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By Root 900 0

angle and related to which they had considered the most improbable questions. Why, for instance, would he not eat broccoli, or raw tomatoes, or any of the cook’s delightful relishes? What made him want the crusts cut off his bread? He could talk at length when enthusing about his iceboats and then refuse to reveal anything about the inner torment that the girls were certain resided in his soul. Why would he not confess his adoration for Marie when it was clear to both the object of that adoration and to his sister that that adoration existed? Would he never want to be a soldier and fight wolves and Americans and other enemies? How was it that he could think of nothing? (When they asked him what he was thinking about, he always said, “Nothing.”) If Marie were here now, the question Annabelle would ask to open the conversation would have been something like, “Why did I have to make it clear to him, and to my father, that he wants to paint hallways?” And then she would have added, “Doesn’t he know how fortunate he is to be a boy who can, with or without parent approval, do what he wants with his life, who can become itinerant, who can get away?” In the end, though, she would have softened. Poor Branwell, she might have said, trapped in a world where the expectation was that, regardless of the detours of his youth, the road he walked would eventually lead him back to the grinding routine of the family business.

Annabelle took the pencil and the small sketchbook out of the pocket of her skirt, stared for a while at one blank page, and began to draw the outline of a raft from memory. She had considerable trouble with the perspective. Having never before attempted to render something so thoroughly horizontal, she was unable to make the structure look as if it were lying flat in the water. Frustrated by this, she concluded that this was not to be a day during which the making of drawings was possible, so she returned the sketchbook and the pencil to her pocket, rose to her feet, and began to walk back to the house.

Passing the quay, she noticed that several of the men were on their hands and knees testing the withes that held the timbers in place. The raft was nearing completion. Soon it would begin its journey down the river, past a scattering of villages and a quantity of islands, moving through the shallows and rapids out into the world.

Annabelle could recall quite vividly the March day in her twelfth year when Marie had been brought across the ice, how she had been transported and then delivered like a package during the least negotiable month when, because of rising temperatures, it was necessary for islanders to make use of a contraption—half canoe, half sleigh—in order to make the journey back and forth to the mainland. This vehicle either slid with great difficulty (pushed by its passengers) over frozen bumps and cracks, or it floated in constant slush and broken ice through frigid and partly thawed waters. The girl, who from a distance appeared to be paralyzed either by fear or by frost, sat upright in the bow, not moving when the other passengers climbed out onto the ice to push, as they made their slow progress from Kingston Harbour to the island.

Annabelle was not a pretty child, and there were moments when, despite her almost complete lack of vanity, she felt a twinge of resentment at the injustice of this arbitrary fact of nature. That March morning, looking through the watery glass of one of the parlour windows toward the partly frozen lake, however, she’d had the odd, inexplicable notion that the small, distant girl in the boat was her other, her more beautiful self being conveyed to her, and that when this girl eventually stepped into her house their two bodies would overlap and become three-dimensional like the twinned images on the photo cards she slipped into the stereoscope on Sunday afternoons. She was mad with excitement, convinced that the girl’s imminent arrival would be more of a longed-for reunion than a first encounter. She stood by the window, transfixed, as the skipper heaved the brown mail