The Sacred Shore (13 page)

He felt reproved by her response, the utter lack of interest in anything for herself. “Well, then.”

Anne shook her head. “You are not offering to
give
to us, Uncle Charles. You have come to buy, to
barter
. You want something in exchange. You think that your payment is enough for us to accept the possible distress and disruption.” Her gaze was as clear as the morning air. “We are at peace here. Yes, life is not easy. We worry about my grandfather, and Father labors enough hours for two men. It would be good to have time for rest, and to not have to work quite so hard.” She smiled at him and finished with, “But most of all my father needs to know what is right, what is in God's plan in this situation.”

His response was somehow robbed of force by her open honesty. “I merely seek to find Elspeth.”

A call from her grandfather pulled Anne to her feet. “We are at peace. I think perhaps that was the reason why Father wanted you to stay here until he could pray and ask God what was to be done. He wants you to understand what we have. What we may be asked to give up.” She turned to the doorway, saying simply, “God's peace is a gift my parents give thanks for every day.”

The control and confidence Anne felt while speaking with her new uncle did not remain as constant as she would have wished. One moment she was unshakable in her faith, the next her emotions rolled and tossed her so she was left frightened and shaken.

She now sat staring out over the tranquil waters of Cobequid Bay. She was seated in her favorite place on the stump of a tree so large she and her grandfather had often used it as a table for a little picnic when she was younger. Anne knew without looking up that John Price was approaching, for his walk had a certain cadence to it, an uneven step that favored his old war wound. She kept her gaze turned seaward as he came over, stood above her for a time, and finally settled in beside her. They had been like this for as long as Anne could remember, friends so close that words often were not even required.

But today she needed to speak with someone, and she knew it could not be her mother. Even though the thoughts might distress her grandfather, she had to voice them. “I was thinking back to last autumn,” she began. “Do you remember the big October storm?”

“I do indeed.” John Price seemed to realize this would not be a short stay, for he settled himself more comfortably and put his walking stick down on the ground. “The first snowfall. Such winds as I thought they might lift me up and carry me off to England.”

“I came out here that afternoon. Mother would not have let me if she had known. The sea was white as far as I could see, the waves tossed up and torn to pieces, as much froth in the air as snow.” She squinted as she had that previous afternoon, only now the biting winds were all inside. “That's how I feel right now.”

“Oh, my child.” John Price laid his hand on her arm.

“What if Uncle Charles goes off and finds Elspeth?” Anne whispered, despair filling her heart. “What will happen to my own family? This family—the only one I have ever known. Will Mother and Father love me as they have? Will I become the
second
child in the family, or not be their child at all? If Elspeth comes back, will they make another exchange and send me to live with people I don't even know?” Part of her knew the answer, but another part wanted to hear it from another.

“Not now, not ever,” her grandfather replied vehemently but kindly.

Anne turned and pressed him with, “How can you be so sure? What if you're wrong? What if … what if they don't
need
me anymore?”

John Price reached over and covered her hand with his own. They sat like this, her sorrowful questions met with that kind gaze Anne had known from earliest memory.

In the distance they heard the lowing of cattle and the clatter of cowbells. A thrush landed in the bush behind them, sending out a song clear as crystal chimes. Anne had a sudden image of long ago. She did not even know how old she was. The same soft loving face she looked at now was leaning over her bed. She had just finished her prayers, and her grandfather was tucking her in for the night. Anne remembered how she looked up into that soft gray gaze and decided that God must have eyes just like her grandfather's.

John Price finally said, “Anne, my girl, there is something I must tell you.”

She looked into the much-loved face, at the grave expression, and nodded her question.

“Back before the Acadian expulsion, I did not know God.” It was John Price's turn to look out over the sparkling blue waters. “Oh, I thought I did. But He was someone I was aware of only distantly. I read the Good Book only for what I could use to judge others. I was a man of rules and laws and judgment and war and revenge.”

Anne smiled and shook her head. “You're telling me stories, Grandfather.”

John Price neither smiled nor turned from his perusal of unseen distances. “I was a harsh father and a hard taskmaster. I lived for order and anger. And I confess that I did not take much notice of my first grandchild, the infant Elspeth.”

Her smile slipped away. “I can't believe this. Not of you, Grandfather.”

John Price's jaw muscles tightened. “I was pleased to have an heir to carry on the family heritage, but discontent that it had turned out to be a girl. There was nothing I could do about the infant being a girl, of course. So I decided to bide my time and let her grow up and perhaps then, one day, she would be of some use, some comfort to me. I paid her so little mind that I did not even know it was you and not Elspeth your mother carried with us to Halifax.” Slowly he shook his head back and forth, obviously pained by the recollection. “Six days and nights I traveled with my own granddaughter, or so I thought, and I did not even know it was you. Did not care enough to see the infant who was there before me.”

He sighed, and suddenly he looked old. Old and sad and defeated by all that was no more. He now turned to her, distress making his voice tremble. “Anne, I knew of the expulsion. I was one of the very few chosen to collect statistics on the region's French villages—how much land, how many cattle—all carefully recorded and readied for the seizures that followed.”

“No,” Anne whispered.

“I did not see them as people. I saw them as the enemy. They were French, and the French had wounded me in battle. That was all I needed to know.” He sighed, a broken rattling breath. “After it was over, after it was done and too late, I learned the truth. About you, and about myself. The Lord used my own actions and my own guilt to break me, to humble me before Him. Then He began the renewing, the rebuilding from the inside to become a servant of God.”

He turned his gaze toward the sea and the sky's unbroken blue. “I shall carry my guilt with me to the grave. That and the fact that it is only God's loving grace, only the Lord's perfect forgiveness, only the Master's healing touch, that has changed me and brought me to where I am this day.”

“Oh, Grandfather.”

“In my private moments I long to have my
other
granddaughter restored to her parents, if only because I am responsible for wrenching them apart.” He faced her again, his emotions clearly threatening to overpower him. “You are no longer a child, Anne. I have waited for just such a day as this to confess to you all that brought you to us. Confess my guilt and beg for your forgiveness.”

Her own emotions poured out in sobs that nearly choked her. She flung herself into her grandfather's arms, and he held her tightly, stroked her hair, and said softly, “If God's gentle mercy can bind us in such a wondrous way, do you truly think your wonderful parents could be any less constant in their love? You are their blessed child, their daughter for life. Of this you can be certain.”

The next day, the Sabbath morning, Catherine woke to feel as though the clouds had rolled in upon her internal world, the storm had suddenly broken. The instant Andrew opened his eyes, he must have felt it too, for his first words that Sunday were, “What's wrong?”

“Oh, Andrew, my husband, what if all my hopes are false?” She clutched at his nightshirt, seeking desperately for something to calm the turmoil. If only she could pull the coverlet of peace back over her terrified and wounded heart. “What if Charles goes and finds our little Elspeth, or what if he finds out—”

“Don't say it, please, I beg you.” Andrew's gaze mirrored her anguish. “I can't bear to think it, not for an instant.”

“I want my daughter so. And yet stirring this all up threatens to destroy the peace and the life we've built here.”

“I know what you are feeling, my love. I feel very much the same,” Andrew confessed in a whisper.

“Charles is such a ruthless, uncaring, cold person.” She waited for Andrew to defend his brother, but he said nothing, only looked over at her with eyes as tormented as her own heart. “I see in him so many threats against our family.”

“It is so hard to hear you say these things,” Andrew said slowly. “I have been leaning upon your calm confidence and faith in God.”

“I wish …” She rolled away, no longer able to lie still, and sat upright on the edge of the bed. She looked over at her husband and said sorrowfully, “I don't know what I wish anymore.” He reached for her hand, and the silent squeeze said that he understood.

Sabbath mornings were usually a time of quiet anticipation for Catherine, a culmination of the week while looking forward to seeing Andrew in the pulpit. But today there was none of this. Even Charles seemed affected, for he took his morning tea and retreated to the bench outside the window. When Anne, then John Price, entered the kitchen, Catherine watched her father and daughter exchange calm, loving glances. On any other day she would have questioned them about the secret they shared. But this morning Catherine had all she could do to prepare for church.

Andrew walked ahead of them, and Catherine watched him go through the motions of exchanging Sabbath greetings with the other villagers. His features looked strained along with his voice. Catherine tried to be interested in comments on the weather, on the first buds of spring appearing, on hopes that a late frost would not kill the nestling sprouts. But the questions, the endless doubts, the dilemma that trapped them, all whirled relentlessly through her mind.

Andrew's sermon seemed to be a struggle for him from beginning to end. His mental turmoil was clear to all, and worried glances were cast among those seated around Catherine. Charles had joined her in the pew, and she could feel as much as see his ramrod-erect figure and the arrogance with which he viewed the service and the congregation. Catherine wished he had never come, wished he would simply depart for England on the next ship. Leave them to sort out their lives and let the past settle back into comfortable memories and whispered, half-remembered dreams. And the waves of guilt pounded through her tortured soul.

She bowed her head, not so much in prayer as in defeat.
I cannot carry this any longer
, she prayed, and at the same time felt God was so distant it was more a conversation with herself than with her Lord.
Forgive me, Father. I don't know what to do. I don't know how to think. Every choice seems equally wrong. It is impossible, and it is tearing me apart. Please take this unspeakable burden from me
.

There was no room for concern about the rightness or wrongness of her feelings or even for a sense of correctness to her prayer. The words were simply formed from the impossible affliction of doubt.

Andrew seemed to stop in time to her prayer. She did not consciously recognize that he had halted in midflow, not at first. Catherine remained with her head bowed and clenched her hands into a tight ball in the center of her lap.
Help us. Please help us
.

Her head came up and eyes opened almost against her will. Andrew was gazing down at her. He seemed mildly surprised, halted in mid-sentence by some secret whisper.

Catherine felt a sigh escape her throat, and with it she seemed to expel all the distress, all the doubt, all the anguish. It was not something she did herself. The calm, the inner peace, arrived with such tenderness that she could only know it had come by the sudden absence of her sorrow. One moment she felt trapped in suffering, the next she was at rest in the hands of God. The moment was perfumed by an eternal presence, a gift from the invisible realm. And then she knew.