An Ungrateful Instrument by Michael Meehan

Author:Michael Meehan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transit Lounge
Published: 2023-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

seven

The girl was dead. Jean-Baptiste was permitted to return. Our father had arranged a marriage with Jeanne Nolson. The marriage was a condition for my brother’s return.

He had come back to the palazzo on the Grand Canal. It was only days later. He met a servant on the stairs by the water. He was told of infection and the girl’s sudden death. She was buried in the cemetery on the island of San Michele. The family had already left, distraught. The other servants were packing up their things, upstairs, to send on after them, as they fled the disease that lurked in the swirling waters, the dampness of the walls.

My brother did not stay for details. He looked up at the windows from which, just days before, he had heard the sound. A sound to live, from now, only in fading memory.

We met with our father and his lawyers at their office on the Rue Madeleine, in Mantes.

I arrived with my brother and our mother to be taken through the chambers. We were led into the dim light, along narrow passages that meandered through piled documents and papers, and up winding staircases of creaking oak. We were taken between clerks perched high on their stools, scarce daring to look up from their flickering quills, steeped in the stench of dogged labour. The raw odour of stale sweat and fetid breath merged with the bestial smells of ancient parchment, of yellowing documents bound up in fading ribbon and piled up on benches and chairs and chests and in front of windows and on the tops of shelves.

Our wide skirts brushed and toppled papers as we edged our way towards the chamber where the lawyers waited, with our father.

He sat within an enclave of papers, boxes and bundles that were stacked below piles of dossiers and files that climbed the walls and windows and blocked the flow of light. He nodded, but did not rise. It was his first meeting with my brother since his return from exile. His nod was fleetingly returned, with my brother elbowing aside the fussing clerks to help our mother to a chair and then finding his way to the far side of the room.

Jeanne Nolson was not present. Nor were her family. They had sent their agent, a fine rosy fellow, a lawyer too, a master of bowings and the baise-main, a master too of the exchange of bales of cotton and shipments of lumber, of corn and rope and marriageable girls.

Our father had set about, with talk of his return, to organise my brother’s marriage to Jeanne Nolson. As though to condemn him to another form of exile. To ensure an incarceration of a longer and deeper kind.

‘You will marry Jeanne. It is arranged. There are papers, prepared. She is willing. As is her family. ‘

Poor Jeanne Nolson. From her, we had no word, no exchange with my brother. She was, I felt, now practising her silence, a silence even deeper than my own, a silence not prepared for as with my long years of retreat.

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