48
CLARE HAD WAITED outside the courthouse, hopeful that the misunderstanding would be sorted out and Fred would walk out through the door. She was sure that Ernie Ryan had something to do with this. When she’d looked at him over her shoulder after Fred disappeared into the station, Ernie had turned and walked away.
After an hour she went home. Surely Fred would be back at classes tomorrow.
The next day she sat on the steps of the art school to watch the evening students arrive. Fred was not among them. Just before the class was to begin, she walked up the two flights of stairs to the classroom where Arthur Lismer was preparing his notes. He had loosened his tie, hung up his tweed jacket, and rolled up his sleeves. The room was warm. A bee had flown in one of the open windows and buzzed sleepily somewhere above them.
Lismer fixed her with his green eyes.
“Fred?” she said, not sure how to start.
He looked around the room. “He doesn’t seem to be here. That’s unusual.”
She told him briefly about the incident on the pier the day before and Fred’s subsequent arrest.
“I myself was briefly arrested when I was drawing down there not long after the explosion. This city doesn’t understand art or artists,” Lismer said angrily. Then, noting Clare’s worried look, “Have you checked at the glassworks?”
SHE FOUND JACK BELL in the new window glass shop, standing by a great circular tank from which a noisy machine was drawing out a tall cylinder of glass. He motioned her into the hall and joined her a couple of doors down, outside the open door of the glass-blowing shop. Ernie Ryan was working on Fred’s bench, turning a piece of glass that hadn’t yet been formed.
“I expect you’re ready to come back to work?” Jack said.
“Where’s Fred Baker?” Clare said.
Jack watched Ernie with a fixed expression. “I hear he’s been interned.”
“Interned?”
“He was arrested on the waterfront yesterday,” Jack said.
“I know, I was with him,” Clare said.
Jack turned to her with surprise.
“We were drawing,” she said.
“Yes, that’s what he — I was told,” Jack’s eyes flitted away from Ernie Ryan, one foot up on Fred’s bench. “The officer told me that he was recording the details of war-related activity.”
“That’s nonsense,” Clare said. “He was sketching dazzle patterns for a stained glass window.”
Jack looked at her with hard skepticism.
“Why were you talking to the police about Fred?” Clare said.
“They came here, asked me a few questions.”
“Like?” Clare said.
“Like whether I felt he was likely to be spying.”
“And what did you say?”
“This is quite an interrogation, Miss Holmes.” Jack pulled on his long chin. “I said I didn’t know if he was likely to be spying, but I thought he was capable of it and that, at times like this, we need to be vigilant. Surely, when our boys are dying over there,” his voice caught and he coughed. “Even if we’re wrong, we need to do everything we can to make sure they’re not put at more risk.”
“And I’m sure Ernie Ryan agreed with you,” Clare said coldly. Her hands were shaking. Ernie ignored her.
“Where exactly is he interned?” she said icily.
“I don’t need to answer any more of your questions, young lady.” Jack looked at his watch. “I need to get back to the office.” He turned to go.
“Jack, please.” Clare’s voice broke. “Tell me where he is.”
Jack gave her a pitiless look. “I believe he’s in Amherst. That’s where they’ve been sending them since they closed the facility here on the citadel.”
“Them?” Clare said.
“Enemy aliens,” Ernie, who had stalked up behind her, said.
CLARE WAITED on the porch for Celia until violet-keeled clouds milling on the horizon split with thunder. The rain followed fast and Clare ran inside to watch for her from the front window.
The girl was soaked by the time she got through the front door. Her dress clung to her ribs and the piano music under her arm dangled soggily. Clare handed her a dishtowel.
“What a relief — rain, finally. I just hope that it doesn’t keep Fred from coming tonight,” Celia said, patting her sheet music with the towel.
“Celia, Fred won’t be here tonight,” Clare said.
“Fred, a spy?” Celia cried when Clare had explained. “That’s impossible!”
“Of course it’s impossible,” Clare said irritably.
“We must get him out!” Celia had begun to cry, her tears joining rivulets of rain streaming off her hair.
Clare took the towel and started drying Celia’s hair. She had no idea how one went about getting someone out of internment camp. Well, she’d have to figure it out.
49
THE BELL IN THE YARD was rung at seven every morning. Half an hour later a guard strode through the barracks. Today it would be Morris, the fellow missing his left arm.
Fred hauled himself out of bed and pulled on his pants, which he left folded at the bottom of his bunk each night. He took his shirt off a hook. While he was putting it on he leaned over the boy, whose name was Ivrey, sleeping in the bunk below him, and shook him gently. Morris would be around soon with the cane he used to rap on the bedposts of the men who had not gotten up. Most nights Ivrey would only get to sleep by four or five in the morning, finally released from whatever horror it was that kept him rocking and staring at the floor. Fred shook the boy until he opened his terrified eyes.
“Ivrey, you must get up now,” Fred said, quietly in German. “Morris will be around soon.”
Ivrey started at the guard’s name and began stirring.
The men elbowed their way through the dormitories to reach the mess hall. It was raining lightly this morning but Fred chose to walk through the yard, to see the whole sky, the possibility of blue, and to smell the salt marsh. The fences surrounding the camp were not high, not like the fences of the asylum or prison, but they were just as effective. The guards had the right to shoot you if you climbed that fence. But there was little worry of escape; most of these men had nowhere to go.
A bird — dull and striped with a yellow above the eye, some kind of sparrow — fluttered out of the sky and landed on one of the fence posts. It tilted its head from side to side, skyward, as birds do, to watch for aerial predators. Arthur Barnstead would know what it was. He had been delighted when Fred asked him to show him some of the local birds. They’d gone out a few times, to the city gardens, the cemeteries, the waterfront. Nesting was over, Arthur had explained. But it was a good time to look for migrating birds. Arthur had lent him binoculars.
The sparrow flew off to a nearby tree. It looked exhausted. It was migrating, most likely, from the northern forests to its wintering grounds in warmer latitudes. Fred would memorize its field marks to ask Barnstead someday.
Breakfast this morning, like every breakfast here, was a bowl of grey, viscous porridge and a mug of weak tea. A half-cup of sugar in a dirty white bowl, on the table, to be shared among eight men.
On Fred’s first day, the camp commander, a barrel-chested Brit who wore a perpetual wince as if maintaining his ramrod posture gave him pain, had swept his hand around the mess. “You men have the same rations, other than tobacco and spirits, as our Canadian soldiers.” He gritted his yellow teeth. “If our soldiers can endure the deprivation you lot surely can too.”
Nikola, the petty officer, from the German warship, sat down opposite Fred. He reached for the sugar dish and spooned out one heaping teaspoon, the rest of the men watching with feigned disinterest. He sprinkled the sugar on his porridge. Then he poured some of his tea into his porridge and stirred it with the spoon. One of the men said something in Polish and the rest laughed.
“He said the officers do it the other way around; they add the porridge to their tea,” Nikola said. “They can’t stand ou
r barbaric manners. That’s why they get their own quarters.” Nikola translated to German, the language Fred spoke with the prisoners, most of whom knew almost no English.
Fred stirred his ration of sugar into his tea. He looked down the long table. “Were you all on the same ship?” he said.
“Most of us,” Nikola said.
“What happened?” Fred asked.
“We were taking on coal in Rio de Oro, on the coast of Africa, when a British warship appeared out of nowhere. Our captain put our prisoners on shore and we went out to meet it.” He stirred his porridge around and around. “We ran out of ammunition. The captain had ordered dynamite packed in place before we left the dock and he scuttled the ship. It tore a hole through the hull. She went down in minutes. The British thought they sank us.” He stopped stirring and looked up. “She was the fastest luxury liner in the world at one time. The captain disappeared, swam to shore. The rest of us were picked up out of the water and taken prisoner. That was the first month of the war. We’ve been here ever since.”
“Lucky,” Fred said. “You got to miss this wretched war.”
“That’s not how most of the men feel — penned up here like cattle, nothing to do,” Nikola said. “We would gladly trade our skins for freedom.”
Karl, the man beside Nikola, thrust his thatch of black hair towards Fred and said low, glancing around for the guards. “How is it going, the war? We haven’t heard much except the guards’ propaganda since Trotsky was here last year.”
Fred remembered vaguely the papers reporting on Trotsky’s brief internment, on his way back to Russia from New York, after the revolution.
“The war continues.”
“Did the Russians make peace with Germany, as Trotsky said they would?” Karl asked.
“Yes. Trotsky is now the Russian Foreign Minister. He negotiated a treaty with the Germans, this spring.” Fred lifted a glutinous spoonful of porridge to his mouth.
Karl slapped his hand on the table. “Hah! Then Germany will win soon.”
“You should prepare yourself for possible defeat.” Fred swallowed the porridge.
Karl looked at him suspiciously, as if this was a taunt.
“Don’t forget, the Americans have arrived,” Fred said. “The week before my arrest, the Allies had broken through the German western front.”
Karl squared his jaw and pulled himself up from his bench. Fred stiffened, thinking the man might lunge at him.
“You asked for the news,” Fred said. “Would you prefer I lied to you, like the guards?”
“Sit down, Karl,” Nikola said, waving his porridge spoon. “It doesn’t matter if Germany or Britain wins. They are not the real enemy.”
Karl sank back down.
Nikola shoved a spoonful of porridge in his mouth and spoke through it, “Corruption.” He took another mouthful. “Imperialism.” Porridge dribbled down his chin. “Capitalism.” The other men, who’d been following the conversation, turned back to their own bowls.
AFTER BREAKFAST, the sailors and the other prisoners, mostly farmers of German descent, reported for their daily chores, cleaning lavatories, peeling potatoes, working in the local farm fields.
“Mop the dormitory, Bacher.” Morris shoved a mop at Fred. “The whole thing.” He kicked the empty bucket and it went clattering across the floor until it crashed into a bunk. “Before ten.”
At 9:55, finished his task, Fred leaned on his mop. His thoughts returned, as they did often, to the day he was arrested and to Clare’s face as she stood watching him walk into the courthouse. The sun came out and light broke into the dark room. He stepped closer to the window and took the small package out of his pocket. He unwrapped the glass eye and held it to the light. Morris came stalking through the dormitory, to inspect his work. Fred stuffed the glass eye deep in his pocket.
IN THE AFTERNOON, he was allowed to go to the recreation room, a dusty foundry shop, which had been cleared of machinery. At tables lined up below tall windows the men made wooden toys for children and leather purses for their wives and girlfriends back home. Ivrey was sitting at one of the tables. He was, with perfect concentration and steadiness, inserting a piece of rigging onto a ship in a glass bottle.
The men were allowed letters out, though they would be censored. That night Fred began,
Dear Clare
I am writing to let you know that I am fine.
He hesitated. He couldn’t tell her about how the police made him strip down to his underwear, in front of two other men, drunks who had spent the night in the cells. The police never told him what they were looking for while they turned his pockets inside out. He couldn’t tell her how anxious he was that they would drop or keep the glass eye. He continued,
The trip to Amherst took a few hours. I tried to enjoy the scenery, as I had never been this way before. The trees were all red and golden and for a moment I had a view of the Bay of Fundy. The camp is
Again he paused. What could he say: crowded, bleak? That it made him despair that men who had come to Canada filled with hope and high spirits had been locked up like criminals. That he felt lucky that he didn’t have a wife and children suffering, waiting for him.
an old iron foundry. It’s a little crowded but there is room in the yard to walk and plenty of free and open sky. I have been keeping notes on the birds I see. When I get out I will show them to Arthur Barnstead.
I hope you are not worried about me.
In fact he hoped she was worried about him. What he wanted to say was that he hoped that she thought of him as much as he thought of her.
I am fine. The guards keep us busy with the chores here. Sometimes we get to leave, under supervision, to work on a local farm. Right now we are harvesting the last potatoes. Otherwise I keep my hands busy. Of course I cannot make glass but we can work with wood or leather or metal to make small trinkets and furniture. One of the sailors, of whom there are a great many, taken prisoner from a German ship, makes extraordinary bottled ships. I think it is the only thing that keeps him from madness.
Sometimes he heard the boy call for his mother in his short, restless sleeps. Ivrey couldn’t have been more than sixteen when he joined up. Fred had tried to tell one of the guards that Ivrey needed to be seen by a doctor.
“Is he sick?” the guard had said.
“He is very distressed,” Fred said. “I am worried for his mental well-being.”
“Yeah, well, lots of people are distressed these days. If we got a doctor in for every man having a mental crisis in here, we wouldn’t be able to feed you all. If he gets a fever or breaks a leg, we’ll get a doctor in to see him.”
I expect you are working very hard at school. It will be getting too cold for plein air. I hope we get the chance to draw together someday. I promise I won’t do anything to get myself arrested. Ha.
Please give my best to Celia. Tell her that I expect her to keep practising without me and to have improved by the time I get back. Alas, I will not be able to make the same promise, as these lodgings, as fine as they are, do not include a piano.
Warm Regards,
Fred
He toyed with Affectionately, Fred. He wished he had been able to tell her how he felt and to give her his gift before he was arrested. It was thinking of that moment in the future that helped him see beyond the fences.
50
ARTHUR BARNSTEAD’S LAW OFFICE was in a red brick building half a block from city hall. His secretary was an older woman with heavy cheeks and grey hair wound into buns on either side of her head.
“I’d like to talk to Mr. Barnstead,” Clare said.
“Do you have an appointment?” the woman said, looking down at some papers on her desk. It was a rhetorical question. She clearly knew Clare’s name wasn’t there.
“No, I was hoping I might just speak to Mr. Barnstead briefly.” Voices could be heard behind the private door with its frosted glass window.
The woman’s jowls sank. “He has a busy morning and then he’s off to th
e courthouse. I could make you an appointment for tomorrow.”
A balding man in a dark suit and vest opened the door to the office. “Thank you, Mr. Beaton,” he said, ushering another man in an unpressed shirt and loose pants out the door in front of him. “I will let you know when your court date comes up.”
He glanced at his secretary and grimaced behind the man’s back, before he noticed Clare standing near the outer door. No one else had yet appeared in the office.
“Your next appointment appears to be late,” the secretary said.
Arthur Barnstead looked at Clare again. “And you are?”
“Clare Holmes. I’ve come on behalf of a friend,” Clare said, looking back at the secretary, who appeared to be absorbed in the papers on her desk. “Fred Baker.”
“Mrs. Edwards, knock on my door when my next client arrives,” Barnstead said.
Prints of exotic birds hung over the desk along with his law degree. A pair of binoculars sat on the windowsill.
“I’m very interested in birds,” Mr. Barnstead said, almost apologetically, signalling to a chair. He sat down at his own desk, leaned back, and waited. Clare imagined that this was a ritual but she sensed in him a heightened interest, as if he enjoyed the unexpected.
“Yes, Fred told me.”
“How is Fred?” Barnstead said tentatively.
“He has been interned,” she said. “In Amherst.” The letter she’d received from him burned in her coat pocket, ready as evidence.
Barnstead squared a sheaf of papers on his desk. “For what reason?”
“Spying,” Clare said. “But Fred is not a spy.”
“How do you know that?” Barnstead said.
“I just know.”
“And how do you know Fred?” he said.
“I used to work at the glassworks.”
“Is that where you were during the explosion?” He set the papers down.
Dazzle Patterns Page 27
