Thomas, A Secret Life

by A. J. B. Johnston

  Thomas wends through the branches along the little-used trail to where he wants to be, up where the river can be seen directly below. That river is black at this late hour of the day, twisting through the valley of Vire. He imagines he can hear the sound of the water’s passage down there, a pulsing ripple. In truth, he hears no such thing. What he thinks is the water is his future trickling away.

  He comes to a halt at the end of the path, where the ground ends and the long, straight drop to the river below begins. Thomas lifts his gaze to the trees on the other side of the Vire. He cups an ear to listen once more, this time for the rustle of their branches. Though it is much too far, he imagines he hears the leaves twisting on their stems. It suggests the tremble of petticoats. It won’t be long, he notices, looking up to the greying sky, before the valley disappears entirely in the darkness of the night. The sun has already sunk below the level of the trees on the other side of the river.

  He wonders how far it is down to the river. Is that one hundred or two hundred feet? And how long might that be if one were to fall or to jump? Would it be the length of a prayer before he hit the rocks or maybe the water? Depends on the prayer of course. He doubts you could get it all said, even a short one. Your mind would not work very well once you’d leapt off into the air. Too much of an unknown, too much of a thrill. Would the impact hurt? He’s not sure. It would certainly be different. They’d be sorry, his father and his mother, they’d be sorry for what they had done.

  Thomas looks at his feet. His shoes are old and worn, scuffed and one of the buckles is askew. Thomas bends to correct the buckle, to get it just right. He straightens again and surveys the dimming scene. He takes a deep breath, one to hang on to and hold. He looks again at his feet, how firmly they are planted on the ground. He wonders if they really will obey him if he tells them to jump.

  Thomas blinks away that thought and decides to study his hands. He holds them aloft in front of his face. He wouldn’t want anything to happen to them if he fell. He likes his hands. They’re good to him when he cradles the quill. And his face, he wouldn’t want his face to get hurt in any fall.

  There comes a whisper:

  Advance soft shadow

  Down the dark wind

  Deepen the twilight

  Dust of the sinned

  Thomas is startled. Those are not lines he’s ever heard before and he likes them a lot. He pats his breeches to see if in a pocket there might be a pencil. There is not, but then he doesn’t have a scrap of paper either. He could use his fingers and scratch the words in the dirt. He adjusts his legs and takes a deep breath. He closes his eyes, hands crossed on his chest. He wants the same words to come to him again.

  Advance soft shadow

  Down the dark wind

  Deepen the twilight

  Dust of the sinned

  Shadow swing round

  Out of the deep

  Blanket this air

  In

  “Hey! Hey, Thomas.”

  Thomas opens his eyes. He looks down to the river, dark now in the gloom, then he scans back along the trail. There’s a dark shape in the shadows, coming along between the trees. The shape is on the path and it’s coming fast.

  “Thought that was you. Whew. Ran all the way.”

  “Jean-Chrys, what … what’re you doing here?”

  “Your mother.” Jean-Chrys bends over with his hands on his knees. He is sucking deep breaths. “Came to the house. Said you’d … you’d taken off. She was … worried I guess. And she asked me to search.”

  Jean-Chrys looks up quizzically at Thomas. Thomas makes a sour face in return. He didn’t ask for this.

  Jean-Chrys stands straight, his full breath back. “Getting late, you know.”

  “Yes, I know.” Thomas studies his friend to see just how much he might know. About his parents and the Church and Thomas’s walk to the edge of the ridge.

  “Want to head back now? Together, I mean? Before it gets really dark. It’ll be black out here and … well, maybe it’s time.”

  Thomas doesn’t answer at once. He studies Jean-Chrys, someone he’s known forever. Well, since they both began to go to church and to school, and that was a long time ago. Then they’ve been to the collège together since then. He’s not as good as Thomas in Latin and rhetoric, but he seems to have a knack for philosophy and mathematics. It strikes Thomas in the fading light that his friend has an uncomplicated face. It reminds him of a cherub as the painters make them out to be. All the rosy-cheeked boyishness is still in its place. And now, because of his run, Jean-Chrys is flush on the brow and the cheeks. He took no hat in his haste, so his hair is dishevelled, his curls here and there. And the eyes, well, they aren’t asking Thomas any questions at all. They’re simply smiling, happy to come help a friend.

  Odd, is it not, that Jean-Chrys isn’t the least bit curious as to why Thomas left his home with night coming on and why he came up on this ridge? Or if he is curious, then isn’t it remarkable that he’s not asking why? That, thinks Thomas, is surely what one should have in a friend. No prying, no bother. Thomas puts a hand on Jean-Chrys’s shoulder. He pats him to tell him without words that he’s glad that he came.

  “What do you say?” says Jean-Chrys with a shrug. “Time to get back? Before the gate closes and we’re locked out?”

  Thomas pats his friend once more. “Yeah, guess so.”

  The two young men turn and begin to file silently back along the narrow trail. In a few minutes they will be back on the avenue of chestnut trees, which leads in turn up to the torch-lit town gate beyond. As Jean-Chrys leads the way, Thomas suddenly realizes with a start what he’s just lost. Several lines of poetry he liked had come to him when he was alone, before Jean-Chrys came along and disturbed his train of thought. As he walks along Thomas tries to summon the poetry’s return. Nothing comes, not a line, not a word. Thomas scuffs the ground, kicking dirt on the back of his friend’s stockings and breeches.

  “Hey. What’re you doing? What’s that?” Jean-Chrys turns full round.

  “Nothing,” says Thomas. His face is fierce in anger and disappointment but that face is not visible to Jean-Chrys in the near dark. “Nothing.”

  “Doesn’t sound like nothing.”

  “It is. Go on, turn round. Let’s get inside the gate.”

  —

  Back at home, up in his attic room at his desk after a wordless entrance into the house followed by a rapid, silent tread up the stairs, Thomas tries one more time to recapture the lost words he heard up high on the ridge. The quill is in hand, ink from the well waiting to make marks on the forlorn empty sheet. Yet not a word, not a one answers the call. He cannot even remember what the lines were about, though he’s certain they were pretty good. Something about the river, was it not?

  Thomas puts the plume back into its well. It’ll have to stay there for a while. He pushes back the chair and takes himself away from the table, over to lie on the narrow bed. Eyes gone large in concentration, he stares up at the bare wooden boards of the steeply pitched roof overhead. Still nothing comes, not a hint of a word. He shifts and tilts his head and stares at the engraving of the Virgin Mary pinned to the wood. He sends her a wordless prayer with the wave of a hand. Nothing comes his way in return.

  Thomas closes his eyes and rolls on his side. He brings his knees up into a child’s comforting curl. He wonders: maybe if he’d pushed Jean-Chrys off the ridge when he first arrived, maybe then the lines would have stayed.

  II

  Journey

  Vire, Normandy

  May 1715

  So far it’s just as easy as he imagined. The key goes in, the hand twists to the left and there comes the sliding sound and clunk. The door opens. Withdraw the key, step into the gloom, lower the satchel to the floor. Close the door softly behind. That’s that. Now he’s inside wh
ere he wants to be. It’s so simple, why didn’t he think of it before? Well, he did think of it before, two weeks before, but that was too soon to take this step. It’s only tonight that is right because tomorrow is hurrying on its way. By the time the next day gets here, Thomas will be done and be gone.

  —

  It took a while for it all to come clear. A month and a half ago, just after he turned fifteen, Thomas asked his father if there was anything he could do to help out in the shop, with the customers or anything else. Just something to keep him occupied until he went into the seminary, a matter of months away. No ulterior motive, not when he said it, none at all. He simply wanted to show his father he bore no grudge, even if he still did. Little did he know where his reconciliatory contribution to the family might lead.

  Jean Pichon was delighted. Thomas saw it in his face right away. Then he heard it in his voice.

  “Surely! That would be good, very good,” said his father, eyes a little treacly. Two firm hands grasped the son’s elbow. They gave a long squeeze. “A clothier you’ll learn to be. If only until you go off to the Church.”

  “Good then,” said Thomas, “just show me what to do.”

  At the time there was no plan, no aspiration for anything untoward. Though, truth be told, Thomas did hope that maybe his good deed would somehow be rewarded. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, is it not? Good deeds find a reward? It took a while to see what that reward might be. When it made its appearance, Thomas was as surprised as he could be that his reward was a possible escape.

  In the first week Thomas found out where nearly everything was in the shop and how it mostly worked. In the second week he stayed late one evening and observed how at day’s end the place was secured. Father checked the windows and made sure both doors were locked – the one to the street and the one that connected to the house. At the end of the third week Jean Pichon gave Thomas the keys to do the lock-up himself. When he was done, Thomas gave his father back the two keys that were used. Jean Pichon told him to follow him into the kitchen. Thomas watched as his father lifted the lid off of a pharmacy jar and dropped both keys inside then put the lid back on. “No one would think to look there,” his father said.

  “No, of course not,” Thomas replied. “Very smart.” He noted with a little smile that the hiding spot in the pharmacy jar was only two containers down from the honey pot into which he used to dip crusts of bread.

  Thomas’s eyes grew a little more bored each day to see how the hours and days of his cloth merchant father’s life ticked by. Luckily, he thought more than once, such a life was not in the cards for him. He still had no plan for what that future life might be and how he was going to avoid the Church, but he knew that at least he wasn’t going to be spending his weeks, months and years in this little Vire shop. Maybe a life wearing a cassock would not be so bad after all.

  One morning toward the end of his third week of working in the shop, while he was folding and putting away bolts of the horrible brown wool cloth, Thomas felt something odd. It was like a thought only there were no words. It was more of a sensation, right in the back of his head. Though he didn’t know what it was, he felt it had to be pursued, whatever it was. He took the sensation to be the forerunner of some thought or idea. Or maybe it was a longing, though his longings usually began in his breeches and this wasn’t one of those. Whatever it was, Thomas felt that something was coming and when it arrived he would pay attention.

  The following week Thomas glimpsed for the first time what that sensation had portended. He was putting away the least expensive bolts of fabric – brown drugget, brown flannel, dark blue flannelette and green serge – when the arm-waving Madame Couperin came in from the street. As always, she wanted to look at the latest cloth. Something about a dress she wanted to have made. Thomas’s father looked after the lady with as much deference as he could. It struck Thomas as funny that the man could be so obliging to customers yet so unyielding to his own blood. No matter. After Madame Couperin left the shop, having purchased ratteens of wool mixed with cotton, Thomas glanced over to his father to ask how many ells the lady had taken. That was when Thomas saw his father bend over beneath the little corner counter that no one ever used. It looked like he was putting something away down there because he was out of sight a whole minute or two. When his father stood up again, the hands were empty and he was glancing around as if he’d just done something secretive. Curious, Thomas idled over to where his father was.

  “Just wondering,” he said, tendering a shrug as if he didn’t really care, “what it is you put down there a moment ago …” Thomas pointed under the corner counter where his father had just been busy. “I didn’t know there was anything under there.”

  Jean Pichon held up a hand to stop his son from saying another word, and the eyes narrowed. Then he relaxed and gave his son a wistful smile.

  “It’s out of sight for a reason. It’s where I keep it all. The money, I mean. A strongbox.”

  Though there were only the two of them in the shop, Jean Pichon was whispering.

  “And this,” he said, pulling on a rawhide string that ran round his neck, one Thomas had always thought held a religious medal of some sort, “this is what opens the lock.”

  “Oh,” said Thomas, blinking. He knew the locks to the shop and where those keys were kept, but he’d not realized there was any kind of strongbox. Of course, the money people paid for the fabric had to be kept somewhere, didn’t it? “Might I look? Under the counter, I mean?”

  Jean Pichon studied his son for an uncomfortable moment then nodded slowly. He checked the empty, quiet shop once more for good measure. No, there were no customers, no one who might see.

  “No harm there, I guess.” But Jean Pichon went over to bolt the door to the street – just for as long as this was going to take – just in case. Then he came back to the corner counter and bent down behind it and pulled out what looked to Thomas like an ancient wooden box. The thing was the size of a large loaf of bread, one of the big round six-livres loaves, if such loaves were baked rectangular not circular in shape. There were two metal bands around the box and a large padlock in the front.

  “Heavy?” Thomas asked.

  “See for yourself.”

  Thomas crouched down and prepared to summon all his strength. It turned out he didn’t need to be Hercules. The box did have weight, but he was able to lift it. He smiled at his father as he demonstrated his feat of strength, jostling the box and holding it at waist height. He could hear the sound of coins stirring within.

  “Used to be heavier.” Jean Pichon gave a knowing look. Thomas recognized that his father was referring to the hated La Motte. But for that mistaken crusade, taking on the town’s most powerful man – a thought Thomas keeps to himself – why he might be heading off to study medicine in Paris after all.

  “Yes, I suppose it was.” Thomas felt the underside of the box with his left hand. There were what felt like small cracks and holes in the underside of the old thing. In one spot a finger went through far enough to touch the coins within. “Don’t you think it’s a bit … old?” Thomas nearly said “fragile” but thought better of it.

  “Of course it’s old. It has character. But the lock’s not. Have a look. That lock will never be picked.”

  “Let’s see.”

  Thomas laid the strongbox on the top of the counter and spun it to check out the lock on the front. Sure enough, the iron lock was large and imposing, and looked like it was only recently manufactured. Thomas sent an acknowledging look to his father, who responded by tugging on the rawhide string round his neck. Out into plain sight came the key.

  “That’s what opens it, is it?” said Thomas. “Better put it away.”

  “Right you are,” said Jean Pichon. He dropped the key back inside his shirt. “You put our box back under the counter and I’ll go unbolt the door.”

 
Thomas did as he was told and neither he nor his father said any more about the strongbox the rest of that day or the next. Nor did Thomas give it any further thought. It had made for an interesting few minutes on an otherwise dull day, that was all.

  Two nights later, however, Thomas woke abruptly in the darkest hour. He sat up straight in his bed and recalled a time when he was young and at the oceanside. He didn’t know exactly where he was or how old he was, but his father was with him. They were walking along a shore. What he remembered was the seabirds wheeling in the air. Gulls and terns. A few of the birds went to the shoreline and picked up something in their bills. They climbed to a great height then dropped what they had picked up. Down the birds would swoop to peck at what they’d just dropped.

  “What’re they doing?” Thomas remembered asking.

  “Mussels,” was the reply. “They’re cracking them. Once the shell gives way, they eat the meat that’s opened up inside.”

  “Oh,” Thomas had said at the time.

  He lay back down in his bed, mulling the memory, rolling his head from side to side. He wondered why such a long-ago day was coming to him now. Odd, to be sure. Wouldn’t it be better to get some sleep? Tomorrow was another day in the shop, and after that another two full weeks.

  And that was when it came to him. It arrived in a rush that was so sharp and clear that he couldn’t get back to sleep at all. He could only think about it over and over, step by step.

  “Pretty easy,” he said out loud at last, rolling over onto his side. He fixed his eyes on the moonlit rectangle of a window across the room and marvelled at what man could learn from nature if only he opened his eyes.

  —

  The question Thomas wonders about over the next few days is the matter of what is right and what is wrong. Is it as simple as the priests and the courts say? Is it really all laid down, on pages in this or that book? Well, who is the author of those books? Might their rules not be in their own unnatural favour?