A Map of Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  The Frenchmen—for that matter, the Englishmen—who worked for her father paid no attention to Annabelle, having intuited early on that one glance in her direction might result in an abrupt termination of their employment. She wasn’t much to look at anyway, with her flat chest, her lameness, her long face, and her severe dark clothing. Annabelle believed that the French thought of nothing but sex, a distasteful subject that never entered her own mind unless she was in earshot of those men, that language.

  Her father’s whiskers had always looked to Annabelle like a feathered headdress (worn upside down, as if it were a bib) and this headdress had always been white. Moreover, he had always resembled certain powerful Old Testament leaders: the temperamental Isaacs and Noahs and Abrahams—even Jehovah himself—an angry potentate whose tantrums were kept only temporarily beneath the surface of his character as the result of an enormous act of self-control. As far as she knew, her father smiled only on the occasion of a launching of a ship and even then he appeared to be showing his crooked and oddly pointed teeth rather than displaying any real signs of good humour. He was much admired for his firmness and for the latent ferocity that everyone sensed in him. And, as owner of Timber Island and everything on it, he was considered to be honest and fair by all the men whose lives he controlled. Women were of no consequence to him—beyond their ability to cook food and procreate—and so he mostly ignored all wives and female children, his own wife included when she was alive. But Annabelle was another matter. She was not afraid of him. And he knew it.

  “What is it?” he asked, not looking up from his papers, recognizing his daughter’s footsteps as she entered his office. The top of his head shone in the low light. The grate was without fuel. “I haven’t much time,” he went on, without giving his daughter a chance to speak, “that vile Gilderson over on the mainland has now built a steamship of all things! The ugliest species of watercraft ever to diversify a marine landscape, I’ll wager! He has had the infernal nerve to invite me to the launching Saturday next, even asked if I’d like to send a small flotilla of sloops to attend the monstrosity’s progress out of the harbour. I certainly will not provide anything of the sort and am writing him at this moment to say just that. The fool!”

  Despite the fact, or perhaps because of the fact, that he was ten years his junior, Oran Gilderson was Joseph Woodman’s chief competitor in the local shipbuilding trade. They were locked together by envy and a not inconsiderable amount of loathing and, as a result, invariably issued handwritten invitations to each other on the occasion of the launching of a ship, savouring the opportunity for potential humiliations of one kind or another.

  Annabelle untied her bonnet, removed it from her head, and placed it on the oak desk directly in front of her. She shifted her weight onto her good leg. There was only one chair in the office and her father was occupying it. “Branwell isn’t happy,” she blurted. “Your son. He wants to paint walls, to do something that is all his own.”

  Her father looked up now in irritated astonishment. “Whatever can you mean?” he asked. He had no time for frivolous interior decoration. A succession of mainland drawing rooms of various hues might have passed through his mind, drawing rooms in which he would have been ill at ease, bored, and overheated.

  “He wants to make frescoes, to paint landscapes in hallways.”

  “Landscapes? Hallways?” Joseph Woodman removed his reading spectacles and peered at his daughter. “For heaven’s sake, why?”

  “To give the people here more scenery.” Annabelle drew herself up into her nearest approximation of good posture. “Some trees, perhaps …”

  “I’ll show them trees,” said her father testily.

  “Live trees,” continued Annabelle. “Mountains … waterfalls.”

  Her father placed his hands flat on the desk and leaned forward. “Don’t be foolish,” he said. “No one will want these walls. No one at all. Paris was clearly a mistake. It’s time he became a man, took some responsibility, and got over his fancy French ways.” This declaration was followed by an ominous, angry silence. Then he said, “Has his mind been destroyed by drink, by absinthe?” Joseph Woodman had no doubt heard about the unsavoury side of the Parisian art world but had overlooked these rumours in favour of removing his son from the vicinity of the hired girl. “Well,” he continued, “did he? Has he?”

  It was well known that Joseph Woodman permitted no liquor of any kind to be unloaded on the island in order to prevent the Frenchmen from infecting the more serious workers of Scots and English descent with their fondness for the grape. Since any reference to Ireland brought with it a tinge of remembered frustration and humiliation, no Irishmen were tolerated on the island either, thereby removing that particular brand of alcoholic danger. Joseph Woodman insisted that Timber Island remain a parched community.

  “Of course not,” Annabelle said. She had read enough about Paris to know that wine, at the very least, would have been imbibed regularly. She didn’t know anything at all about absinthe, but was certain that, regardless of what he may have consumed, her brother’s mind, though filled with melancholy, was completely intact.

  “Well, I won’t have it, this business of decorating parlours …”

  “Hallways,” Annabelle corrected.

  “Parlours, hallways, it’s all the same and I won’t have it.” Both of his fists were clenched now as if he were preparing to do battle with these parlours, these hallways, and his face was reddening as his blood pressure rose. Joseph Woodman had been in a particularly foul temper in recent months. The entire treasury of his beloved Orange Lodge (he had been ardently anti-papist ever since his Irish adventure) had been spent in Kingston on a marvellous triumphal arch that had been erected in anticipation of a royal tour. The Prince of Wales, however, tired of the wretched Irish question, had refused to dock at Kingston at all, forcing schoolchildren to enter boats in order to serenade him with their patriotic songs. These boats could be seen quite clearly from the shores of Timber Island, and the sweet voices of the youngsters could be heard by Mr. Woodman as he sat seething in his office. “Branwell should stick to portraits,” he told Annabelle now, “if he insists on art as a profession. Portraits are what people want.” He looked past her shoulder. “But in truth,” he said, pointing one long finger in the direction of the outer office, “what he should undertake instead is gainful employment with Cummings.”

  Cummings was a thin, sallow-faced clerk of indeterminate age who had been a fixture of the outer office for years. Although he was timid and withdrawn, he had nevertheless once, and only once, summoned the courage to leer at Annabelle as she passed by his desk. No man had ever looked at her that way before, and she was determined that no man would ever look at her that way again. She had, therefore, since that day resolutely refused to speak to Cummings for any reason at all, though she did not tell her father about the incident.

  “That will never happen,” said Annabelle. “It’s not what he, what Branwell, wants to do. It’s not what Branwell should be doing.”

  No woman, not even Annabelle, was going to give Woodman advice. “I’ll be the judge of what he should or shouldn’t do,” he thundered. “And I say that he starts in that office Monday next.”

  Annabelle placed her bonnet back on her head and tied the ribbons under her chin. The bow looked like dark bird’s wings on either side of her narrow face. She gave her father a determined look, which was all the more unnerving because of the one wayward eye. Then she turned, left the room, walked through the outer office, and into the noise and disarray of the yard.

  A half an hour later Annabelle found herself in Back Bay, or, as it was sometimes called, Wreck Bay or Graveyard Bay, one of her favourite island locations. It was a shallow, muddy, weed-fringed spot where annulled ships were brought to die, and several vessels that had been recently towed there were now in the process of doing just that. Others, having been stripped of anything considered useful, had already sunk beneath the surface of the water. In summer, Annabelle li
ked to glide across the bay in a rowboat in order to peer down at the vague shapes of scuttled ships wavering at the bottom of the lake, but today she would remain on the shore. As always, she carried her sketchbook with her in her apron pocket, though, at this moment, she had removed neither it nor her pencil. She sat on a remnant beam near the water, dressed in her dark outfit, dwarfed by a collection of broken masts, frayed ropes, ragged sails, and water-stained hulls in varying stages of decay and levels of submersion. Booms groaned in the increasing wind, chains clanked and knocked against rotting timbers, but Annabelle took no notice of these sounds. She was thinking about Marie. And she was thinking about the baby. If it had been born alive, it would be just two years old by now.

  It is a sad fact that into any individual’s life there will stroll only a very few irreplaceable fellow creatures, friends who, when they are absent, leave one bereft, awash in one’s own solitariness. For the islanded Annabelle, whose dealings with the outside world were severely restricted by her gender and by her geography, there had been her brother, who was largely unconscious of the magnitude of his importance in her life, and there had been Marie. When Marie had been sent away from Branwell, he had suffered from her absence and Annabelle had been denied the companionship of her dearest friend. Marie, at least, like Branwell, had been sent away, had been given a change of scene, however grim that scene might turn out to be. But Annabelle had been left behind in the silent, empty house. This echoing, vacant region, she had concluded, was to be her territory, her prison. She would bang up against its walls as long as she breathed while, mere steps from her window, all those wonderful cathedral-like ships moved soundlessly, like floating works of art, away from her shore. It is sometimes difficult to believe in Annabelle’s fondness for all the schooners and sloops and privateers that were moored at the docks of Timber Island, or which cut through the waves of the lake, or whose sails dipped and flashed on the horizon, and yet, despite all the paintings she made of the demise of such vessels, she couldn’t help but be affected by their beauty.

  Joseph Woodman had told his children that the word schooner came into being as the result of a young man shouting into the crowd at the launching of such a vessel, “See how she schoons!” What could it mean, this verb to schoon? To lean into the wind and move swiftly forward, Annabelle had concluded. She had been known to use the verb now and then when describing the activities of another person, most often, because of her friend’s vitality, in relation to Marie.

  If Marie had been with her at this moment, she and Annabelle would have been engaging in one of their favourite pastimes: discussing what was wrong with Branwell. They never tired of this topic, which they had approached from every imaginable angle and related to which they had considered the most improbable questions. Why, for instance, would he not eat broccoli, or raw tomatoes, or any of the cook’s delightful relishes? What made him want the crusts cut off his bread? He could talk at length when enthusing about his iceboats and then refuse to reveal anything about the inner torment that the girls were certain resided in his soul. Why would he not confess his adoration for Marie when it was clear to both the object of that adoration and to his sister that that adoration existed? Would he never want to be a soldier and fight wolves and Americans and other enemies? How was it that he could think of nothing? (When they asked him what he was thinking about, he always said, “Nothing.”) If Marie were here now, the question Annabelle would ask to open the conversation would have been something like, “Why did I have to make it clear to him, and to my father, that he wants to paint hallways?” And then she would have added, “Doesn’t he know how fortunate he is to be a boy who can, with or without parent approval, do what he wants with his life, who can become itinerant, who can get away?” In the end, though, she would have softened. Poor Branwell, she might have said, trapped in a world where the expectation was that, regardless of the detours of his youth, the road he walked would eventually lead him back to the grinding routine of the family business.

  Annabelle took the pencil and the small sketchbook out of the pocket of her skirt, stared for a while at one blank page, and began to draw the outline of a raft from memory. She had considerable trouble with the perspective. Having never before attempted to render something so thoroughly horizontal, she was unable to make the structure look as if it were lying flat in the water. Frustrated by this, she concluded that this was not to be a day during which the making of drawings was possible, so she returned the sketchbook and the pencil to her pocket, rose to her feet, and began to walk back to the house.

  Passing the quay, she noticed that several of the men were on their hands and knees testing the withes that held the timbers in place. The raft was nearing completion. Soon it would begin its journey down the river, past a scattering of villages and a quantity of islands, moving through the shallows and rapids out into the world.

  Annabelle could recall quite vividly the March day in her twelfth year when Marie had been brought across the ice, how she had been transported and then delivered like a package during the least negotiable month when, because of rising temperatures, it was necessary for islanders to make use of a contraption—half canoe, half sleigh—in order to make the journey back and forth to the mainland. This vehicle either slid with great difficulty (pushed by its passengers) over frozen bumps and cracks, or it floated in constant slush and broken ice through frigid and partly thawed waters. The girl, who from a distance appeared to be paralyzed either by fear or by frost, sat upright in the bow, not moving when the other passengers climbed out onto the ice to push, as they made their slow progress from Kingston Harbour to the island.

  Annabelle was not a pretty child, and there were moments when, despite her almost complete lack of vanity, she felt a twinge of resentment at the injustice of this arbitrary fact of nature. That March morning, looking through the watery glass of one of the parlour windows toward the partly frozen lake, however, she’d had the odd, inexplicable notion that the small, distant girl in the boat was her other, her more beautiful self being conveyed to her, and that when this girl eventually stepped into her house their two bodies would overlap and become three-dimensional like the twinned images on the photo cards she slipped into the stereoscope on Sunday afternoons. She was mad with excitement, convinced that the girl’s imminent arrival would be more of a longed-for reunion than a first encounter. She stood by the window, transfixed, as the skipper heaved the brown mail sacks onto the dock, then held out a hand to the child who had not moved one inch. The man made no effort to escort the girl, but pointed instead at the big house where Annabelle waited.

  Branwell, who was then in his thirteenth year, and home for late-winter holidays, joined Annabelle at the window. As he watched the girl limp toward the house, he said disapprovingly, “She’ll never do, she’s too thin. And, look, she’s lame.”

  Annabelle, who was thinking of her own damaged leg, said nothing at first, then whispered, “I think she will be beautiful.”

  “Doesn’t she know that she’s supposed to come to the kitchen door?”

  The girl’s pale face was visible now. She was about to climb the front steps. Branwell rapped on the glass to get her attention and Annabelle saw two startled dark eyes glance toward the window. “Next door down,” Branwell shouted with more volume than was necessary. “Not here.”

  The girl looked at them for some time—long enough to cause discomfort—and the look combined curiosity and a not insignificant amount of contempt. Then, quite suddenly, she stuck out her tongue before moving toward the appropriate door. Annabelle and Branwell racketed through the intervening rooms of the house to the kitchen. They had both fallen hopelessly in love. But at that moment Annabelle was the only one of them who knew this.

  Inside the kitchen Annabelle and Branwell grabbed each other’s arms and pulled at each other’s clothing, each wanting to be the one who opened the door to the stranger. When Branwell advanced, Annabelle kicked him in the left shin and he swore and lost his grip on the porc
elain knob. “Damn,” he said in a tone much like his father’s, and then again when he saw that his sister was drawing the girl into the room by the sleeve of her tattered coat.

  “Leave go of me,” the girl hissed. She jerked her arm out of reach, then sat on the floor and began hastily untying her boots, ignoring altogether, it would seem, the presence of the other two children in the room. Annabelle withdrew slightly and took in the girl’s costume: a soiled bonnet, worn overcoat, and grey lisle stockings with holes in the knees. Some kind of pinafore was visible where the coat fell open over one raised leg, then the other. Once the boots were off, two white hands covered the dark grey cloth on the feet. She’s not lame at all, thought Annabelle with a rush of disappointment, just frostbitten. The sodden boots lay like small dead animals near the fire. Tears of pain gleamed on the girl’s eyelashes, eyelashes that were dark and plentiful. The sight of those wonderful lashes was to be among the first of many things about Marie that Annabelle’s mind would retain indefinitely.