Divorce, disgrace. The failure of a marriage. Should she accept his offer, the failure would be her inheritance as much as his.
She closed her eyes and realized she could succumb to the longing to be loved. A kiss. His hands would slide to the small of her back. She would bend and fall back.
She saw how far she would fall, then, from the woman she was in the process of becoming.
PART IV September 1889 – June 1890
TWENTY Brass Duck
FLORA STOOD IN THE dust and scraps of the empty workshop. She felt a childlike rush of tears.
He was sweeping the floor, his mouth ugly.
“Did they…did they like it, Mr. Tuck?”
He stopped and crossed his arms, imitating her. “Did they like it, Mr. Tuck? What do you think?”
“I just would like to have seen…”
She would like to have seen the sisters exclaim over the perfect, tiny carpets. The curtains, with their barely visible stitches. The matchstick windows, the feather-light tables. She would have liked to have seen how they did not notice glue, brads, all the meticulous work of measuring, whittling and sanding, but saw only their results, like something from a fairy tale. Oh, Rosamund, isn’t it exquisite? Don’t you love it?
He was in a terrible temper. “Oh, they liked it good enough. They liked it.”
“Well, maybe they will show it to other people and we will get more orders.”
“Somebody snitched to them as to how I was taking advantage of you. Must have been what you told that one who didn’t order. That Mrs. Dunfield.”
“I never…”
“Told me they would ‘withhold’ a certain amount of what was owing unless I promised it would go straight to you. So I promised. But it ain’t. Going to you. Because I put down good money for that dress and you won’t wear it, so now you’ll work for me until you earn back what I paid for it.”
“You could take the amount they were going to withhold and put it towards the dress.”
“You think that will be enough? Hey?”
Flora turned away and pressed her forehead to the window. It was the first day of September, the sky a brilliant blue, the clouds larger, closer.
He had laid hands on her once. She would give him no reason to do so again. The sock filled with coins, hidden beneath the floorboard, was becoming heavy. She did not know what else she could do to make money. Every effort she made in that regard—eggs, mittens, butter—went towards maintaining Josephine’s household.
He slammed the broom into its corner, picked up a scrub brush and dipped it into a bucket of water and lye. He drew the bristles deep into the grain of the table, bore down.
“I’ll wear the dress. It was just too hot, that’s all. I’ll try to order up another house. I can tell people to go to see Hilltop. I can ask the sisters if they would mind.”
He avoided her eyes, muttered something to himself.
“What?” she said. She wanted to snatch the brush and throw it in his face. “I didn’t hear.”
“Never you mind,” he said. “Just git.”
—
The following day, at breakfast, Ellen noticed dark circles beneath Flora’s eyes and a corresponding anxiety in Enid. Josephine, as well, seemed unaccountably agitated, as she had for several days.
Get them out of the house…
She sent the girls to the grocery store.
“I can’t make my cookies until I get more oatmeal and molasses. Beds can wait.”
Enid and Flora walked down the hill. Frost lay as if strewn from buckets—behind sheds, in ditches. A maid stood on a veranda, shaking a small carpet; dust rose in a cloud and then unravelled.
“He thought if I wore the dress I would be able to sell the houses.”
“Why, Flora? Why do you have to wear the dress?”
To hide the guttersnipe. To make me a lady.
Flora sought patience, impatient not with Enid but with the situation she found herself in. Mr. Tuck, and his sulks. The miniature houses, only an idea, now, since the house they had made was gone.
“Anyway,” Flora said. “I said I’d put the thing on and go around again.”
Enid said nothing, and Flora, waiting for a response—commiseration, perhaps, or protest—could not read her expression.
—
After lunch, Enid went out to the garden. The shell bean vines had collapsed, their leaves crunchy. Red and white speckled beans pushed open the stiff pods. She pulled the plants up by the roots and piled them in the wheelbarrow. She pushed the wheelbarrow into the barn and gathered the beans into bunches, weaving lengths of string into the dry, wish-boned stems. Behind her, large doors stood open, framing the green fields, the red and golden hardwoods spiked with spruce trees.
She wore a brown gingham dress with full sleeves. An apron. She had stuffed her hair into a cap, tied at the back.
Jasper Tuck opened the door of the workshop.
His hair fell over his forehead, shading his eyes. He leaned against the wall, ankles crossed.
“You want some nails? For to hang them?”
“Oh.” She looked up at the barn wall, where she had thought to find enough protuberances to hang the bunched beans.
He went back into the workshop and came back with a hammer and nails. He set a neat line of nails along the wall.
This morning Ellen had wondered aloud what Mr. Tuck was doing with himself, now that he had finished Hilltop.
Lots of things he could be doing. Mr. Dougan, now. Would have fixed that latticework. Would have glazed them storm windows.
I could ask him, Josephine had mused. But I can’t pay him, you see.
It occurred to Enid that they were all, to some degree, afraid of Mr. Tuck, although aside from moodiness he gave them no reason to be.
Enid lifted the handles of the wheelbarrow. She saw the subtle, almost unconscious motion of his hand, bidding her to set them down.
“You like it here?”
“Do you
