The Sister's Tale, Beth Powning [important books to read TXT] 📗

branches of elm trees, the town emerged through the snow, a complex pattern of roofs, one higher than the next, planes of white: factories, by their size, and a tannery, by its smell. She thought of the long, dreary days hemming gloves at the workhouse, felt a stab of fear.

The wagon passed the station house and pulled close to the platform along the tracks. She had waited beneath its roof when she arrived, alone, from the Protestant Orphanage in St. John.

In the wagon, people bent to gather their bags. Hands on leather straps, on ropes, on the faded red and blue threads of a carpet bag. A wicker basket, tied with string. The cold air, making noses run. Stepping down, a man’s hand, offered.

“Careful, now.”

Flora climbed down from the wagon, clutching her box with both arms, fear a blood taste in her mouth. She recognized the Overseer of the Poor; he stood on the platform steps holding a gavel and perusing papers. His cheeks were red and shiny as apples, cold-polished.

She stared at him, terror rising as the situation spread itself around her: the unfeeling clamour—laughter, shouts, jibes; pipe stems clamped in teeth; round hats like a flock of black-headed birds. The people from the wagon filed past, as if they knew where to go.

He glanced beyond her, significantly. She turned to see a woman stepping down from a sleigh driven by a dapple-grey horse. A black lace shawl covered her hat. The woman paused, hesitant in mid-step.

A man approached Flora. He held a pencil and a tiny notebook in purple-gloved hands; she smelled pomade emanating from his froth of white hair, curling, woman-like—white carnation in his buttonhole. His eyes met hers and he raised his eyebrows.

“My name is George Francis Train. Of The Weekly Record. I—”

Someone seized her arm. Led her up the steps to a platform beneath the portico.

She saw the sign.

NOTICE OF IMPENDING SALE. ELEVEN PAUPERS…

The people who had been with her in the wagon were arrayed on the station platform on two benches. The wagon was parked before the platform so the ill woman could be present. Snow gathered on the blanket covering her.

Flora set down her box and sat beside the little boy. He shuddered, his cheeks puckered with dried mucus and the trails of tears.

She slid sideways. He looked up and she nodded, minutely—lean on me—and he did. She felt the contact with a shock, the small breathing body so like her own. The only bodies she ever touched were those of farm animals, solid and hot, their hearts uncaring; they suffered her embrace as they would the feet of a fly. The boy relaxed. His shuddering came in spasms, then stopped. He slipped off one mitten and put his thumb in his mouth. He gazed at his boots.

The station windows were streaked with runnels of condensation; she imagined a pot-bellied stove pulsing heat in the little room, and how there must be tea and gingerbread for those waiting to go wherever they wished. Birds burst from the rafters and out into the snow, their wings making a clatter like a winnowing machine. Flora stared out over the crowd, rage rising at the Overseer’s betrayal—putting her on sale like a pig at market.

—

“I beg your pardon,” Josephine murmured, making her way to the front as Harland had instructed her, touching serge sleeves; men averted their eyes.

Josephine felt a sense of disorientation. She could not be in her own town. She wished Simeon were here to share her shock. Eleven paupers: an old man leaning forward, hands gripped between his knees, working his mouth over his gums. A boy about thirteen, head back, hostile. Four middle-aged men and women. Three little children. A bedridden person, bundled in a wagon.

A girl, not a child—dark blonde hair caught up haphazardly, coming loose and falling from a knitted cap, bright against a black cloak. High, clear forehead; sad, far-seeing eyes. Hands gripped in her lap.

Surely that is Flora.

Josephine saw her friend Harland Fairweather transformed by his role. On the platform, he sat at a table. He set down a gavel and fussed with his papers, not looking at the crowd below or the paupers beside him. The table wobbled. Someone wedged a pamphlet under one of its legs. At the bottom of the stairs, Josephine saw a man who surveyed the scene and then scribbled in a notebook, white hair curling from beneath a fur hat.

Harland bared one hand, breathed on cupped fingers and worked the hand back into its glove. He would hate being before a crowd, Josephine thought; he was not one to call attention to himself. When she visited Permelia, she might glimpse him in his weather station, a glassed-in porch at the back of their house, where he pored, utterly absorbed, over thermometers and gauges, peered out at flags, entering figures into notebooks. “It’s not because of his name,” Permelia would murmur, permitting herself an exasperated giggle.

He picked up the gavel and rapped it down. The crowd quieted, shifting. On the air, a hint of the tannery’s stench.

His voice, isolated, was as strange as the scene.

“I am ashamed…” Harland Fairweather called out, and waited for complete silence, until all that could be heard was the diminution of a sleigh’s bells as the driver, seeing the auction, deferential, pulled his horse down into a floating half trot.

“I am ashamed of the task I have to do.”

He pointed down at the wagon and its mound of blankets.

“Look,” he said. “There lies a woman too sick to rise and sit with the others. Yet not too sick not to be brought here in the cold and snow. I feel I must point out that it has come to my attention as Overseer of the Poor that…”

He paused, as if losing his thought. Collected himself and continued.

“…that during the last year, some of these paupers were kept in onerous conditions. I have seen with my own eyes that they were made to sleep in sheds, given nothing