Wild Rose (28 page)

She grew sober, the fact of her desertion by Pierre seemed even crueler than it had at first, no longer to be assuaged by angry outbursts, by sobbing, fainting, screaming – by any histrionics at all. Her response now was heavier, darker; her misadventure had entered the realm where it was merely truth, one that she was still unable to grasp fully, as she was unable to take the measure of her own failings that might have helped bring on her catastrophe.

Chapter Nine

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Altare Dei
II

H
er grandparents ahead of her
, she came slowly out among the other parishioners, her missal held carelessly in one kid-glove-covered hand, the cloying scent of incense slowly being replaced by that of the honeysuckle near the church door, and the roses beginning to bloom along the church wall, now mingling with clover wafting from the hay fields behind
the church. A fat bee bumbled among the straw bonnets and pomaded male heads, and threatened her new spring hat with its lilac silk flowers sprinkled along its curve that only yesterday, out of the blue, grandfather had brought home for her. She lifted a hand to brush at the bee, shielding her eyes with her other hand
against the onslaught of light, and as she dropped her hand, such buoyancy spread through her that she felt she might lift off from among the voluble farmers and their pious wives, the stiffer townspeople, the impatient children, and simply float away across the houses, barns and sheds, and fields of hay, and the two rivers and the tree-clad banks until she had shed the last of the chains that all her young life had held her earthbound. All this in less time than it took to raise her right foot and begin a step forward, before she had even set it down again.

She was at last finished with the convent. What a joy it was in these first few days away to know she would never again have to set foot in that gloomy building that smelled of oil and floor wax and burning holy candles, all mingling with the faint odour of cooking food drifting into the classrooms from the nuns’ kitchen. It was no wonder the village bloomed with such beauty on this early summer morning, nor that the usually dull parishioners today wore such glowing faces. She walked slowly down the stone steps of the church as, behind her
le curé
Deschambeault could be heard clearing his throat loudly, people moving back from him to give him room to address his flock as they stood in the churchyard, as he always did after Mass, with requests for things the church needed, or the nuns, or reminders of meetings, services and ceremonies: weddings, funerals, baptisms, First Communions and Confirmations. Sophie would pay
him no attention, as she had always done, or failed to do. As he began to speak, she kept moving slowly through the crowd.

Violette Hippolyte had left just after the New Year to join the Grey Nuns in Montréal where she would learn to nurse the ill, but the nuns had not even bothered to talk to her about her vocation; they did not think a girl as bold as they claimed she had become as she grew older would make a nun.
No order would have you
, Sister Marie-Catherine had spit contemptuously at her, and Sophie, no longer the terrified child, had allowed herself a faintly insolent smile in reply, and did not lower her eyes. The nun laughed in a disconcerted, faintly helpless way, then, recovering herself, hissed,
You will come to no good, my girl
, her eyes hard and small, glinting darkly, and had thumped away, her heavy black skirts flapping dully around her legs as she turned, as if Sophie were not worth the trouble of punishing.

But finally, over the last years, Sophie had seen why where she was concerned, the nuns had always drawn back from the raised hand, the harsh scolding. Despite the only slightly mitigated scandal of his brother’s suicide years earlier, Grandfather, with his ponderous, grave air, and his commercial interests that concerned everyone in the community, had maintained his place among the village’s
bourgeoisie
. Sophie saw this was why she was saved from the worst, and was grateful at the same time as she was angry at the hypocrisy of it. But even though grandfather was indeed a man of substance, an
homme d’affaires
, his brother’s suicide had, in a small way, set him apart. It was not that anyone blamed him, but some of the townspeople and farmers stepped carefully around him, even – one or two of them – crossing the street to avoid him, as if his brother’s crime would infect them if they went too near. But business at the family general store seemed to be as good as it had ever been. No one snubbed grandmother, though; she would not have noticed if they had.

How thin she had grown. Always a slender woman, she now ate little beyond bread with milk, a few strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries when they were in season, a thin piece of chicken or beef now and then, a few spring vegetables from the garden. Her health seemed good despite her stringent diet, and grandfather had long ago given up trying to persuade her to eat. Always, grandmother glanced at Sophie’s plate with that look weighted with a sort of contempt as if Sophie’s appetite were somehow disgraceful, even though Sophie was as slim as a willow, and young and, as Madame Gauthier said disrespectfully to grandmother, needed a healthy diet. On a day like this even the fierce Mme Gauthier made Sophie laugh. And yet, that tiny nugget of – what? – still stuck in her chest, scraping her heart whenever she looked at her grandmother.

She paused in her quiet movement through the crowd to look around to where members of the congregation stood under the elms and ashes that bordered the churchyard, the men smoking their pipes, all waiting for the
curé
to finish so that they could begin exchanging gossip, chatting about weather, cows, crops and business. The Hippolyte family stood in their customary place to one side at the outer edge of the crowd, and Sophie edged past her grandparents who were in conversation with the owner of the new inn,
l’auberge Saint Louis
, and his elegant if worn wife – rumour had it she had come directly from France – and made her way through the crowd until she reached the Hippolytes.

She saw them all turning and smiling at the sight of her. Little Cécile of the big brown eyes was a tall, thin twelve-year-old now, a sober, unusually studious pupil at the convent; Lucie, at fourteen, was also still in school although no one would accuse her of being studious. Marie-Ange, now sixteen, was married –
So young!
her grandmother had gasped – that familiar contempt settling into the knife-like lines of her face. Earlier, in church Denise had whispered to Sophie that already Violette had made her first vows, and that Marie-Ange…but grandmother had cast one glance in their direction and both were silenced, turning their heads as one dutifully toward the altar, l’curé Deschambeault, and his servers.

“Madame, Monsieur Hippolyte,” Sophie said, nodding politely to them. Pierre and his brothers had been standing among the farmers who were laughing together a few feet from the rest of the Hippolytes, but when he noticed her approaching, out of the corner of her eye she saw him slip away to stand with his own family. For the first time she wondered why grandfather liked so much to visit the Hippolytes when there were so many families who were good customers at
Charron frères
he might as well have stood with on Sundays, but for whom he had only a few words. “I have come to congratulate you on Violette’s first success in the Order.”

“We are so proud,” Madame Hippolyte declared, her old-fashioned once-white bonnet unadorned and slightly askew, her greying hair mostly stuffed into, but leaking an unruly strand here and there. “But oh how I miss her. She was the best daughter. Such a help she was to me.” She sniffed, tears gathering in her eyes, escaping to trace down her plump cheeks.

Monsieur Hippolyte said, heartily, “Come now, my dear, she is still our daughter…”

“Non, non,”
Madame Hippolyte sobbed. “She is Christ’s daughter now…” Monsieur. Hippolyte, undeterred, went on, “And we have still our three girls.”

“Two!” Madame Hippolyte declared, as instantly as angry as she had just been sad, but nevertheless, the tears began to positively pour from her eyes, she withdrew a large cotton handkerchief from her reticule, about to blow her nose, when a bee landed on her fingers and she brushed it off brusquely as if it were no more than a speck of dirt. Flies buzzed, all the parishioners were brushing at them without even noticing they were, and mosquitoes, already a plague, required slapping and brushing also, while in the trees around them birds were in conversation with each other so that the humid air was embroidered by their sound. The scent of wild flowers blooming at the edge of the field behind the line of great old trees filled Sophie’s head, and from somewhere, perhaps across the road muddy from the night’s refreshing rain, a bank of profusely-blooming lilacs tried to outdo the roses in casting their heady, female scent among the parishioners.

Sophie kept resolutely smiling, Marie-Ange or no Marie-Ange. She was not supposed to know about such things, but she did, a little, learning them from her convent classmates who came from the small farms that surrounded the village. Marie-Ange, she supposed, had been at Mass with her too-young farmer husband, but had already crept away. Probably she wouldn’t stand with her family until she carried her baby in her arms, when Madame Hippolyte, in the face of her first perfect grandchild, would forget all about the transgression.

Again, bees circled them, everyone waving them away, Monsieur Hippolyte tipping his head back to look up into the ash tree that spread its branches above them, as if to check for a bee hive. Finding nothing, apparently, he said, his expression deadpan, his tone jocular, “And you, Mademoiselle Charron, when do you leave for the convent?”

Even Madame Hippolyte, forgetting for the moment Marie-Ange, smiled at this sally, and Sophie, pretending sorrow, said,
“Hélas
, I cannot be spared,” then smiling, so they would all know that she understood that they knew she was making a joke, that everyone knew she was emphatically not nun material, not to mention that she could be spared readily as she did nothing in her grandparents’ house, or next to it. She didn’t mind the joke, yet the familiar tug of shame she would never vanquish punctured her ebullience, that among these people she was considered privileged –
was
privileged – despite carrying about every day the heavy burden and most terrible secret of all, that she was not wanted. She turned her head to the left and then to the right, frowning without realizing she was. But Monsieur Hippolyte was speaking to her.

“Lucky for all the young men,” he declared, grinning, wagging a thick finger at her and, embarrassed, Sophie looked down to the ground. Eighteen was marriageable, it was a wonder grandmother and grandfather hadn’t already found someone they would insist she marry: Was it not, after all, a good way to get rid of her? In an effort to forestall this she had suggested
higher education
, but grandmother had only glared at her, and grandfather had laughed, as if she were still six years old. She had no idea what to study anyway: She had no talent for painting or drawing so going away to a young ladies’ art school was out of the question; she had no musical talent either, although she had been forced to take piano lessons and to practice every day, no matter how badly – and while Violette craved a life of piety and service, this was the last thing, God help her, Sophie wanted. Grandfather would let her help with the bookkeeping in the family store, and she supposed she would do that, at least for a while, but forever? A unease, like an itch deep inside her abdomen, its location unreachable, not even quite identifiable, gnawed at her, so that she looked across the group and found Pierre Hippolyte’s eyes, and in the sudden encounter forgot the conversation, forgot everything she had been thinking.

“Perhaps I will go to Montréal instead,” she said, daring a glance at Pierre. He was watching her with a light in his eyes that made a warmth creep back into her cheeks. “Perhaps I will live with my brother Guillaume for a while, see the city, go to Mass in
basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal.”
The idea had just occurred to her; she didn’t know if she meant it or not.

“How lucky you are,” Lucie said, wistfully. Lucie had both parents, had lived with them all her life, she had three – no, four – brothers who lived in the same house too, as well as her sisters Violette, Cécile and Marie-Ange. No, not Marie-Ange. But Sophie’s indignation at the very idea that she who was parentless and sibling-less was lucky was fleeting; it angered her that because she had not ended in a workhouse when her parents’ died, or as a drudge in a nunnery, or – heaven forbid – begging on the streets in a city, something about which she was supposed to know nothing, that she was a lucky girl.

“I’ll help with the babies,” she declared, thinking of Guillaume’s and Hector’s households in the city, but a swell of uncertainty rose at the thought. What did she know of babies? Thinking of them, screaming and smelling, involuntarily, she shuddered. Pierre, she noted, was still watching her and as if he could read her thoughts, a flicker of amusement, or so she thought it was, crossing his face.

Her grandfather was coming across the lawn toward her, so grandmother must be in the buggy now, waiting to go home for the lunch that Madame Gauthier would have waiting for them.

“Madame, Monsieur Hippolyte,” grandfather said, bowing, then smiling at Cécile and Lucie, nodding in a less friendly way at Pierre.
“Mes chers cousins.”
She hadn’t heard him come up, but here he was, at her elbow. “How is everything on the farm? Did the new bull work out?” Monsieur Hippolyte had been standing slightly behind his wife, but now he stepped past her, his chest swelling as he moved to one side of his family so that he might begin a gentleman’s conversation with Grandfather Charron. Pierre appeared to be following his father, but Mme Beauchamp and her three daughters clad in matching white dresses with blue sashes and bonnets had arrived to say hello, and all female attention went to them, so charming were the little girls.