Chapter Twelve #2
“It is this,” Madame Cuvelier says, and she begins to tell the story Jack told the evening before.
“So that’s how Mrs. Henley was found in a small town in Cornwall, nineteen years ago this September.
” She stresses each syllable of the month—Sep-tem-ber—as if Madame Cuvelier might miss its significance.
“She was soon adopted by her parents, Admiral and Mrs. Farnworth of…Woodbane House, Mrs. Henley?”
“Woodbury House, in Norfolk,” Isabel says. “But yes, that is my story.” She forces a lightness in her tone she doesn’t feel. “Extraordinary, isn’t it?”
Madame Cuvelier says, “It reminds me of something that happened in our town nineteen years ago.”
Madame Kerjean is now openly staring at Isabel.
She’s leaning forward in her chair, her elbows planted on a set of bony knees visible under the black cloth of her dress.
She lifts the silver cross to her lips and kisses it.
“Mon Dieu, mon enfant,” she whispers, making the sign of the cross.
She draws a lace handkerchief from the folds of her gown and pats her eyes, whispering again, “Mon Dieu.”
“Could it be her?” Madame Cuvelier says. “I don’t mean to be insensitive, but you can understand how important it is. The family stayed with you and Captain Kerjean the night before they set sail, did they not? Do you think it’s possible?”
“You are twenty-three now?” Madame Kerjean asks Isabel.
“As of last December, as far as I know. My parents chose a birthday for me based on their physician’s judgment of my age.”
“And you have no memories? Not of your parents, nor of France? Not of my husband and me?”
“None. I don’t recall ever having been here.”
“You have her hair,” Madame Kerjean says. “The same, what to call it now? Waviness. Not quite curls. But it was a shade lighter.”
“Hair color can change as we grow older,” says Madame Cuvelier.
Madame Kerjean says, “She had freckles, like you. And your eyes…yes, I believe it could be. Perhaps. Aurélie, her name was. Does it mean anything to you, this name?”
Isabel shakes her head again, her tongue turned to sand in her mouth.
Madame Kerjean continues. “Aurélie Du Pont, she was called. But when they fled Paris, the family took the name Fournier, so they would have taught their daughter to call herself Aurélie Fournier.” She leans in closer and touches Isabel’s hair.
“It could be,” she says slowly. “I can’t be sure. ”
When the woman draws back, Isabel lets out her breath slowly. “But how could I—that is to say, how could one little girl have survived when no one else on the ship did? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“She could swim,” Madame Kerjean says. “I remember distinctly her telling me. She was a sweet little thing. Douce. She told me she could not wait to go to sea. She dreamed of it, she said, back in Paris. I said to her, ‘Are you not afraid of the water? The ocean is very big,’ and she said she wasn’t, for she could swim.
” Madame Kerjean puts the handkerchief to her eyes again.
“I thought she was telling tales. A little thing like that, swim, I thought. My face must’ve shown my disbelief, for the father told me it was true.
“ ‘I taught her myself, as soon as she could walk,’ he said to me, and he explained that he had lost a cousin at a young age, drowned in the pond on the family’s land.
He’d make sure this would never happen to his child.
He said she could swim like a fish. So you see, if any child would’ve known how to save herself in the water, it would have been this one.
” A heavy pause, then Madame Kerjean says, “Captain Kerjean was a very good swimmer, too.”
They’re all silent. A pigeon coos outside. The sun is high in the sky, already; the smell of the sea blows in through the window, overtaking that of the hyacinths and tea. “Pastry?” Madame Kerjean says thickly, offering the basket Madame Cuvelier has brought.
Isabel shakes her head. Madame Cuvelier takes a small round cake and nibbles it.
Crumbs rain onto the skirt of her yellow gown.
The air grows oppressive, despite the half-open window.
The ceiling is too low; the beams only an inch above Isabel’s head when she stands.
There’s no space to breathe. She wants to get out of Madame Kerjean’s house, the town, the stone seawall of the harbor.
She wants the open ocean so she can breathe.
She stands up abruptly. “Thank you, Madame Kerjean,” she says. “You’ve been exceedingly helpful. And you, Madame Cuvelier, I thank you kindly for your hospitality and for bringing me here. I’m afraid I must go back to the ship now. Captain Carlyon is expecting me.”
Madame Cuvelier has risen, too. She brushes the crumbs from her gown and says, “Are you quite well, Mrs. Henley? You look pale.”
“Some fresh air will help, I’m sure.”
They take their leave of Madame Kerjean in a swarm of platitudes. Yes, Isabel will come see her again if she’s ever in Roscoff, and yes, it’s a marvelous story and thank you, thank you, thank you again.
At last, they’re out in the street. As they walk back to the port, Isabel thanks Madame Cuvelier again. “It’s strange to think they may have been my parents,” she says.
“I’ll try to find out more about the family,” Madame Cuvelier says. “I believe there may be an ancestral home somewhere in Brittany. I shall write to you, if you tell me where to direct my letter.”
She gives Madame Cuvelier the name of the cottage and the village. “I shall look forward to your letter, Madame,” Isabel says, and Madame Cuvelier tells her to please call her Lucie.
She declines the offer of another night in the Cuveliers’ guest room.
Jack will sleep on board tonight so he can oversee the loading of the cargo until the small hours and she’s eager to join him.
At the quay, she doesn’t have long to wait for a boat to take her back to the Rapide.
Before the sun reaches its highest point, she’s back on board.
The top deck is such a hive of activity she flattens herself against the mainmast to get out of the way.
“Isabel.” Jack comes striding over. “You’re back. How was it?”
“Fine,” she says, dragging up the corners of her mouth. “Shall I tell you about it later? I can see you’re busy.” The words are as light as the breeze.
“We sail with the morning tide,” Jack says. “So yes, it’s best if you tell me later. Do tell me, however—do you think they could’ve been your parents?”
“Who knows?” she says, holding the breeze, keeping it. “They’re gone, in any case.”
Jack says, “That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose. Will you come and take down the numbers for the goods before the men take them to the hold?”
“Give me a moment to…get something from the cabin. I shall be there directly.”
“Very well.” Jack turns on his heels and marches past the contraband stacked along the gangway to a place near the bow where Harry Tremayne and Dick Pascoe are counting small wooden crates.
She slips down the ladder and into the cabin.
The sun falls in at a slant, the skylight is a rectangle of pure blue.
It smells of polished wood and of the sea.
She leans back against the side of the ship, sinking to a crouch.
It is only then that she allows the tears to come, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet as she weeps for the parents she never knew, whether they were the couple fleeing Paris or whether they were other parents, forever unknown to her.
The sea took them, if they were her parents.
If they weren’t, the sea took them still.
Just as she lost George far away at sea, aboard a ship, just as Jack lost Mary-Anne, she lost these parents she cannot even remember. If they were hers.
She nearly chokes on the thought. It’s obscene that she should love the sea as she does when all it has done is rob her of her family. And what of Jack? Will the sea claim him, too?
Her eyes move from the skylight to the hull of the ship.
Beyond it lies the ocean, vast, unknowable like her parents.
Except, she feels she does know it. That moment in the creek, when she felt she had come home, the voice calling to her, the dreams she’s had full of shadows in the water—there’s a sense of familiarity to it all.
Maybe she has always known it, maybe that’s why she longs for the sea like she does.
The story Madame Kerjean told her fits, and yet it doesn’t.
Could she have been on that ship and washed up on the shores of Cornwall?
It’s possible. Only, the ship left Roscoff on the sixth of September and the crossing shouldn’t have taken more than five or six days, yet she wasn’t discovered in Helford until September the twenty-fifth.
Was the ship blown off course? Had she been in the ocean or somewhere on the Cornish coast, alone, perhaps?
But the latter didn’t explain why she was dripping seawater when she was found.
Or is she not the girl from the French ship, is she someone else, perhaps even—miraculously—someone whose father could be a spirit of the sea, an invocation against its dangers, a creature of legend, as the people of Helford have been telling her?
She presses the heels of her hands to her eyes.
A dull headache pulses behind them. She has never been forced to examine her origins so closely before.
Though she wondered, she was content to accept they were unknown.
She had her parents, whom she loved, and that was enough.
Only now it isn’t any longer. The sea calls to her more insistently all the time and she cannot tell if it’s because she lives so near it or because of something else.
One thing she does know. When Jack said one couldn’t grow up in Cornwall without accepting that there may be some truth in the old stories, he was right.
The Helford River, with its hidden coves and trails, with its shadowy creeks and turquoise waters opening to the sea as if to embrace it, is a place in which fairy stories may just be true.
The tears keep coming. She stays down in the cabin too long.
The door opens and then Jack is crouching in front of her, saying, “Don’t cry.
” He takes her hands from her eyes and pulls her up to standing.
She wants to move into his arms, but instead she leans back against the side of the ship.
Jack says, “They were your parents then?”
“I don’t know. My father was Admiral Farnworth.
My mother was…my mother. Before all else, she was my mother.
Those people who fled Paris—I’ll never know now.
” She wipes her eyes with the cuff of her sleeve.
“I don’t know why it makes me so sad. Nothing has changed.
They were always either going to be dead or they didn’t want me.
I knew that from the moment I learned the story of how I was found, but now…
I can’t stop thinking of how the sea took them, even if they weren’t my natural parents, just like it took George and… ” She trails off.
“And what?”
“What if it takes you, too?”
“Listen,” he says. “The sea takes, but it also gives.”
“That sounds like blasphemy.”
“Because it’s close to Scripture? What does it matter when it’s true? Besides the practical stuff, does it not also give you great happiness to stand on deck with the wind in your hair and a fast sea below your feet? You’ve felt it, haven’t you?”
“I have.”
“Then if you may not have a merman for your father, perhaps think of the sea as your mother. That way you shall never truly be orphaned.”
“What a strange thought, Jack.”
Looking away, he says, “I invented it when I was six, when I lost my mother. It helped me, especially at night, when my father had gone to sea, leaving my sisters and me with our governess. I felt terribly alone. I could hear the sea outside my window and I imagined it was my mother, singing me a lullaby.” He’s silent for a moment, then says, “Even what happened with Mary-Anne could not change how I feel about the ocean.”
The image of him as a little boy, alone, makes the tears rise again.
The distance between the two of them, however small, is suddenly too much; she closes it in two steps and wraps her arms around his waist. Long seconds pass, then he puts his arms around her shoulders and she leans in, sniffing into his shirt. “Careful, it’s my best one,” he says.
This makes her laugh, in spite of it all. “It’s your most mended one and you’ve worn it five days without washing.”
“It’s my best one because you’ve mended it, and in case you didn’t know, it’s only wash day once a week at sea.
Besides, you’ve been wearing my other shirt all through the crossing.
” He lets go of her and moves to the door.
“Come, why don’t you change back into it and play at being a ship’s boy some more?
I could use your help on deck. We’ve never carried such a variety of goods in one run before. ”