“Which she is not, certainly,” he said. “The Mallory case is going to court. I received a letter. Both man and woman are in prison. No doubt the poor woman is glad enough to be under a sound roof. They have written to say there is no need for Enid to testify. I came, today, in fact, to tell you this.” He lowered his voice. “They found the boy’s body. The wife has said that he was…” He avoided her eyes. “Abused.”
She snapped a bean, thinking that her own future was no longer bleak. Thunder rumbled away down the valley, leaving the quickening patter of raindrops.
“I can keep Flora and Enid,” she said. “I can keep them. Maud will leave soon. I really could not run this boarding house without Flora.”
He took a long breath through his nose and closed his eyes. “If you would let me…help pay…”
She felt intimacy rush up, violent as the thunder. You. Me. A matter of allowing, after being asked. Yes, she thought, immediately, a reflex, pleased. And then, after a moment, heard the newly learned response: no, of course not.
Blood rushed to her face. She picked a stray stem end from her skirt.
—
“If I could just see it,” Enid pleaded. They were washing dishes, after supper. The thunderstorm had blown over, but they could still hear a far-off, intermittent rumble. The new cat, a stray, crouched over a bowl of milk, shoulder blades like grasshopper’s legs.
“It’s just a house,” Flora said. She swirled the dishcloth over the bottom of a cast-iron frying pan and handed the pan to Enid, who dried it and hung it on a hook behind the wood stove. For once, Ellen was not in the kitchen. Mr. Dougan had stopped by for a visit and she had taken him out back to inspect the raspberry canes he had planted last summer.
“Not the house. Course I would like to see that, too, Flora. And all them little bitty things.”
“Those. Those things.”
Enid sighed, annoyed.
“Those little bitty things, then.”
She picked up a cut-glass sugar bowl, examined it closely, running the tips of her fingers between the pyramids. “Mr. Sprague knocked over the pitcher that matches this, didn’t he?”
Flora watched her, hands working in the soapy water, feeling for the cupcake moulds. Enid’s face, in its new fullness, was perhaps a version of the father Flora could barely remember. Round brown eyes. Hair darker than Flora’s, strands of red and brown mingled with the blonde. Yet people said to them, Oh, you must be sisters. My sister. I have a sister. Flora felt the wonder of it, that she was not alone.
“He did,” Flora confirmed. “He talks with his hands.”
Enid’s giggle came like rain after thunder, released. She put her hand over her mouth.
“Flora. I meant the dress.”
“What are you talking about? Here.” Flora dumped a handful of the cupcake moulds in the wire drainer.
“Your dress. That Mr. Tuck got for you. I want to see it.”
Enid had been talking about the dress ever since Flora had told her about it. To still her curiosity, Flora described it in detail. The soft white wool, the blue velvet underdress.
“Enid. It’s not my dress. It’s his. It’s like…it’s like one of his tools. It’s just a thing to make us more money.”
“But I…”
Enid set down one of the cupcake moulds. She had dried it with extreme care, as Flora had instructed, so that no rust would form at the tin seams. Swallows nesting in the eaves, above the open kitchen window, made a sweet, contented chirping, like pegs being turned in tight holes.
“I would like to try it on,” she whispered. “I never wore a dress like that. Think I would feel like a princess.”
Flora’s hands continued to work in the soapy water, gathering the forks, pinching and working her thumb along their tines. As evening gathered the light, the house darkened, drawn towards its nighttime self—captured gold in the nap of chairs and cushions, books beneath glass-shaded lamps—and she traced a thought so complex she could not express it, how she and Enid were at the beginning of their life together, sheltered beneath this stout and complex roof, caught in the mesh of Josephine’s family; and yet, still, she felt the thing that she and Enid had never been without—danger, fear—so familiar as to be an essential part of them. The fear seemed to be growing, since she could not trust that this house would always be theirs. For it would not. One day, they would be cast to the winds like fledgling birds. She and Enid were still alone, and the danger, she realized, was that of the two worlds she had begun to inhabit—Josephine’s and Mr. Tuck’s—it was his with which she was most closely aligned and upon which their survival depended.
I can do it, though, she thought, lifting a handful of forks and dumping them in the drainer. She pictured her work for Mr. Tuck like a path which she must follow with extreme caution, navigating places which ordinarily she would avoid.
“No,” she said. “He wouldn’t let you try it on, Enid. I’m his saleswoman, that’s all it is. It’s just a costume. You keep your mind on reading, writing and arithmetic.”
Flora untied her apron and hung it on the wooden rack. She turned from the rack and saw that her sister was staring bleakly out the window, dishcloth hanging in her hands, and wondered if Enid had been seized by the treachery of memory, if the coming of dark reminded her of nights in the Nova Scotia house.
NINETEEN A Dark Ghost
SHE PULLED UP HER sleeve, studied her wrist. Scratched.
“There’s a sale on in Hampton, tomorrow, at the hardware store,” Flora told Josephine. “Mr. Tuck asked me if
