A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [80]
Marie also showed Annabelle the graveyard, an area surrounded by a white picket fence and filled with twenty or thirty small limestone pillars each topped by a lovely stone angel. An Italian monument maker in the town on the shore of the river had donated his services, she told Annabelle, and had carved an angel each time a child died. “I knew some of these children,” Marie said, “not all, of course, but some. They almost all died quietly in the midst of some epidemic or another. Death seemed so romantic, somehow, to an orphan. You got attention, you got prayers with your name in them, and then a religious service just for you. Everyone thought about you for days and days. And,” she paused, “and you got your own angel.” To children with no possessions that angel must have seemed like a special gift, that and your own name carved on the stone beneath it. “In the winter after a storm,” Marie said, “it looks as if there is a choir of miniature angels advancing like an army across the top of the snow.”
Annabelle looked at the graveyard for quite a while, then, just before turning back toward the convent, she plucked a painted splinter from a tilting picket. “But you weren’t the dying type,” she said to Marie.
“No,” laughed Marie, turning back toward the convent, “I certainly was not.”
A few days later the small family (in the company of Aunt Annabelle, as she now liked to call herself) entered a rowboat skippered by a sturdy nun just as the morning sun rose over the river. On the mainland they caught a coach to Kingston and a skiff to Timber Island, arriving late in the afternoon. They knew that Joseph Woodman would still be at work at this time and so, with some trepidation, they approached the modest, unpainted building that he used as an office. Soon they were gathered in front of his large desk. The old man neither stood to greet them nor looked up from the account book he pretended to be studying, and, when he finally spoke, he talked only to his daughter, whom he accused of high treason and “Irish behaviour.”
Annabelle did not flinch. “This is Maurice,” she told him, placing her hand on the top of the boy’s small head. “You are his grandfather.”
“I remember a certain Fitzmaurice from Ireland. Bog Irish and a complete fool. Maurice … an Irish name if I ever heard one.” Woodman eyed the boy suspiciously.
“You know very well it is not an Irish name,” Annabelle replied. “You are perfectly aware that it is a French name. On the other hand, let me remind you that Branwell is an Irish name, and you were the one who chose it.”
“Indeed,” said Joseph Woodman, “and we can all see what that brought him.” This remark was delivered without sarcasm. The patriarch had not the sense of humour to engage in sarcasm.
Then, in the midst of the hollow silence that followed this declaration, to everyone’s amazement, Maurice, who had neither spoken nor smiled throughout the journey or the week that had preceded it, beamed at his grandfather, disengaged himself from his mother’s hand, and scrambled onto the old man’s lap.
Joseph Woodman stiffened, but did not put the child down. The small boy settled into the crook of one unyielding arm, then reached up and touched the white beard. He looked with adoration into the stern face. “Monsieur Dieu,” he said, smiling first at his grandfather and then at his surprised mother, “Monsieur Dieu … il est là.”
This was to be one of the first of Maurice’s fixations on personalities more powerful than his own, fixations that would rule his life. Maurice would always be drawn to those more certain than himself of how they wanted the world to operate, and these attachments would be the source of both his occasional joy and his chronic unhappiness. But that day, his deification of his grandfather was to be the key that unlocked his family’s future. No one is immune to the flattery of adoration, and Joseph Woodman was not to be an exception to this rule. Once Maurice was fully established on the man’s lap, the timber baron’s expression gradually changed from irritated astonishment to a kind of