I am,
Yours truly,
Reverend Charles Snelcroft
Harland stood by the window, holding the reverend’s letter to the light. Permelia, in the kitchen, was engaged in a shouting match with the cook.
“Let me go, then. I’ll go back to me own people.”
There had been a burned crust on the apple pie. He was certain that Permelia raised her voice for his benefit, since the stove was, in fact, in need of replacement. She had brought him an advertisement for a nickel- plated range, pointing out the capacity of its water reservoir, the size of its oven, its nickelled towel rod and teapot stand, its handsome skirting.
Against the sky, the flag’s snap or sag revealed the wind. Just now, it hung limp, as if spent.
Variation within a pattern, he thought, looking at his notebooks, yearning to sit at them for an entire day, comparing temperatures, humidity, pressures and wind speeds for all his recorded Marches. He would comfort himself with the earth’s renewal, how its season of torment and persecution faded in fits and starts, how it did not cease its stubborn efforts.
He would take the letter with him to the store; from the quiet of his office, he would write to Josephine. Please tell Flora…He imagined travelling to Nova Scotia with Josephine and Flora. Dismissed the idea, as if should it linger in his mind Permelia would prise it out like a spider in a cupboard.
—
Sailor lay at Josephine’s feet, snuffling for fleas. The piano had been shifted to provide a bulwark, giving her privacy in the turret room, although on this Friday morning the house was empty save for Ellen, in the kitchen, and Flora, who sat facing her. Pots of geraniums—coral pink, red, white—bloomed in the deep windowsills.
“You know, Flora, I can’t help but think that it is bad for us to wear these corsets,” Josephine said. She sighed and then coughed. Sailor looked up, sharply, and she dropped a hand to stroke his head. “They make actual dents in my flesh. And I can’t breathe, you know. I really can’t. I’ve read that the organs are displaced and that the muscles of our backs become flaccid.”
Flora, sitting on a satin-cushioned chair, felt incomplete without handwork and was unaccountably nervous, not knowing why she had been summoned and sensing, in Josephine, some unwarranted mood. Josephine would never invite Ellen to visit her in the parlour—like a friend, come for a visit.
“Carrie doesn’t wear one,” Flora murmured, embarrassed by the subject yet emboldened by the currency that intimacy offered. “She told me so. She said it is a thing that men want us to do so that we can be beautiful objects, like a horse or a fancy house.”
“She might be right,” Josephine said, pulling back her shoulders.
They sat listening to the patter of rain on the window. Flora gazed up at the trees, indistinct against the sky, like charcoal sketches. The smell of smoke from the kitchen stove sharpened the room’s bookish odours.
“This room is so special,” Josephine said. Sailor raised an eyebrow.
“Why is it special?” Flora asked. She folded her hands; unclasped them, pressed palm to palm; slid her fingers into a fist.
“Simeon asked me what I wanted in a house. Tell me one thing, he said. One thing I had always dreamed of. Would it be a widow’s walk, he asked? So I could stand in all weathers and watch for his return? Would it be a gazebo in the garden? Or a library of my own? I said I would like a place of windows, round, with cushioned seats and stained glass and deep sills for ferns and flowers. So that I could have summer in winter. We sketched it together, drawing after drawing, until we created a room that both of us loved. He added the pointed roof, like a dwarf’s cap from a fairy tale. I designed the stained glass. Calla lilies.”
She leaned forward to trace one with a fingertip.
“I couldn’t sell this house—how…how could I?”
Tears welled in her eyes.
“You know, Flora, I thought that when I arrived on Ocracoke Island I would find that there had been a misidentification. That they’d given me some other man’s possessions. I have a dream that comes night after night. A man appears at the far end of a beach, so far away that he is but a black speck, and he walks towards me, and suddenly I see that it is Simeon. He begins to run and I, too, run. The sand drags at my feet, and I stumble, panting, calling his name, holding my arms out. For months, I have dreamed this same dream.”
“I have a dream just like that,” Flora said. “I dream that I see Enid on a road. At first, I can’t tell if it’s her or not. Then I begin to run. I always wake up too soon.”
Josephine lifted her finger from the stained glass, slightly bewildered, and Flora realized that she had awakened to the fact that she spoke not to a friend of her own status, but with a workhouse girl, who, once, might have been called a guttersnipe. She turned to the table and lifted a letter, worked spectacles onto her nose.
“Mr. Fairweather has found someone who knows where Enid was placed.”
Flora’s hands flew up; she slid to the edge of her chair.
“Enid? Enid, my sister Enid?”
Josephine put the letter down, pulled off her spectacles. “Oh, Flora. I’m so sorry. I read it just like an ordinary thing, didn’t I? She was placed with…let me see…a Mr. Mallory. Mr. Albert Mallory, on a farm in Black Creek. On the Northumberland Shore of Nova Scotia.”
Sailor opened his mouth in a sudden pant. He looked back and forth between them, his eyes anxious.
Flora flushed with a complexity of feelings she could not control or disentangle, stunned that Josephine
