Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  The Pamela always made a profit. Realizing that he had named the ship, in part, because he had watched Giacomo Cerruti die the same kind of lonely agonized death that his family had died, Henry sent five percent of his profits to Cerruti’s family each year. He shared the rest with Oliver and Praise God—each of whom owned a ten-percent share of the ship—and had plenty of money left over for tailors and agreeable girls, silver plate enough for thirty guests to eat off when he had that many to supper, a carriage and six horses to pull it, and everything else of a material nature that he wanted.

  Knowing what he knew, Henry never saved a shilling, not even after Fanny was born in circumstances that taught him even more than he knew already about the stealthy ways of death.

  3

  The house in Shoe Lane in which all the Hardings had died was destroyed, like nearly everything else between the Temple and the Tower of London, by the Great Fire of 1666. The fire, coming almost exactly a year after the death of the Hardings, cleansed the city of plague, but it did not end Henry’s loneliness. He was seldom alone—Oliver was at his side nearly every waking hour. They always had breakfast and dinner and the evening meal together, visiting a tavern or buying oysters or meat pies from vendors in the streets, and very often they slept in the same brothel at night. Henry made friends easily with both sexes and never lacked for the company of people who lived their lives in public places, but he often felt, even when he was surrounded by merry men and women, even when he was making the jokes that made them laugh, that he was utterly alone in the world.

  He built another house in Catherine Street, and one for Oliver next door, and gave parties. He would invite home anyone he took a liking to—merchants and Spaniards with snuff in their mustaches from the Exchange, and ships’ masters back from America whom he met along the waterfront.

  It seemed wrong to Henry that he should be the only Harding left in the world. Not a day passed that he did not remember every one of the people who had died in the plague house. In his sleep he often met his father and his mother and his sisters again as they had been in life; he would wake up happy and then realize that they were all dead. He took flowers to their graves in Saint Andrew’s churchyard on their birthdays, but there was no one to whom he could speak about his family, recalling this peculiarity of his father’s or that quality of his mother’s, and he knew that they would be forgotten altogether if this silence persisted. He did not, of course, believe that his parents and sisters were looking down on him from heaven; to Henry, the dead were dead, and lived on only so long as they were remembered by the living.

  Because of his lack of religious faith, Henry believed even more than most men that the birth of a child was the greatest blessing a human being could know. Next to a child, the greatest happiness he could imagine was a wife with whom one was in love. Henry wanted to love someone, some pure, calm girl who would give him children who would carry the memory of the Hardings into the future. He took to walking through the residential streets of London in the morning and evening hours when he was most likely to come upon mothers and children together. The sight of a young woman walking for pleasure with a couple of dressed-up girls or boys in the soft light of early day or in the last glow of the afternoon filled him with longing. Would he ever be greeted at the door of his own house by a wife and child? In his reveries he imagined himself lifting up the children, kissing their small faces, asking them questions, and looking over their heads into the grave face of a young woman whose eyes sparkled with love and good humor.

  One morning in April, as he walked along a narrow street behind Saint Paul’s, he heard music coming from an open window. Though the sun was now shining again, it had been raining and he could smell the stones of the cathedral that had been charred by the Great Fire. He looked into the open window and saw a young girl seated at the harpsichord. The light fell on the place where she was sitting, and the clarity of her image combined with the pure sound of the notes of her music made a very strong impression on Henry. The girl wore a white dress and her dark hair, plaited into a heavy braid, hung down her back and touched the polished bench she sat upon.

  When the song she was playing ended, Henry stepped away from the window and knocked at the door. He was greeted by a servant, also a dark young woman, who gave him a suspicious look.

  “I was passing by and heard the music,” Henry said, “and I wished to compliment the young lady on her playing.”

  The servant stared at him in silence and closed the door in his face.

  Henry came back the next day and the girl was playing again. This time she was singing in French:

  Quel espoir de guérir

  Puis-j’avoir sans mourir

  “What a sad song,” Henry said.

  The girl turned around and saw Henry standing at the open window, already bareheaded. She had a solemn face with large dark eyes. She did not answer, but she was not startled by the intrusion of a strange man. Her hands lay quietly in her lap and her whole being seemed to be in a state of repose as she waited to see what Henry would do next.

  He smiled. The girl’s eyes changed when she saw the smile and she stood up and smiled in return. The same servant who had opened the door for Henry the day before appeared from nowhere, scuttled across the room, and closed the window. But the girl, just behind her, opened it again.

  “It’s a song about a broken heart,” the girl said. “It means, how can I ever get over this without dying?”

  “I hope it’s only a song.”

  The girl was smiling now. “It’s only a song.”

  Her name was Genevieve Harris, but because she sang all the time even as a child she was called Fanchon, after the merry girl in the French songs. Her father was a Cavalier, a soldier who had gone into exile in France with Charles II. Fanchon’s mother, a Norman woman, had refused to leave France when the king came home from exile, so the child had been raised in Honfleur, the seaport at the mouth of the Seine that had passed back and forth between the French and the English for two hundred years. When Fanchon was fourteen, her mother died and her father brought her to England. She was now sixteen and she spoke English perfectly, but with the softer echo of French in every word.

  “Are you a Catholic?” Henry asked.

  “Of course. But one is not supposed to say so in England, and there are no real churches. Are you a Protestant?”

  “No,” Henry said. “But you really shouldn’t be telling people who look in at your window that you’re a papist.” “God will protect me.”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised,” Henry said. “But it’s just as well to have friends on earth in case you need them.”

  Since Queen Elizabeth had promulgated her “Act against Jesuits, seminary priests, and other such like Disobedient Persons” a hundred years before, 311 Roman Catholics had been put to death in England for refusing to renounce their religion. Although the persecution eased under Cromwell, who only executed two papists during his rule, prudent Catholics still practiced their religion in secret rooms and priests went about the country in disguise, hearing confessions in secret and celebrating Mass with lookouts posted at the doors and windows.

  Fanchon’s father, after he investigated Henry’s financial position, raised no objection to the match. Henry and Fanchon were married by a young Jesuit named Philip Evans who came to the ceremony disguised as a barber and afterward played the lute and sang a song he had written for the occasion. Evans had been confessing Fanchon and her father and the servant, a Norman girl named Antoinette who wept throughout the ceremony, ever since they arrived from France.

  “You understand the burden you are assuming in marrying a Catholic girl, especially Fanchon, who has absolutely no guile?” he asked Henry. “We Catholics must live dangerously in England, always hiding, always remembering that we are surrounded by enemies.”

  “Fanchon will be quite safe with me.”

  “In body, perhaps, but how can her soul be safe if you do not believe in God?”

  “Y
ou may satisfy yourself on that point as often as you like. But you’d better have a pretext for coming to my house. Can you really cut hair?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. Then you can live your disguise by giving me a trim. Then go upstairs and look after my wife’s soul.”

  Marriage transformed Henry. He had never known what it was to sleep with a woman night after night, to eat every meal with her, to make jokes with her, to be kind to her when she was sick, to see love and pleasure and the mirth of passion in her face. Henry was overcome by the sweetness of the arrangement. Fanchon became pregnant almost immediately.

  “You see?” she said. “God wants us to be happy.”

  Henry listened at her stomach, amazed that his child, a Harding coming into a world that the plague had emptied of Hardings, should be growing inside this joyful little person he loved so much.

  One afternoon in February, early in the ninth month of the pregnancy, Henry heard his name being called as he and Oliver stood in the New Exchange bargaining over a cargo for his ship. It was Antoinette, the servant, and her face was distorted by fear. She shouted when she spoke English because she thought that the English were stupid; now she shrieked out the words.

  “The baby,” she cried. “You must hurry, Monsieur Henry. Sang partout.”

  Henry gripped her by the arms. “Sang partout?” he said. “What do you mean, blood everywhere?”

  The Exchange was many streets away in the Strand, and Oliver, roaring like a fullback, cleared a way through the crowd as the friends ran home. But by the time Henry reached Catherine Street, Fanchon was dead.

  Fanchon lay on the bed on a huge damp bloodstain. The midwife was trying to close her eyes.

  “Sometimes they bleed,” the midwife said. “She just went to sleep, sir, think of it like that.”

  Henry looked at her out of uncomprehending eyes. “Shut up,” Oliver said.

  He pulled the coverlet over Fanchon’s body. Henry kneeled down on the floor beside her and looked into her face. The eyes were still open. Something had happened to the brown in them; it was far paler than before. Her hair was tangled and dull and her skin was sallow, as if the life had gone out of the things that had made Fanchon beautiful before the rest of her died. Henry did not attempt to touch the body; he had seen the dead before, and knew what the flesh felt like, chilly and lax, after the person had gone.

  “Sir!” the midwife said, pushing Henry aside and fumbling with the bedclothes as if Henry’s rights over Fanchon’s body had ceased to exist when the body died.

  Henry rose to his feet. Antoinette was sobbing behind him.

  The midwife was still fumbling with the coverlet.

  “You’ll need a wet nurse, sir,” she said. “My daughter-in-law is a big healthy girl with lots of milk and I think you can have her for a shilling a week.”

  “Milk?” Henry said. “What milk?”

  The midwife brought a baby out from under the covers. It was asleep.

  “The poor lady fed it before she died,” the midwife said. “It was the last thing she did.”

  Antoinette uttered a huge sob. Henry had not realized that the child was alive. He had not seen it, sleeping in its bundle at the side of its dead mother. He could barely see it now because his eyes would not focus; each time he tried to look at something or someone, his mind refused to register the image. Instead, he saw Fanchon as she had been in life.

  The midwife opened the swaddling so that he could see the child’s parts. It was a girl, wizened but delicate and large-eyed like Fanchon. Henry put his hand on the narrow breast and felt the heart beating inside; the skin was warm and incredibly smooth and already faintly golden. Then Henry’s eyes unfocused again and instead of seeing the baby, he saw himself as the child, and his father’s hand as his own hand. The child moved, its first sign of life, and opened its lids. She seemed to know her father; Henry had the very strong feeling that Fanchon was speaking to the child, telling her things about him, that she had somehow held some part of herself back from death until her baby and her husband were touching each other for the first time.

  Then Fanchon went away forever. Henry felt it strongly. He held the baby against his face and kissed its powdery skin. His deep love for Fanny began at that moment and never abated.

  “Fetch Evans,” he said to Antoinette, who was still sobbing. “Quick. Run.”

  The Jesuit did not live far away. Evans came as usual in disguise, carrying his scissors and razor in his outer pockets and holy water and anointing oil in little flasks concealed in secret pockets. He muttered in Latin and drew crosses in the air.

  “Here,” Oliver said. “What’s this? This creature is a papist.”

  “Never mind.”

  “Never mind? But he’s baptizing your child.”

  “Her mother would have done the same.”

  “A Catholic? In England? How will she live?” “We’ll keep it a secret,” Henry said.

  Henry named his daughter after her mother, with Antoinette and Oliver as godmother and godfather.

  “Genevieve—what a name for an English girl!” Oliver said. “You’d better call her Jenny.”

  “We’ll call her Fanny,” Henry said.

  Oliver handed the child to Henry, who turned Fanny’s small head, which was covered with silky black hair, this way and that. He wore a gold signet ring on his forefinger, large enough and bright enough to reflect the child’s whole face. Her eyes were open again, and she seemed to see herself.

  It was at this moment that the bells of London began to ring all at once. Evans told them the news. The king had died that day, confessing himself a Roman Catholic on his deathbed. The Jesuit’s face glowed with happiness.

  “Surely God was in London today,” he said.

  “Yes,” Henry said, and took his child out of the death room.

  In fact, neither Henry nor Oliver expected the child to live. The English clay was full of babies. Of Henry’s twelve siblings, only four besides himself had lived beyond infancy; Oliver’s mother had given birth to eight boys and girls and only Oliver survived. How could Fanny last without a mother?

  But she prospered from the first. Antoinette made certain that the wet nurse gave Fanny her share of the milk and didn’t favor her own English child, a boy who smothered before he was a year old when his mother rolled onto him in her sleep. He was almost the last child Fanny ever saw. Antoinette kept playmates away because children got sick and made other children sick too, and because English children spoke English. She spoke nothing but French to Fanny.

  Evans came as before to hear Antoinette’s confession and say Mass and, later, to catechize Fanny. When Fanny was five Henry had a talk with Evans.

  “Fanny needs a tutor. She should know Latin and music and arithmetic.”

  “And the fundamentals of the true faith,” the Jesuit said.

  “You’ve already begun that, so just go on,” Henry said. “But leave out the burnings and hangings and cuttings-off of privy parts until she’s a bit older. I don’t want her in a nunnery.”

  Henry filled the house in Catherine Street with instruments—a spinet, a harpsichord, violas, lutes. Fanny learned them all; she had the gift. By the age of fourteen she knew a hundred pieces of music by heart, including all the songs her mother had played, and could read music and Latin as easily as English. She also knew a little Greek and a great deal of arithmetic, which came to her as easily as music.

  It was the music that pleased her father most. When, in the empty house, Fanny would sing “Heureux qui peut se plaindre” or another of Fanchon’s songs, the sad music and her young soprano voice that sounded so much like her mother’s stirred powerful memories.

  While Fanny was still a child, Henry would take her on his lap after she had sung and played and talk to her about her mother.

  “There she was, playing the harpsichord in a pool of light and singing in French,” he would say. “She had black hair like yours, Fanny, blacker than the hair of any other gir
l in London.”

  Henry told Fanny her mother’s stories about Honfleur—the plump French ships in the bassin sailing off to Canada on the tides that rose and fell twenty or thirty feet, the heaps of fish on the quai, the gray slate houses along the shore, and the beautiful green fields by the river shaded by apple trees. On an eminence above the town there was a cathedral, Saint Catherine’s, that was made entirely of wood. It had been built by the shipbuilders, so it was like the inverted hull of a ship; when the prayerful lifted their eyes they saw ribs and planking and the long keel that was the ridgepole. When the church was full and everyone was whispering it sounded like the sea. Because the Vikings who occupied Normandy had not married the peasant girls they took as wives, Norman surnames were often female Christian names. Antoinette’s family was called Marie, and in nearly every generation there was a blond they called aïeul, grandfather, even as a child.

  Antoinette talked about Honfleur even more than Henry—the food, the wine, the sea air, the good people, the glorious weather.

  “Doesn’t it ever rain in France?” Fanny asked.

  “Certainly it rains in France, but it is lovely rain, the water coming down among the slate houses is so clean that it seems blue like the sky, not brown and filthy as it does in London. And mostly the sun shines in France; God only sends France as much rain as it needs to grow food. He must be trying to drown the English, but they’re too wicked to die.”

  The beauty of Honfleur, a place that Henry only knew from stories and Antoinette had nearly forgotten, was the only matter on which Antoinette agreed with Henry.