“Racket,” he remarked. “Them birds.”
Those birds, she thought, but said nothing. Mr. Tuck was not a person with whom you became more familiar the longer you knew him, but rather less so. She could not reconcile all the parts of his personality; fussy, tough. Crooning teases, then hands grinding her shoulders. He was like a dog into whose eyes you could not gaze for fear of a sudden bite. And yet, he’d rescued the other boarders, lost in the storm. He kept his room immaculate. He paid his bills. Perhaps it was because he was alone in a place where every person had parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. A place where people’s minds were dense and rich with memories whose recounting formed a language of its own—sentences that need not be completed; names, words or remarks that evoked laughter or the shadow of remembered grief. A place where, as a single man, he should be a member of something—church, civic group, club, skating team, cornet band—and was not. Perhaps, she reassured herself, it was only his solitude, like her own, that she pitied. And feared.
PART III June 1889 – August 1889
FOURTEEN Turrets and Gables
JASPER TUCK WORKED LONG into the evenings, a lingering twilight reflected in the workshop window until almost ten. It was June, and the miniature house was framed, sided and roofed. He was making the intricate turrets and gables.
Flora sat at the kitchen table. She was polishing silverware that she’d soaked in a solution of salt and baking soda, then washed in warm, soapy water. In the half-dark, a sugar bowl shone as she rubbed it with a piece of cotton. She was working late to make up for the time she’d given Mr. Tuck during the afternoon. She felt a gathering frustration, a longing to be preparing for Enid.
The next day, as she worked for Mr. Tuck, he noticed a slip of her knife.
“You got to take your time,” he said. “I ain’t got wood to spare.”
She hunched over her table, folding her lips between her teeth, slicing cedar into fine strips.
“Sorry.”
Sighing, stretching, she looked out the window. Fat raindrops were battering the lush summer leaves. She watched with a flicker of envy as Maud let herself out the back door, raised an umbrella, and set off down the lane with a basket over her arm.
Making windows, cutting strips of wood, laying down glue with a toothpick, teasing the squares of glass into place. Her fingers, though much smaller than Mr. Tuck’s, were less dextrous. She could not draw the glue in as fine a stripe. Her knife, held less firmly, was too easily misdirected by twisted grain.
He ran a metal file along a board’s edge with short, practised strokes.
“You hear anything about your sister?”
“Nothing more. We know where she is but no one answers our letters. Mr. Fairweather must find a time to go get her. Or maybe search for her.”
He hung the file, cleared the dust from his work table with a piece of flannel. She noticed that he eradicated every trace of creation, just as he made the miniature house to be so perfect as to bear no mark of its maker.
“I got something for you,” he said. “Not for you, exactly.” He rose from his workbench.
She only half heard what Mr. Tuck said. She sat back, sighing, hunching her head into her shoulders, drawing her shoulder blades together. Nubs for sprouting wings, her mother had said. One day you will have angel wings. After their mother died, Flora had told Enid that their mother had grown wings. White, like our chickens, but much bigger.
“Did you have a little brother or sister?”
She could not contain the question. She would have asked it of whoever was in her presence at that moment.
He paused and studied her, tongue thrust over his upper teeth, a snakelike plumping. He returned to his chair and sat back, one leg crossed over the other. Blue trousers, sawdust-speckled. Shirt open at the neck, the sleeves rolled. His hair was oily, slicked back over his forehead.
“I did. He was…”
He drew a finger along the edge of the workbench.
“What? He was what?”
“I told you my mum and da died on the ferry. Drowned, eh?” He tipped his head back until his mouth slacked open. “I had a little brother. I didn’t tell you about him, did I?”
“No.”
He sighed. He closed his eyes and pressed fingers to forehead, his lips moving against the palm of his hand.
“He was just a baby. I remember him. I was big enough to pick him up. There was a little boy used to come to our house. He was the child of my ma’s best friend. On this one day, when I wasn’t home, the women were gabbing or drinking tea or some such in the front room. The baby’s carriage was in the kitchen, by the stove. It was winter. The baby was fast asleep and that little boy lifted our baby out of its carriage so carefully the baby didn’t make a peep. He went out the back door and carried him down the road and threw him over the railroad bridge into the river.”
“Oh.” She cried out, horrified. “Oh, Mr. Tuck.”
“Shouldn’t have told you. You’ll have fits like me mum.”
Pattering rain. Smell of drenched lilacs.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Your poor mother.”
He came over and touched her shoulder, lightly. She did not flinch, consumed by the thought of him bearing this monstrous story all his life.
“I have something for you, like I said.”
He squatted by a chest, lifted the lid. She heard a rustle of paper. He stood, a dress laid over his arms like a limp girl.
“I want you to try this on.”
“Whatever for?”
“For you to wear
