Bittersweet Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #5): A Novel (18 page)

“Mrs. Beam, she means,” her father interjected.

“And then I rubbed her with olive oil, and combed her hair, and fed her some soup...”

“Tell us about the stove, Elizabeth. The fire. Was there a fire in the stove?”

As best she could, Ellie explained that she had lit the fire to heat the soup she had brought from home. She described the smoke, the plugged chimney, and how she had let the fire go out.

“It was out before I left,” she whispered. “I know it was out.”

“Tell us,” the Mounties said, “did you light a candle? Or the lamp? Did you leave a light burning when you left?”

“The lamp,” Ellie said. “The room was so dark, and Aunt Tilda kept fussing for light, so I lit it and set it on the table beside her where she could blow it out when she wanted to. Then I filled a glass of water for her, and... that’s all.”

A few more questions, and the Mounties thanked Ellie and the family for their help and took their leave.

Ellie, both proud and anxious, stood beside her father and mother as the Mounties rode out of the yard to make their rounds of the community, gather what information they could, and compile a report.

“They’ll get to the bottom of it,” her father reassured. “I’m sure they’ll find some reason, locate someone other than you who
was there, someone who was careless with fire, perhaps...”Bran’s voice died away uncertainly.

Looking up into her father’s face, Ellie’s eyes, for the first time, filled with that haunted look that her parents came to recognize and to dread. “Papa, did I do it? Am I a murderer?”

Bran and Serena dropped to their knees in the yard, putting their arms around their child, assuring her, both angrily and pathetically, that she was, indeed, no murderer. “Never think it!” they said.

“The Mounties,” Bran said more than once, “will find the truth. You’ll see.”

Even then, they had a reputation for “getting their man.”Would it, in this case, be a girl? Serena and Bran pushed away the panic that threatened and put their faith in the law, relieved because the Mounties were on the job. It hadn’t always been so.

Early days in the West had been fraught with wildness and wickedness. It had been a wide-open, free-booting, brigand-plagued time in the history of the territories. There was no law, and there certainly was no order.

Before immigrants were wooed and won to homesteading by the government, and while the Northwest was still considered empty, the Indians and the Métis became the victims of Montana-based traders, men without consciences, who crossed the unmarked international border to barter “firewater” for buffalo hides.

Firewater—the heart and soul of the whiskey trade—was a rotgut mixture of watered-down whiskey, India ink, tobacco juice, tabasco, and even vitriol. This diabolic drink rapidly demoralized the natives and disintegrated their culture; the order of the day was arson, rape, and murder—lawless abandon.

Word went rapidly from the frontier to the Canadian Parliament that the American “wolfers” had perpetrated a massacre of Canadian Indians. Although few episodes in the past have had so lurid a history with so little established fact as the “Cypress Hills Massacre,” still it was the catalyst that prompted the organizing of some sort of police protection.

When it seemed the Indians would certainly seek their own justice, the government hurried into action, resulting in the establishment of a mounted police force for the Northwest. Aside from the fact that they would be under civil control, they would function like cavalry. Their uniform would be scarlet—a happy choice, reminiscent of the British uniform already recognized by the Indians as representing the Great Queen, and commanding respect.

These men, soon to be called Mounties—discreet, resolute, persuasive—managed without too much trouble or time to impose law with a minimum of disruption and, simultaneously, gain the confidence of the Indians. Before long they would preside over the change that made a wilderness into an agricultural community. Eventually, of course, they made a name for themselves across the country and around the world, with a reputation for patient diplomacy and firm action.

In their red uniforms and on their handsome steeds, the Mounties represented law and order wherever they went. The Northwest—white and Indian alike—learned to trust them, to depend on them.

Brandon and Serena Bonney had full confidence that after the investigation a report would be forthcoming that would clear their child of all culpability in the sad Beam affair.

The report, when it finally filtered down to Bliss and the Bonneys: “Accidental death.”

“It’s not good enough!” a disappointed Serena said to her husband. “They should have explained how it happened. They should have cleared Ellie of all suspicion. I know people! They’ll say Tilda Beam certainly wasn’t responsible for the accident, and so somebody else was. And I’m afraid that somebody will always be thought of as Ellie.”

“She’s just a child, Serena,” Bran said gently. “People will be kind—”

Some were. Some were not. Some meant to be. Well-meaning people gave consolation that was condemnation: “After all,”
they said kindly, “no one thinks that Ellie did anything on purpose. Heavens, no! We all know what a helpful, caring child she is. Good as gold, really.”

Or, “Fires happen! And no one, especially a little girl, can be held responsible for a fire.”

Perhaps missing the mark the most: “Ellie will get over it. She’ll forget it. Give her time, and life will go on as though it never happened. You’ll see.”

But glances that were too sympathetic, pats of consolation, cheery words when none were called for, a few gibes by spiteful children, all kept the tragedy, and the uncertainty, alive for Ellie.

Those, and the dreams...

Ellie was making potato salad—the eggs and potatoes had been boiled and the dressing made, and there was no use letting them go to waste. She and her father would have a picnic meal all by themselves.

But there was Tom.

She had gone to the picnic with Tom ever since she finished school at fifteen and considered herself a woman; certainly lots of girls were no older when they married, even began raising a family.

And Tom had offered marriage, right away.

At first her answer had been a light, “I’m too young, Tom! And so are you!”

Tom, grudgingly, had accepted that. By the time she was eighteen, he was more urgent. “I need you; I want you,” he had whispered enticingly, snuggling in the buggy or under a willow tree in the evening’s shadows.

And though her lips and her heart responded, her mind, her guilt-ridden mind, had put excuses in her mouth. “Not yet, Tom. We’re both young—”

“Not
too
young,” he said insistently, pressing to overcome her reluctance with the only means he knew—the pulsing need of their healthy young bodies, the approval of their parents, the pass
ing of time, his need of a partner in the great adventure of setting up his own place.

When Ellie turned twenty-one, her mother died. Tom, called upon to be patient once again, accepted the new excuse: “I can’t... I just can’t leave Dad right now, Tom.”

Accepted it for a time. Finally even Tom—good, patient Tom—grew impatient with the delay, began prodding into the situation and Ellie’s continual objections, thinking, struggling to come to some conclusion.

“It’s because you don’t love me,” he accused, to be met by a fury of denials.

“How can you say that! I’ve loved you for years, ever since that day when you first came to school—”

“Well, then, what’s the problem? Ellie,” Tom studied his fingernails, “are you... afraid? Afraid of marriage? Afraid of me, perhaps?”

This Ellie strongly denied. And surely she had all the earmarks of a normal, loving, eager young woman. Until marriage was mentioned.

Two Christmases ago, riding home together in the cutter after the Christmas Concert, when it seemed the joyousness of the season was filling all hearts, Tom’s hopes rose once more. And once more Ellie—her face rosy with the cold, and the moon making mysterious shadows around her eyes—turned his proposal aside. No longer able to say they were too young, she treated the idea lightly. “Oh, Tom—we have such fun, you and I. It’s special whenever we get together. Can’t we be happy this way for the time being?”

Tom was not to be cajoled; Tom was not about to settle for friendship. Tom said, his brow furrowed and his tone more serious than at any time before, “Ellie, does your refusal to consider marriage have anything to do with that fire? The death, over a dozen years ago, of that old woman?”

“Why would you say such a thing?” Ellie asked tightly, almost angrily.

“Because I’ve thought of every other reason, and nothing else makes sense; I keep coming back to the fire. As I think about it, about you, Ellie, you’ve been different since that time. At first I believed it was natural, considering the shock of that experience, and that it would pass. But I see now that it hasn’t; it’s become a way of life with you. It’s that, isn’t it?”

The cutter’s runners squeaked over the packed snow; the harness jingled rhythmically; the moon kept pace with them, laying a shiny, silvery path across the snow as they moved along. A night for love and romance.

Ellie’s voice was low when she said, “You don’t want to be married to a murderer, Tom. Think of trying to explain to your children that their mother—”

“Hey! What’s this foolishness!”Tom pulled the horse to a halt and there, in the middle of the road and bundled as they were, took her in his arms, shaking her, rocking her, holding her.

“Never let me hear such rot again!” he demanded. “Anyway, that’s all in your head, Ellie, not mine!”

Ellie wept a little—from the force of her feelings. And from the force of his.

“Hey!”Tom said again, watching the tears shine in the moon-glow, “None of that! Those’ll freeze, you know. And I don’t want any frozen ice maiden!”

Even though Ellie managed a weak laugh and Tom wiped away the tears, her heart, deep down inside, remained cold, cold, cold. And his not much better, for nothing had been settled.

Two more years passed; several more proposals and as many refusals.

At times Ellie’s heart quailed. How long would Tom—a perfectly healthy, normal young man—agree to wait? She knew it wasn’t fair; she knew she was being desperately, terribly, unexplainably unfair to Tom.