by Iona Whishaw
“Miss Winslow,” Darling began.
Gilly laughed. “Really?”
“If you let me finish, Miss Winslow was fishing with her neighbours, and one of the children saw a rowboat floating near the base of the point. They heard a groan and found him inside. Would their moving him out of the boat have made the matter worse?”
“It wouldn’t have helped, but he died of sepsis—the seeds of that were already planted. With the blood loss it’s a miracle he made it as long as he did. Is she worried about that?” Gilly rather liked Miss Winslow for her practical good sense. That’s what he told himself, anyway. How beautiful she was had nothing to do with it.
“I think she knew that. He had been in the boat all night and it had taken on a good deal of water, so much of him was submerged. I think they rightly calculated that they ought to get him out to keep him warm, as the ambulance was going to take an hour to get to them.”
Gilly nodded. “No idea who he is?”
“Nope. And no one has called for him. You’d better prepare the spare bedroom. He’ll be staying awhile.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Bohemia, 1938
“My God, what is it?” Klaus groaned and turned over, pulling his pillow over his head, refusing to open his eyes.
“Get up! For God’s sake.” Otto pulled at his roommate. “We have to go, now! They’re here! Sylvia saw them driving into town with their beastly flags.”
Uttering an oath, Klaus sat up, his heart beating frantically. He reached around on the covers and found his shirt, and then sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on his pants. “How much time do we have?”
Otto was pushing things into a rucksack. “How should I know? Maybe they are going to stand down and drink coffee all morning, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
Klaus was up, following Otto’s example, pushing a pair of pants, socks, and some undershirts into his rucksack. They’d been preparing for this. They’d heard that the Gestapo had gone into other towns and rounded up people like them—members of various Communist workers’ parties, union leaders. It was a matter of time, they were told. Hitler already had a starter list and wanted to eliminate every last one of them.
“All right. I don’t need the rest of this crap,” Klaus said, giving the room one more look.
At the bottom of the back stairs, Klaus opened the gate and looked cautiously into the street. He could hear a rumble in the distance coming from the north. “Let’s go,” he said.
They ran down the empty street toward the bridge. If they could get over the bridge, they could run across the fields to the junction where Sylvia should be waiting with the car. That was their plan. On the avenue crossing the bridge, traffic was coming toward them, making for the centre. Germans going to welcome the Nazis, flags flying, people shouting out of the backs of trucks. Otto and Klaus walked normally, trying not to attract attention, looking as much as possible like labourers going to their jobs. The noise of honking and shouting picked up.
“Idiots!” muttered Otto.
They had just made the other side of the bridge and were pushing through the oncoming crowds when Klaus cried, “Oh my God! The membership lists! I ran off and left them. If they find them . . .”
“You can’t go back!” Otto grabbed Klaus’s sleeve. “It’s too late. Please, come.” He pulled at his friend’s arm, willing him to keep going, away from the jubilant crowd and the rumble of the approaching army.
Horror coursing through him, Klaus looked at Otto. “They will have the name of every single person. Julia, Frank, the children.” He turned away and plunged into the crowd, pushing to get ahead, looking like someone eager to welcome the coming plague. He thought he could hear Otto calling his name above the shouting of the crowd.
April 1939
The train pulled to a stop. Klaus looked out the window but could see nothing but snow-covered wilderness. Bending to look out the opposite window, he saw the station platform. It was tiny and looked as if it had been dropped into the middle of a great, vast nowhere.
“This is it?” he asked.
Hans shrugged his shoulders. “This is apparently it.”
The two men pulled their bundles off the racks and helped the women who were setting the three children down onto the platform. Some men were dropping heavy wooden boxes onto the platform in a way that suggested they were glad to be rid of them. The silence after the noise of supplies being unloaded was the first thing that struck Klaus. His ears were ringing from the roar of the train, and now there was a long moment when no one spoke. He stood with the others, looking at their new home. It was as lonely a place as he had ever seen. Vast, shrubby, a forest pushing in from one side. And covered in snow. In April! At home in Bohemia it would already be spring; the trees would be garlanded in tiny pale green buds. He thought stupidly for one moment that he could not even tell what was north, or south, and then he saw the sun in the west and tried to orient himself. Nothing in his life equipped him for this. He had been born and brought up in a town. Involuntarily he took in a great draft of air and then realized the Canadian Western Railway agent who had accompanied them was talking loudly.
“This is it. You live here now.” Almost shouting and speaking slowly, he pointed out at the landscape. When people turned to look at him he muttered, “Bloody foreigners. Tents! Tools. All right? Tools. You can build.” He used his hands to make a house shape in the air.
Hans’s wife, Elsa, moved toward Klaus. “Why is he shouting? What is he saying?”
“He says we live here now, here are some tools, build a house.”
“But can you ask him where? Are there not others here already? I see no sign of anything.”
“Excuse me,” Klaus said. He had studied English in school and had been in England at the beginning of his exile, but suddenly he felt awkward in the face of this impatient and shouting man. “Where are we to go?”
Before the man could answer, a loud “Halloo” rang out from behind the station, and they could hear the sound of horses.
“There,” said the agent. “They have come for you.”
Two great flatbed wagons, drawn by horses snorting steam into the rapidly chilling air, pulled up at the end of the platform.
“Sorry we’re late! One of the wagons got stuck. Welcome! Welcome! We had better get you to the settlement. It is no Praga, I warn you, but we can put you up for tonight and put your tents up tomorrow.”
Klaus, relieved to be hearing them speak German, stared at the two men who had brought the wagons, and shuddered. They were wearing brown parkas. The hated brown of the Gestapo.
“I’m Willi, this is Leo. I see you looking at these coats. Believe me, we wouldn’t wear them if we could avoid it. It’s what they give you, and in the middle of winter it’s fifty below. Even for a principle I won’t freeze to death! Now, it is a long drive back so we should move.”
The agent made a cursory show of helping to move things onto the wagons. “Train goes by three days a week.”
“What’s he saying?” asked Hans.
“The train stops at this paradise three days a week. I don’t know why he is telling us this. We cannot leave.”
“Oh, it’s not so bad as that. Some of us work on the railroad, or on other farmsteads,” the man called Leo said.
Klaus nodded and watched the train pulling away. “I gather there will be no use for my electrical training?”
“Electricity! Ha! We don’t even have enough kerosene lamps yet! And I hope you brought your own bucket for water. We don’t have enough of those either.”
The wagons were heavy now with long wooden boxes of tools—like coffins, Klaus thought—three heavy canvas tents, boxes of cans and sacks of flour and sugar, potatoes, cooking tools, and grates for the fire, as well as sacks that were to be filled with straw for bedding.
“We look
like a bunch of refugees,” said Hans, Elsa’s husband.
“We are refugees,” Klaus said.
“It’s going to be dark soon, and the children are hungry,” Elsa said.
“What about money? They said there would be fifteen hundred dollars for a family. We have been given nothing,” Hans said.
Willi shrugged. “They tell us that they have the money on account. Everything they give you they take off that amount. No one has any idea how much is there.”
“So why can’t there be more buckets?” asked Klaus.
“They know better than us. Your English is good. Maybe we send you to negotiate for buckets and all the other things we don’t have enough of.”
“I’m nineteen years old. No one will listen to me.”
“Believe me, kid, they don’t listen to any of us very well.”
That night, lying in the tent they had set up to protect the supplies because he was the only single man, Klaus stared into the dark, in the unfamiliar silence of the wilderness, longing to hear traffic on the street outside, the sound of people leaving the bar below his apartment. He saw his sister Julia, could hear the last words she ever said to him: “Silly brother. You worry too much. Off you go home and get some sleep or you’ll be late for your shift.” She had kissed him on the cheek and pushed him gently out the door. He had looked for her among the refugees in England, asked and asked, but no one had heard of her, or her children, or her husband. In his addled state of mind as sleep stole over him, he thought that when he destroyed the lists, he must have made the people all disappear as well.
Lane took out a piece of paper and pulled a pencil from the cup she kept next to her typewriter.
“Sorry, little typewriter,” she said. “I will get to you, I promise. First rainy day.”
She drew an approximation of the shape of King’s Cove, rounded it out around the corner past Balfour and on the other side, around and up the lake toward Adderly and Kaslo. Near the point where she and Angela and Kenny had been fishing, she wrote, “Man in boat found.” On consideration she also drew a tiny boat out in the space that would be the lake and wrote a question mark above it. It loomed larger now, because it was possible someone had been watching them move the injured man out of the boat. Then around the corner in the approximate location of the Castle farm, she drew a square and wrote, “Castle farm” and then, “Carl Castle missing from here.” Then she sat back and gazed at her own bit of the lake framed by her kitchen window. There wasn’t enough room to show the whole of the north end of the lake, so she moved a piece of paper next to the first one, drew in the shoreline, and wrote in “Adderly” and “Kaslo.” How far could the boat have come? The man had still been alive but barely. She was no doctor, but left any longer, the man surely would have died if they had not found him.
What lay between Adderly and Kaslo? She needed a map, she thought. There should be some sort of detailed map of the lake. An ordnance map of some type perhaps? She would go into town and find one she decided. She looked at the lines she had drawn. She was looking down on King’s Cove and the lake from above, the way she’d seen France laid out from the airplanes before she jumped. It suddenly made sense to her that this was how she approached her “connecting” process. The knock on her door interrupted her analysis of her process and the follow-up pleasant thoughts of stopping by the police station in town, and maybe even getting a lunch at Lorenzo’s out of the deal.
A man in grey coveralls with a belt full of tools stood at the door. “Ma’am. I’m from the phone company. We’re having a look at the wires here. I understand the service has been spotty.”
“Oh, good. I meant to call someone, but I see one of my neighbours has. What was your name again?”
“Oh. Eddie Carter, ma’am.” He stood expectantly on the doorstep.
Lane glanced past him up to the driveway. A grey van was parked at the gate. “Service certainly has been spotty. Have you found the trouble?”
“We’re checking the lines into each house, as well as the main lines. Do you mind if I have a look at your phone?”
Lane recognized the reluctance she had felt on seeing him but dismissed it. She had been so focused on her map that the intrusion had unsettled her. Obviously he was a phone man, with a proper vehicle, and the phone cutting out all the time had become a bloody nuisance. “It’s an old thing, but I’m fond of it. I’m glad to hear it’s the lines. I thought it might be my phone, though I did hear that a couple of my neighbours have had some trouble as well. Help yourself.”
The man came in and then said, “Do you mind if I ask for a drink of water? It’s a hot day out there.”
“No, of course not. Come on through.”
“Thanks, ma’am. I’ll just slip off my boots.”
Lane went into the kitchen and ran the water, and then set out a couple of glasses.
“You lived here long?” the man asked as he came through the kitchen door. “I notice most of the other people round here are a bit older.”
“Just a year. Have you already been to the other houses? Any luck finding out what is wrong?”
“Nice place. You came out from England I’m guessing.” The man drank the water down at one go and put his glass down. “Thanks. That really helped. I better have a look at that phone now.”
Lane watched him track back through the sitting room door and frowned. He was being evasive about the problem with the phones. She put the glasses in the sink, went into the hall, and watched him pick up the earpiece and jiggle the holder. “Any luck?” she repeated.
“This is a classic. My parents had one of these. But it seems okay. I just have one line to check, connected to the main line down the road. I imagine something is loose there.” He leaned over and slipped on his boots, adjusted his belt, and pulled at his cap. “Thanks again, ma’am. I expect we’ll have it fixed by day’s end.”
Lane stood by the door and, as he turned the van, noisily grinding the gears, she could see that there was a phone company logo painted on the side. She could hear the progress of the van as it reached the intersection, slowed, and turned right, its gears grinding some more, and then headed down the hill toward the Nelson road. Muttering “Hmm,” she slipped on her shoes and, closing the door, walked across the little bridge over the gully and made her way to the post office. She didn’t doubt that he was a phone man, but she certainly doubted his ability to fix anything.
She met Gwen Hughes from up the hill just leaving. “Morning, Gwen. Lovely day.”
“It is. I’ve left Mother on her knees among the lupines and Mabel putting up some beans.”
Lane smiled. She loved the industry of these three women. No doubt bread was rising, and raspberry jam was cooling on a windowsill somewhere. “Have you had the phone man up to yours?”
“Oh, him. Yes. I don’t expect he knows his behind from a gatepost. We were in the garden, but he spent ten minutes inside doing things to the phone and then thanked us and left. They never know anything, these fellows.”
“Did he say what he thought was wrong?”
“Something about the line connecting us with the post office,” Gwen said.
“He was terribly vague with me, as well. I don’t hold out much hope. They must have just recruited him. He didn’t look like someone with any real technical knowledge.” As she said this, Lane realized that was the impression she had been left with. Gwen jerked her head toward the entrance to the post office, where a sudden hoot of laughter from Eleanor emanated. “They’ve all had him. We can only hope he knows what he’s doing.”
Lane smiled. “We can indeed. Give my love to your mum and Mabel.”
“Come up later. No, wait, I’ll call you, so we can see if the phones are working, then you can come up. The bread will be ready, and I’ve just done some gooseberry jam from our few salvaged bushes. The first since . . . you know.”
Lane did know: the complete and utter devastation of the Hughes family, and their root cellar, in the spring, when the bones of a child were discovered buried next to the house. Besides the disruption to their lives the macabre discovery caused, they’d had to tear out all their gooseberry bushes. Some, she recalled, had been recovered and transplanted.
“I would love to. Yum!”
“All right. I’ll call you just before three thirty, in time for tea. Mother will be pleased.”
Her afternoon comforts thus attended to, Lane went to the post office door as Alice Mather came out. Balancing some sweet peas and some letters in her other hand, she greeted Lane by raising her walking stick in a salute. “Morning,” Alice said, and then stopped her progress. “You had that phone man in?”
“Yes. He just left. You?”
“Yup. I didn’t like him,” Alice said decisively.
“No?” Alice was inclined to dislike most things, Lane thought, even when her mental state was in a positive period. But Lane knew she was shrewd. Behind that slightly mad cloak of weird behaviour, which included some frightening moments for the Cove when she took it into her head to go shooting at imaginary cougars, she was a pretty good judge of character. Lane knew Alice didn’t much like her own husband, Reg, and that alone was a sign of good judgment.
“Looked slippery. He fiddled with the phone, asked for a glass of water, and that was it.”
The nearness of this description to his behaviour in her own house made Lane frown. “Did he indeed? You know, I’m not sure I don’t agree with you. The proof will be in the pudding, I suppose. Let’s see if the phones start behaving.”
Alice raised her stick one more time and barrelled off up the hill.
“We were just discussing the phone man,” Lane said to Eleanor once she was inside the post office. “No one thinks much of him. Is that squeaking noise I hear on the other side Miss Alexandra?” At the sound of her name, Alexandra barked happily, and Eleanor picked her up and handed her through the window to Lane.