Jane Urquhart Page 15

  Her father placed his hands flat on the desk and leaned forward. “Don’t be foolish,” he said. “No one will want these walls. No one at all. Paris was clearly a mistake. It’s time he became a man, took some responsibility, and got over his fancy French ways.” This declaration was followed by an ominous, angry silence. Then he said, “Has his mind been destroyed by drink, by absinthe?” Joseph Woodman had no doubt heard about the unsavory side of the Parisian art world but had overlooked these rumors in favor of removing his son from the vicinity of the hired girl. “Well,” he continued, “did he? Has he?”

  It was well known that Joseph Woodman permitted no liquor of any kind to be unloaded on the island in order to prevent the Frenchmen from infecting the more serious workers of Scots and English descent with their fondness for the grape. Since any reference to Ireland brought with it a tinge of remembered frustration and humiliation, no Irishmen were tolerated on the island either, thereby removing that particular brand of alcoholic danger. Joseph Woodman insisted that Timber Island remain a parched community.

  “Of course not,” Annabelle said. She had read enough about Paris to know that wine, at the very least, would have been imbibed regularly. She didn’t know anything at all about absinthe, but was certain that, regardless of what he may have consumed, her brother’s mind, though filled with melancholy, was completely intact.

  “Well, I won’t have it, this business of decorating parlors…”

  “Hallways,” Annabelle corrected.

  “Parlors, hallways, it’s all the same and I won’t have it.” Both of his fists were clenched now as if he were preparing to do battle with these parlors, these hallways, and his face was reddening as his blood pressure rose. Joseph Woodman had been in a particularly foul temper in recent months. The entire treasury of his beloved Orange Lodge (he had been ardently anti-papist ever since his Irish adventure) had been spent in Kingston on a marvelous triumphal arch that had been erected in anticipation of a royal tour. The Prince of Wales, however, tired of the wretched Irish question, had refused to dock at Kingston at all, forcing schoolchildren to enter boats in order to serenade him with their patriotic songs. These boats could be seen quite clearly from the shores of Timber Island, and the sweet voices of the youngsters could be heard by Mr. Woodman as he sat seething in his office. “Branwell should stick to portraits,” he told Annabelle now, “if he insists on art as a profession. Portraits are what people want.” He looked past her shoulder. “But in truth,” he said, pointing one long finger in the direction of the outer office, “what he should undertake instead is gainful employment with Cummings.”

  Cummings was a thin, sallow-faced clerk of indeterminate age who had been a fixture of the outer office for years. Although he was timid and withdrawn, he had nevertheless once, and only once, summoned the courage to leer at Annabelle as she passed by his desk. No man had ever looked at her that way before, and she was determined that no man would ever look at her that way again. She had, therefore, since that day resolutely refused to speak to Cummings for any reason at all, though she did not tell her father about the incident.

  “That will never happen,” said Annabelle. “It’s not what he, what Branwell, wants to do. It’s not what Branwell should be doing.”

  No woman, not even Annabelle, was going to give Woodman advice. “I’ll be the judge of what he should or shouldn’t do,” he thundered. “And I say that he starts in that office Monday next.”

  Annabelle placed her bonnet back on her head and tied the ribbons under her chin. The bow looked like dark bird’s wings on either side of her narrow face. She gave her father a determined look, which was all the more unnerving because of the one wayward eye. Then she turned, left the room, walked through the outer office, and into the noise and disarray of the yard.

  A half an hour later Annabelle found herself in Back Bay, or, as it was sometimes called, Wreck Bay or Graveyard Bay, one of her favorite island locations. It was a shallow, muddy, weed-fringed spot where annulled ships were brought to die, and several vessels that had been recently towed there were now in the process of doing just that. Others, having been stripped of anything considered useful, had already sunk beneath the surface of the water. In summer, Annabelle liked to glide across the bay in a rowboat in order to peer down at the vague shapes of scuttled ships wavering at the bottom of the lake, but today she would remain on the shore. As always, she carried her sketchbook with her in her apron pocket, though, at this moment, she had removed neither it nor her pencil. She sat on a remnant beam near the water, dressed in her dark outfit, dwarfed by a collection of broken masts, frayed ropes, ragged sails, and water-stained hulls in varying stages of decay and levels of submersion. Booms groaned in the increasing wind, chains clanked and knocked against rotting timbers, but Annabelle took no notice of these sounds. She was thinking about Marie. And she was thinking about the baby. If it had been born alive, it would be just two years old by now.

  It is a sad fact that into any individual’s life there will stroll only a very few irreplaceable fellow creatures, friends who, when they are absent, leave one bereft, awash in one’s own solitariness. For the islanded Annabelle, whose dealings with the outside world were severely restricted by her gender and by her geography, there had been her brother, who was largely unconscious of the magnitude of his importance in her life, and there had been Marie. When Marie had been sent away from Branwell, he had suffered from her absence and Annabelle had been denied the companionship of her dearest friend. Marie, at least, like Branwell, had been sent away, had been given a change of scene, however grim that scene might turn out to be. But Annabelle had been left behind in the silent, empty house. This echoing, vacant region, she had concluded, was to be her territory, her prison. She would bang up against its walls as long as she breathed while, mere steps from her window, all those wonderful cathedral-like ships moved soundlessly, like floating works of art, away from her shore. It is sometimes difficult to believe in Annabelle’s fondness for all the schooners and sloops and privateers that were moored at the docks of Timber Island, or which cut through the waves of the lake, or whose sails dipped and flashed on the horizon, and yet, despite all the paintings she made of the demise of such vessels, she couldn’t help but be affected by their beauty.

  Joseph Woodman had told his children that the word schooner came into being as the result of a young man shouting into the crowd at the launching of such a vessel, “See how she schoons!” What could it mean, this verb to schoon? To lean into the wind and move swiftly forward, Annabelle had concluded. She had been known to use the verb now and then when describing the activities of another person, most often, because of her friend’s vitality, in relation to Marie.

  If Marie had been with her at this moment, she and Annabelle would have been engaging in one of their favorite pastimes: discussing what was wrong with Branwell. They never tired of this topic, which they had approached from every imaginable angle and related to which they had considered the most improbable questions. Why, for instance, would he not eat broccoli, or raw tomatoes, or any of the cook’s delightful relishes? What made him want the crusts cut off his bread? He could talk at length when enthusing about his iceboats and then refuse to reveal anything about the inner torment that the girls were certain resided in his soul. Why would he not confess his adoration for Marie when it was clear to both the object of that adoration and to his sister that that adoration existed? Would he never want to be a soldier and fight wolves and Americans and other enemies? How was it that he could think of nothing? (When they asked him what he was thinking about, he always said, “Nothing.”) If Marie were here now, the question Annabelle would ask to open the conversation would have been something like, “Why did I have to make it clear to him, and to my father, that he wants to paint hallways?” And then she would have added, “Doesn’t he know how fortunate he is to be a boy who can, with or without parent approval, do what he wants with his life, who can become itinerant, who can get away?” In the end, tho
ugh, she would have softened. Poor Branwell, she might have said, trapped in a world where the expectation was that, regardless of the detours of his youth, the road he walked would eventually lead him back to the grinding routine of the family business.

  Annabelle took the pencil and the small sketchbook out of the pocket of her skirt, stared for a while at one blank page, and began to draw the outline of a raft from memory. She had considerable trouble with the perspective. Having never before attempted to render something so thoroughly horizontal, she was unable to make the structure look as if it were lying flat in the water. Frustrated by this, she concluded that this was not to be a day during which the making of drawings was possible, so she returned the sketchbook and the pencil to her pocket, rose to her feet, and began to walk back to the house.

  Passing the quay, she noticed that several of the men were on their hands and knees testing the withes that held the timbers in place. The raft was nearing completion. Soon it would begin its journey down the river, past a scattering of villages and a quantity of islands, moving through the shallows and rapids out into the world.

  Annabelle could recall quite vividly the March day in her twelfth year when Marie had been brought across the ice, how she had been transported and then delivered like a package during the least negotiable month when, because of rising temperatures, it was necessary for islanders to make use of a contraption – half canoe, half sleigh – in order to make the journey back and forth to the mainland. This vehicle either slid with great difficulty (pushed by its passengers) over frozen bumps and cracks, or it floated in constant slush and broken ice through frigid and partly thawed waters. The girl, who from a distance appeared to be paralyzed either by fear or by frost, sat upright in the bow, not moving when the other passengers climbed out onto the ice to push, as they made their slow progress from Kingston Harbour to the island.

  Annabelle was not a pretty child, and there were moments when, despite her almost complete lack of vanity, she felt a twinge of resentment at the injustice of this arbitrary fact of nature. That March morning, looking through the watery glass of one of the parlor windows toward the partly frozen lake, however, she’d had the odd, inexplicable notion that the small, distant girl in the boat was her other, her more beautiful self being conveyed to her, and that when this girl eventually stepped into her house their two bodies would overlap and become three-dimensional like the twinned images on the photo cards she slipped into the stereoscope on Sunday afternoons. She was mad with excitement, convinced that the girl’s imminent arrival would be more of a longed-for reunion than a first encounter. She stood by the window, transfixed, as the skipper heaved the brown mail sacks onto the dock, then held out a hand to the child who had not moved one inch. The man made no effort to escort the girl, but pointed instead at the big house where Annabelle waited.

  Branwell, who was then in his thirteenth year, and home for late-winter holidays, joined Annabelle at the window. As he watched the girl limp toward the house, he said disapprovingly, “She’ll never do, she’s too thin. And, look, she’s lame.”

  Annabelle, who was thinking of her own damaged leg, said nothing at first, then whispered, “I think she will be beautiful.”

  “Doesn’t she know that she’s supposed to come to the kitchen door?”

  The girl’s pale face was visible now. She was about to climb the front steps. Branwell rapped on the glass to get her attention and Annabelle saw two startled dark eyes glance toward the window. “Next door down,” Branwell shouted with more volume than was necessary. “Not here.”

  The girl looked at them for some time – long enough to cause discomfort – and the look combined curiosity and a not insignificant amount of contempt. Then, quite suddenly, she stuck out her tongue before moving toward the appropriate door. Annabelle and Branwell racketed through the intervening rooms of the house to the kitchen. They had both fallen hopelessly in love. But at that moment Annabelle was the only one of them who knew this.

  Inside the kitchen Annabelle and Branwell grabbed each other’s arms and pulled at each other’s clothing, each wanting to be the one who opened the door to the stranger. When Branwell advanced, Annabelle kicked him in the left shin and he swore and lost his grip on the porcelain knob. “Damn,” he said in a tone much like his father’s, and then again when he saw that his sister was drawing the girl into the room by the sleeve of her tattered coat.

  “Leave go of me,” the girl hissed. She jerked her arm out of reach, then sat on the floor and began hastily untying her boots, ignoring altogether, it would seem, the presence of the other two children in the room. Annabelle withdrew slightly and took in the girl’s costume: a soiled bonnet, worn overcoat, and grey lisle stockings with holes in the knees. Some kind of pinafore was visible where the coat fell open over one raised leg, then the other. Once the boots were off, two white hands covered the dark grey cloth on the feet. She’s not lame at all, thought Annabelle with a rush of disappointment, just frostbitten. The sodden boots lay like small dead animals near the fire. Tears of pain gleamed on the girl’s eyelashes, eyelashes that were dark and plentiful. The sight of those wonderful lashes was to be among the first of many things about Marie that Annabelle’s mind would retain indefinitely.

  “Well,” said Branwell in the condescending tones of an adult, “what’s your name then, girl?”

  The child sat clutching her toes. She stared at Branwell but did not answer him. Then she sniffed, looked away, and announced, “I don’t have to tell you that. I’ve only got to tell things to the Missus.” She scanned the kitchen, as if she expected to find this person hidden in a shadowed corner.

  “My mother is in bed,” said Branwell truthfully. “She stays there all the time,” he added. This was somewhat of an exaggeration. Mrs. Woodman was prone to bouts of migraine – more prone in winter than in summer – and withdrew for days at a time. But in fair weather, and sometimes even in the coldest season, she would be a more or less cheerful if somewhat vague and occasional presence in the kitchen.

  “She stays in bed all the time,” continued Branwell with an air of authority, “so you’ll have to wait on her and I’ll be the one telling you what to do.”

  “No he won’t,” said Annabelle indignantly. “He’s good for nothing. My father says so.”

  Just then, the cook, a tiny woman with a disproportionately large face marked by two fierce black eyes, entered the room. “What’s this?” she asked, surveying the still-huddled child. “Oh, yes, the girl from Orphan Island.” She shot a look in the direction of Branwell and Annabelle. “What are you two up to?” she asked and, without waiting for a reply, turned again to the recent arrival. “We don’t sit on the floor here,” she offered and then, “I expect you’re far from clean.”

  “Far from clean,” echoed Branwell.

  “No one asked for your opinion,” said the woman testily. “In fact, no one asked for you – either of you – to be in here at all. Both of you – back into the house!”

  The siblings reluctantly withdrew, but not before Annabelle and the girl had exchanged a brief complicitous look.

  How forbidden Marie was! Annabelle’s father had made it clear to her and to her brother that they were not to consort with this girl who was an orphan who would therefore have come from God knows where, the progeny, most likely, of a drunken lout and a shameless hussy. Furthermore, she was there to work, not to lollygag about with the likes of them. Mackenzie, the cook, who up until that time had tolerated the children’s presence in the kitchen only occasionally, now barred them completely from the premises on the grounds that they were too much of a distraction. Banishments and admonishments did nothing to dispel the air of romance and mystery that Annabelle believed was attached to the girl, and, as the days went by, she thought about little else. Often she found herself standing behind the open kitchen door, watching Marie through the space between the hinges while the girl went about her various tasks and was, more or less, bossed and pushed around by Mackenzie, who event
ually softened somewhat under the influence of Marie’s stubborn pride and unquestionable beauty.

  One day, while Annabelle stood in the V-shaped shadow behind the door, Marie, who was scrubbing the floor, began to crawl toward the spot with brush and suds and pail until Annabelle could see quite clearly her small, soapy knuckles and thin, damp wrists. She hunkered down and reached into her apron pocket for a pencil and one of the small pieces of butcher paper she always kept with her in case she might want to make a sketch. Squinting in the gloom, she wrote a message that told the girl to come to her room late at night for a secret that would be told.

  Annabelle wondered if the girl could read, doubted, in fact, that she could, but had made the decision, nonetheless, to make this attempt to communicate with her.

  At first the girl ignored the scrap of pinkish-brown paper as if its sudden appearance in her line of vision had caused her no curiosity whatsoever. Then, quite abruptly, she snatched the paper from the floor and crammed it into the pocket of her pinafore. Mackenzie said something about the fire, the oven, and then something else about the length of time it was taking Marie to finish the floor. The girl did not look up from the brush in her hands, glanced neither toward the door nor toward the cook stove, and even when Mackenzie left the room, she did not remove the paper from her pocket. Just as I thought, she can’t read, Annabelle concluded and having thus concluded did not bother to invent a secret.

  Still, believing the girl to be illiterate had no diminishing effect upon her fascination, and the following day Annabelle was back at her post. She had the odd sense that her already small world had in fact shrunk, and now included only the dimensions of this triangle of shadow and the limited view that could be seen from it. A spider shared this space with her, but it didn’t disturb her at all. Branwell might have screamed and run away, but not her. She wasn’t afraid of spiders, and even had she been, there was theatre on the other side of the door crack and she was able to watch it all day long for months and months if she chose to do so. She was not required, as Branwell was, to participate in any formal kind of education because she was a girl so, even when her brother returned to school, she would be able to remain in close proximity to Marie. When she told Branwell about her luck he repeated his father’s words about the drunken lout and the shameless hussy and predicted that Annabelle would catch cooties from the girl if she didn’t keep her distance.