Knowledge
She also knows that there’s a difference between a preacher, like the man who sometimes rides his cart and buggy through the village on his way to Boston, Bible in his hand and hellfire on his lips, and a priest, like her own Father Clemence.
Preachers marry rarely, but they do marry, and those who do have children in the normal way of things (young and somewhat sheltered she may be, but she’s also a child in a farming village—she knows the ways in which children happen, assuming humans work the same as cows or barn cats).
Priests, on the other hand, don’t marry, and they don’t have children.
But her priest did, and she definitely exists.
Various adults have tried to explain to her where she came from.
She knows she had a mother once, and she knows her mother’s body is in the churchyard, resting peacefully.
Everyone she speaks to seems to have their own mind as to where her mother’s soul has gone.
Some say up to God and the angels, and some say down, to the other place, and since they seem to be equally divided, she assumes her mother’s soul is with her body, sleeping in the earth.
Father Clemence scolds people who tell her that her mother’s gone below, ordering them to speak more kindly to a child.
She loves him for that, for his kindness to the mother she never knew.
The village is equally divided on whether he’s her father by blood as well as by care.
Some of them say he is, and that her mother was a fallen woman, while others say he’s barely short of sainthood for taking in the bastard daughter of a simple soul who’d been led heartlessly astray.
Floretta has long since come to the conclusion that no one knows for sure, perhaps not even Father Clemence, and so the truth must be whatever she decides it should be.
The truth should be that he’s her father.
That the man who has brushed her hair and eased her fevers should belong to her, as she belongs to him.
Every night in her prayers, she asks God—who is good, who can do absolutely anything if He only decides He should—to make Father Clemence her father in every possible way, so that she will never be asked to leave his house, as some of the village women have implied she’ll one day have to do.
It’s a small and selfish miracle, but if God can make the heavens and the earth, she assumes He can handle the requests of children.
She wants this so badly, it would be a blasphemy not to ask him to make her wish come true!
She’s been down by the river all afternoon.
An arrogant name for a muddy trickle of water that barely seems to aspire to the status of creek most days.
Still one of her favorite places for all that it puts on airs about its status.
She loves the ripples on the water, the quick, shy flashes of silvered fish below the surface, the occasional frog brave or foolish enough to stray into sight and find itself scooped up by her quick young hands.
Father Clemence has long since abandoned scolding her for muddying the hems of her dresses, for pruning the skin between her toes.
It brings her joy, and joy is in short enough supply in the village.
She bangs through the front door, running through the house without hesitation.
It’s not large, just two bedrooms and a kitchen sprouting off from a central sitting room that serves as dining space and visiting area for villagers with problems smaller or more personal than the ones they air in the village church.
She knows Father Clemence used to live in the small apartment attached to the church itself; the house where they live belonged to her mother, and to her grandparents before that.
It is the only home Floretta has ever known.
And today she runs into it to find a stranger sitting with her beloved Father, his back straight and stiff as a black oak tree, his hands folded over his middle like the village schoolmaster preparing to deliver a lecture she doesn’t feel she deserves.
A chill runs down her spine, and a feeling like the one she gets every autumn when she sees the first leaf fall, every spring when she sees the first dandelion going to seed.
Something is changing. Once it’s changed, she won’t have the strength to change it back.
The stranger’s eyes flick over her, taking her measure, from her muddy hem to the reddened scratch on her shin where she got too close to a thornbush.
It feels like he weighs her in that look, finding her entirely wanting.
Any flicker of interest in those eyes is outweighed by the disdain, and she can’t imagine him wanting anything more to do with her.
Father Clemence looks at her, at first the way he always has, and then, when the stranger makes a small, disapproving noise, with widened eyes, like he, too, is seeing her for the first time, seeing all her flaws with the eyes of an authority figure, rather than a father.
“Floretta,” he says, his tone breathless and oddly rushed.
Floretta feels something in her chest curl inward like a fern escaping from the sun, delicate and bruised and shying away from his unfamiliar rejection.
She doesn’t think she can take him looking at her like that for very long, thinks it might sink into her skin like a poison and rot her away from the inside out if she tries.
She turns her own eyes away, and finds herself looking at the stranger, who stares unflinchingly back at her.
His eyes are a clear and somehow layered blue, like river water running over stones.
Her own eyes are the same, and in that moment, she knows that God has never listened to her prayers.
He may have heard them, but He didn’t listen, thinking that all she wanted was a father, when what she was asking was that He make sure her life would never need to change.
She doesn’t want this. But still, she is a biddable girl, if somewhat wild, and she knows what’s expected. So she bobs the shallowest of curtseys, her skirt held firmly in her hands, and says a polite, “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know we were expecting company.”
“Floretta, this isn’t company. This is—”
She knows what his next words will have to be, and thinks they might well strike her dead, that it might be better to be struck dead than to be forced to face the reality of another father.
“—your uncle, come to visit us from Boston,” he finishes, and Floretta blinks at him, struck silent by the denial of her expectations.
Her silence stretches out for too long. John begins to frown, judging her apparent lack of manners, and she knows, in the dark, sinking part of her heart, that any chance she has to win his good regard is slipping rapidly away.
She isn’t sure she wants his approval, not really: Floretta has always been a sweet-natured girl, eager to charm the people around her, fully aware that the questionable reality of her parentage puts her at a disadvantage.
There aren’t many people for her to charm in their little village, but she’s done her best, flirting and flouncing and laughing her way through life.
This man, though, with his connection to the mother she never knew and his roots in faraway Boston, which might as well be the moon for all the distance there is between them … this man may be too dangerous to charm.
Or too dangerous not to.
Floretta smiles, wide enough to make a dimple appear high on her left cheek, and bobs a deeper curtsey, this time putting some respect and effort into the gesture. “A pleasure to meet you, sir,” she says. “I am Floretta Bearse, and I am grateful to make your acquaintance.”
Her voice is clear and carrying, her words well formed and easily understood.
John doesn’t stop frowning, but does acknowledge, silently, that she might not have been entirely destroyed by her country upbringing, by her early privation.
Oh, he’ll have his work cut out for him, he can see that clearly enough to have no question, but the work no longer seems insurmountable.
“We’ll have plenty of time to get to know one another in Boston,” he says crisply, decision made.
Horror flits across Floretta’s face, there and gone so quickly that it could easily be mistaken for a shadow cast by the nearby trees, for the sun passing momentarily behind a cloud. “Boston?” she asks, voice quavering, eyes darting to Father Clemence.
And Father Clemence, beloved Father Clemence, guardian against nightmares, provider of safety, comfort, and warmth, does the unforgivable: he looks away.
“Your uncle was not properly informed of your birth when it occurred,” he says, and his voice is a pit leading to perdition, deep and empty and echoing.
“Now that he is aware of your existence, it seems only right that he should have the custody of you. He will see to your care and education, and he will be able to do a far finer job than I could ever have achieved.”
“No,” gasps Floretta. She all but flies to Father Clemence, scrabbling for his hands. “No, you can’t do this to me, no. This is my home! I have as much claim to this place as you do! Who will sweep the hearth and light the fire? Who will sing to Mother’s bones?”
“Quiet yourself, child,” says her uncle sharply.
“These things are not a child’s burden to bear.
You will come with me, and I will shape you into a proper lady.
I will grant you the life you should have lived from the beginning.
You would have no such qualms if things had been done as the law demands, and you had come to me as your closest living relative.
” He rises, and he’s so tall, he’s tall enough to eclipse the sun, to blot out everything else in the universe.