by Beth Powning
She could not speak.
“Maybe Mr. Fairweather himself will go,” Josephine said. “I will ask him, Flora. I promise you. I will ask him to go fetch her back.”
* * *
—
On the following afternoon, Jasper Tuck took Flora into his confidence.
“I have a plan.”
Flora cut a piece of carpet into small squares, leaning forward in a wicker chair, a basket of samples at her side. Her scissors chewed through the carpet with a final effort. March wind rattled the window in its frame, rampaged through the treetops with a sound like surf. Last summer, she and Maud had sat on these same wicker chairs, set around a wicker table on the veranda—drinking lemonade, playing checkers—and heard a frantic peeping. They climbed onto the roof and inched on their bellies to peer into a swallows’ nest. The babies clustered like a handful of finely feathered bones, beaks gaping. She would show all these things to Enid. She would show her a clutch of chicks, in the henhouse. They would stand in the summer sunshine. Enid would hold a bucket, scattering corn. Her hair—dark, now, or blonde? Short or long enough to braid?
“You figure in it,” he added. He lifted a compass, punched it into a sheet of paper with a crispy pop. He swung the pencil, little finger lifted.
He’s a strange one.
She set the small square on her knee, smoothed it. Her job, now, was to stitch over the cut edge and attach a knotted border.
“I’m going to make that house down the street. Hilltop, I hear tell it’s called.”
Of course, Flora thought, with a sudden thrill. Pleasant Valley’s most elaborate house. Where the MacVey sisters lived, purportedly holding seances and musical evenings, hosting visiting dignitaries. She always paused to gaze at the terraced lawns and the rose gardens.
“First…”
He did not finish the sentence, sliding his pencil along a protractor.
“First, we need to talk about that money.”
“What money?”
“Don’t be smart with me. You know what money.”
“I don’t know what you’re taking about.” A flush started in her neck, creeping upwards in revelatory petals.
He exploded from his chair. He seized her arms, half lifting her from her seat, squeezing, his breath sour in her face.
She dropped the scissors, the little carpet. “Let me g—”
“You shut your mouth. I heard you on the other side there. Watching me. Now you listen to me. I been thinking what to do about you. That’s my life savings and it’s my business and nobody else’s. I don’t want one word spoken about my money. Not one word. If you say one word about that money to any of them,” he nodded at the house, “I will know.” He lowered his voice. “I’ll see it in their eyes just like I seen it in yours. People look different at a man with money.”
“I won’t say anything. Why would I? Let me go.”
He released her arms. She fell back in the chair.
“You promise?”
She rubbed her arms. “Promise.”
“Say ‘I promise I won’t say anything about your money.’ ”
“I promise I won’t say anything about your money.” She stared at him, suddenly emboldened by curiosity. “Mr. Tuck, it’s only money. Why do I care? Most men have money, I suppose. I don’t know why you don’t put it in the bank, though. What if there was a fire?”
He kicked his chair back to its place in front of the table. He sat, staring coldly at the drawing he had just made. He placed his palm on the paper, gathered it by slow increments with the tips of his fingers, knuckles whitening as he worked it into a ball. He slid a fresh sheet of paper towards himself. She felt the prickling of sweat beneath her arms.
“I got to go,” she said, winding the excess thread back onto the spool. “I got to clean the upstairs.”
“My plan,” he said, beginning again with the compass, “is for you to go to Hilltop. Talk to them ladies. In your posh accent.”
“It’s not posh.”
“They will not look at the likes of me coming up their path, but if we dress you up in some fancy clothes, they’ll open the door to you.”
“And then what?”
“Then you tell them all about the houses I make and why they should buy my miniature of Hilltop. You’ll have samples of them little carpets, curtains, a bed, say, complete with quilt and pillows. All the fixings. Everything but the people. I suppose I could make people if they wanted. Like you suggested.”
“I don’t have time. I got too much spring cleaning. I’m fixing on getting another cow. There’s the garden. And could be I go to Nova Scotia.”
“Yuh. Your sister. You and Enid going to want to set up housekeeping.”
He moved his chair back, reached down and pulled open the drawer. She averted her eyes. It seemed an intimacy, his savings. The flush had not entirely subsided from her face.
“Look up, Missy Flora.”
He was holding a handful of bills. He leaned forward and laid them on her table.
“Count them. That’s a start. Once we start selling houses there will be lots more. I’ll be employing other girls. To sew all them little things. Your sister, I’ll wager she’s a hand with the needle. Once we get things going, I’ll set up a big workshop. Not here. Down in the town. There’s your job for life. You’ll go to them fancy houses and show off the merchandise. You’ll manage the girls; I’ll manage my men.”
She touched the money with one finger.
“Count it,” he said. “It’s yours if you say ‘Yes, Mr. Tuck, I’ll go up to them ladies at Hilltop.’ ”
The bills were soft as flannel, as if they had been held, caressed, smoothed, passed from hand to hand. Their creases were like the wrinkles in weathered skin.
“I’ll have to tell Mrs. Galloway that I’m getting paid for my work on your houses. Otherwise she won’t like me spending so much time out here.”
“You can tell her. Just don’t say how much.”
She should ask him what he would pay her beyond the bribe, but did not, stunned by more money than she had ever seen before, a wild prelude to her changing fortune. She murmured, yes, yes, she would do it, and looked up, glimpsing how his small, square teeth had been revealed but quickly covered, his face assuming its usual cold watchfulness.
* * *
—
Maud sat on a chair in the hall, reading a letter. Flora, smelling of wood shavings, hair blown and cheeks reddened, sat beside her, unlacing her boots. The ticking of the parlour clock was like a shore against which the moan and whistle of the wind dashed, was rebuffed.
“George,” Maud said, violently clutching the letter to her breast and closing her eyes. “Oh!”
“What?” Flora said. Maud amused her sometimes. She was so often outraged on behalf of someone else, often disproportionately.
Maud’s voice dropped to a loud whisper. “He thinks he’s looking out for Mother. Truly, Flora. It makes me wonder if he can see himself. He is treating Mother like a child.”
Flora wrenched off the boot. It was too small and she massaged her toes. “How?”
“He is still trying to get Lucy and me to see that as soon as we turn twenty-one we should sell the house.”
“Well. That’s a long way away.”
“Yes, but you see, he wants me to start dropping hints. Make Mother see that she would be better off in a smaller house. Even get her to consider remarrying. He says to me in this letter that he is strictly…wait, I will read it to you. Believe me, Maud, when I say that I look at this in a strictly utilitarian fashion. We would incur a fair amount of money from the sale of the house. If Mother relinquished her dower interest, she would be given her share. We would all be able to get ahead with our lives. Then he even describes the little house Mother could buy. Apparently, he has spotted just the place. On Queen Street.”
Flora noticed the banging of pot lids in the kitchen. She was late, and Ellen was annoyed. Still, she sat with her foot in her lap, her skirt hitched. Indecorous, but it was only two girls, in the cold hall, on a March afternoon.
“We have the power to force the sale, George says. You know, Flora, I truly believe he is thinking only of himself, even though he pretends to be thinking of Lucy and me and of Mother. I believe he’s begun to think of this house as his. I believe he’s begun to think of himself as head of the family.”
Flora said nothing. Josephine, living in a small house. With no need of servants. Pictured herself and Enid, standing on a railroad platform, heading for a destination she could not imagine.
“I think of this house as Mother and Father’s house,” Maud continued, not noticing Flora’s sudden stillness. “The house they built with dreams of a long, happy life. Even after we children were grown and gone, they saw themselves living here together.”
Flora pictured her own parents. The wretched straw-thatched cottage. Yet they had made dolls for their little girls. They may have bolstered one another’s courage with the same kind of dream.
She put her hand on Maud’s, knew not to speak.
“I won’t do it,” Maud whispered. She stuffed the letter back into the envelope without properly folding it. “I will resist his idiotic plan. Lucy and I will stand up to him.”
* * *
—
The Intercolonial Hotel rose, three storeys high, against the blue sky. Flora, gazing up, wondered who might be inhabiting its rooms. She stood in a crowd of women, next to Josephine and Carrie.
Carrie had given a speech to the WCTU in Permelia’s parlour, on the subject of the suffrage petition. Afterwards, the women had felt the need to mount a protest. Impulsively, they had swept down Main Street, their heels clicking on the wooden sidewalk—twenty women carrying parasols, white ribbons pinned to white dresses, bright under the early spring sky; their reflections flickered in the window of McAllister’s Dry Goods, crossed its display of chinaware—berry sets, dessert bowls. They flickered, too, across the grocery store window, making a watery, layered painting: hatted, veiled women overlying rounds of cheese, a display of raisins and nuts, strings of sausages, brooms with green and blue handles.
As they had crossed the railway tracks, nearing the hotel, Flora had been pricked by memory of her arrival in Pleasant Valley. The track ran due west, merging to a single, silver glint; picking up her feet to step over the steel rails, she felt the culpability of not having told Josephine that Mr. Tuck had offered to pay her for her work, nor that he wished her to visit the sisters at Hilltop. She polished the intention to tell, like something fragile that must be perfect when eventually offered. She prepared her words, trying to see the situation from all angles. She needed to save money, especially now that Enid had been found. She would need real work once she and Enid set up housekeeping. Jasper Tuck’s little houses were exquisite and she was not ashamed to endorse them. Yet she sensed that she was taking a backwards step, one which was dangerous and predicated on fear; and like so much else in her life, a thing about which she had no choice.
The talk increased as they gathered in front of the Sample Room, a small pub attached to the hotel with one large window whitened by drawn curtains, like a blind eye. Around Flora, excited voices gained strength.
“…things that Premier Blair says about us, I become angrier…”
“They think we don’t want to vote.”
“…said no privilege has ever been denied us.”
“It shouldn’t be a privilege. It’s our right.”
Flora noticed that Josephine was listening, intently, turning to gaze at whichever woman was shouting the loudest.
Two men wearing suspenders, coats slung over their arms, approached the pub, intending to go in. They stopped, staring at the women, muttered to one another. They continued on down the street, glancing back.
Mrs. Humbolt, the president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union local branch, made her way to the front of the crowd.
“Christ’s kingdom is based on the principles of human equality and brotherhood,” she called out to the women. “Human equality means the equality of men and women. Since men appoint us as the repositories of religious and moral virtue, we must use our influence to perfect society. Now, we know that it is women and children who suffer from the evils of drink. We seek a modest and pure world. As the Greek writer Xenophon said, moderation in all…”
The upstairs window opened. A man thrust his head out.
“Ladies, I am going to ask you to leave my premises. You are keeping the gentlemen from my door.”
A chorus of responses rose.
“…send them home to us drunk…”
“…our sidewalk as much as…”
“…things healthful; total abstinence from all things…”
Mrs. Humbolt finished her speech and the women bent their heads in silent prayer. Some held prayer books. Pages rippled in the breeze. Approaching men veered, crossed the street, gathered to stare.
“Now,” Carrie remarked, once the bowed heads raised, “we will take the suffrage petition from door to door.”
A bucket, out the window over their heads. Icy water unfurled, a fringed wave, billowing, widening, the spume separating into silver bullets. Outraged screams. Another bucket followed, another deluge.
“And don’t come back!”
Flora received the full contents on top of her head, water running down her neck, soaking her cape as she ran forward to salvage a prayer book, lying upside down on the wooden walk.
THIRTEEN
Green Rabbits
FLORA SHUFFLED SPRING DIRT from her boots on a pattern of green rabbits. She waited on the mat, just inside the door. The Hilltop house smelled of beeswax, oranges and roast beef. A piano went abruptly silent.
A tall, frail woman drifted down the stairs. Another, older and full-bodied, came along the hallway. Both carried the air of having left more absorbing tasks, yet their faces opened on seeing Flora and she realized that her hair, loosened and wisped around her exertion-flushed face, would be holding the sunlight; and saw an expression of delight and wonder creep over the women’s faces.
“My name is Flora Salford. I work for Mrs. Galloway. She has a boarder who makes little houses. He asked…”
Her voice trailed off. She gestured behind her towards a miniature house in a child’s wagon, parked on the stone path.
“Oh, my, Rosamund,” the thin sister exclaimed, looking past Flora. “Isn’t that something!”
They followed her down the steps to the walkway. The morning was warm, an earthy scent rising from soil soaked by night rain. The thin sister gripped her hands and pressed them to her breastbone. Flora knelt.
“See how he carves the shingles.” She pointed at the pieces of cedar, shaped like fish scales or arrowheads.
The sisters walked around the house, tapping at the glass windows, stroking the frail railings. Flora summoned a tone of proprietary pride.
“These are spindled porch railings. And see how the trim is painted a different colour.”
Flora tipped back the hinged roof.
“Oh, how clever!”
One by one, she extracted a four-poster bed covered with a quilt, a cast-iron stove and a tiny Persian rug. She set them in a row on the path. “He could provide doll’s house people, if you want.”
She paused.
“I could tell you the price.”
Rosamund, the heavier and evidently elder sister, made a hasty, dismissive motion with the tips of her fingers.
“What do you think, Grace?”
Grace stood wide-eyed. “Oh, my, Rosamund. Oh, yes. Yes, we must have one.”
* * *
—
Through a daze of fatigue, Flora chewed toast. The kitchen window was
propped open and she could hear the liquid burble of what she had learned were the first birds to return to the north country, red-winged blackbirds. Sun loomed behind a thin veil of clouds, although snowflakes fell like remnants of plenty.
Ellen was avidly following another murder trial in the Daily Telegraph, reading bits out loud, ruminating about the details as she stirred puddings or kneaded bread; but it was not as satisfying as the axe murder. A man had sent poisoned chocolates to prominent St. John businessmen, including a clergyman whose wife had opened the package, eaten the candy, and died.
“Serves her right,” Ellen said. She sat at the table, leaning on her elbows, the newspaper stained with blueberry preserves. “Greedy thing.”
“Chocolate, Ellen.”
Ellen half closed her eyes, shrugging, absorbed in the paper. She cut no slack for women she considered pampered or spoiled.
Still no letter arrived from Nova Scotia. With difficulty, Flora had located Black Creek on a map. Halifax, Pictou and New Glasgow were large dots along the road’s twisting thread, their names printed in bold, black ink, but Black Creek was printed in pale, spidery font, like flakes of pepper. Mr. Fairweather would need to take several trains, spend a night, or even two nights, then hire a carriage. No date had been set for his journey since Permelia forestalled it, listing the state of the roads—pure gumbo at this time of year—and when that danger had passed, making fresh excuses: their daughters’ dances, plays, recitals, her own health, Harland’s obligations.
At the root of it, Flora thought, buttering another piece of toast, was Permelia’s sense that the journey was another one of Harland’s ridiculous notions, the way he had quit his position of Overseer for the sake of some pauper children. Increasingly, an idea nudged Flora like a cold snout—she must undertake the search on her own. She pondered, spreading blueberry jam on her toast: she could slip away without telling anyone, leaving a note; better yet, confide in Josephine, seek advice and help—but there was so much work on these lengthening spring days that she was exhausted by nighttime and had to force herself to sit down with her books and had neither time nor energy to plan such an overwhelming project.