I knew that I would be haunted for ever by what I had seen. But how much worse must it be for he whose role was forever to transport the drowned into the next life? And, in recompense for this task not of his own choosing, to be ostracised by family, neighbour and friend.
I sank back down onto the sand. The sun was not yet warm but I allowed its brightness to banish the visions of the night from my consciousness. The waves lapped closer, I shielded my eyes and looked out at the island.
Some time later, the routine of the day in the village began again. The men dragged their boats down past me and put out to sea. The women brought wood for the fire. The two children brought me one of the earthenware jugs of fresh water and I thanked them and drank deeply. The other jug was emptied into the eternal broth and the children were dispatched to refill them.
Did they know what horrors I had endured during the night?
I stayed where I was until the sun was high in the sky, allowing the steady and timeless pace of the villagers going about their business to soothe my troubled spirit. Someone brought leaves for the pot. Someone else climbed the uncertain stair and returned a little later with a hessian bag of root vegetables – turnips, I thought, from a distance.
Finally, the fishing boats came back in with their catch, without mishap. I watched but, this time, did not assist as they were hauled up onto the sand. The fishermen tidied their nets and lines and prepared their catch for the cauldron.
I realised it was time for me to be gone. I did not belong here, however romantic my first associations had been. I returned to the small house where I had been so generously received and collected my things. I left a few coins on the table in recognition of their hospitality.
Outside, the sun was bright on the monument in the centre of the village. I paused a while, now understanding it did not commemorate a saint. The opposite, in fact. It was, rather, Ankou. The fisherman called by name in the deep of the night to transport those lost to the sea to the world beyond.
At the base of the monument a small drift of loose sand had blown against the stone, forming a soft dune. I knelt and brushed it away, revealing an inscription. The stonemason had carved the letters in an angular style, almost like Celtic runes. It took me a moment to decipher their meaning. Eventually I solved the puzzle by tracing them with my finger. In this way I imparted to them a kind of cursive flow that put me in mind of my grandfather’s old-fashioned handwriting. Indeed, no sooner was the memory of those days rekindled than I realised that I had known the name of the place all along: the Bay of the Departed.
I made my way to the stair and began to climb back up the cliff. I paused halfway and scanned the beach. I suppose the rhythm of life was the same each day in that place. I saw the gaunt villager cross the sand and watched as he disappeared among the rocks and pools at the northern end. No one paid him any attention. He was afforded no more respect than a shadow.
When I reached the fingerpost, with its three directions offered to the traveller, this time I took the path inland as most likely to lead me to a town where a train could transport me, as swiftly as technology would allow, back to the metropolis.
My journey was done.
Author’s Note
This is the second of the stories inspired by Breton folklore. The westernmost tip of the Brittany coast, jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, is alive with legends of the sea. Mythical creatures, giants, sprites, a kind of Dreamtime that explains the violence and the beauty of the coastline. The stories are often harsh and, to modern ears, cruel. Men and women destined to live out the same sacrifices for all of time, retribution for crimes committed by earlier generations or as an attempt to appease the angry sea.
My version of the Ankou is based on research and translation undertaken by my husband, Greg Mosse, from the books inherited from my uncle in April 2013. I chose to set the story in the period between World War I and World War II, where the way of life still followed the steady tread of the century before and the century before that, and aimed to capture a timelessness in the retelling of the old folk tale.
As in many ghostly stories, the narrator is an outsider who finds himself drawn into a strange, hidden community. Today, this part of Brittany is famous for its surfing and seafood. But the ancient legend – the one that has endured ‘ever since the world began’ – insists that the Baie de Trépassés, the Bay of the Departed, has always been a portal into death.
LA FILLE DE MÉLISANDE
Allemonde, a legendary land
The Past
Author’s Note
This story was written in May 2008 for a 75th-anniversary celebration for Glyndebourne Opera House in Sussex, Midsummer Nights. Each author in the collection was invited to choose one – significant – opera as their inspiration and I chose Pelléas et Mélisande by Claude Debussy. Debussy is an off-stage character in the second of my Languedoc Trilogy, Sepulchre, which is partly set during the 1890s, so I had been listening to a great deal of French impressionist music and reading symbolist poetry, plays and novels to all the better immerse myself in the world of fin-de-siècle Paris.
Pelléas et Mélisande, the only opera Debussy wrote, premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in April 1902. Adapted from Maeterlinck’s symbolist play of the same name, it had mixed reviews at the time, though quickly became seen as marking a turning point in the development of opera from its nineteenth-century traditions to a musical form lighter on its feet.
For readers not familiar with Maeterlinck’s tragic tale or Debussy’s interpretation, here are the bare bones of the story. A man quick to anger, violent and jealous, Prince Golaud comes across a young woman, Mélisande, wandering lost in a forest. Timid, fearful, traumatised, she does not know where she has come from – though she remembers a sea journey – and has no idea why she finds herself in this strange, dark kingdom. Golaud marries her and takes her home to the court of his grandfather, the old blind King Arkel, where Golaud’s mother Geneviève and his young son from an earlier marriage, Yniold, live. Golaud’s half-brother, Pelléas, is also resident at the castle, though he is seeking permission from Arkel to leave.
This being opera, Pelléas and Mélisande fall in love. She is expecting Golaud’s child, but she lives in fear of his violent temper and his jealousy – in Act I, when she loses her gold wedding ring, Golaud forces her to go to find it, despite her terror of the dark – so she looks, in part, to Pelléas for protection. Suspicious, vengeful, Golaud becomes obsessed with finding out the ‘truth’ – ‘la verité’ – of the relationship between his half-brother and his wife, and he forces his son, Yniold, to spy on the pair. When Golaud sees them taking their leave of one another by the fountain in the grounds – they understand their love affair cannot be – he stabs Pelléas and pursues the grieving Mélisande. The closing scene of Act V sees Mélisande going into labour prematurely and dying as her daughter is born, without ever holding her. Even then, rather than seeking forgiveness or attempting to atone for his actions, Golaud still demands ‘the truth’. The whispering final lines hint that the same fatalistic pattern of misery and twisted love is destined to continue down the generations.
From there, I imagined the childhood of this unwanted, unmothered child, Mélisande’s daughter – I gave her the name Miette, ‘little one’ – and what might it have been like to grow up in the sombre halls of the castle, in the shadow of murder. How Miette might have felt hearing rumours about her mother’s death and her uncle’s murder, her suspicions of what might have happened to Yniold’s mother, Golaud’s first wife. Seeing her father not brought to account for his deeds, because of his high birth, yet nonetheless a man haunted by the past and making an annual pilgrimage to the scene of his crime. With such a background, it seemed natural that Miette, purposeful and determined, would grow up to want to avenge her mother.
In the writing, I wanted to mirror the dreamy, otherworld quality of Debussy’s score, the indeterminate setting, the blurring of past and present and future, the sense that nothi
ng was certain, nothing was quite as it seemed. Such is the nature of mythologies and legend, both symbolic and real, not fixed in place or time, but rooted instead in impression, in emotion, in atmosphere. My story is set, however, on the occasion of Miette’s eighteenth birthday . . .
La Fille de Mélisande
The ideal would be two associated dreams.
No time, no place.
CLAUDE DEBUSSY,
writing about Pelléas et Mélisande in 1890
White is the colour of remembrance. The hoar frost on the blades of grass that cling to the castle walls, the hollow between the ribs and the heart. A shroud, a winding sheet, a ghost.
Absence.
The trees are silhouettes, mute sentinels, slipping from green to grey to black in the twilight. The forest holds its secrets.
Mélisande’s daughter, Miette, presses herself deeper into the green shadows of the wood. She can see glimpses of La Fontaine des Aveugles through the twisted undergrowth and juniper bushes. It is late in the day and already the light has fled the sombre alleyways of the park and the gloomy tracks that cross the forest like veins on an old man’s hands.
White is the colour of grief.
This is the anniversary of her mother’s death when, according to the mythology of the land, the paths between one world and the next are said to be open. It is not a night to be abroad. It is also Miette’s birthday, although this has passed without celebration or comment these past eighteen years. The date has never been marked by feasts or fanfares or ribbons.
The story of Mélisande – forbidden love, tragic beauty, a heroine dead before her time – this is the architecture of legend, of fairytale, of poetry and ballad. How could the existence of an unwanted, though resilient, daughter possibly compare? A watchful daughter biding her time.
Miette presses her hand against the silk of her robe, feeling the reassuring crackle of the paper. It is her testament, her confession, an explanation of the act she intends to carry out today. She knows her father, Golaud, has murdered once, if not twice – and holds him responsible for her mother’s death – but yet he has kept his liberty. He has never been called to account. This is not how it will be for her. Although she is the great-grand-daughter of old King Arkel, she is a girl not a boy. She is considered of no account. Besides, Miette wants to explain her deeds, make herself understood. In this, as in so many other ways, she is not her mother’s daughter. Everything about Mélisande’s life – her delicate spirit, her fragile history – remains as indistinct as a reflection moving upon the surface of the water. Where had she come from before Golaud found her and brought her to Allemonde? What early grief had cracked her spirit? What were her thoughts as her wedding ring fell, twisting, down into the well, knowing the loss of it would matter so much? How tripped her heart when she looked at Pelléas and saw her love reflected in his eyes? Did she catch her breath? Did he?
Did she know, even then, that her story would be denied a happy ending?
Miette grew up in the shadow of these stories, now grown stale and battered around the edges. Whisperings about her father, Golaud, and his violent jealousy. Of her mother, Mélisande, and her gentleness. Of how her long hair tumbled down from the window like a skein of silk. Of her uncle, Pelléas, and his folly. Of the others who stood by and did nothing.
Green is the colour of history.
Not the white and black of words on a page or notes on a stave. Not the frozen grey of tombstones and chapels. It is green that is the colour of time passing. Olive moss, sable in places, covering the crow’s feet cracks in the wall. Emerald weeds that spring up on a path long unused. The lichen covering, year by timeless year, the inscription on the headstone, the letters, the remembered name.
At her nurse’s knee, Miette learned the history of Pelléas and Mélisande. A history, a tale, is no substitute for a mother, but it gives a purpose to the suffering. Their story is the legend of Allemonde, a tale perfect in its construction – un amour défendu, a sword raised in anger. Always the balance of the light with the dark, the ocean with the confines of the forest, the castle and the tower. The colours, the texture of the story, Miette pieced together from what was left unsaid between her half-brother, Yniold, and her father.
The truth she learned from her grandmother, Geneviève. Of how men use women ill. How money buys safety, if not peace. Of how the faults of one generation are passed down, silent and sly, to the next. Of how the truth is always shabby, always mundane when set next to the stuff of legend.
In her green hiding place in the forest, Miette sighs, caught between boredom and terror. Her confession and weapon lie concealed beneath her cloak. She is eighteen today. She will act, today.
Il est presque l’heure.
Her father’s custom on this day are well known. From the white-haired beggars at the gate to the servants that walk the sombre corridors of the castle, all of Allemonde knows how Golaud, the widower – some say, the murderer of wives – makes his annual pilgrimage to La Fontaine des Aveugles on the anniversary of Mélisande’s death, though Miette’s birthday is not remembered. Golaud comes to mourn, some say, or to pray. To weep, to pick over the bones of his life. No one knows if it is remorse or grief that guides his steps. He has never shared that chapter of his story and Miette never asked for fear it would strip her purpose from her.
In the distance, the chiming of the bell. The sheep in the fields begin their twilight chorus, the mournful chorus for the passing of the day. Out at sea, the sun is sinking slowly down beyond the horizon, as every day for centuries. And in the palace, the slow and steady business of lighting the candles will now begin. The yellow flames dancing up along the stone walls and grey corridors.
The legend of Mélisande holds that she dreaded the dusk. Miette does not know if this is true. They say that Mélisande feared the night. The ringing of the Angelus bell, the closing of the gates in a rattle of wood and metal and chain – all this made her think of the grave where the worms and spiders dwelt. Mélisande turned to the west, or so Miette’s nurse told her, to the setting sun and the shore, as if looking for that first ship, long departed, which had brought her as a child-bride to Allemonde from who knows where. As if hearing, still, the cries of the sailors and the gulls. An echo of a memory of happier times? Miette glances down and sees the tips of her satin slippers are stained with the first touches of the evening dew brushing the grass.
She shivers and pulls her cloak tight around her with her slim, strong arms. Deep in the folds of cloth, she presses the tip of the knife against her thumb, softly at first, then harder until her skin is pierced, then withdraws her hand. A single, red pearl of blood hangs suspended, like a jewel in the twilight.
There are beads of perspiration at the nape of her neck now beneath the canopy of her hair, worn long in remembrance of her mother. The mother who never held her. Although an inconvenience, the braids are a symbol of the connection between them. Brushed, plaited, smoothed. Though everyone tells Miette she is more her father’s daughter. She is quick to temper, black moods threatening, easily frustrated.
Vengeful.
Beneath the trees, Miette shifts slightly from foot to foot, feeling the cold seeping up from the earth and the roots into her young bones. She does not know how long she has been waiting, entombed in the green embrace of the wood. Long enough for dusk to fall, it seems both an eternity and a moment. Eighteen years, in truth, and although she has been biding her time, all these minutes and hours and weeks, Miette feels panic rising in her throat, nausea, sour and bitter. She wills herself not to lose her nerve. Not now, not at the moment she has been planning for so long. Waiting for.
Pas maintenant.
Red is the colour of dying. What else could it be?
The violent rays of the setting sun through glass, flooding the chamber crimson. The petals pulled from a rose, strewn on the cobbled stones of a garden no longer tended. The colour of the damaged struggling heart. Blood dripping through the fingers.
To steady
her nerves, Miette sends her thoughts flying back to the castle. She remembers herself at seven or eight years old, carried on Yniold’s shoulders. Laughing, sometimes. Content, sometimes. But, quick, the darker memories come. Her past unfolds in her memory like the decaying slats of a paper fan. Older, eleven or twelve, tiptoeing alone down dusty corridors. Or, later still, hidden beneath the covers in her cold chamber, hands over her ears, trying not to hear her father shouting or Yniold weeping. Fear or humiliation, the sound was the same.
A bird flies up out of the trees, the abrupt beating of its wings upon the air mirroring the rhythms of her own anxious pulse. Miette narrows her eyes, sharpens her ears. In the distance, now, she can hear something. The subtle snap of twigs on the path, the rattling of rabbits seeking cover in the undergrowth, the shifting of the atmosphere. Someone is coming.
Him? The man who is her father, though she feels no love or duty to him? Is it he?
Miette stiffens. She has imagined this scene so many times. The single strike of the knife, an act of revenge. An eye for an eye, a blade for a blade. She has imagined how Golaud, wounded, would reach out his hands to her, as once Mélisande had reached for the baby daughter she could not hold. How he would ask her forgiveness.
And, even now, she could give it. Absolve him for his sins. Absolve herself for what she has done.
‘Je te pardonne. Je te pardonne tout.’
That hour has not yet come. Miette waits, holding her breath, wishing the deed could be over. Or need not to be done at all.
The light from a lantern, jagged and uneven, is getting closer. Miette can distinguish the sound of breathing above the twilight sighings and whisperings and chitterings of the forest. The rattle of an old man’s chest as Golaud walks out of the darkness, out of the cover of the trees and into the glade, following the well-worn path to La Fontaine des Aveugles – the Fountain of the Blind Men – to the place where Pelléas fell.