A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [76]
The tree remained after her death, had gained in height and breadth. If Joseph Woodman had ever detected an oak in his yard, he had made no comment on it. Unnoticed, the tree would be safe from the axe, Annabelle concluded, so Branwell would not have that reason to kill his father—though she didn’t doubt that there would be others. She knew that her brother was shattered by the loss of their mother, and she suspected that he resented the way their father was able to conduct business the day after the funeral and all subsequent days as if nothing on his island had altered at all.
Annabelle remembered that on the night Branwell had first ventured to Marie’s room to give comfort, and perhaps to receive it, their father had rampaged through the house like a confused bear, shouting at Marie, who, with some help from Annabelle, had by now assumed most of the domestic duties therein, Mackenzie having decamped with her French husband. Equating all betrayals, imagined and real, with Ireland, Joseph Woodman believed the pair had gone to that country. “They’ll be drowned, I’m telling you,” he had said to Annabelle. “They’ll be ruined. They’ll be out on edge of Dereen Bog, they’ll be stuck beside Loch Acoose with nothing but a ludicrous turf spade between the two of them and enough moisture to turn their flesh to water.” When he stopped lambasting Ireland, he turned to Marie for whatever had gone wrong, and everything he had lost. Annabelle had shouted at him to stop, but Marie, her face flaming, had finally run up the two flights of stairs to her attic to be rid of the hullabaloo, an Irish word that Annabelle knew she had learned as a result of living in this house.
When Annabelle, confronted by her father’s temper, had been taken by the desire to paint burning ships by moonlight, Branwell had likely seen his way clear. Soon their father, exhausted by ill humour, would have been snoring angrily in his bed. Annabelle would be gone for an hour or more. Branwell had likely made his way toward the staircase.
Looking back now with affection, Annabelle imagined Marie sitting up in bed, hearing Branwell’s footsteps, perhaps seeing his shadow on the wall, and she imagined that Marie would have opened her arms to the boy, even before he stepped into the room. She could not, and did not, imagine what happened next, but remembered the warmth of that bed and the pleasure of intimate talk in the place that was Marie’s alone.
As you float on the lake away from Timber Island, then enter the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, the islands thicken until eventually you are aware of a number of shorelines composed of great rocks and tall trees moving soundlessly past the watercraft on which you stand. Sometimes you feel that you are not moving at all and that it is the islands themselves that are adrift, like icebergs sailing purposefully toward open waters. Branwell, however, trapped on the river by his father, was, at this stage, quite impervious to the beauty that surrounded him. Occasionally he would read to Annabelle a poem or two he had attempted in his journal to vent his frustration:
Oh solitude where are they charms
That Sages say they have seen in they face
Better to live in the midst of alarms
Than to dwell in this terrible place
The wind was from the east this week
It blew hard all the day
The raft was stopped at Batiseau
And there now do we stay
Amused by her brother’s lack of literary prowess, Annabelle told him he was in no danger of becoming a poet, but suggested