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

Flora followed Mrs. Wallace down the hallway. Her heart began a rapid beating. Her shoulder began to throb. She felt faint, ran one hand along the yellow-flowered wallpaper.

“I couldn’t give her a bath,” Mrs. Wallace whispered, finger to lips, just before they stepped into the kitchen. “She ate oatmeal, had some tea.”

A girl perched on the edge of a spool-rung chair. The chair was pushed back from the table, as if she were about to jump up. She clutched her hands in her lap.

Purple shadows beneath her eyes. Knuckles, elbows, the bones of her arms. A wide mouth, drawn downwards. Matted hair.

“Enid?”

The girl’s eyes held her, without recognition. Flora stared back. She was not certain, herself, whether this was her sister.

She pulled a chair from the table and sat beside the girl. Sunshine washed over a loaf of bread, a spray of crumbs.

“Are you Enid Salford?”

“I am.”

“Did you come from England? Did you come from a workhouse in Tetbury?”

“I did.”

Flora drew a shaky breath.

“Enid. I am Flora! I am Flora.”

“My sister Flora?”

Hope in the girls’ eyes, a flicker. Flora remembered the feeling as it had once been for herself—irrepressible, treacherous.

Flora laid her hand on the girl’s clenched fist.

“Enid, I am your sister. I truly am. I came looking for you. I’m Flora.”

The minister came from a front room, holding a pen. He sat at the end of the table, looked from girl to girl.

“I’ve been writing to her for years,” Flora said. “I don’t think anyone ever sent my letters. ’Cause I never got a reply.”

“Why did you run away from the Mallorys, Enid?” he said. He spoke as if he had asked this question several times already. “We need to know if they have done something that needs to be brought to the attention of the police.”

She would not tell them what she had seen, Flora realized. One could not speak of evil. She knew the isolation of horror, remembering how Matron’s helpers had held a little girl, working a bar of soap into her mouth. Or how they fondled your private parts when they bathed you. You hid it away, even from yourself—worked it into the deepest soil of your mind.

Sunshine slanted through coloured panes, making a nimbus of the girl’s matted, filthy hair. Flora noticed that it was the same light colour as her own. Tears welled in the girl’s eyes, slid down her cheeks. She was staring at Flora as if seeing her for the first time. Hope, stronger. Eager.

“My sister? My Flora?”

The girl suddenly rested her cheekbone on her hand, as if she were too tired to hold her head up. She sprawled forward, head on folded arms.

They stared at the girl lying amidst jam and bread, in the clean kitchen with its white wainscot and checkered curtains.

Flora looked at Mrs. Wallace’s stricken face, and spoke softly.

“She’s only asleep.”

—

The girl slept for hours at the parsonage before coming to Flora’s room at the inn. Flour-sack dress clutched tightly around her gaunt frame, she huddled at the window’s edge, peering down. It was late afternoon, and the bricks of the dry goods store across the street were flushed a warm red. A top hat, a parasol—people passed, below, on the sidewalk.

“He’s down there, looking for me.”

Flora joined her at the window.

“Do you see him?”

“No.”

She could not rid herself of the stunned feeling that this fourteen-year-old girl, almost as tall as she was herself, was an imposter. Yet in the rich light she could see that the girl’s face bore a similarity to her own.

“I’m going to run you a bath.”

“Run me a bath?”

The girl spoke nervously, and Flora wondered if she was remembering the brutal scrubbing she had received at the workhouse.

“I’ll let you bathe yourself,” Flora said. She went into the bathroom and turned the spigots. The girl followed her, stood in the bathroom door. “Hot, see. Cold. I wish Ma could see this.”

“Ma. Did we call our…our mother Ma?”

“We did. Ma and Papa.”

“I don’t remember a father.”

Your little hand, Flora thought, running her own hand back and forth in the light-rippled water. The river stones, knocking against one another. The grave’s raw dirt. No relatives, only the priest and some people from the farm where Papa worked. She rose and left the bathroom to this unknown girl who was neither the child Flora remembered, nor Enid as she had imagined her. She heard a small, dunking splash. Then silence.

“Is it all right? The temperature?”

The girl did not answer and Flora turned to see that she was bent forward in the tub, weeping, beating her forehead with the heels of her hands.

Flora wet a cloth made of knitted string, rubbed it with soap, passed it up and down the girl’s back, squeezed it onto her shoulders. She dipped it again. Aroma of coconut. Eased the cloth along the knobby spine. Bug bites on the back of her neck, but no marks of whip or hand.

The girl clutched her legs, buried her face in her knees. Her body shook, she wept in spasms that Flora’s cloth could not subdue.

“He were cruel to him, beat him with a big belt. I saw them in the…’n then he…the boy, he…”

Flora asked no questions. It would have to be coaxed out, Reverend Wallace had told her in the parsonage kitchen while the girl slept. If there were some wrongdoing on the part of Mr. Mallory, he’d told Flora, they would have grounds to keep Enid from his custody.

“Sit back so I can wash your face.” She tugged gently at the girl’s shoulder.

The girl sat up and tipped her head back, eyes closed as Flora passed the cloth over her face in slow, coaxing strokes, like a cat’s tongue. The water was turning brown.

“I remember my first time in a tub,” Flora murmured. “I remember the first time I saw water coming from a tap. It was at the place I live now. Lift up your foot.”

She knelt, lifted the girl’s foot and worked the cloth between each toe.

“Now