The Space Between Words

by Michele Phoenix

  “I know,” I said against her hair. This bright, enchanting child who would soon be a woman, this skilled student and avid reader, this lover of nature and of God was a part of me I desperately longed to keep close and just as desperately needed to send far from the dangers that threatened her life.

  In a moment of clarity, I saw her future unfurl in front of me, as if God himself were showing me that she would be safe if we’d just find the courage to send her away.

  Heartbroken but certain, I untangled Julie’s arms and pushed her back so I could look into her face. She was shaking her head, eyebrows drawn, before I began to speak. “Adeline, no,” she said, her voice tremulous.

  “Do you remember when we learned that God has a plan for each of us?” I asked. We’d talked about the story of Moses just a few days before.

  Julie bit her lip but didn’t respond.

  “And do you remember the many ways God speaks to us to reveal his will?”

  She pinched her lips together and frowned, determined not to be convicted by my words.

  “I believe God is speaking,” I said. “Father, Mother, and I love you.” I paused to blink back tears. “We love you too much to keep you here when Charles and Isabelle can lead you to a safer place.” I tilted up her chin so she couldn’t avoid my eyes. “No one wants to say good-bye. But I believe—” I looked at my parents and my brother. “We all believe this is what God wants.”

  “But . . .” She turned her eyes on my father, begging for a concession. “Father . . . God will protect us. You said it yourself: he is our refuge.”

  We’d seen too many die to believe that our faith would grant us immunity from danger. But Julie was just twelve, and in her mind our God would shield the family from destruction when hundreds, maybe thousands, in our community had already died, tormented and tortured for a faith they’d refused to reject.

  I saw my parents exchange a knowing look, then turn their eyes on Julie. “He has made no promises that we would be unharmed,” Father said, his voice resonant with sadness and conviction. “He has promised to be with us, but never that our lives would be untouched by man’s worst deeds. If you stay here—” He paused and swallowed hard. “What Adeline has said is true.”

  I ran a hand over Julie’s cheek when she turned back to me. “I believe this is God’s will, sweet Julie. This is what he wants. For you to reach England and begin a new life there. For you to extend in that distant place what he started here in Gatigny.”

  “Are you sure?” Charles asked as he and Isabelle prepared to leave for their home later that night. There was pleading in his eyes when he repeated his question. “Are you sure you won’t come with us?”

  We knew with a clarity that rendered us speechless that staying in Gatigny would put us at risk. We did so willingly, aware of the peril. My parents would stay for what remained of our congregation, providing comfort to the grieving and guidance to the lost. I would stay for my students, the few who still came to study, most mornings, in the loft above the forge. I drew courage from the certainty that as long as our children were able to read and convey God’s Word, our faith—our very existence—would never be extinguished.

  Charles stood in front of me as strong and determined as I’d always known him to be. From our childhood to this season of our tearing apart, we’d been more than brother and sister to each other. We’d been companions, accomplices, and friends. As I looked into his face, I saw the man he had become, his protective instincts now aligned with the duties of impending fatherhood. He had to move his family out of harm’s way, but he still feared for those he’d have to leave behind.

  “You go,” I said. “You, Isabelle, Julie, and the baby. It is good and right for you to go. But I must stay here, Charles. This is the place where God has planted me.”

  He held my gaze for a moment longer, then he nodded his understanding and turned slowly to leave.

  We stood outside my parents’ home a few weeks later, and, in a ceremony similar to what we’d experienced as a church, Father divided our pages of the Bible into smaller sections, handing a sheaf to each of us and keeping another for himself.

  “Are you still sure?” Charles asked, trying again to talk me into leaving.

  “I’m sure.”

  “If you get caught teaching the children . . .”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “We’ll look out for her,” my father said.

  We said good-bye past midnight, in the courtyard of my parents’ farm. Charles and Isabelle seemed serene, but there was fear in Julie’s eyes. They had packed only what they could carry on their backs and wore dark clothes to blend into the late June night.

  Charles pulled an object from one of the bags he’d brought with him to the farm. “This is for you,” he said, handing me a sewing box I knew he’d made himself. The inlaid wood and smooth finish were signature features of his work. I took it from him, captivated by its beauty and exquisite detail. There were tears in his eyes when he said, “It’s the last thing I made in my shop. I finished it just this morning.”

  “Charles . . .”

  He pulled out the drawer and tugged on the red thread extending from its corner. The bottom of the box came up easily, revealing a space beneath it. The look he gave me was intense with conviction and loss. “Hide your pages here. Your pages of the Bible. If they find you with them . . .” He grasped my shoulders. “Hide them here.”

  “I will,” I promised him. “I’ll keep them safe.”

  I turned toward Julie, her face a mask of reluctance and sadness. “And you, sweet sister,” I said, putting down the sewing box and reaching into my apron’s pocket. “I made this for you to take on your journey.” I pressed into her hands the parting gift I’d confected through blinding tears.

  “You made it?” Julie asked

  “It’s small enough to carry, and what you’re about to live . . .” Losing her was a physical ache. “You’ll write your story here: the places you go and the lessons you learn,” I said as her arms wrapped around my waist. I remembered all the times I’d held her since the morning she was born. “And God’s Word too,” I added. “You’ll carry it with you and share it with those who follow after us.”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Isabelle fold her hands over her still-small belly. She understood. Though distance would soon diverge our journeys, their common roots would bind us to each other.

  “I’ll write it all,” Julie said, understanding as only a sister could how important story and family were to me. “I’ll write it the way you taught me.” She stepped into my arms again and I held her close, reluctant to release her, but eager to let her go. This voyage away from me would allow her to flourish in a safer and more peaceful land than France.

  “Will you tell your story too?” she asked, still pressed into my chest. “So we can share them with each other when we meet again?”

  “I’ll write it all,” I whispered near her ear, but as confident as I was that God would ensure her survival, I had no such certainties that my life would be spared. I stroked her cheek and tried to smile. “Story is sacred, and I will tell mine.”

  When I released her, she melted into Mother’s embrace. They didn’t try to muffle the keening of their grief. Their sadness was the measure of their love.

  Ten days have passed since Charles, Isabelle, and Julie left. As I write these words, I realize how precarious all our lives have become. My parents and I have no illusion of safety. Our end feels inescapable. Our courage stretched taut. Our faith firm, but weary.

  For all its scars and strife, this world still speaks the beauty of its Maker. I rise each morning seeking glimpses of his heart. In simple ways, I see him moving in Creation with serenity and grace. He looks kindly on the good that still reflects his loving purposes and binds the wounds inflicted by the wicked and depraved. He is our hope and refuge still. Though our lives have been dismantled by the cruelty of man, God in his faithfulness has scattered flecks of gold amid the debris of our
loss.

  TWELVE

  MOST EVENINGS GRANT AND I SAT IN THE CONSERVATORY at the gouged antique table we’d moved in for our project. We’d stolen a couple reading lights from around the manor house, as the bulbs in the chandelier barely illuminated the space. It had taken us a while to put the pages back in order. Sometimes the color of the ink, which varied in opacity and shade, was the only sign we had that one sheet led to another.

  We sat side by side with a dictionary and a laptop, slowly and deliberately translating Adeline’s words. When I pushed for us to skip ahead, past sentences that didn’t seem to make sense, Grant dug in his heels. “Let’s figure this out first.” He’d gone to Docteur Fabian only once, when the meaning of an archaic idiom eluded us for hours. The rest of the work we’d done alone as night descended over Balazuc, our minds and efforts trained on Adeline’s account.

  “You realize there are people around here who could give you a hand with the French,” Mona said, probably for the third time that week, as she brought coffee for Grant and tea for me.

  “And give someone else the satisfaction of deciphering this?” There was low-key excitement in Grant’s eyes. He seemed as fascinated by the task as I was.

  His expression grew grim as Adeline wrote of the atrocities she’d witnessed. When she made reference to a boîte à couture, I entered the words into the online translation engine and froze. Grant had been working on the previous sentence and felt more than saw my surprise. He swiveled the laptop so he could see the screen. “A sewing box.” It was a statement—as if he’d been waiting for the confirmation.

  I got up so fast that my chair toppled backward, and I heard Grant chuckle as I hurried from the room. I found the box where I’d left it by the fireplace in the cottage and returned to the conservatory with it. We pored over Adeline’s description of the gift again, just to confirm what we already knew.

  “Looks like a match,” Grant finally said.

  “It is. It’s . . .” I felt tears come to my eyes. “It’s Adeline’s sewing box.” I missed Patrick so fiercely in that instant that it took my breath away.

  My mind flashed back to the moment when we’d found the compartment hidden inside the shallow drawer. To Patrick’s statement about our treasures finding us.

  “He knew,” I said to Grant before I’d had time to consider the words. I ran my hand over the sewing box. “Patrick knew what this was. The story it held. He knew.”

  I felt Grant lean back in his chair. His eyes were on me when I looked up. “Before he died?”

  There was something about our shared discovery that made me trust the moment. I shook my head. “No. When I . . . when I found the box at Passé Composé.”

  “I see.”

  I looked down again. Away. Anywhere but at Grant. “I would have missed the box if not for him. That’s the part I don’t—I don’t understand.” I struggled with the conflicting reality and squeezed my eyes shut to remember more clearly. “I’d gone up the ladder to the second floor where he was looking through old maps.” The memories were treasonous. “I saw him.” I said it again because it had been so real. Because it still felt so real. “I saw him . . . but he wasn’t really there,” I added, as much for myself as for Grant.

  “But you thought he was.”

  “Did Mona tell you?”

  He nodded.

  I blinked back tears. “I was sure he was. I can picture him standing by that collection of maps as clear as . . . as clear as you’re sitting right here.” I wondered if the pain and shame of the illusion would lessen with time. I doubted that they would. “He told me it was a good find.”

  “It was.”

  “But he wasn’t really there,” I said again.

  Grant sighed. “In ways that matter, he was.”

  I found it reassuring that he was neither laughing at me nor questioning my sanity.

  “He told me the box had found me—that there was a reason for it. That afternoon when . . . before he . . . before Mona found me.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “I don’t know. I want to.”

  He stretched his neck from side to side, and I heard something pop. Then he leaned forward in his chair and gave me a considering look.

  “I’m not crazy,” I whispered, as much to convince myself as to persuade him.

  He gave me his usual half smile. “Your mind gave you the illusion it needed to survive.”

  I pulled the sewing box closer and opened its lid, imagining the items Adeline would have kept in it. “Why did you need me to know your story?” I whispered to the box.

  Grant chuckled. “Okay, now I might have some questions about your sanity.”

  I felt myself blush. Adeline’s face, the way I imagined her—long dark hair, pale skin, deep and earnest eyes—floated into my consciousness. Hundreds of years later, her courage still moved me. “Do you think she lived for long? After her family left?”

  “Adeline? I’m guessing the rest of her journal might tell us.”

  “She could have survived,” I said, wanting to believe that she had.

  “She could have.”

  We sat in silence for a while. “I want to know,” I whispered.

  He grinned. “I want to sleep.”

  I glanced at the time on my laptop’s screen and saw that it was nearly two in the morning. So I placed the pages of Adeline’s notebook back in the box’s bottom drawer and pushed it closed. “Back at it tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  Grant walked me to the door.

  In an attempt to learn more about the Bible pages we’d found in Adeline’s sewing box, we drove to a Huguenot museum seventy kilometers away in Mialet. From the outside, it looked like just another historic farm nestled into a wooded hill, but on the inside it offered a modern, thorough exploration of the region’s religious past.

  The curator, a distinguished gentleman by the name of Yves Vivier, seemed pleased that we’d come to him in search of answers. “They were in a drawer?” he asked in barely accented English as we stood near the welcome desk. Though he appeared to be nearing seventy, the sparkle in his eyes was youthful.

  “Under the false bottom of a sewing box’s drawer,” Grant confirmed.

  “Astounding.” He led us into his office and offered us coffee, which Grant accepted and I declined. He motioned for us to sit, then opened a document on his computer, clicked a few keys, and finally turned the monitor around so we could see what he’d found. It was a printed page in Old French—and it looked just like the one we had.

  “Lucky for us, someone thought it would be a good idea to scan all the pages of rare editions of the Bible,” he said. “Ezekiel, right?”

  Grant and I looked at each other while Monsieur Vivier clicked around on his computer some more. When he turned the monitor toward us again, a page identical to the first one of Adeline’s was on the screen.

  “Notice the lettering, the layout on the page . . . What you’ve got here,” Monsieur Vivier said, turning the monitor back to himself, “is a rare edition of the Bible, published probably around 1688 in Geneva.” I could tell by the glint in his eyes that he was intrigued by our find. And I could tell by the matching glint in Grant’s that he was just as relieved as I was to have the pages authenticated. “Tell me again what the woman said—the one who wrote the text you found with these pages.”

  Grant and I told him about Adeline’s family, their church in Gatigny, Charles and Julie’s flight to England.

  “This was around 1695?”

  “Yes.”

  He went to the shelves that lined one wall of his office and climbed onto a footstool to reach for two books. “You’ll find information about the refugees who fled to England in this tome,” he said, handing a thick book to Grant. “And this one here will give you some insight into the life that awaited the Huguenots who made it across the Channel.” He handed the second book down to us. “Somewhere around chapter fifteen, I believe . . .”

  “How soon do you need t
hese back?” I asked.

  He waved off my concern. “Whenever you return them is fine. And if I find anything else, I’ll send you an email.”

  Grant took one of the B&B’s business cards from his wallet and handed it to Monsieur Vivier. “Email’s at the bottom.”

  “Balazuc?” he asked after glancing at the card. When we nodded, he said, “You’ll likely pass right by the place where Gatigny used to be on your drive home from here.”

  “Used to be,” Grant repeated.

  “Not much to show for it now, of course. It was the only town in the Vivarais to have been struck by the Great Plague of Marseille—in the 1720s, I believe—and they wasted no time burning it to the ground. What little was left of the structures they buried for good measure.”

  I caught Grant’s eye as Monsieur Vivier went on. “They found the town’s foundations when a—what do you call it?” He thought for a moment, smoothing his mustache with his index finger. “A commercial complex, that’s what it is. They found it when a commercial complex was being built on the site several years ago and did some excavating. But there was little there worth unearthing, so they went back to bulldozing the area where Gatigny once stood.”

  “So there’s nothing left of it,” Grant said.

  Monsieur Vivier shook his head. “It wasn’t much of a village to begin with. But there was a strong Protestant presence there—that’s what drew the king’s attention. I suspect nefarious souls alerted him to it.”

  “Are there any records that would indicate if Adeline ever married, if she had children, where she was living at the time of her death?” I asked, intent on learning all I could about her fate.

  “I’m afraid you’ll find no such records,” Monsieur Vivier said, frowning. “One of the king’s more insidious decrees was that no Huguenot milestone—whether it be baptism, marriage, or death—could be legally recorded unless it was recognized by the Catholic Church. The Protestants of that era, as unwilling to recant and submit as they were, would have wed in secrecy and buried their dead in private services, often in unmarked graves.”