Afternoons were filled with lessons and prayers. After a while, I could recite the prayers and sing the songs. I had no idea what the words meant, but I copied the sounds and joined in. I said my French prayers quite convincingly. I learned the names of some saints and surprised Donatienne with the few on which Ma had instructed us. Her favorite was Saint Agnes, who watched over children. I did not tell Donatienne that I thought Agnes had fallen asleep on her watch where Patey and I were concerned. I excelled in my lessons, determined that the nuns might question my spiritual devotion, but not my knowledge.
When we settled in our beds at night, I made up stories and told Donatienne about my life. I wanted her to know that I did not belong in this place, and that Patience and I deserved to be released. “Patience was a gentlewoman, you know,” I said. “She was engaged to marry a prince, the heir to the throne of, of Carbundium. His father owns five castles, and she shall have her pick of any or all of them. With seven ladies-in-waiting at each castle. The prince angered an ogre who charged across the ocean on a ship with sails made of spiderwebs and witches’ hair, and he stole her from the handsome prince. I saved her from him and I came along, too, to be with her, for I would rather be with Patience and keep her safe in this place, than back in the castle in Bariander.”
“You said the place was called Carbundium.”
“Bariander is a town in Carbundium.” The story was getting unwieldy, and I gulped at my mistake. I should not have made up such long, difficult words.
“And that is in Jamaica?”
“No, that is the place where the prince lives. Patience and I live in Jamaica.”
“What is his name? The prince.”
“Theodore. Prince Theodore of Carbundium.”
“Is he tall? Is he gallant? What color are his eyes? Say it in French.”
“Not too tall. Rose.” I took a deep breath of relief. This, at least, was easier to remember.
“Red eyes?”
“Bleu. I meant blue.”
Now and then, when the men worked in the fields I imagined Reverend Johansen out there, sweating under the sun with the others, his scrawny gray hair blowing in the breeze. Perhaps that one was he, or that over there. I missed Reverend Johansen. I suppose though he was not my pa, nor anything like Pa, he seemed more like a nice uncle, a real uncle, not like Rafe MacAlister. When I wrote to Ma I would tell her to come get him, too, and Donatienne if she wants to come along with Patey and me. We would be a little family. I would write to August, also, and he could come home. Perhaps Ma and Reverend Johansen would marry, and August marry Donatienne. Patience and I would be sisters all our lives and shun all men now that she had her lost love in England and I left mine in the graveyard at Collins Pond.
Some days all I could think about was that the building where the men lived was where I might find paper, quill, and ink. I took afternoon strolls up and down the length of the buildings, each day a few steps closer to the priests’ dormitory. Sometimes one of them came out and I waved to him in a friendly manner, thinking that I must learn enough French to ask one of them to speak to me of the Psalms. That had made Reverend Johansen my friend, and it might work again. But their door was kept locked as if they were dangerous convicts. No one opened when I knocked.
In the kitchen during the execution of my chores, I sneaked half-eaten rolls and tidbits of mutton gristle or a leaf of parsley from the plates as I cleared them from the tables, folding the morsels into my sleeves. When I gathered herbs by the kitchen door, I put mint in my cheeks to suck on. When they made me work in the garden I ate the raw vegetables and sometimes even the leaves of them. One evening, Violette, a novice who was fifteen and devout, caught me finishing a carrot off a plate meant for a sick nun. They made me crawl on my knees up the center of the chapel for eating one carrot. In truth I had eaten nine carrots before anyone found out. But scolding and kneeling were nothing compared to what I had endured before. It meant only inconvenience.
The sisters bade me confess my theft and gluttony to a priest in a little closet, but I believed Reverend Johansen’s words, that I had no need to tell any human being every sin I knew. In confession, I said, “Père Jean, I have stolen a carrot. I broke it into twelve pieces, one for each of the Apostles, and I tithed two of them, planting them again to grow two carrots out of the one, and I gave one bite to each of the ten most thin and starving girls in this place. They were hungry, Father Jean, so wretchedly hungry they had begun to eat their clothing.” He said he had been told I ate it myself, but I cried then, real tears, and said, “On my honor, I did it only for the little ones.”
“Marie,” Father Jean said, “it was a cooked carrot. You cannot plant a cooked carrot. Do you add lying to your sins?”
I gasped. I had forgotten. “I did not know it would not grow, Father. I swear it.”
Sister Marta, who supervised the kitchen work, decided I would be of more use in the weavers’ barn.
The weaving barn, the grange de tissage, was a mass of confusion. Baskets overflowing with wads of yet-to-be-spun wool hung from walls at one end. Similar ones running off with flaxen tow clung to the other end as if they were bats in a ceiling. Cloth bolts filled bins and shelves in complete abandon. Coloring and dyes filled another room, and outside, great vats filled with horrific-smelling concoctions, far worse than anything I had known sleeping with goats, awaited processes I had yet to witness.
The sister in charge of the beginners there, which included two other children, a boy and a girl, and me, put us all to carding wool. Her name was Sister Joseph, which I found quite confusing. I did not ask her why she had a man’s name. I decided to ask Donatienne when I got a chance. Sister Joseph asked me how old I was. Eleven, I knew. I wondered what would be the better answer for sympathy. “Nine,” I said.
I still went to chapel first thing in the morning, took French lessons, and had meals. All afternoon I worked in the barn. I left every day covered in lint and fell asleep in my cot next to Donatienne. I needed her to translate what Sister Joseph said to me, but every time my compagne entered the wool room she began such sneezing and coughing it was as if she were breathing in poison. Her eyes swelled shut and her nose ran, and she grew faint of heart until they insisted she leave.
The two children were French but a third girl spoke English, and therefore had a compagne, an older nun named Sister Évangélique. Sister Évangélique was not patient, and she had no teeth at all, so all her words in either language were slurred and full of sounds that did not belong in them. I stayed close to Sister Joseph rather than asking for a translation. Both Sister Joseph and Sister Évangélique bowed their heads, their eyes wide, lips sealed, when Sister Agathe approached. I did not lower my head before her but stared straight at her when she crossed the room.
One time, right after morning chapel, Sister Agathe tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Your eyes are so hard. Your soul is far away, is it not? You must accept your life. So much sadness you have seen.” She carried a large basket covered with a towel.
I smiled and said, “Not at all. I will carry that to the rectory for you.”
“This is a bushel of laundry. Why do you want to go to the rectory? Every day you ask me to go there for something or other.”
“I hoped—” I stopped in mid-sentence, trying to think up a believable ploy. “To find Reverend Johansen. I was sure he was with the Brothers.” I smiled my most convincing smile. “He is my uncle.”
“I will ask if you may visit him, since he is your uncle.”
“Will you? Thank you, Sister,” I said, and went skipping off to class. I stopped in mid-step so abruptly that my shoe left a mark on the cobble. It was not what she said that stopped me, but the sudden realization that I could not distinguish in which language I had heard it. Was I becoming French? “Oh, la, non!” I said.
After lessons, Sister Agathe took me to the rectory door, knocked, asked through the spy window for Reverend Johansen. She spoke in whispers to the voice on the other side so that I c
ould not understand. Afterward, Sister Agathe said he worked in the vineyard with other men. I was not allowed near those men and they were not to come near the girls. “You are allowed to pray for him,” she said. “Not to see him. We protect our girls from all contact with men.” I did not have to pretend my disappointment at her words. One friend, no matter that he was old Reverend Johansen, made such a difference in my hopes for escape. As I walked away, I felt as if someone had hung a boulder about my neck.
The girls from the grange got potato soup with leeks at noon. If weather permitted we sat outside under a tree as if it were a picnic, always under the watchful eyes of les bonnes soeurs. Sister Évangélique knew English, and could tell Sister Joseph what we said. Christine came to my side one day, asking, “Have you turned Catholic?”
“I am only learning to comb wool, waiting until I can go home,” I replied. “I have written to the king of England to notify my mother where I am. She will be here soon.”
Christine’s face registered her scorn. “Pah. King of England. I say you were always Catholic and destined for hell.”
I shrugged and asked, “Have you seen Patience? Princess Patience?”
“She’s in the sick ward with Rachael.”
“What is wrong with them?”
“Only that my sister is married and therefore has legitimately gotten with child, and your sister is a slattern and will give birth to a bastard. She should be stoned.”
When I spoke then it was more loudly, it was in French, and I turned my head toward the two nuns. “My sister Patience is kind and brave. Her baby is not a bastard. He is the future king of Carbundium.” I left the small table and sat on the grass in the shade near Sister Joseph. I was not sure what the word “bastard” meant other than what I had heard aboard the English privateer ship. No child of Patey’s would be called such. “Sister Joseph?” I began, my hand upon her knee. “I am convinced with all my soul the faith I have found here is the one and true faith. May I please be baptized?” I watched Christine’s face curdle as if she had a goat’s cud in her mouth. At the same time, both sisters patted my arms and head and smiled, crossed themselves, and kissed my hands.
Little fanfare accompanied my baptism. Patience was allowed to come as my next of kin, to witness it. I hardly knew her, for she was pale and swollen. Patience was getting near her confinement, she said. And so, while I was in the best graces with the nuns and the priest with whom I had contact, I asked permission to attend her birthing. They told me I could not. After that I relegated lesser sins such as daydreaming or sleeping during prayers to the priest’s ears. I held no qualms at all about belaboring the ears of God Himself with supplications about returning home to Ma. I promised Him anything, even a life of poverty, if we could only get home.
In early July it was time to pull flax. Sister Agathe led the children to the edge of a field so large it seemed to go on into eternity. She showed us how to pull the plants, how to lay them thus and so. They did not come easily from the ground, and they were covered with tiny stickers. By the end of the first day I was sweaty and dirty, and my hands swollen and blistered, so that I had trouble getting ready for supper and prayers and bed.
Over the next days, I pulled flax until my fingers bled. I looked at the land laden with flax running waist to chest high as far as I could see. It went on and on, and as I bent to spread some that had fallen in a clump, blood marked the stalks I laid. I squeezed a fist and let it go. Fresh blood ran from cracks across the backs of my knuckles as I forced my fingers closed, and when I opened them it ran from open blisters in the palms. The hands did not seem to belong to me; their swelling made them foreign and unnatural. The sun was high overhead. Other captives, bent so their backs moved as bears, spread throughout the vast field, rose and bowed like birds picking for bugs. None of the compagnes worked in the field. No nuns stayed amongst the reeds and flax, yet a few watched us from a platform afar off.
I heard someone singing. It made me remember Patience saying she was no slave to be singing or dancing her grief away. With a great sigh I realized I was once again a slave and I began humming a tune, then singing the English words. After our noon meal, others sang, too, some together as a chorus, some just by themselves as I did. We worked until the sun crawled toward the horizon and one of the nuns came to the edge of the field and swung a bell. Everyone filed onto a path so as not to step upon the flax.
We washed our hands every evening at a large barrel of cold water. One day Sister Joseph tapped me on the shoulder so suddenly I thought she carried Birgitta’s goat stick. I bowed my head and pulled my hands from the water, cringing away from the whipping I expected. “See here, Marie! Stand up straight and look at me,” Sister said.
“Yes, madame. Oh, la, yes. Oui, ma soeur.” I switched from English to French.
“You are baptized. You will not sing the pagan songs here. You will sing only hymns to the Virgin. Is this clear to you?”
“Oui. But others sang first. I merely joined.” I knew it was a lie. “Greensleeves,” and “O Waly, Waly” were about longing and love, not worship. I had forgotten that some might know the English words.
“Will there be any more singing of unrighteous songs in the fields?”
“Non, ma soeur. I will not sing in the field.” I hung my head, expecting a beating to follow the words. It did not. She had only her bony dog finger to tap my shoulder rather than a stick. I felt so exhausted. I pinched my lips and thought, Curses on you, Sister Joseph. I thought of the song I had used for Mistress Hasken. I puffed out a large breath. It fit, except that I had loved Sister Joseph. Until then. I stuck out my lip, thinking, No singing in the field. No singing the wrong song. I wished I were a pirate. I would sing the “Faraway Isles” song and “Blow the Man Down,” even one they did not know I knew, that had all a woman’s parts named right in the singing, “The Captain’s Tart.” I wanted to sing all the songs that insulted every ear on this land. Every place I was bound to, I knew all the wrong songs. My face reddened and I felt a flush of heat across my cheeks. Tears were welling and my lower lip quivered against my will. With great effort I tucked it under my upper teeth. I hated Montréal and I hated this convent and I hated Sister Joseph for making me work so hard.
Sister Joseph put one hand under my chin and lifted my face to hers. She said, “Now, let me put some salve on your poor little hands.” She clucked her tongue.
One moment I was full of hate, the next, longing. I told myself I hated Sister Joseph, even as she rubbed salve on my hands. I hated her as she wrapped them in cotton lint and put a pair of black stockings on my hands as if they were gloves. I hated her as she led me to the dining room and sat beside me. After the blessing, I opened my eyes and saw that I had two pieces of bread on my plate and she had none. Oh, la. I wanted to climb into her lap and be comforted! I wept. If she had only stayed cruel I could have held only my anger and hatred, but instead I turned to Sister Joseph and asked, “Will you fix my hands again?” not because the bandages had fallen, but because I wanted her to caress and hold them again. She murmured to me as she straightened the stockings that I had worked so very hard, much more than the other girls, and that she was proud of me for such a great labor unto the Lord. When she had finished pulling the stockings in place, she hugged me and I loved her for it.
In chapel, I fell asleep during prayers. One of the girls awoke me when it was over and I stumbled as I followed the others to my dormitory where Donatienne waited to help me into my nightgown. She held in her hands the rough, gray thing as I approached the bedside. Exhaustion left me bitter and anger flooded my thoughts. “Leave me alone,” I said. I swatted at the thing, sending it to the floor.
“What is the matter, Marie?” Donatienne picked it up, searching for the sleeves.
“My name is not Marie. I am tired. I have worked like a slave all the day long, and you ask me what is the matter? Leave it on the floor; I do not want your help.”
“Very well. I will not help you.” She laid the gown
on my bed.
I hated that horrible bed. The small comfort that it was not a flea-ridden bearskin next to a chimney, nor a mat on the fetid floor of a Saracen bilge-hold did not make it my bed. My bed had coverlets of goose down and pink satin. My bed had carved and rubbed mahogany posts and a down tick and a cunning wee stair to get into it. My bed was on the top floor of a stone house on Meager Bay. “Do not look at me, either,” I said, and burst into tears. Why could I not hide them now? Why was I no longer brave? Why did Sister Joseph not come and hold my hands in hers again? Such hard work as this day I hoped never to see again.
Donatienne mumbled, “Très bien.”
I answered in French, “And stop saying ‘very well.’ It is not very well at all.”
“Your French has improved. You have found your tongue.”
My tears flowed in earnest then, and I blubbered, “Je vous déteste. I hate you.” I turned away from her and pulled down my skirt, dropping the loose shirt atop it, both in a heap on the floor beside the bed. I pulled the gown on over my petticoat and shift. I kicked off my shoes but did not bother with the stockings for I could not use my fingers, wrapped as they were in other stockings.
Donatienne sobbed as she put on her own night clothes and climbed into her bed only inches from mine. “I am sorry if I have offended you.”
Her words threw fresh oil onto the fire of my anger. “Pulling flax all day for two days, that has offended me.” Uncontrollable tears annoyed me for a short time before I slept the sleep of exhaustion.
Some of the flax was left to ret or cure in the field; some was bound in bundles, wrapped in tow sacking, and sunk at the edge of the river in vast trays made of logs. Rocks weighted the bundles so that they stayed in the water. Mold and rot made a stench in the bundles worse than the garbage bins before they set them afire. That was the most valuable flax of all, for Sister Agathe said when it was woven it shone like gold.