The Sister's Tale by Beth Powning (e reader for manga .txt) 📕

stood in front of the linen press, fingers lifting hair from her scalp.

She sighed to enable herself to breathe. Her body was as if drowning in something other than water.

Long ago, before Simeon’s death, she had agreed to host a tea meeting. The meetings, Permelia said, were to raise money for the projects planned by the beautification committee: paint for picket fences, new trees for Arbour Day, hiring a lamplighter for the new street lamps. Last Sunday, after church, Permelia had reminded her of this obligation, how it would need to take place soon.

“We usually put little tables in our front parlour,” Permelia had said.

“How many?”

“Oh, six or so.”

Tablecloths. The white ones with a pattern of embroidered forget-me-nots. Blue napkins to match.

On the veranda, Maud laughed. “Oh, you!” She did not mind being bested by Flora, who would not be smug, like Lucy, or dismissive like George.

Flora’s English accent, broadening. “Sorry, Maudie.”

Josephine heard the girls putting away the game, the scrape of chairs, their footsteps going through the parlour, their voices, muted behind the kitchen door.

Quiet.

Quiet was like the reaper; she felt his presence in corner or doorway, cold, silent—an essence, expectant. She closed the linen press and stood with her forehead pressed against it.

And there must be freshly polished silverware. Cucumber sandwiches and lemon cake. Bouquets of snapdragons and baby’s breath.

She went to her desk and opened a large black book. Every evening, she entered the day’s receipts in their narrow columns, writing carefully and with a sense of obligation. Mr. Eveleigh had shown her how to keep accounts. To prove to the court that you are not squandering the children’s inheritance.

The children, she thought. Not hers, as if the court-mandated custody rendered them more their own people, now, than their mother’s children. They seemed, all at once, to have become an independent unit, when such change should have happened incrementally, by dint of new loves, new friendships, new occupations.

She put her face in her hands.

Simeon must have left a will. Perhaps a maid, illiterate, tossed it out.

He would be so angry to know this. He would be furious to learn that all he had planned for her—the turret room, the greenhouse and roses, the house with its varnished maple floorboards—was in jeopardy.

The pulse of insects, a murmur of voices in the kitchen—she heard not the quiet of a summer night but the absence of Simeon’s voice. She felt the yawning stretch of her life without him, a pain from which she could not run, that she must accept. With which she must live. That could not be ameliorated, save by sleep.

Tea meeting.

If Mr. Dougan were here, he would have brought down the freshly painted chairs. He would have set up the tables. Margaret and Mary would have found and washed and ironed the tablecloths and the napkins. The details which must be correct—gleaming silverware; spotless, starched folds of linen; place markers on flowered cards—seemed an attention to minutia which Josephine, at this moment, saw as a means to fill the moments of a shallow life. A futile fussiness.

She broke into a sweat. She stood and staggered, light-headed, the black dress encasing her in heat.

She made her way down the hall and pushed open the kitchen door. Ellen was reading aloud from the paper.

“There was blood and plenty of it outside the left leg. I mean by plenty of it a stream as wide as one’s three fingers…Oh, Mrs. Galloway. I’m just reading that old axe murder trial. Mr. Dougan got me into the habit. They’re going over it now. They expect a verdict tomorr—”

Josephine collapsed.

Flora jumped from her chair, tossing down sock and darning egg.

Maud shrieked.

Sailor scrabbled from his pillow.

A tiny, muscled, sun-bronzed woman started up from the corner. Indigent Ida, well-known in the town and surrounding countryside, had just arrived, coming at nightfall, as was her habit. She carried herbs and ointments, asked for nothing more than a meal and a single night’s lodging. Always, she would be gone in the morning, vanishing into the dawn like a stray cat.

She knelt by Josephine.

“Water,” she said. Her voice was husky from disuse. “A cloth.”

Flora brought a basin and a cloth.

Ida bathed Josephine’s face, unbuttoned her cuffs, ran the cloth over her arms and wrists. She held a small leather pouch to Josephine’s nose.

“I fell,” Josephine murmured.

They helped her into a chair. Maud ran into the parlour and returned unfolding a fan—red, a golden crane spreading its wings. She stood by her mother, frantically stirring the air.

“The tea meeting,” Josephine said. Her fingers stroked Sailor’s head, automatically. He showed the whites of his eyes, looking up at her. “I can’t.”

“The likes of them,” Ellen muttered. “When they know you’re shattered.” She pulled the kettle to the hot part of the stove, jabbing a stick of wood with unnecessary force into the fire box.

“Tables and…Mr. Dougan not here for the little…”

“Them little chairs.” Ellen imitated a simpering voice. “And you with no Mr. Dougan. No Margaret and Mary.” She scooped tea leaves from the canister, an irritable motion at odds with the worried look she sent Josephine.

Flora watched Josephine straightening her sleeves, brushing down her skirts. She had changed from the self-possessed woman who had purchased her at the auction into a person whose movements were uncertain, half-formed. Who wandered the house, staring from windows at the flicker of tree shadow, the late roses; who picked up misplaced objects—an eyeglass case, a book—and put them down again. Who forgot to bathe. Whose hands trembled. Who slept on her chignon and did not notice when her hair slipped from its pins.

Ida settled back noiselessly in the corner. The lamp began to smoke and Maud turned up the wick.

“I’ll tell Mrs. Fairweather, Mother,” she said, her voice earnest. “I’ll call her on the telephone and say you’ve fallen ill.”

Maud was the best telephone operator in the household. She loved to use it.

They sat drinking tea and nibbling gingersnaps. In the circle of caring women, Flora felt a sense of being part, no