Galore (13 page)

A private audience was requested by a sharp-nosed twenty-six-year-old and they were sent off in a carriage circling a public garden. He did his best to engage Lizzie in conversation about pheasant hunting and French décolletage, his accent and concerns so affected he seemed cartoonish. He made the Newfoundlanders who visited her father with their endless stories of giant squid and shipwrecks and bad drink seem worldly. It struck her suddenly that her father intended her to marry such a one as this fart-faced bore. The notion was so disturbing that a spell overtook her and she nodded off while he talked.

On two other occasions she fell asleep in the presence of suitors and she was stared at and whispered about in the same way she had been at home. Eventually she refused to leave her room altogether. King-me tried threatening her from the other side of the door but it was clear that she’d poisoned her chances at a match in the West Country, perhaps in the whole of England. He and Selina turned their attention to finding a suitable girl to take back to Newfoundland as a housekeeper, so as not to have wasted the trip entirely.

Selina paced the deck endlessly on the voyage home and if the wind was up Lizzie walked with her to keep the willow of a woman from being blown into the ocean. Selina was distracted and melancholy and seemed in no mood for conversation, which suited Lizzie fine. Virtue Clouter often took the air with Selina as well, though she walked several feet behind. A shy sixteen-year-old, she never looked at a person directly and only spoke when spoken to. Lizzie resented the new housekeeper’s shadowing them and said little to avoid being overheard. But she couldn’t disguise how happy she was to be free of the corsets and petticoats and still single.

—You seem awfully pleased with yourself, Selina said one afternoon.

—I’m happy to be going home.

Selina shook her head. They stopped near the stern of the vessel and stared out at the ship’s wake, the empty expanse of ocean between them and England. —Your father, Selina said, won’t ever allow it.

—Allow what? Lizzie asked. She glanced back at Virtue standing six feet behind them, her gaze carefully averted. And in that moment it was obvious to Lizzie her secret was no secret now, if it had ever been one.

Her mother reached up to take the porcelain brooch from Lizzie’s bonnet. —Mark my words, Selina told her. She weighed the brooch in her hand a moment. —There’s your Callum Devine, she said, and tossed it over the rail. —You say your goodbyes now or your heart won’t ever be your own.

Lizzie glanced back at the servant a second time but Virtue had turned away.

Virtue Clouter was the only servant in King-me’s employ who lived in Selina’s House, sleeping in a new room built off the kitchen with its own door facing the outbuildings so she could collect the morning’s eggs and carry in firewood. She was inconspicuously competent in her work. She was modestly pretty and her prettiness went unnoticed by all but the most familiar. Harry and George both announced their childish intentions to marry Virtue, and Selina came to depend on her in all household matters. But there’d been no talk of hiring a housekeeper before Lizzie locked herself away in her room in Poole and the timing made Virtue suspect.

In the first weeks after their return Virtue sometimes followed Lizzie when she left the house on her wanders, keeping a discreet distance behind just as she’d tracked behind Selina aboard the vessel. It was a clumsy attempt at spying but Lizzie refused to give her the satisfaction of a confrontation, leading her a chase over half the shore, across rattling brooks that soaked their feet, through the thickest tuckamore on the hills.

Eventually Virtue relented and Lizzie was left to her own devices, though the simple fact was she had nothing to hide. No clandestine meetings in the spruce above the Gaze, no secret trysts on a bed of moss out by Nigger Ralph’s Pond. Lizzie was forced to make do with the barest glimpses of Callum sculling in off the fishing grounds with Daniel Woundy or carting a sack of flour from King-me’s store down to the harbor. It was her father’s meddling that kept Callum at a distance, she was certain, the threat of losing credit with Spurriers which would drive him off the shore altogether. He offered his modest bow if they crossed paths but not so much as a word passed between them.

Months went by in this fashion and years on top of those. Her only reassurance came in rare encounters with Father Phelan, who offered the details of Callum’s recent confessions. —Still lusting after a young girl he can’t have, the priest told her. —Tormented, he is. The places he imagines kissing the child, it would make the Devil blush.

—But not yourself, Father.

—The Lord gives me strength, he said.

She spent her life in a state of unrelieved anticipation that made her flighty and unreliable and increasingly reclusive. Her family treated her as a kind of retarded child they expected would carry on in the same perpetual half-life. She roamed as she wished and reported to no one and grew wild in her habits, spending days at a time alone with the plague of yellow nippers and blackflies in the woods, snaring rabbits in the backcountry or fishing for trout at Nigger Ralph’s Pond.

When King-me’s eldest boy turned eighteen, the family planned a return to England to find him a wife. King-me was afraid Lizzie’s strangeness would ruin Harry’s chances and was relieved when she showed no interest in going. She was left behind with Virtue for company and John Tom White assigned the task of watching out for them.

The two women barely acknowledged one another, even as the winter closed them inside. Virtue attended to the needs of the household and cooked the meals and retired to her own room early each evening. John Tom talked about Virtue regularly while they ate, sitting back in his chair with both hands on his belly, as if he were the patriarch of the house. —That’s a good woman going to waste is what that is, he said. —She twenty-three now and so many unattached men in the harbor. John Tom seemed unaware he might be implying the same about Lizzie across the table.

In November, John Tom began bringing a fellow from Harbour Grace along for supper, a single man spending his first winter in Paradise Deep. John Tom introduced him to Virtue and sat back then as if a match had been made. The man appeared to assume as much as well, arriving on Sundays to sit with Virtue in the kitchen while she worked dumbly at the fingers in her lap. He talked of wedding dates and children and cutting lumber for a house in the droke at the base of the Tolt Road. Virtue refilled his tea without offering a word. She assumed she’d said or done something to encourage the man’s assumption but could not for the life of her think what it was.

John Tom White was delighted with the arrangement. —You won’t find no better man the length and breadth of the country, he told Virtue. —A horse of a man you got there.

He let it be known far and wide the two were engaged and Virtue could only nod helplessly when visitors called at the house to congratulate her and wish her well. She went at her work with a furious energy, scouring the walls and floors and windows, cauldrons of water at a full boil to scour bedsheets and curtains and their clothes, as if all the activity would free her of the obligation she’d somehow contracted.

On Boxing Day, John Tom White organized a dance in one of King-me’s stores. He convinced Daniel Woundy and Jabez Trim to play together and word of the entertainment made its way to every household on the shore. Lizzie had no interest in attending but Virtue was in a torment about facing her fiancé in public and begged for her company. —Perhaps your man Callum will be there, she said.

It was a sly tactic that Lizzie couldn’t help admiring. She said, Who was it asked you to spy on me, Virtue?

—Spy, ma’am?

—When you first came out here. Following me when I left the house.

Virtue looked at her feet. —I didn’t know a soul here is all. I thought maybe … But she stopped there and backed out the door. —I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am, she said.

Lizzie entered the dance arm in arm with Virtue, sitting against a wall while the floor shook beneath them. There was no sign of Callum, but Virtue’s intended was waiting and he approached her with his hand extended. He was a good-looking man, there was no denying the fact. Dark hair and most of his teeth still and he looked like he had never gone hungry. Virtue hadn’t stepped on a dance floor in her life but he made her look a natural.

Lizzie danced only once, forced to her feet by Father Phelan who seemed to have made a pledge to dance with every woman present. Bowed low when he returned her to her seat. —Your man Callum, he said, leaning close. —He asks you not to wait for him. The priest straightened and looked down on her while she searched his face. —I wish I had news more suited to the season, he said.

Virtue stayed on the floor hours before she took note of Lizzie watching the dancers blankly from her seat against the wall. She excused herself from her partner and walked over to ask if there was anything wrong but Lizzie could only shake her head. Callum had given her up and she wished now she’d gone over the rail of the vessel after the porcelain brooch. Virtue helped her to her feet and the two women slipped out of the dancers’ heat to make their way home. The servant settled Lizzie into her bed and left her staring out the window, the stars being choked by frost creeping across the pane.

Virtue’s intended came by hours later, begging to be let in. He was drunk and insistent, slapping at the door with his open palm, and Virtue stood a chair against the handle to keep him out. He sang half a love song and then hammered at the door awhile longer. Lizzie came in from the kitchen to ask if she was all right and Virtue shouted out to him that he’d woken the mistress. —The mistress is it? he said. —You sure it isn’t someone else I’m disturbing? Virtue begged Lizzie to go back to her bed and he demanded to know who she was speaking to. He cursed her for a lying whore and accused her of taking a stream of men to her bed while he sat demure in the kitchen and talked of marriage like a fool. —Who is it? he shouted. —Tell me the bastard’s name.

—You’re drunk, Martin Gallery, she said. —You be on your way.

He came to the house the next day, gray with a hangover and remorse. Fighting back tears as he explained it was only love of the woman that made him so heatable, that he had no doubt Virtue was alone last evening and her refusing to let him in proved only her worthy character. He would be a fool not to see she was a Christian woman and he prayed she might find it in her heart to have him still. He was standing near the fireplace, his head bowed in an attitude of abject contrition, and Virtue watched him a full minute, thinking of his hand at her back on the dance floor. It was the first time since she left her home in England she hadn’t felt lonely. —You will not drink in our house, she said.

—I will not, he said.

—You will not speak to me in the manner you spoke yester evening.

—I swear to God.

Virtue took a breath. She’d never mustered a tone of such authority in her life and having some say in the affair gave her the impression she’d consented to it all.

After Gallery left the house, Lizzie came into the kitchen. She hadn’t cut her hair since she’d heard Callum sing for the first time, when she was still a child, and it had grown almost to her thighs. She’d been proud of the extravagance, the weight of it a constant reminder of him. She set a chair in the middle of the kitchen and handed the housekeeper a pair of scissors. Virtue weeping as the lengths fell away from Lizzie’s head, the dark scrolls mounding about their feet. —Burn it, Lizzie ordered before she left the room.

Through January and February and March the foul weather made a prison of the house. Lizzie grew to despise everything in it, her minder not the least. John Tom White drank regularly in honor of the upcoming nuptials he seemed to feel single-handedly responsible for arranging. He was giddy with his little triumph. He came to Selina’s House direct from afternoons spent at Shambler’s tavern and he treated every meal as a kind of personal victory celebration. —A horse of a man Virtue have got herself there, he told them.

He dropped dead in the middle of a toast in March, striking his head against the heavy table as he fell. Virtue thought he’d knocked himself senseless and she knelt over the bulk of him, laughing at the ridiculous man and shouting his name until Lizzie forced her to stop. —He’s not asleep, Virtue, for the love of God.

She held the back of her hand to her mouth and laughed. —He’s not dead? she said. And she bit her hand to keep from laughing again.

Virtue was sent to Barnaby Shambler who had become undertaker to the Protestants on the shore. John Tom White had been drinking on a tab for months, Shambler told her, and he refused to add to the uncollectible debt by burying the man. Virtue went to find Jabez Trim and when they returned to Selina’s House they found Lizzie sitting in a chair beside the corpse. Keeping John Tom company out of remorse for wishing ill on him so long.

—We got no choice now, Jabez said, but to fetch Devine’s Widow from the Gut.

The widow was already gone to her bed when Jabez arrived at the house. Callum woke his mother and he dressed to accompany them over the Tolt.

—You oughten to come, Devine’s Widow said.

—And who’s going to see you back after you’ve looked after John Tom?

The old woman watched her son while he busied himself at his boots. —I thought your mind was made up to leave that girl be.

—I’m only coming to keep you company, he said. He was out the door then, shouting at them to get a move on.

Callum hadn’t known a moment of real peace since the afternoon he’d seen Lizzie perform in Spurriers’ storeroom as a girl. Mary the Mother of God speaking to the gathering as if she’d appeared out of a Lordly shaft of light through the roof. It was a witching he’d never heard tell of, that a child could conjure such a vision, his pulse so fierce as he watched her that each heartbeat rippled across his sight. When Mary fell to her knees at the Savior’s tomb his legs quivered and he thought he might drop where he stood. And then Lizzie surfaced through that likeness of rapture, collapsing up there in his stead. A hush in the room those few moments before the angel began screaming, Callum’s cock on end and his throat closed over with reverence and dread and wanting the strange little dark-haired girl for his own.