A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [75]
Branwell’s father had informed him that, in order to better learn the business, and to familiarize himself with the timber merchants in Quebec City, he would be required to make several journeys on board these rafts over the course of the season. When he complained about this to Annabelle, one afternoon on Signal Point, she announced that when their father was safely away on business in Toronto or visiting the remaining forests of the upper Great Lakes, she would be boarding a raft herself, going with him out on the river.
Her brother laughed, of course, at this ridiculous suggestion and told her, as he confessed in his journal, that she had taken leave of her senses. “There is something that needs to be done,” she apparently said to him, “something you will come to understand.” Her last fire would have been collapsing into embers as she said this, and the water that surrounded the island would have been lively with sails, the harbour bristling with masts. She had made her decision. Her fires had been on the wrong side of the island after all. Her brother was weak. He needed direction. He needed looking after.
Annabelle recalled that the night Branwell had first visited Marie’s bed, she herself had been out in the yard until midnight painting the ships across the water in Kingston Harbour by the light of the August moon. Branwell had said that if she added fire to the scene its light would compete with that of the moon to bad effect. She had paid no attention to his advice. How am I to see the schooners at night if not by the light of the moon? she asked. You could slip across the water and set them alight, her brother had teased in response. And all the time he was thinking of Marie, of how to draw nearer to her.
In the five years since Marie’s arrival in their household, whenever Branwell was home from boarding school, Annabelle had watched him try various means to catch and hold the hired girl’s attention. He had taunted her unmercifully, and when she did not respond with enough vehemence to the suggestion, for instance, that her attic was filled with bats, or the kitchen alive with mice, he had taken to making jokes, usually on the subject of her French heritage. Sometime later, he occasionally refused to eat the appetizing and decorative pies and pastries Mackenzie allowed Marie to make, culinary creations for which the girl seemed to have a special gift and ones that she presented with pride at family dinners. Annabelle suspected that Branwell barely knew what he was up to, and half-despised himself when he did this. It hadn’t escaped Annabelle’s notice that when he trailed around after Marie while she was straightening up the house, or criticized her work, or now and then tugged on the one black braid that hung down her back, the bewildered expression on his face in no way matched the authoritarian tone of voice he was attempting to achieve. In the past year or so, though, her brother’s behaviour had ameliorated somewhat in relation to Marie: he had become quiet, almost thoughtful in her presence, and could be seen smiling at the girl in a wistful way across a room. And then, one Saturday afternoon, when she and Marie were busy with sewing, Annabelle had followed the direction of Branwell’s focused gaze and had realized that he was staring, with a considerable amount of intensity, at Marie’s downcast face.
Their mother had been dead for a year. No one—not even the parade of doctors called in to examine her—had been able to say precisely what was wrong with her. It had been very apparent to everyone that the woman was dying—but of what exactly? She became weaker and weaker, her small frame diminishing, her vague expression changing to one of sorrow and resignation. Near the end, she had been brought each day to the parlour where she could see from the window the oak sapling she had planted years before, a sapling that by now had become a flourishing young tree. She could watch its trembling leaves lose green, gain gold, look at its thin arms bending in the autumn