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

longer abandoned: the house rising above and around them—closets, hallways, turrets, gables, verandas. The barn, with its empty loft, its vacant stalls. Her garden, growing in the darkness. Baby beets, slender carrots. Rows of potatoes, with purple blossoms. Mr. Fairweather, asking questions that might lead to Enid’s discovery. Josephine, always kind. Maud and Ellen, like friends.

“You should keep a boarding house,” Indigent Ida remarked, from the half dark. “Got the space. Got the women.”

PART II October 1888 – April 1889

SEVEN Emissaries of Winter

MRS. BEAMAN, A SEAMSTRESS, covered Josephine’s bureau with a collection of hats.

Miss Harvey, who worked in the boot factory office, settled gladly for Maud’s bedroom. She was gaunt, a minimal presence, and would not mind a smaller chamber.

Flora and Maud decided to put Mr. Sprague in Lucy’s room, overlooking the side lawn. Thirty-five and unmarried, he was a typesetter and Pleasant Valley’s newly hired lamplighter. From his window, overlooking the roofs of town, he could check the lights’ glimmer.

The boarders had use of the parlour and the front door. They were given the large, new bathroom and were provided with breakfast, boxed lunch and dinner.

George’s room remained empty until the early evening of October seventeenth.

In the kitchen, Ellen, preparing for tomorrow’s lunches, carefully tipped eggs from a spoon into boiling water. Josephine and Flora bent over sewing and knitting, while Maud spread a letter from Lucy on the table and read aloud.

“…a spirited meeting, run by Cousin Carrie. We discussed how women constitute a ‘sex class’ in society, which is deemed inferior. Lydia Mills read a paper written by an American suffragist. We spoke of joining the Canadian Women’s Suffrage Association. I was excited and have made new friends. There is a woman who runs a boarding house, there are two artists, and some who have gone to university in the United States. I—”

A knock came on the front door. Ellen started; an egg slipped from her spoon. Maud, apprehensive, looked up at her mother.

“I’ll go,” Flora said.

She set down her knitting and slipped quietly along the dim hallway. As she opened the front door, the sharp decay of autumn entered—peony bushes frozen to pulp, decaying leaves.

A man.

Holding a kerosene lantern. Face half-darkened in shifting shadow.

“This a boarding establishment?”

“It is.”

“You got a room to let?”

“Wait, please.”

She went to the kitchen.

“There’s a man, asking if we have rooms.”

Josephine sighed. She had not slept the previous night and had been listless, fatigued, all day long. She went into the hall, turned up the gaslight. Flora and Maud stood behind her as she interviewed the man on the doorstep. The man said he was from Gloucester County, gesturing northwards. He was a carpenter. He had secured work here in town. He needed a place to make the miniature houses that he sold. He was not married and had no references other than one of the actual little houses, which he could show Josephine, if she wished. He bowed, slightly, when he told her his name—Jasper Tuck—and reached into his pocket, withdrawing bills ready to pay for one week in advance. He said he would be gone all day during the week and would need a space for his woodworking. He had noticed the barn. Could he pay extra for use of a bit of it? He had noticed that the trellis had come unattached and that there was a rotting step on the veranda, on the kitchen side.

“I can fix those up for you,” he said.

Then he stood silent. Josephine asked him to step inside.

—

Once it had been decided to turn the premises into a boarding house, Josephine and Maud had joined Ellen and Flora in the row of small servants’ rooms that lined a narrow hallway—beadboard walls painted white, sun-faded quilts, one bureau in each room and a row of hooks. As the nights grew longer, the rooms grew cold, their only heat source the stovepipe that rose through the hall floor from the kitchen below.

Josephine asked Flora to bring her a cup of tea in the mornings, and to sit on the single chair by the door while she drank it so they could discuss the day’s doings.

She does not realize, Josephine thought, sitting up against her pillow and taking the cup and saucer from Flora, how the sadness in her eyes has changed to a quick attentiveness.

Or how we have all begun to rely on her.

“Thank you, Flora. I find it hard to get out of bed in this cold room.” She sipped at the tea. Felt the hot drink warm her from inside. “Did you find a man to supply wood?”

“Yes,” Flora said. “He will bring it cut, cured and split.”

“How much will it cost?”

“He will take trade. I offered onions, and weekly delivery of gingerbreads, and eggs as long as the hens are laying. Is that all right?”

“It is.”

“And I found a rooster. From the same place as is bringing the cow.”

“A cow, Flora! And you know how to milk it, of course.”

Flora looked at her hands, lying open in her lap. She curled them into fists. A hardness crept into the corners of her mouth, vanished. She nodded.

“The cow is being delivered next week, but we need hay so I thought we might ask Mr. Fairweather if he knew of someone who could bring a few loads, but I don’t know how we…how…”

“To pay for it. Yes.”

Josephine cradled the cup in her hands, as if it did not have a handle.

“I will sell a bracelet. To pay for the hay. You can tell him that.”

“And Mr. Tuck,” Flora said. “He could put a stanchel in the horse stall, maybe widen it.”

Josephine felt herself yield, incrementally. To Flora’s competence. To a sense of comfort, derived from the tea’s steam. To small losses and odd gains.

—

Twice a day, Harland went to his weather station in the veranda. He opened a ledger and wrote