“Michel! Come dance with us!”
He shook his head, smiling. “Can you girls not see how the sea has changed? The captain will want you all below deck until this storm blows through.”
Marthe looped her arm through Lou’s. She tried to pull Élisabeth along with them, but her sister was looking out across the ocean, her arms hooked over the railing, her hands clasped together in prayer. For once Marthe could not blame her.
A storm coming. Wolves waiting. She did not know which would be worse.
5
That night the sea rose up like the monster Leviathan, determined to toss the ship into Hell, severed from the grace of God. As theSaint-Jean-Baptisteheaved and fell, Élisabeth gripped the sides of her bunk until the splinters dug into her palms. The girls screamed and prayed, but the ferocity of the storm seemed even to have shocked the crew, for they could hear the sailors’ panicked cries on deck. Élisabeth thought of the priest’s warning about witch-conjured storms.There would be no hope of survival.Father de Sancy knew this would happen. He had foretold it. Why had she not confessed that the woman in the velvet dress had stolen her letter? The priest could have thrown her overboard and they would have been safe.
The sea convulsed again and Élisabeth clasped her hands together to pray.
Merciful Saint Anne, we cast ourselves at your feet and humbly beg you. Recommend us to your daughter, the Blessed Virgin, that she might serve as our passport and preserve us from peril.
The sound of thunder exploded like a battery of guns above their heads and Marthe shrieked. Élisabeth wrapped her arms around her sister and buried her head against her back. She murmured her prayers as quickly as her tongue would allow.
Holy Virgin, mother of God, serve as our passport and preserve us from peril. Serve as our passport and preserve us from peril.
The ship was a drunken sailor, blindly careening and lurching with no care for those in its midst. Élisabeth remembered when she was six and her older brother, Jean-Jacques, had pushed her backwards off a haystack. Falling, falling, her stomach rising, waiting for the sound of her body hitting the earth. She felt the same now. But here there was no hay to break her fall, only the filthy ship, and the next desperate reel and stagger.
Holy Virgin, mother of God, serve as our passport and preserve us from peril.
Merciful Saint Anne, we cast ourselves at your feet and humbly beg you.
Those girls not praying were retching. The ocean waves rolling over the main deck crashed down the light well and sluiced vomit across the floorboards. The girls were a desperate mixture of prayer and bile, helplessness and panic.
The Devil will come for you, wayward girl.
An echo of her mother’s long-ago warning rang in her ears, and she knew, even here, in the middle of the sea, the one with the black feather in his hat had found her. She had tried to run, but the Devil had been following her ever since the day she had succumbed to desire.
Élisabeth put her hands over her ears to block out the sound of the ship’s groans. She could not stop the memory of that day in the apple orchard more than a year ago: the blossoms trembling in the breeze, the wind shaking some of the petals loose, covering the ground in a blanket of pink. It was springtime and the sun’s heat did not wither them; the days when the fruit would lie rotting on the ground surrounded by wasps were still ahead.
She had run outside to hide from the cook, whose hip hurt, making her more sharp-tongued than usual. Élisabeth had grabbed a trug and said she was going to weed the kitchen garden. Once she was outside though, she had run to the back of the farm, pulling off her cap, loosening her hair, and letting her fingers rub the strain from her scalp. She had thought she wanted to be alone, to fret over Papa’s worsening cough, and to give herself a moment to grieve forher brothers, but a figure strolling towards her turned her mind from sorrow to sweeter things.
Rémy approached like a cat with its tail flicking lazily behind him, his eyes catching hers and holding them firm. She’d said good morning and lowered her gaze. But with a cocksure smile, he’d put his hand on her forearm and she’d felt a surge of longing so powerful it felt as if she were an apple tree ripped up by her roots, toppled in a storm.
The ship listed to its side and she screamed.
Take more care, or the Devil will come for you, wayward girl!
She should not have let it go any further than the apple orchard. She should not have agreed to walk with him up to the top of the cliff, where the great rock jutted out over the ravine like a gargoyle guarding a cathedral. She had been warned. She knew what would happen: the Devil comes for wayward girls.
But after months of his tender promises, she had relented. When Rémy whispered his secret plan and tied a stem of yarrow around her ring finger, she’d believed him. He said that they could lay amid the gorse and red sorrel and bell heather as man and wife—and none but the hillside gnomes would be the wiser.
Even then, even after they’d made the climb up to the Roche d’Oëtre—handfasted, secretly pledged to marry—she might have changed her mind. When she gazed out across the valley, past leagues of oaks and ash, to where the river wound past the chapel in neighbouring Bréel, on its way out of Normandy towards places forever out of her reach, there was a moment when it might not have happened. From the top of the cliff, the world had seemed so wide. Élisabeth took a step out onto the ledge and called out her name.
Éli-sa-beth.
Éli-Éli.
Li-li.
That was when Rémy Delaunay had pulled her back from the world below and into his arms.
“I saved you,” he had said, though she had not been in danger of falling. “Come. We are as good as married in God’s eyes already.”
It was enough, this promise, to convince her that their pleasure was no sin. So she’d let him pull her off the rock and into the spiky heather.
