The Space Between Words

by Michele Phoenix

  When the tour ended, Connor found us eating caramelized peanuts next to a statue of John Cabot. “I’m a pirate! I’m a pirate! I’m a pirate!” he yelled, letting out another heartfelt growl and pointing to the patch covering one eye.

  Mona moved it to his forehead. “Keep it up there while we’re moving, will you? You just ran over two innocent bystanders.”

  We headed back to our hotel in Dunster after lunch.

  “Why don’t you two do some exploring in town while I wrangle my little pirate?” Mona said as she helped Connor out of the backseat.

  “You and Grant should go,” I countered. “I’ll keep an eye on Connor.”

  She dismissed the offer with a wave of her hand. “Absolutely not. It’s your last day in this country, and all you’ve seen of it so far is archives and books and the occasional cathedral. So why don’t you make like tourists and see what you can while the day’s still young.”

  “Are you sure?” Grant asked.

  “Go forth and conquer!”

  Minutes later, Grant and I strolled down High Street looking in the windows of mom-and-pop stores, tearooms, and tourist traps. Learning of Julie’s survival and finally admitting that there were things we would never know about the Baillards’ fate had seemed to remove a burden from us both. It felt as though we were finally living in the present after so many weeks spent steeping in the past.

  A handwritten sign across the street caught my eye. “We never indulged,” I said, imitating Nelly’s dramatic voice and pointing at the offer of cream teas for five pounds each.

  “I don’t do tea,” Grant said.

  “Come on—just this once. As an homage to Nelly.”

  He gave me a look.

  “Tea for two?” the hostess asked as we entered the tearoom. She seated us at a small, lace-covered table in the alcove, took our order, and retreated to the kitchen. I looked at Grant and had to giggle. He seemed so out of place in a space saturated with floral prints and delicate decor.

  We talked about the trip and our morning’s excursion to Bristol until our waitress brought our order: several scones, an assortment of jams, and a dish of clotted cream. “Scone, then clotted cream, then jam,” she instructed us.

  “Is it that obvious we’re new to this?” I asked her.

  She smiled. “I’ll be right over there if you need further coaching.”

  “I asked for coffee, right?” Grant said to me, eyeing the pot of Earl Grey sitting between us on the table.

  “I think laughing at you when you did was her very English way of saying ‘fat chance.’” I stared at the white substance in front of me. It looked more like butter than cream. “Patrick would say to just rub it on my thighs in a circular motion. It’s all going to end up there anyway.’”

  Grant laughed and reached for a scone. I watched him spread a thick coat of clotted cream on it and top it with strawberry jam. He gave me a dubious look as he took his first bite, and I watched his expression morph into pure delight as he starting chewing.

  “That good, huh?”

  He rolled his eyes and motioned for me to try it too. I followed the same steps and, after sampling my own scone, reached for the pot of cream to set it down right next to me. “You can have the rest of that,” I said, wiggling my finger at the scones and tea. “This little pot of decadence is entirely mine!”

  Our hostess, who told us her name was Lydia, was attentive and entertaining. She brought Grant a cup of coffee when we were getting near the bottom of the pot of tea. “This one’s on the house if you promise to leave some flyers lying around your hotel’s vestibule.”

  Grant smiled. “For this cup of coffee, I’d have done a lot more.”

  She pointed at the empty dish in front of me. “Liked it, did you?”

  “You could say that.” I giggled.

  “Well, it’s a lucky thing you came to me for your first cream tea. Some other places in town serve whipped from a can, but this here’s from our own cows on our own farm just up the road a bit.”

  Grant pointed out our alcove’s window at an unusual stone-and-timber structure that stood in the middle of High Street. Its central pillar, dormer windows, and bell tower had piqued our curiosity. “We’ve been trying to guess what that is,” he said to Lydia. “Know anything about it?”

  “Do I?” She laughed and rested the cups she’d been removing on the edge of our table. “What you’re looking at there is all that’s left of Dunster’s Yarn Market. It’s from the 1600s, I believe, and rare because of its octagonal shape. This entire region was a hub of wool and fabric trade all the way back to the thirteenth century, and that little market is a vestige of the era.”

  “Sounds like you know your local history,” Grant said, glancing at me. I knew what he was thinking.

  “I know a little, mostly because I’ve been hearing my husband prattle on about it for all of my adult life. He’s the true historian in these parts.” She looked at us askance. “I’m assuming from the looks on your faces that you’re history buffs too.”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “We’re just—we’re intrigued by a span of several years at the end of the seventeenth century. Do you know if any Huguenots might have settled in Somerset?”

  She held up her hand. “Stop right there. I can assure you that I’ll have no answers to your questions.” She leaned in and spoke in a conspiratorial voice. “But if you leave me a good review on Open Table, I may be able to point you toward someone who knows a lot more.”

  “Five stars,” Grant said, leaning in as well. “The clotted cream alone put you over the top.”

  We hurried back to the hotel and told Mona where we were headed, then drove off toward Nether Stowey, our eyes peeled for a small farm on the outskirts of the village.

  “Can I help ya?” a man called from the open door of his barn after we’d pulled into the driveway and exited the car.

  Grant raised a hand in greeting. “Lydia sent us! I think she called to let you know we were coming.”

  The scrawny middle-aged farmer took a rag from the waist of his pants and wiped his hands on it, sauntering toward us. “Just rang a few minutes ago. Name’s Roger.” He shook our hands. His grip felt like leather. “You’re the Americans, then?”

  “Lydia told us you’re the local historian,” I said, curiosity and time constraints making me cut to the chase.

  “Unofficially, but yes. What brings you to the farm?”

  “Probably a wild-goose chase,” Grant said, shaking his head. “We’ve been here for a few days trying to learn more about the Huguenots who escaped to England.”

  “Seventeenth century,” Roger said. “Some in the sixteenth too.”

  “So you know of them?” Grant asked.

  “Of course! A bunch of them settled in London—but you probably know that. Spitalfields, I think, is where the largest number landed.”

  He waved at us to follow him as he walked off toward a garage just behind the farmhouse. “Lydia tell you how history stole her parking space?” he asked.

  Grant laughed. “She didn’t—but I’m guessing there’s a story there.”

  Roger unlocked the garage door and pushed it up on its tracks, revealing rows of shelving lining every wall, each holding neatly organized and labeled items. “She regularly threatens to throw all this rubbish out so she can park her car in here again. And I tell her that I’d be happy to move it all into the sitting room if it will ease her mind. That generally ends the conversation!” He walked to the back corner of the garage and reached for something sitting high on a shelf. “This here’s the only item I can trace back to the Huguenots.”

  He handed me what appeared to be a piece of rolled-up fabric. I spread it out carefully, revealing small slots hand-sewn into the faded, striped cloth. “Is it a pencil case of some sort?” I asked.

  “Something like that. Could have been for art supplies too. Brushes and such,” Roger said. “Don’t know if you can tell, but that’s silk. A little more coarse than what we se
e today, but definitely silk.”

  I finished unrolling it and held it up in front of me for closer inspection. Grant’s intake of breath made me look over the pencil scroll at him.

  “Turn it over,” he said, his voice electric.

  What I saw when I did made my heartbeat accelerate. I glanced at Grant again, then back to the cloth. There were three small letters embroidered in red thread in one corner of the fabric. The same three we’d found on the bottom of Adeline’s box.

  “Where did you get this?” Grant asked Roger.

  “Found it at a flea market. Bridgewater, I think. Didn’t have much use for something so pretty, but—”

  “How did you know it was connected to the Huguenots?” Grant interrupted him, voicing my own question.

  “Because of the note, that’s why. It’s the whole reason I bought it,” Roger said with a broad smile. “There was a letter of sorts wrapped up in it, you see. Got it right over here.” He reached for something that looked like an old photo album and turned a few pages, then handed it to me. “Stuck it in here with postcards and the like to keep it from getting damaged any more than it already was.”

  The yellowed pages, two of them, lay under a thin layer of plastic. The words on them were in tiny script, written in faded pencil.

  “This roll . . . it came from somewhere near here?” Grant asked while I tried to read the note.

  “I’m thinking maybe Holford.” Roger pointed over his shoulder. “’Bout two miles away. Seems a logical assumption, when you consider the mill.”

  “What mill?” I heard the tension in Grant’s voice and felt the same expectation tightening my own lungs.

  “Lydia didn’t tell you? There’s a silk mill in Holford. Story goes the Huguenots ran it back in the day—the handful who settled here. Not much left of it now, mind you. Just a few walls.” He hunched his shoulders. “You can still get to it if you don’t mind trespassing a little.”

  Something I couldn’t define was making my skin tingle. Roger nodded toward the book I still held. “You able to make out what it says?”

  I shook my head. “Not all of it. The writing is so small and most of it is faded . . .”

  “Lucky for you I’ve had some time to look it over.” Roger pulled a pair of glasses from the pocket of his plaid shirt and propped them on his nose, then took the photo album from me and began to read, his voice taking on a formal intonation.

  My grandmother believed in the power of words, in the capacity of story to transcend both time and place. This scroll is evidence of the temerity of her escape, a tribute to the ancestors who lost their world to save their faith.

  All I know of our story I learned from my grandmother, an overcoming woman who spoke often and profoundly of her flight from oppression, her stranding among strangers, and the joy she uncovered in the ruins of her grief. The history of my people is a tale that must not perish. I’ve told it to my children and they’ll pass it down to theirs, not to boast of our resilience, but to bear witness to the courage we displayed because of God. These pages I leave here, inside the scroll her sister gave her, are the evidence of her enduring, woven as it is into the fabric of this place, this site of our restoring and rebuilding.

  From the dungeons of our shock, wrapped in the chains of all our losses, we, the hounded Huguenots, may have doubted for a time, but we knew God in our core to be unshakable and real. My grandmother’s survival is a tribute to that faith, a sturdy kind of certainty forged in the flames of man’s worst deeds. She died believing still.

  It is to honor her and those who went before us that my family and progeny will strive to live the truth we learned from her:

  Roger glanced up long enough to say, “This next bit’s in French, but I looked up the translation.”

  Enduring with courage, resisting with wisdom, and pressing on in faith.

  “Persisting in faith,” Grant whispered next to me, correcting Roger’s translation, his eyes meeting mine. And with those words, we knew beyond a doubt that we had found Julie Baillard.

  Roger closed the album and removed his glasses. “I’ve read it a thousand times and it still gives me chills.”

  By unspoken accord, we let the silence deepen, honoring the history recorded by Julie’s granddaughter.

  Then Grant said, “Where can we find this mill?”

  Roger went to a table near the garage’s entrance and found a pad of paper in its drawer. “I’ll draw you a map.”

  THIRTY

  GRANT HELPED ME OVER THE GATE MADE SLICK BY RECENT RAIN. We’d driven the short distance from Roger’s farm to Holford, a village nestled in the hollow of two hills. Its main street was no more than a narrow lane bordered on each side by thatch-roofed homes. We could see little beyond the gate, but Roger’s drawing told us the old silk mill was somewhere in the trees along the overgrown path that extended from where we stood down a slight hill.

  Grant climbed over the gate clearly marked with No Trespassing signs and caught my eye as he jumped down. We hadn’t said much, our minds still reeling from the sheer magic of our find.

  We took a few steps, and Grant held out a hand. “Watch out, it’s slippery,” he said. I took it gratefully, mostly because my legs had felt weak since we’d left Roger’s museum-garage.

  “There it is.”

  I followed Grant’s gaze to the small structure on our left. All that remained were stone walls, the roof, and windows long gone, but that they were still standing felt miraculous to me. About ten feet wide and thirty feet long, the mill stood in mute tribute to the history it had witnessed.

  We circled it slowly, taking in the crossbars still spanning window openings and the roofline overgrown with vines.

  “Look at the arch,” Grant whispered.

  It took me a moment to understand what he was referring to, then I saw it—an arch of red bricks framed the top of the front door and extended several feet on either side. “Just like the grave in the Sandhurst cemetery,” I said, remembering the arch spanning the ground where the Huguenots lay.

  We walked over mounds of sticks and leaves to enter the small house. Grant pointed out the holes where crossbeams used to hold up the roof’s timbers. The silk mill’s walls seemed strong, unbowed by time and elements. I marveled that so much of it, despite the centuries, had remained standing.

  As we stepped back out the front door, Grant pointed to two other structures just a few feet away—the remnants of a wall and, right next to the stream, the corner of a smaller building.

  Then he nodded back at the larger edifice. “Probably the main house,” he said. “And the ruins over here could have been the fulling mill. With the creek right there, they likely used water to power some of their machines.”

  “Like Pierre’s inventions back in Gatigny.”

  “Julie would have told her new community about the machines he’d created.”

  We looked around in silence for a few minutes. It wasn’t until later that I realized my hand had been in his for most of the time we’d spent in Holford’s glen. We moved slowly to a fallen tree propped a few feet above the ground next to the creek. I sat on its broad trunk as Grant leaned back against it, facing the house that stood like a ghost in the silent, darkening space.

  “So this is where it ends.” Grant’s voice was low. I looked at him. His gaze was soft and bright. “She may not have known where Charles and Isabelle ended up, but she found something here. Had children. Continued with the trade she’d learned from Constance in Gatigny. Adeline would love this—to know her instincts had been right. That Julie had survived.”

  “I think she knows.” Grant looked at me, and I met his gaze.

  We let the silence stretch again. There was something about the glen that felt healing. I leaned sideways until my shoulder rested against Grant’s, surprising myself and him. He hesitated only briefly, then shifted to draw me close. His arm anchored me to his side as his cheek settled on the top of my head. I turned my face into his neck.

  There
was a smile in his voice when he said, “Listen, I’m not complaining, but . . . is there something I should know?”

  I laughed, but kept my head right where it was. “I think—” I hesitated, trying to find meaning in the muddle of my mind. There was relief. There was sadness. There was trepidation. Gratification. Need. Confusion. I didn’t know how the emotions were connected to each other or which were the most important for me to speak to Grant.

  A small movement on the periphery of my vision caught my eye. It drifted through the air, then settled on my denim-clad leg.

  “A bit late for ladybugs,” Grant said when I raised my head to look at it.

  “The bête à bon Dieu,” I whispered. I straightened and looked around, careful not to disturb the bug, half expecting to see Patrick standing by the house or sitting by the stream. But there was no one there.

  “The French have a saying about ladybugs,” Grant murmured near my ear, watching it fan its wings and move across my leg.

  “God cries when they get hurt,” I said, my throat constricted. Tears clouded my vision. “That’s what Connor told me. God cries when the helpless get hurt.”

  I sat up straight, willing to speak, but words seemed insufficient for the thoughts that held me captive. In my spirit I heard my friend’s voice saying, “Use your words, Jess. Use your words,” as the ladybug flew off.

  “I was so scared about what we’d find,” I finally admitted. “I wanted to know, but I was so scared.” I looked up. Grant’s eyes were on me, concern in their depths. “What if we’d gotten to England and discovered that they’d all died before they made it here? What if the horror—” My breath caught, but I wanted to speak while my courage held out. “What if the horror Adeline lived with and died by had just . . . been it. Nothing more. Just death and destruction and evil.”

  Grant’s eyebrows were drawn. He listened intently, his eyes on my face, and I knew he’d sense the meaning in the space between my words.