1DEATH KNOCKS AND THE JOURNEY BEGINS
Mary Craven didn’t think about death until the day it knocked politely on her bedroom door and invited itself in. That, she decided soon after, was the perfect way to describe death—something that pretends to act on formalities like knocking but then, in the end, does exactly what it wants to do.
In this instance, death came in the guise of her nanny, Miss Patricks, who was the one rapping at the door, then scuttling inside with her chin trembling. She was bringing the news that would change Mary’s life forever.
“I’m afraid there’s been an awful accident, my dear,” she managed through a throat full of sobs. She hung her gray head so that her jowls grazed her ample chest, moving the pocket watch she had pinned there to-and-fro. “An awful, terrible accident.”
She was wringing an embroidered handkerchief to ribbons in her hands. This annoyed Mary, who despised useless fidgeting and stalling. In fact, if it were not obvious the woman would break down at the slightest provocation, she would have yelled at her. Instead, she sighed, opening her green eyes wider in an expectant expression.
“It’s your parents, my dear. Your lovely parents…”
These were words she hadn’t heard before—her parents, lovely? There were many things that could be said about her parents, but lovely was not one of them. Something was amiss. Mary had the feeling now of running out of breath when one was in the lake—those seconds before the burn started and you felt you must fight for your life, just before you found the bottom and kicked to the surface.
“What of my parents?” Mary said, wanting to get to the end of this encounter as soon as possible.
“I’m afraid, sweet child … they have passed on.”
There were words after those, but none of them mattered. They blended into a kind of low-pitched ringing in her ears.
“Leave me.” Mary said it without hearing her own words, her eyes caught now by a gray bird that had settled on her window ledge. “Leave me now.”
She assumed Miss Patricks toddled her way out at some point. But she couldn’t be sure, because she ceased to notice anything around her except for that bird.
Her mother had a dress that color. She’d worn it last week when the City Council came for dinner. Her father, also a councilman, with his impressive mustache and impressive rounded gut, was a man with power in Toronto. Her mother, always removed from her daughter as if surrounded by her own light, was considered by society to be a great beauty. For both these reasons, fancy dinner parties happened all the time at their house. And that evening Mary had been sent away just before dinner to eat soup and crackers in her suite under the supervision of Miss Patricks, even though she was far too old to still have a nanny and just old enough to be a guest at a dinner party.
She had noticed her mother’s dress before being banished. It was silk and lace with tailored hems at her feet and severe shoulders that did nothing to hide her enviable figure. The color made her eyes seem violet and more alive than usual. Mary wanted to tell her how magical she looked, with her hair pulled up in an intricate knot and left curly at her temples, her earlobes decorated with bright pearls. She wanted to tell her how she was proud to have such a beautiful woman as her mother. But she didn’t. It was her small punishment for being sent away. Cecile Craven would have to go down to dinner without any compliment whatsoever.
“I think Mother looks awful tonight,” she told Miss Patricks around a mouthful of lukewarm tomato puree. “Like she’s in mourning.”
Miss Patricks was shocked, though she shouldn’t have been. She had been Mary’s nanny since the beginning and was well accustomed to her moods. “Miss Mary, what an untrue and unkind thing to say!”
“She looks like she could leave straight from dessert to the funeral home.”
Mary wondered, watching as the bird took flight, if that’s where her mother was now, and if that was the dress she was wearing.
No one came to put her to bed. She was fifteen—the occasion had been marked by a small dinner her father couldn’t make time for—so she didn’t really need any assistance. But she liked to stay up late and read, and it usually fell to someone else to remind her to put the books away and get to sleep. It was a part of her routine. In fact, some nights she stayed up longer than she wanted to, her eyes watering, her brain refusing to hold the sentences longer than it took to reach the end of one. Still she would remain propped up against her pillows, waiting for the door to open and the admonishing to start.
But tonight the sky grew heavy and the moon pulled itself high, and no one came to remind her of anything.
The night bugs tuned their instruments and set into an orchestral swell, and still no one came.
Everything was dark, outside and in. Mary hadn’t eaten anything since lunch. She stayed seated at her small table by the window, wondering if this was how it would be from now on—if no one would ever come for her again.
Later as she slumped over the table, sleeping on her folded arms so that her cheek would be crisscrossed with indents, she was roused and put under her covers fully clothed. Only her shoes were unlaced and removed. In the morning she found those shoes sitting on her chair.
What an odd place to put shoes, she thought. She knew whoever had put her to bed last night had not been Miss Patricks, who would have insisted on taking off her dress and pinafore and sliding a crisp white nightie over her head. At the very least, she would have carried her shoes to the closet. It must have been one of the other servants—perhaps her mother’s maid, Isabelle, or her father’s valet, George. She thought they must be wandering the halls at this hour like stiff-shirted ghosts, with no one to wait on.
For the next few days, she was left largely on her own. She walked the hallways of the house and through the manicured lawns. Every now and again, Miss Patricks would call her in for some under-spiced food and once made her a bath, but even the nanny seemed to be there only part-time. Mary began to wonder if she was left alone at night, so she climbed down the stairs past dark and found Miss Patricks and Isabelle drinking her father’s whiskey from her mother’s good china.
Mary wanted to yell at them, to reprimand them for being thieves and lazy to boot, but she couldn’t find her voice these days. Instead, she threw the book she was carrying—Kim by Rudyard Kipling—over the banister of the curved stairs. It landed with a resounding thump in the foyer and scared the women so badly, Isabelle spilled whiskey on her apron.
It was an odd thing to be completely alone, without ally or friend. If she had had siblings, she supposed this was when they would have rallied together. She had once hidden in the hallway while her mother had tea with her friends. One woman explained how a wife could take charge of her life and take certain precautions to ensure the number of children she bore was limited. Mary’s mother shared that she was happy to have gotten what was required of her out of the way so she could live her life. Mary understood that she was that which had been “gotten out of the way.”
She wondered if she had been a prettier child, a more agreeable child, that perhaps there would have been more children in the house. She carried that burden, layering it with spite and aloofness until it no longer cut, like a grain of sand polished inside an oyster.
The funeral was just as her mother would have wanted it—full of society’s best and brightest fawning over her heavy-framed portrait. And it was also exactly as her father would have wanted it—stuffed with the most powerful men in Toronto, all taking the opportunity of being in the same room to discuss business.
During the service, the minister talked about how John and Cecile Craven were the perfect couple, the epitome of their time, how the new century could use more good people like them. “They made it into 1900, but left us too soon for this new age to properly benefit from their like.”
Even Mary thought that was a bit much. All her father did was take meetings and talk until the other men had to stifle yawns. All her mother did was drink wine before lunch and throw parties where she could surround herself with the other diminished women with their soft hands and sharp words. She thought the minister was a bad preacher and a worse poet, but she held her tongue, squished in between the mayor and her nanny in the first pew. Miss Patricks was beside herself to have such a place of honor. Mary noticed the mayor smelled like tobacco and mothballs and had too much hair in his ears.
She couldn’t help but hear the way people were speaking about her—Poor child, and Little wretch, and Such a pity she wasn’t a few years older, she could be married off quick enough. All this and yet no one bothered to speak to her. It was horrible, but she remained unmoved. In fact, besides the flash of anger at the servants drinking her father’s whiskey, Mary was unmoved for most of those days.
Until, of course, she was bundled onto a carriage and taken north.
Miss Patricks was the one who packed her things, prattling on as she did. Perhaps she expected the girl to release her legendary temper. When Mary remained tight-lipped after they had boarded and started off, the nanny sighed deeply and took out her knitting. No more effort at conversation was made.
It had been an hour, and the houses and roads of the city were long gone when Mary suddenly began to speak. It was as if the city itself had been holding her silent. Now that they were out in the wild open, her thoughts were loosened and her voice followed.
“What will become of the house?”
Mary wasn’t sentimental. She learned that word from a book a few years back and tried to figure out how it fit in her life. Turns out, it didn’t. She didn’t hold on to any of her old dolls—instead she’d asked George to take them to the orphanage or the dump, either one was fine. She didn’t have a favorite dress or a good-luck locket. She didn’t even have any friends, not really. But suddenly, she felt unmoored. Her hands felt too empty. She felt like she was missing something, or maybe even someone.
Miss Patricks, on the verge of napping, gave a start, snorting as she did.
“Oh, well, the house was appointed to your father along with his position,” she replied. “I would imagine the city takes it back.”
“And their things?”
Miss Patricks, seemingly offended that the next question should be about baubles and furniture and not her, answered without cushion. “Auctioned off. Already in process. Of course, the proceeds will be put into a trust for you along with the inheritance.”
Mary greeted this new knowledge with silence. But, roused now—upset, even—Miss Patricks rambled on.
“And that’s all well and good but what of the staff? Not so much as a pension or a reference letter. I suppose I might as well head back down east. There’s nothing here. God knows your guardian didn’t extend the invitation to me. Me, the one person who raised the girl, for God’s sake.”
Mary was suddenly interested. “They say I am to live with my uncle Craven, but I don’t know him. Is he a man of wealth?”
The older woman shook her head. “I know that you were raised in a rather cold home, but that you, at your age, are even concerned with a man’s standing is an odd thing. And that your first questions are not about his goodwill or his household, his willingness to take you in blood or not, well, that’s just unseemly.”
Miss Patricks adjusted her sweater, her thin lips pursed. But she couldn’t stop there—she clearly wanted to gossip about the mysterious Mr. William Craven. “And yes, to answer your question. He is very successful. But he is also an odd character. Never even bothered to come down to the city. Just stayed up here in this godforsaken wilderness. They say the entire settlement is nothing but Indian French half-breeds who’ve forgotten their paler roots. Imagine that, preferring their company? Doesn’t say much about a person, if you ask me.”
Mary was sorry she had begun this conversation already. She remembered her mother saying it was important to remind staff they were employees. That if you gave them an inch, they’d be asking and giving advice. Mary knew her mother was not a very good example as far as parents went, but she was still the only example she had. So she sat up straighter and let her eyes glaze over. “I didn’t.”
“You didn’t what, dear?”
“I didn’t ask you.”
The rest of the trip was carried out in silence.
2THE MANOR ON THE BAY
The journey was long and bumpy. There were wide roads, but some parts were less used than others, and the going got rough. The trees on either side were dense, and more than once she saw a deer skulking at the edges.
When they got closer to their destination, there were more carriages on the road, some hauling wagons stacked with giant logs and smaller cut planks. They drove by a family on one corner, dressed in patched trousers tied with bright sashes, who were selling baskets and jars of canned fruit.
“Humph, already with the Indians,” Miss Patricks scoffed.
Mary was more interested because of her nanny’s disdain. She leaned out the window and locked eyes with the tallest girl, whose dark hair hung to her waist. There was something about her eyes, the way they connected with her own without any shame, that made Mary envious. She pulled herself back into her carriage and refused to look outside at the small wooden houses and long horses ridden by men who tipped their hats or looked in with interest.
The carriage turned onto a curved road. The trees here were white birch and calloused oak. Mary leaned her head against the wall and counted the turns as they took them. She was feeling nauseous. Not from the travel, but from something she didn’t want to name—a thing akin to fear that made her want to sleep. But there was no time for that now. The carriage came to a stop and shook as the driver climbed down from his perch.
They were met at the front gate by a young woman in a green cloak. She was tall and thin and had the most beautiful hair Mary had ever seen, all wrapped about her head in thick braids like a kind of hat.
“I suppose this is my replacement then,” Miss Patricks sniffed. “Looks to be not much older than her charge.”
Trunks and suitcases were unloaded as the woman came over to greet them. “You must be Mary. Me, I’m Flora. Pleased to meet you.” The girl was cheerful and brimming with an energy that shocked the travel-weary newcomers. “And Miss Patricks, then?”
The older woman did not shake the girl’s hand. Instead, she looked away and sniffed again, then directed her unease to the men lifting down trunks. “You there, be careful with those. If you can’t do it right just leave it and I’ll manage it myself, but don’t expect any extra if that’s to be the case.”
Flora leaned down. “Well,” she whispered conspiratorially in Mary’s ear. “She’s a bear, no? Must have been a real fight for you, trying to breathe around that one all these years.”
Mary was enchanted by the young woman’s voice. It was free and smooth, not stuffy like the British immigrants her father entertained in his office, which apparently meant smoking cigars and grumbling loudly. And she spoke to Mary like she was grown—which of course, she was, though no one else seemed to notice. There was an ease about her, something unseen in any household staff Mary had ever encountered.
Copyright © 2023 by Cherie Dimaline Productions, Inc.
