Ann-Marie MacDonald - Fall on Your Knees

Camille could have had her pick of husbands. She really was the most beautiful in that many-sons sort of way. She could have been Camille MacNeil, Camille Shebib or Camille Stubinski. Instead she is Camille Jameel. She doesn’t blame Pa — Pa she reveres. And how could she blame Materia, whom she idolized? So she hates Frances, the slut who lives only to dishonour the memory of poor Materia.

Camille is a simple woman who wanted a simple life. Instead she got a complicated one. She giggled and batted her eyelashes and where did it get her? Jameel’s gin joint. Pa gave Jameel a big dowry, God only knows where that money went. Camille is not talented. She would have been good at the things she was raised to be good at. The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear we should not judge. We should just say, poor Camille, she turned into a bitch the way most people would have — and stay out of her way.

In her heart, though, there is still expectation. A clearing in the woods. Not when she looks at her five sons, who were absorbed by their father as soon as they were big enough to carry a crate or run with a message. Not when she looks at her husband, who never even bothered to shave on their wedding night — he examined himself and the bedsheet right after to make sure he hadn’t been cheated. No. The clearing in her heart is where Camille pauses like a deer, and waits for Pa to see her.

The following night, the inky spectre waits once again in the back room. Frances actually gets a bit nervous — Camille is the type of woman who sits like a lump, then picks up an axe one day.

“Hi, Aunt Camille, what can I do for ya?”

“You’re shit.”

“My, that’s a lovely ensemble you’re wearing.”

“You’re a disgrace to my father.”

“How’s he doing, I keep meaning to drop by.”

“You’re not fit to set foot in my father’s house.”

Frances snaps shut her bulging Guide pouch and leaves. Camille has just given her an idea.

The address is in the phone book. Frances finds her way to a house on the hill. She flits from hedge to tree. From shrub to side wall — the coal chute is just big enough for a child. Once she is inside her grandfather’s house, there are quite a number of secret vantage-points. And plenty to steal, one hardly knows where to begin.

There’s a grate on the inside wall of the opulent front room. Frances’s face can often be seen there through wrought-iron vines, but no one ever thinks to look. The closet beneath the stairs is full of soft dark things. When its door stands open a crack it is possible to discern a thin white stripe interrupting the sliver of gloom. That’s Frances peeking out. Hands seeking furs and shawls have brushed right past her curls, hardly pausing to register them as just so much more mouton. And if, one night, the occupant of the master bedroom upstairs awoke and looked under the bed for no reason, he might see her lying there with her arms folded across her chest, staring up at the spot where his heart sleeps. That is, if she is not peering at him through the brass bars at the foot of the bed.

Frances drinks in her grandfather’s long lean frame, his skin the tone and supple texture of aged deer-hide. She can’t see Mumma anywhere but in the colour of him, in the liquid ebony of the eyes — though his are sharp — and the waviness of the steel-grey hair. She is pierced with a sudden longing for her grandmother and wonders how it is possible to miss what you never had. She is surprised to locate one family resemblance, however: there is something of Mercedes in the angles of Mahmoud’s body, his carriage and immutable spine. Frances concludes, not for the first time, that she herself is a changeling.

She always brings back a present for Lily. A sterling silver tail-comb with tortoiseshell teeth. A moonstone ring. A braid.

Lily strokes the dry black braid as though it were a creature prone to sudden death by fright.

“It was Mumma’s,” says Frances.

“Can I keep it?”

“It’s yours.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I found a trapdoor like in Arabian Nights . It leads to an underground garden. There’s everything you can think of down there just growing on the trees. Jewels, hair…. And babies that haven’t been born yet.”

Lily assumes this is Frances’s way of talking about the old French mine. She doesn’t like to think of Frances there alone, looking for treasure. Robbing the dead. Lily begs to accompany her but Frances says the Arabian garden is a “solo mission”. When Frances brings Lily back a single pearl, however, Lily starts to worry because it means that Frances has been diving. She is afraid Frances might decide to drown in the pool at the old French mine. Lily knows how tempting it can be to breathe water so she asks Ambrose to watch over Frances. Please, dear brother, deliver our dearest Frances from drowning as you delivered me.

The first time Frances stayed out all night, Mercedes was frantic. She changed in and out of her nightgown, wrung her hands and several times was halfway out the front door — but with no idea where to search she soon returned to her vigil at the kitchen table. Besides, what if Frances should telephone while she was out?

Mercedes did her fretting silently so as not to worry Daddy, who was in a much-needed and uncharacteristically deep sleep in the wingback chair. In the morning, Lily came down to find Mercedes peeling onions at the kitchen table.

“What are you cooking, Mercedes?”

“Nothing, Lily, go back to bed.”

“It’s morning…. Is Frances home yet?”

Mercedes wiped her eyes with her onion hand by mistake and found herself unable to do anything but gulp.

“Mercedes —”

“I’m just slicing onions, Lily, don’t be foolish.”

“Don’t worry about Frances, Mercedes, I asked Ambrose to look after her.”

Mercedes seized Lily and hugged her. Lily felt something hard pressing across her spine — Mercedes had forgotten to put down the paring knife — but Lily was too polite to say anything. James came into the kitchen rubbing his hands together, refreshed despite a night in a chair in his clothes, “Who feels like bacon and eggs? I’ll cook.”

“Oh Daddy,” said Mercedes, “don’t worry about Frances, she’s sure to turn up.”

And she did, that afternoon, with a tiny carved ballerina for Lily.

Now Mercedes has ceased to worry when Frances disappears like a cat for days, confident that she is being watched over through the special intercessions of Lily. Mercedes puts it down as another sign and adds it to the lengthening report she will one day soon make to the bishop.

Mahmoud never misses the braid because he has no idea it survived the Materia purge. Frances found it under the red velvet lining at the bottom of Giselle’s jewellery box. It was a close call.

Mahmoud was in bed and out like a light at the other end of the room. Frances stood at her late grandmother’s vanity and surveyed the loot laid out before her. Silver brushes, combs and hand mirrors. A rosewood jewellery box. She lifted the lid and up struck a hurdy-gurdy orchestra along with a pink ballerina. Frances shut the box instantly and turned back towards Mahmoud, who groaned, rolled over and looked straight at her. They just stayed like that, staring at each other, until she realized he was still asleep. She waved at him. She gave him the finger. She returned to the jewellery box and opened it a hair’s breadth — yes, now she could see the little dancer lying flat on its face. Frances slipped a finger through the crack and pinned the thing in dead-swan position while she opened and plundered the box. She checked for a false bottom in case of cash, lifting the red velvet lining, and that was how she stumbled upon the black braid lying coiled in its jewelled nest. It must have been Mumma’s because why else would it be hidden? Artefacts of lost girls are always forbidden. Frances stuffed the braid and the jewels into her Guide pouch leaving only a strand of genuine pearls. She extracted the ballerina by its roots, little red bits of velvet trailing from its pointed feet. She considered laying it on Mahmoud’s pillow like an eldritch gift from the tooth fairy, but decided Lily might like to have it. Finally, she picked up the strand of pearls and carefully severed its string with her teeth. She removed one pearl, then coiled the rest back into the otherwise empty rosewood box and tiptoed from the room with her booty.