Maud

by Melanie Fishbane

  The idea that Pensie didn’t trust her clawed at Maud’s heart, but she was learning that certain things needed time to heal.

  —

  The next day was Sunday, and after church, Maud took one last walk to the cemetery, alone. “It is all my fault,” she said to her mother’s stone as the warm August wind gently blew on her face. How disappointed her mother must be.

  Afterwards, there was a little gathering of friends and family to say farewell to Maud. Pensie came, but she was quiet much of the time and only gave Maud a brief goodbye. Maud wanted to run after her, but after last night what more could be said? In time her friend would fully forgive her.

  Even Grandma was silent most of the day. When she did speak, she told Maud to be respectful of her stepmother’s rules, then later stuck some money into Maud’s hand when no one was looking. Miss Gordon paid a call and gave Maud a small book of poems, Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

  “To me, this is some of the most truthful writing on love,” Miss Gordon said.

  Maud took the red-bound book and caressed its edges. Even now, after all that had happened between them, her first instinct was to tell Nate about the book—perhaps even find a poem to read together. But she couldn’t now. Not today. They might have left things on a friendlier note, but it still hurt too much to see him.

  Packing her trunk later that evening—the poems she had written, Aunt Annie’s quilt, Nate’s letters—everything seemed significant. She packed her beloved books: Little Women, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Pride and Prejudice, and The Last of the Mohicans, which she planned to read on the train as it had good descriptions of Indians. Aunt Annie had suggested that Maud wear her hair up for the trip, and showed her how to do it. The first time Maud saw herself with her hair pinned up she realized she was no longer the scared young girl who had come back from Park Corner last summer.

  Maud wrapped Nate’s letters in the white shawl she’d worn that first night he walked her home and placed them delicately in the chest. She wasn’t sure if she would be returning to the Island again, and she didn’t want to think what Grandma would do if she ever saw them. She still thought of the old journal, the one she had burned not even a year before. So much had changed since then. It was probably just as well that she had burned it—it was as if it had been written by some other girl.

  “Come in,” Maud said, when she heard a soft knock at the door.

  Grandma entered, holding something against her chest, and sat down on the bed beside a pile of clothes. Maud could see she was cradling a square item in her hand. Maud sat down beside her grandmother. The only sound was the waves of the Gulf lapping the shore.

  “It is almost your mother’s room again,” Grandma said.

  “I’m going to miss the sound of the water,” Maud said. “Father says there is a river near his house, but I’m not convinced it will be the same thing.”

  Grandma gave a kind of strangled half laugh. “It won’t be. You can be sure of that.” Then she cleared her throat and sniffed. “I have been keeping something for you. I was considering giving it to you for your sixteenth birthday, but as you won’t be here, I was thinking you could have it now.” Grandma held on to the item for a long while and then passed it to Maud.

  Maud took it from her as delicately as she could. It was wrapped in a worn piece of cotton, faded brown with flowers. It would make a lovely quilt square.

  “Before you open it, there is a story I want to tell you. I suspect you’ll be too distracted by the item once you unwrap it. You should know what it is, who it belonged to, and why you are getting it now.”

  Maud placed the package carefully upon her lap, suppressing the urge to open it.

  “When your mother was nineteen years old, there was a popular notion among her friends to collect signatures and stories. Not unlike an autograph book, but it was called something different. Although I suspect that they are similar in nature.”

  Maud’s heart thumped loudly.

  “This belonged to your mother when she was a little older than you.”

  Everything went silent. Even the waves.

  “I don’t have anything that belonged to Mother.”

  Grandma took a deep, long breath. “You do now.”

  With shaking fingers, Maud delicately unwrapped the cloth, revealing a brown square book about the size of a prayer book. The spine was a little frayed but it was still in excellent condition. Leaning it over to the lamp, Maud could see the cover had the word Scrap written in gold across the middle with raised borders of fancy swirls, reminding her of royal carvings.

  Maud’s tears fell on the old worn cover.

  “It is called a Commonplace Book,” Grandma said.

  “You’ve had this all this time?” Maud said. She was too surprised to be angry.

  Her grandmother didn’t respond. Maud tore herself away from the Commonplace Book in time to catch Grandma discreetly wiping her eyes.

  “It was too painful,” she said, after a while. “You know I don’t enjoy talking about…her.”

  Because of what she did and the shame she caused? The question was on the tip of Maud’s tongue. But if she asked, would Grandma take the book away? Would it ruin one of the few good moments she had had with Grandma since that awful day almost a year ago when her journal was discovered?

  Maud placed her hand on top of the book, then carefully opened it and read the inscription on the flyleaf: Miss Clara W. Macneill. Cavendish. April 11, 1872.

  Her mother’s handwriting. Had she ever even seen it before? She opened the book and started to read through it.

  There were poems: poems written by family members to her mother, and a few in what appeared to be Father’s handwriting. Maud couldn’t be sure.

  “Your mother didn’t know how clever you would be or foresee your talent for writing, which I suspect you get from my side of the family—although I’d deny it if you said anything,” Grandma said. “Your grandfather is much too proud of the Macneill bloodline in that department.”

  Maud froze. There were blank pages. Blank pages she could fill with her own words!

  “Thank you, Grandma,” she whispered.

  Grandma stood up, tapped Maud gently on her hand, and left.

  Sitting in her mother’s bedroom, Maud turned each page as if the book were a long lost relic.

  Picking up her pencil, Maud wrote one sentence and then another and another. It felt as though she and her mother were having a secret conversation, one that reached back in time and brought her to a deep understanding of who her mother was: a woman in love with a man her parents didn’t approve of.

  —

  As Maud crawled into bed that night, she thought of all that had happened in the last year, all that had changed. She realized that she would miss her grandparents, the constancy of them. She would miss the constancy of her friends nearby. The constancy of daily rituals and school days with Mollie and Jack and, yes, Nate. Would he write, as he’d promised?

  And who would do the readings at next year’s lecture, or perform at Miss Gordon’s concerts? Would there be another Four Musketeers to take their place? Certainly the job could not be left to Clemmie and her ilk, but Mollie was still there. She would do her best to represent them.

  And what of her favorite haunts? Would there be a Lover’s Lane, a Haunted Woods, or a Hole in the Wall in Prince Albert?

  Maud had learned that Saskatchewan was being christened “A New Eden,” promising rich, fertile farmland, full of opportunity. Her father had also written about her going to high school. It was rare to have that opportunity—for a woman, anyway. It sounded as though it would be the perfect place to start over. Her grandparents wouldn’t be there to judge her; there would be no whispers from the townspeople, from families who claimed superiority.

  She was proud of being part of the Island’s history; its forests and flowers were imprinted on her heart. And she was bringing with her Grandfather Macneill’s sto
ries, her journal, and Mother’s Commonplace Book. They would connect her to a treasured past while she climbed to a bright new future.

  BOOK TWO

  Maud of Prince Albert

  1890–1891

  To be fully appreciated, Saskatchewan must be seen, for no pen, however gifted or graphic, can describe with anything like justice, the splendid natural resources, the unequalled fertility, and the rare beauty of the prairies of this Western Eden.

  —L.M. Montgomery, “A Western Eden.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  As twilight descended upon the Saskatchewan prairie town of Prince Albert, exhaustion hung on Maud like the red caked dirt on her travel suit. She was in her new room in her father’s home, Eglintoune Villa; she had immediately christened the room “Southview,” as it looked south on the main road, which went uphill to the newly erected courthouse. It was all so different from her beloved Cavendish. She desperately missed the Tree Lovers, she missed the Gulf’s dull roar, she missed the Island’s red roads. Although she was a short walk from the North Saskatchewan River, and she thought the poplar trees here were beautiful, Maud hadn’t realized how much of the Island’s beauty she had taken for granted.

  She had kept a record of the seven-day, three thousand–mile journey she had taken from Cavendish and had promised herself that she would copy it over into her regular journal when she arrived; she didn’t want to forget anything.

  Although happy to be reunited with Father the previous day, a part of her wished to be back in Grandpa Montgomery’s grand house in Park Corner, where she had stayed for three days before they set out on their journey across the country. It had been a rainy and gray morning the day she and Grandpa left Park Corner. Uncle Cuthbert drove them south to Kensington Station, where they’d picked up the train to Summerside to catch the ferry the following day.

  At Kensington Station, when Grandpa came back with the tickets, he had exciting news. Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald and his wife were on their way to Summerside for a political rally via Charlottetown. Grandpa wired a telegram to them, arranging for them all to travel together. How thrilling! Her first train ride and she was to meet one of the most powerful men in Canada, one of the Fathers of Confederation.

  When the special car came, Maud followed Grandpa on board, and suddenly, there she was, standing next to the great man himself. He was spry-looking, not handsome, but with a pleasant enough face. Lady Macdonald was fairly quiet and—despite her beautiful silvery hair and imposing stature—was dressed quite dowdily in her high, laced collar and black cap.

  The prime minister and Grandpa discussed shipyard closures, but Maud was too busy looking at the Macdonalds and the elegant furniture of their train car to pay attention to the exact nature of what they were saying.

  About half an hour later, they arrived in Summerside and, after saying goodbye to the Macdonalds, were greeted at the station by Grandpa’s daughter, Maud’s Aunt Nancy, and her husband, Uncle Dan Campbell, who took them back to the hotel they ran. The next morning, Maud and Grandpa took the ferry to Pointe-du-Chêne and then the train to St. John, New Brunswick. Even now, copying down the moment she had left the island for the first time, Maud’s chin trembled as she remembered the boat floating away from the dock. As she stood on the deck, gripping the railing, tears whipping against her cheeks, she watched her beloved red earth fade from view.

  From New Brunswick they boarded another train, traveling through the wooded hills of Maine to Montreal, where Maud went out on her own along the Old Port, as her grandpa had stayed at the hotel to get some rest. She stayed close enough to the hotel so she wouldn’t get lost, but she couldn’t help feeling a spice of adventure in walking alone in such a big city where no one knew who she was.

  They took a sleeping car that evening and Maud woke in a region that was all stumps and rocks in Northern Ontario and wrote in her travel journal as they entered the province of Manitoba. After a short stop in Winnipeg, which looked as though someone threw a handful of streets and houses down and forgot to sort them out, she and Grandpa finally arrived in Regina, Saskatchewan, at five o’clock in the morning. It was so cold and foggy that it was hard to see the city; she could only make out a series of gray buildings and matching gray sky. Grandpa checked them into the Windsor Hotel across the street from the train station, and Maud was so exhausted that she almost didn’t make it up the stairs into bed before falling into a dreamless sleep.

  —

  A few hours later she was woken up by a knock at the door. She was expecting to see only Grandpa, so it took her a few moments to realize that the man standing beside him was her father. A few more lines to his face since the last time she’d seen him, but with the same brown hair and beard, and friendly cobalt-blue eyes that were exactly like hers. At the sight of her, he opened his arms and, without hesitating, she stepped into his big hug and breathed in his smell of summer sun, fresh-cut wheat, and tobacco.

  “I’m so happy to finally have you here,” he said, with his hands on her shoulders.

  “I didn’t expect to see you until we got to Prince Albert,” she said, delighted.

  “We didn’t know if we would be able to arrange it.” Grandpa slapped Father on the back and laughed. Maud had forgotten how they shared the same explosive laugh.

  “I was able to come with a friend of mine who was traveling here on business,” Father explained to Maud, “but we are going to have to be creative getting back to Prince Albert.” Father unbuttoned the top of his jacket and sat down on one of the plush mauve chairs. “While the freight train now goes to Prince Albert, there’s no passenger car. So we have to stop in Duck Lake first.”

  Maud had an absurd vision of them lugging their trunks through acres of wheat fields.

  Her father laughed when he saw the dubious expression on her face. “At the end of every freight train, there’s a little red wooden carriage called a caboose,” he went on. “It’s a three-hour journey, and it will be a little cramped, but nothing we can’t handle, right, Maudie?”

  Her father’s enthusiasm was contagious and, even though her sense of adventure had left her in Winnipeg, she found herself smiling back at him.

  “In the meantime, I was able to arrange a horse and buggy to tour Regina for the day so we can see the sights—what sights there are to be seen,” he said. “How does that sound?”

  Maud couldn’t stop staring at her father. The whole trip out West, Maud had been worried that he would be ashamed of her, but, instead, he had planned something for them to do together. “Yes!” she said, when she could find her voice. “That sounds wonderful.”

  After Maud got herself dressed and had a quick breakfast of tea with toast and jam, they stepped out of the hotel onto Broad Street, where the horse and buggy were waiting. Around the train station, a new business district had formed, and as Father drove Grandpa and Maud through Regina, Maud watched people going about their everyday lives. She had never seen a North West Mounted Police before and was struck by how many of them they were—and how handsome their uniforms were. She had seen police officers when she had visited Charlottetown with Grandma, but there wasn’t much of a need of one in Cavendish. Regina was also so new-looking, compared to her home’s older, more established houses and farms, whose founding families had come over one-hundred-and-fifty years before. The recently completed Government House, the official residence of the lieutenant-governor for the North-West Territories and Saskatchewan, was a grand two-storey imposing building made of stone and—according to Father—had running water and flushing toilets.

  When Father detoured outside of Regina to show them the farms in the area, all Maud could see was dust and dirt; she prayed that Prince Albert would be better. She longed for Cavendish’s rolling hills and deep green pastures and red shores.

  All through the tour, her father and grandpa chatted, and while she appreciated the time to absorb her new surroundings, she also couldn’t wait to be alone with her father so she could talk to him about Mother’s
Commonplace Book, and about Mother. She knew this wasn’t the right time, though; if she were going to find out the truth, the timing would have to be perfect.

  So she sat back and listened to Grandpa and Father discuss the “rough and tumble” Prince Albert politics.

  “I’m glad that you got that matter settled with your supervisor,” Grandpa said.

  Father cleared his throat. “In addition to my duties as agent at the Confederation Life Insurance Company, there are a few ventures that look promising.” When Grandpa didn’t respond, Father went on. “You’ll find that I’m quite well respected in Prince Albert, Father. People are happy I’m back, and there’s talk of me running for local government.”

  “Following in the family business,” Grandpa said. “About time.”

  When they finally boarded the caboose later that evening, Maud found herself shivering in the tiny car, which was lit by oil lamps and not much else. Her head hurt and she ached for a warm bed and some hot tea. A few hours later, they arrived at Duck Lake, a small town a few hours south of Prince Albert, where they stayed with one of Father’s friends, Mr. Cameron. It was so late when they arrived that Maud just tumbled into the small bed in the spare bedroom and fell immediately into a deep sleep.

  Maud woke refreshed the following morning and was relieved to find the world outside had changed from dusty brown to luscious green. There were even some poplar trees nestling in the distance.

  After breakfast, Father’s father-in-law, John McTaggart, arrived to take them on the last stage of the journey to Prince Albert. Mr. McTaggart was a local businessman and government land agent; his job was to convince people to move west—and to hear him talk, it was all he could do to keep people from coming. “Everyone wants to start fresh. Already Prince Albert can boast two thousand homesteaders who have come to work the land,” Mr. McTaggart said as they drove away in his horse and buggy and started the journey north.

  “It’s a fool’s notion,” Father said. “I’m not going to rely on the land; I’ve seen too much of that back East. I make a good living as an auctioneer and, then—” He turned and winked at Maud. “Who knows.”