The Space Between Words

by Michele Phoenix

  “Lucky boy. I miss the luxury of a good midday nap! Have you been around back?” he asked, pointing toward the other side of the church.

  “Not yet,” Grant said.

  Our host motioned for us to follow him. “I don’t know why you’re wasting your time here when there’s something just around the corner much more pertinent to your research. Come,” he said, setting off in the direction he’d pointed. “I think you’ll appreciate this.”

  He led us past the front entrance of the church and around to the graveyard that extended in the back. “This one here is what you’ll want to see.” He led us to a wide tomb—probably six feet across—covered by an arched layer of red bricks. “That curved shape is typical of Huguenot graves,” Pastor Slater said. “Easy to pick out if you know what you’re looking for.” He motioned toward the weatherworn marker above the grave. “See the angel in the pictogram there? And the smaller figures clinging to each of his arms? Those are refugees being guided out of France. A powerful image, even in its eroded state.”

  “Any tombs here with the Ballard name on them?” Grant asked, using his phone to take pictures of the grave.

  “Not to my knowledge, but so many have been worn down by the elements that it’s a bit hard to tell.” He turned to me. “Right, then. Remind me how you found our little country church?”

  “We’ve been doing some research,” I said, reaching into my purse. “I found these pages of a Huguenot Bible in an antique sewing box in southern France, along with the journal of its last owner, and we’re trying to trace her descendants.”

  Grant pocketed his phone and took over. “We were able to find her brother’s last will and testament in the Huguenot Museum in Rochester. Then yesterday we decided to search for something similar to these,” he said, pointing at the pages the pastor now held. “We somehow came across an announcement from 2002 about the event you organized here.”

  “Ah, yes. Our storytelling evening! One of our many attempts to invite new blood into our congregation,” Pastor Slater said, chuckling. “I think we had a grand total of three visitors come from outside the church, and two of them left before we got around to the history lesson.” He turned our pages over and studied them intently. “Remarkable, really,” he said.

  “Are they anything like yours?” Mona asked, voicing the question I’d been trying to suppress.

  He looked at each of us in turn, then handed the pages back to me and fished around in his pocket for a set of keys. “I think you’ll be intrigued,” he said a bit mysteriously, leading the way to the side door of the church.

  I barely heard Mona say, “I’ll stay out here and keep an eye on Connor.”

  We followed Pastor Slater into the modest sanctuary of Sandhurst Baptist Church. He stopped when we reached a small wooden frame hanging under an arched window toward the front. “This is what you’re after,” he said, and Grant and I pressed forward to see what was behind the glass.

  “Good Lord,” Grant said.

  The pastor chuckled. “Well, you’re certainly in the right place for that sentiment.”

  The first word I saw was Ezekiel in bold letters at the top of the page. When I looked beneath it, I recognized the same type of script and anomalies as I’d seen in ours.

  I reached for Grant’s arm instinctively. “Grant . . .” I heard the awe in my own voice.

  “Looks familiar, does it?” Pastor Slater asked. Grant took our pages from my hand and held them up to the one hanging on the wall. They were a nearly perfect match—the typesetting, the margins. Our pages lacked the stains and discoloration of Pastor Slater’s, but they seemed ripped from the same Bible.

  Ken lifted the frame off its wall hook and brought it to the small table at the front of the sanctuary. He flipped it over and laid it down so we could see the other side through the double-glassed mounting. We leaned in again, taking in the details. There was a page number in the upper-right corner.

  “Four sixty-seven,” Grant said.

  I flipped over our pages. “Four seventy-three to seventy-eight.”

  “Close enough.”

  “Tell me it’s a match,” Mona said, walking in with a groggy Connor at her side.

  “It’s a match,” Grant confirmed.

  “It’s a—” A hand fluttered to her chest as her eyes got wide. “It’s a match?” she asked, incredulous. When Grant nodded, she hunched down in front of Connor so they were eye to eye. “Connor, it’s a match. We found a treasure!”

  He frowned at her. “Can I have a juice box?”

  She laughed and straightened. “So much for family bonding!”

  Grant looked from the framed page on the table to Pastor Slater. “Just finding Charles’s name in Rochester felt like beating the odds, but this . . .” He shook his head, a smile softening his features. “This is astounding.”

  “And in this country,” our new friend said, “this kind of ‘astounding’—and anything else, really—is celebrated with a steaming cup of tea. So . . . how would you like to adjourn to the church kitchen so we can connect our pieces of this puzzle? You can tell me all you know, and I can tell you all I know and—Connor, is it? He can have a go at the toys we just bought for the Sunday school room. How do you feel about that, young man?” He bent down to look into Connor’s surly face.

  “Can I have a juice box?”

  “I think we can rustle something up.”

  Minutes later, we sat around a Formica-topped table in the church’s kitchen, the framed page lying between us. We told Pastor Slater the rest of Adeline’s story while Connor played with Legos on the floor. Mona prompted us for details we overlooked in the retelling, and I tried not to laugh watching Grant drinking his tea with a barely perceptible grimace.

  “You never told us how your page got to the church,” Grant asked when we’d finished our story and answered the questions Pastor Slater asked.

  “A bit of a mystery there—and short on details, I’m afraid,” the pastor said.

  “Whatever you can tell us will be more than we know now.” I smiled my encouragement.

  “Right. Well, as the story goes, in November 1972, someone knocked on the manse door and my predecessor opened it. He found a stranger standing there, an elderly man who seemed in poor health. He said he was the final descendant of a family that had fled from France to England, and that he wanted to leave a sort of memento with our church, something that had been passed down for generations. He didn’t come inside and didn’t offer any information beyond that—not even his name. He essentially bequeathed his document to us for safekeeping and walked away.”

  “How did you know it was something special?” Grant asked.

  “I’m afraid none of us did for quite a while. When I arrived in the late eighties, we performed a bit of a purge. My predecessor had been reluctant to throw anything away, you see, so I declared the rubbish bin a sacred space and filled it as often as possible in my early days here. When I came across the page tucked into a file with a brief account of its mysterious arrival, I was tempted to discard it too. It’s the historic French that kept me from it, at first. And the more I researched it, the more I realized that it was worth keeping. It’s from a rare edition, you may know, and such a fascinating vestige of a Huguenot tradition.

  “So we framed it and hung it on the wall, and in 2002 we tried to use it to draw new people into the congregation.” He smiled. “And all these years later, here you are.”

  “Here we are,” Mona repeated.

  Grant spoke up. “We’ve been hoping to find something that proves that the younger sister survived their escape from France. But I’m guessing this page comes from Charles’s side of the family, not Julie’s, since his son lived just a few miles away in Hawkhurst.”

  “And in the last will and testament,” Pastor Slater said. “Nothing about her in there either?”

  I shook my head and tamped down a feeling of defeat. “We’ve found no trace of Julie,” I admitted. “Nothing since the day they left
Gatigny.”

  “There would have been so many hazards to a voyage like theirs.” Our new friend shook his head, likely imagining the challenges the Baillard children encountered.

  “But this is good,” I said, nodding toward the frame in the center of the table. “We found one of the pages Charles carried to England, and that will have to be enough.” I corrected myself. “It is enough.”

  We talked a bit more about our quest, the village of Sandhurst, and the weather. And when Connor got antsy again, we said our good-byes.

  “You’re brave people going on a grown-up adventure with a squirrelly little boy.”

  “Oh, he hasn’t exactly suffered,” Mona said. “With all the bribery we’ve resorted to, this may turn out to be the trip of his lifetime!”

  “And what does he get for the stop in Sandhurst today?”

  “Two hours at a playhouse near Maidstone on the way home,” Grant said.

  “Yay! Yay! Yay!” Connor yelled.

  “Blessings, my friends.” Pastor Slater stood by the car as we prepared to drive away. “Remember that the right side is the wrong side on our roads!” He leaned down to wink at me. “You’ll keep him sorted out.”

  With Mona and Connor deep in conversation about the realness of Bigfoot, Grant and I rode in silence for a while. I wondered if this was the beginning of an ending. For our vacation. For our search. For our partnership. I watched Grant’s hands on the wheel, his driving strong and self-assured, and I found it hard to imagine the person he’d been before coming to France. He’d brought the same protective impulses to Adeline as he did to Connor every day. As he did to me in different ways. I could scarcely envision the failures he’d described.

  “I’m sorry about this morning,” I murmured, surprising myself almost as much as I seemed to surprise him.

  He glanced at me, then looked back at the road. “No need for that.”

  Now that the topic was broached, I wasn’t sure how to proceed. “I was . . . blunt.”

  He shrugged. “You were honest.”

  I wouldn’t have called it honest. Wise, maybe—that’s what I’d told myself when guilt had stirred during our day in Sandhurst. By saying what I had that morning, I’d protected myself from the hazards of attachment—from the quicksand of need. But in a part of my mind I still couldn’t quite control, I felt the looming threat of trying too hard to stay safe.

  “And we’re okay?” I asked the man whose sturdiness of spirit was a quieting force.

  He took his eyes off the road again long enough to cast me a thoughtful smile. “We’re fine,” he assured me.

  I hoped we really were.

  Grant’s phone rang just as Mona and Connor’s debate about Bigfoot was reaching a conclusion. He took the phone from the console where it was charging and glanced at the screen. “Unknown caller.”

  I put out a hand. “Want me to answer it?” He handed me the phone and I swiped it on. “Hello?”

  “Jessica, dear. Is that you?”

  I recognized her voice immediately. “Nelly?”

  “Indeed! Calling with disappointing news, I’m afraid. After speaking with you, I called every Huguenot-savvy acquaintance I could think of, but the only suggestions they offered for your little search were things you’ve already done.”

  “Nelly—”

  “So, much as I dislike having to concede defeat, I’m afraid I must throw in the proverbial towel—”

  “Nelly,” I tried again.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “We found another page from the same Bible.”

  “You did!” Her voice went up a notch with excitement. “Like the ones you brought with you?”

  I spent a few minutes explaining how we’d found Sandhurst and filling her in on the new information we’d gleaned. “I don’t think we can hope for much more,” I said in conclusion. “We know Charles survived, and we found another page of the Baillard Bible. We’ll have to be content with that.”

  “So it’s just Julie you’re missing.”

  “Yes, but we’re not even sure she made it across the Channel.”

  “The Channel . . . ,” Nelly said thoughtfully.

  Something in her voice caught my attention. “What are you thinking, Nelly?”

  “I’ve got to hang up,” she said so loudly that I pulled the phone away from my ear. “I’ll call you back the moment I’ve confirmed a little hunch I have. Cheers!”

  And the line went dead.

  She called back when we were at the playhouse. Mona and I sat in the coffee shop while Grant helped Connor negotiate a climbing wall.

  “It’s all as it should be,” Mona said. “The women sipping coffee and the men watching the children.”

  I looked at the phone’s screen when it vibrated and felt my pulse accelerate. “Hello?”

  “Jessica, luv, it’s me! How do you feel about a quick trip out to Somerset?”

  I mouthed to Mona to get Grant and said, “Tell me what you’ve found,” into the phone. I had that feeling—that Patrickesque feeling—that our quest wasn’t quite over yet.

  “Your comment about the Channel got me to thinking, and I just might know someone who can advise you on your search,” she said, her voice bright and animated. “Last we spoke was probably thirty years ago, so it took me a while to find his most recent known address . . . and longer than that to remind him of who I was once I tracked down his current phone number. I must warn you that he’s an original. About as warm and fuzzy as a prickly pear, and obsessed with the strangest things, one of which might be of interest to you. Corbin Owens is the name—are you writing it down, dear? But he goes by Corb or ‘Captain Corb.’ Not a real captain, mind you, never has been, but he likes the prestige of the title. That’s my guess.”

  I was frantically taking notes with the phone on speaker. Grant had joined Mona and me while Connor burned energy in the bouncy castle with a new friend. “Nelly, who’s Captain Corb?”

  “Well, that’s a long story that barely bears repeating. We were sweet on each other once. Met at university . . . and you know what they say about opposites attracting. We were just crazy for each other until our opposites did what they tend to do second: repulse. But that has no relevance to the investigation you’re conducting.

  “Captain Corb is absolutely barmy for old ships’ logs. He’s collected them since uni and become a sort of reference on all things related. Made quite a name for himself in dusty historian circles. So if you’ve got the stomach for a probably less than civil encounter, I’d suggest you find a little town called Dunster on your map or your phone or whatever you techie-types use, and get your American fannies to the lovely county of Somerset.”

  “Does he think he can help us?” Grant asked.

  “Oh, hello there, young man! I didn’t know this was a party call. I’m confident he can at least give you some direction on the matter. I’ve shared with him all the information you gave me, and he’ll use the time until you get there to peruse the mounds of ancient, musty tomes he calls a library.”

  She gave us his number and his address and signed off with a cheerful, “Now you go find that pot of gold!”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  IT TOOK US SIX HOURS TO GET FROM BURHAM TO Dunster the next day. On the edge of Exmoor National Park, just a stone’s throw from the Bristol Channel, it was a quaint and scenic town. In tourist season, it would have been overrun with vacationers, but it felt nearly deserted on a damp January day.

  We found our hotel and moved our bags into our rooms, then Grant and I set off toward Captain Corb’s place while Mona, Connor, and his scooter headed toward a bakery the check-in clerk had told us not to miss. I marveled at the beauty of Dunster. Everything we saw seemed saturated with the past. The church, the narrow and cobblestoned streets, the castle perched high on a hill above the town. It was the stuff of fairy tales and make-believe.

  “Brace yourself,” Grant said as we arrived at the door of a row house whose white façade seemed to have been recently pa
inted.

  “Maybe Nelly was exaggerating . . .”

  The door opened before Grant had the chance to knock.

  “You Nelly’s friends, then?” Corb’s accent was thick and coarse. So was his voice. He looked at us through bloodshot eyes, his coveralls straining against a huge beer belly. Wisps of gray hair escaped a stained, beige, knitted hat.

  “We are,” Grant said.

  The old man looked at me. “You reckon I can help you?”

  I quelled the urge to step back. “Nelly thinks you might.”

  “Old bat still off her trolley?”

  “I—I’m sorry, I don’t know what that means.”

  He turned and walked away. “Bloody Americans.”

  I looked at Grant, and he met my gaze, perplexed and amused. “You think we’re supposed to follow him?” he asked.

  “You’ll protect me, right? If things get weird.”

  “I’ll use my martial arts,” he said, entering the house before me and following our host down a narrow, book-lined hallway.

  “Barrel racing is not martial arts,” I retorted.

  I heard him chuckle and fell in behind him.

  “Sit,” Corb instructed as we took two steps down into a square room whose floor and walls were lined with stacks of books and maritime mementos. There was an anchor in one corner so large that I wondered how he’d gotten it into the house. An antique diving suit stood eerily in another corner, and I could see a captain’s wheel, a cannon, and what looked like a treasure chest from where I stood.

  “You sit there,” Captain Corb said to me, motioning to an armchair with tattered gray fabric and a sunken seat cushion. “You.” He pointed at Grant, then motioned toward a wooden stool not far from the chair I now occupied. Grant checked its solidity before perching on it.

  “So you’re hunting for refugees.”

  I wasn’t sure whether it was a question or a statement. Grant seemed to think the former was true.