Émile caught his breath as the woman closed the door silently behind her. “Mr Tremblay said you’d need company,” she said in French. “Pleased to meet y—”
She looked up and froze, just as he had. She was older, wiser, dressed in a grown woman’s clothes and far more fluent than before, but her eyes shone through like a connection to the past.
“Marie?” he gasped.
The momentary look of elation on her face faded away as quickly as it had come. She regarded him like a tailor viewing an ill-fitting suit. “Do I know you?”
The words cut, because he knew she knew. “Years ago…” he said. “Aboard the ship, we—”
“I’m afraid you’re mistaken, sir,” she said. “I’ve never been to sea.” She started undoing her gown. “Now if you’d like to—”
“No,” he said, hand out to stop her. “No, let’s…” He could see the hurt in her eyes, even in the darkness. He looked to the chairs in the corner, at either side of the window. “Can we talk?”
She sneered at the idea. “If you’re not interested, I can find another girl to—”
“Please,” he said, sitting down, himself. “Just for a little while.”
She sighed loudly, rolling her eyes, and then dropped into the opposite chair, glaring at him. They stayed that way for a few moments, watching each other, studying each other, wondering who would say what first.
“How have you been?” Émile asked, and immediately regretted it.
“Oh, wonderful,” she said. “Would you like to know the details? Here, let me tell you about my last customer. He—”
“No, no…” he said. “I apologize. I just…I just didn’t expect—”
“To see me again? Yes, that is the sense I got, after seven years in captivity.”
“Seven years…” he whispered to himself, stunned at how the time had rushed past.
“What was your name again?” she asked, and he did his best not to show how much it stung. “I try so hard to remember, but it’s so long ago, I—”
“Émile,” he said. “My name is Émile.”
“Ah,” she smiled. “Now I know who to curse at night.”
“Marie—”
“Marie-Celeste, if you please,” she said, eyes narrowing. “It’s funny…for the longest time, I thought the word ‘Celeste’ meant people like me. The colour of my skin. That woman you brought me to, the one with the clothes, I thought she was telling me we were alike. She was giving me the word for kin. ‘Celeste.’ We are Celeste.” She leaned back in the chair, faced twisted up like she’d tasted something sour. “I am Marie, the Celeste girl. Marie, Celeste. Marie-Celeste. By the time I realized I was wrong, it’d stuck.” She laughed, bitterly. “No one in the world will understand that but you, I suppose.”
“Marie, I—”
“Marie-Celeste,” she snapped.
There was silence for a good long time.
“I tried to find you,” he said, eyes downcast. “When I learned you’d survived, I tore that city apart trying to find you, but you were…you were already gone.”
She turned away. “It’s fine. I don’t blame you for that anyway. I thought you were dead, after you abandoned me, holding onto that railing, leaving me to drown.”
“I wasn’t—”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s done now. And like I said, I don’t blame you for losing me. I was impossible to find, unless you chose to look where you didn’t want to find me.”
Émile studied her again, this time not through the lens of a cherished memory, but a calculated analysis. She was just as lean as before, but not malnourished. Tremblay fed her well. Her clothes were clean, tailored, proper, so she was a valued member of his coterie. She had on lace gloves, which she had picked at until the tip of the thumb had come apart. Nervous fidgeting. Frustration, maybe. Not fear. She seemed too calm for fear. She seemed too numbed to her existence for anything resembling fear.
But there was something else to it, too. The way she was watching him from the corner of her eye said something. The way she turned her body to the side, her shoulder facing him, said something. The way she was ostensibly here for one reason, but was sending every signal his way to contradict it…that said something, too. He realized she was observing him the way he was her. Trying to unravel the story of this odd figure in her past. Trying to pick apart his motives, and find where to push the knife.
“Where did you go, after the ship sank?” he asked.
She smiled. “You first.”
He nodded, thought back. “Once I learned you’d survived, I went everywhere, looked everywhere for you. There were so many clues that turned out to be false, I couldn’t—”
“You failed. It’s understood. Move on.”
“Where were you?” he asked. “What happened to you?”
She sneered at him. “You don’t want to know. You think you do, but it’s just to torment yourself, add to your guilt.” She sat up straighter. “So alright, let’s begin. The men who found me passed me off to someone else, and they passed me off again, and again, and again. At some point, I assume they realized I wasn’t a boy, just wearing a boy’s clothes, and started bringing me to different places, different homes. One night, I was in a house with a little blond girl who kept screaming every time I looked in her direction, so they kept me chained in the dog house out back. But it wasn’t winter yet, so I suppose I was lucky.”
Émile tried to imagine it. And he could. All too easily.
“After that, there was a school. A nun with a stick taught me to speak, and to pray, and to be ashamed of who I was. I have scars for each book of the Bible, do you want to see?” she asked, pulling off her shawl to show her back to him, but he shook his head, closed his eyes.
Another long silence. He heard her cover herself again, settle back into her chair.
“Sister Agatha, she was called,” said Marie-Celeste, quietly. “Taught me the English I needed to understand I was unloved. Abandoned. Cursed.” She switched to English to say: “‘You are the devil’s child. The sooner the Lord takes you, the sooner we’ll all be free.’”
Émile opened his eyes, saw the hurt in hers, the way she was staring into a memory, trembling with sadness and anger at what had been done to her.
She straightened, washing that away. “She sold me the next summer. To a merchant from Québec. Mr Lachaine and his wife. Mrs Lachaine wanted a slave girl, like her family in Virginia, so they found a way. I was free to go, they said, so long as I paid my debts to them first. Housing, food, clothes…I never earned more than I cost. And once I learned how to behave myself, Mrs Lachaine was actually quite merciful toward me. Here, do you want to see where I broke my leg? Let me show you the scar—”
She lifted her skirt, but Émile caught her hand, stopping her. “I believe you.”
She pulled her hand free. “Why must I be forced to live it, but you have the choice to look away?”
He moved back silently, as she finished raising her skirt to show a savage scar on her right, below the knee. Émile knew enough about injuries to tell it had been bloody, and savage, and ignored. The fact that she walked without a limp said it had happened when she was young. The fact that it still looked so raw said that it was anything but an accident. The Lachaines had broken her, and forced her to keep working.
“Luckily, Mr Lachaine had a gambling problem,” said Marie-Celeste, with a faint smile. “And so one day, Mr Tremblay came to visit, to take his due. At first, I admit, I was scared of him. The way he came in the door, yelling big words I still couldn’t understand. He seemed to me like another monster, like all the others. But then Mrs Lachaine yelled at him like she had at me, and he struck her, and I…” She smiled. “I was in love.”
She saw Émile’s expression and rolled her eyes. “Oh, not like that. I was a child, and he…” She smiled, tipped her head to the side, stuck on a thought: “Is that why you saved me? Because you wanted to—”
“No,” said Émile, so certain it stopped her smile cold.
She looked out the window instead, the breeze cooling her skin. “Mr Tremblay took me, too, as payment for the debts. I expected to work, like I had before, but he never made me. The girls taught me French—the important French, anyway—and how to act like a woman’s meant to act, but even at dinner-time, I never had to work. Never had to cook. Never had to clean up afterward. And every day, Mr Tremblay would ask me: ‘Hello, Marie-Celeste! How’s the weather today?’ and I would tell him how hot or how cold, snowing or raining.”
She closed her eyes, letting the wind dry the sweat on her brow. “When I was fifteen—fifteen was a guess, of course, but I liked it—I finally got up the courage to ask Mr Tremblay how much money I still owed him, and how long it would take to be free. And he sat me down, and he took my hands, and he said: ‘Men don’t own men, my dear. The only debts are debts of the soul, and in that regard, you owe me nothing.’”
Émile was astounded by the sentiment, especially from Tremblay…but then he realized it still fit. This was a man who valued moral rights above all else. He wasn’t upset with Mercer over lost money, he was upset with him over a broken promise. He didn’t rule his little fiefdom with fear and violence, but extravagant debauchery, and pleasure for all. When he’d seen Marie-Celeste, terrified and abused in that household, it stabbed at a part of his conscience and forced him into action. He wasn’t a bad man, this Charles Tremblay…so long as you stayed on the right side of his convictions.
“He told me I was free to go whenever I chose,” continued Marie-Celeste. “Said he’d send me on my way with a gift to get me started, too. Said it was entirely up to me.” She smiled, a wide smile. “Nothing had ever been up to me before. Not with the Lachaines, not with the nuns, not with all the men before that…” She half-looked over her shoulder. “Not with you.”
He sunk his head, chastened. “But now you’re…he has you…”
She laughed. “That’s my choice. My decision. My contribution to the life we lead. If I feel unwell, he won’t beat me for staying in bed. If I’m tired, he won’t curse me for saying no. He doesn’t have me mopping the decks for the sake of working. I do what I want, when I want, because I enjoy being useful, not because someone else told me what useful is supposed to be.”
“But you could go…” said Émile. “You could go and start a new life, and—”
“And what?” she laughed. “Marry? Marry whom? Or work? Work where? And how? And how long would it take before some man came along to drag me away and put me somewhere where I had no choices, had no rights, and—”
“Alright, I’m sorry. I—”
“No, I don’t think you are!” she said. “You keep saying that, but I don’t think you understand what you should be sorry for! If you want to apologize for something, apologize for not letting me drown!”
He sat back, stunned. “I…”
“I don’t remember where I was born,” she said. “I don’t remember my parents. My brothers. My sisters. All I remember is you…you grabbing my hand and pulling me into that boat. That was the start of a lifetime of suffering that I have fought and struggled to stitch together from the misery you left me.”
She turned to him, spread her legs and said, with a deadness in her eyes: “Mr Tremblay wants me to keep you happy.”
Émile’s voice was weak, quiet. “And what do you want?”
“I want you to go,” she said. “And stop giving false hope to people in need.”