On Renfrew Street (Amherst Island Trilogy Book 2)

by Kate Hewitt

  “Let me see it,” Ellen demanded, and nearly ripped the paper from Amy’s hands while her friend watched miserably. She scanned the list for herself, and saw the names in black and white. Then she flung the paper to the ground and turned away from Amy, pressing her trembling lips together, desperate to compose herself.

  Amy laid a hand on her shoulder but Ellen barely felt it. She felt numb and so very cold inside, as cold as Henry must have been as he sank beneath the icy waves… oh, she couldn’t think of it. She couldn’t bear thinking of it, of his terrible last moments, whether he’d been afraid or resigned or brave. He must have been brave,

  She closed her eyes, fighting against the relentless images that flashed in her mind of darkened hulks of iceberg, the cries of people begging to be saved…

  “The lists might not be complete, Ellen,” Amy offered quietly. “There is still so much confusion around the whole thing. If we wait, there might be more news tomorrow. More survivors. Surely they didn’t get them all in the first go. Everything’s been in such a state…”

  Ellen shook her head. “No,” she said flatly. “I know he’s dead. I can feel it.” It was as if there was an emptiness inside her, where that had once been hope. She turned around, resolute now, thankfully cloaked in numbness, which was better than the grief she knew yawned beneath, like the dark, swirling water beneath the ice. “I must go back to Norah’s. She will want to know.”

  Norah took the news stoically, her lips compressing as she gave one brief nod. “I suspected as much. It is a terrible, terrible tragedy,” she said, and left the room.

  The whole city seemed to be in mourning as the news rolled in. Only seven hundred and six survivors, and over fifteen hundred dead, many of them Glaswegians who had been part of the great ship’s crew.

  Ellen felt as if she were travelling in a fog; everything felt muted and distant, even irrelevant. She had not realized she loved Henry until recently, and she’d only known him a short while, but the fact that she hadn’t even been able to tell him made the pain of his loss all the harder to bear.

  Her grief was a private burden to bear, because no one, not even Amy, had known the depth of her feelings for Henry. She’d barely know it herself! And while she’d been intending to accept his proposal, she hadn’t, and so she had no status as the fiancée she felt she was. She was nothing more than an acquaintance, perhaps a friend, and people would only look askance at her if she admitted how grief-stricken she was. Ellen wondered if anyone would even believe her, if she spoke about Henry’s proposal. In any case, she did not.

  Two weeks after she’d first heard the dreadful news, Ellen returned to Norah’s house to discover, much to her surprise, a letter from Edith McCallister, asking her to call on her the next day at the villa in Dowanhill.

  With trepidation Ellen mounted the villa’s steps the next afternoon. The weather had finally started to warm, and in the square’s garden, the cherry trees’ pink blossoms were starting to unfurl. Nerves leapt in her belly as she remembered the last time she’d climbed these steps, to attend the McCallisters’ ball. That evening had been terrible in so many ways, and yet she was still glad she’d stood up for herself. But she had no idea why she was climbing the steps now, or what awaited her inside the imposing villa.

  A parlormaid showed Ellen into a comfortable drawing room; a fire burned in the grate even though the day was warm. A few minutes later Edith McCallister entered, dressed all in black. Her hair, as dark as Henry’s, was drawn back severely, and her face looked bloodless. She was an entirely different woman from the one Ellen had encountered at the ball; that woman had been glittering with both life and malice, but this woman looked drained of all her spirit.

  ‘Miss Copley,’ she greeted her rather flatly. ‘It is kind of you to see me.’

  ‘I am honored to be asked, Mrs. McCallister,’ Ellen answered stiltedly. She had no idea why the grieving woman had called her to the villa, or if she even knew about Henry’s proposal. She doubted she did, but then why was she here?

  ‘I know you were very important to Henry,’ Edith said as she sat down and arranged her stiff skirts. She gestured for Ellen to sit as well, and she did so. ‘When he told me he had asked you to marry him, I must admit, I was not pleased.’

  What on earth, Ellen wondered, was she to say to that? She merely nodded. A maid brought a tea tray in and Edith gestured for Ellen to pour. As she did so, the older woman resumed.

  “I don’t think you can blame me for that, Miss Copley. Henry told me how you did not welcome his suit, and you felt the two of you were ill-matched. I think we were in agreement on these matters.”

  Ellen swallowed, unsure how to reply. Yes, she had thought that way, but she’d changed her mind. She did not think Edith McCallister would welcome the news now.

  “You know they have found his body?” she asked bleakly.

  Ellen’s hands shook and hot tea splattered onto her fingers. With effort she kept them steady as she finished pouring them both cups of tea. “I didn’t know that,” she said quietly.

  Edith accepted a cup of tea, her pale face somber as she explained. “Yes, the White Star Line charted a ship from Nova Scotia to retrieve as many bodies as they could. I think over three hundred were found. Henry had his passport on him, the poor lad. I suppose he held a hope of being rescued.” She retrieved a lace-edged handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes. “So they were able to identify him. We’re having his body shipped back. I couldn’t stand the thought of him being buried in some strange cemetery in Halifax, with no one ever to visit his grave.”

  “I see,” Ellen managed numbly. Edith’s words made Henry’s death all the more real and horrible. She stared down at her tea, and after a moment Edith continued.

  “The funeral will be in a fortnight, after his… well, when things are settled.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are welcome to attend,” Edith continued, her manner turning rather stiff. “I know Henry held you in great affection, and it seems… appropriate for you to be there.”

  Ellen could tell this cost the woman a great deal. She suspected that if Edith McCallister had her way, she would not have any part in her son’s life, or her current situation. And she knew that she had no right to attend the funeral, or even be here speaking to Henry’s mother. Their relationship had not been official or recognized. Edith McCallister was being generous.

  “That’s very kind of you, ma’am,” she said quietly. “Thank you. I will be sure to be there.”

  Ten days later Ellen stood in the shadow of the tall, needle-like spire of the Dowanhill Church on Hyndland Street and watched, still numb inside, as Henry’s body was laid into the earth.

  She stood apart from Henry’s family, knowing she had no right to include herself in their number yet feeling closer to him than the other mourners who stood back from the gravesite to give his family a bit of privacy in this difficult moment.

  Amy had accompanied her to the funeral, as had Norah, although her landlady now stood with a few of the art professors who had known and liked Henry. Amy stood next to her, and as Ellen watched Henry’s casket lowered into the ground she linked arms with her. Ellen leaned into her friend’s embrace, suddenly feeling so weary she could barely stand. How could she be grieving so much, when she’d known Henry so little? Or was she grieving more than Henry? She was grieving the end of a dream, of the life she’d begun to imagine for herself, as a wife, a mother, mistress of her home.

  Afterwards she went back to Amy’s rather than the reception at the McCallister home. Edith McCallister’s welcome, it seemed, did not extend that far. She wondered what would have happened if Henry had survived and she had married him. Would his parents have thawed and accepted her eventually, or would she and Henry have always been navigating that precarious social divide, torn between familial duty and love?

  The answer no longer mattered.

  “You look as if a breath could blow you over,” Amy said once they were settled in a
small sitting room with cups of tea and slices of cake. Ellen took a small sip of tea and picked at her cake before pushing it away.

  “I feel as if I could blow right over,” she said. “I wish I would.”

  “Oh, Ellen.” Amy eyed her friend with sympathy. “I thought,” she said after a moment, “you didn’t care for him that way?”

  “I thought that as well.” A lump formed in Ellen’s throat as she remembered how firmly she’d declared to Amy that she had no intention of setting her cap at Henry. She hadn’t told her friend about Henry’s offer or her decision; it had been too private a matter, and she would hardly tell her friend she’d accepted a proposal before she told the man himself.

  Now she swallowed past that lump, her voice coming out thickly. “The trouble is, I discovered that I did.”

  “Oh, Ellen.” Pushing aside the tea tray, Amy went and took Ellen in her arms. “I’m so very sorry.”

  And then finally, after weeks of numbness, Ellen finally thawed. It was a painful, excruciating even, but necessary. She pressed her head into Amy’s shoulder and wept.

  The next few weeks drifted by in a sea of indifference for Ellen. She attended lectures but she heard not a word; she painted and sketched and sculpted but none of it mattered. When Grieffenhagen raged at her, she merely stared at him, unmoved. He shook his head in exasperation before moving on, which was, Ellen supposed, as much of a reprieve as she could expect.

  Amy tried to rouse her out of her lethargic state, inviting her to tea and to a lecture at the house in Blythewood Square; Ellen went, but she felt as if she were a ghost, drifting among the living. She wished she were a ghost. She’d known loss in her life, and disappointment, and grief, many time over, but this struck a deeper chord.

  “I don’t even know how I can miss him so much,” she confessed to Amy one spring afternoon. “I shouldn’t. I didn’t know him that well, and yet… he loved me, Amy, and I cared for him. I think I would have loved him, if I’d been given the chance, and it tears me apart inside to know that I wasn’t, and that he’ll never know. He died not knowing how I felt, or that I would have married him.”

  A month after Henry’s funeral, Norah finally took her aside. It was mid-June, and spring was on the cusp of summer, the air warm and fragrant, the nights wonderfully long and light.

  “Ellen, you cannot go on like this,” she said sternly, as Ellen sat in her little sitting room and picked at a loose thread on her skirt. She did not answer and Norah let out an impatient sigh.

  “Do you think you are the only one who has ever grieved?” she demanded and Ellen looked up in surprise.

  “No, of course not.”

  “Don’t you think other people found the will to go on, Ellen? Learned how to join in with the living?”

  Ellen’s eyes filled with tears and she blinked them back. “It has been less than two months, Norah, and Henry was very dear to me.”

  Norah’s gaze narrowed. “How dear?”

  “If you must know, he had asked me to marry him. And when he returned from America, I intended to accept.” Ellen’s voice trembled and she pressed her lips together in an effort to regain her composure before continuing, “Now a whole life I might have had is lost to me. I grieve that along with the loss of Henry.”

  Norah was silent for a long moment. Ellen stared down at the floor, longing only for this wretched interview to be over.

  “I want to show you something,” Norah finally said and to Ellen’s surprise she turned and left the room. After a moment’s hesitation, Ellen followed her.

  Norah was in the foyer, buttoning up her coat. Ellen gaped. “Where—where are you going?”

  “To my studio. And you’re coming with me.”

  “Your studio—“ Ellen exclaimed. She had never been allowed in that inner sanctum, and she had no idea why she was being summoned now. Wordlessly she reached for her own coat.

  Norah walked briskly through the back garden, down to the old, brick outbuilding that she’d fashioned into an art studio, and used to paint portraits.

  Ellen felt a little stirring of curiosity as Norah unlocked the door and ushered her into one large room with long sashed windows letting in the June sunlight. Canvases lay stacked against a wall, and a few were propped on easels and shrouded with sheets. Ellen breathed in the scents of turpentine and linseed oil.

  She stood in the doorway while Norah riffled through some canvases in the back of the studio, clearly looking for one in particular.

  “Here we are.” She pulled out a small canvas and wordlessly handed it to Ellen. She took a moment to study it, her gaze resting on the dark oil paint. It was classic Norah, a portrait of a mother with a boy; the woman wore a white dress that slid from her shoulders with a loose bouquet of yellow flowers in her lap. The boy, in a yellow smock, leaned against her; she had her arm around him as she gazed down at him, her mouth turned down in what Ellen wasn’t sure was a frown of resignation or simply an expression of her devotion.

  “What do you see when you look at this?” Norah demanded, sounding almost angry, and Ellen’s startled gaze flew up to meet her landlady’s.

  “You mean beyond a mother and her son?”

  “What emotion do you see, Ellen?” Norah pressed. “What do you feel when you look at this painting?”

  “I…” Ellen licked her lips. “Sorrow, I suppose, although I’m not sure why. The mother… she looks almost as if she is afraid she’s going to lose her son. Or even…” She paused, and Norah raised her eyebrows.

  “Or even?’ Norah prompted. There was a fierce light in her eyes that took Ellen aback.

  “Or even… as if she’d already lost him.”

  “Yes.” Norah lowered the painting, and the fierce light in her eyes had dimmed, replaced by something that looked like grief as her shoulders slumped and her eyes briefly closed. “Yes, exactly.”

  “Norah, I don’t understand…”

  “The people in this paintings are models,” Norah stated flatly. “They’re not even related. I scoured the streets before I found what I was looking for, and brought them into the studio.”

  Ellen felt a flicker of surprise and even disappointment. She’d assumed there was a story behind the painting, because she had felt the emotion in it. Norah must have guessed what she was thinking, because she nodded, as if agreeing with something Ellen had said, and continued, “The truth of this painting is not who the people are. It’s the feeling that went into capturing them on canvas.” She let a long, low breath. “I’ve never been a mother, Ellen, and I never will be.”

  “You might,” Ellen protested. Although her sophistication and success made her seem older, Norah was in fact only thirty years old.

  “No, it is a decision I made a long time ago. I knew if I married my dedication to painting would be compromised. But it doesn’t mean I have not grieved the children I will never have.” She rested her gaze meaningfully on Ellen. “The life I will never have. That is what I have communicated with this painting. The loss I have felt, in the choices I have made.”

  Ellen swallowed uncomfortably. “I never meant to presume that you hadn’t…” she began and Norah shook her head impatiently.

  “I am not telling you all this so you feel sorry for me, far from it. I am telling you this because I want you to do what I did, and how it helped. Pour your emotion, all your grief, into your work. It will help you and perhaps it will help others.” She gave a small, sad smile. “And perhaps, better still, it will produce a great work of art.”

  Several weeks later Norah’s charge was still reverberating through her as Ellen went about her lessons. She felt a desire and even a need building inside her to paint something of what she’d felt in losing Henry, and yet also of the surprising joy she’d had in knowing him so briefly. She’d started something in pencil, but the medium she’d loved for her Sketches of Springburn seemed insipid for the message she wanted to communicate now, the emotions she longed to pour out, like a maelstrom inside her, battering at her def
enses.

  Then one night as she sat curled up in her armchair and gazed out at the summer night sky, the first stars just beginning to appear like pinpricks on a dark velvet cloth, an idea came to her. An idea that was enormous and frightening and yet wonderfully right.

  The next day she asked Norah if she could use some of her studio space, and her landlady gave a satisfied smile as she nodded.

  “Yes, of course. Just let me know what you need.”

  Alone in the sunlit space, armed with oils and brushes, Ellen began a work the likes of which she’d never even dreamed of before.

  At the end of June Ellen received another summons to Dowanhill. She mounted the steps of the McCallisters’ villa with the same wary trepidation as before; Edith McCallister had not reached out to her since Henry’s funeral and in truth Ellen hadn’t expected ever to see the woman again.

  Ellen had barely stepped across the threshold before Edith McCallister came to the point. She bustled into the small sitting room where Ellen had been directed by the parlormaid; it was not the spacious drawing room of before and Ellen wondered if the change of room was meant as a slight, and if so, why.

  “It seems,” Edith said in a strained voice, without any greeting, “that our son has left you a bequest in his will.” Ellen blinked, too stunned to reply. Edith’s mouth compressed. “Did you know about this?”

  “No, of course not.” Ellen’s mind whirled. Clearly Edith thought she was a gold-digger who had sunk her greedy talons into her son. Ellen shook her head slowly. “I never asked for anything from Henry. And if you feel it is… inappropriate, then of course I will refuse…”

  “I do not know whether to believe you,” Edith returned coolly. “But it was my son’s wish that you be provided for, and I will honor his request, for his sake, I must make clear, and not yours.”

  Ellen flushed at the intended insult. “I do not need provision, ma’am.”