Waiting for Time

by Bernice Morgan

  Her mother had stood there a long time, leaning on the spade and looking at the newly turned earth. Behind her, Tessa and Mary waited. Mary was sure her mother was going to fall forward and die. She reached over and took Tessa's hand, wondering what they would do with their mother when she was dead. But Una had not fallen. She turned, laid the spade against the wall, went to the fire and carefully poured the tea. They drank slowly, warming their hands on the bowls. There was enough tea for them to have a second bowlful. When the tea was gone, Una told the girls to take a quilt each, tie it around their shoulders and to put on their heavy caps. She did the same and, after adding the kettle and bowls to the pile on the table, she pulled the corners of the old cloth together to make a sack.

  “Where's we goin'?” Tessa asked. It was the first time she had spoken that morning.

  “To Coltsford,” their mother said, “there's nothing left to eat.”

  “But what'll we do without a house ta live in?” Tessa's bottom lip quivered.

  “I don't know,” Una looked around as if she might see an egg or bit of bread they had not eaten, but there was nothing. “Maybe I can get work in one of the big houses, or maybe the postmistress got somethin' for us from your father. We can't stay here and perish.”

  They walked all day. It was slow, cold going. The ground was rock hard and in places the path had turned to ice. Dark came and they had still not seen the church spire that was the first sign of Coltsford. They tried to continue but when Mary stumbled into freezing water up to her knees they had to stop for the night.

  They turned into a field where stubble stood stiff against the sky, tinkling like glass as they moved through it. Mary's feet were freezing. They tried to make a fire with the flint and bits of grass, but it would not light and after a time they were too cold to try any longer. Tessa rolled their two quilts together and pulled Mary down beside her. She hauled the wet boots off and rubbed her sister's feet and legs until blood began to circulate. Then the children curled against each other and slept, no less comfortably than they had the night before.

  When the cold, grey dawn came their mother could not walk. Again and again she tried to stand but the willpower that had carried her through the previous day was gone. She told the girls to go on to the village and ask after Master Potts. Surely he would send someone out for her. They wrapped their blankets around her and left without a word. It was a long time before they reached the village and longer still before they could get anyone to understand and go for their mother.

  Una was dead when they brought her, stretched out on the back of a longcart, into Coltsford. The two girls and the body were taken to the house of Master Potts who disclaimed all responsibility for the wretched family.

  “It was only out of charity that I allowed the Sprigs to live in the house for as long as they have. There's nothing I can, or should, do for them,” he told the village constable who delivered the children to his door.

  However, being one of the guardians of the poor for the county, William Potts did make arrangements to have Una laid away in a field behind the regular graveyard, a narrow strip of land where paupers, gypsies and others unworthy of the rites of the church were buried.

  The girls were more difficult to dispose of. Master Potts gave Mary and Tessa a stern lecture on the trouble they were causing him and the village: “Coltsford is already supplying alms to a dozen families who, had they been provident, could have gotten along on their own. But no, they come to us saying it's the coldest winter in a hundred years—as if that was a reason why we should take in paupers from all over the countryside. Why, there'll be no end to it!”

  The other guardians must have agreed with him, for the next day, after spending the night in a back kitchen of Master Potts' house (where the cook fed them the best supper and breakfast of their lives) Mary and Tessa were trundled off to Christchurch where the district workhouse was located.

  The workhouse was a bleak two storey building with a graveyard on one side and a stable on the other. There was a church on the far side of the graveyard and a row of dingy houses facing. The girls were met at the front door by Mrs. Brockwell and an overpowering smell of disinfectant—the two were to be forever connected in Mary's mind.

  Mrs. Brockwell had been recently appointed to her position as overseer of the workhouse after a bout of typhus had wiped out most of the inmates. She was well chosen, for never had such an enemy of dirt lived as Mrs. Brockwell. She barely gave Mr. Potts' driver time to deliver his message before she had the girls stripped, into a tub and scrubbed until their skin was raw.

  Mary and Tessa lived in Christchurch workhouse for the next three years, scrubbing clothing, floors, dishes and the bodies of old, diseased and dying paupers who spent their last days there. The girls worked thirteen hours a day and lived mainly on watery soup and workhouse bread, which was made with flour the miller swept up from his floor each night.

  “I s'pose you might think we were miserable, but you know, we weren't,” Mary tells her great-granddaughter.

  “Betimes we thought of poor little John Luke buried under the ground in Master Potts' hut, and of our mother, cold and alone outside the churchyard in Coltsford, but we never gave a thought to our Da, nor expected to see him again 'tho we told Mrs. Brockwell often that he would surely be back one day and pay for our keep like Master Potts' driver told her.”

  Although Mary and Tessa worked until their backs ached, until their hands were raw from lye and. water, they were young and hopeful and still had enough energy to join a group of town urchins who congregated in the churchyard each evening at dusk to play toss stick, hoist yer sails and run, or to sit on fallen headstones eating food the boys had stolen.

  “Me sister Tessa was all there for a bit of fun, she could get us all splittin' our sides pretendin' to be Mrs. Brockwell. The poor woman, who was not all that bad to us now I thinks back on it, had this way of rollin' her eyes up to heaven and moanin' about the sin and filth of the world. 'Twas a fair treat to watch Tessa do her.”

  A rat-faced youngster called Tim Toop, the smallest, although not the youngest of the thieves, became Mary's and Tessa's special friend. Mrs. Brockwell, who sometimes hired one of the boys to dig over the potato garden or do some job beyond the strength of even Tessa or Mary, refused to have Tim near the place because, she said, “He'd as lief steal from his friends as from his enemies, and cares not for God nor man!”

  This was true. Tim was smart and quick, with darting little eyes and hands that followed in a flash. He could have a cake, a ribbon, or a coin, off the shelf and tucked into the folds of his ragged shirt without the person standing next to him being aware he had moved.

  Tim was often in trouble with the band of thieves he ran with. He was greedy and liked to keep his loot to himself, sometimes refusing to relinquish it to the common pool the boys traded for clothing and food, or to pay the watchman who let them sleep in a shed down on the docks. Still he was perversely generous with Tessa and Mary, whom he called Blackie because, he said, “Ye're like a black cloud compared with Tessa.”

  When Tim was in rebellion against the bigger boys he would stay behind when the others left the graveyard and share some special treat with the girls. Once he had a bag of strange, sweet nuts, another time a small loaf of white bread still warm from the oven. One glorious night they sat around a headstone sharing a complete chicken, stuffed and roasted.

  As the years passed without any word of Tom Sprig, Mrs. Brockwell became more and more impatient.

  “Good nature can only be taken so far. There's no reason I should be responsible for two big girls like them, especially now they're comin' to the age when they needs to be watched,” Mary heard the woman tell Reverend Wentworth, the pastor of Saint James Church.

  “I can't be after 'em day and night, your reverence, they needs more instruction than I can give 'em, if you take my meanin'.”

  It was unclear what instruction Mrs. Brockwell was referring to, since her only communication to the girl
s was to tell them which floor to scrub, which old person to clean, or what vegetables to dig for tomorrow's soup. Tessa and Mary had never, as the old minister assumed, received any religious guidance, could not count or tell A from B.

  The next time the minister and his wife came to do the rounds of the workhouse, Mrs. Wentworth spoke of a friend of hers who was going out to the islands of the new world, “Mrs. Armstrong is a gentlewoman, married to an upstanding Christian man who has made a good deal of money trading in cloth to the Army. It seems he has a mind now to set up business in this place called Newfound-land.”

  The minister's wife explained that her friend was in need of two or three maid servants to take along since the family had four small children.

  Welcoming what she considered to be divine intervention, Mrs. Brockwell immediately arranged for Tessa and Mary to be inspected by the lady and her husband. She herself signed the necessary papers that bonded the girls into service for five years in exchange for their passage to the new world.

  “Seems to me not right to be given over for five years just to get to some place we never heard of,” Tessa said bravely.

  “Altogether too flick with that tongue of yours, you are—it'll get you into trouble yet, mark my words,” Mrs. Brockwell told her. “Why, there's hundreds paying pounds for the opportunity you girls is gettin' for nothing. I can't think why you're so ungrateful—but then I s'pose that's the way of it—we'll be rewarded in heaven.”

  Before they left, she took Mary and Tessa over to the church where Reverend Wentworth prayed for them and told them to be good girls.

  Of the trip across the Atlantic Mary can recall little. She was very ill and would have died (as did a female servant belonging to another family on the boat) if Tessa had not taken care of her, seen to it that she got clean water and what food she could eat. Tessa herself was not ill but grew pale and exhausted from running between Mary and the four Armstrong children.

  Mrs. Armstrong, a haughty stick of a woman with a gull's face, had a way of hitting the girls so that the large garnet on her finger made the blow much more painful than it appeared. She took a special dislike to Tessa and hit her often. More quiet and watchful, Mary learned quickly to dodge blows and keep out of the woman's sight when she was having one of her moods.

  Mr. Armstrong was called Colonel and seemed, in addition to his business interests, to have some connection with the fort in Newfoundland. He was very different from his wife, plump and shorter, red-cheeked with a smooth shiny face, given to jokes and easy laughter. He was a great favourite aboard ship, talking business with other passengers and with the ships' officers, and spent little time with his wife and children. When they did see him, Colonel Armstrong was always jolly and agreeable, calling Mrs. Armstrong “my beauty” and Mary and Tessa, whom he seemed unable to tell apart, “my little dumplings.”

  Mrs. Armstrong's eyes followed her husband everywhere he went. She watched him as a child might watch a dish of sweets being passed around the room, with greed and love, and fear that someone else might empty the dish before it reached her hands. When the Colonel joked with the girls, Mrs. Armstrong frowned and told them they should have more respect for the master, although they never returned his pleasantries and shied away from his fat, damp hands that seemed always to be reaching out to pinch their cheeks or pat their bottoms.

  During the second week out, the Colonel found Mary alone and slipped his hand, like a fat grub, into the neck of her dress, clutching at her small breast. She jerked away and ran to hide below deck, where Tessa found her vomiting behind a pile of salt pork barrels.

  After that, the girls tried never to be where Mr. Armstrong could come upon them alone. They were helped in this by Tim Toop. Tim's irresponsible heibits had finally antagonized his fellow thieves beyond bearing. They had threatened him with such violence that the boy stowed away in the hold of a ship about to leave port. Found the second day out, he was marched off to the first mate and forced to mark his X on a paper saying he would work his passage across and remain with the ship for two seasons.

  The master pointed out to Tim that he could refuse, in which case he would be thrown overboard. Tim put a firm X down on the papers and watched as the mate wrote “Tim Toop” on the list of ship's crew. It was the first of many legal, and illegal, documents on which his name would appear.

  Once he had signed on and become a member of the crew, albeit the most lowly, Tim had the freedom of the ship and was delighted to find the girls he had shared graveyard meals with. Whenever he saw Tessa or Mary he would wink or give them playful punches. Sometimes at night the three children would huddle in the shelter of the foredeck and whisper about the place they were sailing to.

  “'Tis a place big as all England,” Tim, who listened to the seamen talk, told them, “with woods goes on for miles and miles—miles and miles what no one owns, only Indians, and they're wild and will shoot arrows into ya! There's animals, too, jeezely great beasts, bears and wildcats and deer twice as big as the ones in England—and you know what? There's gold and jewels mixed in with the rocks!”

  Tim's voice dropped so low the girls had to bend close to hear. “They can whistle for me once we makes land! I tell ya I'm not goin' back, I'm goin' to run away and get rich!” He let Mary and Tessa feel a coin he'd stolen from the cook when he was helping in the galley.

  “By the time we gets there I'll have a good few—it'll give me a bit of a start. You two should do the same—that Armstrong woman'd never miss a ring.”

  The sisters piously assured Tim they would do no such thing. Tessa warned him that he would be hung from the yardarm if he was caught stealing.

  The girls told Tim how their mistress hit them, showed him the bruises on their arms. Tim, who had been beaten most of his life, was not impressed. However, when Tessa recounted how Mr. Armstrong's hands had grabbed beneath Mary's blouse, the boy immediately recognized the Colonel's intentions. “Given a chance that old bugger'll have ye both knocked up!” he told them and went on to explain facts of life that Mrs. Brockwell had not seen fit to instruct them in. He offered to demonstrate, patting his crotch and laughing at the girls' horrified faces.

  When the ship docked in St. John's there was pandemonium, families and servants rushing back and forth, calling lost children, searching for personal belongings. Trunks, hat boxes, tables, chairs, beds, books and even musical instruments were being lowered onto the wharf. Animals were led ashore, crates hoisted over the side, barrels rolled down the gangplanks. Noises everywhere: seamen shouting orders, creaking chains, screeching pulleys, dogs barking, babies crying, the neighing of frightened horses. In the swirl of confusion, Tim Toop disappeared.

  The Armstrongs had rented a narrow house on the hill below the fort. Mrs. Armstrong was very disappointed with it. It was barely large enough for the family, she said, and completely unsuitable for entertaining. Mary, Tessa and the old woman hired to cook slept on the third floor under the peaked roof. The room had two tiny windows from which you could see the crooked street, other roofs and the harbour. The glass in the windows and the slate shingles on the roof clattered in the wind and for several nights the girls hardly slept.

  Fall slid into winter and the attic room grew colder and colder. Some nights Mary was sure the whole house was about to blow away and tumble down the hill into the harbour. Mary and Tessa slept on straw on the floor with but one blanket between them. Mrs. Bowden the cook slept in the same room. The girls never found out where the woman came from. She used to keep a little brown bottle of medicine tucked into the cuff of her wool stockings and would take it regularly before bed each night.

  “'Twas a good spell before it come to us it was the Colonel's Madeira. I don't blame her a bit, took somethin' to sleep in that room. She used to hide bits of bread and cheese in her pockets, too—for me and Tessa to eat in bed—and she kept three bricks near the kitchen fire all day to carry upstairs. Them bricks were the only bit of comfort we had, we'd try to get asleep before they got cold.”


  At the Armstrongs, Mary and Tessa worked even harder than they had for Mrs. Brockwell. They could not go to bed until the household was settled away, until guests left, dishes and pots were washed and the kitchen set to rights. Then porridge must be started for breakfast, candles trimmed, lamps cleaned and fires laid for the next day. Long before dawn they must wake and begin again. First they lugged buckets of water on a hoop from the well pump halfway down the hill, then they had to light four fires: one each in the kitchen, dining room, parlour and in Mrs. Armstrong's bedroom.

  While Mrs. Bowden prepared the Armstrongs' breakfast, Tessa and Mary set water to heat, carried it upstairs for Mrs. Armstrong's bath. They emptied all the chamber pots, scrubbed them and returned them to their place under the beds, the cloth bag containing dirty pieces of silk was removed, taken downstairs to be washed later, a clean bag with clean silk scraps was hung on the rod near Mrs. Armstrong's pot. Next they woke the children, bathed and dressed them in front of the fire in the Armstrongs' bedroom.

  Sometimes even Mr. Armstrong took a bath there. He liked to have Tessa or Mary bring extra buckets of hot water up from the kitchen to pour over his back as he sat in the tub. On those occasions his wife would sit at her little table in the corner, sipping tea. “You two will have the Colonel spoiled,” she would chide in a high, false voice as if carrying water up a flight of stairs had been Mary's or Tessa's idea. She always turned her head away when they poured the warm water over her husband. He would chuckle and tell the girls they should get into the tub with him and make playful grabs at them with his wet hands. His wife clicked her tongue, pretending it was all a game.

  Mrs. Armstrong hired and fired five nursemaids in quick succession. “Slatternly, stupid creatures who wouldn't have been let in the door of any decent English house,” she told her husband, and arranged for the two older children be sent daily to an infants' school run by Miss Slater on the Upper Path. The younger children's needs must be cared for by Mary and Tessa, who, their mistress said, had little else to occupy their time.