The Sister's Tale Page 2

  Looks, exchanged. Pickpockets, guttersnipes.

  Josephine’s heart quailed as she saw the response. They assumed, she saw, that the child would be sullen, bitter, ungrateful.

  Her voice firmed.

  “Margaret, could you make up a bed for her in the little room at the end of the hall? Make it nicely, with plenty of bedding. She was working at that farm where both husband and wife were killed on the Mine Hill.”

  Ellen paused, the custard spoon briefly forgotten.

  “Ah. I did read of it. Terrible thing.” Her tone yielded, allowed the possibility of pity. “Poor wee girl…”

  * * *

  —

  In the clear morning light, Josephine stood in the hall waiting for Mr. Dougan to come with the horse and sleigh.

  She held the newspaper in gloved hands and perused the front page. The words were somewhat obscured by her lace shawl but she did not wish to undo the bow she had tied beneath her chin.

  AXE MURDER. The horrible deed of blood which was committed at Tyne Cove yesterday has caused much excitement. A woman, Mrs. Elsa Cavanaugh, was found murdered in the home of Mr. John Tatum, with indications of a violent struggle. Her wrists and hands show marks as if they had been made by the teeth of a human being and her body bears the marks of bruises. The walls of the room in which she was found are finely spattered with stars of blood. The murder weapon, an axe, was in plain sight, leaning against the stove, soaked in blood. Her reason for being at the home of Mr. Tatum, by his accounts, is as a boarder. She was found by him when he returned from St. John. He saw the body lying on the floor, the head red and her clothes tossed up. By his account, Mrs. Cavanaugh, a widow, was of County Tyrone, Ireland, and has been living in this country for over thirty years. She was fifty years of age, portly, of short stature and ill health. It is not known…

  The front door opened. She lowered the paper, startled. On the cold air, the smell of horse, the bite of snow.

  “Ready, ma’am?” Mr. Dougan gave her his arm as she stepped up into the sleigh. She had asked him not to tip his hat. You are in Canada, now, she’d said.

  She settled, pulled up the bearskin rug. A blanket for the girl was folded on the seat beside her. Mr. Dougan handed up a basket prepared by Ellen—gingerbread, a ham sandwich.

  “She said the girl will be cold and hungry,” he explained.

  Dappled coat groomed to a trout-shimmer, the mare snorted, neck arched, as Mr. Dougan climbed into his seat and collected the reins. Josephine, adjusting her collar to cover her nose, felt a wave of pleasure as the sleigh slid down the lane—lindens, snow-covered lawn, the house Simeon had built for them, with its scrolled red trim, turret and verandas.

  She leaned forward to enjoy the sight of Hilltop, the town’s largest house, built by an English duke for his two childless, widowed sisters. Snow made a conical cap on the roof of its three-storey turret and accentuated its delicious details—veranda railings topping spindled balusters, Gothic windows with stained-glass panes, gingerbread scrollwork.

  Everything had become like a painting, Josephine thought—all things made less ordinary by a turn in the weather.

  TWO

  The Auction

  A SMALL, QUICK-MOVING WOMAN came up the attic stairs and stooped over the pallet, shaking the sleeping girl, impatiently.

  “Dress in your warmest clothes.”

  She sat up, slumped forward, mindful of the nails poking through the sloped ceiling. Her nightdress was missing a button at the neck, the collar scrubbed to a threadbare finish. She crossed her arms, felt the warmth of her own hair, fallen from its pins. She could not make out the woman’s expression.

  “Why?”

  “Because you…And pack up all your belongings.”

  “Am I leaving?”

  “Yes. The Overseer of the Poor will no doubt reimburse you.”

  The woman’s dress rustled as she lifted it to descend the perilous stairs.

  The girl dressed in her union suit. She pulled a wool sweater over her dress, worked her feet into long stockings. She knelt to set folded clothing—wool socks, drawers, two merino undershirts, her only other dress—into the wooden box, painted green, that had accompanied her on the ship, the train, the wagon to Ada and Henry’s farm, and now here.

  She went down the narrow stairs, awkward, one arm barely surrounding the box.

  The kitchen was warm, lit by kerosene lamps.

  “They’ve eaten,” the cook said, glancing at her. “They let you sleep in. You’re to have your breakfast and then go wait in the hall.”

  She sat at the kitchen table and ate a bowl of oatmeal and a slice of buttered bread with jam made from last summer’s raspberries. She went into the hall and slid onto the bench where the children sat to remove their boots. In the cold light, she could see snow falling past narrow windows on either side of the door.

  She listened to the ticking of the clock, thinking of Ada, remembering how she’d been glad to see her wearing her red felt hat on the day that she and Henry set out for town to buy the dimity.

  The last thing I saw of them. Shooing the barn cats from their feet. Their winter boots.

  A knock on the door; she jumped to her feet and opened it. A man stood in the falling snow.

  “You Flora Salford?”

  “I am.”

  “Got your things? Hand ’em over…”

  Bits of hay clung to the man’s wool coat. Gobbets of frozen mucus in his moustache. She followed him out the door. He was in a hurry, she thought, and wondered why. An open farm wagon stood in the street, filled with men, women and children. They did not look up at her, but hunkered against the cold and the snow.

  The man gave her a hand up onto the wagon’s iron step.

  “Where are we going?” she asked. Her words hung in the air, an embarrassment, for no one answered. All the people had bags at their feet. All jolted in the same direction as the wagon moved off. A woman lay rolled onto her side, grey hair showing above a blanket. Beside Flora was a boy her own age. He leaned forward, arms like broken branches, hands hanging. A little girl began to cry, a keening mournfulness muffled by an older girl’s coat. A little boy huddled on the bigger girl’s other side. Flora didn’t dare look at all the others—four or five men and women.

  “Where are we going?” Flora whispered to the boy her own age. Rheumy eyes lifted only as far as his knees and then returned to settle on his hands. As if, she thought, she had said it to torment him.

  The wagon passed through the centre of Pleasant Valley. The street widened, storefronts on either side—dry goods, laundries. Rug-covered horses stood hitched to sleighs. The wagon rattled over the train tracks, turned towards the station.

  Men pressed together, jostling, in front of the station house, a two-storey building. People carrying satchels and carpet bags hurried up its front steps, crossed a porch, vanished inside. Across the street stood a long, three-storey hotel. Beyond, beneath the snow-covered 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 we
re 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 but rags for bedding.”

  He took a deep breath. He worked a handkerchief from a pocket and wiped his mouth and nose. Josephine saw his hand tremble as he put it back.

  “Some have been worked beyond their power of endurance. But as you all know, we have no other way to care for the poor. We have no almshouse. So it is my unfortunate duty to offer these paupers for sale to the lowest bidder. Those who receive them will be paid the amount of their bid by the province, as a monthly sum, for the duration of one year. It is my fervent hope that those who receive these paupers will treat them with humanity and decency.”

  He worked spectacles over his eyes, wrapping the temple tips behind his ears. Josephine watched as the girl sat straight and placed her feet side by side, keeping her eyes fixed on Mr. Fairweather. The girl did not appear to realize that she was a lodestone, every man’s eyes sliding, looking away, returning.

  “I will begin with these three children so that some one of you will take them home, give them a decent meal, and comfort them in their distress. They are orphans, aged…”

  He ran his finger down the paper.

  “…aged five, seven, and eight. I offer them as a block.”

  Josephine covered her mouth. She would bid for them. She tried to think where she would keep them. She could not put them in her daughters’ rooms. And George would be outraged should he return to find his room occupied.

  “What am I bid for the block of three?”

  The little boy sat up and reached for his older sister’s hand. Like the mother who should have been there, Josephine thought, and her heart felt thick, shortening her breath.

  “What am I bid for the block of three? May I remind you, these are sisters and brother.”

  No one bid. Josephine felt a recklessness threaten to overtake her.

  “I’ll take the boy,” a man called out. “I bid thirty-five dollars.”

  No one else bid.

  She drew a breath, parted her lips to speak.

  The Overseer brought the gavel down. A wail rose from all of the children. Already the purchaser was mounting the steps.

  The two little girls went next, bought together.

  The blonde girl sat apart from any others, now, as the older boy was sold. Then the old man. Then the bedridden woman, who went for the high price of $101.

  “Flora Salford.” He pointed at the girl.

  He had not named the other paupers.

  So I will be absolutely certain.

  “Formerly a hand at the Quigley farm. You will know that Henry and Ada Quigley met their deaths earlier this month when their horse slipped on ice on the Mine Hill. By her own account, this young woman is fifteen years of age, able and capable of hard work. She comes with complete outfit except she needs winter boots, which the purchaser must provide. What am I bid?”

  Harland’s eyes scanned the crowd. Hands shot up. He did not look at Josephine.

  He wants me to bide my time? Josephine did not know this game nor how it was best played. I will hear yo
ur bid, he had said.

  A man’s voice called out. “I bid fifty dollars.”

  “Forty-nine.”

  The first man, again. Square, fleshy face. He poked up the handle of a cane. “Forty-eight.”

  Now a third man. “Forty-seven.”

  Harland glanced at Josephine. She held her hands palm outwards, fingers stretched—ten dollars less—hoping he would understand.

  “I am bid thirty-seven,” Harland said.

  “Thirty-six.” All three men called out at the same time.

  Again, Josephine flashed her hands. Harland brought down his gavel. “Sold…for twenty-six dollars.”

  An uproar ensued. He pounded, pounded, the crack of gavel on maple.

  THREE

  Polite and Invisible

  THE DRIVER WHIPPED the dapple-grey mare into a hard trot. Balled snow flew from her hooves. Flora fell backwards against the quilted padding. The woman who’d won her at auction, jostled, attempted to unfold a plaid wool blanket.

  “Pull her down to a walk, please, Mr. Dougan. We can hardly…”

  Flora turned to look back. Snowy roof of the train station, a white gleam, and men’s hats, the size of pebbles.

  “There,” the woman said, as the horse dropped into a restrained, high-stepping walk. She handed Flora the blanket, which she had shaken from its folds.

  “And there’s a ham sandwich for you in the basket,” she said, lifting up a hinged wooden cover, revealing a paper package. Flora was not hungry, but took it out and unwrapped it. The bread was faintly warm, the ham smelled of cloves. She took a bite, seeing that the woman was watching her.

  The woman looked away, pulling the bearskin up over her neck and shoulders. She drew a long breath and pressed the back of her glove to her lips.

  She was a woman poised between youth and the beginnings of decline, her cheeks marked with fine, curved lines; a slight downturn at the corners of her lips; a strong nose; full, cold-flushed skin, the skin of shade and expensive soap.