As she began to knot a noose in the length of rope, she thought how surprised Emily was going to be one day in the future upon her return to Sherbourne Street. She, Mavis Lapthorne, would be waiting for her.
Several times the doorbell rang through the house in the next few days. Its clanging reached the basement but was unheard. Among the would-be caller was an irate representative of the local authorities, intent on investigating some rumours that had reached his office about the Herbert Drayton Memorial Society. Another who came was Peter Hagen. He arrived with a bouquet of red roses and a betrothal ring in his pocket.
Shock chilled through him when he saw the shuttered windows. He hammered on the door and rang the bell fiercely. At his failure to get any reply, he walked around the house in the vain hope he might find someone in the garden at the rear, or a kitchen window open to show the place was still occupied. Then he made inquiries at every one of the neighbouring houses, including those on the opposite side of the street. All he was able to gather was the Distribution Home was closed, the two women in charge had gone away, and the girls had departed in hackney cabs.
“Have you any idea where they might have gone?” he asked desperately. The reply was always the same. Nobody knew.
For a while he sat on the porch steps, writing a letter to Lisa. One of the neighbours had obliged him with a sheet of paper and an envelope. When he had sealed it he put it through the door in the hope that when somebody returned to the house, the letter would be forwarded on to Lisa wherever she was. Standing on the porch, he rubbed his chin with his thumb as he considered where he might get a firm clue to her whereabouts. Then, balling his hand, he gave a thump against the porch pillar and leaped down the steps to hasten away in the direction of the local administrative offices of the Parliament buildings. He was again out of luck. All he gathered there was that the closing down of the Distribution Home had come as just as much of a complete surprise to the officials there.
He did no better at the railway station. Booking clerks shook their heads in answer to his questions. Since he was unable to find a porter able to remember a party of girls, he could only conclude that if they had travelled by train then each one had carried her own luggage. Determined to leave no stone unturned, he went last of all to the steamship companies’ offices at the harbour.
Nobody was able to help him with any information. Coming out of the last of the buildings, he paused in the entrance hall to study a framed map of Canada on the wall. The only clue he had came from what Lisa herself had told him, her impression that the older girls were always being sent westwards. She could be anywhere in that vast area of land west of Winnipeg. But he would find her. Somehow and somewhere he would find her again. It was a search he would never surrender.
The bouquet of red roses he had bought lay forgotten on the porch of the house in Sherbourne Street.
Six
Lisa sat looking out of the colonist-car window at the passing Ontario farmland and forest and rivers. Days of rail travel stretched ahead. For the first two hours of the journey she had supposed Miss Drayton and Miss Lapthorne to be in First Class accommodation in another part of the train. Then she had been called over to the vacant seat beside Mrs. Grant to be informed that neither woman was accompanying the party to Saskatchewan.
“I’m Miss Drayton’s new deputy,” Mrs. Grant continued, “since I know the West and Miss Lapthorne does not. Unlike my predecessor, I’m accustomed to managing without a personal assistant. However, I know you are used to young children, and therefore I’m going to entrust you for the time being with a special task. At one of the halts along the line, I shall be taking on board the train an eleven-year-old. She will need your undivided attention. The home into which she was placed was not as I had been led to believe. I want you to calm and reassure her in readiness for her next placement.”
“When will that be? If she has been through an unhappy experience, as you say, you can’t expect her to recover quickly. I remember at the orphanage in the mother country it sometimes took months before such children began to adjust to disciplined surroundings.”
“Fiddlesticks! Children adapt quickly. She will be going to a prairie homestead in about two weeks’ time. In the meantime, do as I have instructed you.”
Lisa returned to her own seat. There was much to think about which was a good thing, for it enabled her to keep heart-tearing images of Peter at bay. Mrs. Grant had said enough for her to realise she could no longer expect to remain in employment at the Distribution Home. In other words, she was in exactly the same situation as the other girls in the party.
Her gaze flicked over them. Some chatted together and a few bent their heads over tattered copies of romantic tales; others played cat’s cradle with a piece of string, or amused themselves and one another with “I Spy” games linked with the passing landscape. Before leaving Sherbourne Street she had given them the customary eve-of-departure talk as she had to all other groups of similar age going westwards. After urging them to adapt as soon as they could to the customs and ways of their new land by thinking of themselves as part of Canada already, she prepared them for proposals honourable and otherwise if they should find that their employer was a man living on his own. The reaction was the same as that of others before them. Since the majority hoped to marry eventually, not many were unduly disturbed, and almost without exception the girls boasted that they knew how to take care of themselves. Yet, as on previous occasions, the bravado wore thin with several of them in the night. Lisa had made a pot of tea many a time in the dark hours, sitting with nervous girls in the kitchen lamplight while counselling courage and fortitude in addition to the use of wits to get out of any unpleasant situation. After all, she had often added silently to herself, none knew better than she what it was like to be caught unawares by male violence and, in her case, to the most terrible cost of love itself.
Now, from what she had deduced from Mrs. Grant’s words, it would soon be her turn to face an employer as yet unknown. It would happen when the child soon to be committed to her care was judged ready by the woman’s definition of fitness to be taken to a new home. Within her own mind, Lisa had already decided not to be thrust again into a domestic post not of her own choosing. She had had enough of being subjected to the petty rules of others without being allowed a voice in the shaping of her own future. Well, that state of affairs was about to change. The West of this great continent was not England, where references to character and working ability were demanded before a threshold could be crossed. It was not even Toronto where the same conditions were maintained. The West was open to all who came there seeking work and adventure and new horizons. She would seize her independence as soon as the right moment presented itself. Prudently she had saved a little money out of the minuscule wage Miss Lapthorne had paid her, which meant everything would be vastly different from the last time she set out for freedom, along an English road.
It was sometime during the afternoon of the following day when the train was slowing down towards a station that Mrs. Grant made ready to alight. This time it was not to buy provisions from local people proffering wares, but to meet the child being delivered once more into her hands. The girls in the party, always eager to get out into the fresh air, however briefly, crowded out after her to throng about looking at everything. Lisa took her turn last of all and waited by the steps of the car for the child to be brought along. From a distance she saw that a woman was handing the little girl over to Mrs. Grant. Some conversation was exchanged between the two adults, although not a word was addressed by either of them to the child, who stood silently, a thin scrap of humanity with hanging dark hair and garments too big for her. After nods of goodbye, Mrs. Grant and the woman parted company, the former to retrace her steps towards the door of the car, the wrist of her charge gripped firmly in her hand.
Lisa watched them approach. As they drew near it seemed to her there was something vaguely familiar about the child, who was looking warily up at the train. She too
k a step forward and then another.
“Minnie?” she called softly, still unsure.
The child turned her gaze sharply at hearing her name spoken. For a moment there was a blank stare. Then there came a sudden transformation in the pinched features. A great sob burst from Minnie’s throat, mangling her shout. “Lisa!”
She hurled herself forward, tangled hair streaming behind her. Lisa, running to meet her, caught her in outstretched arms. Both of them cried, Lisa cupping the child’s head against her. Mrs. Grant watched them for a few moments and then prodded Lisa in the shoulder.
“I had never expected that you two would know each other.”
“We came to Canada from the same orphanage in Leeds.”
“What a stroke of luck. That means your task is half done for you. I expect to find Minnie as right as rain in no time at all.” She went bustling off to round up the Home girls and get them back on the train.
In the midst of joy there came the thought of another child. Lisa drew back a little to take Minnie by the shoulders and look searchingly into her face. “Do you know anything about Amy? Where she is or how she is?”
The reaction to her question was a stark look, huge tears overflowing. “She’s dead. We was together and she’s dead.” Minnie’s voice was rising in pitch to a quavering note of distress. Lisa, hiding her deep sense of shock, quickly put gentle fingertips against the child’s lips.
“You can tell me about poor Amy another time. Not now, my dear. Let’s get into the train and take our seats. I’ll tell you a story if you like. Do you remember how you used to like my stories?”
As they were about to step up into the car, Minnie clutched frantically at Lisa’s sleeve. “Don’t let Mrs. Grant take me away from you ever again!”
Lisa looked down into the wan and desperate face upturned to hers. She had seen far too much sadness in children’s faces and had raged in frustration countless times against those who used authoritative power or sheer brute force to inflict misery into their lives. This was one case she might be able to amend. “Just stay close to me, Minnie,” she advised. “I’ll find a way to prevent it somehow, I promise you.”
The wheels of the train began to turn again, the bell of the locomotive clanged in its pattern of announcing arrival and departure, and the passengers settled down once more to the routine of the journey. Lisa was engaged in telling Minnie a Hans Andersen story and was listened to either surreptitiously or openly by the older girls sitting nearby. At the back of her mind she was readjusting the plan she had formed towards her break for freedom. She had been right in her first assumption that this escape would not be in any way like the last one she had attempted. This time she would have Minnie with her.
The nights were long for those who found it hard to sleep, unlulled by the endless rattle of the wheels. Blinds were drawn down when night fell, but occasionally Lisa would lift the one by her away from the window to look out into the darkness. It was somehow comforting to catch sight of a lighted window or to see bright clusters of them lying like glow-worms to denote a number of habitations. These became more and more scattered and sparse as Ontario was left behind and Manitoba spread out under the wheels. There, after leaving Winnipeg, even the trees fell away and the morning dawned when the Home girls awoke to find nothing but prairie stretching away into the distance as far as the eye could see on either side of the train. They stared aghast as if hypnotised by such vastness. Even Lisa felt herself quail.
“Oh my God,” one London girl finally groaned expressively.
The exclamation acted like a signal. All the rest began to snivel, weep and sob out loud, continuing to stare out of the windows as if clinging to a faint hope that surely somewhere a forest or a hill or a mountain would rise up to break the endless monotony of the strange landscape spread in every tawny hue that could be derived from dried grass and tumbleweed and stubble. Lisa, suppressing her own apprehension, had difficulty in rousing two of the tearful community into helping her serve the simple breakfast. Mrs. Grant did not take the least notice, sipping her coffee when it was served to her, and reopening a book where she had closed it the night before. It was easy to see that these weeping sessions at first sight of the prairies were commonplace to her.
This was confirmed for Lisa in a general way by the conductor. When he came through selling tickets to those newly come aboard, she followed him through to the platform between two cars where she could speak to him unseen by Mrs. Grant. She asked him about the number of halts, including those for taking on coal and water, that the train would make before reaching Regina. He knew the Home party would be alighting there and assumed that Lisa was getting anxious for the journey to be done for the sake of the weeping girls.
“Immigrant women who have never seen the prairies before always cry at this point,” he informed her phlegmatically. “Even those who have come from Russia or some of the mid-European countries where they’ve only known privation and persecution often bawl like the rest. It gets worse for many of them when they learn that for days more they’re not going to see anything else but prairieland. Some of the refined ladies have hysterics when they get off the train at their stop to find its only mark is the name of the place on a board by a water tank and nothing more. They’re the ones used to house servants and streets full of shops. Why their crazy husbands bring them or send for them, I don’t know. They have with them trunks full of fancy clothes and white gloves and fine china, and then find themselves in sod-roofed shacks on homesteads miles from their nearest neighbour. Sometimes half their precious possessions have to be dumped before they get there when the horses tire along the way. You going far from Regina?”
“Not until we Home girls go our separate ways,” she answered.
“Well, don’t you worry too much about that weeping and wailing in there,” he advised her, giving a nod of his head towards the car. “I tell you that for every woman who continues to fear the West, there are thousands who overcome every hardship and raise their families and prove themselves to be the very salt of the earth. Those girls will be the same before long.”
“That’s good to know,” she said before thanking him for the train information he had given her.
“You’re welcome.” He touched the shining peak of his cap and moved on to the next car while she returned to take her seat by Minnie again.
It had not been easy for her to restrain the child from following her onto the platform. Minnie wanted the constant reassurance of her presence and did not like her to be out of sight. Knowing from the past that Minnie was tough and resilient by nature, Lisa hoped that her spirit had not been entirely broken, but it was too early to tell yet, for she whimpered constantly in her sleep and turned away when others spoke to her. At least there was an improvement in her general appearance. Lisa had brushed the tangles from her hair, sewn some missing buttons onto her clothes from a sewing kit, and replaced the string in her boots with a pair of laces. It did seem to Lisa that she might have found a turning point when she took the chocolate-box ribbon from her valise and used it to tie back the child’s hair.
Minnie seemed awed by it. She kept eyeing her reflection in the window, putting up her hand now and again to touch the smoothness of the satin reverently. Lisa, seeing this first stirring from a terrible listlessness, thought the ribbon could not have been put to better use.
By now Lisa had gathered enough facts from Minnie to form some picture of what life had been like on an isolated farm for her and Amy during the three years and more since they had been taken from the house in Sherbourne Street. There had been no schooling, no play with other children, only grinding work from morning until night on the land and in the house. The farmer and his wife, fraught by failed crops and sick cattle, had been unable to afford hired help and with no children of their own had taken Home children to slave for them. “They’re cheaper to feed than chickens,” the farmer had said once in the children’s hearing, “but as senseless if wits ain’t beaten into them.” Two older
Home boys ran away. One was recovered and bolted again six months later with weal scars on his back that he would never lose. The girls had missed the company of the second boy, for he had been a kind lad, taking over some of Amy’s heavier chores and sharing berries or any extra victuals he managed to scrounge, for they were always hungry. Amy, terrified of everything in her timidity, seemed to lose the power of speech after a while. People who called at the farm thought she was dumb. As time went by most of the callers were those trying to extract money owed to them, and there would be shouting and swearing and ugly scenes. The girls dreaded these occasions, for afterwards the couple became even more bad-tempered with each other and with them. Minnie became deaf in one ear after a session of being hit about the head.
Conditions deteriorated still more. When there was little food on the table, the girls went without. There was more trouble when a kindly minister, perhaps alerted to their state by some report, wanted to remove them from the farm then and there. He was shown adoption papers to prevent his action and was seen off the land with the threat of a shotgun. Then Amy fell ill. She had ailed before, but this time she could not rise from the straw on which she slept. Two days later she died. Minnie did not know if there had been a proper funeral, for the same day the woman sent by Mrs. Grant had come to the farm. She had declared the adoption papers to be null and void, which Lisa concluded could easily have been bluff more than truth, and had taken Minnie away with her. After two overnight stays they had come to the railway station where Minnie had found Lisa again.
The journey continued. Lisa, who had written down the times of halts that the conductor had given her, made a careful decision as to at which point she and Minnie should leave the train. She made final preparations, tucking away into her valise some portions of her daily allowance of food that would keep wholesome for a few days. Then she told Minnie exactly what they were going to do when the moment was right for their dash for freedom.
What the Heart Keeps Page 12