by Beth Powning
A carriage was coming up the lane. Mr. Fairweather held the reins in one hand, the other lifted to greet her.
“Flora,” he called. “Wait, please.”
He climbed down and clipped a line to the horse’s bridle, looping it around the hitching post. She approached and stood holding the headless chicken, watching, curious, as he pulled an envelope from his pocket.
“I have heard from Miss Rye at last. I was forced, finally, to have my lawyer contact her, threatening consequences if she did not investigate, and so she did.”
His fingers trembled, slightly, as if with excitement, and he had some difficulty extricating the letter from the envelope.
“We have, finally, some news about your sister.”
The house, suddenly, seemed like a painting—trees flat against a sullen sky, she herself a girl in a book about Canada, standing by a wood-shingled house before a man in a long frock coat and a beaver hat. She clutched her waist with her free hand. Her belly cramped with a swoop of fear.
“Miss Rye confirms the date that an Enid Salford arrived in Halifax. She said only that Enid went to some trusted friend of hers who found a situation and sent her off on a train. She did not name the trusted friend, nor tell me anything about the ‘situation,’ so I will have to ask my Halifax acquaintances if they have any ideas who that friend might have been. Less than I hoped, Flora, but we can surmise that she is in Nova Scotia.”
Nova Scotia, Flora thought, stunned. The sky itself seemed to come closer, now that she knew for sure that her sister was alive and living in the next province.
He tapped her on the shoulder with the letter, smiling. “I’ll let you know when I hear anything. You’ll say hello to Mrs. Galloway for me, won’t you?”
She watched his carriage retreat down the lane beneath the leafless branches. The sickness in her belly remained, but changed—both dread and excitement.
Snowflakes fell, wavering down like emissaries of winter.
She heard the tap tap of Mr. Tuck’s little hammer, persistent, as if nothing had changed.
EIGHT
Tin Reindeer
“YOU WANT TO WATCH out for him,” Ellen said, kneading dough.
The wind moaned and whistled, carrying the snow in twirling columns and forming drifts on the veranda. Flora opened the firebox to insert a stick of wood, and the dance of flame made a liveliness in the wintery light. Maud sat at a small table in the corner, her pencil scratching, muttering breathily over her algebra.
Flora closed the firebox door and resumed her seat by the window. She was turning a collar for Mr. Sprague.
“I see him looking at you, Flora.”
Maud raised her eyes at Ellen’s insistent warning, but Flora held the collar closer to her face, tugging at the stitches with a curved ripper.
“Who?” said Maud.
“That Mr. Jasper Tuck. I don’t trust that one.”
Ellen was kneading dough at the long, central table. Press. Turn. Fold. Emphasizing her words. “You’re a rare beauty, Flora. It will get you into trouble.”
It, Flora thought. Not me, but it.
She knew how Mr. Tuck looked at her. It was nothing more than the way most men looked at her. Women, too.
“Flora?”
“What?”
“Are you listening to me?” Ellen laid the shaped dough into a bread pan and sprinkled it with cornmeal. “Girls like you end up…well. Do you know what men want from the likes of you?”
Maud turned on her chair. “Don’t say ‘the likes of you,’ Ellen. You make it sound as if Flora was a low woman. We know, you know. We are modern girls.”
Ellen’s mouth hardened. Maud, her pet, seldom offered opinions. “I was only thinking,” she said, chastened. “Of that poor woman who was murdered.”
“Oh, that. Ellen, what could you expect? She was living with him. She had taken a room in a tiny house with an unmarried man. Flora is not like that. She is not stupid.”
* * *
—
It seemed the world was lost. There were no houses, no people, no horses or trains or towns. Only the whiteness, a muted roar, and flakes that came endlessly from nowhere, from nothing, unbidden, mysterious and persistent, piling on the porch railing, obscuring the trees.
Cold seeped through cracks in the plaster walls; snow found its way under loose windows, lay on sills and did not melt in unheated rooms. No mail arrived, the phone did not ring. Josephine could not track the progression of the sun.
So it must have been for Simeon in storms at sea.
She stayed downstairs only long enough to forbid Maud from going to school. She spoke to Ellen, knowing that her orders lacked conviction, and that if she asked Ellen to make apple pie, the cook might make lemon and no one would care. She sensed Ellen’s pity, was made to feel like an invalid as Ellen cajoled her with tea, rusks, puddings.
Josephine continued to worry over Sailor, forgetting that he had survived the perils of shipboard life. She stood in the back door wrapped in a housecoat, arms around her waist, watching as he went into the snow and hunched to relieve himself and trotted back obediently at her call. He followed her upstairs, wet, dripping. She sat in her bedroom, her housecoat dark with melting snow.
She bent forward, moaned into her cupped hands, rocked.
His letters.
My dear Josephine, I sit in the presence of monkeys. They have white faces and shriek with bared teeth.
My dear Josephine, it is late at night on a calm sea and the monotony cannot be described. I miss you, my dearest.
My darling, I miss you. Have you purchased the croquet set and bid Mr. Dougan flatten the yard?
She had been like a child, believing expectations would always be realized. Her imagined future was the engine of her self. Always, upon his return, she had been borne by his enthusiasms. Always, when he was gone, his energy remained, a source never entirely tapped. Enough to see her through.
She crawled into bed with Simeon’s letters, his dog at her side.
Pity, sympathy, warmth, caring. She felt it, tepid water lapping at her shores. She stared, wide-eyed, dry-eyed, at what it had been to be loved.
* * *
—
By midday, snow skirled faster past the windows and the howl in the branches of the trees grew louder. Ellen, reading the newspaper, clucked her tongue. The boarders had all walked to work this morning, even Mrs. Beaman, vanishing into the thickly falling snow.
“Thank the Lord your mother kept you home,” Ellen remarked to Maud, lowering the newspaper at a gust that shook the house.
Maud had seemed relieved when Josephine told her to stay home—whether or not school is cancelled—but Flora thought that if she were in Maud’s place, she would have protested, determined to hand in her homework, not wanting to miss a single moment of learning.
Learning.
It was the same as freedom, for at the workhouse schooling had been the only time that she and Enid were without fear. Neither Matron nor her henchwomen stood along the walls of the classroom—as they did in the lunchroom, in the welting room, in the yard. Matron must have assumed that the young teacher would discipline them as she did—boxing ears, smashing heads into walls—but he did not. Every girl or woman or child in his classroom was eager to sound out words, listen to stories, hear about kings and queens and the shape of the world that spread beyond the workhouse walls.
Flora noticed that Ellen was fascinated by a newspaper column far removed from cooking, murder, or Ellen’s own prospects. It was called About Women, reprinted from the American papers. Today Ellen read out loud about a Miss Letta L. Burlingame, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had been licensed to practise law; of women granted patents, in New York State; and of women university students.
“The name of the first woman graduate of Columbia is Miss Mary Parsons Hankey. She is about 20 yea
rs of age…”
Flora, her mending complete, sat across the table from Maud. She watched equations— −2x − 3 = 4x − 15 —emerging from the sharpened tip of her pencil.
“I could get you some books from school,” Maud remarked, setting down her pencil and working at the paper with an eraser.
One day, Flora thought, when she and Enid were reunited, she would need to go to a real job, every morning, like the boarders.
“All right.”
She tipped her head to read the spines of Maud’s books, piled on the table. History, geography, English. With Maud’s coaching, she could study after her work was done, late into the night. She did not know what this learning would do for her, whether she would ever go to school or become a lawyer like Miss Burlingame. She knew what it was to ferret and scratch and kill and steal to keep a little sister alive; she had seen old women, stunned with loneliness and hunger, waiting for gruel at long tables; had stood on a station platform and looked down on a sea of men willing to purchase her. She ran her palm over the cover of the topmost book—she would become educated.
“Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton…” Ellen looked up. “Now, who is she?”
“She’s a suffragist,” Maud said. “She’s fighting for women to have the vote. And to have equal rights to men.”
Ellen nodded, repressing comment, momentarily at a loss, her opinion uncertain on this topic. “…in a recent visit to Paris, met some of the most distinguished suffragists of France at a reception given at the residence of her son, Theodore Stanton.”
“Women like Cousin Carrie,” Maud murmured, making an equal sign with two short dashes of her pencil. Satisfied, Flora thought, wondering if arithmetic was fun.
Ellen lowered the newspaper onto her lap with a sudden rustle.
“Is Cousin Carrie a suffragist?”
“Haven’t you been listening to Lucy’s letters, Ellen?”
Flora realized that not a sound had come from Josephine’s room since she had gone up to clear away her breakfast dishes. Leaving Ellen and Maud arguing about the difference between suffragists and suffragettes, she went up the stairs, knocked gently on Josephine’s door, cracked it open. In the dim light, she saw a mound of bedding strewn with papers. Josephine had fallen asleep propped against her pillows, hand on one of the pages.
* * *
—
At six o’clock, when only Mr. Tuck had returned, Ellen covered the serving bowls with tea towels and slid them into the warming oven. Flora ran up the front stairs and knocked on his door.
He was sitting on a straight chair in the room that had once belonged to George, hunched over a wastebasket, carving, his blade gleaming in the light of a kerosene lamp, which illuminated only the knife, his hands, his knees, and a patch of flowered wallpaper.
“We haven’t rung the dinner bell because none of the others have come home.”
He glanced up at the window. Black, speckled with knots of ice.
She put her hand on the pleated folds of her gingham bodice. He looked at her from beneath his shock of hair. Comfortable in his warm room, with his knife. Waiting. She wondered if he wrote letters, if he had friends.
He set down the knife.
“Suppose you want me to go look for them.”
He followed her down the stairs, sock feet making no sound. He lifted down his coat, still wet. He pulled a damp cap and mittens from the pockets.
“Wait,” she said. She rummaged in the hall closet for dry mittens and cap.
She watched as he suited himself for the weather. He took his time, tugging the laces of his boots, pulling the cuffs of his coat down over his mittens, wrapping a scarf around his neck and mouth so that only his eyes showed. His movements were contained and she could not tell if he resented being called upon to help or relished the task, tucking it away as a bargaining chip.
She held the door as he trudged away into the darkness, leaning out to watch the rays of his lantern lighting streaks of wind-raked flakes.
Returning to the kitchen, she retrieved her work basket and sat by the stove. Josephine soothed Sailor, stroking the concave silkiness beneath his jaw. Maud fitted a sock over a darning egg. Ellen picked up her knitting.
“They can die within sight of home, you know,” she said. “Oh yes, they can. Mr. McFee was lost until two a.m. His wife, poor thing, nearly died herself of the fright. He came staggering in, half-dead. I’ve lost the horses, he said. I had to leave them. Well. His men went out and found them. They were almost to the barn.”
“Do you think the boarders could be lost right here in town?”
Ellen looked at Maud over her busy fingers. She sniffed, speaking as if reluctant. “Only ’tis good we had a man to send.”
’Tis good we had a man.
Flora noticed that Josephine turned from the words, setting her chin on the heel of her hand. The house was silent, save for the sounds of the storm. Even Ellen sighed rather than spoke, all during the hour it took until the front door opened and Jasper Tuck stamped in, having located Mrs. Beaman two houses down the hill, Miss Harvey shuddering in the lee of the skating rink, and Mr. Sprague in the process of knocking on doors, seeking Miss Harvey.
“Got ’em,” Jasper Tuck called.
A tremendous stamping in the hallway. Boots, the snapping of coats, exclamations.
Ellen flew up from her chair and Flora knelt to retrieve her knitting, which had fallen beneath the table, five stitches dropped.
* * *
—
Three days later, on a Saturday after the roads had been cleared, the trains were running, and the sky was blue, a knock came in mid- afternoon. Josephine opened the back door to find Cousin Carrie and Lucy on the step.
They stepped in, both talking at once, exuberant, eyes swimming and cheeks red from the frigid air.
“We just came from a Women’s Christian Temperance Union meeting,” Lucy said, pulling off her mittens.
“We’ll catch the four o’clock train back to the city.” Carrie’s words tumbled over Lucy’s and she laughed, unwinding a red paisley scarf. “I know it’s awkward, too late for lunch, too early for tea. Never mind. We wanted to see all of you.”
Another knock came on the door. Carrie opened it. Her mother, Azuba, stood on the doorstep. Azuba’s hair was still dark and glossy, streaked with grey. She bore the brisk competence of a woman who cares for a husband’s hidden illness—Nathaniel suffered from dizzy spells, induced by a pirate’s bullet. She began speaking and removing her gloves as soon as she stepped over the doorsill.
“Darling.” She kissed Carrie, hugged Lucy, turned to take Josephine’s hands. “Nathaniel had to see the cooper about ordering apple barrels. I knew Carrie was coming here after her meeting, Josephine. Well, I decided to come up with Nathaniel. I wanted to hear about the meeting.” Her voice softened. She looked into Josephine’s eyes with an understanding that accepted its own limitations, allowing Josephine the singularity of grief.
“And I needed to see you, my dear.”
Maud flew down the stairs, thrilled to see her sister, cousin and aunt. The women trooped through the kitchen.
“Hello, Ellen, how’s…Flora, isn’t it?…How did you…when…so much snow…”
“Tea. Some cookies,” Josephine whispered to Ellen.
Flora stirred the coals, took split maple logs from the wood box and worked them into the stove. Ellen foraged in the cookie jar.
“Should have made…” she muttered.
Mothers and daughters—Josephine, Lucy and Maud, Azuba and Carrie—went down the hall and out to the turret room.
“It was a special meeting of the suffrage committee,” Carrie said. She spoke in a firm, declamatory voice, accustomed to teaching. She laid out a petition on the round, carpet-covered table, smoothed it with the palm of her hand. “They are going to expand their mandate to include social iss
ues of concern to women, not only the problems of alcohol. They’ve agreed to endorse our petition demanding universal suffrage. The WCTU has great influence over both men and women. Their endorsement will carry weight.”
In the front half of the parlour, Mr. Sprague and Miss Harvey were playing checkers. Mrs. Beaman observed, making wry clucks at moves whose consequences she could foresee.
Josephine listened as the women embarked on a lively discussion, so absorbed by the content of what they had to say that they did not notice her silence, nor bother with etiquette—dashing away statements with the back of a hand, interrupting, correcting or contradicting without apology.
“…federal Franchise Act? Yes, it does, truly. It explicitly excludes all women, most status Indians, and all Asians.”
“Only white men merit full citizenship?” Maud was hesitant, taking her lead from Lucy’s excitement. She glanced at her mother.
Lucy set down her teacup. “Well, of course. If we vote, it could lead to a decline in the birthrate. Didn’t you know this? No, really, I read this in the paper. The vote would ‘unsex’ and degrade us, it would ruin ‘domestic harmony’ and therefore lead to a decline in the birthrate. Does it not make your blood boil?”
“The States are ahead of us,” Carrie said. “Wyoming and Utah territories granted suffrage to women in sixty-nine and seventy.”
“Well, but we have Emily Stowe. Without her, the University of Toronto would never have opened their medical school to women. Now she is working for better factory and health laws.”
Azuba looked up from a calm perusal of the petition. “What does Premier Blair think?”