CLAUDINE AND SIMON AND THE NUN
It went like this.
Quebec City, 1668.
There was a nun. She watched over the women — the so-called King’s Daughters — and bolted, unbolted the door.
The nun wanted Claudine’s hands to be folded demurely.
They weren’t. She wouldn’t.
Because first impressions were important, especially for a poor girl from Paris.
Claudine’s hands were on her hips.
The nun had described him as tall. Must have confused him with another because there were many lonely settlers knocking on the door to meet the maidens sent by the King.
Simon was short, smelling of pine.
Better, Claudine sniffed, than stinking of rum.
The man her sister Madeleine — her hands were always demure; the nun liked that — had agreed to marry must have bathed in rum.
Simon had a white frilled shirt, freshly blackened boots. There was a new hat in his hands.
She curtsied.
He bowed deep and slow.
And rather silly. Claudine tapped her foot.
Simon: ‘Mademoiselle DesChalets, the name I have is Simon LeRoy.’
Claudine, laughing: ‘What French is that? It’s never heard in Paris!’
The nun whispered to her that the men in the colony speak patois.
Simon went slowly (absurd if he thought that would help). ‘Who is your father?’
Claudine stared. ‘No one of note or name. He ran off after my saintly mother died, if you must know.’
Her dress had a lacy collar and pleated sleeves. He tried a compliment. ‘You must be good with a needle.’
Claudine smiled a half-truth. The dress was part of the trousseau given to all the maidens, but she could sew a little. Buttons and hems.
Simon — her nose was correct: wood — was a carpenter. ‘Every man is taking a wife and wants to make a proper home. Day and night, I am making tables and chairs and beds. Many beds!’
Claudine wanted to wink.
Because there was talk of beds, the nun brought the letter from a priest in Paris attesting to Claudine’s excellent character.
Simon blinked at the paper, rubbed his beard.
Claudine snatched it back. ‘You don’t like what you read, Monsieur?’
‘I cannot read,’ he said.
It went like this until there was silence.
Until Simon cleared his throat. ‘You are an acceptable wife. Am I an acceptable husband?’
There was a white feather pen. The nun gave it to Simon. She pointed to a line beside his name on the marriage agreement.
He carefully drew a large X.
The nun wanted Claudine’s X to be demure, dainty.
It wasn’t. She didn’t.
Claudine twirled the pen, swooped it like the bird the quill had come from. She tickled Simon’s chin with it, wrote grand and fancy things in the air as if she really were the King’s daughter.
Karen writes in a basement. Her words are in or forthcoming in FlashBack Fiction, Scapegoat Review, Reflex Fiction, Funny Pearls, Retreat West, Briefly Zine, The Ekphrastic Review, Versification, and others. She/her. @MeKawalker883.