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By Root 909 0

Annabelle pretended to ignore though she knew the vocabulary well. The enormous dram, or unit of the raft, sixty feet wide and almost two hundred and fifty feet long, had just been completed and the rivermen were now poling sticks of oak timber (along with some pine to ensure buoyancy) into the first crib, which had been fastened by withes and toggles to its neighbour. Annabelle’s favourite part of the raft, the temporary frame bunkhouse where the men slept and ate, would not be constructed until later when all of the cribs were filled and the floor of the raft was secure. Then, as a final touch, a mast with a sail attached to it and a recently felled small pine would be erected in the very centre of the dram. No one had ever properly explained the presence of the pine to Annabelle, but she secretly believed that it must be an offering of sorts to the wounded spirit of the plundered forests.

The Frenchmen—for that matter, the Englishmen—who worked for her father paid no attention to Annabelle, having intuited early on that one glance in her direction might result in an abrupt termination of their employment. She wasn’t much to look at anyway, with her flat chest, her lameness, her long face, and her severe dark clothing. Annabelle believed that the French thought of nothing but sex, a distasteful subject that never entered her own mind unless she was in earshot of those men, that language.

Her father’s whiskers had always looked to Annabelle like a feathered headdress (worn upside down, as if it were a bib) and this headdress had always been white. Moreover, he had always resembled certain powerful Old Testament leaders: the temperamental Isaacs and Noahs and Abrahams—even Jehovah himself—an angry potentate whose tantrums were kept only temporarily beneath the surface of his character as the result of an enormous act of self-control. As far as she knew, her father smiled only on the occasion of a launching of a ship and even then he appeared to be showing his crooked and oddly pointed teeth rather than displaying any real signs of good humour. He was much admired for his firmness and for the latent ferocity that everyone sensed in him. And, as owner of Timber Island and everything on it, he was considered to be honest and fair by all the men whose lives he controlled. Women were of no consequence to him—beyond their ability to cook food and procreate—and so he mostly ignored all wives and female children, his own wife included when she was alive. But Annabelle was another matter. She was not afraid of him. And he knew it.

“What is it?” he asked, not looking up from his papers, recognizing his daughter’s footsteps as she entered his office. The top of his head shone in the low light. The grate was without fuel. “I haven’t much time,” he went on, without giving his daughter a chance to speak, “that vile Gilderson over on the mainland has now built a steamship of all things! The ugliest species of watercraft ever to diversify a marine landscape, I’ll wager! He has had the infernal nerve to invite me to the launching Saturday next, even asked if I’d like to send a small flotilla of sloops to attend the monstrosity’s progress out of the harbour. I certainly will not provide anything of the sort and am writing him at this moment to say just that. The fool!”

Despite the fact, or perhaps because of the fact, that he was ten years his junior, Oran Gilderson was Joseph Woodman’s chief competitor in the local shipbuilding trade. They were locked together by envy and a not inconsiderable amount of loathing and, as a result, invariably issued handwritten invitations to each other on the occasion of the launching of a ship, savouring the opportunity for potential humiliations of one kind or another.

Annabelle untied her bonnet, removed it from her head, and placed it on the oak desk directly in front of her. She shifted her weight onto her good leg. There was only one chair in the office and her father was occupying it. “Branwell isn’t happy,” she blurted. “Your son. He wants to paint walls, to do something that is all his own.”