A daughter to avenge a mother, a less familiar story.
Golaud places the lantern uncertainly on the edge of the well. Miette waits. It is not yet her turn to step upon the stage. Her father is muttering, talking, but so softly that she cannot distinguish one word from the next. She moves a little closer, picks out the words.
‘La vérité. La vérité.’
Over and over, like a chorus refrain, the syllables bleeding one into the other and back again. Demanding the truth. The words he said to his Mélisande as she lay dying.
Tell me the truth.
Golaud leans forward, two twisted hands in the yellow halo of light on the grey stone of the well. Miette steps forward, in silence and without drama. For if she is to rewrite this story, it cannot be told in noise and emotion, but rather enacted with cold purpose. It is a practical ending, not a theatrical one.
One step forward, then two. Un, deux, trois loup. Coming to get you, Mr Wolf, ready or not. A game of grandmother’s footsteps played by two lonely children, she and Yniold, in a desolate palace long ago.
With a third silent step, she is on him.
Now, at last, she is ready to join herself to him. A murderer for a father, a murderer for a daughter.
As Golaud stoops forward to gaze into the blind eye of the water, Miette has the advantage of height. Thinking of Mélisande and her Pelléas, of Yniold’s mother too – dead before her time – Miette lifts the knife and, with the strength of both hands and the weight of her body, she brings the blade down between her father’s shoulders.
He cries out, once, like an animal caught fast in the metal jaws of a trap, then nothing. She has heard it said that the soul takes flight alone and in silence. She does not know if this is true, only that he does not speak or cry out again.
Miette relinquishes her hold on the hilt and steps back, half stumbling on the hem of her cloak beneath her heel, sodden with dew. She, too, is silent. There is nothing to say, though she wills him to turn, wishing her act of vengeance to be understood. At the same time, she does not want to see the life leaving him or her own image reflected in his dying eyes.
Golaud falls forward, as once Pelléas had fallen. His hands slip from the wall, empty fingers scratching down the stone surface of the well, down to the ground. No crash of cymbals to mark the moment of death, no crescendo, merely justice done.
Then, a nightjar calls, a spur to action. Taking the letter from her pocket, Miette places it upon her father’s body. The testimony of Mélisande’s daughter, eighteen years in the telling. A confession of why and how she killed her father.
‘La vérité,’ she whispers.
This is the truth. Set it down, set it down.
The truth is that stories can be rewritten. Acts of love and death.
Miette stretches to take Golaud’s lantern from the rim of the well, taking care not to touch him, then turns to walk back through the forest. How easy, it seems, to kill a man. So easy to separate the spirit from the skin and bone?
In the distance, the bell strikes another hour. It marks the end of one history and the beginning of another.
Gold is the colour of loyalty. Of a duty fulfilled.
THE REVENANT
The Fishbourne Marshes, Sussex
Winter 1955
The Revenant
When latest autumn spreads her evening veil,
And the grey mists from these dim waves arise,
I love to listen to the hollow sighs
Thro’ the half leafless wood that breathes the gale.
For at such hours the shadowy phantom pale,
Oft seems to fleet before the poet’s eyes;
Strange sounds are heard, and mournful melodies
As of night wanderers who their woes bewail!
from Sonnet XXXII, ‘To Melancholy’
CHARLOTTE TURNER SMITH
I first saw her on a Thursday afternoon. She was ahead of me on the path out on the marshes, walking fast as if to keep an appointment. Her hands were dug deep in her pockets and her shoulders hunched. A blue belted jacket and pleated skirt, white shirt just showing above the collar and shoes suitable for pavements not mud. Seamed stockings. Later, I realised why she looked familiar and why the look of her struck a false note.
But not then. Not that first time.
That Thursday, I stopped, puzzled I’d not noticed her before. The path, at this point, was narrow and accessed only from Mill Lane, and though I usually walked down to the estuary in the afternoon, when I could get away, it wasn’t a popular spot. Although the lights of the lending library were visible on the far side of the field, most local people considered this area west of the Mill Pond too deserted, too overgrown and that November it had rained and rained.
She was too far ahead for me to make out her features and, besides, she didn’t turn round. But her brown hair, visible beneath the rim of her cap, looked salon curled and from the way she moved, I thought she was about my age. That, too, stuck in my mind. Those who did come out this way were mostly old men with time on their hands, or farm workers taking a short cut across the fields to the big houses up along. Not girls in their twenties.