The Sister's Tale Beth Powning (dar e dil novel online reading .TXT) 📖

in Margaret’s room. Next to Ellen. And Flora is just across the hall.”

“At least you have your own bed.” Lucy smoothed the coverlet. “I have to sleep with a snoring girl. I use six inches of the mattress and she has the rest.”

Maud sat at a small table. Fingerless gloves were draped on a pile of school books.

“Maud, what do you think of George’s plan?”

“To sell the house?” Maud picked up the gloves and pulled them onto her hands, slowly, not looking at her sister. “I don’t like to think about it. This is home.”

“Home? Not the home I knew.”

“No,” Maud said. She folded her hands and her eyes filled with tears. “Of course not. It’s not the same home. Not without Father.”

“Oh, Maudie. I meant…”

“It’s too soon to be talking like this,” Maud said, suddenly vehement. “You and George. Talking about selling this house.”

Lucy picked at a loose thread in the coverlet, cast a sly look at her plain, earnest sister. “We do need to consider it, you know.” Her voice was pleasant.

“Don’t take that tone with me. I am so sick of it, Lucy. I’m the one who is helping Mother with her grief. I’m the one who has to see our home turn into a…”

“But you know, Maud, once you turn twenty-one, it becomes our house. Yours and mine and George’s. Not Mother’s.”

“We all need to agree, and I will never turn Mother out of her home.” Her hands trembled, tearing off the fingerless gloves. She slapped them down.

“A smaller place would be better for her, Maud. All of this, you know. It’s just keeping up appearances. When in truth, you’re now living like servants. You are servants. To those…boarders.”

“You are a hypocrite, Lucy.”

Now Lucy’s cheeks flared. She sat up straight and glared at her sister.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Yes, you are. You speak of women’s rights, yet you treat Mother like a child. You treat honest work as if it were demeaning. You and George. You are thinking only of yourselves.”

Lucy was silent. Maud fussed with the gloves, glancing up at Lucy, who did not meet her eyes.

“You know, Maud.” Lucy’s voice was less sure. “He’s so…so persuasive. George. You’re right to be thinking for yourself. I just realized that he…”

“But he could be right, I suppose.” Maud, quick. Unaccustomed to being heard. “It is hard on Mother. It is hard.”

“Maud.” Lucy paused, glanced uncertainly at her sister. She took a long breath. “No, really, George is only trying to do the right thing. We have to…”

“Lucy?” Carrie was calling up the stairs. “We will miss the train.”

—

Harland made a more elaborate window display. He added a Christmas tree: loops of popcorn chains, dangling silver-painted walnuts, candles in tin clasps. Beneath it, he set a wooden crèche, with carved figures: Mary, Joseph, baby, wise men, camels, donkeys, and sheep. Overhead, he hung the usual tin reindeer, suspended on wires.

This afternoon, laying silk scarves and shirts in tissue-filled boxes on which the store’s name was printed in raised script—Fairweather’s Gentlemen’s Clothing—Harland’s hands moved as if independently, making small, fussy tucks. Miss Floyd stood across the aisle at another counter, doing the same with muslin night shirts. Harland’s eldest daughter draped white fabric over plinths, creating a necktie display.

He strove to make himself see the store as a stranger might, in order to keep it fresh. His father—who had recently died, leaving the business to Harland—had been his employer, and he remembered doing his father’s bidding, every Christmas draping the same white fabric over the same plinths; unpacking shipments of handkerchiefs, gloves, bow ties, French suspenders.

The store’s quiet was broken only by the rustling pluck and crimp of tissue paper as he and Miss Floyd made fluted petals around the patterned silks and fancy-front shirts, yet Harland was oblivious of scarves or tissue paper. Yesterday. He had asked for a special meeting of the justices of the peace. His cheeks burned as he remembered. His words, prompting a speculative silence, and then delicate questions. As if there must be something to account for such a decision: ill health, mental incapacity, domestic turmoil? When he avowed that none of these things had caused his decision, rather that he could not in good conscience continue to provide his wholehearted support, he felt their disapproval. And then the shift of status, just as Permelia had predicted. Their eyes, meeting each other’s and not his. A peremptory politeness, harbinger of exclusion. He had pushed his resignation letter across the table, as if bidding farewell to a part of himself.

He moved down the counter to begin on the bow ties.

Outside, Josephine Galloway passed the window. She paused to look up at the tin reindeer, so delicately suspended that they turned on the slightest draught, galloping on air. She opened the door.

“The reindeer! It was a treat for me to see them when I was a child.”

He fumbled as he set the box aside and came around the counter. He joined her outside. Stepping into the cold was like plunging into the sea.

“I wanted to tell you, Josephine—”

He caught himself, flushed.

“Excuse me.”

“No, I am glad. I would like to call you Harland.”

She smiled at him through the black veil sewn to her hat.

“I am no longer the Overseer of the Poor. I have resigned.”

“Why?”

“The three children. I begged someone to take all three. I should have taken them myself if no one would. I fear for the little boy.”

He saw how their reflections in the store window watched them, blind.

Josephine laid her hand on his sleeve; quickly removed it.

“I understand,” she said.

Her voice trembled. She seemed as if she was, like him, without layers against the cold.

He shivered, ran his hands up and down his arms. “I am going to help Flora look for her sister. May I stop in from time to time to keep her informed?”

“Please. Please stop in and visit us.”

Her words were plain, unadorned, separate from this season of excess; he watched as she continued along the plank sidewalk and