stone. I reached into the well. It was cool and clear. ‘If I’d known this was here yesterday I needn’t have bothered you for a drink,’ I said. Then I turned to smile at him.

  Emile gave a little bow and said, ‘I shall leave you be, my lady.’

  My body shouted no, but thankfully the word didn’t make it out of my mouth. ‘I have a picnic,’ I blurted instead. ‘There’s more than enough for two. Will you join me?’

  He wavered, clearly as full of doubts as I was. We both knew that Harriet, the vicar, everybody would find the idea of me sharing my picnic with the village carpenter highly incongruous if not improper.

  But it was a warm summer’s day. The well was secluded and shady. And we both wanted it.

  ‘I will,’ he said, with another incline of his head.

  ‘Good show,’ I said, and I set about spreading out the rug on the paving stones and laying out the jars and unwrapping the treats Cook had packed up for me. He untied his apron and hung it over a low tree branch, and sat on the opposite edge of the rug. I passed him a wooden plate and a spoon, and we began to sample the food. Cold lamb and pigeon pies, dressed salads, rolls and cheese, tiny fragile fruit tarts. There was also a bot
tle of lemonade and two tin cups. I filled my plate and then sat back, trying to eat delicately even though I was ravenous.

  ‘What marvellous food,’ he said, spearing some lamb on his fork. ‘I haven’t eaten this well in …’ He trailed off, but I didn’t ask him to finish.

  ‘It’s my Aunt Harriet’s cook,’ I said. ‘She’s very good. She’s been in service to my aunt for nearly fifteen years.’ I took a toobig bite out of a pie, and had to put my hand over my mouth while I chewed.

  He smiled at me. ‘Steady now.’

  I flushed with embarrassment, then managed to swallow it and say, ‘I have rather an appetite for a woman. Aunt Harriet has had to caution me twice already since I arrived. “Slow down, Little Sparrow, there’s plenty of food and plenty of time.”’

  He seemed to be trying not to laugh. ‘Little Sparrow?’

  ‘It’s what she has always called me. When I was very small, she visited one miserable November when it rained forever. I was desperate to get into the garden, but my mother wouldn’t let me. Aunt Harriet said I reminded her of a little sparrow, trapped in the house and always trying to be free. Clearly it wasn’t about how I ate.’

  We laughed together. I was delighted by the way the skin around his eyes creased, the way I could see his back teeth. But mostly I was delighted that I’d made him laugh. ‘What’s the French word for sparrow?’ I asked him.

  ‘Moineau,’ he said.

  ‘That’s pretty. Everything sounds prettier in French.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ he said. Then, ‘Actually you are right. I was only being polite.’

  ‘Well. Don’t be polite. Be yourself,’ I said.

  ‘If that is what you wish, ma’am.’

  ‘And don’t call me ma’am.’

  ‘If that is what you wish, Moineau,’ he said, grinning.

  A lovely bubbling happiness welled up in me. My smile seemed too big for my face. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that is what I wish.’

  ‘Here is a good location to wish anything,’ he said, gesturing behind him with one of his big, square hands. ‘You see?’