The Tenderness of Wolves (3 page)

The skin was cold, but felt otherwise human, normal; like his own skin. He tried to keep his eyes off the terrible wound but, like the flies, they seemed unable to stay away. Jammet’s eyes stared up at him, and it occurred to Knox that he was standing where the killer must have stood. He hadn’t been asleep, not at the end. He felt he ought to close the eyes but knew he wouldn’t be able to do so. Shortly afterwards he fetched a sheet from upstairs and covered the body. The blood was dry and wouldn’t stain, he said–as if it mattered. He tried to cover his confusion with another practical remark, hating the hearty sound of his own voice as he did so. At least tomorrow it will not be his sole responsibility any more–the Company men will arrive and, probably, they will know what to do. Probably, something will
become apparent, someone will have seen something, and by evening it will have been solved.

And with this spurious hope, Knox tidily rearranges the papers into a pile and blows out the lamp.

It is past midnight, but I sit up with a lamp and a book I am unable to read, waiting for a footstep, for the door to open and cold air to fill the kitchen. I find myself thinking yet again about those poor girls. Everyone in Dove River and Caulfield knows the story, and it is recounted to anyone who comes here, or repeated over and again with subtle variations on winter evenings in front of the fire. Like all the best stories, it is a tragedy.

The Setons were a respectable family from St Pierre La Roche. Charles Seton was a doctor, and his wife Maria a recent Scottish immigrant. They had two daughters who were their pride and joy (as they say, though when are children ever not?). On a mild day in September Amy, who was fifteen, and Eve, thirteen, set off with a friend called Cathy Sloan to gather berries and picnic by the banks of a lake. They knew the way, and all three girls had been brought up in the bush, were familiar with its dangers and respected its code: never stray from the paths, never stay out after dusk. Cathy was exceptionally pretty, famous in the town for her looks. This detail is always added, as though it makes what happened even more tragic, although I cannot personally see that it matters.

The girls set off with a basket of food and drink at nine in the morning. At four, the time by which they should have returned, there was no sign of them. Their parents waited a further hour, then the two fathers set out to trace their
daughters’ footsteps. After zigzagging around the path, calling constantly, they arrived at the lake, and searched, still calling, until after dark, but found no sign of them. Then they returned, thinking it possible that their daughters had taken another route and had by now arrived home, but the girls were not there.

A massive search was got up, and everyone in the town turned out to help look for the children. Mrs Seton took to fainting fits. On the evening of the second day, Cathy Sloan walked back into St Pierre. She was weak and her clothes were filthy. She had lost her jacket and one of her shoes, but was still holding the basket that had contained their lunch; apparently now (grotesque detail and probably untrue) it was full of leaves. The searchers redoubled their efforts, but they never found a thing. Not a shoe, not a scrap of clothing, not even a footprint. It was as though a hole had opened in the ground and swallowed them up.

Cathy Sloan was put to bed, although whether she was actually ill was a moot point. She said that she had had some sort of argument with Eve shortly after setting off, and had dawdled behind the other two until losing them from sight. She walked to the lake and called for them, thinking they were mean to have hidden from her. She became lost in the woods and could not find the path. She never saw the Seton sisters again.

They townspeople went on searching, sending delegations to the nearby Indian villages, for suspicion fell on them as naturally as rain falls on the ground. But not only did they swear their innocence on the Bible, there was not a scrap of evidence of a kidnapping. The Setons looked further and further afield. Charles Seton hired men to help him look, including an Indian tracker and then, after Mrs Seton had died, seemingly of a broken heart, a man from the States who was a professional searcher. The searcher
travelled to Indian bands all over Upper Canada and beyond, but found nothing.

Months became years. At the age of fifty-two Charles Seton died, exhausted, penniless and at a loss. Cathy Sloan was never quite the beauty she had been; she seemed dull and stupid–or had she always been that way? No one could any longer remember. The story of the case spread far and wide, and then passed into legend, recounted by schoolchildren with wild inconsistencies, told by frazzled mothers to curb their children’s wandering. Wilder and wilder theories grew up as to what had happened to the two girls; people wrote from far-flung addresses claiming to have seen them, or married them, or to be them, but none ever proved well founded. In the end, no explanation could possibly fill the void left by the disappearance of Amy and Eve Seton.

All that was fifteen years ago or more. The Setons are both dead now; first the mother died of grief, then the father, bankrupt and exhausted by his relentless quest. But the story of the girls belongs to us because Mrs Seton’s sister is married to Mr Knox, and that is why we fell into a guilty silence when she came into the store that day. I do not know her particularly well, but I do know that she never speaks of it. Presumably, on winter evenings in front of the fire, she talks of something else.

People disappear. I’m trying not to assume the worst, but all the lurid theories about the girls’ disappearance are haunting me now. My husband has gone to bed. Either he isn’t worried, or he is indifferent–it is years since I could tell what he was thinking. I suppose that is the nature of marriage, or perhaps it just goes to show that I am not very good at it. My neighbour Ann Pretty would probably incline towards the latter; she has a thousand ways of implying that I am deficient in my wifely duties–when you think of it, an astonishing feat for a woman of such little sophistication.

She holds my lack of living natural children as a sign of failure to do my immigrant duty, which is, apparently, to raise a workforce large enough to run a farm without hiring outside help. A common enough response in such a vast, underpopulated country. I sometimes think that the settlers reproduce so heroically as a terrified response to the size and emptiness of the land, as though they could hope to fill it with their offspring. Or maybe they are afraid that a child can slip away so easily, they must always have more. Maybe they are right.

When I got back to the house this afternoon Angus was back. I told him about Jammet’s death, and he examined his pipe for a long time, as he does when he is deep in thought. I found myself close to tears, although I did not know Jammet well. Angus knew him better; had gone hunting with him on occasion. But I could not read the currents moving under his skin. Later we sat in the kitchen at our usual places, eating in silence. Between us, on the south side of the table, another place was set. Neither of us referred to it.

Many years ago, my husband took a trip back east. He was gone for three weeks, after which he sent a telegram saying to expect him back on the Sunday. We had not spent a night apart in four years, and I looked forward keenly to his return. When I heard the rumble of wheels on the road, I ran to meet him, then saw, puzzled, that there were two people in the cart. As the cart came closer I saw that it was a child of about five years, a girl. Angus pulled up the pony and I ran towards them, my heart beating thickly in my throat. The girl was asleep, long lashes lying on her sallow cheeks. Her hair was black. Her eyebrows were black. Purple veins showed through her eyelids. She was beautiful. And I couldn’t speak. I just stared.

‘The French Sisters had them. Their parents died of
plague. I heard about it and went to the convent. There were all these children. I tried to get one who would be the right age, but …’ He trailed off. Our infant daughter had died the year before. ‘But she was the bonniest.’ He took a deep breath. ‘We could call her Olivia. I don’t know if you’d want to, or …’

I threw my arms round his neck and suddenly found that my face was wet. He held me tight, and then the child opened her eyes.

‘My name is Frances,’ she said in a noticeable Irish brogue. She had a sharp look about her with her eyes open; alert.

‘Hello Frances,’ I said, nervous. What if she didn’t like us?

‘Are you going to be my Mama?’ she asked.

I felt my face go hot as I nodded. She went quiet after that. We took her inside and I made the nicest dinner I could muster–whitefish and vegetables and tea with lots of sugar, although she didn’t eat much, and stared at the fish as though she wasn’t sure what it was. She didn’t say another word, her dark blue eyes flickering from one of us to the other. She was exhausted. I picked her up in my arms and carried her upstairs. The sensation of holding this hot, limp body made me tremble with feeling. Her bones felt fragile under my hands and she smelt stale, like an unaired room. Since she was almost asleep I just took off the dress, shoes and socks, and tucked a blanket around her. I watched as she twitched in her sleep.

Frances’s parents had arrived at Belle Isle aboard a packet ship called the
Sarah
. The steerage was packed with Irish from County Mayo, which was still suffering after the potato famine. Like those people who catch onto a fad long after it has gone out of fashion, they developed typhus fever on board, although the worst of the epidemics had subsided. Nearly a hundred men, women and children died on that ship, which sank on its return journey to Liverpool. Several
children were orphaned and had been taken to the nunnery until they could be found homes.

The next morning I went to the spare room to find Frances still asleep, although when I touched her shoulder gently I had the impression that she was pretending. I realised she was scared; perhaps she had heard terrible stories about Canadian farmers and thought we were going to treat her as a slave. Smiling at her, I took her hand and led her downstairs to where I’d prepared a tub of hot water in front of the stove. She kept her eyes on the floor as she lifted her arms for me to peel off the long petticoat.

I ran out of the house, looking for Angus, who was splitting wood at the corner of the house.

‘Angus,’ I hissed, feeling angry and stupid at the same time.

He turned round, axe in hand, frowning at me, puzzled. ‘Is something wrong? Is she all right?’

I shook my head to the first question. It occurred to me that he knew, yet I instantly dismissed the idea. Used to me, he turned back to the log; down came the axe; neat halves span into the log basket.

‘Angus, you got a boy.’

He put the axe down. He didn’t know. We went back inside to where the child was playing idly with the soap in the bathtub, letting it pop up through his fingers. His eyes were large and wary. He wasn’t surprised to see us staring at him.

‘Do you want me to go back?’ he asked.

‘No, of course not.’ I knelt beside him and took the soap from his hands. The shoulder blades stuck out like wing stumps on his skeletal back.

‘Let me.’ I took the soap and began to wash him, hoping my hands would tell him more than words that it didn’t matter. Angus went back to the woodpile, and let the door bang behind him.

Francis never seemed surprised that he had come to us dressed as a girl. We pondered for hours over the French Sisters’ motives–did they think a girl would find a home more easily than a boy? Yet there had been boys in the group of orphans. Had they simply not noticed, been blinded by the beauty of his face, and dressed him in the clothes that seemed to suit it best? Francis himself didn’t offer an explanation, or express any shame; nor did he offer resistance when I made him some trousers and shirts and cut off his long hair.

He thinks we never forgave him for it, but that’s not so with me. With my husband though, I’m not sure. A Highlander through and through, he doesn’t like to be made a fool of, and I don’t know that he ever recovered from the shock. It was all right when Francis was a child. He could be very funny, clowning and mimicking. But we all got older, and things changed, as they always seem to, for the worse. He grew into a youth who never seemed to fit with the others. I watched him try to be stoic and tough, to cultivate a foolhardy courage and that casual disrespect for danger that is common currency in the backwoods. To be a man you have to be brave and enduring, to make light of pain and hardship. Never complain. Never falter. I saw him fail. We should have lived in Toronto, or New York, then maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. But what pass for heroics in a softer world are daily chores here. He stopped trying to be like the others; he became surly and taciturn, no longer responded to affection, wouldn’t touch me.

Now he is seventeen. His Irish accent is quite gone, but in some ways he is as much a stranger as ever. He looks like the changeling he is; they say there is Spanish blood in some Irish, and to look at Francis you would believe it–he is as dark as Angus and I are fair. Ann Pretty once made a laboured joke that he had come to us from a plague, and had become our own personal plague. I was furious with her
(she laughed at me, of course), but the words stuck and barge out of my memory whenever Francis is storming through the house, slamming doors and grunting as if he were barely able to speak. I have to remind myself of my own youth and bite my tongue. My husband is less tolerant. They can go for days on end without a good word passing between them.

That is why I was afraid to tell Angus that I have not seen Francis since the day before. Still, I resent him for not asking. Soon it will be morning and our son has not been home for forty-eight hours. He has done this before–he will go on solitary fishing trips that last for two or three days, and return, usually without fish and with barely a word about what he has done. I suspect that he hates to kill anything; the fishing is just a cloak for his desire to be alone.

I must have fallen asleep in the chair, because I wake when it is nearly light, stiff and cold. Francis has not returned. Much as I try and tell myself it is a coincidence, just another extended fishing-for-nothing trip, the thought keeps coming back to me that my son has disappeared on the day of the only murder that Dove River has ever known.