Jane Urquhart Page 16

  Her mother, though as listless and seemingly preoccupied as always, made the odd appearance. Occasionally, she would drift into the kitchen, where she would look at Marie – not with curiosity exactly – but with detached puzzlement until Mackenzie explained, for the fourth or fifth time, who Marie was and what she was doing there. Annabelle squirmed in embarrassment behind the door at these moments. What was it, she wondered with some impatience, her mother thought about all day, what made her seem so absent even when she chose to leave her room and be among them? Though Annabelle didn’t know this, the truth was that Mrs. Woodman had never successfully managed to emigrate from England in her mind, and even as she stood in these rooms and gazed out the windows of this house, a landscape of a very different kind lit her imagination. Only Branwell would listen with any interest when their mother described stone villages and picturesque fields. Annabelle had no time for this rhapsodizing about distant places, places she doubted she would ever see and knew her mother would never see again.

  “The girl from Orphan Island,” Mackenzie would say, and Annabelle’s mother would reply, “Oh yes, of course,” then move vaguely around the kitchen touching a pewter jug, an earthenware bowl, as if she hoped that something in the kitchenware’s insistence on being solid might pull her back from the lost green landscapes of the past and into the overheated interiors of the present.

  On one of these days, shortly after Mrs. Woodman had floated out of the kitchen to wander aimlessly through the other rooms of the house, Marie was commanded by Mackenzie to once again scrub the floor while the cook went to fetch a brisket of beef at the island’s butcher shop. What a thin back she has, thought Annabelle, looking at the nearby laboring figure. Her clothing, which was not finely tailored as Annabelle’s, fell away from her spine toward the floor and appeared to be much too big for her frame. She watched the girl’s muscles move under her cotton clothing and, as she was watching, one arm shot out from the body and shoved a familiar piece of butcher’s paper under the door. Annabelle stooped to retrieve it and, in the gloom, read her own message. Then she turned the paper over in her hands and was confronted with a one-word message: No.

  It wasn’t as if Annabelle was unaccustomed to this word: her father often shouted it across the shipyards, or yelled it in the direction of Branwell and her when they were making demands. It wasn’t that she hadn’t seen it scrawled in two large characters across various letters of request on her father’s desk. But to have the negative emerge from such a small, such a powerless source shocked her deeply and hurt her in a way she hadn’t been hurt before. What could it mean, this refusal, this annulment?

  Annabelle crumpled the paper in her fist, then walked into the parlor where she stood looking out the window at late-spring snow falling on vessels that had remained useless and dry-docked all winter long. In the corner of the room the recently fed Quebec stove roared as it devoured wood. Overhead she heard Branwell’s quick steps progressing along the floorboards of the upper hall toward the back stairs, along with the clicking sounds made by the dog’s nails. Soon, from the direction of the kitchen, Annabelle could make out the sound of Branwell’s voice demanding that Skipper perform the one trick he had managed to teach him. “Roll over,” he said and, shortly after, and much to her chagrin, she heard Marie’s laughter followed by some light scolding about dog hair on the floor, and then the sound of Branwell and the dog beating a hasty retreat when Mackenzie must have been coming up the walk.

  Nothing was ever going to happen to her, Annabelle suddenly knew. Plenty was going to happen to Branwell, she suspected. A great deal had undoubtedly already happened to the rejecting Marie, but she, Annabelle, was never going to be granted access to that intriguing history. She felt as if she were now and would be forever outside of everything, forced to dwell in the shadows, witnessing only a fraction of the world through a thin crack of light. With this feeling came a considerable amount of resentment.

  Why should she remain invisible to this hired person? How dare she pretend that Annabelle was not close at hand, breathing the same air, walking up and down the same staircases? Did she not have two legs – one shorter than the other, it was true – and a nose, and hands and a heart, just like this other girl? She was determined to exist, to take up some space – whether wanted or not – in Marie’s mind, along with memories of Orphan Island, of her journey to that destination, throngs of other splendidly independent orphans, children with no fathers obsessed by nautical calculations and the distribution of timber, and no distant mothers bent under the weight of the memory of green fields too far away to matter. She would have murdered her parents at that moment had it guaranteed a nod of approval from the girl, had it guaranteed an entry into the brotherhood, the sisterhood of those fortunate enough to be orphaned.

  But that moment passed and Annabelle realized that a less dramatic method of gaining the girl’s attention and approval would have to be discovered. Late afternoon found her a solitary, bundled creature engaged in frantic activity mere feet beyond the kitchen window. She lay on the ground, scissoring arms and legs, making angels in the snow deposited by a late March squall. She created snow men and women, hurled snowballs, lifted armloads of snow from the ground and flung them toward the sky, creating her own private, contained blizzard. As it grew darker the kitchen became a colorful, warmly lit stage where the girl, Marie, carried out her tasks under the instructions of Mackenzie or, when the cook left the room, on her own. During one of these latter periods Annabelle threw a snowball at the kitchen window. The girl gave absolutely no indication that she had heard the sound of the impact.

  Then, just as Annabelle was thinking of re-entering the house, Marie approached the kitchen window with a saucepan of hot water in her left hand. When the glass was sufficiently clouded, she extended her free hand and with one thin finger wrote the words No I will not on the steamy surface. Infuriatingly, Marie wrote the words backwards so that Annabelle would have no trouble reading them, and even more infuriatingly, she never once looked in Annabelle’s direction.

  Annabelle marched inside and tramped snow all over the house looking for her brother. When she found him in his room upstairs, she said indignantly, “That girl downstairs can read, and she can write backwards and forwards. How about that?”

  “So what,” Bran said, not looking up from a novel entitled Ralph, the Train Dispatcher. He did not seem interested in the least. But he was absently pulling on his ear, a nervous habit he had developed in early childhood, and Annabelle knew, therefore, that any information concerning Marie was not something he was likely to forget.

  The attic where Marie slept was not heated like the rest of the house by fireplaces and Quebec stoves, but it was made almost habitable by the fact that the two huge chimneys, through which the smoke of the half-dozen hardwood fires passed, were fully exposed and their bricks were warm. Despite this, one night, after everyone else in the house was asleep, while Annabelle ascended the steep stairs with a combination of anticipation and misgivings, her entire body was covered with goosebumps as the cold slipped under her nightgown and up her legs. It was dark as pitch on the stairs and she believed that she had not made one sound, yet when she emerged into the attic, which was partially lit by a quarter moon, she could see that Marie was sitting up in her bed.

  “Get in here,” the girl said. “Get in here or you’ll freeze.”

  Annabelle made her way quickly across the room, then scrambled under the covers. Marie shifted to one side to allow some space and Annabelle was aware, for the first time in her life, of the warmth that the recent presence of another body lends to flannel sheets. “Have you been to sleep yet?” she asked.

  Marie shook her head.

  “Nor me. But, then, I knew I was coming up here later.”

  “I knew that too.”

  Annabelle was surprised by this revelation but decided not to let on. “What’s your favorite thing?” she asked.

  “Night,” said Marie, “now. My bed is all that is mine.�
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  “But it’s not yours,” said Annabelle, proprietorship igniting briefly in her small self. Didn’t her father own the whole house and everything that was in it? For that matter, didn’t her father own the whole island and everyone on it, and all the ships that were built there and sailed to and from it, and all the timber that was rafted down the river? There was something unfair about this distribution of ownership and Annabelle knew it, even then. Still she added, “Your bed belongs to my father,” then to associate herself with this awesome power, “to my family.”

  “But I am the only one here and I like that. And after I come up to bed at night and lie down, nobody tells me what to do.”

  “I’m here with you now,” Annabelle persisted, “and if I told you to do something you’d have to do it.”

  “I would not,” said the girl. “I would not because I’d say no.”

  Annabelle believed that that was precisely what the girl would say and decided to pursue the notion of superiority no further. In truth she was relieved that she had been allowed entrance into the girl’s world, not sent away as she had suspected she might be.

  Marie had the whole pillow. Her pillow, thought Annabelle. “Maybe,” she ventured, “if I asked nicely you would do it.”

  “Maybe. What would you ask?”

  “I would ask you about the orphanage.”

  The nuns have no money, Marie told Annabelle; all the money goes to the monasteries where “there is nothing but men.” Some of the boy children in the orphanage would eventually enter monasteries themselves, hoping to experience comfort. It was a very good idea, if you were a boy, to pretend to have received a “call” from God, instructing you to become a monk or a priest. That way you wouldn’t have to be a farmhand owned by a mean farmer. It was not, however, a good idea to pretend to have received a “call” if you were a girl “because nothing would change except your clothes and those for the worse.”

  Annabelle had paid very little attention to these details. “But how did you become an orphan?” she asked.

  Marie was silent, staring at the ceiling. Then she rolled over on her side to face Annabelle, her dark head in the angle of her arm. “It was a wolf,” she said.

  Annabelle doubted this. “All the woods are chopped,” she announced. “Father says so. They’re chopped all the way to Lake Superior so there can’t be any wolves here. All the timbers come down on boats from Lake Superior.”

  “Yes, this wolf came on a boat with the timbers and he came dressed as a soldier so no one could know. Then he got to our house and ate my mother all up and killed my father.” Marie was silent for a few moments and Annabelle feared that this wolf was the only part of the story that she was going to tell. Then the girl added, “He was a royal wolf with blue eyes, and he had medals from the wolf kingdom.”

  “And he made you his orphan,” murmured Annabelle. Drowsy now, it seemed to her that this change of status from daughter to orphan would be like a sort of marriage, would necessarily involve ceremony and a long significant pause in the action when the blue eyes would lock with yours and tokens would be exchanged. Perhaps even a kiss. Then orphanhood. And, yes, then beauty.

  Annabelle wanted something to dream about, something that was all hers, an orphanhood, a wolf of her own.

  “The wolf made you beautiful,” she said, drunk with a combination of this thought and approaching slumber. “Where is he now?” she asked, her voice thick with sleep.

  “He’s here. He swam beside the boat to the island,” said Marie. “He’s always with me. He bought me when he killed my parents. He owns me.”

  Both girls began to fall seriously into sleep. “He’s come down with the timbers, he’s just outside the house,” said Annabelle, who was already dreaming of a flash of blue eyes caught in moonlight and large, formal pawprints in the snow.

  Annabelle, thinking of Marie, began that spring to light fires during the day at the Signal Point of Timber Island – or so the story goes. This was the method of communication usually used by islanders for weddings and funerals and other newsworthy events, and was a kind of throwback to the bonfires lit on significant holidays in the distant British Isles from which many laborers in her father’s empire had emigrated. However, Annabelle, had she been asked to explain it, wouldn’t have been sure what she was trying to accomplish by doing this. Not knowing for certain where Marie was, she had little hope that a message would reach her friend, and so, eventually, she simply settled in to enjoy the flames. She loved to paint fire, and she loved to watch it.

  Branwell, who despite Annabelle’s best efforts was by now spending his days working with Cummings, was sent out by his father to Signal Point to see what on earth his sister was doing, but she never confessed to him her original intentions, which, by the end of the first week, she had realized were quite futile, at least in respect to the messages being sent by the blaze.

  Her brother, not anxious to return to account books and columns of figures, sometimes took to doing “the ranges”: an exercise in establishing a sort of mental aerial perspective. As he had explained earlier in his journal, and as he undoubtedly now explained to Annabelle, this involved the sorting of landscape by distance, beginning with the shore of the next island, followed by the intervening water, then the shore of the mainland, the barracks of the military school, the taller buildings and steeples of Kingston, and then the far-off deep purple of the now completely deforested hills to the north. Why ranges? Annabelle might well have asked. Like rows of mountains, her brother would have replied, one range behind another. Better would have been the sails of ships placed side by side in a harbor and looked at from the end of a peninsula, she had thought, but did not say so aloud. Instead she asked about Marie, about whether her brother ever thought about what might have become of her.

  Branwell, to Annabelle’s annoyance, probably would have continued to squint into the distance, and even more maddening from Annabelle’s point of view the young man probably would have been making all those self-conscious gestures with thumbs and fingers at right angles, gestures that suggest that artists are intending to frame one view or another. Stop doing that, Annabelle very likely would have said, judging from her character, stop doing that and answer my question. What he answered we will never know. In fact we will never know whether the question was posed, though my father seemed to think that it would have been, that it had been, because shortly after this Branwell began to write in his journal again. One of the entries for that spring included not only the direction and speed of the winds and breezes but also the fact that Annabelle had been lighting a great number of unnecessary fires, and that she had asked him a question that had caused his mind to become troubled in the extreme.

  Annabelle, meanwhile, had been visited by an unshakeable notion. The river was free of ice by now and each day ships docked at the island’s quays and unloaded an enormous quantity of timber onto the island – if it were to be used for shipbuilding – or into the bay opposite to that of the nautical graveyard if it were to be poled downstream to Quebec. Teams of Frenchmen were to be seen busily assembling timber rafts, leaping from log to log like frantic squirrels, and shouting a variety of curses and commands that seemed neither to be directed at any particular individual nor related to a specific task. Still, the rafts, which were like islands themselves, sprang into being and sprouted small bunkhouses on their surfaces with remarkable swiftness, and they could be seen moving away, like large swimming animals, into the current of the river, heading east, as they had for as long as Annabelle could remember whenever the river was open to navigation.

  Branwell’s father had informed him that, in order to better learn the business, and to familiarize himself with the timber merchants in Quebec City, he would be required to make several journeys on board these rafts over the course of the season. When he complained about this to Annabelle, one afternoon on Signal Point, she announced that when their father was safely away on business in Toronto or visiting the remaining forests of the upp
er Great Lakes, she would be boarding a raft herself, going with him out on the river.

  Her brother laughed, of course, at this ridiculous suggestion and told her, as he confessed in his journal, that she had taken leave of her senses. “There is something that needs to be done,” she apparently said to him, “something you will come to understand.” Her last fire would have been collapsing into embers as she said this, and the water that surrounded the island would have been lively with sails, the harbor bristling with masts. She had made her decision. Her fires had been on the wrong side of the island after all. Her brother was weak. He needed direction. He needed looking after.

  Annabelle recalled that the night Branwell had first visited Marie’s bed, she herself had been out in the yard until midnight painting the ships across the water in Kingston Harbor by the light of the August moon. Branwell had said that if she added fire to the scene its light would compete with that of the moon to bad effect. She had paid no attention to his advice. How am I to see the schooners at night if not by the light of the moon? she asked. You could slip across the water and set them alight, her brother had teased in response. And all the time he was thinking of Marie, of how to draw nearer to her.

  In the five years since Marie’s arrival in their household, whenever Branwell was home from boarding school, Annabelle had watched him try various means to catch and hold the hired girl’s attention. He had taunted her unmercifully, and when she did not respond with enough vehemence to the suggestion, for instance, that her attic was filled with bats, or the kitchen alive with mice, he had taken to making jokes, usually on the subject of her French heritage. Sometime later, he occasionally refused to eat the appetizing and decorative pies and pastries Mackenzie allowed Marie to make, culinary creations for which the girl seemed to have a special gift and ones that she presented with pride at family dinners. Annabelle suspected that Branwell barely knew what he was up to, and half-despised himself when he did this. It hadn’t escaped Annabelle’s notice that when he trailed around after Marie while she was straightening up the house, or criticized her work, or now and then tugged on the one black braid that hung down her back, the bewildered expression on his face in no way matched the authoritarian tone of voice he was attempting to achieve. In the past year or so, though, her brother’s behavior had ameliorated somewhat in relation to Marie: he had become quiet, almost thoughtful in her presence, and could be seen smiling at the girl in a wistful way across a room. And then, one Saturday afternoon, when she and Marie were busy with sewing, Annabelle had followed the direction of Branwell’s focused gaze and had realized that he was staring, with a considerable amount of intensity, at Marie’s downcast face.