Thomas, A Secret Life

by A. J. B. Johnston

  THOMAS

  A SECRET LIFE

  A Novel

  by A. J. B. Johnston

  Copyright © 2012 A. J. B. Johnston

  This book is a work of fiction dramatized from a historical viewpoint. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictionally.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Cape Breton University Press recognizes fair dealing exceptions under Access Copyright. Responsibility for the opinions, research and the permissions obtained for this publication rest with the author.

  Cape Breton University Press recognizes the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Block Grant program, and the Province of Nova Scotia, through the Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage, for our publishing program. We are pleased to work in partnership with these bodies to develop and promote our cultural resources.

  Cover design by Cathy MacLean Design, Pleasant Bay, NS

  Cover image: Vue du pont neuf à Paris / anonyme. - N°INV=RO 795 ; 1521 (Ro).

  Toulouse, Musée des Augustins, photo : Daniel Martin.

  Photo of A. J. B. Johnston by Chris Reardon Photo

  First printed in Canada

  eBook development by WildElement.ca

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Johnston, A. J. B.

  Thomas : a secret life : a novel / A.J.B. Johnston.

  ISBN 978-1-897009-74-1 [print]

  I. Title.

  PS8619.O4843T56 2012----C813'.6----C2012-903184-4

  The font used in this manuscript is Garamond, which would have been familiar to all French readers in the 18th century. Claude Garamond created the typeface in the 1540s for the French king François I. The French court later adopted Garamond’s Roman types for their printing. When Claude Garamond died in 1561, his punches and matrices were sold to a printer in Antwerp, which enabled the Garamond fonts to be used on many printing jobs throughout Europe. The only complete set of the original Garamond dies and matrices is at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, Belgium. Today, the Garamond typeface is regarded as eco-friendly because it uses less ink than many other fonts.

  Cape Breton University Press

  P.O. Box 5300

  Sydney, Nova Scotia B1P 6L2 CA

  www.cbupress.ca

  THOMAS

  A SECRET LIFE

  A Novel

  by A. J. B. Johnston

  Cape Breton University Press

  Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada

  For Elinor

  La nuit est la mère des surprises.

  – Pierre Claude Guignard, L’École de Mars (1725)

  I

  Departure

  Vire, Normandy

  December 1712

  The boy struggles in the dark, kicking at the panting vision of dogs running through his head.

  The dogs are in a woods, this Thomas knows. He knows them as shadows, long-stretched shadows a-running on wintry wastes, lean hunters bent on prey.

  Yet where is their prey? There has to be prey. There always is. For these are dogs, forest dogs, and they run like this only when there’s prey. If Thomas can’t see it, it must lie ahead. Deeper into the sentinel forest than the boy can yet see. Perhaps there will come a clearing, if a clearing these dense woods allow. It is hard to imagine. The black branchless trunks loom like a phalanx of thick oars and masts standing up straight. No, that’s not right. The trees are wooden soldiers. Dark soldiers whose furred canopies link arms overhead. There is only enough space among this wooden army’s legs on the white ground below for the dogs to run and weave in a ceaseless onward file.

  The snow in the dense woods is thin, a crisp covering of white hiding what the boy’s ears make out under the dogs’ drumming paws as the crush of last autumn’s dried leaves. Powdery bursts of white kick up as they run. Quick rise and long fall, the disturbed snow makes a second slow tumble to the frozen ground.

  There might be a moon, there must be a moon, how else can he see what he sees? Yet there is no hint of sky’s lantern nor any stars penetrating this forest of dark trees. Thomas twists and extends. He stretches long where he lies, sightless hands clenching then uncurling to understand. Then it comes to him: there’s something special about these woods and these dogs. This is a course being run, and it’s running through the heart of the land.

  A sudden wind, a dark gust, pushes into the woods. The dogs’ fur ruffles and the snowy cover underfoot turns a cold winter’s deep blue.

  The drum beats on, tireless legs all a-whirr. Rasps of hot breath in Thomas’s fearful ear. A rhythm of wants and needs. With a shiver, a shiver from his head to his toes, it’s made clear. These dogs, these blood-driven dogs, they’re not dogs at all. Nor hounds on a chase. They’re tongue-dangling wolves in a forest where it’s Thomas who is the prey.

  Run and rasp, run and rasp, the hungry wolves pound the frozen ground. Rasp and run, he hears them coming on. Behind him, beside him, and he’s running too. He’s running but they’re close. No, closer than that. He smells the lick of their foaming breath and knows they are near. His limbs, his only hope of escape, they start to freeze up. Thomas turns to face them as they come on the run.

  Run and leap, run and leap, leap and…

  “Maman!”

  The blanket is kicked off. Sent into the air of the grenier then fluttering to the cold floor.

  “Maman!” shouts the boy again, struggling to come round, to send away the sights and sounds of the dark woods and their wolves on the run. “Oh, please, please come now,” he implores the air above him, more a prayer than anything else.

  Thomas is shivering, his skin wet from the dream. He is frozen where he is, curled on the narrow attic bed. The blanket is out of his trembling reach, sprawled on the floor beside him not even an arm’s length away. His body has taken over, his mind cannot think. The grenier awash in the colour of spilled milk that’s coming from the little window on the other side of his room.

  —

  Ashes and embers, the fire is out. Thomas peeks from beneath a weight of blankets, arms round legs, hands clasped tight.

  Motionless in the dark, eyes wide and round, Thomas feels a hand smoothing the covers. Oh yes, her hand. His mother’s hand. She’s pressing through the wool blankets on his chest and shoulder too. Even when the pressure lessens Thomas knows where the hand has gone, to twist the frayed edge of the woollen cover, threads his mother’s fingers play round and round. His own hands slide up to find more heat between his thighs.

  Above the bed, through the tiny window that peers out upon the chimneys and rooftops of the town of his birth, comes the still milky light of an unseen moon. It paints the room pale and sickly. Thomas gives a start. The mother’s hand returns, to his hair this time. She pushes her boy’s head gently back down to the bolster.

  To the exposed wooden beams above the bed in his coldly lit room, to the chilled air that draughts across his attic space, Thomas asks the question that’s been troubling him of late. “Am I bad or good?” He does not say the words aloud, yet his mother feels his young frame tremble and sees his lips move in silent mouthing.

  “There, there,” she whispers. “Everything’s all right. Back to sleep you go.”

  Thomas is not so sure that’s what he wants. Not quite yet. Sleep was wher
e he’d been when a dream turned into a nightmare. A race through the woods that he couldn’t let come to its end. That’s why his mother is there beside him, seated on the edge of his bed. She has one hand upon his back, rubbing a circular path. The other is tousling the hair upon his head. She told him that she climbed the stairs to answer the shout. He did not at first remember the shout, though it made sense that he might call out after he’d seen what he’d seen.

  To soothe the child, her only boy, Marie came up to this his room, the coldest in a cold and wintry house, up at the top of the second set of steps. Too old at twelve to be calling out his mother’s name, Thomas was yelling it nonetheless and Marie answered it as she always does. Each time she leaves the huddled warmth of a husband’s bed and sets her feet on boards so chilled she has to pull on thick wool socks. The socks now wait on the chair beside her side of the bed just in case, just in case her little boy cries out in his sleep. Off she went, socks pulled on, grabbing a blanket from the armoire as she hurried past.

  “The moon,” was all he said in a tiny voice when she opened the door. She came and bent over him, covering his slim trembling frame with the blanket she’d brought and Thomas’s own that had been kicked to the floor. She pressed the covers to his body and leaned on him so he’d feel her weight and so she could transfer some of her heat. “The moon,” he whispered once more before he closed his eyes and wished he could undo the vision of his earlier sleep.

  Marie didn’t ask what it meant, “the moon,” and Thomas didn’t say. It was enough that she had come.

  It is not the first time he has awoken and called for her. It is the third time in a month. The third time since the weather turned cold, cold enough to keep snow on the rooftops of Vire and on the ground. She wonders, was it the same dream, always the same dream? She doesn’t know and won’t ask. She doesn’t want to encourage him to be so troubled by such a foolish thing. The moon. Marie shakes her head. Despite his twelve years, old enough for many boys to start acting like men, learning their fathers’ trades, Thomas is nowhere near ready. He should be showing more interest in their family business. A cloth merchant is better than many other trades, why can’t the boy see that? Marie does not know why her only son is so late. In her dark doubt and swirling worry, she still gives in, rising in the dark to answer Thomas’s cries when they come.

  “Won’t grow up” is how Marie’s husband, Jean Pichon, put it once. They were in the kitchen. He cast an accusing look in her direction. She shrugged it off and hid the wince, but she knew that he was right. Jean Pichon’s sleep is never troubled by foolish fancies. There are only two sides to her husband when they’re in bed. One is the stiffening twixt the legs; the other is worries of shipments of cloth gone astray. No, that’s not true, there’s a third side, the one that allows him to go deep asleep and snore like some kind of machine. Of late, the money worries are the most frequent. It’s become no easy matter to pay the bills of the household since the run-in with La Motte, the town’s perpetual mayor. Stupid business that, taking on Vire’s mightiest pillar. Her husband should have known you cannot win when you go against a superior. Tilt against a pillar hard enough and the roof can come down. Which it did, only not on Renaud Brouard sieur La Motte as it was supposed to but on Marie and Jean, found guilty of calumny, La Motte saw to that. So now there are pressures on Jean Pichon’s cloth-selling business like never before. Which, Marie muses, taking her hands away from her son to rub them together for a bit of warmth, means her husband has to have a vent for the way things turned out. Thomas, it seems, is that vent. Jean Pichon doesn’t often put it in words that Marie is coddling their only son, but then he doesn’t have to. Marie knows just by looking at her husband’s downcast face that that’s exactly what he thinks. He blames the boy’s disappointingly slow path to manhood on her side of the family. The first-born, on the other hand, eager and obedient Anne, she takes after my side, says Jean Pichon’s appraising look.

  Marie exhales deeply as she glances round Thomas’s moonlit attic room. It’s so bare. Yet it’s not because of the setback in the family business that her son’s room looks like it is fit for a monk. No, it’s more than that. It’s because her son wants to be a priest someday. He’s never admitted it; he may not even know it yet himself, but Marie sees that’s how it is. Her boy chooses to live at the top of the house in a cold and nearly empty room. It’s a stark and simple preparation for his later path. That’s why he has so few pieces of furniture up here. There’s the small bed in which he lies and where she is seated and there’s the old armoire against the far wall, barely visible in the gloom. Closer at hand is the rickety desk with its lone candlestick on top. And a couple of chairs. The wash basin and then the battered oval rug on the floor. She can’t see his chamber pot. It must be beneath the bed. Surely to God he is not one of those boys who pisses in the fireplace rather than in the pot, just because it saves him the time of taking out the pot and dumping it in the street. No, Marie shakes her head, not Thomas. Her nose would know if he’d ever done that, and he hasn’t. He’s a special boy, destined to be a priest.

  Marie closes her eyes. The warmth that comes when the lids slide down is a comfort. Not much of a comfort but better than none at all. She thinks her husband is of course right, about her coddling Thomas. Yet what can she do? We’re all the way we are, are we not? Me. My boy. There’s nothing we can do to be someone else. And that’s how Thomas is: soft, sensitive. One day he’ll be a wonderful man of the cloth. That’s why she comes to him now, so that that later day will arrive. Fate is fate. All we can do is give it a helping hand.

  “The moon,” Marie mouths, opening her eyes once again. The room is still a pale ghost, though brighter than before. The moon must be marching on, closer to the frame of the small window. “The moon,” she repeats as softly as she can, wanting to know why her son’s eyes were wet with fright when she first came into the room. She lays a hand upon his head once more and tries to caress away the recollection. “Oh, help us Lord,” she mouths with upturned face, staring at the beam above her head. Is this son of mine afraid of the moon with its unearthly light? She musses the boy’s long brown hair and issues a yearning sigh. How she wishes this moon-frightened son of hers might find some strength. Stand up on his own two feet. Grow a backbone. Those are things her husband, Jean, has said. Become a man. Marie shakes her head. A mother’s hopes may well end in disappointment, that she knows. It’s the curse of having hopes at all. Though in Thomas’s case, his slowness about making his way in the world can be forgiven if in the end he does become her shining priest.

  Thomas hears his mother sigh. He twists his head her way to see if she is all right. He senses that she’s puzzled by what he said when she came into his room. He’d near shouted out “the moon” when he should have said “the dogs” or truth be told “the wolves.” The moon was nothing more than the source of light in his room, and in the nightmare as well. Yes, it had to be the moon’s glow that painted the snow-covered floor of the sentinel forest first cold white then an even colder blue. “Maman,” he says, wanting now to explain. The spinning head, the throbbing heart, are gone.

  “Shoosh,” Marie says. “Shoosh. It’s all right. You’re all right. Be quiet and try to go to sleep.”

  Thomas does as he is told. Yet he wonders how long it’s been. How long has she been sitting with him, on the edge of the narrow bed? Minutes? Or could it be an hour or more? He’s warm now beneath the blankets and the comfort of a portion of her weight. He shifts to see his mother’s face. Her eyes are closed as if in prayer and yes, the lips they are moving though there is not much he can hear. He catches just enough to recognize the usual prayer, an invocation to Him on high. Well, to the entire Trinity and of course to Mary too. Thomas once used to say that very prayer himself – even as recently as a few months ago – yet he does not anymore. He no longer hears the call he once heard. In fact, he’s no longer sure he ever did. He now thinks it was his imagination, an im
agination shaped and willed on by the very woman seated on his bed. Thomas knows she wants a priest and that means it must be him. His older sister can only be a nun, and they have no other children.

  So she’ll come to understand that he has lost the Church’s call. She will, will she not?

  No, she can’t or she won’t. Thomas rolls over. He knows it’s true. He’s stuck. Still, he’s glad she came when he called. It was a troubling dream.

  Thomas listens to the rise and fall of a mother’s mumble, a prayer sent to the attic ceiling and the sky above. He knows his Latin and what the words mean. Nonetheless, he chooses not to hear any meaning but instead something like a running brook. The words are the stones in that stream.

  Thomas understands that such prayers repeated low and often are a comfort. Well, they’re a comfort for her, his mother, and many others. Mostly women, it comes to him. He’s never seen or heard his father in prayer. The man hardly goes to church. Why is that? Because women are the ones that have the babies, Thomas decides. That gives them the connection with the blessings of God, for children come from Him.

  Is this something I think myself or something I’ve been told? Thomas’s eyebrows rise and his mouth makes a shrug.

  Past his mother’s elbow, an elbow he notices is poking nearly out through a frayed portion of her chemise, Thomas makes out in a squint the rest of the tiny attic room. He sees his table, the one with the wobbly back leg. He pictures the leather-bound volume that lies inside the desk’s only drawer. The book is his, a gift from his father. Well, hardly a book and not much of a gift. From an auction six months ago: “thrown in with the rest” was what Father said that day, tossing it Thomas’s way. Not in a mean way, not at all, but it was not handed over carefully the way Jean Pichon gave big sister Anne the glass paperweight a moment earlier. Father said it was “of value” because it came from Venice, made by the Jews. “They have some secret,” he said with a knowing nod of the head. Anne’s gift fit in her hand and it was bluish green with specks and swirls. She keeps it in her bedroom window where it catches the sunlight for the hour or so it shines on that part of the house. Thomas’s gift, the two book cover boards, tossed not handed, has never seen the sun. It stays in the desk drawer where Thomas keeps it. The only light it catches is from a candle’s glow at night when Thomas has reason to take the thing out of its hiding place.