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

the front doors had been open to the air, women continued to mill in the vestibule, chanting—“Full suffrage for women! Full suffrage for women!”—hoarse from heat, fury and profound disappointment.

—

The station platform was crowded. Dresses, parasols, hats. Sweep of silk. Restless, rustling.

Lucy and Carrie stood with a group of St. John women, speaking in low voices. They summoned energy, Flora observed. Their eyes were dark with anger and determination. They were laying plans.

The train hissed and squealed to a stop. Josephine and Maud climbed up the steps and entered the carriage. Ellen, who seldom left the house, gripped both Flora’s and Enid’s hands before taking a breath and setting a foot onto the metal step.

No one spoke as the train left the station and gathered speed, a regular jolting that smoothed into a sleep-inducing sway as they passed eastward along the river.

Flora pressed her face to the window.

The first time she had taken a train in Canada, she had been coming from the Protestant Orphanage in St. John. Late spring, and the fruit trees had been veiled by pink blossoms, the fields lush with grass, unbruised by hooves or weather. The houses seemed whiter in memory, even though it was the same time of year. The barns, too, had seemed freshly painted, and the sky a darker blue. She’d watched a woman wearing an apron scatter corn to her chickens while tea towels tossed on a clothesline; and Flora had thought that she would step onto the Pleasant Valley train platform and be greeted by a kindly family.

She had travelled with hope. She had lived with hope, even when she guessed Ada had not mailed her letters, even when she’d mounted the steps of the train platform to be sold at auction. She had held Enid in her heart.

Hope, she thought, watching cows on a raft being poled out to the interval islands, was perhaps what allowed buds to burst from twigs, or brought grass from the soil, or gave chicks the energy to break their shells.

She reflected that she had only lost hope once, after Enid had vanished and Ellen had remembered the brass duck. But it had returned.

Enid slumped, rested her head on Flora’s shoulder.

The vote failed, Flora thought. Her heart lifted.

But we didn’t.

She drifted off to sleep, thinking of the boarding house, and of her cow, and of Enid’s schoolwork, and of the next petition she would champion, making up its words to the rhythm of the clattering wheels.

Election Act…amended…have the right…

AFTERWORD Some True Things, Notes and Historical Reference Material

NOTES:

I have used the spelling St. John for the city now known as Saint John, New Brunswick. The former is how the name was usually spelled during the time period of the novel.

Mount Allison University has had many different names between 1843 and the present, related to a male academy, female academy, commercial college and the university. I’ve endeavoured to use names appropriate to the years mentioned.

The regatta held in the novel is based on an account of the Jubilee Regatta held on June 20, 1887, in Saint John, in celebration of the Jubilee of her Majesty, Queen Victoria. I do not name it as such in the novel, however, since the events of the novel and the actual event do not coincide.

Some readers may be aware of a terrible murder that occurred at the time of this novel in the vicinity of Saint John, and for which a man was hanged. Mr. Tuck’s story bears some resemblance, but is not intended to depict the true and tragic events. The articles read by Ellen in The Sister’s Tale are adapted from the real accounts of this murder, known as the Little River Tragedy, as reported in The Daily Telegraph, Saint John, New Brunswick, 1878.

The town of Pleasant Valley is loosely based on the town of Sussex, New Brunswick, just as Whelan’s Cove is based on present-day St. Martins. Tyne Cove and Black Creek are entirely fictional. All the characters of The Sister’s Tale, except for George Francis Train and a handful of well-known political and historical figures, are products of my imagination.

The philanthropist Maria Rye (1829–1903) is real, although the part she plays in this novel is invented, including her letter to Mr. Fairweather.

George Francis Train (1829–1904) was a highly eccentric Bostonian who did, in fact, stun the town of Sussex in 1887, when he secured a position at the local paper. After denouncing the pauper auction, he was dismissed and sent packing. Every detail about him, as mentioned by narrator or characters, is true. Including the purple gloves.

The Commodore (the name is my invention) is based on an eccentric bachelor of the period, Dr. Goodfellow, a dentist who wore a paisley shawl around his shoulders when he went for walks “with the ends drooping to the ground,” as described by Grace Aiton in The Story of Sussex and Vicinity.

Sussex had its first telephone exchange and operator in 1891. I took the liberty of changing the date to a few years earlier.

—

TRUE THINGS:

1889: The last pauper auction was held in Sussex, New Brunswick. The Kings County Almshouse and Poor Farm was established in the Parish of Norton, New Brunswick.

1895: An Act Respecting the Property of Married Women showed a dramatic transformation in New Brunswick women’s legal rights, including “Married women may hold real and personal property” and have “full control of property, possessed at time of marriage or acquired after.”

1917: I took the liberty of changing the date of the second reading to the women’s enfranchisement bill. The actual mobbing of a member of the legislative assembly occurred in June 1917, when a private member’s bill calling for women’s enfranchisement went into second reading. After being roundly expected to pass, it was voted down.

1919: Women gained the right to vote in provincial elections in New Brunswick.

1920: The Dominion Elections Act was amended so that every “eligible” Canadian over the age of twenty-one, male or female, could vote in federal elections.

1929: