Sarah Gristwood - The Girl in the Mirror

What I remember most is the moment before it started – a pause in time, like the pause of a bee hovering in the air, before it crawls into the bell of the flower. It had been a mild day, almost sunny, and I remember the flat warm light on the canal waters, and a moored boat rocking, and the blue of my new dress as I walked slowly, brimful of pride.

Then out of nowhere my mother had been there, snatching at my hand. ‘Run!’ she panted. ‘Run, Jeanne, that’s right, quickly.’ I looked sideways at her, consideringly, and I did run, but not that fast. I could almost have thought it was a game, if it weren’t for the little mewing sounds she was making as she tried to catch her breath, and the fact that her grip on my arm was hurting me. It had been weeks and weeks that she hadn’t wanted to play any games, or to do anything that meant moving quickly, but now she was a pace ahead and tugging me along, despite her huge swollen belly.

We’d almost reached the canal water by the bridge when she stopped, as hard as if she’d run into a brick wall. ‘Oh, mon Dieu . Oh God protect us, they’re here already.’ I didn’t know who she was talking to. ‘Maman,’ I said clearly, ‘where is Papa?’

She looked at me almost as if I were a stranger. Or as if I were a grown-up, maybe.

‘They got him,’ she said, as if she wanted me to remember. ‘They came to the silk merchants’ district first. Everyone knows where the chief Protestants live in this city.’ While she spoke her eyes were casting around. ‘There!’ she said, and stumbled sideways down an alley. I followed, but I didn’t move as fast as she did. My petticoats were in the way, and I didn’t understand why we were running, anyway. At the corner I paused as I heard a man yell. A man with a curved metal cap on his head, and something long and shining in his hand. He yelled again, with a sound of triumph in it. He was pointing at me.

As we reached the end of the street Maman was banging on a door. I knew the man who opened it; I’d watched him talking with my father, though he’d never spoken to me. ‘They’re coming, they’re coming, you can get away, you’ve got money, if you can only get up north there’ll be a boat to take you away. You won’t be on the list, Jacob, they won’t stop you, you’ll be all right, only you must take Jeanne.’ She was talking so fast she sounded as if she were crazy, like the old woman in the house next door. Maman always said her wits had gone awry. Jacob was slinging his bags round his shoulders. He must have packed them already. His head jerked up, like a bird when you startle it. The man in the tin hat was rounding the corner, leisurely, and I could see that he was laughing, I could see his black beard and his dark eyes. At that moment my mother doubled over, clutching at her stomach, and giving a gasping little cry.

‘Go!’ she hissed at Jacob, fiercely. As he darted away round the corner she sank down against a wall. Whoever lived in that house had been doing their washing, and the sheets were all hung up to dry. My mother pulled one down right over her, almost as if she were hiding, but that’s silly. ‘Go, go.’ It was as if she were screaming in a whisper to me. For a second I hesitated, then I dashed round the corner. From the dark of a doorway a hand reached out and Jacob grabbed me.

‘Shhh –’ Then, as if to make sure, he clamped his hand over my mouth. From behind us I could hear soft thuds, like the blows a baker gives to the dough, and voices in a foreign language, and my mother’s voice crying ‘No!’ and a scream cut off. I would have run back but Jacob was holding me. There was a horrible rasping, gurgling sound, then the voices were moving away. For what seemed like long minutes Jacob held on, until at last he released me. There was a pile of white and red where my mother used to be. The corner of the sheet had fallen over her face and below it … I gazed, uncomprehending. I couldn’t understand the glistening mass of red tubes and bags, like something left over on the butcher’s counter, as being part of her in any way.

‘Dear God in Heaven,’ said Jacob behind me. I could hear someone retching, but it was him, not me. I was staring at a strange small figure, like a deformed doll or like a devil in an old wall painting, lying bloody on the ground beside my mother, and at the hilt of the knife standing up from her belly.

Beside me on the boat Jacob half reached out a hand, but uneasily. As if he were trying to comfort me, but didn’t quite know how. Maybe he didn’t know about children. Or maybe there wasn’t any comfort. When he touched my blue dress it was slimy and stinking, from when I hadn’t been able to lean over in time, and I’d just been sick down my own front until everything inside me was aching. Around us, I could hear other people crying and moaning but I was tired, so tired, and as I slid down to sleep the dreams took me.

My dreams were full of jolting, and the running, the not being able to run fast enough. Not the blood, or only occasionally. After that there had been the squeak of the cart wheels, and the cold of the night air, and me not understanding yet that it was no use to cry for my mother, and Jacob telling me to hush, we weren’t safe yet, and the piles of still, silent shapes by the roadway. Another child screaming on one high note, and the sound growing and fading as the cart moved closer and then slowly away. A man pinned to a wall – if I did see this, or did I imagine it? – pinned there with spikes, and his hands and his feet lying a few yards away. Other people, people who weren’t dead or dying but who looked away as we passed by in our little island of catastrophe.

‘Bloody Papists,’ the man next to me had muttered, but Jacob hushed him.

‘That’s not the way.’ Later, remembering, I realised he sounded almost resigned, as if none of this were a surprise to him. As if, when he’d opened the door to my mother, it had been just the latest chapter in a long unfolding story.

A long time later there had been warmth and a fire, and a strange woman trying to persuade me to eat, even while she was crying quietly. I took the bread and pretended to mumble it, and some kind of unconsciousness overcame me. When I woke the next morning, trying to understand where I was, I could hear Jacob talking with urgency.

‘… can’t keep her. What am I to do with a five-year-old?’ he was saying. ‘If you’ll take her, I’ll leave you half the money.’ The woman was protesting when I sat up, and they saw me.

Then there were more nights, and more carts, until Jacob said we were getting near the sea. He’d begun talking to me by now, though I didn’t always understand him, and he said he’d decided to go right away.

‘We fled once before, after St Bartholomew’s Day,’ he said. ‘France to the Low Countries, frying pan to fire. What a mistake that turned out to be! The north’s trying to hold out but, mark my words, the Spanish will soon be all over this country, and their Inquisition with them. There’s only one boundary I trust, and that’s the sea.’

Jacob had settled me on the deck, propped up against his bags and with his cloak over me. There was something hard sticking into my back, and cautiously I poked my hand inside the sack. My fingertips felt a book, but fatter and somehow more bumpy than a book ought to be, and between the pages strange shapes, thin and scratchy. Then the ship gave another lurch, and once again, though I’d retched until my stomach was empty, the sickness overcame me.

As the storm began to slacken and a grey light dawned, for the first time we could see each other clearly. Jacob was gazing at me almost in horror, as if he’d never seen anything like me before, and I gazed back at him defensively. I could smell that there was sick in my hair, and my dress was filthy. Jacob cast his eyes around the weary huddle of other passengers, rummaged in the sack where he kept his money, then went over to the nearest family. They had two little boys with them, and the youngest was staring at me, his thumb in his mouth. They didn’t look happy, but they looked better than me. Jacob came back with some clean shabby clothes. The rough breeches felt strange, but then everything now was strange to me. Jacob told me we were going to London – ‘though sometimes I wonder why. A vile climate, and the English hate foreigners like poison. But there are people I know and there’s work I can do, and there’s no doubt it’s a great city.’