The Reinvention of Love

years. I walk the streets at night when I am on land. Here, on the ship, I pace the decks, the spray in my face. The salt water stings my skin and the decks are slippery. Sometimes I am thrown against the railings by the heave of the ship. The nights have no stars.
    I see you ahead of me on the slope of lawn at dusk on Notre-Dame-des-Champs. You turn and your face has the gold of the sun’s glow behind it. You turn and smile, because you are waiting for me to catch you up. I struggle over the grass, my small legs pumping hard. I am always so grateful when you wait for me, and always so afraid that you will not wait long enough, that you will turn away before I reach you.
    Madame Baa found me shivering on the foredeck. Is that where I was? I thought I was with you.
    Madame Baa is kind to me, sister. As kind as Maman. You would like her. She took me in when everyone else shunned me, thinking me mad because I walked the streets of the hot place dressed in the heavy clothes of the cold place. But I had no money. Papa had stopped sending me an allowance. If Ihad no money, how could I have afforded to buy new clothes?
    Madame Baa says, “Quiet, child.” Sometimes, when I am writing, it seems that I am also speaking the words out loud, and this is confusing to her. She thinks I will feel better if I am quiet.
    Maman is dead. Do you know this? Her heart gave out. Have you seen her? I know she was buried in the cemetery at Villequier with you. Can you reach out through the cold earth and touch her?
    I agreed to go on this ship, to go with Madame Baa back to France, because I longed to see Maman. But she died just before we boarded, and I could not escape the passage. Now it will be Papa who meets me at the docks. I am afraid to see Papa. I fear he will be very angry with me. He had endless patience with you. With me, he has no patience at all.
    You were so good at everything, sister. I tried to do one thing with all my heart, and I failed terribly at it.
    I tried to love Albert, but he would not let me. He did not want my love. He has married someone else now, an English-woman. Albert is back in England with his new English wife. He probably never thinks of me.
    Madame Baa says, “Come here, child.” She says, “Don’t cry.” Am I crying?
    I must do as she says.
    Halifax was cold. Bridgetown, Barbados was hot. Albert was posted there without warning, and I followed him within the very week that he sailed.
    I was not prepared for the heat, just as I had not been prepared for the Halifax winter. Bridgetown was scorching. I could feel the heat of the streets through the soles of my shoes. The bonnets I wore had to be peeled from my scalp at night.
    I did not deceive myself that Albert would be pleased tosee me, and I was not wrong. But my need to see him was so great that it no longer mattered what he felt about it all. I did not care that he loathed me, that he begged me to leave him alone. I just could not. I did not do it to cause him any pain, only because I had no other choice. I was drawn to him. My destiny was his destiny.
    There were orders at the garrison to keep me out. I found lodgings nearby, but had to leave those quite soon because I could not pay the rent. I had taken little from Halifax, just one trunk of clothes and papers. I was allowed to keep the trunk in a shed at the landlady’s house in Bridgetown, and I returned to it daily to collect and deposit papers, and to occasionally change my clothes.
    I was starving and Madame Baa took me into her small house with the metal roof and fed me a stew that tasted much better than it looked.
    Madame Baa is a slave. She was stolen from her homeland, a place called Trinidad, and forced to work on the sugar plantations in Barbados. She was freed only last year, and even though I ask her continually to tell me about her time as a slave, she will only say that talking about it makes her think about it, and she’d rather not do that any more. “I am a free woman now,” she says. “And I am going to Paris.”
    Her family are all dead. Sometimes Madame Baa says that I remind her of her daughter, but I cannot see how. I think she desires everyone to remind her of her daughter. I understand that. I know what it is to lose someone and want nothing more than to see her again, to have her turn around at the top of the garden and wait for you to catch her up.
    Albert did not stay long in Barbados. He was waiting for a posting back in England, and when it came through,