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

“Oh, Ellen. To have seen such a thing as a child.” She drew a long breath, shaking her head. “Oh, Ellen. Terrible. And no one…”

She broke off, as if searching for stronger words.

“No one, believe me, Ellen, no one would blame you. Flora is right, she was only saving herself. And saving you. She did it for you and your brother. So you wouldn’t be killed.”

“Well. ’Tis many years ago now and not a night goes by I don’t pray to the good Lord to watch over her in heaven.” A tear glistened on Ellen’s cheek and she removed her glasses and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “Now. I’ve told it. How many years I’ve been keeping that inside me is a thing I wouldn’t want to tell.”

“Not Mr. Dougan?” Maud said, suddenly. “You never told Mr. Dougan?”

Ellen shook her head and began to laugh. “He always said I was like to be a murderer myself, the interest I took in crime.”

They heard a shriek and a burst of laughter from the front parlour.

“He’s done it again,” Enid murmured. Mr. Sprague manoeuvred the Ouija board shamelessly.

Ellen dropped the stork scissors into her basket. She rose, shook tea leaves into the brown pot and filled it with boiling water.

“What are we going to do?” Josephine asked.

Maud lowered the cloth from her forehead and glanced at her mother.

Ellen, Enid and Flora exchanged glances.

“Me, my children, and you three,” Josephine continued. She poured the tea. The kitchen rang with the tinkling percussion of cup and saucer. Outside, the last light had faded from the sky. “Maud and Lucy and I have discussed this. Of course, I have not had a chance to talk to George.”

George seldom visited, citing busyness.

“Lucy and Maud have told me that they do not intend to sell the house when they reach maturity, even if George…well. That’s as good as done, then, since all three must make the decision. I intend to stay on here, and will continue taking in boarders. Maud’s grandparents have recently informed me they will pay for her to attend the Ladies’ College in Sackville next year. As for Lucy, we don’t know her plans but I do not expect her to return to Pleasant Valley. It is my hope that you three—Ellen, Flora, Enid—that you three will stay here, and do as you think best. It is my dream that you, Flora, will assume a larger role in running this establishment and that beyond room and board I might someday offer a share of whatever income we can glean. And it is my hope, too, that you, Enid, will go to school. Perhaps even starting this year.”

Flora set her teacup back in its saucer. She noticed dried pie dough on her sleeve, picked at it.

“I know you are not my daughter, Flora,” Josephine said. “But you are no more a servant to me than is Ellen. As I understand it, and from what I have learned from Cousin Carrie, as we try to be persons we must become something new. I am not a wife. I am not a homeowner. I’m just…we’re just…friends, I suppose. Pieces of the same puzzle.”

Making a life.

Flora brushed her sleeve. She said nothing.

What, after all, she thought, had she imagined for herself other than two things—one, hazy as sunshine through mist, was a house of her own; the other, the one that had nurtured her through the long, lonely years with Ada and Henry, had been to find Enid, whom she had betrayed without meaning to—Enid, running up the road in her dream, always vanishing. Enid was solid, now, at her side, murmuring with an anxious tone—Flora?—as if it were she who must care for Flora and not the other way around.

Josephine’s offer was the second choice of her life, she realized. The first choice had been based on Maria Rye’s story, a bright concoction spun of things that a pauper child might desire. This new offer, however, was a real possibility, and such possibility, she saw, was also what a pauper child might desire, and now she knew its truth: the tall windows, the verandas and linden trees, the claw-footed tub with its iron spigots, the maple-leaf dresser handles, the oak telephone. Too, she herself was no longer a lost child, but had been saved, and had herself saved Enid, and might say that just as Josephine was no longer only a widow, she was no longer only an English orphan.

The dream of a white house with roses and a chicken pen shrivelled like a drawing crumpled and tossed onto a fire, and all that was left of it was a sock weighted with ill-gotten money which, she saw now, must be taken from beneath the floorboard and given to the police.

She skipped several stages of her answer to Josephine. Her eyes focused on the shapes she drew on the table with the tip of her finger, a large square with lines drawn across it.

“We could make Mr. Dougan’s tack room into a cottage so we could take on more boarders. I know we could barter for work. We’d need a carpenter and a mason. You could put two bedrooms, like this, and this. If we…give me your pencil, Enid.”

TWENTY-FOUR A Different Outcome

ENID STOOD BENEATH THE trellis on the back stoop nervously clutching a book bag to her chest. It was fall, and the school year had already begun. Flora, standing in the doorway, remembered Enid at the parsonage table, her hair in hanks, flour-sack dress hanging from bony shoulders. Her mouth, a slash of misery. Now, shiny blonde hair was parted in the middle and caught back in a chignon, like Josephine’s. Enid had starched and ironed a green plaid dress herself.

She looked neither at Flora nor at Maud, but out towards the street. Her lips trembled, her breath was rapid. Excitement, fear—each mitigated the other, making her uncertain.

Maud, one step lower,