“You are not in too much pain, my dear?” Dr Spicer asks.
“Only in my heart,” she says, shivering. “I cannot bear to be near that man for a moment longer.”
“After Dr Spicer left, Mr Eriksson was very agitated,” says Easter, who is seated next to Miss Kitty. “He didn’t seem to care much about how his own wife was. He seemed more troubled about going back downstairs to face the men from the mine company and Mr Nathaniel.”
“Mr Nathaniel was still there?” I ask, thinking the storekeeper would have disappeared pretty quickly after his accusation.
“He was sitting downstairs on the settee, bold as brass, drinking all the brandy and telling the mining company gentlemen about his poor injured son,” Easter says with sarcasm dripping from her words. “But before Mr Eriksson rejoined them all, Miss Kitty said something to him.”
She nudges her mistress.
“I told my husband that I knew he was involved,” Miss Kitty says, gripping her tin mug tight in one hand. “I said I saw him at his desk counting out money one day when he thought me fast asleep on the settee. Next day, I watched from my bedroom window as he passed the money to Mr Nathaniel, standing waiting outside. When he heard that, my husband looked at me most murderously…”
“He did,” Easter confirms. “As soon as he stormed out of the room, we both looked at each other and knew we had to leave. We took a few things and crept out the back door…”
I see Father frown and realise I am frowning deeply too. The truth is, I may have hated Miss Kitty with a vengeance when I was younger, but this person in front of me today is a pathetic, bedraggled version of the girl she once was, and does not frighten me one bit. Also, I am aware that Easter and Dr Spicer both have some fondness, as well as pity, for the troubled invalid they have both cared for in their different ways.
But wait: what are Easter and Miss Kitty saying exactly? Where are they to go? Do they mean to ask to stay here? As this startling thought comes to me, Miss Kitty appears to droop, like a cut flower out of water. By comparison, Easter sits up straight by her side, like a strong reed in a buffeting stream.
“Miss Kitty has something to tell you,” she says, patting the young woman’s arm as if urging her on.
“You – you have to understand, Mr MacKerrie,” says Miss Kitty directing her words to Father, “that it was a shock when I heard about Scots folk come to town, and then realised it was your family. I felt very confused and troubled because, you see, I have always tried to persuade myself that my papa was a good and noble man. But tonight, as Dr Spicer attended to me and explained your side of things, I realised he was … not.”
“Go on: tell them what your father was like,” I hear Easter mutter to her.
“Papa, for all that he might spoil and indulge Mama and me … you see, he was just as quick to be in terrible tempers with us. Mama to this day has a small scar here from when Papa threw a china cup at her.”
Miss Kitty raises her free hand and gestures to a spot above her right eyebrow.
“And he cared for nothing but money. How to get it, how to gamble it away,” she continues, glancing occasionally at Easter for reassurance. “When his heart gave out and Mama went to sell Tornish, we found that a large amount of what he left us had to be used to pay his debts. We took what little remained and went to London … where I met my husband.”
Emotions are fickle things. Like a brisk easterly wind that races along only to change direction in an instant, emotions can switch around and have you see things quite differently. For these last few years, the news of the Laird’s wife and daughter’s fall from grace would have sounded like sweet revenge indeed. And yet now pity pinches at my heart to hear that she grew up with one bully and married another.
And something else pinches at my heart too, a burning, questioning curiousity.
“After your Father died and Tornish was sold, who bought the island?” I interrupt Miss Kitty. “And the families there … were they all well when you were last there?”
Her red-rimmed eyes turn to me. “Oh, but there was no one left on the island. Father had them all removed when he turned the place into a hunting ground. And the Englishman who bought the island was some rich man that had once come to shoot the deer Father bred.”
In that crushing moment I try not to be overwhelmed with sadness thinking of that once bustling island now empty of all the folk we knew. All except dear Mother, who lies quietly at her rest in the churchyard there.
“I’m sorry that I shouted out against you when I saw you all,” mutters Miss Kitty, sinking into herself in her awkwardness. “When my husband made me come into the parlour, I couldn’t bear to think what you would remember of me…”
I see Lachlan glance up at that, remembering the blow she once gave him about the head. Jean – even though he knows nothing of our history – puts a calming hand on my brother’s shoulder, and I am grateful to him for it.
“Course I lost my parents too young to know for sure,” Easter speaks up, “but don’t children generally learn their manners – or lack of ’em – from their parents? And from what Miss Kitty says, her own father was not the best of men.”
“Well said, Easter,” Dr Spicer praises my friend. “It is no excuse, but it is always wise to consider the reason for people’s behaviour.”
Then Mr Nathaniel and his son must come from a very long line of mean-spirited, low-minded ancestors, I think to myself darkly.
“And … and so I am set on leaving my husband,” I hear Miss Kitty say. “I will tell him to give me my steamship fare and enough money that I might set myself up with a little apartment in Chicago.”
“You are sure he will do that?” Jean asks dubiously, glancing up from the stool he sits on, puppies and Lachlan playing at his feet. The paws and snout of one puppy are black from chewing on a half-burnt piece of kindling that has fallen out of the pot-bellied stove.
“He will if he wants his wife to keep her mouth shut and not have the shame of her confirming his involvement in the mine collapse – and of his neglect of her!” Easter says very surely.
“But my dear,” Dr Spicer says to Miss Kitty, “even if he gives you enough money for accommodation, how will you live?”
“Well, I have some jewellery I can sell,” she answers, shakily taking a small bulging bag from the pocket of her skirt. “And I shall have to find myself a little job, I suppose…”
Despite the strange and serious turn this evening has taken, I nearly laugh out loud. What on earth can a pampered, petted creature such as Miss Kitty do exactly? Who would rush to give her any kind of employment?
And then my merriment sinks away when I realise that if Miss Kitty is to leave, then Easter must be set on going too…
“You are bound for Chicago?” I say, a crushing weight squeezing my chest as I begin to miss my friend already.
“No, not at all!” Easter says with a cheerful laugh, pulling a well-worn letter from her apron pocket. “Miss Kitty will make sure Mr Eriksson settles on my wages due, then I’m headed west!”
My heart skips as if excitement is a living thing in my chest.
“West, you say?” I hear Father ask her.
“Yes! I know some fine folk that have settled there. Mrs Clarice Campbell and her husband – they are in a town in Minnesota called…” Easter stops to read the details of the letter she unfolds. “…Hopetown … Hopetoun.”
“Hopetoun, eh? You know, Hopetoun is the name of a wee place in Scotland, near Edinburgh,” says Father, his face brightening, his rusty-red eyebrows raised high. “How are these folks, the Campbells, finding it there? Are they homesteading?”
My heart begins to lift; Father might just have glimpsed an invisible thread. A fine one, for sure, barely there, really… He mistakenly thinks that these Campbells Easter speaks of must be directly from Scotland with such a name, rather than a black American couple that have inherited it as a matter of chance and circumstance down the years, in the same way Jean has his French name. Bu
t at this moment I am not about to explain that to him. For is Minnesota not a place of prairies and far horizons? Dare I hope that Father is thinking that particular state may be a better, happier place for us to settle after what has happened here tonight?
“Here, come let us see if we can find this town,” says Father, ushering Easter away through to the storefront schoolroom where a large map of America is nailed to the wall. I’m about to follow when Miss Kitty asks something of me.
“Excuse me,” she says, rather shyly. “What became of Miss Caroline? Do you know?”
“Why yes,” I reply. “She married Samuel Mitford, the artist who came to paint your father’s portrait. They were in Glasgow for a while but are now in London I believe, with my sister Ishbel.”
“Really? My mother and I spent a summer in Glasgow, two or three years ago, before Father died,” Miss Kitty recounts.
I don’t tell her that I saw them both from a distance once, attending an entertainment in the park arranged by Effie’s mistress Mrs Lennox. But still, now that I recall that time, I realise Miss Kitty might unwittingly hold a clue to what happened to my other sister…
“Amongst the society ladies you met in Glasgow, do you remember a Mrs Lennox?” I ask.
“Mrs Lennox?” murmurs Miss Kitty.
“She did a lot of charity work,” I try to prompt her.
“Yes, yes I do!” she says, suddenly becoming more animated. “Mother and I didn’t know her well, but we took tea with her on occasion at other ladies’ houses.”
My heart lurches. To speak of Mrs Lennox seems to make a long-lost invisible thread of my own come trembling into view, bringing me closer to Effie than I have been in a very long time.
“Ah, I remember now … it was terribly sad,” Miss Kitty chatters on. “Just before we went back to Tornish, we heard that Mrs Lennox had come down with influenza and died after only a few days. One minute she was doing wonderful work for the poor, the next her house is shut up and sold off, just like that.”
And just like that, the invisible thread I have been imagining is broken, snapped, and my heart with it. So Effie never got my letters. They must have lain on the dusty doormat of the empty house till the new owners tossed them aside, not remotely interested in who the Miss Effie MacKerrie on the envelope might have been. But where on earth did she go? To London, to be with Ishbel, Caroline and Samuel? But then, what happened to the letter I sent to them?
“Bridie! Bridie! What do you think, my love?” I suddenly become aware of Father saying.
I look up to see him grinning ear to ear in the doorway through to the storefront.
“I know it sounds like a crazy scheme, but should we do this? Didn’t you always dream of it?”
I try to smile at him while my mind quickly grapples with his meaning, hoping it is what I think it is.
“Shall we go west, my Bridie?”
This small heart of mine, it may never quite mend at the loss of my sisters, especially when it breaks a little every time I think too hard of them. But what Father has just said, it goes a long way to healing me.
I gulp away the pained knot of sadness in my throat and give him a grateful smile.
“Yes, Father,” I tell him. “Let us go west…”
I glance around at our peculiar collection of people (and pups!) in the parlour, and know that in a week or so, as the first steamship of spring comes puffing to Hawk’s Point harbour and leaves again, we will all be gone, beginning our separate new stories.
Perhaps Mr Eriksson’s days in the town are numbered too if he has so dreadfully disgraced himself in the eyes of the mining company. Meanwhile the oily Mr Nathaniel will be rubbing his hands together, eyeing up the position of mine manager himself, perhaps, along with his other grand plans!
Sadly, I guess there is no point expecting Mr Schwarz or Mr Belfonte to believe a lowly miner like Oskar’s father, or believe anything my own father or Lachlan or I were to say about the storekeeper and his guilt – not with our characters so tarnished. But how desperately unfair is it that a man with such a tainted soul as Mr Nathaniel can get away scot-free?
Isn’t it unspeakably unfair that good people might never expect the goodness they are due, or that a sour-hearted, mean-spirited man such as Mr Nathaniel might never face the justice and punishment he deserves?
But that is sadly the way of our world, is it not?
And yet … and yet perhaps there is one small act of vengeance I can take pleasure in.
For Nat’s Store will this moment still be empty, I think. And like everyone’s home in town, the back door will likely remain unlocked.
“I’ll fetch a few more logs to burn,” I mutter, getting up and pretending to examine how the fire in the stove is going.
Father, Dr Spicer, Miss Kitty and Easter are talking again, and my brother is too busy with the pups to pay me any attention as I snatch Lachlan’s collection of crows’ feathers from the small jar on the shelf.
Only Jean watches me wordlessly as I now quickly bend to pick up the charred stick that one of the pups has lost interest in.
“I will help you with the wood,” says Jean, standing up and following me to the door as I open it.
“There’s no need,” I tell him, then quietly ask him a question. “But can you tell me how to call someone ‘evil’ in Chippewa?”
Jean lets his gaze fall to the items I hold then looks me straight in the eye.
“You might call a man an evil spirit, or devil,” he says, summing up the storekeeper very well. “We’d say ‘maji-manidoo’…”
“Thank you,” I tell him as I turn right out of the side door when the wood pile lies to the left.
I’ll have to be quick, and I’ll have to remember to bring in some logs on my return so no one guesses the mischief I have been up to.
And when I am seated in the parlour again in a few minutes’ time, I’ll listen out for the eventual slam of the front door of Nat’s Store, whenever Mr Nathaniel and Charlie and their guests from the mining company amble back.
And I will strain to hear the shouts of alarm that will surely ring out when the storekeeper finds that the ghost of the Indian maiden has paid him a call, leaving a blackened word scrawled on his pillow with a charred stick and a trail of black feathers scattered about his bed as a warning that someone knows the truth of his wicked lies.
For all of the injured miners’ sakes, for Easter’s sake, for all our sakes’, I wish the superstitious Mr Nathaniel much dread, fear and nightmares, and I am happy to deliver them to him…
I stretch my wings wide and glide, feathers skimming the blue morning haze that hovers over a shape-shifting, evergreen sea of treetops.
The snow is fading fast from the mountains and valleys, from the forest upon forest that goes on as far as the eye can see.
It is truly beautiful.
I’m sorry it does not feel like home.
And so I turn in my flight path to face the silver span of the lake and gently flap my wings, speeding up with every beat, chasing the ship that ploughs through the water, with drifting puffs of steam as its flag.
Like a great iron arrow, the ship will point me where I need to go.
To the place where I can finally land…
And then my dreamings of leaving Michigan and Hawk’s Point scatter in an instant as gunshots and screams wake me.
“What’s happening?” I ask in alarm, struggling to sit up from the rough mattress and get my balance in the rocking, rattling wagon.
Directly in front of me, in the open hooped arch of the white canvas roof, I see Dr Spicer – or her back at least – as she struggles to hold the reins steady.
On my hands and knees, I scramble over to her, the puppy Patch jumping beside me as if this is an excellent game.
But where are the others?
And what is this? Are we under attack by ruffian bushwackers, out to steal from us? Or have we stumbled upon a skirmish between Union and Confederate soldiers? Though how can that be when we a
re so very, very far from where the fighting is taking place?
With a last heave I lean across the wooden bench that Dr Spicer sits upon and grapple for the reins, but Father, who has been walking alongside and leading the horses, has already got hold of Sultan’s halter, while the less skittish Queenie whinnies her disapproval of the terrible noise. I cannot see Pip, the piebald pony that Dr Spicer bought from a farmer on the way here, or Lachlan, who was riding Pip the last I saw before I fell asleep. What I can make out are the wooden buildings of a town up ahead, and the figures of a milling, roaring crowd. So at least no attack is aimed directly at us … but what business is happening up ahead? And where exactly are we?
“Is this it? Are we at Hopetoun at last?” I ask, though the doctor has not yet answered my first questions.
Before she can say a word, there is another rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire, though it now sounds to me peculiar, each bang coming far too fast after the other, faster than any shotgun can be reloaded.
Another frightened scream rings out.
Is this how it is to be? We have journeyed all this way, these last three weeks, only to find our destination is not a happy ending but a battleground of some kind?
But then I see Easter to the right of the wagon, arms swinging by her sides as she walks, looking back over her shoulder and shouting to someone unseen, “It’s only firecrackers! Ain’t you heard any before?”
“Whoa!” Father is calling out and brings the two horses to a standstill. “Firecrackers, you think, Easter? Must be some kind of celebration then. Maybe they knew we were coming and wanted to welcome us!”
With Easter’s knowledge and Father’s joking, my frantically thumping heart begins to slow and to steady.
Ah, and now here is Lachlan, coming trotting alongside us on Pip.
“Are you all right?” he asks of Dr Spicer.
Little Bird Lands Page 12
