The Island of Doves (20 page)

“Their word against mine before a judge? Preposterous.”

“Edward, do you understand what I’m telling you? It’s not their word against yours. I have hard evidence. You’re going to jail.”

Edward shook his head. He couldn’t let reality intrude—not yet. The truth was that losing Susannah had been like the rock that starts the avalanche. He knew he couldn’t stop it now. “No, I am not.”

Nathaniel looked up at the ceiling, then threw up his hands. He put on his hat. “I tried. I really tried to help you. I hope you will remember that. It’s all I can do.”

It didn’t seem like it took them a full hour to arrive, but Edward couldn’t be sure. He hadn’t looked at his watch in days. He had always, in his quest to transform his efforts into wealth, carefully monitored the passage of time, as if without him, it wouldn’t go on. But now Edward understood the secret mechanism by which the world worked, and it was nothing so systematic as the gears of a watch. Instead it was like Erie, where you tried to hook as many writhing fish as you could, and they were all too heavy on the line. A fish flopped into your boat and back out again; it took your line and pole and arms back in the water with it up to your elbows. Or you clubbed a fish and it lay still for a while, then revived. Or you slit through its gills with your knife before it came to and you skinned it and pulled out the bones and even fried it and consumed it beside your fire, but the next time you were near the lake you saw that there were always more fish surfacing to pluck gnats out of the air, and your boat was too small, your arms too weak, to get them all.

When they came and made the arrest—two men in blue coats, one fat, one thin, like twins who had not divided evenly in the womb—he went quietly along, and because he did not argue or try to fight them off they left his hands unbound. They put him in a black carriage with no windows. There was just the light that came in through the spaces between the planks, and doors that bolted shut on the outside. The conveyance had no seat, and so Edward sat on the floor with his knees pulled up and bounced around like a kernel of unpopped corn.

Edward watched through the gap between the boards as the officers pulled the carriage up in front of the squat brick jail he had spent so much time building. The thin officer went up the stairs to the front entrance and inside, perhaps to unlock the cell door and ready it for him. Edward recalled the weight of those iron bars. Three workers had strained to carry them into the building. Though it had only ever been used to house drunks while they snored through their hangover and, once, a thief with a weak grasp of geography who thought he could ride the Erie Canal from Albany all the way to Chicago, the cell had served the city of Buffalo well.

Word of his arrest traveled fast, and Rache came straight from the brickworks to the jail when he heard. After a loud argument with the jailer, Rache was admitted to visit with Edward, but they were not allowed to talk in private. There would be no telling Rache what papers to burn, and so their conversation consisted of Edward’s directive on what to say to the men.

“The truth will come out,” Rache said, as a way of reassuring Edward, but it did little to ease Edward’s anxiety. The truth
would
come out. And what would he do then?

Edward shuffled through the mail the man brought him and almost cast it all aside when his eye caught a glimpse of Wendell’s handwriting on an envelope. The paper was badly battered, as if the letter had been sent many months ago, was lost and then found again. Wendell, ensconced as he was in the remote outpost of Green Bay, might be the last man from Buffalo not to know of this turn of events. Wendell, who had always been loyal, if weak, nonetheless knew the world for what it was. Perhaps his words would provide some encouragement or, if nothing else, some distraction.

My dear friend,

I write to you with a heavy heart, sharing in what I know must be a time of great sadness for you. Mrs. Beals received word that Mrs. Fraser is feared dead after my boat departed for Green Bay. Her letter was carried on a small steamer that followed my boat all the way to Detroit. I remember noticing its gleaming red wheel wells, newly painted, and debated with myself over whether this was mere ostentation. So much in our time is, and thus it can be difficult to recognize true beauty.

But true beauty, sir, was within your dear wife, and it shone out in her countenance, her kind voice, and her bright and active mind. I tell you nothing of which you are not fully aware, I know, but I must tell it nonetheless.

We docked at dawn in Detroit, and a deckhand from our shadow boat raced aboard to deliver his bag of letters that we were to take on to points farther north. Some passengers were roused from their beds for urgent letters but I was long awake, at the rail, watching Detroit’s steeples ease into view. Hence I received her letter right away, and how great was my sorrow when I read your sad news! The weight in my heart extended to my limbs and I felt frozen. The bell in the tallest belfry began to ring just then and I felt our Creator himself rang that bell to remind me that, though lost to us for a time, your dear wife is in a happier place now, where her garden might bloom perpetually and know no winter.

The gangway had been extended to the wharf and passengers bound for Detroit streamed off the boat. Mrs. Fraser was so much in my mind just then that my eyes played tricks on me: I saw her face in the crowd, a woman remarkably like her in demeanor and gait met my gaze. And I swear, sir, that she recognized me too.

I started, dropped my letter, and bolted toward her, but the crowd converged and the woman disappeared. How cunningly truth eludes us, when our mind is bent by our heart’s desire. I felt so keenly your dear wife’s absence that my mind conjured her image. She was but a mirage, of course—I knew it in an instant. I feel certain that you too have seen this mirage, my friend, and I join you in grief as

Your constant friend,

Wendell

Edward held the letter pinched between his fingers and stared at the words.
A mirage of Susannah on a westbound boat. A mirage of Susannah in Detroit.

How was it possible? And yet hadn’t part of him suspected it all along, been unable to accept her disappearance and the idea of her death? Edward thought of Sister Mary Genevieve standing in the road earlier that day. She hadn’t been afraid of him.

A wave of rage crashed over him and he glanced up wildly, first at Rache’s meaty grimace, then at the bars between them and the stone walls that enclosed his cell. Edward had built this jail, and he knew better than anyone that there was no way out.

Susannah had tricked him—and ruined him. She was alive and walking free, while Edward was here, behind these bars. But they couldn’t hold him forever. Now that he knew the truth he could bide his time, wait for his chance. And then he would find her.

F
all on the island was a brief and brilliant affair. The trees seemed to change color overnight and burn gold and rust-red for just a day or two before icy rain stripped the branches. Magdelaine had told Susannah that the men who had once worked tirelessly as traders—those who had not returned to Quebec or found new homes elsewhere—were unengaged now that the demand for pelts had ceased. Mainly they fished, in bobbing canoes anchored off the beach. They were trying to take as much as they could from the lake before the surface froze and they would have to cut their way through for fresh fish. The women worked just as hard, drying and preserving the whitefish and trout so that in January they could summon a halfway decent stew.

Susannah’s garden yielded a small harvest of potatoes, squash, and oats, plus a good crop of apples and a thimbleberry bush draped with red jewels. She took it all in its time, and Esmee helped her turn the berries into preserves. She traded seeds with a Presbyterian woman in exchange for crocus and snowdrop bulbs and planted them in rows in the beds closest to the lane. When the weather turned cold, she set her sights on putting the garden to bed for the winter. She had plans for the spring, ideas about how to make the most of the medicinal herbs, and had ordered from a catalog seeds to start with next year. The little wooden box arrived on the last boat of the season, the seeds in five burlap pouches nestled in a bed of hay. The safety of that dry place gave her a peaceful feeling. The seeds were tucked away, suspended from the moisture that could set free their lolling, searching roots.

Despite the arrival of her obituary back in the spring, Susannah still had not felt that she was truly safe from Edward’s reach. It wasn’t until October, when the frost came and the boats stopped running, that she finally allowed her fear to recede. He believed she was dead—after all, he had held a funeral for her, had printed the details of her life in the newspaper. And even if any part of him still doubted her death, he could not get to her here. The frozen lakes were keeping her safe.

Esmee taught Susannah her ribbonwork technique for embroidering skirts and cloaks and moccasins, and they sat by the fire late into each night, working the layers of silk in silence. In the time it took Susannah to embellish the cuffs of a pair of mittens for herself, Esmee completed three wool capes. The first two came quickly, one for herself and one for Magdelaine. On the third garment the rhythm of her fingers slowed as she switched to a small needle and fine thread and peered over a French book Magdelaine had given her as a gift, trying to copy a climbing vine shown in the picture. This cape was larger than the other two, and Susannah knew without asking who would wear it.

She had assumed Esmee would expect her to make her own new clothes, but one chilly night at the end of October, Susannah retired to her room to find a muslin-wrapped package on her bed, tied with a bow. Inside was a simple dress of fine red wool, the collar, cuffs, and hem edged with flowers in black satin ribbon. A Mackinac dress for a Mackinac winter.

The next day Alfred Corliss knocked, and when no one answered—Magdelaine and Jean-Henri had gone to Market Street, Esmee was at church, and Susannah only watched from the upstairs window—he wrote a quick note and stuck it under the door. It was addressed to Susannah, an invitation to come tour the school and have dinner with the reverend and his wife. And Alfred too. She wrote back a polite but terse decline, and asked Jean-Henri to walk her note over to the mission school. Alfred posed no danger to her now, but she had lied to him about who she was and it felt too late to tell the truth, too late to try to explain it all.

It was a mark of her settling in that Susannah had allowed herself to make plans for the garden, planting those bulbs for the spring. Whenever she felt uneasy about her own future, she remembered her promise to Sister Mary Genevieve and her gratitude to Magdelaine. What she wanted now was to help Magdelaine find some peace. While the woman hadn’t exactly softened toward Jean-Henri, Susannah noticed that she mentioned Montreal less. They didn’t discuss the sad story of her sisters again after that day in the churchyard, but Susannah felt that some kind of uncertainty lingered there. If she needed an explanation for why fortune had brought her to this place, perhaps it was to be the one to help this family settle the past, once and for all. Only then could Susannah think about what lay ahead for her. She tried to be satisfied with this plan.

Still, she felt the familiar melancholy that always set in this time of year. Daylight grew shorter, the sun setting before they sat down for their evening meal, and everything seemed to be dying. Winter meant waking to the cold morning. It meant day after monotonous day stuck indoors, sealed away from the weather.

November had brought icy rain; December brought the snow. Susannah watched from Magdelaine’s warm sitting room, the fire roaring beside her chair, as snow drifted from the wind off the lake until it obscured the front porch, piled up to the windows, wrapped itself around the thimbleberry bushes like fleece. Magdelaine brushed the front steps clean each morning with a broom and cleared a path to the dogs’ pen. Esmee was careful to set the water pump’s handle high each night and wrap it with a blanket to keep it from freezing.

Despite the weather, Magdelaine’s students came faithfully each week to read from the catechism together, to study their figures and Magdelaine’s maps. Susannah assisted with it all and helped the girls practice reading in English. They all spoke French at home, and some of them Odawa, and in comparison the English was difficult, puzzling. But French was the language of the island’s past, Magdelaine told them, and English was its future. Whites from the East came regularly now on things they called pleasure trips, journeying just for the novelty of sleeping in the well-appointed cabin of a steamboat, of seeing the last of the real-life savages before they were all pushed west. A shop had opened on Market Street to sell Indian curiosities to the travelers: cornhusk dolls, woven mats and baskets.

The Americans might be strange, Magdelaine said, even ridiculous, but they had money, and they were coming. The girls had to understand what they could expect for their futures. Magdelaine was patient but stern and didn’t hesitate to make them repeat over and over the question about the fifth article of the Apostles’ Creed:
What benefit have we by the resurrection? It confirms our faith and hope that we shall rise again from death.
She seemed to want the girls to understand that it meant not just the final death that waited for them, but the many deaths that would precede it, the setbacks and disappointments that would require them to begin again with new hope.

But the girls, of course, were girls. They had never left the island and never wanted to, and they cared little for what might come or go from it. The affairs of men, French or American, meant nothing to them. They did not understand that those men might become their husbands, and then their affairs would matter very much indeed. The third week in December would be their last meeting before the Christmas Eve Reveillon, and they anticipated the party with as much excitement as Magdelaine had hoped they would direct toward their studies. But she confessed to Susannah that she could not blame them—it was a joyous time of year.

Their discussion veered quickly, when Magdelaine gave them license, from eternity to
pattes d’ours
stuffed with stewed rabbit, to melted chocolate with cream and tart apple preserves. The girls and their mothers would cook for days in preparation, Magdelaine explained. They would burn through piles of firewood in the small hearths of their trading cabins. When the fire on the beach was ready, they would bring the food out on large tables and cook the rest outdoors. The girls would make crepes for the young men they fancied and show off their skills. Everyone said no girl was fit to marry until she could turn a crepe.

The morning of the feast, Susannah heard Esmee lay the fires and begin her work in the kitchen before dawn, and she rose to join her. It had snowed again in the night, and the windows shimmered with frost in the candlelight as Susannah buttoned her red wool dress and tied a fresh apron around her waist.

Esmee showed her how to roll out the dough and cut it into rectangles for the pies. As she worked, Susannah noticed how sure her hands felt as she moved the rolling pin in careful arcs. Her work in the garden had made her arms at first sore, but then, the more she kept at it, strong. She had brought the garden to life with these hands, and the accomplishment satisfied a thirst she hadn’t understood was there. Here in the kitchen, working beside Esmee, she thought of nothing but the dormant bulbs, the resting branches of the apple tree. She was happy.

“Susannah, how did you celebrate Christmas as a child?” Esmee stirred the pot of stewed meat that would go into the pies.

“Quietly,” Susannah said, calling up memories from a lifetime ago, back when her parents were still alive. Before Edward had taken her down such a different path than the one she had hoped for. “We would go to church. My mother would always send our cook home to be with her own family, and she would make something for us herself. A goose or a turkey. Buttered potatoes. She had been a farmer’s daughter and knew her way around the kitchen.”

She marveled at Esmee’s skill with spooning just the right amount of meat to fill the pies, folding the dough so that the corners matched perfectly and pinching it closed. She rounded the edges with her knife to make the pie resemble the bear paws for which they were named. “I suppose you have been making these same pies for many years.”

“Yes,” Esmee replied. “My mother taught me how. But we didn’t have the same sort of family celebration you describe. We never lived in the same house as my father—my mother was a summer wife, to be sure. My father worked for Monsieur Fonteneau, and then madame for many seasons, and I only saw him a few times a year. He had another wife, other children, in Montreal, and spent Christmas out on the trade route or in the city with them.”

Esmee did not relay these details with bitterness but only as matters of fact. Hers was a common story that had been played out many times on the island.

“I didn’t know,” Susannah said, “that your father had worked for Magdelaine.” Susannah had spoken to Jean-Henri about Therese, and Magdelaine herself, but she had never asked Esmee about it. Of course, the young woman would have been just a baby when it all had happened. “Was he with Magdelaine when she learned what happened to her sisters?”

Esmee paused in her work and looked up at Susannah with wide eyes. She wiped her hands on a towel and crossed the kitchen to peek into the front hall. “I’ve never spoken about this with madame,” she said in a low voice, returning to the table. “She might be angry if she hears us.”

Susannah nodded. “Forgive me for bringing it up.”

“No,” Esmee said, “it’s all right. Jean-Henri told me you have taken an interest in his family’s . . . history. The answer is yes, my father was there. He was the one who buried Josette in that churchyard.”

“Oh,” Susannah sighed. Somehow she had not thought to imagine the burial, and the fact of it made the story even sadder. She had come to view Josette as a version of herself, the Susannah who couldn’t escape from Edward; she could almost feel the dirt piling up on her, raining down from Esmee’s father’s shovel. She took a deep breath to remind her lungs that she was still here. “How very sad it must have been for Magdelaine.”

“She was beside herself, according to my father. Even a year later, when he tried to get her to go looking for Therese, he couldn’t wake her from that spell of her grief.”

“Look for her where?” Susannah asked. “I thought Therese died that day too.”

Esmee gave her a confused look.

“Jean-Henri said—”

“Ah, yes. Well, he was a little boy then. No one was sure what to think of what he said he saw. Therese’s body never washed up, but that’s not unheard of in cases like these. It’s a big lake and currents can carry bodies a long way. For a while, according to my father, people accepted Jean-Henri’s story. But then the next year my father was in Quebec City and he saw Therese walking down the street.”

“He did? Are you certain?”

Esmee nodded. “The way he told it, he approached her. She looked very different, he said. She was much thinner and her hair was pulled severely back under a black bonnet. But it was her. She pretended not to know him, told him he had her confused with someone else. When she walked away he followed her until she came to a building and went inside. It was a convent.”

Susannah felt a twinge of recognition, but of what she could not say. “And he was
sure
it was her?”

“Yes,” Esmee said. “He didn’t tell me about it until many years later, of course. As soon as he returned to the island that spring, he told Magdelaine what he had seen. But she didn’t seem to believe that Therese could be alive.”

“How could she not want to know whether it was true?”

Esmee shrugged. “You have to understand. She was still very angry at Therese then. Whether she was dead or alive. Perhaps Magdelaine felt that if Therese had chosen to leave the island, she should not interfere with that choice. She felt that, either way, Therese was dead to her. Or perhaps she simply didn’t believe my father’s account.”

“But why would he lie?” Susannah’s mind was racing to catch up. She thought back to her conversation in Ste. Anne’s with Jean-Henri, how Therese had been like a mother to him when his own was away. “And Jean-Henri—does he know about this?”

“I don’t know,” Esmee said. “I have no idea what my father said to him, and I certainly would never bring it up. I try not to interfere. This is not my family, not my business.” She said this wistfully, as they both knew Esmee longed to be a Fonteneau. “Unless Magdelaine told him—and that’s hard to imagine because she wouldn’t have wanted to give a little boy false hope about finding his beloved aunt—I would guess that he does not know.”

Susannah clutched the rolling pin. Again she felt that twinge of recognition, a sense that she had known something about this story before Esmee told it to her. She tumbled the details through her mind once more. Was it Esmee’s father she recognized? But how could she? Was it Quebec City, a place to which she had never been? Then suddenly she realized what it was: the convent. The woman he had seen, the woman he thought was Therese, had escaped him by running inside a convent.