Waiting for Time (21 page)

Before they left, she took Mary and Tessa over to the church where Reverend Wentworth prayed for them and told them to be good girls.

Of the trip across the Atlantic Mary can recall little. She was very ill and would have died (as did a female servant belonging to another family on the boat) if Tessa had not taken care of her, seen to it that she got clean water and what food she could eat. Tessa herself was not ill but grew pale and exhausted from running between Mary and the four Armstrong children.

Mrs. Armstrong, a haughty stick of a woman with a gull's face, had a way of hitting the girls so that the large garnet on her finger made the blow much more painful than it appeared. She took a special dislike to Tessa and hit her often. More quiet and watchful, Mary learned quickly to dodge blows and keep out of the woman's sight when she was having one of her moods.

Mr. Armstrong was called Colonel and seemed, in addition to his business interests, to have some connection with the fort in Newfoundland. He was very different from his wife, plump and shorter, red-cheeked with a smooth shiny face, given to jokes and easy laughter. He was a great favourite aboard ship, talking business with other passengers and with the ships' officers, and spent little time with his wife and children. When they did see him, Colonel Armstrong was always jolly and agreeable, calling Mrs. Armstrong “my beauty” and Mary and Tessa, whom he seemed unable to tell apart, “my little dumplings.”

Mrs. Armstrong's eyes followed her husband everywhere he went. She watched him as a child might watch a dish of sweets being passed around the room, with greed and love, and fear that someone else might empty the dish before it reached her hands. When the Colonel joked with the girls, Mrs. Armstrong frowned and told them they should have more respect for the master, although they never returned his pleasantries and shied away from his fat, damp hands that seemed always to be reaching out to pinch their cheeks or pat their bottoms.

During the second week out, the Colonel found Mary alone and slipped his hand, like a fat grub, into the neck of her dress, clutching at her small breast. She jerked away and ran to hide below deck, where Tessa found her vomiting behind a pile of salt pork barrels.

After that, the girls tried never to be where Mr. Armstrong could come upon them alone. They were helped in this by Tim Toop. Tim's irresponsible heibits had finally antagonized his fellow thieves beyond bearing. They had threatened him with such violence that the boy stowed away in the hold of a ship about to leave port. Found the second day out, he was marched off to the first mate and forced to mark his X on a paper saying he would work his passage across and remain with the ship for two seasons.

The master pointed out to Tim that he could refuse, in which case he would be thrown overboard. Tim put a firm X down on the papers and watched as the mate wrote “Tim Toop” on the list of ship's crew. It was the first of many legal, and illegal, documents on which his name would appear.

Once he had signed on and become a member of the crew, albeit the most lowly, Tim had the freedom of the ship and was delighted to find the girls he had shared graveyard meals with. Whenever he saw Tessa or Mary he would wink or give them playful punches. Sometimes at night the three children would huddle in the shelter of the foredeck and whisper about the place they were sailing to.

“'Tis a place big as all England,” Tim, who listened to the seamen talk, told them, “with woods goes on for miles and miles—miles and miles what no one owns, only Indians, and they're wild and will shoot arrows into ya! There's animals, too, jeezely great beasts, bears and wildcats and deer twice as big as the ones in England—and you know what? There's gold and jewels mixed in with the rocks!”

Tim's voice dropped so low the girls had to bend close to hear. “They can whistle for me once we makes land! I tell ya I'm not goin' back, I'm goin' to run away and get rich!” He let Mary and Tessa feel a coin he'd stolen from the cook when he was helping in the galley.

“By the time we gets there I'll have a good few—it'll give me a bit of a start. You two should do the same—that Armstrong woman'd never miss a ring.”

The sisters piously assured Tim they would do no such thing. Tessa warned him that he would be hung from the yardarm if he was caught stealing.

The girls told Tim how their mistress hit them, showed him the bruises on their arms. Tim, who had been beaten most of his life, was not impressed. However, when Tessa recounted how Mr. Armstrong's hands had grabbed beneath Mary's blouse, the boy immediately recognized the Colonel's intentions. “Given a chance that old bugger'll have ye both knocked up!” he told them and went on to explain facts of life that Mrs. Brockwell had not seen fit to instruct them in. He offered to demonstrate, patting his crotch and laughing at the girls' horrified faces.

When the ship docked in St. John's there was pandemonium, families and servants rushing back and forth, calling lost children, searching for personal belongings. Trunks, hat boxes, tables, chairs, beds, books and even musical instruments were being lowered onto the wharf. Animals were led ashore, crates hoisted over the side, barrels rolled down the gangplanks. Noises everywhere: seamen shouting orders, creaking chains, screeching pulleys, dogs barking, babies crying, the neighing of frightened horses. In the swirl of confusion, Tim Toop disappeared.

The Armstrongs had rented a narrow house on the hill below the fort. Mrs. Armstrong was very disappointed with it. It was barely large enough for the family, she said, and completely unsuitable for entertaining. Mary, Tessa and the old woman hired to cook slept on the third floor under the peaked roof. The room had two tiny windows from which you could see the crooked street, other roofs and the harbour. The glass in the windows and the slate shingles on the roof clattered in the wind and for several nights the girls hardly slept.

Fall slid into winter and the attic room grew colder and colder. Some nights Mary was sure the whole house was about to blow away and tumble down the hill into the harbour. Mary and Tessa slept on straw on the floor with but one blanket between them. Mrs. Bowden the cook slept in the same room. The girls never found out where the woman came from. She used to keep a little brown bottle of medicine tucked into the cuff of her wool stockings and would take it regularly before bed each night.

“'Twas a good spell before it come to us it was the Colonel's Madeira. I don't blame her a bit, took somethin' to sleep in that room. She used to hide bits of bread and cheese in her pockets, too—for me and Tessa to eat in bed—and she kept three bricks near the kitchen fire all day to carry upstairs. Them bricks were the only bit of comfort we had, we'd try to get asleep before they got cold.”

At the Armstrongs, Mary and Tessa worked even harder than they had for Mrs. Brockwell. They could not go to bed until the household was settled away, until guests left, dishes and pots were washed and the kitchen set to rights. Then porridge must be started for breakfast, candles trimmed, lamps cleaned and fires laid for the next day. Long before dawn they must wake and begin again. First they lugged buckets of water on a hoop from the well pump halfway down the hill, then they had to light four fires: one each in the kitchen, dining room, parlour and in Mrs. Armstrong's bedroom.

While Mrs. Bowden prepared the Armstrongs' breakfast, Tessa and Mary set water to heat, carried it upstairs for Mrs. Armstrong's bath. They emptied all the chamber pots, scrubbed them and returned them to their place under the beds, the cloth bag containing dirty pieces of silk was removed, taken downstairs to be washed later, a clean bag with clean silk scraps was hung on the rod near Mrs. Armstrong's pot. Next they woke the children, bathed and dressed them in front of the fire in the Armstrongs' bedroom.

Sometimes even Mr. Armstrong took a bath there. He liked to have Tessa or Mary bring extra buckets of hot water up from the kitchen to pour over his back as he sat in the tub. On those occasions his wife would sit at her little table in the corner, sipping tea. “You two will have the Colonel spoiled,” she would chide in a high, false voice as if carrying water up a flight of stairs had been Mary's or Tessa's idea. She always turned her head away when they poured the warm water over her husband. He would chuckle and tell the girls they should get into the tub with him and make playful grabs at them with his wet hands. His wife clicked her tongue, pretending it was all a game.

Mrs. Armstrong hired and fired five nursemaids in quick succession. “Slatternly, stupid creatures who wouldn't have been let in the door of any decent English house,” she told her husband, and arranged for the two older children be sent daily to an infants' school run by Miss Slater on the Upper Path. The younger children's needs must be cared for by Mary and Tessa, who, their mistress said, had little else to occupy their time.

Mrs. Bowden made trips down over the hill for vegetables, meat and fish, but Mary and Tessa were only allowed to go as far as the water pump. Mr. Armstrong told them the streets of St. John's were not safe for females at night. Since there was not time to go out by day the girls saw almost nothing of the town. One day Tessa came back from the well and told Mary she'd seen Tim standing in a doorway as if watching for someone, but when she waved and called out he hadn't seemed to know her.

Mrs. Armstrong spent her time sitting near the parlour fire, working red roses on a set of needlepoint covers for the dining room chairs. She complained constantly of the cold, the lack of good tea and congenial society. Her temper grew even worse when winter came and she discovered that every woman she accounted her social equals had returned to England for the season. She swore that she would die of cold before spring, if she was not poisoned first by the food, which had a rotten taste and was, she said, making her sick.

Every few days she took up and abandoned new ideas about the running of the house. One week she accused the servants of being thieves. For a short time after this she counted each item of food and watched as Mrs. Bowden locked it away each night. All to no avail. Mrs. Bowden's brown bottle was always full and there was always cheese and bread for the girls to gnaw on at night.

After the food counting fancy passed, Mrs. Armstrong announced that prayers would be read by the Colonel each morning at six. Then she decided the servants had to take a cold bath every Saturday night. Each practice continued for a week or so until she thought of some other way to make their lives miserable.

Only the woman's meanness was constant. When Mary's boots fell apart, Mrs. Armstrong made her wear a pair of her husband's castoffs. Although Mary stuffed rags into the toes they were still far too big and flopped up and down, rubbing her heels until they bled. Mary hated her mistress. She learned to choke down rage by imagining what colour the blood would turn the dress Mrs. Armstrong was wearing if she were to drive a knife into the woman.

Mrs. Armstrong's only pleasure came from the status her husband enjoyed with officers of the fort. Governor and Lady Hamilton having returned to England, she felt it fell to her to “bring a touch of graciousness to the poor men's lives.” To fulfil this duty she gave a dinner party each week.

On these occasions Mrs. Armstrong was usually the only woman present. When the Armstrongs and their guests sat around the dining room table, which was too grand for the small room, Mrs. Armstrong, with her hair pinned up in elaborate curls, seemed happy, completely unlike the woman who had terrorized the servants all day. She would smile in the candlelight, the tops of her pale breasts pushing up above the dark taffeta whenever she leaned forward to speak to the officers. Tessa and Mary, bringing in food, would be surprised to see how young the woman looked as she sipped wine and flirted with the men in red uniforms.

“But she wasn't near as pretty as Tessa. Tho' we was half-starved and worked like dogs, Tessa was still pretty, taller than me, she was, with blue eyes and blue-black hair and white skin—not plain and dark like me,” the old woman tells her great-granddaughter.

Mary and Tessa had to stand in the doorway between kitchen and dining-room waiting for Mrs. Armstrong to indicate when to serve something or take something away. In the kitchen behind the girls, the old woman would be watching pots, laying food out on platters and piling dirty dishes in a corner to wash later. Sometimes there would be one or two soldiers lounging in the kitchen waiting for the officers. They would help keep the fire going.

The night it happened, Tessa was moving around the table from place to place with a platter of baked hen. One of the young officers, as he served himself from the platter, looked up. “Uncommonly pretty maid you have here, Mrs. Armstrong,” he said, smiling at Tessa.

Mrs. Armstrong shot Tessa a look of such hatred that Mary, watching from her place in the doorway, felt a chill of fear, like the cold tip of a knife touching her skin, tracing a line around her heart.

“We was done for, that minute we was done for and I knowed it. I saw it in the look the crow gave Tessa.”

The guests were barely through the door when Mrs. Armstrong swept into the kitchen. She walked over to Tessa, who stood back on with her arms in a pan of greasy water, grabbed the girl's long hair and yanked her around. She pulled Tessa across the room, screaming that the girl was a dirty little slut and would not spend another night under this roof.

Mrs. Bowden rushed over and, with a good deal of courage, tried to calm her mistress down, pleading that she was sure the girl meant no harm. With her free hand Mrs. Armstrong struck the cook across the face and continued pulling Tessa towards the door. The enraged woman's screeching grew louder until it filled the room. She called Tessa a wanton whore and said she'd tried to corrupt first her husband and now her guests, that she was not fit to stay in the same house with innocent children. Tessa sobbed and tried to pull away and Mary stood with her back pressed against the wall, struck dumb, knowing nothing could stop what was about to happen.

Mrs. Armstrong had gotten to the back door and was pushing Tessa, who was wearing only a thin dress, out into the snow, when Mr. Armstrong came into the kitchen asking jovially what the fuss was about. He tried to calm his wife, her voice did drop slightly, but she continued to scream that the girl was not spending another night in her house, that she was going to have her charged with disorderly conduct and insolence.