She spoke next of her life in London, spoke of her family without any introduction, as if he knew them as well as she. Well, he did soon enough, certainly.
Boston finished his coffee, made a brief movement of leaving. He would have to leave soon if he were to hire a canoe to take him down the inlet. And so what held him there? He cannot say, but it was impossible for him to move from the block of sunlight, impossible to move away from her voice that was wrapping about him like twine. He should have been more careful. Odd things lie in wait for weary travellers. He knew that as well as anyone.
“And so I signed up on the Tynemouth. Can you believe that, Mr. Jim? Ah, but I didn’t want to share the fate of my older sister who hoped for greater things but ended up in Dark House lane, selling fish and oysters. I’d never heard of Victoria, and for certain not the colony of Vancouver Island. Anything outside the boundaries of London were like a foreign land to me. I still can’t believe I’m here. I’m often pinching myself I am.”
Of this sea voyage she spoke in great detail. Of how when they finally arrived in Esquimalt the men lined the road and she had five marriage proposals within a day. Oh, but they were rough-looking characters and she would not be so rash. She had signed a contract to work for the Avalon Hotel and she intended to honour this contract. But then she met Mr. Hume. He begged for her hand. Such a fine man. How could she refuse him? She had wanted to stay in Victoria, but he knew of free land to be had in the Cowichan. It astounded her and still did. “One hundred and sixty acres. We’re like Lords and Ladies of the manor, that’s what.”
She spoke at length of this husband, Mr. Hume, and said several times how he was to come home any time now. She looked to the forest as she did so, as if expecting him to stride forth. Later she changed her story. “I can tell you the truth. You ain’t, I mean, you’re not a thief or a cutthroat. You have a good face, you do.”
Her husband had, in fact, set off just five days ago to seek gold in the Cariboo. He was sure to find it as he was more clever than most and more handsome, too. Didn’t women glance at him in the streets? Didn’t it make her both jealous and proud? And he knew something of everything—languages and poetry and history and old tales and he’ll write his memoirs as soon as he’s old. At that point she dashed inside the cabin and came out with tintype that bore her husband’s face in muddy shades.
Her way of remembering was not as his, was not like opening a book and seeing it all there, the same each time. She struggled with names and pondered dates and was often turning back to fill in a word or gesture or detail which had escaped her before. Likely, too, events shifted and reformed for her, as they did for most people and as such could not be taken as truth.
Mary and Jeremiah returned and stood quietly by, only then did she pause and so allow him a chance to leave. “Why, the whole afternoon is gone!” she said and looked about as if it might be retrieved from under a root.
He held up a marten pelt, the second best one he had, a paltry offering for the return of his money, for her hospitality. That was when she said: “Not to worry. Think on it as a gift, for your birthday, like.”
“Have none,” he replied.
“None? Ah, well and so, it’s just an ordinary gift, then. But if you like, you can bring me something when you’re back this way again. Not that it matters. Just come again and I’ll have some better food for us and you can tell me of yourself, because I chatter on so, indeed I do.”
≈ ≈ ≈
The women have walked on, their rain pattens clattering on the boards. Boston thumps back up the stairs, his boots now covered with mud, now heavy as anvils. He cleans them on the boot scrape and enters a haberdashery. He does this small politeness of scraping his boots, but he does not take off his hat, which is battered and sweat-rimmed at the crown.
The haberdashery is long and narrow and is lit with lanterns though outside it is not yet dark. He shifts uncertainly. He has never entered such a place. Why would he? It is a woman’s place. Here are needles of all sizes, hatpins the size of daggers, bone corsets and steel embroidery rings, tins of buttons and tins of beads, stiff bonnets perched on wooden heads, and other, unnameable things, their gleaming and sparkling multiplied in the wall of looking glasses. He has no liking for looking glasses. Cannot imagine why anyone does. But this time he pauses at his own image. “You have a good face,” the Dora woman had said. He never thinks of his face, whether it is good or otherwise, but considering it, at this moment, even he can see that for most people it would not be a face to inspire trust, not at all.
≈ ≈ ≈
“Something for the wife, sir?” The woman is as small as a child and her dress is festooned with scalloping and bright coloured bows. Her ringleted hair, however, is grey, her face furrowed, her voice a harsh rasp.
“Need a gift, for a lady.”
“A lady? Had you anything particular in mind? Most gentlemen do.”
Boston’s mouth is dry. “Ribbons,” he says after a pause. Women went in for ribbons. For their hair, he supposes, or to pin on their dresses.
They are amongst the gimping and edgings, are of pink or white satin and unfurl from fat rolls. How many? How long? They would be soiled and tangled by the time he gave them. They would resemble shrivelled worms.
“Your expression tells us we have not divined quite the best thing. Come. Look.” The old woman now shows him ivory combs, silver scissors, silver lockets, bracelets dangling with cupids and hearts, crystal bottles of perfume. “We know the best way to a lady’s heart, oh, yes, indeed.”
Boston has now fully entered foreign territory. He does not like it. So many of the objects are small and smooth, but with sharp, unexpected points, with uncertain purposes.
Perhaps the woman, this Dora Hume, is touched with madness, perhaps loneliness has got to her, out there alone in a cabin, her husband away. It’s different for women; they subsist on speech and company. He doesn’t long for companionship. If he had a family, a wife, a servant, one of these ‘friends,’ then every night there would be speaking; every night there would be more words that would stay with him until the grave.
The money was his own. It was her own peculiarity, then, her choice to return what was his. It was not a gift she gave him, no matter what she said about birthdays and such. It did not need recompense to show that he was her equal. She gave him water and food, true, but these things are always given to travellers in need. It was expected of her, of everyone, and was, in fact, some kind of law. Such acts are always reciprocated sooner or later and so cannot be considered generosity at all, but rather a way of equalizing. Don’t the few trappers in his parts keep a grudging eye on each other? And only last summer he’d helped those Klallams. He found them near his trapline, an old man and his youngest son. They were exhausted and starving and so he took them to his cabin, gave them food, let them sleep on his benches. They had been living in the Songhees village in Victoria until the Whites burned their huts and forced them to leave at rifle point. It was all so that Tom Dyer, the pox, didn’t spread to the Whiteman’s town, though it was the Whiteman who set Tom Dyer loose among them, who made it so they rotted while they still lived. The younger Klallam showed him the five slashes on his arm and told him in Chinook, in low furious tones, that the slashes were for each of his dead children and one for his wife. Later the old man raised himself up and spoke in a dialect that Boston barely understood, though it was plain he was laying curses, a litany that went on until darkness fell.
No, he will waste none of his time, none of his money earned from his own toil. It was idiotic to even consider it. He was not in her debt. He owed her nothing. Not even this second, return visit she asked of him.
≈ ≈ ≈
The old woman holds up a brush made of boar’s bristles and inlaid with shells. Boston mutters that he must be going.
“I am sorry, so sorry that we did not find something for your lady,” the old woman rasps. “Think on it well, and then return. The exact thing is never easy to find.
No indeed.”
Two
Eugene Augustus Hume has never liked parlours and Mrs. Jacobsen’s at the Avalon Hotel is no exception. In the half-dark of imminent dawn, the bric-a-brac and furniture seem hunched and huddled and quietly animate, like exhausted refugees seeking shelter from some cataclysm. But it is natural that he stay here. It is his home in a way, given that when he arrived in ’61 he had stayed at the Avalon for nearly six months. He lived then in a two-room affair for a cracking good price. Meals were included and Mrs. Jacobsen often served him with her own hands. Eugene merely had to assist with errands and with the odd reluctant bill payer, a task he did with tact and soldierly aplomb, though he did not relish it, hearing echoes of his own not-so-long ago protestations in that of his quarry, recalling his own name chalked on the blackboard behind the counter of the tailor, the butcher. He initially suggested that perhaps Mr. Jacobsen should be the one to act the constable. This suggestion astonished Mrs. Jacobsen. He was a partial invalid, she proclaimed, who rarely dared venture from his room on the southern side. And indeed, Eugene himself has never yet seen him up close, only rounding a corner, disappearing into a doorway, poking about in the pantry, enough to ascertain that Mr. Jacobsen is a small man with the furtive movements of a creature who prefers the dark. He is inept, perhaps, but far too ambulatory to be called an invalid. Perhaps Mrs. Jacobsen was referring—and this thought wanders into Eugene’s mind unbidden—to his prowess in his husbandly duties.
≈ ≈ ≈
Eugene strikes a lucifer and lights a candle. The wick is untrimmed and the flame flares high. Above the sideboard is a great oil of some blank-faced, inbred aristocrats picnicking on a hill. A child has crawled away from the group and is a hand span away from an ominous thicket. None of the picnickers seem to notice the wayward child in the least.
He sniffs at a decanter. Ah, quite so. Sherry. It is a lady’s drink, but a good a capper as any to a fine evening. He was the last man standing at the Brown Jug, an establishment that was known to stay open for business as long as there was someone to serve, as long as there was someone, such as Eugene, celebrating before a departure into the wilderness. And yet no matter how many times he raised his arm in a toast there remained that fluttering at the back of his skull, as if moths were rising from sleep.
He contemplates a small statue of a cherub, says: “Steel yourself, Eugene Augustus. You have whiled away enough time. You are off to the goldfields, off to see the elephant, as they say. Now there is an absurd phrase, made by men who have likely never seen one of those ponderous creatures in their lives. But then what is two weeks more, or three? The gold, by all accounts, is still tight in the earth’s icy embrace where it has lain for centuries—no, millennia. Consider Mr. . . . Mr. Lell, that was the name, and his book about stones and so forth. His Geological Ideas, that was it. Consider the vast stretches of time. How after millions upon millions of years, a mountain is still young! It is a stretch of nothing, like an afternoon for us mortals. And our afternoon is as a lifetime to a gnat. Hah, what think you of that, my little marble friend? Your parts are like to be as ancient as the Coliseum, as the very sea itself, as ancient as . . .”
“Mr. Hume. Is it you, sir? Are you there?”
Eugene starts, mouths a curse as sherry spills on the carpet.
“I heard voices. I was terrified out of my wits. I thought I might faint.”
Mrs. Jacobsen stands in the doorway. One hand holds a wrapper closed over her nightdress, the other a candle in its holder. Her hair, a robust red in better light, here streams darkly over her shoulders. And though she is affecting terror, affecting a heaving of her considerable bosom, it is doubtful she has ever fainted in her life. Not that this matters. She was beautiful once and thus can be forgiven much. Indeed Eugene sees her, not as she is now, but as she was thirty or forty years ago, with a regal, formidable beauty, the likeness of an Athena. He does not often boast of it, but he has an astonishing ability to detect the lost lineaments of beauty, much the way an archaeologist detects a once splendid city under rubble.
He covers the spilled sherry with his foot. “My apologies, madam, if I have awoken you. I cannot sleep.”
“You cannot sleep? Have you tried Doctor Helmcken’s blue pills? Have you tried a purge? An iced bath? It draws the agitation from the limbs. It steadies the mind.”
Eugene admits he has not tried any of these remedies but will, of course.
Mrs. Jacobsen is filling his glass and now her own. He notes that she is remarkably powdered and rouged for one awoken in a fright. Notes also (how can he not?) her wrapper shifting open to show the complicated affair of her nightdress, the ravine between her once no doubt splendid breasts. He murmurs his thanks. Mrs. Jacobsen sits on the divan. He is relieved to sit also, for the late hour is bringing with it an unsteadiness of posture. He chooses the nearest armchair. His knees rise uncomfortably high. He will be glad when a taller monarch comes to the throne and the furniture is no longer made in deference to a woman the size of a gnome. His father, God rest him, had chairs from the reign of King George. Card playing chairs, high enough so that a tall man could sit with some dignity. They were the only items of furniture his father brought with them as they moved from this inn to that lodging house. A man without a chair is nothing, his father said, in one of his more philosophical moods.
“I, too, am often restless.” Mrs. Jacobsen says. “I, too, am often afflicted with wakefulness. Did you know it travels through a family line? Did you know that my Great Aunt Wilhelmina did not sleep for twenty years?”
“I did not know this. But it is fascinating, truly so.” Eugene smiles, showing his array of fine teeth. Mrs. Jacobsen’s stern countenance transforms before this smile, before the manly presence that is Eugene Augustus Hume. He stands a head taller than most. Is broad shouldered and well featured with a clean-shaven chin and waves of chestnut hair. He wears checkered trousers in shades of brown, a matching frock coat, a fawn-coloured waistcoat, and a cravat of burgundy silk. All of which bring attention to the fine amber of his eyes. His top hat is on a side table as are his gloves. Not for him these coke hats and bared hands. And he has that way of looking about, as if he is always ready to leap to the rescue. Dashing, in a word.
“Mr. Hume. If I may ask. If I may be forthright. Do you feel at home here at the Avalon? Do you feel as if you are suited to its environs?”
“Indeed, madam.”
“Then I have an offer. A proposal.”
“A proposal?” The moths arise as he takes a good draft of sherry.
“I would like you to stay and have Mr. Vincent’s position. Would that be agreeable? Would that take you off this silly notion of the Cariboo?”
“But you have only recently hired him.”
“He shakes. He is forever making mistakes in the accounts. He often sleeps throughout the afternoon. And he quails completely at bill collection. I am certain we can find an agreeable arrangement.”
“But the steamer leaves. I am booked and . . .”
“And how many make their fortune? How many return, in fact, as paupers? Truly, sir, how many return not at all, but perish of this or that?”
“I have attempted far more difficult journeys, I assure you. Journeys rife with indescribable dangers. It is just . . .”
“Just? Yes? It is just?” Mrs. Jacobsen says, though the name is there, as if scrawled on the air between them.
“That I have certain obligations. The Cowichan, my land, and . . .”
“And? Miss Timmons? Is that what you mean? Have you married her, by the by? Should I offer my belated congratulations? Should I inform all my acquaintances?” Mr. Jacobsen smiles as if this were merely gay repartee.
“No, that is to say, not yet. I am waiting until I have sufficient means to provide a grand breakfast feast after the ceremony. It would be a disgrace to the name of Hume otherwise. Until then we are married in our souls, that is, as they say, in the custom of the country, a union that has a long and honourable tradition h
ere. Even good Governor Douglas and his lovely dusky wife . . .”
“Indeed, but that was long before the arrival of proper ministers. We have ministers aplenty now. We have churches of every stripe. Perhaps you have not tied the knot because you have realized that it would be unwise? Perhaps that is why you cannot sleep?”
Eugene frowns and sadly shakes his head.
Mrs. Jacobsen twists her hair between her fingers. “I am sorry. I apologize. My jests sometimes do not sound as they should. I . . . it is just . . . you see, when you left with Miss Timmons I was shocked. I was astounded. I gave that young woman employment, a fine little room, as many sweet buns as she cared to stuff herself with and wages that were much higher than in London, or any other great city of Europe. What’s more, I offered her friendship, albeit the restrained friendship of an employer, of an older, wiser woman, but still. And how did Miss Timmons thank me? She left before her contract was completed. And with a lodger.”
Reckoning of Boston Jim Page 2
