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

the tame black one she could hold in her arms and the old Barred Rocks. She stripped their feathers by the toolshed where he could keep an eye on her while he repaired a whippletree. He told Doreen to keep her in the house.

Enid spent the afternoon on the front porch, shelling peas.

Crickets rasped. Shush of wind in the spruce trees and the endless booming concussion of the unseen surf. Chicken blood crusty on her cheek, her thumb stained green.

Someone knows I am here. Someone had to of told that girl.

Enid had been driven to this house. She did not know how far they had come, for she had fallen asleep and it was pitch dark when she arrived and she had stumbled into a half-lit room where Fred, younger and smaller than she was, sat on a chair with his hands gripped in his lap.

Could I run away.

Whatever Mr. Mallory was plotting would be worse than anything she might encounter in woods, road or town.

Take a sack of bread and cheese. Might be wild berries.

Creep through the woods, just out of sight of the road.

She slept under a bearskin, knew the coarse black hair and the thick, curled claws.

Take a kitchen knife. One of them long ones.

—

The next morning, Enid was not at the breakfast table and the cow bawled in the pasture, unmilked.

Mr. Mallory shoved Doreen out the front door.

“I told you to keep an eye on her,” he roared.

She fell to her knees.

“I was asleep, like you,” Doreen screamed. She stumbled to her feet, slapped at her skirts, furious, brushing away dirt. Both of them stared up the road, where, in the opening, sunlight flashed in the spruce trees.

“Git on up that road and find her.”

“I can’t…”

“You git on up along there and find her.”

“I—”

He snatched up the shovel and prodded her in the small of the back, forcing her to stumble over the sun-baked soil.

The cow stretched her neck, continued her gut-deep complaint. Mr. Mallory heaved the shovel as far as he could. It clanged, end over end.

SIXTEEN Sisters

FLORA TRAILED HER FINGERTIPS across the woven tablecloth. The regularity of its criss-cross pattern calmed her. She sat with a cup of tea at the kitchen table of the Anglican parsonage. Pies with lattice crusts cooled on a cupboard shelf. The minister’s wife was snapping green beans into a bowl.

“Reverend Snelcroft, in Halifax, wrote to the Overseer of the Poor in Pleasant Valley, Mr. Fairweather,” Flora explained. “He said my sister was to be placed with Mr. Albert Mallory. The hostler at the inn knew a driver who would take me there. Mr. Perley Hayes. He had heard tell of the Mallorys. He drove me up there.”

She gestured, vaguely.

“But the Mallorys said…” her voice faltered. “They didn’t know any Enid Salford.”

A practised listener, the minister’s wife watched Flora keenly through steel-rimmed spectacles. She clucked with sympathy.

“Shame. What a disappointment for you.” Her voice was apologetic. “But I’m sure my husband never heard anything from Reverend Snelcroft.”

Flora opened her mouth to protest. Closed it. The minister’s wife reached forward and patted Flora’s wrist, distressed.

“I’m quite certain. My husband tells me everything. A minister’s wife, you see, has to know.”

Flora looked out the window, hiding her disappointment.

“I’m sorry, Flora. He would especially have told me if it was something to do with children.”

Swallows, like a row of pearls, made the clothesline sag.

—

She spent the rest of the day asking. At the docks. In the dry goods store. At the train station. At the livery stable, the shoemaker’s shop, the blacksmith’s, the milliner’s. People paused in their work, surprised. They looked at her with puzzlement, listened to her query, responded with sympathy. No one had heard of a young English girl named Enid Salford.

By the end of the day, she could no longer bear to tell the story.

At the inn, waiting for supper, Flora sought the breeze, choosing a table by an open window, but even so, beads of sweat prickled her scalp. She felt lost, bereft, as if a cherished picture had been torn from her hands and cast onto a fire.

A young woman pushed open the screen door. Dusty, scuffed boots, one set precisely in front of the other, warily stepping over the floorboards to the front desk. She spoke with the clerk, who took note of the washboard-wizened dress and missing buttons before nodding towards Flora. Flora witnessed the exchange, watched the woman slipping between the dining room tables, slumped like a folded napkin.

“You the one lookin’ for an English girl?”

Flora nodded. The young woman’s eyelids were swollen by blackfly bites.

“I cm’in town to see my brother. He tol’ me someone named Flora from this hotel came to the docks askin’ about an English girl.”

She paused, eyeing Flora. Flora squeezed her cloth napkin, focused on each word, like extracting gold from sand.

“I know where that girl is. She’s up to Black Creek. At the Mallorys’.”

“I went up there. But Mr. Mallory told me…”

“He’s a liar. Mr. Mallory. He’s bad. He’s real bad. My husband gots a distillery. Mallory buys from my husband. They drink. I heard him talking about that girl. He was some angry. Said he asked for a boy.”

Flora was seized with trembling.

“You’re sure.”

“Yuh. Sure.”

Flora took coins from her bag.

“Thanks,” she whispered, pressing coins into the woman’s hand. She felt the brush of fingers. The woman vanished, a ripple of motion, then stillness, like the disappearance of a fox.

—

Perley Hayes appeared at the door of his house.

“You been up there once, he told you she ain’t there. She ain’t there. You got no reason to go up there again.”

Flora stood straight. She lifted her chin and stared down into the man’s eyes.

“I think she’s there. I was told she is there.”

He drew the back of his hand over his nose, wiped his hand on his pants. He settled into himself, staring past Flora, over the harbour. “Askin’ for trouble and I don’t want