Sister Agathe and the priest frowned at me. I stepped away. He put oil on Patey’s forehead and tried to get her to eat a bit of Eucharist. When he finished, I returned to her side and sat on the floor by the bed where I could hold her hand and wait. “Patey will not die,” I chanted over and over again.
Suddenly I stood. I ran. First out the door, then to the chapel. I rang the bell to call a priest to the confessional. “Father? Father! Hear my confession.” A candle came into the little cell with a man’s form. “Tell God to let Patey live. I confess I have told lies. I lied about the carrot. I ate it myself. I lied to my compagne about my family. I lied about my ma driving a coach and my age and I told Violette how the dogs we owned would eat her alive once I get home. There are hundreds more, too. Forgive me, Father. Please do not let my sister die. Please!” The priest was one of the old ones. He could not understand my frantic mixture of English and French, and mumbled something I could barely make out. “You old spider!” I shouted, and ran from the chapel back to the sickroom.
Donatienne appeared carrying a bundle of blankets and two pillows. “I came to wait with you,” she said.
“I am not afraid to wait alone,” I said. Donatienne’s face showed I had hurt her feelings once again. “What I meant to say, Donatienne, is that I did not want to trouble you. I very much wish you to stay.”
She smiled and said, “I will make us a bed here.” She put the pillows side by side. Laid the blankets next to each other. She lay upon them and reached for my hand.
I reached for Patey’s hand and with the other I took Donatienne’s while she talked about her father who was a tailor, and her mother, who bore seven children before Donatienne was eleven years old. All of them, father, mother, three sisters, and four brothers, perished in La fiévre épidémique. Their lives were gentle, she said. Not aristocratic, but pastoral. Earthy. Sleeping with the sun and moving with the seasons. When she finished I told her about playing on the beach and gathering shells. I told her about the taste of sugarcane. The food Lucy used to make us. I told her about Allsy. When I said that she died, Donatienne wept. That stunned me so that I wept, too.
A nun came in carrying a candle and held a mirror to Patey’s mouth and nose to see if her air moved. When they saw she yet breathed, they changed her dressings and I watched in shock at seeing so much blood. One time Patience groaned when they lifted her. I helped change the dressing, steeling myself against the horror I saw, trying to think that what my hands did would save my sister from death and that my hands must not carry their terror to my heart lest I die of it or faint and be useless to her.
The ceiling had been painted a vivid shade of blue such as no sky could ever be. It was hazed of candle smoke. My room at home had had a blue ceiling, too, but peaceful, cerulean, the color of the bay if a storm should approach at sundown and cast unusual lights into the water. The effect was supposed to be that one lying in bed had a sense of being under the sky, and therefore under the caring eye of their Maker. I saw spiderwebs an ell across, clotted with dust, smoked and greasy black. I patted Patience’s arm and ran my hand down it to hers. Everything about her was sticky and moist. I held her hand to my face and kissed it. In the dim candlelight, I saw my hand blackened with her blood, and I rubbed it against my apron. I spat upon it, too, and rubbed more, imagining my face smeared with blood. “I will not accept your death, too, sister,” I cried. “I shall not.”
Once I asked a nun how the babe fared. She shook her head. I did not ask if it had died, for I feared Patience’s words might have cursed the poor thing. I hummed to keep from letting in the thought that Patey had wished it evil and thereby caused its death just as she had brought a storm to the ship at sea. I rose and sat upon Patey’s bed, leaning to press my cheek against hers and put my lips to her ear. “We have to go home, Patience. Get well. We shall escape, you and I. Do not give up, sister. I have seen the wall. I have found the vineyard and the gate. There is a way out of here, a way home.” Patience’s chest rose and fell in terrifying cadence, and my soul felt cold as the darkest day of winter. I drifted off and woke with a start. She yet lived. A greening sky showed in high windows where only black had been before.
After she had lived two weeks, they allowed her to go in an invalid’s chair to the garden and I was sent back to the grange. To my surprise, other girls carded wool in my place. I knew not what I should do. I felt perturbed at them for having my chair.
Sister Joseph met me with a smile and crooked her finger, motioning me into another area. “This, Marie,” she said, “is a spinning wheel.”
CHAPTER 12
August 18, 1730