The Spoils of Sin (15 page)

‘I hardly gave you a thought, these past months,' said Charity. ‘I have more than enough in my life to occupy me, without any further anguishing over a prodigal sister.'

‘But when you heard I was paying a visit, you took the trouble to come and see me.'

‘We were due a visit in any case. Another month and I shall be unable to travel. And Moses will be much too engaged with the planting and tending to spare the time.'

Fanny was beginning to hope that the delicate topic of her choice of profession had been avoided. ‘Your children do you credit,' she said.

‘I fear that cannot be said of Jimmy. He is so frail, I expected we should lose him over the winter. He has a disorder of some kind which cannot be reached by medicine or fresh air or good food. It is deep in his bones or his blood, and it brings us great distress to see him.'

‘You are plainly doing your best for him.'

‘I hope that is true.'

They were walking alongside a sturdy new fence, which divided the half-acre of ground surrounding the house from the rest of the property. A number of horses were roaming free, nibbling the fresh young grass. ‘There is so much work here,' Fanny murmured. ‘How can they manage it all? It seems hardly to have been begun yet.'

‘Dadda is hiring a young man for the heavier tasks. Reuben has ploughed fifty acres already, as he did last year. But it is a small proportion of the whole, as you rightly say. There is an urgent need for another man on the place.'

‘If Carola is right about the rush for gold, it might be difficult to find a suitable person.'

‘It will all be well for them. Dadda is making a good income in Oregon City, with his harnesses and saddles. The homestead can wait, if it has to. It is not the same with Moses and me.'

Fanny quickly saw an opportunity. ‘You have no way of earning money - I can see that. You must produce everything for yourselves and go without anything else.'

‘Not quite,' Charity objected. ‘We sold half a hundredweight of potatoes last year, the crop was so bountiful. We were altogether blessed.'

But Fanny was already opening her pocket and taking out some banknotes. ‘Twenty dollars for the children,' she said. ‘From a doting aunt.' It gave her a warm satisfaction to find herself able to make such a gesture. She and Carola had each provided herself with thirty dollars from their savings, to cover all expenses on their journey. It was much more than enough – especially as there was already a resolve forming in Fanny's breast to cut the visit short and return to Chemeketa sooner than planned.

A host of emotions were visible on Charity's face: suspicion, rejection, temptation. ‘How can you possibly afford to give me so much?' she protested.

Fanny half smiled at the simple calculation that four male patrons was all she required to replenish the outlay. Here, she decided, was the chance to reveal to her sister just how successfully she had established herself, away from the family. ‘It might take a day or two to earn it back,' she said carelessly. ‘Depending on how many men have left Oregon for the magical goldfields to the south.'

Charity narrowed her eyes. ‘It's true then? You make your living as a…as one of those women? You and your friend.' She looked her sister slowly up and down, as if seeing through her skirts and petticoats to the flesh beneath. ‘You place yourself on the market like a cow. Or a slave.'

‘I make myself available,' Fanny corrected, struggling to maintain her dignity. ‘Do not reproach me, Charity. Not when I have so plainly made a more secure choice than have you. So long as I have my health, I can earn good money. There will be other times, I warrant, when you will be glad of that. I can be generous, sister, to those who do not judge me.'

‘And to those who do, you merely patronise.' The pregnant woman did not take the money, but left it in Fanny's hand. A hand that drooped after a few moments, and closed around the notes. ‘I cannot take it. It would sully me and my family.'

‘When is money ever clean? From where do you draw such righteousness, even now? By what right do you discriminate between what I do and what you do? Merely the words of a priest lie between us. Words without substance, given meaning only on account of convenience.'

‘What you do with many, I shall only ever do with one. There is a difference. What you do without fondness or feeling, I do out of love. There is another. And, Fanny, when I do it, it is sanctioned by God, for the procreation of children. It is blasphemy as well as stupidity to claim otherwise.'

‘I thought you changed,' murmured Fanny. ‘But I see now I was wrong.'

‘I am older and have a deeper understanding of these matters – but the priority of my values remains the same. Moses has made me happy, Fanny, in ways I could never have guessed. Can you look at me and tell me with any candour that you are happy?'

Fanny swallowed and flapped the banknotes feebly.

‘I see that you cannot. Then I pity you, and because of that I will take your money. I will do good with it, and redeem the taint that is upon it.'

‘You talk like a ranter, a Quaker, a prating Mormon,' Fanny choked, unable to find anything bad enough to liken to her sister.

She was rescued by Nam, their small sister, running out of the house in search of them. ‘Fanny! Your dog has pushed Ellie onto Walter, and woken him. Mother says you must tie him up out of doors, and such a beast ought never to be allowed in a civilised home.'

‘He does no harm,' Fanny argued. ‘I suppose he was trying to play.'

They processed back to the house, where Mrs Collins was standing on the deck holding Hugo by a rope around his neck. The dog was slumped in passive dejection, while Walter's indignant howls echoed all around. At the sight of Fanny Hugo raised his ears hopefully.

‘Oh, Hugo – what have you done?' she said sweetly, making it clear to everyone that she had no intention of actually chastising her pet.

‘Nothing so very bad,' chimed Nam. ‘Not like when Melchior bit my hand almost in two.' There were still scars on her fingers and the back of her hand, and movement was slightly impeded as a result of a dog bite almost three years earlier.

Order was restored, with Walter pacified and Hugo forgiven. Fanny sought out Carola and invited her to take a stroll. ‘You are inordinately restless, are you not?' said her friend. ‘First you go walking with your sister, and now me. What are you trying to avoid?'

‘My family,' said Fanny shortly. ‘Now come along and admire the scenery with me.'

Carola made no further demur, and was soon listening with sympathy to Fanny's account of her exchange with Charity. ‘She despises me,' she finished miserably.

‘As would your other sisters and mother if they knew the truth,' Carola pointed out. ‘We have elected to be universally despised, and you knew it from the start. What is so special about Charity's opinion?'

Fanny shook herself exaggeratedly, and gave a strange low trill of frustration. A sound like a skylark with something wedged in its throat, or a growling dog with a strangely high-pitched voice. Carola laughed and said, ‘I wager you could not do that a second time!'

Fanny took a steadying breath. ‘I see no possibility of enduring this for another three weeks,' she confided. ‘Would it distress you greatly to leave sooner than we planned?'

‘It would,' said Carola, more seriously than Fanny had ever seen her. ‘I will have no truck with your silliness in the matter. Charity and her family will depart again tomorrow, leaving you no cause whatsoever for running away. The air is good, the change in our daily lives a tonic. Your people need the assistance of two extra pairs of hands, and I for one am eager to help. You and I could manage a saw between us, and cut logs enough for a year of fuel, if we set to right away.'

‘I think not,' Fanny contradicted. ‘It is scarcely milder here than in Providence, and there we consumed a mountain of firewood every winter.' She held out her hands, palms uppermost. ‘And the blisters it would cause make me shudder.'

‘Then you might milk the cows while Lizzie cuts the logs. There are a thousand tasks, Fanny, and your father is hard pressed with it all.'

‘He appears quite content to me. He has what he always wished for, and I see little cause for complaint.'

Carola gave her a cold look. ‘Then put it down to my peculiar bump of benevolence, because I wish most passionately to be of use to your parents. They did not expect their son to lose the use of an arm, nor their eldest daughters to leave them so quickly. If we partake of their food, we must repay them with out labours.'

‘If we return to town, we will not be partaking of their food.'

‘We shall not leave here one hour before the appointed day. The date now is the tenth. We shall depart on the first day of April and hope there will be at least enough returned gold-diggers to warrant our presence.'

‘I could leave without you,' muttered Fanny.

Carola treated this idle threat with the contempt it deserved. ‘Calm yourself,' she advised. ‘I dare say, if the roles were reversed, I might chafe a little at the unaccustomed attentions of my relatives, but it is a natural curiosity they feel, and quite easily satisfied.'

‘With untruths,' flashed Fanny. ‘I have to watch my tongue every moment of the day. And my powers of invention are a feeble shadow of yours.'

‘Then leave me to speak, and keep your own lips sealed.' Carola sighed impatiently. ‘The questions will all run out in another day or so. We will be absorbed into the work, as if we had always lived here.' She folded her arms. ‘We remain here until the first of April, and that's an end to it.'

Two days later, Fanny had an inkling as to the cause of her friend's insistence on remaining at the homestead. Not a simple wish to abide by the original plan, but a fascination, it seemed, with Fanny's brother Reuben. The first suspicions arose one evening, when Carola and Lizzie came in from the barn, rosy-cheeked and chattering animatedly about a new foal just born.

‘No time for a plate of bread and meat, then?' asked Mrs Collins, with enough snap in her voice to warn them. ‘Did the mare require your assistance for two hours and more, before she could deliver her young one?'

‘Not so long as that, Ma,' said Lizzie. ‘The mare had no difficulty. We merely spent ten minutes admiring the little one. He has a crooked blaze and two white feet.'

‘Then what else was so important it kept you from your meal?'

Lizzie rolled her eyes. ‘I cannot speak for Miss Beaumont, Mam, but for myself, I have been pitching out the mildewed hay, turning the midden and mending a tear in one of the corn sacks.' She pushed back a sleeve of her shabby woollen dress. ‘See these muscles – I am more like a boy than a girl, with the work I must do.'

Nam wrinkled her nose. ‘And you smell like a midden,' she said.

Everyone but Fanny was diverted by this. She was watching her friend's face as it became likely that she would be called on to account for her own activities. The absence of Reuben was increasingly noteworthy as Mrs Collins slammed pewter plates onto the plain board table, while muttering irritably about the impossibility of keeping everybody fed if they stayed outside until all hours.

‘Where might your brother be?' she finally demanded of Lizzie.

‘Ask Miss Beaumont,' was the careless reply.

All eyes turned to Carola, who was washing her hands in the stone trough which stood in a small area at the very back of the room. For a second too long, she pretended not to notice. Then, eyes wide with innocence, she replied, ‘I believe he is collecting timber with the workhorse. Something of the kind, at any rate. I cannot be sure.'

Fanny watched the easily satisfied nods and shrugs at this, and marvelled. Carola had not blushed or stammered, and yet it was as clear as day what had been taking place. If not a full seduction, then the preliminaries to it, she was certain. A wholly disproportionate horror flooded through her. Reuben was in her eyes a victim in every way. It could be nothing more than pity that motivated the experienced young woman in her attentions. Pity for a young man with a painful disability, who would never find himself a wife amongst so much competition. Even if Carola regarded herself as a benefactor, offering him relief from enforced celibacy, she would be playing havoc with his feelings. Reuben was no Abel Tennant, handsome and carefree and utterly irresponsible as that lad had been. Reuben had always been slower and more serious, sharing many characteristics with his full sister, Charity. Fanny had wondered, now and then, what sort of a Puritan their mother must have been.

In their room that night, she challenged her friend. ‘Have you seduced my brother?' she demanded, in a soft hiss. ‘Is that where you were at supper time?'

Carola turned to face her full on. ‘Seduced?' she echoed. ‘Does that word carry any meaning for the likes of us, think you?'

‘Why shouldn't it?'

‘Does it not hold implications of virtue lost and innocence despoiled?'

‘Reuben has both virtue and innocence.'

‘Perhaps so,' said Carola with a little nod. ‘And you regard me as a corrupting influence on him, it seems.'

‘I can see no advantage to him.' Fanny was faltering a little, suspecting flaws in her own logic. ‘He is my brother,' she finished weakly. ‘Have some care, if for that reason alone.'

‘You have no cause for concern, in any case. There has been no impropriety between us. I enjoy his company, and nothing more than that. He has a dry wit that I fancy remains concealed from his sisters.'

‘Wit? Reuben?'

‘You have perhaps not heard his tales of a soldier's life?'

‘I have heard a few. None of the telling struck me as unduly witty.'

‘He has perhaps felt some shame at his failure to fight. He has put all his strength into the homestead tasks, in recompense. There is a nobility to him, Fanny, that I find admirable.'