A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [106]
The temperature inside the room rose. Annabelle sat perspiring beside the window looking at the lake.
Finally a skiff she recognized, though not at all the one she was waiting for, was seen on the horizon, coming from the open lake and not from the direction of Kingston. It annoyed her that Maurice would arrive at this moment as if he knew she was not herself and was consciously intending to invade her privacy. Perhaps he had been sent to spy on her. Well, he wouldn’t find her, she would remain hidden, and he would go away again. She looked at her forearms, which were almost unrecognizable: reddened by sun, covered with flour dust, and laced with scratches from long periods of time spent in the centre of bushes. She remembered the man’s fingers on her shoulder, the Masonic ring, the grey and black hairs that grew just above the knuckles.
It was the look on Maurice’s face as he approached the house that caused Annabelle to become instantly sane. As if she had snapped shut a book she had been reading—a fantasy about a foreign country, perhaps—and the world of numbered things she had inhabited for the past few days closed with a bang and her previous life opened before her in a violent rush. She forgot all about the latches and doorknobs and piles of discarded lumber. She forgot all about Gilderson and his big warm hand and her own bony shoulders. She forgot all about the baking. She gazed with horror at her unkempt flowerbeds and vegetable garden. Then she looked again at Maurice’s face, and the last vestiges of trance drained out of her. Even from this distance she could see he too had been weeping; there was sorrow in the way he carried his body, even his hands appeared to be sad. Annabelle rose to her feet and called her nephew’s name. She was certain that he had come to deliver some terrible news. Marie, she suddenly knew, was dead.
When after a while they pulled away from the quay Annabelle remembered the small, dark figure she had seen arriving in the sleigh boat all those years ago and the Gilderson daydream fell forever from her mind. She realized, just for a moment, that in recent days while she had been wandering around her empty house and vacant island half-crazed, almost as if she had been acting out the silly Lady of stupid Shallot, Marie, her better, more beautiful self, lay trembling on the edge of death. Annabelle was filled with grief and shame, and fully herself again. She recalled her friend at the orphanage talking about the carved angels walking on the snow. Marie was not the dying type, they had agreed on that distant afternoon.
She would bring her back to the island to be buried. She would have a small white angel carved for her grave. What would any of their lives have been without the quickening that an orphan had caused in the only world that Annabelle had ever known?
Branwell remained at the Ballagh Oisin for another year and a half after his wife’s death. Alone and miserable, he responded only now and then to messages from his sister, who begged him to return immediately to Timber Island. This was something he had decided he would never do for, despite the fact that his dear wife was buried there, he would not allow himself to be a gravestander. His father, he remembered, had often carried on about the senselessness of an Irish poem entitled “I’m Stretched on Your Grave,” and somehow the idea