Love her.
Curator’s note: The following pages were found in a cave on an islet eleven miles southwest of Barbados. The narrative is, of course, incomplete, disjointed, and unreliable, as is the information contained within its pages. There is no record of Brother Marcel Renau living in the Monastery of the Holy Veil during the years in question. There is a record of the order for the execution of a Gabrielle Belain in St. Pierre in 1698; however, no documentation of the actual execution exists. Some of this narrative is indecipherable. Some is lost forever. Most, if not all, is blatantly untrue, the ravings of a lost sailor gone mad without water. As to the conditions in which these writings were found: this too remains a puzzle. The cave was dry and protected and utterly empty except for three things: a human skeleton, curled in the corner as though sleeping; a two-foot length of human hair, braided tightly with a length of ribbon and a length of rope, laid across the hands of the dead man; and an oiled and locked box made of teak, in which these documents were found. Across the lid of the box the following words had been roughly scratched into the wood, as though with a crude knife or a sharp rock: “Bonsoir, Papa.”
Two days before Gabrielle Belain (the pirate, the witch, the revolutionary) was to be executed, a red bird flew low over the fish market, startling four mules, ten chickens, countless matrons, and the Lord High Constable. It flew in a wide spiral higher and higher until it reached the window of the tower where my beloved Gabrielle awaited her fate. People say that she came to the window, that the shadows from the bars cut across her lovely face. People say that she reached out a delicate, slightly freckled hand to the bird’s mouth. People say that she began to sing.
I stood in the hallway with the two guards, negotiating the transfer of food, water, and absolution across the threshold of the wood and iron door that blocked Gabrielle from the world. I did not see the bird. I did not hear song. But I believe them both to be real. This is the nature of existence: We believe, and it is. Perhaps God will turn His back on me for writing such heresy, but I swear it’s the truth. Gabrielle, like her mother before her, was a Saint Among Men, a living manifestation of the power of God. People believed it, therefore it was true, and no demonstration of the cynical power of bureaucrats and governments and states could unbelieve their believing.
Gabrielle Belain, at the age of ten, walked from the cottage where she lived with her mother past the Pleasure House to the shore. The moon, a thin slash on a glittering sky, cast a pale light on the foamy sand. She peered out onto the water. The ship, hidden in darkness, was still there, its black sails furled and lashed to the tethered boom, its tarred hull creaking in the waves. She could feel it. Actually, there was never a time when she could not feel it. Even when it was as far away as Portugal or Easter Island or the far tip of the continent, she knew where the ship was. And she knew she belonged to it.
Four porpoises bobbed in the waves, waiting for the child to wade in. They made no sound, but watched, their black eyes flashing over the bubbling surf. A mongrel dog, nearly as tall as the girl, whined piteously and rubbed its nose to her shoulder.
“You can’t come,” she said.
The dog growled in response.
Gabrielle shrugged. “Fine,” she said. “Please yourself. I won’t wait for you.” She waded in, caught hold of a porpoise fin, and swam out into the darkness, the dog paddling and sputtering behind her.
The sailors on the quiet ship watched the sky, listened to the wind. They waited. They had been waiting for ten years.
By the time Gabrielle was thirteen, she was the ship’s navigator. By the time she was fifteen, she was captain, and a scourge to princes and merchants and slave traders. By the time she was eighteen, she was in prison—chained, starved, and measured and weighed for hanging.
At night, I see their hands. I do not see their faces. I pray, with my rattling breath, with the slow ooze of my blistered skin, with my vanishing, worthless life, that I may see their faces again before I die. For now, I must content myself with hands. The hands of Gabrielle, who thwarted governors, generals, and even the king himself, and the hands of her mother, who healed, who prayed, and God help me, who loved me. Once. But oh! Once!
Gabrielle’s mother, Marguerite Belain, came from France to Martinique in the cover and care of my order as we sailed across the ocean to establish a new fortress of prayer and learning in the lush, fragrant islands of the New World. It was not our intention to harbor a fugitive, let alone a female fugitive. We learned of Marguerite’s detention through our contacts with the Sisters of the Seventh Sorrow, several of whom waited upon the new and most beloved lover of the young and guileless king. Although the mistress had managed to bear children in her previous marriage, with the king she was weak-wombed, and her babes flowed, purple and shrunken, into her monthly rags with much weeping and sorrow in the royal chambers. Marguerite was summoned to the bed of the mistress, her womb now quickening once again.
“Please,” the mistress begged, tears flowing down those alabaster cheeks. “Please,” she said, her marble mouth, carved always in an expression of supercilious disdain, now trembling, cracking, breaking to bits.
Marguerite laid her hands on the belly of the king’s beloved. She saw the child, its limbs curled tightly in its liquid world. The womb, she knew, would not hold. She saw, however, that it could, that the path to wholeness was clear, and that the child could be born, saved, if certain steps were taken immediately.
But that was not all she saw.
She also saw the child, its grasping hands, its cold, cold eye. She saw the child as it grew in the seat of authority and money and military might. She saw the youth who would set his teeth upon the quivering world and tear upon its beating heart. She saw a man who would bring men to their knees, who would stand upon the throats of women, whose hunger for power would never cease.
“I cannot save this child,” Marguerite said, her leaf green eyes averted to the ground.
“You can,” the mistress said, her granite lips remaking themselves. “And you will.”
But Marguerite would not, and she was duly imprisoned for the duration of the pregnancy, until upon the birth she would be guillotined as a murderess if the child did not live and as a charlatan if it did.
It did not. But it did not matter: Marguerite had been spirited away, disguised in our habit and smuggled onto our ship of seafaring brethren before the palace ever did turn black with mourning.
I helped her escape, my Brothers and I. I placed our rough robes over those blessed shoulders, and helped her to wind her hair into the darkness of the cowl. I pulled it low over her face, hiding her from the world, and took her hand as we hurried through the city’s underground corridors, never stopping until we made it to the harbor, and hid her in an empty wine barrel on our ship. I told myself that the thudding of my heart was due to the urgency of our action. I told myself that the hand that I held in my hand was beloved because we are all beloved by God. To be human is to lie, after all. Our minds tell lies to our hearts and our hearts tell lies to our souls.
It was on the eighteenth day of our voyage that Marguerite gave me leave into her chamber. It was unasked for and yet longed for all the same, and came to me the way any miracle occurs—in a moment of astonishment and deep joy. On that same day—indeed, that same moment—a storm swirled from nowhere, sending the wind and sea to hurl themselves against the groaning hull, and striking the starboard deck with lightning.
Was it the feeble lover, I wondered, or the lightning that produced such a child when she bore a babe with glittering eyes?
Gabrielle. My child. I am supposed to say the issue of my sin, but I cannot. How can sin produce a child such as this?
On the morning of the forty-first day, a ship with black sails appeared in the distance. By noon we could see the glint of curved swords, the ragged snarl of ravenous teeth. By midafternoon, the ship had lashed itself to ours and the men climbed aboa
rd. In anticipation of their arrival, we set food and drink on the deck and opened several—although not all—of our moneyboxes, allowing our gold to shine in the sun. We huddled together before the mainmast, our fingers following prayer after prayer on our well-worn rosaries. I reached for Marguerite, but she was gone.
A man limped from their ship to ours. A man whose face curled in upon itself, whose lashless eyes peered coldly from a sagging brow, whose mouth set itself in a grim, ragged gash in a pitiless jaw. A mouth like an unhealed wound.
Marguerite approached and stood before him. “You are he,” she said.
He stared at her, his cold eyes widening softly with curiosity. “I am,” he said. He was proud, of course. Who else would he be? Or, more importantly, who else would he desire to be? He reached for the cowl that hid the top of her head and shadowed her face and pulled it off. Her hair, the color of wheat, spilled out, poured over the rough cloth that hid her body from the world, pooled over her hands, and around her feet. “And you, apparently, are she.”
She did not answer, but laid her hands upon his cheeks instead. She looked intently into his face, and he returned her gaze, his hard eyes light with tears. “You’re sick,” she said. “You have been for . . . ever so long. And sad as well. I cannot heal the sadness, but I can heal the sickness. He too suffers.” She pointed to the pockmarked man holding a knife to the throat of our beloved Abbot. “And he, and he.” She pointed to other men on the ship. Walking over to the youngest man, who leaned greenly against the starboard gunnels, she laid her hand on his shoulder. “You, my love, I cannot save. I am so sorry.” Tears slipped down her cream and nutmeg skin. The man—barely a man, a boy, in truth—bowed his head sadly. “But I can make it so it will not hurt.” She took his hand, and squeezed it in her own. She brought her pale lips to his smooth brown cheek and kissed him. He nodded and smiled.
Marguerite ordered a bucket to be lowered and filled with seawater. She laid the bucket at the feet of the captain. Dipping her hands in the water, she anointed his head, then his hands and his feet. She laid her ear upon his neck, then his heart, then his belly. Then, scooping seawater into her left hand, she asked the pirate captain to spit into its center. He did, and immediately the water became light, and the light became feathers, and the feathers became a red bird with a green beak who howled its name to the sky. It flew straight up, circled the mainmast, and spiraled down, settling on the captain’s right shoulder.
“Don’t lose him,” she said to the captain.
In this way she healed those who were sick, and soothed the one who was dying, giving each his own familiar: a one-eared cat, an air-breathing fish, a blue albatross, and a silver snake.
When she finished, she turned to the captain. “Now you will return to your ship and we will continue our journey.”
The captain nodded and smiled. “Of course, madam. But the child in your womb will return to us. She was conceived on the sea and will return to the sea. When she is old enough we will not come for her. We will not need to. She will find us.”
Marguerite blinked, bit her lip so hard she drew blood, and returned to the hold without a word. She did not emerge until we made land.
Our brethren that had preceded us met us on the quay and led us to the temporary shelters that crouched, like lichen, on the rock. That the new church with its accompanying cloister and school were unfinished, we knew. But the extent of the disorder was an unconcealed shock to all of us, especially our poor Brother Abbot, whose face was stricken at the sight of the mossy stones upon the ground.
Brother Builder hung his head for the shame of it. “This is a place of entropy and decay,” he muttered to me when the Abbot had gone. “Split wood will not dry, but erupts with mushrooms, though it has heated and cured for days. Cleared land, burned to the ground, will sprout within the hour with plants that we cannot identify or name—but all our seeds have rotted. Keystones crack from the weight of ivy and sweet, heavy blossoms that were not there the night before. The land, it seems, does not wish us to build.”
The Abbot contacted the Governor, who conscripted paid laborers at our insistence—freemen and indentured, Taino and grim-faced Huguenots—to assist with the building, and soon we had not only church and cloister, but library, bindery, stables, root cellars, barrel houses, and distilleries.
Desperately, I hoped that Marguerite would be allowed to stay. I hoped that the Abbot would build her a cottage by the sea where she could keep a garden and sew for the abbey. Of course, she could not. The Abbot gave her a temporary shelter to herself, forcing many of the brethren to squeeze together on narrow cots, but no one grumbled. At the end of our first month on the island, she left without saying good-bye. I saw her on the road as the sun was rising, her satchel slung across her back. Her hair was uncovered and fell in a loose plait down her back, curling at the tops of her boots. I saw her and called her name. She turned and waved but said nothing. She did not need to. The sunlight bearing down on her small frame illuminated at last that to which I had been blind. Her belly had begun to swell.
Gabrielle was born in the vegetable garden that separated the Pleasure House from the small cottage where Marguerite lived and worked. Though the prostitutes gave her shelter in exchange for her skills as a cook, a gardener, and a healer, it soon became clear that her gifts were greater and more numerous than originally thought. As Marguerite’s pregnancy progressed, the gardens surrounding the Pleasure House thrived beyond all imaginings. Guavas grew to the size of infants, berries spilled across the lawns, staining the stone walkways and steps a rich, dark red, like blood coursing into a beating heart. Vines, thick and strong as saplings, snaked upward along the whitewashed plaster, erupting in multicolored petals that fluttered from the roof like flags.
Marguerite, when the time came, knelt among the casaba melons and lifted her small hands to the bright sky. Immediately, a cloud of butterflies alighted on her fingers, her heaving shoulders, her rivers of gold hair, as the babe kicked, pressed, and slipped into the bundle of leaves that cradled her to the welcoming earth.
The girls of the Pleasure House saw this. They told the story to everyone. Everyone believed it.
After Gabrielle was born, Marguerite scooped up the afterbirth and buried it at the foot of the guava tree. The girls of the Pleasure House gathered about her to wash the baby, to wheedle the new mother to bed, but Marguerite would not have it. She brought the baby to the spot where the placenta was buried.
“You see this?” she said to the baby. “You are rooted. Here. And here you will stay. The captain can believe what he will, but you are not a thing of water. You are a child of earth. And of me. And I am here.” And with that she went inside and nursed her baby.
Though I assume it was well known that the babe with glittering eyes was the product of the one time (but oh! Once!) that Marguerite Belain consented to love me, we had chosen to believe that the child was a miracle, conceived of lightning, of sea, of the healing goodness of her mother. And in that believing, it became true. Gabrielle was not mine.
For months, the Abbot sent a convoy of monks to the little cottage behind the Pleasure House to argue in favor of a baptism for the child. Marguerite would not consent. No water, save from the spring that bubbled a mile inland, would touch Gabrielle. She would not bathe in the sea. She would not taste or touch water that came from any but her mother’s hand.
“She will be rooted,” she said. “And she will never float away.”
After a time, the girls of the Pleasure House emerged to shoo us off. They had all of them grown in health and beauty since Marguerite’s arrival. Their faces freshened, their hair grew bright and strong, and any whiff of the pox or madness or both had dissipated and disappeared. Moreover, their guests, arriving in the throes of hunger and lust, went away sated, soothed, and alive. They became better men. They were gentler with their wives, loving with their children. They fixed the roof of the church, rebuilt t
he washed-out roads, took in their neighbors after disasters. They lived long, healthy, happy lives and died rich.
Gabrielle Belain was never baptized, though in my dreams, I held that glittering child in my arms and waded into the sea to my waist. In my dream, I scooped up the sea in my right hand and let it run over the red curls of the child that was mine and not mine. Mostly not mine. In my dream, a red bird circled down from the sky, hovered for a moment before us, and kissed her rosebud mouth.
When Gabrielle was six years old, she wandered out of the garden and down the road to the town square. Her red curls shone with ribbon and oil, and her frock was blue and pretty and new. The girls of the Pleasure House, none of whom bore children of their own, doted on the child, spoiling her with dresses and hats and dolls and sweets. To be fair, though, the girl did not spoil, but only grew in sweetness and spark.
On the road, Gabrielle saw a mongrel dog that had been lamed in a fight. It was enormous, almost the size of a pony, with grizzled fur hanging about its wide, snarling mouth. It panted under the star apple tree, whining and showing its teeth. Gabrielle approached the animal, looked up at the branches heavy with fruit, and held out her hand. A star apple, dark and smooth, fell neatly into her little hand, its skin already bursting with sweet juice. She knelt before the dog.
“Eat,” she said. The dog ate. Immediately, it stood, healed, nuzzled its new mistress, shaking its tail earnestly, and allowed her to climb upon its back. In the market square, people stopped and stared at the pretty little girl riding the mongrel dog. They offered her sweets and fruits and bits of fabric that might please a little child. She came to the fishmonger’s stall. The fishmonger, an old, sour man, was in the middle of negotiating a price with an older, sourer man, and did not notice Gabrielle. A large marlin, quite dead, leaned over the side of the cart, its angled mouth slightly open as though attempting to breathe. Gabrielle, a tender child, put her hand to her mouth and blew the fish a kiss. The fishmonger, satisfied that he had successfully bilked his customer out of more gold than he had made all the week before, looked down and was amazed to see his fish flapping and twisting in the rough-hewn cart. The marlin leapt into the air and gave the customer a sure smack against his wrinkled cheek, before hurling itself onto the cobbled path and wriggling its way to the dock. Similarly, the other fish began to wiggle and jump, tumbling and churning against each other in a jumbled mass toward freedom. People gawked and pointed and gathered as the fishmonger vainly tried to gather the fish in his arms, but he had no idea what to do without the aid of his nets, and his nets were being mended by his foulmouthed wife in their little hovel by the sea.
Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories Page 7