“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.