“Ellen, Ellen. Please.” Harland sighed, putting his head back against the chair.
Josephine, pouring tea, was thinking about a rumour Maud had overheard when standing in a line at the grocery store. Mr. Fairweather is seeing quite a lot of Mrs. Galloway.
—
Flora sat beneath the window, reading aloud from a small book with gilt-edged pages. Enid, in bed, held her knees, the quilt around her shoulders.
“…and her daughter secretly warned the travellers to be very careful not to eat or drink anything as the old woman’s brews were apt to be dangerous. They went to bed and…”
Enid drew a long breath and laid her cheek on her knees.
Flora closed the book on her finger and stared out the window. A leaf fell, twirling. They had heard Mr. Fairweather send away the reporters. They had heard him come into the house.
They listened to the drumming of rain. A blue jay cried.
“So sad,” Enid said, her jaw working against her knee. “That bird. Like he’s lost someone.”
Flora watched the raindrops.
“What are you thinking about, Flora?” Enid murmured, still looking sideways, her gaze unfocused.
“How the rain is like nothing becoming something.”
“No, really.”
“How everyone is talking about us. How it seems like we can’t get away from bad things. How it’s like we were born nothing, and we will stay nothing.”
Flora’s hair pillowed at the nape of her neck, held off her white lace collar by a blue ribbon. Her eyes were resolute, sorrowful.
Enid whispered, “Flora, you are so beautiful. Just to look at you is to see goodness.”
“It’s only a danger,” Flora said. “It makes men want us. Like possessions.”
“I know,” Enid said.
“Why do you think he took that duck, Enid? I think it’s the strangest thing. Just a toy.”
“I think…”
Enid could not speak of Mr. Tuck without tears. She had turned the duck over to the constables. The dress, too, had been confiscated.
“I think he wanted it same as why I wanted it. I don’t feel sorry for him, Flora. I think he is a madman. But maybe…maybe once he was a boy like Fred. Maybe it was a part of not being poor. To have a thing, for no reason. Just a toy.”
The sisters listened to the sound of the rain, a hushing. Flora opened the book and resumed reading, her voice gentle, even though the story uncoiled a tale of the worst and the best of human nature.
—
Nothing was heard of Mr. Tuck. No hotels reported seeing him. He was not spotted at any train station. No stories were brought in from the countryside of a man asking for food and shelter. No vagrant was sighted in any town. Constables could not locate him in Moncton, St. John or Fredericton.
The horse and carriage, however, were found and duly returned.
—
A week after Enid’s ordeal, Flora and Enid decided they must face Mr. Tuck’s workshop. Their shoes left black circles in the morning’s silvered grass as they crossed the lawn to the barn. Stepping over the threshold, Enid began to tremble and Flora took her hand.
“It’s all right, Enid. He’s not coming back.”
The tiny tools were gone. The dresser drawer hung open.
“I wish there were something of his,” Enid said. “I want to smash it.”
Flora looked at the chair where she had spent hours cutting out pieces of carpet, or sewing, or making the miniature windows.
“He’s gone,” Flora said, “But he’s not. He’s out in the world, waiting to find another woman to use. Or kill. He let another man hang for his crime.”
They listened to the drip of melting frost; the croon of hens on the other side of the wall.
Enid stared around the workshop. “I thought I seen the worst with Mr. Mallory and Fred. I feel like I can’t go out in the world. I feel like I got to just stay in my bed.”
“We have each other. Fred didn’t have anyone. Fred thought no one loved him.”
“I loved him. The dog loved him.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Enid. Fred probably didn’t know what love was.”
She thought of how she herself knew more about love now, having suffered the cruel possibility of its loss. How it was a thing like light. You could not describe it to a person who had never seen it. And yet, indescribable, it was something you trusted when, lonely in the dead of night, you waited for morning.
“I got to ruin something that was his,” Enid said. She was pacing around the room, touching the bench, opening a cupboard door. “Are we bad girls, Flora?”
Flora had wondered the same. She had determined to value herself by the degree of kindness so freely given by the Creek Road household.
“We are good, Enid. We have always been good. And now we live with good people. Josephine, Ellen, Maud…” She spread her fingers, tipped her palm towards the house.
“Yes,” Enid said. “Yes, we are so lucky. Flora, let’s just sit here for awhile.”
Flora sat at her old place. Enid slid gingerly onto Mr. Tuck’s chair.
Flora wondered if Ellen, too, thought of herself as a bad person. If not bad, then less. She pushed down her rage against Mr. Tuck because she did not know what she would do with it when it came.
“We will have to be on our guard for the rest of our lives, Enid,” she murmured. “Not only for him but for the likes of him.”
Flora watched her sister, who slumped, chin in hand. Brown and green plaid dress, the body burgeoning beneath it, womanly—yet in Enid’s eyes, such sadness. As if she were still running, trying to leave something behind, knowing it would come again. A threat, in unknown form.
“I know, Enid,” she said. “I know what we should do.”
TWENTY-THREE Reckonings
FLORA AND ENID SAT side by side on a small divan. Outside, men scaled ladders, installing storm windows. Enid’s hand was poised as if to pleat her skirt, but then clenched against the impulse; Flora noticed how
