by Beth Powning
“It’s hot, too. They keep it hot and moist so the thread won’t snap. There are rules posted everywhere.”
Lucy glanced at Carrie, who was more like an aunt than a cousin. She looked down at her hands, worried at a welt. Carrie, for her part, gazed at this girl upon whom she had showered gifts. They sat listening to the gulls.
“I came, Lucy, because your mother is worried.”
“I’m all right.”
“I know you are, Lucy. I’ll tell Josephine that you are.”
Carrie was certain that Lucy was hungry; that she had not expected to have a strange girl in her bed; that she was appalled to be living in a place that stank of the privy and was liable to flooding by any exceptionally high tide; that she was shocked by the factory conditions. She saw, too, that the girl was fiercely animated by the death of her father, which she had not yet grieved or accepted.
She handed Lucy a slip of paper.
“This is my address. Women meet at my house every Thursday evening at seven p.m. We are trying to change the laws so that what happened to your mother—having no custody over you children, you know, and all the rest of what happens to a woman when her husband doesn’t…when a will can’t be found—can never happen again.”
Lucy did not take her eyes from Carrie’s face.
“We want to make laws so that no children will work in factories or be without education. So that not only young men will be expected to attend university or to become doctors and lawyers. So that women will have the vote to ensure these changes. Even become lawyers and write new legislation. The women in the group are not all privileged, Lucy. There are single and working women, too.”
Lucy took the card and angled it, tipping her head. She drew a long breath as if overwhelmed by the challenge she had imposed upon herself and which, Carrie could see, far surpassed her imaginings.
* * *
—
Flora stepped onto the porch of Fairweather’s Gentlemen’s Clothing store. A boy was painting the railings. The paint in the bucket was skimmed with dust and contained a half-drowned butterfly. A bell tinkled as she opened the door. Inside, it was cool and smelled of sizing. She approached the counter where a girl was absorbed with folding a shirt.
One of Mr. Fairweather’s daughters.
“May I speak with Mr. Fairweather?”
The girl’s eyes shifted with a sequence of expressions that Flora had become accustomed to: surprise, jealousy, disdain—the paradigm of finding Flora inadequate to her beauty.
They went to the back of the store.
“Visitor for you, Mr. Fairweather.”
“Come in.”
Over the girl’s shoulder Flora glimpsed the Overseer perusing a catalogue with drawings of men’s collars. He rose to his feet, flustered.
“I am the one who…”
“Yes, yes, yes. Of course. I remember.” He scurried away his papers. “Are you happy at…of course, such a sad time. Do close the door. Sit, sit, Miss Salford. Please.”
She sat, thinking of the butterfly and wishing she had paused to pinch it, for she’d seen its paint-coated wings stirring. Mr. Fairweather, too, resumed his seat, gripping his hands together on his desk.
A nice family, he’d told her. Where you’ll spend Christmas.
He coloured, a flush that began above his collar and streaked up his neck.
“Is Mrs. Galloway…something…”
“Please, I wondered if Mrs. Galloway told you about my sister.”
“Your—” The colour subsided as his thoughts cleared. “Ah, yes. She did tell me.”
His temporary confusion emboldened Flora. She sat forward on the edge of her chair.
“I want you to help me find my sister. Me and her were separated. Like them children at the auction. They told me I was to come to Canada and better myself. I was to make a home so me and Enid wouldn’t be in the poorhouse. I promised my sister that.”
Fists, white-knuckled. Pressed to her knees.
“I promised her.”
He drew a breath, picked up a glass paperweight, watched the play of light in its suspended flowers as he turned it.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you, Miss Salford. After Ada and Henry died, you know, there was simply no time. It would have taken weeks, perhaps months, to determine which of the philanthropic organizations brought you here. Or to search the ships’ passenger lists. We had to find a place for you.”
“It’s all right, Mr. Fairweather. You done a good thing for me. I am happy to be with Mrs. Galloway. But I have to find Enid.”
He nodded, held up a hand.
“Yes, yes. Of course. I will make a start to look for your sister.” He retrieved a sheet of paper, slid a gold pen from its holder, a tiny ear spoon at its tip. He rubbed the spoon between two fingers. “Let’s begin with what you can remember. All right?”
He met her eyes and she saw his shame.
* * *
—
At church, the following Sunday, the minister preached on the evils of the pauper auction and the need for an almshouse.
“For the love of money is the root of all evil, 1 Timothy 6:10,” he said. “We should not begrudge our taxes for this use. It is our duty to our fellow man.”
Permelia and Harland sat in their usual pew.
It was mid-July and the heat was oppressive, extending even into the night. Permelia chafed at Harland’s presence in the bed, calling him a stove. He began sleeping on the porch where he could smell the sharpness of dew-wet soil, loosened around his perennials. He listened to the town’s quiet—no horse hooves, no strike of hammer or cry of child, only the chirr of insects. Up the street, Josephine slept alone like Permelia, only not by choice. He imagined that she curled on her side with arms spread around the phantom shape of Simeon. He’d hardened and relieved himself, guilty, ecstatic.
He flushed, in church, remembering. Handkerchief in his hand. Washing it.
It would never happen again, never. He stared straight ahead, listening to the minister, but could not help glancing sideways. Josephine wore black, a lightweight crepe. Her face was veiled, her Bible bound in black Moroccan leather.
He would help the girl, he thought, and felt a lightening, a relief from the weight of guilt. He sensed the justice of doing so. The expiation. For he had followed the progress of the little boy separated from his sisters and discovered that he was hard used by the man who had purchased him.
He thought of renouncing the job of Overseer of the Poor. Paying the fine. Permelia shifted on her seat, plucking at her skirt, a sheen of perspiration on her face. She fretted over the fit of her clothing and complained of the cook’s food.
* * *
—
Maud answered the telephone. It was Mr. Fairweather.
“I have purchased bicycles. I wondered if you and Flora would like to try them. Perhaps Mrs. Galloway, too?”
Josephine smiled when told of the request.
“Goodness, no, Maudie. You go. You and Flora. Does he want you now? You go right down. The dishes can wait.”
Maud and Flora went to the store. Mr. Fairweather wheeled out two brand-new bicycles.
“My wife, Mrs. Fairweather, you know, she won’t try,” he said. “Nor any of my daughters.”
“You first, Flora,” Maud said, nervous.
He held the bicycle steady while Flora clambered onto the seat, hitching up her skirt. He held the back of the seat and ran behind, letting go only long enough for her to feel the thrill of freedom.
* * *
—
Fireflies blinked, the darkness lilting with their interrupted wander. Maud and Flora had taken to playing checkers on the front veranda, evenings, by the light of a kerosene lamp. Both would turn sixteen in August.
Josephine stood in front of the linen press, fingers lifting hair f
rom her scalp.
She sighed to enable herself to breathe. Her body was as if drowning in something other than water.
Long ago, before Simeon’s death, she had agreed to host a tea meeting. The meetings, Permelia said, were to raise money for the projects planned by the beautification committee: paint for picket fences, new trees for Arbour Day, hiring a lamplighter for the new street lamps. Last Sunday, after church, Permelia had reminded her of this obligation, how it would need to take place soon.
“We usually put little tables in our front parlour,” Permelia had said.
“How many?”
“Oh, six or so.”
Tablecloths. The white ones with a pattern of embroidered forget-me-nots. Blue napkins to match.
On the veranda, Maud laughed. “Oh, you!” She did not mind being bested by Flora, who would not be smug, like Lucy, or dismissive like George.
Flora’s English accent, broadening. “Sorry, Maudie.”
Josephine heard the girls putting away the game, the scrape of chairs, their footsteps going through the parlour, their voices, muted behind the kitchen door.
Quiet.
Quiet was like the reaper; she felt his presence in corner or doorway, cold, silent—an essence, expectant. She closed the linen press and stood with her forehead pressed against it.
And there must be freshly polished silverware. Cucumber sandwiches and lemon cake. Bouquets of snapdragons and baby’s breath.
She went to her desk and opened a large black book. Every evening, she entered the day’s receipts in their narrow columns, writing carefully and with a sense of obligation. Mr. Eveleigh had shown her how to keep accounts. To prove to the court that you are not squandering the children’s inheritance.
The children, she thought. Not hers, as if the court-mandated custody rendered them more their own people, now, than their mother’s children. They seemed, all at once, to have become an independent unit, when such change should have happened incrementally, by dint of new loves, new friendships, new occupations.
She put her face in her hands.
Simeon must have left a will. Perhaps a maid, illiterate, tossed it out.
He would be so angry to know this. He would be furious to learn that all he had planned for her—the turret room, the greenhouse and roses, the house with its varnished maple floorboards—was in jeopardy.
The pulse of insects, a murmur of voices in the kitchen—she heard not the quiet of a summer night but the absence of Simeon’s voice. She felt the yawning stretch of her life without him, a pain from which she could not run, that she must accept. With which she must live. That could not be ameliorated, save by sleep.
Tea meeting.
If Mr. Dougan were here, he would have brought down the freshly painted chairs. He would have set up the tables. Margaret and Mary would have found and washed and ironed the tablecloths and the napkins. The details which must be correct—gleaming silverware; spotless, starched folds of linen; place markers on flowered cards—seemed an attention to minutia which Josephine, at this moment, saw as a means to fill the moments of a shallow life. A futile fussiness.
She broke into a sweat. She stood and staggered, light-headed, the black dress encasing her in heat.
She made her way down the hall and pushed open the kitchen door. Ellen was reading aloud from the paper.
“There was blood and plenty of it outside the left leg. I mean by plenty of it a stream as wide as one’s three fingers…Oh, Mrs. Galloway. I’m just reading that old axe murder trial. Mr. Dougan got me into the habit. They’re going over it now. They expect a verdict tomorr—”
Josephine collapsed.
Flora jumped from her chair, tossing down sock and darning egg.
Maud shrieked.
Sailor scrabbled from his pillow.
A tiny, muscled, sun-bronzed woman started up from the corner. Indigent Ida, well-known in the town and surrounding countryside, had just arrived, coming at nightfall, as was her habit. She carried herbs and ointments, asked for nothing more than a meal and a single night’s lodging. Always, she would be gone in the morning, vanishing into the dawn like a stray cat.
She knelt by Josephine.
“Water,” she said. Her voice was husky from disuse. “A cloth.”
Flora brought a basin and a cloth.
Ida bathed Josephine’s face, unbuttoned her cuffs, ran the cloth over her arms and wrists. She held a small leather pouch to Josephine’s nose.
“I fell,” Josephine murmured.
They helped her into a chair. Maud ran into the parlour and returned unfolding a fan—red, a golden crane spreading its wings. She stood by her mother, frantically stirring the air.
“The tea meeting,” Josephine said. Her fingers stroked Sailor’s head, automatically. He showed the whites of his eyes, looking up at her. “I can’t.”
“The likes of them,” Ellen muttered. “When they know you’re shattered.” She pulled the kettle to the hot part of the stove, jabbing a stick of wood with unnecessary force into the fire box.
“Tables and…Mr. Dougan not here for the little…”
“Them little chairs.” Ellen imitated a simpering voice. “And you with no Mr. Dougan. No Margaret and Mary.” She scooped tea leaves from the canister, an irritable motion at odds with the worried look she sent Josephine.
Flora watched Josephine straightening her sleeves, brushing down her skirts. She had changed from the self-possessed woman who had purchased her at the auction into a person whose movements were uncertain, half-formed. Who wandered the house, staring from windows at the flicker of tree shadow, the late roses; who picked up misplaced objects—an eyeglass case, a book—and put them down again. Who forgot to bathe. Whose hands trembled. Who slept on her chignon and did not notice when her hair slipped from its pins.
Ida settled back noiselessly in the corner. The lamp began to smoke and Maud turned up the wick.
“I’ll tell Mrs. Fairweather, Mother,” she said, her voice earnest. “I’ll call her on the telephone and say you’ve fallen ill.”
Maud was the best telephone operator in the household. She loved to use it.
They sat drinking tea and nibbling gingersnaps. In the circle of caring women, Flora felt a sense of being part, no longer abandoned: the house rising above and around them—closets, hallways, turrets, gables, verandas. The barn, with its empty loft, its vacant stalls. Her garden, growing in the darkness. Baby beets, slender carrots. Rows of potatoes, with purple blossoms. Mr. Fairweather, asking questions that might lead to Enid’s discovery. Josephine, always kind. Maud and Ellen, like friends.
“You should keep a boarding house,” Indigent Ida remarked, from the half dark. “Got the space. Got the women.”
PART II
October 1888 – April 1889
SEVEN
Emissaries of Winter
MRS. BEAMAN, A SEAMSTRESS, covered Josephine’s bureau with a collection of hats.
Miss Harvey, who worked in the boot factory office, settled gladly for Maud’s bedroom. She was gaunt, a minimal presence, and would not mind a smaller chamber.
Flora and Maud decided to put Mr. Sprague in Lucy’s room, overlooking the side lawn. Thirty-five and unmarried, he was a typesetter and Pleasant Valley’s newly hired lamplighter. From his window, overlooking the roofs of town, he could check the lights’ glimmer.
The boarders had use of the parlour and the front door. They were given the large, new bathroom and were provided with breakfast, boxed lunch and dinner.
George’s room remained empty until the early evening of October seventeenth.
In the kitchen, Ellen, preparing for tomorrow’s lunches, carefully tipped eggs from a spoon into boiling water. Josephine and Flora bent over sewing and knitting, while Maud spread a letter from Lucy on the table and read aloud.
“…a spirited meeting, run
by Cousin Carrie. We discussed how women constitute a ‘sex class’ in society, which is deemed inferior. Lydia Mills read a paper written by an American suffragist. We spoke of joining the Canadian Women’s Suffrage Association. I was excited and have made new friends. There is a woman who runs a boarding house, there are two artists, and some who have gone to university in the United States. I—”
A knock came on the front door. Ellen started; an egg slipped from her spoon. Maud, apprehensive, looked up at her mother.
“I’ll go,” Flora said.
She set down her knitting and slipped quietly along the dim hallway. As she opened the front door, the sharp decay of autumn entered—peony bushes frozen to pulp, decaying leaves.
A man.
Holding a kerosene lantern. Face half-darkened in shifting shadow.
“This a boarding establishment?”
“It is.”
“You got a room to let?”
“Wait, please.”
She went to the kitchen.
“There’s a man, asking if we have rooms.”
Josephine sighed. She had not slept the previous night and had been listless, fatigued, all day long. She went into the hall, turned up the gaslight. Flora and Maud stood behind her as she interviewed the man on the doorstep. The man said he was from Gloucester County, gesturing northwards. He was a carpenter. He had secured work here in town. He needed a place to make the miniature houses that he sold. He was not married and had no references other than one of the actual little houses, which he could show Josephine, if she wished. He bowed, slightly, when he told her his name—Jasper Tuck—and reached into his pocket, withdrawing bills ready to pay for one week in advance. He said he would be gone all day during the week and would need a space for his woodworking. He had noticed the barn. Could he pay extra for use of a bit of it? He had noticed that the trellis had come unattached and that there was a rotting step on the veranda, on the kitchen side.
“I can fix those up for you,” he said.