A Map of Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  “Well,” said Branwell in the condescending tones of an adult, “what’s your name then, girl?”

  The child sat clutching her toes. She stared at Branwell but did not answer him. Then she sniffed, looked away, and announced, “I don’t have to tell you that. I’ve only got to tell things to the Missus.” She scanned the kitchen, as if she expected to find this person hidden in a shadowed corner.

  “My mother is in bed,” said Branwell truthfully. “She stays there all the time,” he added. This was somewhat of an exaggeration. Mrs. Woodman was prone to bouts of migraine—more prone in winter than in summer—and withdrew for days at a time. But in fair weather, and sometimes even in the coldest season, she would be a more or less cheerful if somewhat vague and occasional presence in the kitchen.

  “She stays in bed all the time,” continued Branwell with an air of authority, “so you’ll have to wait on her and I’ll be the one telling you what to do.”

  “No he won’t,” said Annabelle indignantly. “He’s good for nothing. My father says so.”

  Just then, the cook, a tiny woman with a disproportionately large face marked by two fierce black eyes, entered the room. “What’s this?” she asked, surveying the still-huddled child. “Oh, yes, the girl from Orphan Island.” She shot a look in the direction of Branwell and Annabelle. “What are you two up to?” she asked and, without waiting for a reply, turned again to the recent arrival. “We don’t sit on the floor here,” she offered and then, “I expect you’re far from clean.”

  “Far from clean,” echoed Branwell.

  “No one asked for your opinion,” said the woman testily. “In fact, no one asked for you—either of you—to be in here at all. Both of you—back into the house!”

  The siblings reluctantly withdrew, but not before Annabelle and the girl had exchanged a brief complicitous look.

  How forbidden Marie was! Annabelle’s father had made it clear to her and to her brother that they were not to consort with this girl who was an orphan who would therefore have come from God knows where, the progeny, most likely, of a drunken lout and a shameless hussy. Furthermore, she was there to work, not to lollygag about with the likes of them. Mackenzie, the cook, who up until that time had tolerated the children’s presence in the kitchen only occasionally, now barred them completely from the premises on the grounds that they were too much of a distraction. Banishments and admonishments did nothing to dispel the air of romance and mystery that Annabelle believed was attached to the girl, and, as the days went by, she thought about little else. Often she found herself standing behind the open kitchen door, watching Marie through the space between the hinges while the girl went about her various tasks and was, more or less, bossed and pushed around by Mackenzie, who eventually softened somewhat under the influence of Marie’s stubborn pride and unquestionable beauty.

  One day, while Annabelle stood in the V-shaped shadow behind the door, Marie, who was scrubbing the floor, began to crawl toward the spot with brush and suds and pail until Annabelle could see quite clearly her small, soapy knuckles and thin, damp wrists. She hunkered down and reached into her apron pocket for a pencil and one of the small pieces of butcher paper she always kept with her in case she might want to make a sketch. Squinting in the gloom, she wrote a message that told the girl to come to her room late at night for a secret that would be told.

  Annabelle wondered if the girl could read, doubted, in fact, that she could, but had made the decision, nonetheless, to make this attempt to communicate with her.

  At first the girl ignored the scrap of pinkish-brown paper as if its sudden appearance in her line of vision had caused her no curiosity whatsoever. Then, quite abruptly, she snatched the paper from the floor and crammed it into the pocket of her pinafore. Mackenzie said something about the fire, the oven, and then something else about the length of time it was taking Marie to finish the floor. The girl did not look up from the brush in her hands, glanced neither toward the door nor toward the cook stove, and even when Mackenzie left the room, she did not remove the paper from her pocket. Just as I thought, she can’t read, Annabelle concluded and having thus concluded did not bother to invent a secret.

  Still, believing the girl to be illiterate had no diminishing effect upon her fascination, and the following day Annabelle was back at her post. She had the odd sense that her already small world had in fact shrunk, and now included only the dimensions of this triangle of shadow and the limited view that could be seen from it. A spider shared this space with her, but it didn’t disturb her at all. Branwell might have screamed and run away, but not her. She wasn’t afraid of spiders, and even had she been, there was theatre on the other side of the door crack and she was able to watch it all day long for months and months if she chose to do so. She was not required, as Branwell was, to participate in any formal kind of education because she was a girl so, even when her brother returned to school, she would be able to remain in close proximity to Marie. When she told Branwell about her luck he repeated his father’s words about the drunken lout and the shameless hussy and predicted that Annabelle would catch cooties from the girl if she didn’t keep her distance.

  Her mother, though as listless and seemingly preoccupied as always, made the odd appearance. Occasionally, she would drift into the kitchen, where she would look at Marie—not with curiosity exactly—but with detached puzzlement until Mackenzie explained, for the fourth or fifth time, who Marie was and what she was doing there. Annabelle squirmed in embarrassment behind the door at these moments. What was it, she wondered with some impatience, her mother thought about all day, what made her seem so absent even when she chose to leave her room and be among them? Though Annabelle didn’t know this, the truth was that Mrs. Woodman had never successfully managed to emigrate from England in her mind, and even as she stood in these rooms and gazed out the windows of this house, a landscape of a very different kind lit her imagination. Only Branwell would listen with any interest when their mother described stone villages and picturesque fields. Annabelle had no time for this rhapsodizing about distant places, places she doubted she would ever see and knew her mother would never see again.

  “The girl from Orphan Island,” Mackenzie would say, and Annabelle’s mother would reply, “Oh yes, of course,” then move vaguely around the kitchen touching a pewter jug, an earthenware bowl, as if she hoped that something in the kitchenware’s insistence on being solid might pull her back from the lost green landscapes of the past and into the overheated interiors of the present.

  On one of these days, shortly after Mrs. Woodman had floated out of the kitchen to wander aimlessly through the other rooms of the house, Marie was commanded by Mackenzie to once again scrub the floor while the cook went to fetch a brisket of beef at the island’s butcher shop. What a thin back she has, thought Annabelle, looking at the nearby labouring figure. Her clothing, which was not finely tailored as Annabelle’s, fell away from her spine toward the floor and appeared to be much too big for her frame. She watched the girl’s muscles move under her cotton clothing and, as she was watching, one arm shot out from the body and shoved a familiar piece of butcher’s paper under the door. Annabelle stooped to retrieve it and, in the gloom, read her own message. Then she turned the paper over in her hands and was confronted with a one-word message: No.

  It wasn’t as if Annabelle was unaccustomed to this word: her father often shouted it across the shipyards, or yelled it in the direction of Branwell and her when they were making demands. It wasn’t that she hadn’t seen it scrawled in two large characters across various letters of request on her father’s desk. But to have the negative emerge from such a small, such a powerless source shocked her deeply and hurt her in a way she hadn’t been hurt before. What could it mean, this refusal, this annulment?

  Annabelle crumpled the paper in her fist, then walked into the parlour where she stood looking out the window at late-spring snow falling on vessels that had remained useless and dry-docked all winter long. In the corner of the r
oom the recently fed Quebec stove roared as it devoured wood. Overhead she heard Branwell’s quick steps progressing along the floorboards of the upper hall toward the back stairs, along with the clicking sounds made by the dog’s nails. Soon, from the direction of the kitchen, Annabelle could make out the sound of Branwell’s voice demanding that Skipper perform the one trick he had managed to teach him. “Roll over,” he said and, shortly after, and much to her chagrin, she heard Marie’s laughter followed by some light scolding about dog hair on the floor, and then the sound of Branwell and the dog beating a hasty retreat when Mackenzie must have been coming up the walk.

  Nothing was ever going to happen to her, Annabelle suddenly knew. Plenty was going to happen to Branwell, she suspected. A great deal had undoubtedly already happened to the rejecting Marie, but she, Annabelle, was never going to be granted access to that intriguing history. She felt as if she were now and would be forever outside of everything, forced to dwell in the shadows, witnessing only a fraction of the world through a thin crack of light. With this feeling came a considerable amount of resentment.

  Why should she remain invisible to this hired person? How dare she pretend that Annabelle was not close at hand, breathing the same air, walking up and down the same staircases? Did she not have two legs—one shorter than the other, it was true—and a nose, and hands and a heart, just like this other girl? She was determined to exist, to take up some space—whether wanted or not—in Marie’s mind, along with memories of Orphan Island, of her journey to that destination, throngs of other splendidly independent orphans, children with no fathers obsessed by nautical calculations and the distribution of timber, and no distant mothers bent under the weight of the memory of green fields too far away to matter. She would have murdered her parents at that moment had it guaranteed a nod of approval from the girl, had it guaranteed an entry into the brotherhood, the sisterhood of those fortunate enough to be orphaned.

  But that moment passed and Annabelle realized that a less dramatic method of gaining the girl’s attention and approval would have to be discovered. Late afternoon found her a solitary, bundled creature engaged in frantic activity mere feet beyond the kitchen window. She lay on the ground, scissoring arms and legs, making angels in the snow deposited by a late March squall. She created snow men and women, hurled snowballs, lifted armloads of snow from the ground and flung them toward the sky, creating her own private, contained blizzard. As it grew darker the kitchen became a colourful, warmly lit stage where the girl, Marie, carried out her tasks under the instructions of Mackenzie or, when the cook left the room, on her own. During one of these latter periods Annabelle threw a snowball at the kitchen window. The girl gave absolutely no indication that she had heard the sound of the impact.

  Then, just as Annabelle was thinking of re-entering the house, Marie approached the kitchen window with a saucepan of hot water in her left hand. When the glass was sufficiently clouded, she extended her free hand and with one thin finger wrote the words No I will not on the steamy surface. Infuriatingly, Marie wrote the words backwards so that Annabelle would have no trouble reading them, and even more infuriatingly, she never once looked in Annabelle’s direction.

  Annabelle marched inside and tramped snow all over the house looking for her brother. When she found him in his room upstairs, she said indignantly, “That girl downstairs can read, and she can write backwards and forwards. How about that?”

  “So what,” Bran said, not looking up from a novel entitled Ralph, the Train Dispatcher. He did not seem interested in the least. But he was absently pulling on his ear, a nervous habit he had developed in early childhood, and Annabelle knew, therefore, that any information concerning Marie was not something he was likely to forget.

  The attic where Marie slept was not heated like the rest of the house by fireplaces and Quebec stoves, but it was made almost habitable by the fact that the two huge chimneys, through which the smoke of the half-dozen hardwood fires passed, were fully exposed and their bricks were warm. Despite this, one night, after everyone else in the house was asleep, while Annabelle ascended the steep stairs with a combination of anticipation and misgivings, her entire body was covered with goosebumps as the cold slipped under her nightgown and up her legs. It was dark as pitch on the stairs and she believed that she had not made one sound, yet when she emerged into the attic, which was partially lit by a quarter moon, she could see that Marie was sitting up in her bed.

  “Get in here,” the girl said. “Get in here or you’ll freeze.”

  Annabelle made her way quickly across the room, then scrambled under the covers. Marie shifted to one side to allow some space and Annabelle was aware, for the first time in her life, of the warmth that the recent presence of another body lends to flannel sheets. “Have you been to sleep yet?” she asked.

  Marie shook her head.

  “Nor me. But, then, I knew I was coming up here later.”

  “I knew that too.”

  Annabelle was surprised by this revelation but decided not to let on. “What’s your favourite thing?” she asked.

  “Night,” said Marie, “now. My bed is all that is mine.”

  “But it’s not yours,” said Annabelle, proprietorship igniting briefly in her small self. Didn’t her father own the whole house and everything that was in it? For that matter, didn’t her father own the whole island and everyone on it, and all the ships that were built there and sailed to and from it, and all the timber that was rafted down the river? There was something unfair about this distribution of ownership and Annabelle knew it, even then. Still she added, “Your bed belongs to my father,” then to associate herself with this awesome power, “to my family.”

  “But I am the only one here and I like that. And after I come up to bed at night and lie down, nobody tells me what to do.”

  “I’m here with you now,” Annabelle persisted, “and if I told you to do something you’d have to do it.”

  “I would not,” said the girl. “I would not because I’d say no.”

  Annabelle believed that that was precisely what the girl would say and decided to pursue the notion of superiority no further. In truth she was relieved that she had been allowed entrance into the girl’s world, not sent away as she had suspected she might be.

  Marie had the whole pillow. Her pillow, thought Annabelle. “Maybe,” she ventured, “if I asked nicely you would do it.”

  “Maybe. What would you ask?”

  “I would ask you about the orphanage.”

  The nuns have no money, Marie told Annabelle; all the money goes to the monasteries where “there is nothing but men.” Some of the boy children in the orphanage would eventually enter monasteries themselves, hoping to experience comfort. It was a very good idea, if you were a boy, to pretend to have received a “call” from God, instructing you to become a monk or a priest. That way you wouldn’t have to be a farmhand owned by a mean farmer. It was not, however, a good idea to pretend to have received a “call” if you were a girl “because nothing would change except your clothes and those for the worse.”

  Annabelle had paid very little attention to these details. “But how did you become an orphan?” she asked.

  Marie was silent, staring at the ceiling. Then she rolled over on her side to face Annabelle, her dark head in the angle of her arm. “It was a wolf,” she said.

  Annabelle doubted this. “All the woods are chopped,” she announced. “Father says so. They’re chopped all the way to Lake Superior so there can’t be any wolves here. All the timbers come down on boats from Lake Superior.”

  “Yes, this wolf came on a boat with the timbers and he came dressed as a soldier so no one could know. Then he got to our house and ate my mother all up and killed my father.” Marie was silent for a few moments and Annabelle feared that this wolf was the only part of the story that she was going to tell. Then the girl added, “He was a royal wolf with blue eyes, and he had medals from the wolf kingdom.”

  “And he made you his orphan,�
�� murmured Annabelle. Drowsy now, it seemed to her that this change of status from daughter to orphan would be like a sort of marriage, would necessarily involve ceremony and a long significant pause in the action when the blue eyes would lock with yours and tokens would be exchanged. Perhaps even a kiss. Then orphanhood. And, yes, then beauty.

  Annabelle wanted something to dream about, something that was all hers, an orphanhood, a wolf of her own.

  “The wolf made you beautiful,” she said, drunk with a combination of this thought and approaching slumber. “Where is he now?” she asked, her voice thick with sleep.

  “He’s here. He swam beside the boat to the island,” said Marie. “He’s always with me. He bought me when he killed my parents. He owns me.”

  Both girls began to fall seriously into sleep. “He’s come down with the timbers, he’s just outside the house,” said Annabelle, who was already dreaming of a flash of blue eyes caught in moonlight and large, formal pawprints in the snow.

  Annabelle, thinking of Marie, began that spring to light fires during the day at the Signal Point of Timber Island—or so the story goes. This was the method of communication usually used by islanders for weddings and funerals and other newsworthy events, and was a kind of throwback to the bonfires lit on significant holidays in the distant British Isles from which many labourers in her father’s empire had emigrated. However, Annabelle, had she been asked to explain it, wouldn’t have been sure what she was trying to accomplish by doing this. Not knowing for certain where Marie was, she had little hope that a message would reach her friend, and so, eventually, she simply settled in to enjoy the flames. She loved to paint fire, and she loved to watch it.

  Branwell, who despite Annabelle’s best efforts was by now spending his days working with Cummings, was sent out by his father to Signal Point to see what on earth his sister was doing, but she never confessed to him her original intentions, which, by the end of the first week, she had realized were quite futile, at least in respect to the messages being sent by the blaze.