A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [95]
“Maps of the bogs,” Annabelle explained, not waiting for the question. She picked up the duster, bent over Gortatlea Bog, and brushed the dust from the beautiful colours.
“The villainous Irish bogs.”
“The very ones.”
Branwell began to weave around the topography in the direction of his sister. “He kept these maps.” He studied each map for several minutes and then, as if exhausted by the information they imparted, he collapsed in Cummings’s chair, which Annabelle had brought from the outer office after her father’s death. Remembering her own visits to her father’s inner sanctum, the coldness of the surroundings and the coldness of the welcome, she wanted any visitors who came her way to at least be able to sit down. As an older woman, and, though she wouldn’t have admitted this, a lonely one, she wasn’t averse to a bit of conversation.
She asked her brother to stay for an evening meal, and offered him a room for the night. Then she began to speak about the maps. “Look at this,” she said, pointing again to the map of Gortatlea Bog. “Or this.” Her toe touched the centre of Glorah. “He loved all of this. It’s obvious. Why did he want to destroy something he thought so beautiful?”
“People do what they have to,” her brother said quietly, “and sometimes things are destroyed in the process.” He began to pull on his right ear. “Poor Father,” he said. “He likely didn’t even know that he loved looking at landscape, figured it was only useful if you could exploit it in some way or another.”
Annabelle wondered if in fact persistence was part of the explanation she was looking for. Was it the knowledge of something you have loved continuing to exist after you have left it behind that had caused such fury in her father? Branwell was still pulling on his ear and looking out the window. Annabelle could see that though the revelation of the maps had moved him, he was nevertheless preoccupied by something else. “What is it?” she asked finally. “What’s on your mind?”
“Worry.”
Annabelle waited. Then, when nothing further came from her brother’s lips, she asked him what it was that concerned him. “Sand,” he replied. “Maurice’s foreman has told me that the soil is changing. He says it’s turning into sand.”
“But that is nonsense,” said Annabelle. “Soil doesn’t just spontaneously turn into sand.”
“Yet it seems to be so. Caroline is in a state because her flowerbeds are beginning to be filled with sand and her lawns are not growing properly. There is a different kind of tough grass coming up and it is sparse, with a lot of sand showing through.” He sighed and looked at his hands, which were clenched in his lap. “And that’s nothing compared to the sand around the hotel,” he said. “There are dunes gathering beside the porch.”
Annabelle tried to call up this image of the porch, but could picture only white rocking chairs, swept steps, tidy lawns.
“Well,” she said, “perhaps that’s only natural that this should happen. Tremble Point is situated on the sandy end of the County, after all. Maybe by next year things will have returned to —”
“You have no idea,” Branwell interrupted, “what this is doing to Marie. There is sand some mornings in the corners of the guest rooms. Sometimes it gets into the bread she bakes or, worse, into her sauces. Almost always it is sprinkled on the top of her lemon meringue pies. It is bothering the guests. Some are leaving early. And Marie … it’s as if she is carrying the weight of this somewhere near her heart. She doesn’t really complain, but I can see it in her face, I can see it in her eyes.”
“Marie does not complain? About something this serious?” Annabelle recalled the fearless, outspoken little girl from orphanage, the strong young woman Marie had become. “Something is terribly wrong, then, and she is remaining silent so as not to make things worse.”
Branwell nodded in sad agreement.
On her