The Island of Doves (15 page)

“Good morning,” she said to Susannah. “How did you sleep?”

“Very well. For the first time in a long while.”

Esmee smiled and gestured to the table. Susannah sat down in the chair, and Esmee held the dough in one hand and wiped the table with a rag in the other. “Good. But you must be famished. Would you like something to eat?”

Susannah felt her stomach lurch. “Yes, thank you. I feel like I could eat a horse.”

“Lucky you won’t have to do that!” Esmee moved with measured grace from the cupboard to the pot on the fire, then over to the table, and placed a steaming bowl in front of Susannah, along with a spoon. Black wild rice, whitefish, and pale green leeks floated in an inky broth. Susannah sipped it carefully from the edge of the spoon, unsure of what to expect, then felt her throat relax as the flavor bloomed in her mouth. She realized that the color of the broth came from the rice, and it tasted fresh, almost of grass, with a sweet pucker from the leeks. A satisfied smile broke out on Esmee’s face when Susannah began taking large bites of fish, slurping a bit in her rush to eat the food.

“Coffee?” Esmee asked.

Susannah nodded without stopping to speak.

The door off the kitchen opened and Magdelaine came inside, carrying a basket of chopped wood. She unwrapped her shawl. Esmee set down the coffeepot and hurried to the sitting room, then came back carrying a pair of moccasins. Magdelaine stepped out of her wet boots and into the dry moccasins.

“Thank you,” she said. “And good morning, Susannah. I see you have been introduced to Esmee’s wonderful cooking.” Magdelaine wore a fresh blouse with the sleeves turned up to her elbows and her long black and gray hair in two loose braids. “How are you feeling this morning?”

“Rested,” Susannah said, setting down the spoon with some embarrassment. She had emptied the bowl in a few short minutes and longed for more. Before she could ask, Esmee whisked it over to the pot and brought it back brimming with stew, then set coffee and hot milk before them both.

“I’m glad,” Magdelaine said, sitting down and folding her hands on the table. “Because your journey is over, but we face a new challenge. What will you do, now that you are here?”

Susannah thought back to Magdelaine’s comment the previous night about the weather in January and felt again the same uneasiness about her future. What
would
she do? How would she fill her time, with what purpose? “Forgive me,” Susannah said. “But I have no idea.”

“Well, what
can
you do? Do you know how to cook?”

Susannah shook her head, conscious that Esmee had paused in her work at the hearth in order to hear her answer. “No. There was always . . . someone always did it for me.” Esmee seemed to relax then, reassured that she wouldn’t have any competition for her position. Susannah thought of Marjorie back in the kitchen in Buffalo, kneading a small loaf of bread for Edward alone. She had been Susannah’s only friend, really—and of course it was her concern that had set Susannah’s escape into motion.

“How about needlework? Could you mend? Do the washing?” Magdelaine held a smile pressed between her lips, and Susannah saw that she was teasing her. “I suppose someone did that for you too.”

“Yes,” Susannah said, studying her cup. “It seems I am fairly useless.”

Magdelaine shook her head. “That’s not true. Perhaps you had an education. Could you teach?”

Susannah brightened then. Indeed her father had made sure she had good tutoring from the time she was young. In recent years, books had been her only companions, books and her plants. “Yes, I would be glad to try my hand at that.”

Magdelaine nodded. “Come on. I have some things to show you.”

As they stood to go to the sitting room, Esmee was one step ahead of them, kneeling at the fire to stoke the banked coals and warm the room. “I teach a small group of island girls the catechism, as well as some geography and figures.”

She pulled two books down from the shelf. One was small enough to fit in a pocket; the other was wide, with thick pages. Susannah opened it to see columns of handwritten numbers. A ledger.

“I always kept very careful records,” Magdelaine said. “Sales, inventory. Now I use them to help these girls learn sums. Heaven knows no one else is teaching them.”

Susannah nodded. “I would be glad to help you.”

Esmee had moved from the fire to the birdcage near the window. She scooped food from a lidded pail and poured it into a dish. Susannah hadn’t known she was listening to their conversation until she spoke. “But what will you tell the girls, madame? About Miss Dove?”

Magdelaine nodded. “Esmee’s right—we don’t want a lot of rumors starting about where you came from. I suppose I will simply tell them I hired you to assist me, that I brought you here from the East. They know so little about the rest of the world. I don’t think it would occur to them, or anyone else on this island, to question it.”

Esmee smiled. “That is probably so.”

Susannah gestured to the cage. “That’s a beautiful dove,” she said to Magdelaine.

“Do you think so? It was a gift from my son. I think it seems awfully cruel to keep it penned in that cage. Every time I come into the room and see it, it upsets me.”

“It isn’t cruel. Many women in New York keep them as pets.”

“That’s what Jean-Henri says.”

“They are bred to live in cages. I don’t think it would occur to them to expect another kind of life.”

Magdelaine smiled. “The women, or the doves?”

Susannah grinned back at her. “I see your point.”

“This one was wild once, until Jean-Henri caught it. He said it was a good-luck charm, and keeping it might help you to arrive safely. I was willing to try anything! You aren’t the first Miss Dove I tried to help, you know. But you
are
the first one to successfully make the journey.”

Susannah remembered the nun telling her that Father Adler had assisted women like her. “What happened to the others?”

Magdelaine was quiet for a moment. “The first Miss Dove managed to leave home—she was coming from Quebec—but when she got to Detroit her fears got the best of her. The unknown seemed worse than the suffering she knew. She returned home. We don’t know what happened to her after that.”

Susannah’s eyes widened. It had never occurred to her to stop and turn back once she’d slipped away from Buffalo. Nothing could be worse than returning to that house.

Magdelaine grimaced as she continued. “The second Miss Dove was desperate to make the journey, but we were careless in our planning. Her husband intercepted a letter that included too many details, and he quickly understood what she meant to do. He waited to see whether she would follow through with it. When she turned up at the port in Boston, ready to board a boat to New York, soon to follow the path you took here, he was waiting for her. She never made it out of the city.”

“And the third Miss Dove?” Susannah asked.

Esmee moved at the edge of the spotless room with a broom.

“Is you,” Magdelaine said. “So you can see why we must be careful, why we must explain your presence to anyone who might otherwise gossip about your arrival.”

Susannah was coming to understand just how much was riding on her escape, and how much she owed Father Adler, Sister Mary Genevieve, and Magdelaine. She was glad to be able to earn her keep by helping with the teaching, but still, a question nagged at her. “How long am I to stay here?”

Magdelaine shook her head. “That is up to you. You are my guest, not my servant. You are not indentured to me. I imagine that after what you have been through, you’d like some time to rest. And we will want time to be sure you are safe, that you won’t be followed. But soon you will begin to think about your future. When you are ready to move on, we’ll help you. Though I’m sure you know that you can never go back where you came from.”

Susannah nearly laughed at the prospect. “Nothing on earth could compel me to do that—believe me.”

Even in her certainty, Susannah felt a pang of homesickness. Not for Edward, of course, but for her childhood home, for the Manhattan City she might never see again, for the plants surely dying of thirst in her greenhouse.

She tried to imagine what it might be like to stay here on the island, or if she didn’t stay here, where else she might go, but her mind came up empty. Never in her life had it occurred to her to wonder about who she wanted to be; the script always had been written by someone else. First she was a daughter, deeply loved but protected, directed. Then she became the wife of a man who controlled each minute of her day. His desires, his plans, were necessarily hers. And there was no room for anything else. For the first time, Susannah’s future was like a book with blank pages, waiting to be written. It was a terrifying prospect.

She thought then of the promise she had made to Sister Mary Genevieve, that she would try to be of use to Magdelaine. Perhaps the answer to her future lay there. The woman had been through terrible tragedy—one sister killed, the other vanished. Maybe if Susannah could learn more about what had happened all those years ago, she would understand what she could do to help Magdelaine, how she should focus her efforts.

“I know you have your reasons for choosing to help me,” Susannah began. She felt a stir of anxiety that she might be broaching a sensitive topic, but she pressed on. “I am so sorry for what happened to your sisters.”

Esmee paused in her work, then leaned the broom up against the wall and left the room.

Susannah glanced after her, feeling tension swell between herself and Magdelaine. “I apologize,” she said quickly.

Magdelaine’s expression remained calm, but Susannah saw her throat move as she swallowed. “I don’t like to talk about the past.”

“Forgive me.”

“There’s no need for forgiveness. We must focus on the future now.” Magdelaine stood, reclaiming control of the conversation. “I would like you to stay close to the house for now. If there is anything you need, any sort of food, or a book that I do not have here, one of us can go to Market Street or send for it. You are welcome to get outside for fresh air, of course—we can’t have you cooped up in the sitting room. But please, be careful. Try not to get yourself noticed. If you’ll excuse me, I have some things to take care of.”

She went upstairs, leaving Susannah alone in the sitting room. Maybe it was the tension she had caused, but suddenly she did feel cooped up, in need of fresh air. She crossed into the front hall, then out the door onto the front porch. With her arms crossed against the chilly breeze, she looked out at the lake. In the distance she saw a schooner with its sails ballooning in the wind. The lake was a serene gray under a white sky; it seemed completely different from the day before, when it had been dark, and the day before that, when it had been as blue as the Caribbean. The variety was a wonder, or perhaps a terrifying kind of changeability. Like the beasts that lurked in the Michigan forest she had watched from the deck of the boat, the lake was indifferent to the story of one woman, indifferent to the story of five hundred on a boat that it could smash in the shallows with one leaping wave.

Around the side of the house was the wooden pen that contained Magdelaine’s four dogs, and they leapt into a barking frenzy as soon as they caught a glimpse of her coming their way. Susannah froze. Dogs had always scared her. As a girl, she had cowered from the ones that roamed the alleys in Manhattan, feral and hungry. The barking made her feel as though she were choking on her own heart. But she tried to talk herself out of the fear of these dogs, secured in a pen. Though they threw their bodies against the door, its lock held.

“Don’t be afraid. They really are softhearted, in spite of the way they sound.” Jean-Henri appeared, carrying two pails across the yard. “And they are only interested in these,” he added, holding up the buckets.

Susannah watched as he carefully unlatched the door to the pen and squeezed his body through the small opening without letting the dogs escape. The howling ceased as they descended on the pails of food.

Jean-Henri wiped his hands on his trousers and secured the pen before crossing back over to where Susannah stood. “I gather you never had a dog of your own, Miss Dove?”

Susannah laughed. “No. Not even a tiny terrier.”

She glanced around the yard beside the house. The ground was mostly bare, with patches of brown grass lying down here and there from the weight of the recently melted snow. Along the house, small green shoots had begun to sprout—little weeds and the earliest spring flowers. The bare branches of two apple trees laced together like long, dark fingers. They were only a few weeks away from budding, but the fruit would be poor if they weren’t pruned soon. Susannah flexed the fingers on her injured hand. The pain was still there, but it was receding. The hand would never be the same, but she felt she soon might be able to put it to use. She wanted badly to ask about the trees but was afraid of giving offense.

“Mr. Fonteneau, is your mother . . . fond of gardening?”

Jean-Henri laughed. “In a word, no. My mother dislikes anything that requires her to stay in one place for too long. You should have seen the struggle I endured simply getting her to live in this
house
.”

“I see,” Susannah said.

She had seen the island from a distance as the boat approached. Only this southern edge seemed to have been cleared of trees. The interior was sure to hold botanical treasures. And there was the possibility of growing peas, radishes, herbs, and potatoes, right here in the yard.

Jean-Henri followed the path of her gaze and winced. “It must not seem like much, to you. I get the feeling you are accustomed to something much grander.”

Susannah shook her head. “What I wonder, sir, is whether I might try my hand at the work. I intend to make myself useful to your mother. I would like to start a garden here.”

He looked at her in surprise. “You want to plant a garden?”

“If you think that would be all right with your mother.”

“I think she will be very surprised. And pleased.”

“Is there . . . do you have a shovel I could use? And a saw for the trees?” And all at once Susannah recognized a new difficulty: The small amount of money she had left from her exchange with Tiny would soon run out. In Buffalo she never once thought about the cost of tools, or the wood that kept the fire going in the greenhouse so that it would stay warm all winter and her plants could thrive while icicles hung from the eaves at Hawkshill. She would have to ask for yet more generosity from this family until she had a way to repay them.