Past Lives (5 page)

“I love you,” he whispered, kissing my forehead fiercely and then briskly exiting the room, not giving me the chance to say it back. I wondered at the sensation of love—the dull ache and maddening butterflies vying for my attention all at once. It mixed poorly with the distress and anxiety that tore me apart, and I tried to calm myself with the only truth I could hold onto.

That I loved him, too. More than I could possibly know.

Chapter Seven

And the Lights Go Out

Jacqueline and I spent our days in my favorite sitting room, which was a pale yellow, trimmed in white. Fresh daisies were replaced daily in our delicate family vases. My father was very surprised when I told him that we wanted to be updated on everything happening in Paris, though he seemed pleased. The pressure to get married to a high society man was diminished in the fear for our lives and our station. Winter passed by cold and empty, our only solace the occasional letters from Bastien, which had become my air in a suffocated, gilded prison.

He wrote to Jacqueline about the riots and the poor conditions of the city, the uprisings that he was a part of stopping on a daily basis. To me he wrote his innermost thoughts, his philosophies and his desires. He spoke of family, and of how much he wished to raise a son in a world that would know peace. I daydreamed of being the mother to that imaginary little boy, and held the letter to my beating heart as I stared out to the south, where he was risking his life day in and day out.

Have you lived long enough to have experienced the insanely quick passage of time? Like, years of your life go by, and you are stuck in such a routine that one day you wake up and realize that it’s three years later and you don’t know where the time went? Well, that’s kind of what happened to us. I mean, horrible things happened. In May of 1790, the aristocracy was abolished in the new legislature that was forcing its way into our lives. Our tenants tried to revolt against us, and my father made them a deal to keep things peaceful, though we lost much of our fortune providing them with the land they declared as their own. Our massive house was costing us to keep up, and we discovered that many aristo families were cutting down or even losing their homes. Many had even fled the country to England, a nation that we had always despised.

The next year passed by, the riots getting more and more violent. The revolution was recruiting en masse, and I found myself looking out my front window just waiting for them to come for me…again. My dreams were wrought with violence, the bloody corpses of Giselle and that poor girl in the hallway tugging at my mind while I slept. I would wake up sweaty and afraid. When I woke from a nightmare, I pulled out one of Bastien’s letters and read his words of love over and over again, allowing them to caress my mind back into calm.

By the end of 1792, a man named Robespierre began calling for the head of the king after many, many attempts to maintain the peace. It was around that time, in December, when Jeanette and her father showed up at our door, shivering. Although we had had our differences at court, I graciously ushered them in and called for hot tea…a delicacy at that point. Jeannette and her father eyed the servants with mistrust.

“I hope you can trust these bastards,” her father said, and I grimaced at his foul language. He was beyond caring. “Our servants were the ones who ratted us out to the damn revolutionaries. We’re lucky we got out with our lives.”

“And your mother?” I asked Jeannette quietly. She stared at the ground, refusing to respond, her silence confirming the worst. My father came in then and saved me from the conversation, offering them our home for as long as they needed. They both hesitated, clearly seeing us as an unfortunate last resort despite their dire circumstances. Finding no alternative, Jeannette’s father reluctantly accepted the offer. It was a strange addition to our household, and Jeannette sat in hostile silence in my reading room as Jacqueline and I went about our usual business of reading, sewing or otherwise occupying our time. We continued to get letters from Bastien, though they become more infrequent, much to our chagrin. It was the first subject Jeannette deigned to comment on.

“So you’re really going to debase yourself by marrying a soldier?” she asked one day, interrupting a conversation Jacqueline and I were having. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.

“You, who have no home and exist on the whim of my father’s mercy, have an objection to my marriage to a soldier? Or haven’t you heard that the classes no longer exist?”

“They will
always
exist,” she hissed, her anger boiling over. I was sure she had repressed plenty of it, as I watched her seethe through every conversation in the house. Jeannette was not one to keep silent about anything, and I was amazed it had taken this long. Still, that was all she blurted before storming out of the room, and Jacqueline and I smirked at each other before carrying on.

Minus a few snide comments here and there, Jeannette stayed silent through most of the winter and into the spring of 1793. We hadn’t received a letter from Bastien since Christmastime, and the morale in the house became decidedly low. Even as the weather blossomed into a beautiful summer, a sense of foreboding had taken over all of us. This, of course, was made worse when the news came that the new committee of public safety apprehended the king and queen and then began beheading nobles for ridiculous reasons. One afternoon, my father gave me a small dagger to keep by my bed in case we faced attack, and we all waited through the summer, all the while pretending to go about our normal business.

It was a bit after Robespierre was elected to the committee of public safety that we began to hear about the beheadings. Members of the aristocracy were being singled out and charged with false accusations, given a joke trial, and then murdered. As autumn cooled the earth, the coming freeze set in heavily alongside our terror. I slept each night with my hand inches from my dagger, not knowing what I would do if it came down to it. Jacqueline and I began sharing a bed, more out of comfort than for protection. Jeannette coiled in on herself like a snake waiting to strike, rarely leaving her room. Our fathers holed up in the library, mine in particular scoping out anyone who would help us…and finding little response.

The night they came, I was awoken by the torchlight first. It was late October. They had already killed the queen the week before, though we had just gotten word out in the country. My heart began to race, and I think a part of me knew that it would be my last night on earth. I shook Jacqueline awake and held my hand to her mouth, gesturing to the flickering light outside the window, the echo of voices floating up to our ears. We shivered as our feet touched the cold ground, though the floor had nothing to do with it. I grabbed my dagger, the pearl white handle slippery in my clammy hands. As I approached the window I was surprised to see that it wasn’t torchlight at all…someone had caught fire to my home, and it was burning its way towards us.

We ran from the window, not bothering to throw a robe on over our nightgowns, and threw open the bedroom door to the sounds of blossoming panic. Beyond the cries of fear we could hear the yells of aggression, and I knew as sure as the cut of a knife that we were under attack.

“Jacqueline, quickly! To the attics!” I whispered fervently.

“Won’t that be more dangerous, what with the fire?” she asked. Although we had mapped out just how we would handle an attack, someone burning us alive had never occurred to me.

“You’re right. We must try our luck getting down into the cellars,” I decided, and she nodded in agreement before we quickly padded our way through the hallway, my useless knife wobbling precariously in my shaking hand. I tightened my grip. Servants ran by us in a panic, and we ignored them as we tried to make our way quickly down a staircase near the servants’ quarters on the other side of the house. We made it all the way to the kitchen before we were discovered.

“I really should have taught you more stealth,” Bastien said, his silhouette impossible to make out in the shadows, but his dear voice unmistakable. We all rushed at each other, holding each other close in the last embrace we would ever have.

“What are you doing here?” whispered Jacqueline. Bastien motioned for us to keep following him toward the cellar. We crept down the stairs slowly, blindly holding the walls we could not see as we made our way lower into the ground.

“I got word of the attacks reaching the countryside and made haste as soon as I could to get out to you. It looks like I may be too late.” I felt his hand grasp for mine in the dark, and I held his fingers tightly, squeezing into them everything I possibly could—my love, my fear, my hope. He held back just as fiercely. I wished I could see his face.

We finally reached the bottom floor and hid behind some casks of wine, still holding each other tight, Bastien wrapping his wide arms around us both.

“I saw them down here,” a voice said from above…a woman with a strange accent. Light flickered at the top of the staircase, and Bastien ushered us behind him. Jacqueline and I crouched into as tiny a ball as we could, silently praying that they would not find us here. Their light licked the stone walls as they made their way down the steps, and time came to a stop.

Standing at the head of a small group of violent looking men was Jeannette, dressed in a servant’s apron and covered in flour. Her eyes flashed when she saw me, her gaze raw with the animalistic need to survive, and one other unmistakable thing.

Hate.

In such a small space, with actual light, we looked ridiculous trying to crouch in a corner and remain unseen. Slowly, with resignation, we unfolded ourselves and stood before our judge and jury: the angry people of France. The man holding the torch was the first to break the silence.

“You, as members of the aristocracy, have been condemned to death for your crimes against the people of the republic of France.” His voice was deep and resolute, his anger radiating in the firelight. Bastien stood to his full height, his dark hair brushing against the ceiling.

“These women have no cause to harm you. You will let them go, and I will be tried for that which you condemn.”

“No!” I cried, coming out from behind a barrel and standing up next to him. His look of reproach was not enough to keep me from standing by his side at the moment of our death.

“I personally have seen the crimes this woman has committed, and stand as witness,” Jeannette said, and I realized the strange accent was hers. She was convincingly pretending to be a servant in my household, and I knew there would be nothing I could say to condemn her in their eyes as my own kind. The torch wielder unsheathed his own dirty knife, which was much larger than my own. His eyes sparkled with malicious humor as he flipped it around and held the handle out to Jeannette.

“Then you may have the pleasure of carrying out her sentence,” he said, Jeannette’s eyes widening for barely an instant before she grasped the handle firmly and without reservation.

“I tell you, you
will
not do this!” Bastien yelled, and before he could say another word, a man from the back pulled out a pistol and shot him in the stomach. He cried out, pitching forward in agony.

“No!” Jacqueline cried, falling onto her brother, laying him on his back and cradling him as he bled out onto the floor. I watched Jeannette approach me slowly, deliberately, like a cat stalking its prey. She stood before me, victorious.

“Why?” I asked, truly needing to know. My knees shook with the fear of death, my nostrils heavy with the scent of Bastien’s blood. She leaned in close and whispered in my ear.

“Now my family can have their rightful title back, as it should always have been.”

And then she plunged the dagger into my stomach, piercing pain driving straight through me as I fell to the floor next to Bastien, our faces nearly touching. I heard another gunshot and felt Jacqueline fall over Bastien, and then the light began to recede. I stared hard at Bastien’s face as it disappeared in the darkness, holding onto any thought that would drive away the pain…the weakness as my life left my body. He stared back, the chocolate of his eyes turning to coal.

“I love you too, Bastien. I’m sorry I never said it before,” I whispered, a single tear rolling down the side of my face and into the pool of his blood.

“I wish that things…could have been different,” he said, his eyes losing focus. I began to feel a warm cocoon wrap around me, the consuming desire to close my eyes for eternal sleep.

“As do I, my love. As do I.”

Part Two—U.S.A.

The Civil War

Chapter Eight

Luck of the Irish

Whenever my father took to the bottle, I got to hear the story of how we came to live in Georgia. Since this happened a lot, I got to hear it all the time. It’s actually quite the harrowing tale.

Once upon a time, my father was a wealthy Irish landowner in county Claire. He and my mother owned a two-story house, and inherited the farmland from generations past. Our family had a reputation for being kind and benevolent landlords, and my mother would often take her woven basket around the region and provide gifts on special holidays to the people who tilled our land. Even though we were Protestant in a Catholic country (which England was desperately trying to change, with their laws preventing Catholics from owning things or influencing the country in any way), our neighbors were always our friends.

Then a cold wind blew, so cold that it pierced the earth and brought poison to the land. The fist of the English squeezed and squeezed, and the people of Ireland became a skeletal lot, too poor to even gain sustenance from the land. The only thing that kept them alive was the blessed potato, a vegetable with enough nutrients to sustain the rising population. And then one day God frowned upon the Irish, as he so constantly did, and the potatoes came out of the soil black and rotted to the core. The people of our country cried and cried to the heavens, wondering just what we had done wrong.

With no crop to sustain us, my father took all the money we had left and bought passage for my small family for a ship to America—the land of dreams and promise. And then we got to Georgia…the end.

I cut short because usually that’s the part he liked to talk about the least, and he drank enough to fall into a sound sleep by then. In actuality, I remember it quite differently, though by the time we left I was only five years old. I do remember Ireland as a lush and beautiful place…tragically so. The Cliffs of Moher towered over the sea, and I would often sit and watch the waves crash into the jagged rocks below, free to come and go as they pleased. I often wished I could do the same. By then the famine had crashed into our country, and I watched as my family grew thinner and thinner, my brother Jack often giving up half his nightly potato to me.

I watched as people barely able to stand hobbled their way to the fields, only to soil their hands in the rank, black poison of rotten potatoes. I watched them die there, starved and alone. It was when my mother really began to take ill that my father got desperate and sold everything we had back to the English for much less than what it was worth. We waited for weeks at the docks to pass all their health tests before boarding a sailboat for Boston. The journey of 43 days might as well have lasted 43 years. We sat in our cots below deck, huddled and afraid.

As I cried, Jack held me close, putting on his bravest 8-year-old face. We were both so quintessentially Irish, with our curly black hair, pale skin and bright blue eyes—eyes just like my mother. My father, who had some English in him, had sandy blonde hair, and I believe would have had a thick build had it not been starved out of him. The first hour on that boat was the only one that was bearable. After that, the vomiting started down below, and the stench of bile seeped past our patched clothing and right into our skin. I watched as men, women and children emptied their bellies over and over again into pots that weren’t cleaned. We lived in a world of vomit, feces and urine, the smell unbearable when the hot sun beat upon the deck of the boat and boiled us whole above crashing waves.

My mother in particular got the worst of it. She had been well bred enough to have never suffered a day in her life until the blight set in and destroyed our lives. It was my belief later that she died of a broken heart rather than an empty stomach. I sat on my cot, day after day, watching my poor father hold back her hair as he rubbed her back, her skeletal body draped over an already disgusting pot of puke. She couldn’t hold down the floured biscuits and nasty barrel water we had as provisions.

Really it was ironic for her to die of starvation after we had already left The Emerald Isle. When my father finally found the will to tell a crew member, the three of us watched in horror as she was wrapped in some cloth and heaved into the ocean. It was the only time I had seen my stoic Irish father finally break down and sob openly. Kneeling on the deck, he began to bang his head on the wooden railing of the ship. Jack cast a sideways glance to me, wiping away his own childhood tears. I think that was the day we had given up on the idea of childhood for good anyway.

“Papa, you must stop this…you are scaring J…” Jack pleaded, ever my protector and friend. If my father heard him, the only indication was that he stopped injuring his head on the railing and instead sat in silence, which he did not break until our feet touched the dirty, polluted ground of America. I remember watching the tarp that carried my once beautiful mother away further and further into the sea, and I hoped that the angels would take her and give her a big bowl of hearty soup. She would like that, I thought.

By the time we reached America, the once proud landowning and well educated man that was my father stood hunched over, a husk whose soul was lost at sea with his wife. It was Jack who had to speak on our behalf as we waited at customs for hours, our sticklike legs burning from the energy it took to stand for hours at a time. It was Jack who found someone from county Claire who was willing to guide us to their group and help us find a place to live and perhaps a bit of food for the night. I placed my tiny hand in my father’s, his eyes clouded in mist as he mechanically went through the motions of allowing his small children to lead the way to a new and horrible life.

There’s a funny thing about Boston in the 1850’s that you might not know if you’re reading this in the 21
st
century. Bostonians
hated
the Irish. Like really. Hated them. Spit on them. Abused them. Tried to pass laws to prevent them for entering the country or working in America at all. Our family complexion and dirt-matted hair gave us away outright, and as we hurried through the crowd in our disheveled state we were met with nothing but glares and mumbled curses about more filthy Irish coming to destroy this great city. It was a blessing when we finally made our way to the waterfront, though it smelled like fish and human waste. Strings draped in clothing connected the little brick buildings to each other, and I wondered how they could possibly ever be clean in a place like that.

We were introduced to a thin woman named Sally who took one look at my father and tsked before ushering us into a small kitchen.

“We have nothing to offer you here,” she said, her eyes hard. Still, there was something about her I liked. I didn’t believe she would throw us out on the street.

“Please ma’am,” my brother pleaded. I could tell he was near fainting with the exertion it took to get here without any food and little water. Still, he carried on, holding our father and me on his young shoulders. “Can you at least tell us where we can find some work, so as to feed ourselves?”

“Yes, please,” I said in my smallest voice. I had learned that adults were most susceptible to small children. I had also been told that I was a particularly beautiful little girl, and I tried to make my eyes as big and pleading as I could. It was the only tool in my five-year-old arsenal, and it worked. The tenseness in the woman’s skeletal shoulders released, her face falling into a mask of hopeless sympathy. Sitting back in her hard, wooden chair, she sighed and rubbed a hand across her eyes, holding it there as though she could keep the world from reappearing when she opened them. Finally, she pushed the chair back and pulled out a few dirty mugs, filling them with a thin broth from a large pot on the stove.

“It’s not much,” she said, stern. “But it will at least get you through the day. I can likely find work for you and your father, boy, but the girl should not be out so young. We should keep her here and raise her like a proper Irish lass.”

We sipped at the plain broth, which was still better than the dry biscuits and nasty water we had been imbibing for the last month and a half. I didn’t want it to end, but I knew better than to ask for more when it did. It was then that my father spoke up.

“Is there a room to let here?” his voice was creaky and he sounded much older than his 28 years. The woman looked relieved that he was able to speak at all.

“Yes, for $1.50 a week there’s a room upstairs to let, though don’t be expecting anything grand. If you can’t afford that, there’s room on the lawn or in the cellar. The lad down there died of pneumonia just a few days ago, so I’d be careful to wash everything before you bring the children down.”

“We can take the room upstairs for now, thank you,” my father said, his words dripping from his bearded mouth in a dull monotone. I wished secretly that he would shave…that he would bring back the light in his eyes I had barely known. Although we had struggled in Ireland, the love of my parents kept us strong. Without that, I truly knew not how we would survive in a land that hated us so much. The woman raised her black eyebrows in surprise, but said nothing. My father slipped her the coin across the table, and she ushered us up creaky, moldy stairs into a dark, smelly room on the third floor.

There was no window, just a filthy blanket and pillow on a slatted wooden floor. I gazed up at our new guide as though she had three heads. Surely she couldn’t expect us to live in such a place?

“The boy can start his begging with the others in the morning. There’s a man downstairs who recently had a few of his workers die off of cholera. He needs a good shovel hand for the police stables. If you’d like, I can get you started on that,” she said, looking expectantly at my father. He stared at her, his pale blue eyes devoid of any emotion, before giving a short nod.

“Alright then. Sleep well, and welcome to America!” she cackled as she made her way back down the hallway. I must admit that I didn’t find her joke very funny at all.

“J, go ahead and curl up on the bed. You’ll need some good sleep, and we can stretch out for the first time in ages,” Jack said. I shook my head.

“You’ll have to go to work tomorrow. You should take the bed.”

I jumped as my father’s hand came to rest on my shoulder. I gazed up at him in confusion, though I leaned into him for comfort. His other hand rested soundly on the shoulder of my brother.

“You will both take the bed, and I shall sleep on the floor. Tomorrow I will discover a good place for us, my children.”

We curled up on the makeshift bed, hard as it was, and tried not to breathe in the stench of an unknown number of sweaty bodies. Although it was uncomfortable, it was still better than the stacked bunks from the boat ride over, and I fell asleep within minutes.

This was what it was like to be in America as a hated outsider in the 1850’s. But surely by the 21
st
century things will be much better…