• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 890 0

in life had been made legitimate by a ceremony of candles, incense, and chant, and who now had a full-blown temper tantrum just as vows were being exchanged and had to be taken from the room. Annabelle would never forget the sound of the boy’s cries echoing through the wooden halls of the dark building after one of the nuns had lifted him up and carried him away. These howls, to her mind, did not presage a happy life, and, in fact, her predictions would prove to be accurate. For although Maurice would become inordinately successful, he would never be particularly happy, would never, in fact, develop the capacity for happiness, and would eventually come to grief as a result of a combination of serial fixations, greed, and bad weather.

But that day young Maurice recovered from his tantrum in time for the wedding supper and even submitted to being held, for a few tense moments, first by his father and then by his aunt, who repeatedly identified herself to him as such. Annabelle was enthusiastic in her new role; Branwell, fully attentive to his reawakened love for Marie, less so in his. He wanted all of his bride’s attention and was a bit nonplussed by the notion that any other living creature could be in a position to make demands of her. Moreover, the child had become accustomed to occupying that most coveted spot by Marie’s side in the warmth of her bed and, even during the first few days after the wedding, several discussions took place about this matter.

Marie seemed filled with joy, not only by her marriage to Branwell, but also by Annabelle’s reappearance in her life, and, the day after the wedding, so that Branwell could spend some time alone with his son, she offered to take her friend on a tour of the home that had preceded her long and lively tenure in the Timber Island attic and that had provided her shelter since. There were fewer orphans in the dormitories now, Marie told her friend. “Not so many wolves, I suppose,” Annabelle commented. Marie showed Annabelle the cot at the end of a long dormitory, the place that had been hers before she made the journey to the island. “I’ve always loved beds,” she said as they left the room. “They are nests, really, a small space you burrow into, a space that comes to know your shape.”

Annabelle’s astonishing scrapbook—a scrapbook that would contain only one paper scrap—was begun during this tour of the orphanage, or at least the first relic to be placed in it was plucked from the rough surface of the rickety front steps of that structure as she and Marie walked out the front door to stroll around the property. Annabelle had long been intrigued by the idea of relics. A French riverman had once showed her a splinter of “le vrai croix,” which he said he kept always on his person and which he claimed had been entirely responsible for the safe passage through rapids of every raft on which he had laboured. Should not, then, a splinter of this piece of architecture that had harboured her friend be kept by her as a magic charm?

That was the beginning, and as soon as she had the splinter tucked safely inside her sleeve, she regretted not having plucked a similar specimen from the delivering raft.

Eventually, Annabelle’s book of relics, her splinter book, as Branwell would come to call it, would contain samples from any number of wooden constructions: a splinter from an assortment of sad, decomposing vessels in Wreck Bay, for instance, shavings from the floor of the shop where ships were being conceived, bits of bark from a delivery of rough timber—all dated, identified, and catalogued. She also included several ominous-looking charred wooden matches that, according to their labels, had been used quite innocently to light candles and oil lamps in the house on significant occasions of one kind or another. There would be fabric in the book, square inches of canvas and short lengths of rope from the sail loft, given to her by Monsieur Marcel Guerin, the sail master. But the only paper scrap in the book was the small half-inch of waxed paper she tore from the edge of one of the orphanage