The Island of Doves (19 page)

“It was the worst day of my life—and I wasn’t even here.” She surprised herself by allowing the words to spill out. “Worse than the day my husband was killed. Worse than the first time I had to leave my son behind on the island.”

Susannah looked at her in surprise. “Leaving Jean-Henri was difficult for you?”

“Of course. He was my son.”

“He still is, isn’t he?”

“What do you mean by that?”

Susannah shook her head and seemed to try to muster the courage to say what she meant. “It is only that you seem awfully determined to make him go away. Though you
must
know that he truly does not want to go.”

Magdelaine gave her a hard little laugh. “You don’t have a child. You don’t understand.”

Susannah’s face clouded over for a moment with pain, and Magdelaine instantly regretted her words. She realized she did not know whether Susannah had lost a child, whether she longed for one or not. She might never have the chance to have a child now, given her circumstances. “I’m sorry,” Magdelaine said. “That was a terrible thing to say.”

“I may not be a mother,” Susannah said, “but I’ve been a daughter. I know how much my mother meant to me, how much I mourned her when she died.”

“Maybe I have regrets,” Magdelaine said. Was that true? she wondered. “Maybe I didn’t care for him the way that I should have. Maybe I punished him for things that weren’t his fault.” She was losing control of her voice. A kind of strangled sound was climbing up her throat, threatening to break into a sob. Who was this person speaking out through her mouth?

Susannah took Magdelaine’s hands and, with more authority than she had ever heard the wisp of a woman muster, said, “They are gone, your sisters. But your son is still here.”

Homecoming

E
dward sat behind the massive desk in his study and surveyed the piles of paper that needed attention. He had stopped opening the letters weeks ago when he could no longer muster the energy to read them, much less respond to their requests. Bills languished in those piles, Edward knew—increasingly terse requests for overdue payments on his loans, invoices from suppliers, timid appeals from workers for back pay. And the condolence letters! Every woman in the county, it seemed, be she the wife or mother or aunt of one of his workers, had written to say how sorry she was to hear of his wife’s passing. They fell all over themselves to express this sympathy, all for a woman whom they did not know. Of course, they were trying to inquire, in the only way they knew how, after the sanity of the man who employed their men, the man who could decide, on a whim, whether they might eat this winter.

Edward relished the opportunity to ignore them all. Back in the spring, when the news of Susannah’s death had first shocked him into a rage, he had vowed not to drink anymore. But he found the stuff more difficult to resist than he could have imagined. His defenses, once ironclad, were down now as October ushered in fall’s chill, and he began yet another month of rambling around the big empty house. What Edward hadn’t expected was the pleasure drink brought. It was the ritual he liked: the sound of its pouring, the color like late-summer honey. When it slid to the back of his tongue and worked its scald on his throat—well, that was something to long for. He understood it now, why some men would do anything for it. After three glasses he felt he was looking at the world through a stained-glass window. Everything was dappled with bubbles and pink hued.

He saw too that it wasn’t drink itself that had ruined so many men but what the drink unleashed. It was like a crowbar that pried the locks off the door—pried the very hinges, so that it could never be closed again. Losing Susannah had showed him just how little real control he had, and that realization sent a shudder through all of his endeavors.

In September, Marjorie had announced in a whisper that her husband finally had saved enough money to settle the scrubby little plot of land in Illinois they had been lusting after, and she would depart.

“Yes, fine, as you wish,” Edward had mumbled, hardly looking up at her.

He gave her an extra two weeks’ pay without complaint, as it helped to dispense with her more quickly. He had come to dread interactions with anyone and wanted to be alone in the house.

But after a month without her, Hawkshill showed signs of serious neglect. A woman from the Presbyterian church brought him a pot of stew a few mornings a week. He knew how to reheat the food himself over the fire but not how to wash the pots, and he left them crusted in a heap on the board in the kitchen. Flies got to be a problem. One evening he sat dozing before a low fire in his study, his glass listing to the side and cold scotch soaking through the leg of his trousers. As he wrenched his eyes open he saw a pair of mice making off with a heel of bread, the last he had in the house until some other woman took pity on him and brought more food.

He had been the most careful man he knew; now he was careless, and he was surprised to find he didn’t really mind it at all. The brickworks he had worked so hard to build kept on running without his management of the day-to-day affairs, it seemed. He had always taken great pleasure in controlling every detail of work in the hot yard of hard-packed dirt. The yard belonged to him and he could summon things out of it. That fact had always been a comfort to him. But no longer. When the inquiries into this decision or that began to irritate him, he found a squat and malicious little man named Rache, shorter and crueler than Napoleon, to carry messages from the house and oversee the workers. After that, Edward seldom put in an appearance there.

Still, he was well aware that his debts far exceeded the sums he could raise if he had to by selling the factory and the homes he had built, even by selling Hawkshill. He was spread as thin as a sheet of ice and it was only a matter of time before it cracked.

And yet he tarried. His indifference to the impending collapse, and the drinking, were symptoms of a notion that had infected his mind, though at first he could not articulate just what it was. Each day he rose late and roamed the house in his nightshirt, now yellow with sweat, prowling cupboards and closets in search of some clue as to what had become of his life. He dressed and went to dinner at a tavern, though it was wearying to endure the silence that engulfed the clusters of men who sat over their glasses of ale. People were talking about him, he knew. They wondered how long he could go on as he was. Everyone thought he was overcome by grief at the sudden loss of his wife.

In the afternoons he walked through the dense woods to the clearing in which the Lamb of God Church sat. Workers and their weary-looking wives came for a kind of Mass most days of the week and always on Sunday, though they led the service themselves. He had asked Marjorie once why the blasted priest was never in his own church, and she explained that Father Adler was assigned not just to Buffalo but to the whole of Erie County and beyond. He traveled in the good-weather months, taking communion to villages that hadn’t seen a priest or been given the sacrament in a year. All that for a magical crust of bread, Edward thought. What a waste.

He watched Sister Mary Genevieve from his hiding spot as well, though he wasn’t sure what he was looking for. She sat alone in the rude cabin reading for hours, then moved about at the hearth to stoke up the fire and cook herself a meal. Once a week she washed clothes and linens and hung them on a line. Once or twice he saw the priest’s vestments hanging alongside her kitchen towels, but by the time he could concoct a reason to inquire after the priest, he was told the man had departed for some other remote place once again. Edward had intended to speak frankly with the man about his suspicion of the nun, that she knew something she wasn’t telling about his wife’s death. But he never could get an audience with Adler.

One afternoon as he crouched in the dense undergrowth beneath a stand of pines, his hands and cheeks now ravaged with a poison oak rash despite how careful he had been to avoid the leaf Susannah had once warned him about, the nun finally varied from her routine. Around two o’clock she pulled on her black bonnet and set off toward town with a stack of letters in her hand.

Edward shot up from his hiding spot, then forced himself to hang back a good distance before following her. He waited until they both were on the road among milling shoppers and children darting underfoot with their games before approaching her.

“Sister, good afternoon,” he said.

It was clear from the look that came over her then that she did not know he had been watching her. She glanced behind him, wondering, Edward knew, where he had come from. Hawkshill was on the far opposite end of town.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Fraser,” she replied, her voice steady and her eyes on the road. She glanced up at him, then let her eyes flit nervously away again. “Are you well, sir? You look poorly.”

He nodded. “It is my grief, you see. For everyone else, six months have passed, but for me, not a single day. I am trapped forever in the memory of the night you delivered the terrible news.”

She seemed to consider what to say next, then simply nodded. There was nothing in his voice that sounded grieved, he knew. It was full of malice.

“The Lord offers healing if you will turn to him,” she finally said. “Healing for any affliction.”

She was talking about the drink, and this galled him. “Where are you from, Sister?” he asked.

“My work has taken me to many places all over the East and Northwest.”

“So, not from here? Not from New York?”

“No.”

“You’ve no family nearby? How very lonely you must be.”

“Sir, when a religious woman takes orders, she renounces the ties to her blood family so that she may devote herself completely to the Holy Family. Everywhere I have been and everywhere I will go, this family is with me. There is no loneliness in that.”

He laughed. “Indeed. But say you were, one day, to disappear. Do you think anyone would notice that you were gone?”

She stopped walking and turned to him with wide, fearful eyes. Two men, one in front of the other, passed by them carrying a rolled-up rug on their shoulders. Sister Mary Genevieve glanced at the backs of their heads, then to the other side of the road, where a woman stepped carefully around a muddy spot in the road, a baby on her hip. Her eyes met Sister Mary Genevieve’s and the nun tipped her chin slightly. The woman hurried inside the tavern behind her.

“I’m not sure I understand the purpose of your question, Mr. Fraser.”

He shook his head, changed course. “You . . .” He laughed again, rubbing his forehead with his palm. “You are a slippery one. You think you hide behind holiness, but I see you for what you really are. A liar. A derelict.”

“You treated Mrs. Fraser like a dog in the street,” the nun said, her face reddening. “You nearly killed her yourself, probably more than once. How dare you mourn her? How dare you threaten me?”

“How dare
I
?” he shouted. A few people stopped their nearby conversations and turned to look. A year ago he would have cared about propriety, about rumor. But now he didn’t care a whit for any of it.

“Even now I see that though you claimed not to know my wife, you were in fact acquainted. That she told you lies and played upon your sympathy, you, a person who is nothing—a lowborn, a
Catholic
, for God’s sake. Did you ever stop to think about why she might talk to you? To question whether she was telling the truth, whether she was even sane?”

“I’ll say no more on this matter.” The nun’s shoulders seemed to relax as a man came walking toward them from the tavern. “It is past. Let the dead rest in peace.”

“Sister,” the man said, “is everything all right here?” He had broad shoulders and wore a white shirt and waistcoat with no jacket. Broken blood vessels coursed his wide, red nose, indicating a few decades of hard drinking, and the singsong clip of his voice was unmistakably Dublin. He was one of a handful of micks who called themselves the “volunteer constabulary.” Edward knew this one, in fact, from a fight the man had helped him break up in the brickyard. And he had paid him a time or two to do his bidding.

“She’s perfectly fine, Padraig,” Edward said.

“It’s
David
, actually, you smug son of a bitch.”

Edward waved his hand, a gesture to dismiss the man’s insubordination. “I have business to attend to at home.”

“So you will go there directly, then?” David said.

Edward didn’t answer. Sister Mary Genevieve stood next to her protector, her chin raised, her eyes blazing. Edward chewed his bottom lip while he held her gaze a moment longer, then turned to go.

“And you’ll not be bothering the sister again, Mr. Fraser?” David called after him. “Won’t be lurking outside her cottage?” So she had seen him after all, and told her friends about it.

It took everything in Edward’s power not to answer this challenge. The world had gone crazy, and no one saw it but him. What kind of a world was this where someone like that would speak in such a way to someone like him? There were people who counted and people who didn’t count, but suddenly it seemed the nothings were taking matters into their own hands. Edward was the one who needed protection. Everyone wanted something from him. They wanted his money, his power, his wife. They wanted to make him into a Papist. That was what it was. They wanted to shove Rome down his throat like a tonic for a disease he didn’t have. The colors of the road—the mud, the mustard-hued manure between the ruts, the vivid red of maple boughs arching over the footpaths—all of it blurred in his field of vision. He felt he was losing control of his mind, but he no longer cared about control. The world was a chaotic place, and he knew he had to be willing to do anything in order to survive in it.

Bad news came in threes, so Edward wasn’t the least bit surprised to find Nathaniel waiting for him in his study back at Hawkshill.

“You let yourself in, I see,” Edward said.

Nathaniel let his eyes roam the room without moving his head. Beneath the plates of decaying food, the half-empty tumblers, were the items Edward had purchased to furnish this big house. There was the gleaming oak desk and bookcase, a hand-carved sideboard, an oil painting of two pears tipped askew in a blue china bowl. “You are cavalier with your possessions, sir,” Nathaniel said.

“What better way is there to relish ownership of a thing?” Edward asked. “It is mine, so I may break it.” He hadn’t grown up with money. It wasn’t until after he married Susannah that his business took off, aided, of course, by his many frauds. Now he had the house, the possessions that he had long felt he deserved, and he would be damned if anyone was going to take them away.

Nathaniel’s jaw tightened. Edward was going to make him struggle through this task. He wouldn’t make it easy on him. “Edward, I am here as a courtesy. To give you one last chance to tell the truth.”

“The truth about what?”

Nathaniel sighed. “If you don’t, in about an hour some men are going to come here to arrest you. I have a file full of evidence on my desk, depositions from lenders who will testify that you falsified documents to secure loans, claiming properties you do not own as collateral, using false names, failing to pay taxes . . . the list goes on.”

Edward sat very still. In the golden haze of afternoon light, Nathaniel’s face was positively childlike in its earnestness. Edward felt charmed by the display, and a little embarrassed for Nathaniel, a city
attorney
, obviously an intelligent man by all accounts, but one who, it seemed, knew nothing of the world.

“Nathaniel, between the brickworks and my construction projects, I employ most of the working men in this town. The working, taxpaying,
voting
men.”

Amusement broke out over Nathaniel’s face. “And a good many of them are owed back pay and have witnessed you breaking numerous laws. If you really think they will be loyal to you now, you are even more deranged than I thought.”