A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [70]
“Far from clean,” echoed Branwell.
“No one asked for your opinion,” said the woman testily. “In fact, no one asked for you—either of you—to be in here at all. Both of you—back into the house!”
The siblings reluctantly withdrew, but not before Annabelle and the girl had exchanged a brief complicitous look.
How forbidden Marie was! Annabelle’s father had made it clear to her and to her brother that they were not to consort with this girl who was an orphan who would therefore have come from God knows where, the progeny, most likely, of a drunken lout and a shameless hussy. Furthermore, she was there to work, not to lollygag about with the likes of them. Mackenzie, the cook, who up until that time had tolerated the children’s presence in the kitchen only occasionally, now barred them completely from the premises on the grounds that they were too much of a distraction. Banishments and admonishments did nothing to dispel the air of romance and mystery that Annabelle believed was attached to the girl, and, as the days went by, she thought about little else. Often she found herself standing behind the open kitchen door, watching Marie through the space between the hinges while the girl went about her various tasks and was, more or less, bossed and pushed around by Mackenzie, who eventually softened somewhat under the influence of Marie’s stubborn pride and unquestionable beauty.
One day, while Annabelle stood in the V-shaped shadow behind the door, Marie, who was scrubbing the floor, began to crawl toward the spot with brush and suds and pail until Annabelle could see quite clearly her small, soapy knuckles and thin, damp wrists. She hunkered down and reached into her apron pocket for a pencil and one of the small pieces of butcher paper she always kept with her in case she might want to make a sketch. Squinting in the gloom, she wrote a message that told the girl to come to her room late at night for a secret that would be told.
Annabelle wondered if the girl could read, doubted, in fact, that she could, but had made the decision, nonetheless, to make this attempt to communicate with her.
At first the girl ignored the scrap of pinkish-brown paper as if its sudden appearance in her line of vision had caused her no curiosity whatsoever. Then, quite abruptly, she snatched the paper from the floor and crammed it into the pocket of her pinafore. Mackenzie said something about the fire, the oven, and then something else about the length of time it was taking Marie to finish the floor. The girl did not look up from the brush in her hands, glanced neither toward the door nor toward the cook stove, and even when Mackenzie left the room, she did not remove the paper from her pocket. Just as I thought, she can’t read, Annabelle concluded and having thus concluded did not bother to invent a secret.
Still, believing the girl to be illiterate had no diminishing effect upon her fascination, and the following day Annabelle was back at her post. She had the odd sense that her already small world had in fact shrunk, and now included only the dimensions of this triangle of shadow and the limited view that could be seen from it. A spider shared this space with her, but it didn’t disturb her at all. Branwell might have screamed and run away, but not her. She wasn’t afraid of spiders, and even had she been, there was theatre on the other side of the door crack and she was able to watch it all day long for months and months if she chose to do so. She was not required, as Branwell was, to participate in any formal kind of education because she was a girl so, even when her brother returned to school, she would be able to remain in close proximity to Marie. When she told Branwell about her luck he repeated his father’s words about the drunken lout and the shameless hussy and predicted that Annabelle would catch cooties from the girl if she didn’t keep her distance.
Her mother, though as listless and seemingly preoccupied as always,