“Flora is the beautiful one,” she said. She felt the need to explain this so he would not expect too much.
He stepped closer, held her shoulders.
“She might be the beautiful one. But you and me. You and me, Enid. We’re a secret, the two of us. Aren’t we?”
He raised a finger to stroke back a strand of hair that lay across her forehead but changed it into a warning shake.
Teasing, she thought. He left the workshop and again stood under the tree. Her own gingham dress was like a wilted leaf, softened by washing and the sunshine and snap of the clothesline. She tied the strings of her cap. There were more beans to pick, rows and rows, lying dead and dry in the soil.
—
Enid told Flora that she had met a girl who was working in one of the other big houses on Creek Road. Sometimes she and this girl, Colleen, would walk in the pastures up behind the houses.
Flora felt a pang of jealousy and chastised herself for it. Enid had never had a friend.
—
September drew to a close. After supper, darkness sifted down and the few feeble crickets fell silent. With dishes done and the house readied for morning, Flora and Enid went up to their bedroom to study.
“What are you reading, Flora?” Enid asked. She was practising her addition. 11 + 17. 23 + 10.
“Then all around was heard the crash of trees / Trembling awhile and rushing to the ground. It’s a book about how men and oxen cut down all the trees and turned the forests into farms.”
Rustle of turning page. The scratching of Enid’s pencil.
Flora dropped her forehead onto the heels of her hands and stared at the poem’s illustration, an etching of mighty trees and men swinging axes; the largest of the trees was in the process of falling, and Flora felt sad for it, and for the young birch trees that bent beneath it. Mr. Tuck had not asked her to go out prospecting for new customers, and so there were no little houses to make. Josephine relied on her to keep the boarding house running; this was Flora’s work, yet it yielded only room and board. She had only erratic slices of available time, which were all right for a job with Mr. Tuck; but she did not see how she could work in the tannery or the boot and shoe factory or the steam laundry. Mr. Tuck had not asked her to go around in the dress. His face was closed, forbidding. She figured he was hatching a new plan.
Flora wondered if she and Enid would ever leave this house, no matter how far they furthered their education.
She pictured the drawer filled with banknotes. Orange, grey and green.
—
Occasionally, Enid waited for Mr. Tuck on a side street. She wore the dress, concealed by a cloak. He picked her up with a horse and buggy from the livery stable.
Enid knocked on doors. If admitted, she unrolled large pencil drawings that Jasper Tuck had made of his creations. She explained about the similitude of the reproduction. Who is the maker? she was asked. Mr. Tuck had told her not to point him out as he waited in the buggy. She was to say that Mr. Jasper Tuck had recently moved to town and that he constructed these houses in his own workshop. Should you be interested, Enid said, we kin ask if those as owns one of his little houses can let you see it. She stood straight and fearless, proud of herself in the beautiful dress. Women sent her away with cookies or a loaf of bread. They smiled, giving her pats on the shoulder and glancing at the man on the buggy as they followed Enid to their doorways. One asked if Mr. Jasper Tuck was her father.
After the third such visit, Mr. Tuck no longer spoke when she climbed back into the buggy. His eyes skipped to the closing door, the face in the window. His expression masked any emotion. He lifted the reins and clucked to the horse.
—
Josephine took down the Simpkin’s Tooth Powder monthly calendar from its nail and turned it to October. There was more sky visible between the branches; the rooms of the house seemed larger in the unimpeded light.
“Do you remember the pirates?” she asked Carrie, who had stopped to visit. Carrie was on her way to the train station, heading back to St. John after visiting her parents in Whelan’s Cove.
“I remember it more as a sensation,” Carrie said. The turret room was chill, and both women wore merino shawls. “With pictures strewn around like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.” She spoke briskly. “My dear dead dog, Gig. I remember that. And how I helped my mother make my father’s hair into little braids to bind the wound.”
Josephine realized she should not have forced this from her husband’s cousin, who had never asked her how she had felt upon visiting the scene of Simeon’s death.
“I’m sorry, I should not have asked.”
Flora came in with a plate of oatmeal cookies, fresh from the oven. Carrie’s eyes followed her as she left the room.
“She seems sad,” she said. “Is she still pursuing her studies?”
Josephine felt a pang of guilt, realizing her own preoccupation ever since the precarious moment with Mr. Fairweather. “Yes, I believe she studies in the evening with Enid.”
“What will become of them? The sisters?” Carrie leaned forward to take a cookie from the plate. “They must have a life of their own, someday.”
Her eyes were calm, as if the question were simple, but Josephine saw it encumbered with Carrie’s understanding of what constituted a life—women as players in a political drama, their choices weighted with historical significance. Josephine wanted to protest that she had saved the girls from poverty and degradation. She wanted Carrie to acknowledge the gracious house with its linens and
