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

pauper in the finest Savile Row suit and put him on the stage? He intends to show how we judge by appearance and circumstance. Will you come with me?”

“Yes. Well. Unless Simeon has returned.”

Carrie’s face gentled. She patted Josephine’s shoulder.

“My mother told me this was why she wanted to go to sea. She was tired of waiting. Always waiting.”

—

“Go on to bed with you,” the cook said. Flora had dried the last pot and was hanging the cloth on the wood stove’s handle.

Ellen sought her chair as if it were the day’s single consolation, a sigh carrying her down, feet rising to a footstool. She had snapped at Flora, today; harried her, hurried her. She had been exasperated over all the things the girl did not know how to do.

“I have to sweep,” Flora said.

“Only me to look at it.” Ellen flicked her hand at the floor.

Flora stood with her feet set neatly side by side and looked at the floor.

“I know about loneliness,” Ellen said. The cook was gazing at her as if seeing someone else. “You go on up to your bed.”

As Flora climbed the stairs, the conversation she had overheard this afternoon ran in her mind, a quiet murmur spiked by occasional audible words—education, angry, conditions—and wondered at these tea-drinking, educated Canadians. What they have. Houses and husbands. In her room, the kerosene lamp guttered; she turned the knob and the flame leapt up behind the smudged glass. Snow sifted under the window, made a line along the sill. She put on wool socks, a flannel nightgown and a woollen cap. She blew out the flame and slid between the sheets.

In the unfamiliar darkness, death was close. She could still hear Ada Quigley’s voice over the clicking of knitting needles and the crackling fire in the wood stove.

I’m going to make a baby dress.

Can I help sew it?

If you get yer chores done.

She wished she had seen the dimity that Ada had gone to town to buy. Ada didn’t usually go to town with Henry, especially not in winter, but she had not yet seen her daughter’s baby and wished to have a tiny dress ready for the child when she did.

Did you get them caulked shoes on the mare?

A sharp question to Henry. The last thing Flora heard her say.

She rolled onto her side, arms around her knees. The story unfolded, over and over in her head.

At the church, a woman pulled the cover over the keys of the pump organ. All the black-coated people filed out and into buggies and carriages, bound for Ada and Henry’s house. The kitchen was packed with people smelling of horses and wool. Women poured boiling water over tea leaves in pitchers, passed plates of pie, just as if the kitchen were their own. People ate dutifully, without pleasure. The hired men packed up their belongings; they paused, looking at Flora—before leaving, they filled the wood box with maple chunks, split fine. She watched Ada and Henry’s daughter bundle up the baby whose gown had caused her parents’ deaths. And then, once everyone had left, she stayed in the house all alone, because no one knew what to do with her. Beads of sap froze in the joists and swelled against the sinews of their encasement, waking her with cracks as loud as gunshots. She’d clutched the quilt to her mouth. Ma? Ma? Longing for a ghost to breathe on her cheek, even cause her death if it might take her home to a meadow in the Cotswolds, lacy with the umbels of wild carrots, shining with hovering damselflies. The next morning, neighbours arrived in their wagons to do the chores. They came stomping into the kitchen and fired up the wood stove. They started at the sight of her.

The Overseer of the Poor arrived. He set his cane against the scarred wainscot, sat in a straight-backed chair. He folded his gloved hands.

“You’re a Home Child, of course, but we’ve lost track of your papers. In such a case, the province will assume your care. You’ll spend Christmas with children your age. After that, we’ll see what can be done with you.”

“I want to go back to England. Please. Send me on the boat. Send me home.”

“We’ll see.”

He’d patted the back of her hand. She got in his carriage and they drove out of the valley, passing the cemetery where Ada and Henry would be buried in the spring when their bodies were taken from the icehouse.

Children your age.

Had the Overseer truly thought she would spend a happy Christmas with the Pleasant Valley family?

Once she had been placed on Henry and Ada’s farm, she’d tried to change the way she talked, copying the cadences of the hired men. In the one-room schoolhouse where she had gotten a bit of learning on days when she was ahead with her chores, the children had teased her. They had mocked her strange dress and stockings, as if the workhouse were an odour emanating from them, even though the clothes were fresh from Ada’s soap. The children in Pleasant Valley were no different. They imitated her accent, dropped dead flies in her porridge.

She was made to sleep in the attic on a pallet whose buckwheat hulls, leaking from its seams, crunched and slithered, leaving little but cloth beneath her. The ceiling slanted close, stippled with nails whose points bristled with frost. On Christmas morning, she had peered out the attic window and seen smoke drifting from the chimney, separating into white strands, like angels on the point of dissolution. Downstairs, a fir tree stood in the parlour, hung with painted baubles, but she had been told to remain in the kitchen, helping the cook.

One day she would tell the Overseer of the Poor. How she had thought she would have turkey and mince pie, as she always did on Ada and Henry’s farm. And instead, at the cook’s sharp call, had steeled herself to leave her warm cocoon and put on the clothes