The Space Between Words

by Michele Phoenix

  I sat in the chair across from him and said, “Passé Composé,” stumbling over the pronunciation. “Mona suggested we go there, and . . .” I stopped short as memories of being there with Patrick made my sense of reality waver. I could picture the barn, the old man with the limp, Patrick climbing the ladder to the second floor and calling out to me when he found the map of Paris. I could hear his voice and sense his nearness even in hindsight. But with newfound lucidity, I could also remember that the old man had eyes for only me. How could I have been so sure—so grounded—in the illusion that Patrick was alive?

  I shook my head to clear it of the static that seemed to swell when memories of Patrick came to mind. “Mona suggested that I go there,” I corrected myself. “Me. Just . . . me.”

  Seconds of silence ticked by. I picked at a chip in my chair’s wooden armrest.

  “I’m sorry. For what you’ve been through.” Grant’s voice was soft. Sincere.

  His words made me feel fragile, so I pointed at the sheaf of paper he’d set on the couch beside him and turned the conversation back to more neutral things. “Do you think you’d be able to help? I tried to translate some of the pages on my own, but a lot of it just didn’t make sense. Not even with a search engine doing the work for me.”

  He picked up the pages and glanced through them again.

  “Looks like archaic French,” he said. “Vieux français. It’s not surprising the search engine failed.”

  “Is it much different from modern French?”

  “Not impossibly so. Alterations in spelling and sentence structure, vocabulary, too, and they’ve swapped some letters out for others in the . . .” He paused to think. “In the more than three centuries since this was written, but I’m sure it can be done. Just might take some time.”

  The challenge was daunting. I felt my shoulders sag. “I know you’re busy with the barn and keeping things running around here and taking care of Connor, and I feel bad asking you to—”

  “I’d be happy to help you with it.”

  “But . . .” I saw no hesitation on his face. He merely hunched his shoulders and smiled. “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve spent every evening since I got to France either reading books or watching dubbed episodes of old American shows on French TV. This kind of a project might actually be a nice change.”

  “I can help you,” I offered, surprised by a flutter of anticipation. “Type it up as you figure it out—or Google words you don’t understand.”

  “We’ll need a place to work,” he said. “And maybe some resources other than the Internet.”

  “I don’t want you to spend anything.”

  “Docteur Fabian’s the town historian. He’ll at least point us in the right direction if we can’t figure it out on our own.”

  “You’re sure you’re okay with this?” I said, afraid I’d pressured him into something he didn’t want.

  He shrugged. “I like mysteries, remember?” There was something that looked like anticipation in his gaze. “We can work in the evenings. After Connor goes to bed. Maybe in the conservatory?”

  “Only if you feel like it.”

  He smiled. “I will. And if something comes up, we’ll play it by ear.”

  It felt a bit frightening to have committed to the project, but as I looked at the pages Grant still held in his hands, I sensed again that the sewing box had found me for a reason. There was something of Patrick in the mystery it harbored, and I wasn’t ready to completely let him go.

  “So,” Grant said as he stood, dwarfing the small space with his height, “do we start tomorrow?”

  I shrugged and hoped it looked casual. There were butterflies in my stomach. “If you’re okay with that.”

  ELEVEN

  The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes came as no surprise, nearly ten years ago. It legitimized the hardships we’d already been enduring. Hardship is a toothless word. What we’d survived were atrocities too inhumane to comprehend. In reality, the Edict had been annulled for years in incremental ways, well before the Revocation was decreed: our “places of safety” left defenseless, land confiscated, crops destroyed. Friends labeled us heretics, and neighbors sold us out for the king’s promised reward.

  It was my brother, Charles, who first warned us that something ominous was afoot. Thirteen at the time, he’d been out in the thick brush around Gatigny collecting rabbits from the traps he’d set the night before. He saw three horsemen approach the village from the north and crest the hill across the valley from our farm.

  Despite his age, Charles knew enough to be concerned. Though our parents had tried to spare us from the horrors emanating from the capital, we’d overheard whispered exchanges about threats, reprisals, and fast-spreading unrest.

  Charles ran back to the farm and found our father and me loading bales of raw silk onto our cart.

  “Father!” he yelled. “The king’s men! I just saw three of them ride into town.”

  Our father’s gaze narrowed, his eyes nearly black in his somber, weathered face. To Charles and me, he was the epitome of Man: strong, unflappable, driven, and astute. In every way, he lived up to his name. Pierre. The rock. “They’re there now?” he asked in his deep, soft voice.

  “I think so,” Charles answered, a bit breathless from his run.

  Father was already striding toward the barn. He lifted a saddle from its shelf.

  “Can I come with you, Father?” Charles asked. “I can ride Caprice!”

  Our father installed the saddle on his Percheron’s back and tested the straps. “You two stay here,” he said, his tone calm and commanding. Then he looked at me. “Tell your mother where I’ve gone.”

  It was dark by the time Father returned. Charles and I had climbed up to the loft above the sitting room, where we slept, and had tried to stay awake as we waited for his arrival.

  Our mother sat beneath us, next to the crib where baby Julie cooed, repairing a tear in one of Father’s shirts. When he unlatched the door, we inched closer to the loft’s edge to peer down. Mother looked up as he entered, but she said nothing while he ladled some soup into a bowl, then joined her.

  Charles and I looked at each other, impatient, but didn’t make a sound as our father ate in silence. Though he was a year younger than me, there was something about my brother that evoked courage and calm. I sensed, as we waited for Father to speak, that those traits would be tested by what we were about to learn.

  Father soaked up the last of his soup with a piece of black bread, put down the bowl, and leaned back in his chair. “It’s as we feared,” he said. As I write, I can still hear the disquiet in his voice.

  “The king?” Mother asked.

  He nodded. “Three messengers brought the decree and nailed it to the church’s door.” He leaned forward and propped his elbows on his knees. “The Edict has been revoked.”

  “Pierre . . .” She put down her mending and stared, a hand fluttering to her chest.

  “What we’ve endured until today, I’m afraid, has been only a prelude to the hardships we will know.”

  “How can he do this?” Mother asked. “How can he reverse the laws that have ensured our safety and freedom?”

  I looked at Charles and he looked at me. I could see the fear he tried to conceal. For this news to shake my intrepid brother’s bravery was more frightening to me than the words our father had uttered.

  “We were inconvenient to the Crown before,” Father said, a sort of hollowness in his face. “But we’re intolerable now. There are no more limits to what our enemies can do.” Rising from the chair seemed to require great effort. He looked down at Julie in her crib, then went to the stove, opened its door, and shoved a few pieces of wood inside. “Our faith has become criminal. Either we convert to King Louis’s religion or we risk losing everything. And if we’re found meeting together, reading together, singing . . . It’s all punishable by death now.”

  “Pierre.” Mother sounded breathless. “Death?”

  �
��Or the galleys. Death delayed.”

  “What can we do? There must be something we can do.”

  “There is nothing.”

  They stared at each other for long moments as tears trickled down my mother’s face. Beside me, Charles breathed fast and hard, distraught by what he’d heard. He inched closer to me in the shadows of our loft. We didn’t know what words to use for the emotions tightening our chests. So we lay there, side by side, long after our parents had finished speaking, and listened to the silence reaching us from below.

  By declaring that we must be converted or destroyed, the king unleashed a virulent strain of persecution among the loyal who followed his decree. In the decade after the Revocation, they closed our schools and colleges, forbade employers from giving us work, and offered even more enticing rewards to those who would convert us. Even Charles, who for years worked as a carpenter, was forced to shutter his shop in Gatigny, resorting instead to clandestine labor for allies who kept his activity from the authorities.

  When the mere threat of reprisals failed to extract enough Huguenot abjurations, the king ordained that we be made more miserable yet and enlisted his dragoons as hammers sent to shatter us.

  The soldiers stopped at nothing to break the bowed and straining resistance of the Huguenots still clinging to their faith. Dozens of our churches were destroyed, their walls torn down, their Bibles burned, their pastors tortured or killed for preaching to the few who remained faithful. The dragoons poured boiling water down the throats of women, bounced the elderly in blankets until their old bones broke, and ended the lives of the most headstrong of men with dismembering racks they constructed in public squares.

  The Protestant community was brought to its knees by the persistent brutality of the king’s decree and its subjects’ inhumanity toward the Huguenots they martyred. We heard rumors of conversions by the thousands in towns and villages surrounding us, but saw only a few among the Huguenots we knew.

  Until the dragoons arrived in Gatigny.

  They rode into town nearly two years ago, invested with the authority to live in our homes, to confiscate our belongings, and to convince us to recant by any means they believed justified. Half a dozen soldiers were assigned to our small town. We were a people besieged. A community of faith oppressed and ostracized.

  The dragoons pitted horror against horror in their macabre attempts to steal our souls from our God’s clutches, and their efforts were rewarded. After they forced his feet into boots filled with hot grease, Brother Sebastian was the first to recant his beliefs. His wife, Marie, converted, too, after they brutalized their daughters, only to savage her as well despite her desperate abjuration. For months after the attack, Sebastian sat hunched outside his home, his feet and livelihood destroyed, his spirits broken by his forced conversion.

  “Depart from me, for I never knew you,” he mumbled incessantly. No salve could soothe the anguish in his soul.

  When the house where I held classes with a handful of our children came under the dragoon’s surveillance, Serge, our blacksmith and our friend, offered the loft above his forge as a much safer place to study. Our numbers had dwindled from fifteen to only three, but I found joy and divine purpose in deepening their knowledge and heightening their skills.

  So we read the Bible and learned to write God’s truth by lamplight there, removed from the prying eyes of disloyal neighbors and surrounded by the smell of coal fires and burning hooves. The students staggered their arrival, and Serge helped them in through the alley-facing window at the back of the shop. We sat close enough to hear each other over the hammering and hissing down below. Sometimes we forgot about the danger that lurked outside our walls and Serge had to remind us to keep our laughter down. So we muffled the freedom-giving sound with hands over our mouths and let our joy of living and believing become silent.

  Many of Gatigny’s believers vowed to continue worshipping together despite the threat to our shrinking congregation. We met by torchlight in the hills of the Boutières, timing our movements to limit suspicion. Our intimate knowledge of every wildlife path and clearing in the deep, dense woods around our village was an advantage we used to outsmart the king’s henchmen. We moved in silence on familiar soil, agile and quick, to the meeting places arranged by word of mouth a day or two before our gatherings. Then, like our ancestors before us, we sat on the bare ground, on fallen trees and rocks, buffering our resilience and drinking from the Holy Book we kept hidden on our farm.

  “The faith that unites us cannot be extinguished,” my father, our pastor, declared at the end of every service, unbowed in carriage and in voice. Yet we’d already seen our numbers dwindle, our losses the result of fear, of prudence, or of capitulation.

  Though we acted as if our gatherings could go on unimpeded by the threats against our lives, we knew in our hearts that a marginal community could only subsist for so long. After one of our own was captured and tortured by dragoons for information about our meetings, we knew our safety could no longer be ensured.

  We gathered in secrecy for the last time, two months ago, to honor our union and finalize our parting.

  My father stood deep in the gully carved by winter’s thaw, and we sat on the embankments, Charles and his wife, Isabelle, Julie, and me. The weight of grief pressed into us as I held my sister close. She was just twelve and overwhelmed, her tears a testament to the loss of our dissolving. We knew we’d never meet this way again. Of the forty-some families that had formed our congregation, only nine remained. Those who could afford it had moved to safer countries. Others had restricted their faith to the privacy of their own homes. And others yet had bowed under the threats and harassment of the king’s vicious envoys.

  Father reached into his bag and took out the Bible we kept hidden behind loose bricks in the well next to our home. It was missing half its pages now, as we’d given portions of it away to nearby gatherings whose Scriptures had been confiscated and burned by the king’s men. Father held what remained of our Bible in both hands and declared, “This is the Truth that binds us to each other and to God. These are his words exhorting us to faithfulness and strength. These are the pages that emancipate our faith from the dictates of a king. We will carry them with us as a testament to our resistance, as a reminder of all the Huguenot community has endured.”

  He was silent for a moment, peering into each of our faces with a sincerity and conviction that lent valor to discouragement. Then he stepped up to a boulder and held the Bible aloft. “We are neither bowed nor broken, neither fearful nor bitter. We stand today a strong, victorious people, sharpened by affliction and united by our God.”

  He rested the Bible on top of the boulder and took a knife from his belt to slit its binding. “Let the head of each family come forward,” he said. Using his knife, he divided the Book into several sections and handed one to the elder of each family, instructing some of them to take an extra sheaf for those who hadn’t made it to our final gathering.

  “The Word of God,” he said once all the pages had been passed out, holding our family’s with one hand and covering them with the other. “Thus far the Lord has helped us. As his Word has endured, so will the God who spoke it and those who find in him salvation for their souls.”

  He prayed a blessing over our disbanding church in a voice rich with authority, soft with emotion, and strong with purpose. He described the peace we could know in spite of all our losses. Then we sang a final hymn in the quiet tones we’d learned to use since the Edict’s Revocation and separated into the night, each family timing its departure and charting its return to avoid the dragoon’s detection.

  “I think this is God’s will,” Charles said as we sat around our parents’ cast-iron stove several weeks later. He’d come to tell us of a plan that seemed to me both dangerous and wise. His voice was solemn, his expression grim. “With a baby on the way, I think we need to flee.” He looked around at each of us: his wife, Isabelle, our sister, Julie, our parents, and me.

  His plan
was simple: to travel by night to the coast and, from there, on to the safety of England. It wasn’t without risk. We knew it was a crime to flee, punishable by death, not only for those running, but for the families they left behind as well. Charles knew the dangers. My father knew them, too, when he gave the plan his blessing.

  “Please. Come with us,” Isabelle begged after Father and I said that we would stay in Gatigny. Her hand grasped my mother’s while her eyes implored me. “If you stay here . . . If you stay here and they find we’ve left . . .”

  Mother patted her hand and tried to smile. “Whatever may come, the Lord is with us.”

  “He’ll be with us as we travel to England too,” Charles interjected, urgent and earnest. “Please,” he said. “Please come with us.”

  “You should go, Constance,” Father said to Mother. “There’s no need for you to stay here. You’ll be safer with Charles and Isabelle.”

  She shook her head. “My place is with you. And at my age . . .” Tears filled her eyes. “My place is with you.”

  “You’ll take Julie,” Father said to Charles. Mother’s hand fluttered. She looked away. I felt my breathing stop as dread and certainty settled in my chest. In every way that mattered, Julie was my child. The countless nights I’d rocked her to sleep, the long days we’d spent spinning raw silk onto skeins, the twelve years of laughter and love we’d lavished on each other had woven a bond that could scarcely be described. Yet as Father spoke, I realized I could not let my selfishness deprive her of life.

  Julie’s eyes were wide with disbelief. “But I don’t want to run,” she said.

  “You must,” I whispered through a tight throat. Letting her go felt utterly wrenching, yet it was completely right.

  Julie murmured, “Adeline . . .”

  “You’re not safe here.”

  “Then you aren’t safe either.” Her lip began to tremble, and I reached out to draw her close. “I don’t want to run,” she said again, her face pressed into me, her arms tight around my waist.