“Harland, in these months since Simeon died, I have felt extreme affection for you. If things were otherwise, if…you, for example, were a widower…I might have considered…”
She could not say there is a difference between affection and love.
His eyes filled with tears. The boarders vanished into the dining room. He took her hand and lifted it to his cheek.
He pressed his lips to it.
He laid it back, gently.
“I suppose, then, that I should not visit.”
“Not without Permelia,” Josephine said.
He stood. She, too, rose to her feet, letting the apron cascade from its folds as she tied it around her waist. His polished shoes were silent on the carpet; he stepped across a slant of light like crossing a brook. He stopped with his hand on the doorknob. They could hear the clash of cutlery; Flora’s voice, less English, now.
He opened the front door, paused as if to speak, looked at his shoes. He walked down the drive, and she remembered when he had remarked upon his father, The Commodore, who exercised—rain or shine—with his little dog, and how she had thought, then, of the loneliness of old age.
—
Ellen pushed a kettle of beans to the back of the stove, added a stick of wood to the firebox. She sat in her rocking chair and did not pick up her knitting. Maud did not open her history book. Josephine gathered a white shawl around her neck. Flora and Enid sat in chairs at the kitchen table, their pencils dropped onto pages of arithmetic.
“What he must have thought of us,” Ellen said. “Serving him dinner. Would you like milk with your tea, Mr. Tuck?”
“I should have turned him from the door,” Flora said. “I should have said, We have no more rooms.”
“But how could you have known, Flora? He was a perfectly decent- looking man. No, if there is fault it is mine. I should have asked around before taking a stranger into my home. Our home,” Josephine added, glancing at Maud.
Flora wondered if George was still encouraging his sisters to sell the house, or if their determined resistance had made the idea fade away. Still, Josephine would never own the house; once the children achieved their majority, if they did not sell the house but allowed their mother to continue living in it, would she need to pay them rent? Would she be able to keep Ellen, Flora and Enid? Flora did not know, but imagined this as a worry that darkened Josephine’s relationship with her children. Nor did Josephine entirely own the furniture, or anything else in the house. She managed the property. Her best recourse would be to remarry. Flora had noted that Mr. Fairweather had ceased visiting and that Josephine seemed quieter, and yet, oddly, at peace.
Maud pressed a hot facecloth to her pimply forehead. “It makes me feel sick. To think how he would have been laughing at us. Being polite to a murderer. Thinking that he was an ordinary person. When he was—when he is—a monster.”
Josephine reached forward to pat Enid’s shoulder. “Never fear, Enid. He will not come around here again. Somewhere, someday, he will be hunted down and caught and brought to justice.”
“Maybe,” Ellen said. “Or not…”
Flora caught revelation in her tone. “Why do you say that, Ellen?”
It had come upon them, tonight, after the dishes had been washed and dried and put away: the reckoning. A gash had closed, and yet would not be healed until the manner of its affliction was discussed.
“I should tell you,” Ellen said. “I should tell you, and you’ll not see me in the same way ever again.”
Josephine glanced at her, surprised.
Ellen picked up a pair of stork scissors. Snipped threads from her apron with its beaky blades.
“Well, then. My father was a man something like Jasper Tuck. Fine looking, made the ladies take pity on him with stories of, oh, you know, being ill done by one thing or another. We had a cow and pigs and all…and I suppose he did the odd job, being a child I didn’t know, just that he reeled home from the pub after dark and when me Ma heard his steps on the road she hid me and my little brother away out of sight. I never knew what it was she’d done wrong, that he had to come home to punish her. I thought that it must be me he wanted, for badness I’d done. I thought she took my part, the slaps across the face, the punches, the kicks when she was knocked down on the floor moaning with her poor arms covering her head. Me under the bed or peeping through the wardrobe door. So the one night, he tripped and struck his head and then he didn’t move. I remember how quiet come over the house. How long she sat there, like a dog, panting. Then she put a mirror to his mouth, put her fingers to his neck. She tied his hands behind his back and she tied his ankles together and she took a pillow from the bed and she…”
Fingers pressed against her lips, Ellen took a long breath.
“…sat on his head.”
Flora covered Enid’s hand with her own, sliding her fingers into the grooves between the knuckles.
“…flopped around…Then he was dead. She untied his arms and legs. Put the pillow back on the bed. Not a one of us, not me nor her nor me brother, not a one of us ever said a word. We went to the funeral and not a person in the village as didn’t pity us.”
“Good for her,” Maud breathed.
“I’m as good as a murderer, you see.”
“He would have killed your mother one day,” Flora said. “Oh, I heard stories in the workhouse. Your mother was as good as dead, Ellen, and she knew it. She had no choice.”
Josephine, shocked, sat
