Put on the Armour of Light (22 page)

Charlie,

Here is St. Thomas — doubting Thomas — who also happens to be the patron saint of carpenters and builders. I'm leaving him as a token of the work we did together.

So much to say that I can't. Forgive me.

Pete

Charles sat down heavily on the bedstead, which protested with a metallic groan. He looked closer at the face of the little monk, who clutched the large carpenter's square to his chest with an intense expression. There was something familiar about the rapt features. Then Charles laughed out loud.

“M
r.
Lauchlan! Won't Maggie be glad — and Miss Jessie. Shall I set another place for dinner?” Lizzie dried her hands on her apron and closed the door behind him.

“Yes, thank you, Lizzie. Is Dr. Skene at home?”

“No, sir. Still at the college, but expected any moment. I'll tell Miss Jessie you're here.”

There was no need for at that precise moment Aunt Jessie came barrelling through the swinging door, face alive with all the doings of the kitchen. Also at that precise moment a voice came down the stairwell from the second floor.

“Charles?”

“Charles, how good to see you,” Aunt Jessie said. “Pork pie for dinner. You'll stay?”

“Of course he'll stay. He can't avoid us forever.” Now Maggie was standing on the landing and looking down on him rather coolly.

“Maggie, don't abuse Charles. I'm sure he's been busy.”

“Well he can make himself useful while waiting for his pork pie by helping me pack my trunk. Somehow I have to get under the two hundred pound limit.”

“Up you go, Charles.” Aunt Jessie dropped her voice and spoke out of the side of her mouth. “But I hope you're good at walking on eggshells; she's been that hard to deal with.”

Charles dutifully ascended the stairs and followed Maggie to the second floor sitting room. The open trunk was in the middle of the pleasant, book-lined room with all manner of shoes, umbrellas, parasols, sporting equipment and assorted personal oddments in piles on the overstuffed chesterfield and chairs.

Until now he had somehow managed to evade thinking about the enormity of her leaving. He looked at the trunk, gaping open like a foreshortened coffin. “Should you be taking so many books? They have libraries in Germany, you know.” Blast. That wasn't what he felt like saying at all.

“You can go back downstairs if all you're going to do is criticize.”

“I thought you wanted some help.”

“Help, yes. Carping, no. We don't see you for weeks and when you come around, it's just to find fault.”

“It hasn't been weeks. I had to help Peter finish up in the sanctuary.”

“But I'm going to be gone for a year, maybe more. Didn't you — I thought you would want —” She faltered but her eyes held his.

The air crackled orange and yellow. Suns exploded into sparking showers and her hair, her clothing, rippled with a dangerous energy. His resolve was crumbling, smashing to powder and along with it any thought of suffering in noble silence. The floor heaved and gave way underneath him as he crossed toward her.

“Stay!”

Her arms slipped under the back of his jacket just as their lips collided. The walls of the room bowed outward in a rush of air. Former points of reference vaporized; bridges burned merrily but all unheeded. Even gravity worked on them in strange new ways. The open trunk, though, remained stolidly itself. All wrapped up together and oblivious, they bumped into it. She overbalanced and, to avoid falling into it, fell backwards onto the chesterfield, dragging him down on top of her.

He should get up immediately. And he would. As soon as he could splice together the shredded connection between his doing and his thinking selves. The sensation of her body beneath him was not helping, especially when she moved like that. With Herculean effort, he pulled away and landed flat on the floor next to the chesterfield, facing up. From there all he could hear was his own breathing. Up above he could only just see her diaphragm rising and falling under the fine, starched linen of her shirtwaist, now sweetly disarrayed.

She raised herself on one elbow, looking down at him, strands of hair escaping their pins and falling down around her face.

“Stay?” she said, reaching for his hand. “And do what?”

He removed a pair of galoshes and a tennis racket from his chest with his free hand and raised himself to a kneeling position. “Marry me, of course. Look, it's a lot to take in, I know. So soon after Trevor —”

“But I wasn't in love with Trevor.”

“Uh — What? You weren't?”

“No.” There was a sadness in that finality. She let go of his hand, slipped off the chesterfield, and walked over to the window where a glass paperweight set on the sash was catching the late afternoon sun. She captured the wayward strands of hair and pinned them up again, a gesture of such unselfconscious beauty that he wanted to see it again a thousand times.

“I kept expecting to fall in love with him at any moment. We were such grand friends. But it didn't happen.” She turned back to face him. “And I can't pretend that it did just because he's dead. That sounds awfully cold doesn't it?”

After he had scrambled to his feet and put his arms around her again, she buried her face against his chest.

“
Shssh
now,
shssh
. Breathe. It's just the truth, that's all — that's better, breathe. You can't love someone because they want you to.”

She pulled back, leaving tears blotted on his lapels. “But it's horribly unfair, isn't it?” She found a handkerchief in the pocket of her skirt. “When I should have been thinking about Trevor, when he needed me to love him, I was actually thinking about you.”

“Darling girl. Don't ask me to feel sorry about that.” He saw the crease in her forehead. “About everything else, but not that.” He tried to pull her gently back.

“Now what will we do?” The crease was still there.

“Well for a start, we'll have to cancel your train ticket,” he said, “And we'll have to cable the steamship company to return your passage money. Oh, and I suppose you'll have to write and cancel your —”

“But Charles, I'm still going.”

“Still? But I thought —”

The train jolted and groaned, straining to be gone. He detached her from the huddled group on the platform and, taking her arm, led her to the foot of the metal steps going up to the car next to the sleeping car where she had a berth. She was juggling the small bouquet of flowers he had given her, and the basket of fruit. He handed her up the steps and she turned back at the top as the train began to move. He walked along with it. She said she wished she could explain why she had to go. He said she had to have this chance; it was what he loved about her.

The train began to move faster. He jumped onto the bottom step to give her one last thing, a small white cotton bag of humbugs from Mrs. Gough, tied with a blue ribbon. Then he kissed her quickly and jumped off onto the platform. As the space grew between them, the conductor appeared behind her and shooed her into the car.

He crammed his hat back on and walked slowly back toward the others. Dr. Skene looked stoical but he had his arm around his sister. Lizzie was dabbing at her eyes with the corners of her apron. Without speaking, they walked back into the station.

On the way to the streetcar stop, Dr. Skene said, “I've a plan to send a few of our theology students to Germany next summer. You know, our top men. Can't let Queen's and Knox steal the march on us. We'll send a few of the better arts men, too.”

Charles, whose mind was still on that train, answered in a distracted fashion, “Well, you'd better send someone older with the arts men, or the parents won't pay to send them.” He heard what he had just said, and halted, mid-step. “Sir? Can you arrange it? Can you pull it off?”

“You should have some study leave coming, shouldn't you?” said Dr. Skene. “You haven't taken a real holiday in six years.”

When the tram rolled up, Aunt Jessie had to tug at their sleeves, so deeply were they immersed in the details of the scheme.

I
would like to thank Dave Margoshes and Doug Whiteway, both of whom read excerpts from an early draft of this book and offered much encouragement. I owe a debt of gratitude to Sylvia McConnell, who read the manuscript at a later stage, dealt sensitively with my jitters, and suggested changes which made this a much better book. It may interest readers to know that there was a real life model for Rosetta Cliffe, the photographer in my story. My thanks are due to Elizabeth Blight, former Head of Still Images at the Archives of Manitoba, for sharing with me her research on Rosetta Carr, who plied her craft bravely in the male-dominated commercial photography business of 1890s Winnipeg.

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