“And you will write.”
“And I will write.”
Jasper didn’t know what stretched before him. He didn’t know if his life would be truncated in the trenches or his heart be stolen by a chance encounter with a doe-eyed French girl. He didn’t know if he would be scared or homesick or sad, nor if he would ever see the four walls that embraced him now again.
But he had a certainty beyond his mother’s tears and his father’s averted eyes.
Beyond any law inscribed by Toronto’s police force.
Beyond.
A line from a verse in Habakkuk, one he’d heard Ethan Talbot quote numerous times.
I will work a work in your days…
Jasper Forth knew he would be just fine.
* Ray’s habit of referring to the duo as Herringford and Watts proved a habit difficult to break, no matter how long the new sign flourished in Merinda’s townhouse window.
† Merinda yearned to shake him so as to rattle the italics from his head. Instead, she sat patiently with a pasted-on smile.
‡ One room Jem was secretly certain would soon need to be outfitted in either pink or blue.
§ Jasper never fancied meatloaf.
EPILOGUE
Our world moves on, and our transient city welcomes some and waves goodbye to others in a consistent state of uncertainty. Our enduring constant is change. We will be ready for it, armed against it, and welcome it. Perhaps Toronto’s limitless quality is the inability for it to be pigeonholed into one thought or idea. You cannot impress upon it a label or description. You cannot ascribe to it one culture or tradition. It is all of these things, strong and supple and welcoming. A revolving door. A welcome mat. Ultimately worth fighting for.
Ray DeLuca, the Globe and Mail
Jemima,
We arrive by the 12:15 train on Thursday. While we have made arrangement for accommodation at the King Edward, we have not yet arranged transportation from Union Station to the hotel. Your father is unaware I am writing you, but I am assured he would be placated by an opportunity to see his grandson again—however unexpected such opportunity may be.
Jem clutched the note from her mother to her heart.
“You’re nervous,” Ray said, tugging a sweater over Hamish’s head.
“Not for myself. For you.”
“Jem…”
“It slays me that they haven’t taken the time to get to know you.”
“Jem, while I would dearly love your parents’ approval, I have never expected it.”
“I know, but you deserve it. You have mine.”
Ray smiled. “Come, then.”
A short, sunny walk later they arrived at Union Station, Ray fiddling with the button on his collar. Jem let Hamish walk a few steps before his “up, up!” had her hoisting him into her arms.
“Ray…”
“My love, we are doing this right.”
Jem repositioned Hamish in one arm and reached for Ray’s hand as they crossed through the station lobby to the tracks. A group of soldiers meandered by, their rucksacks over their shoulders, their girls at their heels, handkerchiefs balled in their hands.
Ray’s fist, too, was balled to stop its shaking. Jem turned to him with a smile. “I never wanted anything but you, even before I knew you were you. My heart knew before my head could catch up.”
The 12:15 train rumbled over the track with sparks and smoke, and then it screeched to a stop.
Jem’s stomach was doing somersaults as she watched the doors to the first-class compartments creak open. She didn’t want Ray to see her nervousness, so she studied his profile under his smart new bowler. He wasn’t completely handsome, of course. She would have found him boring if he were. But he looked rather smart in his new clothes, and she had always loved the way his long eyelashes nearly swept his cheeks and his ears stuck out just a little and his hair (even newly cut) rebelliously curled a bit at the back of his collar.
She set Hamish down a moment, relishing the way his strong little grip held tightly to her skirt, and then she reached over and began unbuttoning Ray’s collar button.
“Jem! What are you doing?”
“There.” She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek before stepping back and taking his free hand. “I see them!” she announced a moment later, her eyes flickering over the platform.
She loosened Hamish’s hand from her skirt and placed it on Ray’s pant leg. He felt a small tug and looked down. For a moment he only had eyes for Hamish, who was chewing on the string affixed to his sweater. But once he looked up again, his father-in-law’s stony face stalled his delight.
He was, however, mercifully silent.
Ray watched Jem slowly straighten her spine and saunter ahead.
She kissed her mother on both cheeks and took her father’s hand.
“Mother, Father,” she effused cordially. Then she walked back to her husband and child and picked up Hamish. Ray watched her eyes glisten.
Jem’s mother observed her grandson, smiling with undisguised joy when the baby seemed to recognize her and began babbling a string of happy, chattering sounds. She leaned over him and kissed him.
“He is almost speaking.” Jem’s mother’s voice wavered slightly. Ray couldn’t tell if it was from emotion or pride.
“Darling, take him a moment?” Jemima turned to Ray and winked.
“Mother,” Jem said proudly, knowing neither of her parents would lash at Ray while he held their precious grandson in his arms. Her heart skipped several beats watching the reverence with which he hoisted Hamish higher on his shoulder, caressed his cheek, and allowed his sometimes-stalled half-moon smile to tickle wider across his cheek. “I believe you have yet to meet my husband.”
Ray found something in himself there, with this beautiful, beaming girl beside him and her father’s moustache the latest thing of interest to his beautiful little son. He gave Mrs. Watts a bow, taking her hand and kissing it. “A pleasure!” he said and upon rising, conjured up the brightest, most luminous smile he could, full-teeth flashing, black eyes twinkling, and he watched as her breath caught a little.
Mrs. Beatrice Watts melted into the platform.
They dress in their Sunday best and give their men something to picture on the battlefield. Merinda recalled a line from a recent Globe article that had reminded her of Jasper’s desire for a “picture to come home for.”
Before this moment, the closest Merinda Herringford had come to cosmetics were soot and grime on a case. She stared at the mirror in the foyer, dabbing her lips with rose color, working the slightest line to her eyes, impressed at how even the minimal smudge of gray at her lashes made her green eyes look brighter.
Then she took a sparkly bandeau borrowed from Jem, flouncing her bobbed blond curls around it so the beaded ornamentation caught the light.
She tugged at the skirt falling away from a ribbon accentuating her waist and then at the gossamer tulip-shaped sleeves scalloped over her arms.
Perhaps Merinda Herringford wasn’t able to give Jasper Forth the kind of send-off he desired or deserved, but she could give him a farewell worthy of his sacrifice.
She arrived at Union Station as it erupted in an uproar of goodbyes. In a few moments the platform would empty of its cacophony and chaos, and then it would be relatively quiet and peaceful until another regiment would pull in like a gruesome tide.
And she wondered as she scoured the crowd for a sight of him why she wasn’t made like Jem, who was happy with the knowledge that a man lived and died for the prospect of holding her near.
A moment later she spotted him, just under the clock, every other man surrounding him diminished by Jasper in uniform.
Merinda straightened her own shoulders, exhaled, and seized the moment, parting the crowd and tapping Jasper on the shoulder. Swerving, he took in her glossed lips and lined eyes and bandeau and feminine shape. His intense gaze made her feel as if she were her blackboard and his eyes a piece of chalk.
“Jasper.”
/> “Mer—” His voice tried to wrap around her name but failed. “You came.”
He adjusted his rucksack, removed his highlander beret, and then ran his hand through his regulation length hair.
“Jasper, I need to—”
“Tell me you’re here because you love me,” he pleaded. “Please tell me, Merinda, that you’re here to make everything I have ever wanted appear in thin air. Tell me that every dream I—”
Merinda’s voice was like broken glass. “I can’t. I don’t feel that way, Jasper.”
“What is it, Merinda? What is it you feel? It has to be me.”
“It’s not you.” She grabbed at his uniform.
“Don’t say it.”
“I’m sorry, Jasper.”
“Please, Merinda.”
Merinda—nose running, splotchy, frantic, afraid Merinda—held him tightly. “Stop it!” she shrieked. “Jasper… I don’t know how.”
“To love? Rubbish!”
“You want all of me. You want all of me, and I am not meant to give that to you. But you are one part of my heart, and it’s likely to rip if you keep talking like this.” She rose on her tiptoes to bring them eye level. “I’d trade my life for yours in a moment.” She spoke through the milling soldiers, the din of farewells. “I’d fight in your place. You know I would because I do love you. Just not in the way you need.” She drew in a long breath. “But I can give you one cracker jacks of a send-off!”
She tilted his head down and kissed him, hard and strong. He fell into it desperately, his arms encircling her and every breath traded with her. He gave in longingly, pulling her more tightly against him. He gave in hungrily to grasp the second-rate stars he was being offered, the edge of a complicated dream. He ferociously kissed her and then pulled back to plant a few more kisses over her tear-stained face and into the bobbed curls under her fashionable bandeau and into the nape of her neck and over her collar bone. She knew it wasn’t meant to be, but she tasted it.
When they stupidly drew back, tears stained his face as well.
She punched him, beat against him. “You have to come back for me. You have to come back for me.”
“I will. You know I will.” He touched her cheek. “What you did today… for me… I didn’t think you were listening that night.”
“I am always listening to you, Jasper.”
“No, you’re not. You don’t even know how I take my coffee—”
“Black. One sugar.”
“Merinda, I’ll write you.”
She punched his arm again. Her words were gone. She nodded as she watched him turn at the shrill of the whistle.
Time peeled back, revealing moments when Jasper and Merinda skipped class to wander the Philosopher’s Walk, taste the tingle of ice cream or the first warm summer rain on outstretched tongues, balance test tubes and test theories. Then Jasper passed the police exam, and Merinda found the city a puzzle she would never fully solve.
The shrieking train’s whistle pulled them back to the present. Merinda heard Jasper’s last farewell, and then he was lost in a depth of khaki uniforms.
The crowd swarmed around her in a wave of noise, some sobbing, others cheering. A reflection of a city on the brink of something momentous. But she knew the light would come, eventually. She knew that while Toronto might find itself wading in a darkness it had never known, it would emerge stronger. It was resilient.
She shouldered through a mass of people, hope surging through her. With Union Station behind her, she tilted her chin in the direction of Yonge Street. Though autumn was actually just beginning to make its presence felt on the year, to Merinda it seemed this moment that winter was whipping through the air, its first portentous chill blasting September in with a harbinger of darkness and frost.
Merinda crossed Front Street at a diagonal, in the opposite direction of the driving wind humming over the lake and nipping at her heels.
She didn’t look back. She passed another swarm of service men in khaki kits, their rucksacks full of bully beef and regulation socks, their eyes under their peaked knit hats full of the promise of victory and adventure. Their sweethearts, in painted lips and spit-shone Sunday best, were draped on their arms, tripping along to the promise of We will be home. We will be home by Christmas. We will be home.
Merinda breathed in her city, drawing strength from its pulse. It was her own, this ragtag, mismatched quilt of a place with its Tower of Babel dialects and soot-stained buildings and cadence of progress and reform.
Her city.
And she took it alone. No man on her arm, no family awaiting her. Just the promise of Turkish coffee and problems to be solved, an empty blackboard, a small magnifying glass, and years’ worth of Wheaton and Holmes quotes.
Merinda drew a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. She took the city in her stride, the trumbling street cars, the horses’ hooves, the whistles of the constables on patrol, the screech of an automobile’s tires. Merinda waded through the collage and maze of a world that might, at any moment, leave her behind.
Above, a few saucy clouds puffed out their presence in a cerulean sky. Towering buildings scraped to heaven alongside steeples and trees and the ornamented outlines of large structures in marble and stone.
Toronto wasn’t just a city. Rather, it was a starring character in the nickelodeon of her life. She matched the rhythm of the pulse of its people, their steps a heartbeat, the tangy breeze and whistling music of the street musicians their lifeblood.
This is your great romance, she thought with a growing smile. The one true love of your life. And for Merinda Herringford, jauntily swinging her arms as she quickened her pace toward Wellington Street, flirting with the bustling enterprise of Yonge, she knew that was all she would ever need.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. The onset of the Great War is a major theme in The White Feather Murders. Do you have any familial connections who fought in WWI?
2. Jem, Merinda, Jasper, and Ray are all very different people with very different personalities, and yet through the Herringford and Watts series they are closely linked. Which character do you most identify with?
3. Ethan Talbot quotes Ray a verse from Habakkuk when trying to encourage him that God is doing a work in his days. At the end of the book, Jasper recalls the same Scripture before he goes off to fight. How do you think this verse is different for both of these men and their experiences? How does it apply to your own life?
4. In what ways do you find current society parallels Jem’s and Merinda’s changing world?
5. Jemima wants to be a lady detective as well as a wife and mother, and she often finds herself at odds when attempting to balance both. Can you think of an instance in your own life where you have been caught between two worlds? How did you make it work?
6. The theme of reconciliation is important to the characters in The White Feather Murders. Jem has her first contact with her parents since her marriage to Ray, and Ray reconciles with his sister, Viola. Can you think of an instance of reconciliation in your own life and how it changed you?
7. Ray sends Jem to Merinda’s for her safety and Hamish to Jem’s parents’ house. Would you act in a similar manner in the same situation?
8. At the end of the novel, Merinda is alone mostly by choice. Why do you think that independence is so integral to her? In what ways do you find her choices preferable to Jem’s? In what ways do you find Jem’s choices preferable to Merinda’s?
9. Toronto is a starring character in the “nickelodeon” of Merinda’s life. Can you think of a place that inspires for you the same fondness and connection Jem and Merinda have for their city?
10. The Herringford and Watts series was partly inspired by the belief that God uses different women for His purposes and that there is no one-size-fits-all formula. Sometimes He uses Marys and Marthas, at other times Deborahs and Esthers. Can you think of other Christian women in history as well as biblical figures that exemplify the above statements?
AUTH
OR’S NOTE
The First World War changed Canada. Speaking of the Canadian victory at Vimy Ridge in 1917, Brigadier General A.E. Ross said, “I witnessed the birth of a nation.”
The Great War not only changed Canada—it changed the world.
So much was going on at the home front and internationally that it is impossible to encapsulate all of it. The social structure of the entire globe was changing. In researching life on the Canadian home front just as war broke out, I consulted several sources. L.M. Montgomery’s novel Rilla of Ingleside is a wonderful glimpse into Canadian female life during the war years. Deafening, a novel by Frances Itani, also paints life in Canada during that time.
The Toronto Reference Library was, again, immeasurably helpful as I created my historical imaginings. In particular, Our Glory and Our Grief: Torontonians and the Great War by Ian Miller, and The Ward: The Life and Loss of Toronto’s First Immigrant Neighbourhood by John Lorinc and Michael McClelland, are two of the most fascinating sources I found in my research for the series.
The War Measures Act was adopted by Canadian Parliament on August 4, 1914, directly after Canadians officially joined the British war effort. It gave broad powers to the Canadian government to maintain security against perceived threats of insurrection. While I fictionally created Mayor Montague’s anti-immigrant measures, what I read about some of the conditions of this Act made the powers granted to my fictional Morality Squad unsettlingly close to the truth. The federal War Measures Act required the registration and, in certain cases, internment of those deemed aliens of “enemy nationality.” This included more than 80,000 Canadians formerly citizens of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. More than twenty internment camps were established during the WWI era, and almost 9,000 Canadians were interned between 1914–1920 from a multitude of nationalities, including those of Italian and German descent.
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