by Janet Lunn
Jane, inches from the window sill, came back 180 years to the abandoned attic that had once been a bright flower-painted bedroom for those other twins. And, with the complete return of her own memory, the door swung open. Elizabeth stopped shouting.
Outside, the rain was pouring steadily down. Shaking and chill, Jane knew she was not finished. She spoke carefully into the blackness where Hester had stood.
“We don’t hate you, Hester,” she said. “They didn’t hate you either, but I don’t suppose,” she added honestly, “they loved you either because, you know, you weren’t very nice to them. But they didn’t leave you out of things on purpose. We wouldn’t either. It’s just … it was just there are two of us … were two of them,” she stopped, confused, “two of all of us, I guess. Anne said it, too, we come in two halves. We don’t always like it either.” Jane couldn’t see but she felt tears of misery running down Hester’s face.
“You can’t help it, couldn’t,” she amended, “being the way you were,” Jane sighed, “and we can’t help being the way we are and if we’re more the same than most people we can’t help that either.” She stopped, not knowing what to say next. Suddenly she remembered Joe and his silly story about ghosts haunting until they’re forgiven.
“It was an accident,” she said softly. “You didn’t mean to set the fire. I know you didn’t. It wasn’t your fault. You shouldn’t have run away,” she scolded gently as though she were talking to a baby. “I guess you’ve been well and truly punished for that, though.”
Elizabeth came slowly across the room to stand beside Jane. She was still clutching Great Uncle William’s book she had absentmindedly picked up in the garden. “And if she hated you all her life after that,” Elizabeth explained, as patiently and gently as Jane had done, and Jane knew, by “her,” Elizabeth meant Melissa, “she couldn’t help it. She shouldn’t have been so mean, but Anne was her twin and she couldn’t help it. She just couldn’t.” There were tears in Elizabeth’s eyes now, too, and tears trickling down her cheeks.
Jane spoke again. “You were scared, I know that, but you didn’t mean to do that awful thing. Please. You can go away now. It was an accident, Hester. I promise you it was an accident.”
She paused for a moment, listening, waiting. Then she said, “Where did you put it, Hester?” and waited again. “After the accident, I mean,” she prompted and although Hester said not a word, in a moment Jane went over to the edge of the room where the sloping roof made a deep triangle with the floor. She felt with her hand way into its corner. There was a hole just there in the floor and under it her hand felt a space and came upon the thing she was looking for. She brought it out and took it over to the window.
Dusty, faded, very dirty, its clothes almost completely eaten away by moths, the little wooden doll was in every way identical to the one Elizabeth still held tightly in her hand.
Together they turned and faced Hester’s corner. Jane spoke. “If you were mean and hateful at all, Hester, it was a long time ago now and it’s all been made right. I’m sure it has.”
“You can rest now,” said Elizabeth.
There was silence in the attic. The rain was falling softly and steadily outside. Horse was waiting by the attic door and, closing it carefully behind them, the twins went with him down the stairs.
Epilogue
In the end, it was Aunt Alice who helped the twins sort out the bits and pieces of Anne and Melissa’s story – not the story, they already knew that – but the things that came later, and it took over a month to do it.
They went to her, even though they knew she didn’t believe in ghosts, because they thought she might be able to tell them things about the family.
But Aunt Alice, as she always did, surprised them. She listened closely to their story, raising and lowering her eyebrows a few times, tapping her fingers against the window sill she sat by, and when they were finished she said, “Humph,” and sent Miss Weller to get the old family Bible from the bookshelf.
There they were: Anne and Melissa Sabiston, born January 12, 1825, to William and Phoebe Sabiston, in Raggs Hollow, Yorkshire, England. There were others too, born to William and Phoebe: a son William, born March 2, 1818 and Patrick, born April 4, 1830.
Anne’s death was entered in the Bible July 22, 1838 (the reading of which caused Aunt Alice to say, “Humph,” again). Melissa wasn’t in the Bible any more – but Hester was: Hester Armitage, born May 21, 1823, died June 4, 1895, and a brother, William Armitage, born June 3, 1832.
“Why,” said Aunt Alice in surprise, “that was old Aunt Hissy! Died when I was five years old.” She put down the book and sat, looking out the window.
“Nobody liked her, remember that, though I don’t remember her much myself – always smelled of lavender, still can’t stand that smell – always black dresses. She was an old maid like me.”
“Oh Aunt Alice, not like you,” Jane said vehemently.
“Well, she never married. Ruled our house like an old witch woman. Lived in that room we used afterward for an attic. Never liked it there, always thought she’d left bits of herself behind – or the memory of them.”
Aunt Alice looked thoughtfully at the two girls sitting on the floor by her chair. “Humph,” she said once more.
“How did that room ever get to be Hester’s in the first place, I want to know,” asked Jane.
“Well, I suppose,” said Aunt Alice, frowning, “the house simply belonged to her.”
“But it didn’t,” Elizabeth jumped up. “It wasn’t her house. It was Anne’s and Melissa’s. She just came to visit, remember?” she turned to Jane.
“Yes,” said Jane, “and besides, if it was her house why did she only live in the attic?”
“Don’t know,” answered Aunt Alice. “You know, you’ve got me curious, stirred my old memories all up, bottom ones all bubbling up to the top. Remember old Aunt Hissy, now, sitting there like an old broody hen – horrible old woman. Children,” she snapped shut the big Bible decisively, “if we want to know things you’ll have to be my legs.”
For the next week or so Aunt Alice sent Jane and Elizabeth to the church her father’s family had always gone to, to the City Hall, to the Ontario archives where old records are kept, and, on a hunch of Elizabeth’s, to the sailing records of ships that sailed out of Toronto in the year 1838.
Among the old church records they found the marriage recorded of Melissa Jane Howarth to William Armitage, October 1, 1870. They couldn’t decide who these two people were because they knew their Melissa’s name was Sabiston, although they thought William Armitage might have been Hester’s brother. The next recording was that these two people had a son, William, born on July 8, 1872.
Jane was delighted to find him there, “I guess that’s the William who wrote the book.” The records went on to tell that William Armitage married Margaret MacGregor and that they had children named Alice, Arthur, Patrick and twins, Julia and Jane.
“Why,” said Elizabeth, “that’s Aunt Alice and old Uncle Arthur and Grandma and …”
“Well, then Grandma was a twin, too! I’ve never heard her say that.”
They saw why when they read that Jane’s death was recorded three years after her birth.
They were thoughtful for a minute after reading this. “I guess we’re just lucky,” said Jane quickly and read on, bringing the family up to date as far as their mother’s birth.
“We should all be in there,” Jane decided – “and in the old Bible, too,” said Elizabeth and they determined to ask if they could be put in.
They had to write to the National Archives in Ottawa to find what Elizabeth wanted to know. It was not in the year 1888 where she had thought it would be, but on the Royal Lady, sailing from Toronto harbor, May 4, 1839, the passenger list included William and Phoebe Sabiston, their son Patrick and their daughter Melissa. “William must have been old enough to stay here,” said Jane.
“So,” said Elizabeth softly to herself, “she went away on the ship.�
�� And she could almost remember being on the ship, clutching the little wooden doll.
The story, or at least the family history, was beginning to fill out. But before they were finished they had to wait for Aunt Alice to write and get an answer from a cousin in Yorkshire, England. The cousin, whose name was Anne (which excited the twins) wrote this:
“My dear Alice, So sorry to hear about broken hip, hope mended, don’t up too soon.” (How the twins giggled at this distant cousin using these same shortcuts – only more – Aunt Alice always used.) “Looked up record you asked. Herewith: great-grandmother née Melissa Sabiston married John Howarth. He died 1857, buried village churchyard. No record here. (“Oh,” said the twins, disappointedly. “Now wait,” Aunt Alice cautioned.) Six children recorded: Anne Elizabeth, Melissa Jane born 1850 (“Oh,” cried the twins, a very different sound from the last disappointed oh, “then that’s the one who married William Armitage in 1870.”) William born 1852, James born 1853, Alice born 1855 died 1856.” (“How sad,” said Jane.)
Here Aunt Alice’s voice began to get excited.
“Now,” she said, “listen.” Elizabeth read over her shoulder: “Anne Elizabeth m Rob’t Drover of Ntgmshr (my grdfthr).”
“What on earth does all that mean?”
Aunt Alice translated: “Anne Elizabeth married Robert Drover of Nottinghamshire (my grandfather).”
“Your grandfather?” asked Jane, completely bewildered.
“No,” said Aunt Alice, “hers.”
“Oh.”
“Wh. went to India,” the letter went on in its own kind of shorthand the twins insisted was like reading one of their mother’s lists of moving instructions or grocery shopping.
“Jas m Amy Armstrong also Ntgmshr (probably related) Melissa J emigrated Canada 1868.”
“You see,” Elizabeth sang, “you see, there she is!” “– and must have taken mother because no burial record here. Hope have been help must fly, Anne.”
“Well,” said Aunt Alice when the twins said nothing, “get me the Bible.”
“But what about Hester?” asked Elizabeth. “How come she lived in the house and ran it and everything?”
“Don’t know,” said Aunt Alice again, “but there she was. Maybe they took her in. Old maids had to live somewhere in those days. Didn’t go to work. Had to accept charity.”
“Then it never was her house,” said Jane.
“And she had to live in it,” Elizabeth added, almost to herself. “She had to live in it all that time. You know, I am sorry for Hester. I really am.”
“I know,” said Jane. “It must have been awful. No wonder there’s still a memory of her.”
“I wonder if that’s what ghosts really are, memories,” said Elizabeth, “leftover memories, left loose because they weren’t finished. Then when someone comes along and finds them and finishes them, they disappear.”
“I’m going to give her back her brooch,” Jane decided. And she did. She wrapped it up in a new piece of blue cotton cloth and put it deep down in the hole where the twin doll had been hidden all those years. And, after that, they seldom talked of Hester.
They never learned, search through records and historical documents though they might, what finally happened to Melissa. There was no record of her death or burial and it made the twins sad. They felt as though Melissa had never stopped grieving. They never found out, either, how the little doll came to be in the Antiques, Dolls Mended shop.
There were many things the twins never understood about all of it but there was no doubt that it changed the way they felt and thought about each other.
It was Jane who said it.
“It’s true,” she said, “what I told Hester.”
“You mean about being two halves of a person?”
“Yes, two halves and that’s that.”
“I suppose it is.” Elizabeth thought for a minute. “I mean if that’s the way we are I guess that’s the way we are, isn’t it?”
“Maybe it isn’t so bad.” Jane picked up the two wooden dolls from the window seat.
“We’ll have to paint them both,” she said, smoothing her hand over first one chipped head and then the other.
“Yes,” Elizabeth smiled at Jane. Jane smiled back. A smile? two smiles? two half-smiles? They didn’t care.
Copyright © 1968, 2003 by Janet Lunn
Published in Canada by Tundra Books,
75 Sherbourne Street, Toronto, Ontario M5A 2P9
Published in the United States by Tundra Books of Northern New York,
P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901
Library of Congress Control Number: 2003100906
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Lunn, Janet, 1928-
Double spell / Janet Lunn.
eISBN: 978-1-77049-040-6
I. Title.
PS8573.U55D6 2003 jC813′.54 C2003-900694-8
PZ7
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
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