Ghost of the Southern Cross

by Nellie P. Strowbridge

  One sealer drew a bottle of rum from his bunk. “Here, Alfred, take a lick. Just don’t tell your mother. She’ll be on her knees with the Bible.”

  Alfred shook his head while another sealer prodded him, “We’re men here. Down the hatch, me son.”

  Alfred glanced at his brothers. Then he opened his mouth. He gulped the fiery liquid and let out a screech when it hit his throat. His eyes watered.

  The sealers clapped their hands and stomped their feet. “You’ve been screeched, b’y,” one of them said.

  Thomas shook his head at his younger brother. “You’ll learn, Alfred, to make your own choices.” He glared at the other sealers.

  John Bishop from Kelligrews lowered himself to a berth. “If we get a good crop,” he said, “we might have to give up our bunks for seal pelts and fat. Perhaps sleep on them. But we won’t be killing seals on Sunday. The captain don’t owe with that kind of disrespect. When God rests, he rests.”

  “The Commercial Society presents a silk flag to the St. John’s captain who brings in the most seals,” Noah said, his eyes bright. “Some day I’ll be a captain and get a silk flag fer me ship.”

  Joseph laughed. “There’ll be a long day before that.”

  “And a long night gettin’ to the seal patch, and a tirin’ one if we don’t get some sleep,” Thomas said. He blew out the lamplight.

  Conversation gradually quietened as, one by one, the sealers settled into sleep amid the steady beat of the ship through cold, dark waters.

  28

  Simon Swartz, a wiry little man, lifted his burlap bag to his shoulder and walked down the frozen path like a soldier. He had hitched his horse and cart to a post at the end of Church Road. Other peddlers waited until later in the spring to go from door to door selling their wares or making an exchange. Simon knew well enough that women who had hoarded a few coins in a jar all winter were ready to part with them if there was a sealer in their household expected to return with cash. Sometimes Simon accepted knitted goods in exchange for items a woman didn’t have the money to buy. He had been born with a flipper left hand—no fingers, just a thumb. He kept a glove on it so he would not be accused of causing a woman in the family way to be frightened and thus have her unborn child cursed with the same malady. He showed respect for people’s superstitions and they were grateful for his caution and allowed him their hospitality.

  On and on from house to house he went, his bag getting lighter as he pried what money he could from the jars and purses of careful mothers. He always smelled of something grand and women were known to have invited him in just for his scent. They were drawn to his quick, easy smile and bright brown eyes and seduced by the scent of new cloths and soaps that smelled like a field of flowers. To the children the sight of pearl, silver, and gold buttons, shiny as money and in all sizes, intrigued them. They gathered close to the peddler’s knee. He wasn’t a heartless fellow and, sometimes, if he was satisfied with the jingles in his pocket and he saw a child’s dress apart for want of a button, he willingly parted with a bright one just to see a little girl’s dull eyes shine. He thought of it as wiping the clouded windows of a soul to show its gleam.

  Other times the peddler gave a family a coin or two in exchange for heirlooms he knew had value for a wealthy customer but meant little to hungry families trying to survive hard scrabble days. His eyes held a glint like new coins as he carried off items from an old fellow’s shed: treasures to antique dealers, useless to him. After the death of an elderly member of a family, goods of little value to those left behind were often tossed into the sea for wild birds to pick at—gold brooches, figurines, baroque framed paintings, and other articles—unless Simon got there first. He opened his bag in the homes of wealthy people, hopping from one item to another like a leprechaun, grinning all the while, persuading the lady of the house to buy a must have item.

  He lifted the latch on the storm door to Joe Maley’s house and cautiously entered calling, “Missus.”

  Caroline hurried toward him wiping her hands on her apron. “Come in,” she said and he followed her inside to the large kitchen. He lowered his leather cap to the table, its crown sunk into a bowl holding white pools of light coming through the kitchen window. He flicked his right hand through loose black lines of wavy hair and scratched at needles of black beard pushing through white skin. He dropped the ragged-edged bag, burlap sprouting threads, and bent down leaning back on his haunches, black boots under him.

  He looked up at Lavinia, who had come to stand by her mother. “I suppose,” he said, “you want to see what’s in me bag.”

  “I’ll thank you to empty it on the table,” she said, her eyes eager.

  He bowed. “Just for you.” He carefully lifted out a soft brown cloth and spread it on the kitchen table as if it was a tablecloth made ready for food. Caroline watched as he lovingly lifted items she wished she could afford. She wondered aloud if he had a flowered plate, one to hold a nice cake for company. She’d keep it for Lavinia’s hope chest. She looked at him hopefully.

  “Indeed,” he answered and lifted an exquisite plate wrapped in a flour bag.

  Lavinia let out a startled breath. She swallowed in longing.

  “I’ve got a few ten-cent pieces,” Caroline said.

  The peddler had thought his prospects good. Now he was disappointed. “It’s worth more than a dollar,” he told her.

  Caroline’s look pitched on a paisley scarf hanging on a nail that her mother had left her. She hated its bruised colours and seldom wore it. She offered it to the peddler and he reluctantly accepted it and her ten-cent pieces. To be sure she was fair Caroline handed him some buttons she’d cut off a dress she was using for mat rags.

  She saw him look toward the kettle boiling on the stove. “You’ll have a cuppa. Sure, you will,” she said.

  “You are unthinkably kind, ma’am,” he said as she set a cup of tea before him and laid out a dish of bakeapple jam and a thick slice of bread.

  The man lashed into his bread in silence. Then he asked for another slice. When he was finished he looked up with a slight smile. “I’ll thank you for the cup of tea, such as it was.” He got up, gathered his bag, and left the house without a backward glance.

  “That man can put away a turn of grub given the chance,” Caroline said. “He’s got goods but nothing he can eat.”

  Lavinia held her wedding plate up to the light and read the gold lettering: limoges, france. “How far it’s come,” she said, rubbing her finger over its wide gold edging. She could already see the plate holding fresh blueberry cake dabbed with cow’s cream as she sat at a table, just her and Joshua Rideout, her future husband.

  The peddler trudged back down the road not suspecting that before the day was over lives would be changed, secrets made and kept for a while. He had no idea how lucky he would be this night after a day with a disappointing turnover of coin and article.

  29

  Maggie was at William’s house the next day sitting by the table drinking tea when Caroline rushed in exclaiming, “There’s bad news but it’s not anything to do with the Southern Cross.”

  “What is it, then?” Maggie asked. She laid down her cup.

  “Laura Rideout was found frozen to death outside her grandmother’s house in Manuels this morning.”

  Maggie’s hands gripped her cup. “Oh, no!”

  “Indeed!” said Caroline. “Ebbie Miles looked through his window and saw that there was no smoke from the chimney. He went to check on the trouble and found Laura outside on the ground, a bloody gash on her forehead. Phoebe, her grandmother, was inside huddled under her counterpane.”

  “And little Lily? Sure, she’s the very spit of her mother,” Maggie said.

  Caroline shook her head. “He never found her.”

  Maggie gasped. She thought of Timothy gone to the seal hunt on the Southern Cross. He�
�d come home to find his wife buried and his daughter gone.

  Caroline had seen a wolf around the place the week before, a large, white animal with a black stripe down its spine. It had let out a high-pitched, mournful howl during the early hours of the morning. Then it had run off down the road.

  “Such a sad situation, the child likely carried off by a wolf,” Caroline said.

  Joe heard her as he came into the house. He stood in the doorway. “I doubt that’s the way it was,” he told her. “The mother’s coat was missing. Whatever that means we might never know.”

  Maggie hadn’t seen much of Laura after they grew up but she remembered a silver scar on Laura’s arm after she was married. Laura had confided, “Timothy and I did it in secret after the wedding, cut along each other’s arm to let our blood flow together, with the hope it would sneak into each other’s veins. It’s an old Scottish custom.”

  Maggie had looked at her. “A blood tattoo?”

  “Kind of.” She giggled. “We have matchin’ scars. Matchin’ wedding rings can get lost.”

  “I never expected you to be married before me, Laura,” Maggie had said with a mock pout. “Now here you is soon to be a mamma and Timothy these past two seasons gone on successful seal voyages.”

  As Laura thickened with child she gained weight everywhere. Her scar widened. It no longer matched Timothy’s. But it didn’t matter. The two were a true match.

  * * * * *

  “I’m gone,” Laura had called to her mother, who was busy banking the fire for the night. She pulled the hood up around Lily’s face and drew the two-year-old to her bosom as she closed the door and started up the hill to her grandmother’s house. The night was crystal cold, the air still, and the road hard and slippery.

  Ebbie later surmised that she was almost to the door when she teetered on the icy path. Her feet gave way and she hit the ground, cushioning Lily.

  Maggie imagined Laura lying motionless, eyes closed, the child screaming. Lily would have seen her mother’s face in the silvery light of the moon, blood leaking from a cut on her temple. She likely looked toward the house as if longing to get inside, where it would be warm. Then she would have burrowed down beside her mother, searching for the warmth of her mother’s body against the cold air seeping into her bones.

  Phoebe had grown tired waiting for her granddaughter. She had climbed the stairs to her room and gone to bed. Soon she was sound asleep, warmed under a mound of quilts while her granddaughter and great-granddaughter lay without shelter beyond the reach of their home.

  Wind came like a ghost, its fingers slithering up and down the child’s spine. Someone heard her cry long and loud, breaking into sobs as if she realized she was all alone, abandoned by a mother who refused to answer her, hold her, save her from the cold. Someone found her tugging on her mother’s hand, as if to urge her to get up and take her inside, a mother who lay silent, unheeding her daughter.

  It would be years before the mystery of that night would unfold to the satisfaction of Laura’s family.

  30

  More than a year had passed since Emily Penny left Foxtrap and went to St. John’s to become a servant to Adam Dixon, a merchant on Duckworth Street. When the horse and wagon carrying the young girl had drawn up in front of a beautiful mansion she had thought, If only the other girls from Foxtrap could see me in this mansion!

  The driver got down and tied his horse to a post and she followed him along a cobblestone walkway and up brick steps that led to wide double doors. He pushed a button and a ringing sound echoed inside.

  “This must be heaven,” she said, looking at the doors as if they were pearly gates.

  He laughed. “If heaven has an attic it’s likely where you’ll be sleeping, or in the basement with other housemaids.”

  She turned to look at the street crowded with colourful buildings. She drew in a deep breath, the eateries with foreign spices and other goods mysteriously potent.

  A door to the mansion was opened by a straight-backed, elderly man who gave her a stern look. Emily passed him, fastening her gaze on the woman descending the carved oak staircase beside windows in wide casements. “Oh!” she said. Her hand went to her mouth.

  Mrs. Abigail Dixon stopped at the foot of the stairs, her hand resting on a brazen figurine golden under sunlight shining through the bubbled glass windows. She nodded toward Emily and disappeared into the oak-panelled drawing room, leaving the door open for her to follow.

  Emily hesitated in the doorway of the room while the mistress, now in a wing chair by the fireplace, eyed her with disdain. Emily turned to take in the room with its bevelled glass windows and high ornate ceilings.

  “Pay attention to my instruction; it won’t be given twice,” the mistress said with such a sharp voice that Emily knew she would no longer belong to herself but to this woman, who likely had a covey of housemaids ready to drop a thought or a night of sleep to rush to her whims.

  Emily went to say, “Indeed, ma’am,” but her tongue seemed to be stuck to the roof of her mouth.

  Every morning Emily hurried down to the kitchen, where the cook was preparing Abigail’s breakfast. An egg was placed, like a clouded moon in white edging, between two halves of rye bread on a gold-rimmed plate. When the meal was ready Emily brought her mistress breakfast in bed on a tray holding an image of the late, sour-looking Queen Victoria, not someone she’d want to be facing during her morning tea. Her knuckles were white from her tight grasp, her cheeks flushed as she climbed the winding stairs careful not to slop the tea and juice.

  She was the only servant in the attic. Others had a bed in the basement and were scurrying in all directions without a thought of conversing with her. Even the cook scarcely glanced her way as she came into the kitchen to help with the peeling of vegetables after she had finished the beds and dusting. She scrubbed the kitchen floor afterwards feeling hot and faint. She grumbled under her breath, “To be a servant is less than living.”

  She never told a soul her secret; soon it would tell itself.

  One night the persistent ringing of a bell woke her. She imagined the merchant’s stout finger on the button. It kept ringing as she drew on her clothes and followed its sound three flights of stairs down to the library. Cline, the elderly father of the merchant, was sitting in a Queen Anne chair. He held out a small book. “Read to me, my dear,” he said, his voice crusty. He cleared his throat. “Me eyes are old and rheumy.”

  She drew in a startled breath. “But sir, I can’t tell how to form the black marks into sounds. I have no meanin’ for them.”

  “The late Queen Victoria didn’t raise subjects such as ourselves to be ignorant and unlearned,” he said. “You, too, will learn. I shall teach you.”

  She gave him a level look. “I might be ignorant of your ways and the Queen’s ways, sir, a queen gone beyond words and life itself, but I’m not unlearned. I know how to mix barm and raise bread. I can draw a mean flower and embroider it on a pillowcase in a clear stitch that the ma’am can be proud to show off.”

  “Then you shall add to your learning this instant. Your voice will fit pleasantly over words. There’s no end to what you can do with them. Words can fill reams using only twenty-six letters.”

  True to his word the old fellow drew a sheet of parchment from a desk drawer and dipped a pen into an inkwell. Then he began to show her how to form letters to be coupled into an unlimited number of words, and words into sentences with periods, question marks, and other markings.

  She eyed the bottle of ink intently. Then she turned and asked, “How many words can be made from a whole bottle?”

  He gave her an amused look. “That depends on how large the words are.”

  Once a week for months the old gent called her to the library. He patiently taught her how words she spoke every day looked on paper. “Ah,” he confessed one day, as if she hadn
’t already figured it out, “it’s loneliness that bothers me more than me old eyes.”

  She smiled. “Don’t I know it.”

  One day after she finished work, she went into the library intending to find a book. Instead she climbed upon a high bed against the wall and lay down, her body settling into a feather mattress thick enough to give her the sensation of floating. She stared at the stained glass windows, hardly able to turn from them to study the white plaster ceiling and its adornments: circles wreathed with fruit, leaves, and swirling ribbons. A green basin holding candles hung from the centre of the ceiling. She drew in a deep breath picturing the lovely bowl of light cutting through the darkness at night. She wondered how one man and woman could have all this and her mamma and pappa have hardly a door to their thin-walled house.

  She turned, startled, as the door opened and her mistress came in. “How dare you lie on your laurels and your work undone?” she asked.

  Emily swallowed hard and sat up. “But ma’am—”

  The woman rushed forward. Her hand cut across Emily’s face. “You’re nothing but a blundering bay girl.”

  Emily fell backwards and landed on the floor rug. She jumped up and ran past her mistress and through the hall toward the outside door. She grabbed it hard and pulled it open. She ran down the street crying.

  A white-haired, distinguished-looking man passing by asked, “What’s the matter, young maid?”

  “Nothing a’tall, sir.” She drew back from his hand as it reached for her arm.

  “I could find a spot for you,” he said, his voice low and coaxing.

  Abigail watched Emily run down the street in her bare feet and saw herself as the ragged young girl who had left Conception Bay years before. Adam Dixon, buying her father’s fish, had been so taken with her he had employed her for a month. Then he had married her. He didn’t tell her that he’d been stricken with a severe case of mumps as a child. It went down in his cuffs.