Wild Rose (43 page)

“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Mrs. Hartshorne agreed. “But what can they do?”

“Just take her to another town, I reckon,” Mrs. Murphy said. “The Mountie says he can’t get rid of her until somebody gives him some evidence she’s breaking the law.” Mrs. Hartshorne snorted yet again.

“All he has to do is sit there after midnight and count ‘em comin’ and goin’.” Sophie wondered how Mrs. Hartshorne knew that. Despite her business, or maybe it was because of it, she knew herself to be isolated from the everyday life of the town, and uncomfortably knew that she had somehow chosen this. “It’s as if –” Mrs. Hartshorne paused, then went on, a plaintive note in her voice, “as if somehow they don’t want her to go –”

“Oh, now,” Mrs. Murphy interrupted. “I have heard with my own ears the men saying she must go. We all know she must go.”

More disturbed by all of this than she could understand, Sophie said, “I must run down the street and get Charles. Mrs. Wozny will have had quite enough of him by now.” She hurried into the bedroom for her mantle, and before either woman could speak again, went to the door. “Will you look after the place for me for ten minutes while I get my baby?”

“Sure and we will,” Mrs. Murphy declared and Mrs. Hartshorne murmured assent through a mouthful of pie, grateful, Sophie thought, to have reason to stay in the warmth and comfort of her room for a little longer, where they didn’t have to worry about making tea or pies or straightening up the room. What luxury it was to them. No one knew that better than she did, Sophie thought.

As she hurried down the path, snow banked up on either side, she was thinking, where had all that talk about faithfulness, about sacrifice, about prayer, gotten her? The most prosperous woman in town was Adelaide Smith. And had she not, one sleepless night when she had stepped out of the house to get a little fresh air, seen Frank Archibald hurrying across the street to his own house as if he were coming from Mrs. Smith’s? And yet she had heard him with her own ears sitting in her café, saying that something would have to be done. She wondered what went on between Mrs Archibald and her husband when they were in bed together every single night. Or maybe they slept in separate rooms now.

Before she quite realized it, Adelaide Smith and what she did for a living came into her mind, thoughts of how such acts
might play themselves out in real life – the strange man undress
ing in her boudoir – no, not boudoir, a homely room with a hard, narrow bed, no decorations, no silks, no perfumes, probably freezing cold too, in this weather – herself stripping off her clothing – Here Sophie came back to herself. But the moment between the anonymous man, the voluptuous Adelaide with her hard face and frizzled, too-red hair insisted itself into her mind’s eye. It – the act itself, then the money coming from the man’s pocket and Adelaide’s taking it in a hardened boredom as she threw a wrapper over her nakedness. She gave the man a beard, then took it away in favour of a poorly-trimmed moustache. Made him fat, gave him an appalling odour of dried sweat, saw his unlovely elbows and knees, scarred and rough, and then allowed herself a glimpse of his genitals.

Inadvertently, her hand came to her forehead, she had been about to cross herself. But the picture of the man’s body made ugly by work, accidents and hardship, the woman’s falling breasts and protruding stomach without her stays, her fiercely-died hair, and that air of clamped-down emotion that she had observed on every occasion Sophie had seen her, made her drop her hand to her side. They were, surely, no different than she was, only that she was younger and still had a pretty body, despite her baby. But Lily looked as if she hadn’t had a good meal in her life, as if she’d been born with the bruises on her arms, as if they were her natural state. She was filled with pity for the girl, even as distaste rose. She scurried, slipping and nearly falling, on the hard-packed snow that formed a path to Mrs. Wozny’s where she knocked, too loudly, on the door.

~

Not long after she had put Charles to bed
, she heard again the tell-tale creak of footsteps on the snow outside her cabin, judged them to be a woman’s, followed by a firm knock on her door. She had been sitting quietly mending Charles’s small trousers by the light of the kerosene lamp, tired out from her long day, yet not really wishing for her bed. She set aside her mending, crossed the room, lifted the curtain, then, seeing that it was Mrs. Emery at her door, she kicked aside the folded blanket she used to stop the draught coming from under it, lifted the bar, and pulled the door open. Mrs. Emery hurried in, red-cheeked and puffing, riding on a freezing blast.

“Is something wrong?” Sophie began.

“Well, yes and no,” Mrs. Emery responded, beginning to unwind the shawl she had thrown over her head and shoulders, even as she stamped her feet on the rag rug to throw off the snow on her boots. “Mrs. Tremblay is in my parlour. Poor thing, she couldn’t bring herself to come here, so she came to me instead. I told her I’d see if you’d talk to her.” Sophie stood, frozen. “Now, Sophie,” Charlotte went on. “You just put on your things and go over. Poor woman is in a state.” She had begun to take off her mantle. “I’ll stay here with the boy. Now off you go.” Sophie could only think that now that the moment finally had come upon her, her chief thought was that Mrs. Tremblay would know what had become of Pierre.

When Sophie was dressed in her warm outerwear, her hand on the latch, Mrs. Emery said, as if she had just remembered meaning to say this, “She is so ashamed, torn between her daughter who has ruined herself, and her grandchild that she wants so badly, and you. She knows you’re a decent woman. She says she is so sorry –” Sophie pulled open the door and stepped outside, shutting the door on Mrs. Emery’s voice, hardly noticing she had.

Grandchild!
It was as she had feared – so much so, that she
had been unable to think in any rational way about the possibil
ity. Marguerite was expecting a child, a half-sibling to her own beloved Charles: Pierre would never come back now. She knew it, she wanted to fall full-length on the hard–crusted snow and beat her fists against it. Pierre, in his desperation to escape their life, had fallen low; now he had dragged her down with him. It
was all she could do not to scream aloud. All his protestations of his great, unending love for her; his ecstatic praise of her body, his near worship of it. And this, this it had come to! Rage, too, propelled her, stomping across the snow-packed street.

Already the cold was seeping through her mantel, her toes were curling in protest against it; she was wracked with shivering, as she hurried, the deep cold rendering the path icier even than usual, slipping and catching herself. Off balance, staggering like a drunk, she reached Mrs. Emery’s verandah, where she paused with one hand on the railing, the other lifting the mantel’s trim at her shoulders to press the fabric over her mouth and nose, against the air so frigid it couldn’t be breathed except through cloth lest it freeze her throat and lungs.

She was through the door, was in the hallway removing her hat, mitts, her heavy coat and boots, and then opening the door into the parlour where a fire burned and Mrs. Tremblay sat perched on the edge of the horsehide sofa, much as Sophie had only a few months before asking for refuge, and as though she expected momentarily to be sent away. The woman’s eyes were red and swollen, she held a cotton handkerchief in one hand and passed it to the other, then passed it back again, crumpling and straightening it only to crumple it again. At this sight, Sophie’s rage deserted her, replaced by a colder anger.

“Let us speak
en français, n’est–ce pas?”
She was not unaware of the irony of choosing to return to her native tongue at a moment of extremity when so often she seemed to have repudiated
it. Mrs. Tremblay, a small woman grown even smaller by her life of unrelenting work, had the largest, darkest eyes Sophie had ever seen – they were like holes in her bony face. She nodded, never removing them from Sophie’s. “Madame Tremblay, I do not hold you responsible for your daughter’s transgression.” Sophie, in view of Mrs. Tremblay’s alarm, thought it best to make this clear. Tears poured down Mrs. Tremblay’s cheeks.

“I thought she was ruined,” she said, her voice so soft Sophie had to listen closely to hear it. “But she says that
he
is getting your marriage annulled, that the priest has told him it can be done, and that before their baby is born, they will be married.”

Sophie found herself sitting.

“Annulment?” she whispered. Mrs. Tremblay lowered her eyes, wiping them with the handkerchief, and the sight of her tears angered Sophie so that she demanded, “Where is he? Is he here?” She was not too upset to notice she had left Marguerite out of the question.

“They are travelling to Québec for the annulment.” Now she stared at Sophie, while her hands crumpled and straightened the piece of cloth.

Sophie said, “He will seek an
annulment?”
She paused. “An annulment of our marriage?” her voice rising. “We were married by a priest; it was a legal marriage. We have a child, a son, he cannot…”

“I know nothing about that,” Mrs. Tremblay said hurriedly, raising one hand as if to protect herself from the onslaught of Sophie’s emotion. Such a frightened little woman she was, Sophie thought, contemptuously.

“The priest said that they are very hard to get. That is why
he
wants to go back to Québec – to see a priest there.”

“He is still my child’s father. How does he plan to annul that?” Sophie demanded. Then, trying to get command of her thoughts,
What was it she had waited all these months to hear?
“Did he send a message for me?” She hated herself for asking. Mrs. Tremblay blinked and lowered her eyes again.

“He told Marguerite that he was sure you would have taken the boy and gone back to Québec.”

“From where was I to get money to go back?” Her rage had returned and she sat rigid, trying to contain it.

Mrs. Tremblay said, “I had to tell you how sorry I am. Marguerite is a child, she made the mistake a child makes, even now she can’t see what harm she has done you. But I am a woman too; I suffer too; I know what she has done to you.” She produced this torrent of words in a low voice. “Jean, her father, Monsieur Tremblay, he says he won’t take her back, she can’t come back, she has to stay with
him
. I want only to see her, and to hold my little grandchild –” She buried her face, sobbing, into her handkerchief.

What use was there to be angry with this woman, who, even as Sophie pitied her, she also wanted to shake by the shoulders until she gained some backbone. She drew in a deep breath through her nose, mouth closed, straightening her back, placing her feet together neatly.

“I pity you Madame,” she told the other woman in a voice that was as cold as an Englishwoman’s. “What’s done is done. But I do not wish to meet Marguerite – or Pierre –” her voice rising on the last word, “And I will never – never –
jamais
– see their child. That child will never know my child. Tell them that.” She got up from the sofa, rushed from the room, replaced her mantle over her shoulders, pulled on her boots and went outside.

She would concentrate all her energies on escaping from Bone Pile so that she would not have to be reminded of this every single day, for now she saw at last that Pierre’s action was deliberate; she saw now that his sale of the farm went beyond mere impulsiveness. He had done it so that he would be forever free of her and of their marriage, so that he could never go back. He had repudiated his own son. As for his talk of annulment – she had no idea what if anything she should do and for an instant wished she could find a priest to talk to, then squashed the thought.
Le bon Dieu
knows I no longer want to be married to that blackguard. Let him do what he wants.
But he will never see Charles again.

As she walked through the freezing darkness, not even feeling the cold this time, she thought how strange it was that a life could begin in such a normal way as hers had, and go on so easily, until suddenly, one day, God struck out and in one crushing blow erased all those happy years, and she, never knowing what it was she had done to lose His favour. She lifted her eyes to the star-ridden sky above her, all those little eyes, she thought, shining in the darkness, watching us all.
Do your worst
, she told them aloud.
I will never beg; I will only carry on.

Chapter Thirteen

Fire

S
he opened her door one cold morning
on her return from taking Charles to Mrs. Wozny’s house, to find a man sitting at the table, his back to her, warming his hands over the cook stove. She was startled, but already he was rising, turning back to her, smiling in a not-quite friendly way.

“Mrs. Hippolyte,” he said. She saw that it was Walter Campion, and a jolt of fear passed through her, some fleeting thought that having taken the farm, he might now be after her café, but then, she reminded herself, what she didn’t own, he couldn’t take. He shifted the chair around to face her and sat down again.

“Mr. Campion,” she said, withholding warmth from her voice. She closed the door firmly, pushing against it, shaking out her shawl as she crossed the room to hang it on its hook just inside the bedroom, doing the same with her mantle while he watched her in silence.

“I helped myself to some coffee,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”