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

She sat hunched at the table, pleating her skirt into fans and then smoothing it out. Creasing, smoothing, creasing. Her face did the same thing, anxious ridges forming on her forehead, clearing away when Flora whispered to her, then rising up again.

“It is because of what we expected,” Josephine said, pushing her bowl away. “Maud, put down that rag and come sit.”

Josephine noticed Maud and Ellen exchange a glance of surprise at her tone.

It had crept over her, gradually, her own understanding of why Enid did not smile, not at beauty—the bee-laden blue delphiniums, the trellis smothered with roses—nor at new dresses, her bed with its bright quilt, Ellen’s desserts. Enid was filled with a story too dreadful to tell, with resentment for the story itself and rage for those who had created it. The child knew neither what was expected of her nor of how she fit into this household.

“Ellen, I believe you have done the right thing to show her that you are interested in her. Perhaps we need to…”

She cupped her cheek, gazing out the window. Lilac leaves drooped in the still air. Sailor, standing, alert, stirred his tail.

“Let her be. Ask her nothing. Be as kind as we can. Leave the disciplining, if there is need for it, to Flora. One day, she will begin to shed her fear and anger.”

“Sounds like someone else I know,” Ellen said. She picked a bit of hull from a strawberry. “They be sisters, alright.”

After they washed up, Josephine found Flora sitting on the bottom tread of the stairs with her head in her arms. Josephine paused. Her heart had not yet resumed its normal pace after the scene in the kitchen. She lowered herself next to Flora, tucking up her bombazine skirt. Flora did not look up but held out a hand for Sailor, who trailed Josephine without fail, the click click of his claws percussion to the rustle of her skirts. The dog licked Flora’s hand, once.

“She won’t listen to me.” Flora’s voice was muffled.

Josephine thought of her advice to Maud and Ellen. She was accustomed to a different way of speaking with Flora, as if Flora were her partner, someone she might go to with questions of her own. The air was tense, as if Enid’s sulking wafted down the stairs; and she realized, suddenly, the extent to which the girl had shattered the household’s hard-won peace.

“I could not do without you, Flora,” she said. She drew a breath, not knowing what she intended to say next.

Flora raised her head, clearing her face with both hands. She stroked Sailor. Her hand trembled.

“Are you thinking that you should send me and Enid away?”

“No. No! Certainly not.” Josephine realized that she had revealed conflicted feelings.

“I’m trying,” Flora said. She did not blink, fighting back tears. “I’m trying to see her as the Enid I remember. But she’s not.”

“She’s probably doing the same. Trying to see you as the sister she lost.”

“We were both lied to. Stolen. Used like animals.”

“How used?”

“Why do you think they name it the work house? We did nothing but work. Like we were being punished for something we never did, but we felt bad about ourselves anyway. Like it was our fault being poor, being orphaned. Like it happened because we were bad children. We made gloves. Every day. Hour after hour. You should have seen the bruises on Enid’s hands.”

Josephine sensed an outpouring long in the making.

“Then we were used again. Told we should come over here to have a better life. Oh, here, here with you, it is better. But…”

“Oh, Flora.”

“I see clean faces, happy faces. People who enjoy life and think people are good. You think people are good, don’t you? You think the world is made of people like you and…” She made an encompassing gesture. “People who live in these houses. Mr. and Mrs. Fairweather.”

Flora’s eyes were dark. Her voice raised. Sailor scrambled to his feet, panting.

“I have never, ever in my life felt like I belonged anywhere. I’ve never ever felt like I had the right to shop in a store, or walk down a street. I’ve been looked at like I were a…dangerous dog…rabid, wild. Or else a thing to be used. I came to Canada because I was told I would get a better life. I dreamed of it. All the way over in that ship, I cried, thinking of little Enid, left behind, and then I hoped, I hoped, I imagined a pretty house and kind people who would help me and send for my sister. I saw myself saving money. She told me that’s what was going to happen. That lady who came to the workhouse. She lied. When I got here, I was made to work, worse than in the workhouse. To do things I had never done before. We got no training in England. We got no training in the workhouse. We was treated like cows. Fed, told to walk in circles for exercise. Got stood in washtubs and our privates felt up by nasty women. Got fed less than you would feed Sailor and sent to bed.”

They watched through the screen door as Mr. Tuck walked across the grass and entered his workshop. Evening light saturated the red rose petals, their sun-baked sweetness filled the hall.

“Only thing we learned was to sew gloves,” she whispered.

Josephine pulled Sailor close, put an arm around him, ran her fingers through his black fur.

Flora took a long breath, watching the sunlight casting the screen’s pattern onto the floor in trembling trapezoids. She hunched forward, her arms still clasping her legs. There was no sound from upstairs and she wondered if Enid had stolen to the top of the stairway and was listening.

“Something happened to Enid,” she said quietly. “Something to do with that horrible man in Nova Scotia. She told me she weren’t…wasn’t ruined. I asked, and she said no, she wasn’t ever ruined but the boy were ruined. What boy, I said. What do you