A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [96]
“Is there a chance that the foreman is mistaken?” she asked.
Branwell shook his head. “He says it has something to do with the rotation of crops.”
“But Maurice—and everyone else for that matter—has been growing nothing but barley. No one is rotating crops.”
“That’s it exactly. They haven’t been rotating crops. None of the barley farmers along our stretch of shore have been rotating crops and now the soil is depleted. They were making pots of money,” he said bitterly. “Why would they want to change?” Branwell lifted his arms into the air in a gesture of desperation. “All this sand,” he whispered, “all this sand because of people’s obsession with money.”
Annabelle stood in the centre of the room, bogs all around her. For the first time she thought about the tidy lush landscapes of her mother’s past, and for the first time she found herself hoping that these landscapes were still there just as her mother had described them to Branwell, each field in place, crops rotated or left fallow every year or so. The oak her mother talked about came into her mind and she glanced out the window searching for the tree in her own yard, as if for reassurance.
She turned to the Branwell. “You must tell Maurice to sell immediately,” she said.
“He’s been thinking of politics,” Branwell ventured, without much enthusiasm in his voice. “He’s joined the Tory party, so I suppose that’s a start.” He drummed his fingers on his father’s desk. “How can I convince him to sell? I wanted him to rotate the crops two years ago. I wanted him to sell out last year. But it’s clear that nothing I say will move him.”
“He’ll listen to Marie. He’ll listen to his mother.”
Branwell looked embarrassed. His hand moved again toward his ear. “Marie tried to speak to him,” he said, “but Caroline would hardly let her raise the subject. She became quite hysterical” He paused. “It’s only Caroline that he listens to now.”
“Why doesn’t Maurice just put his foot down?” Annabelle could feel an angry flush travel up her neck and flood her face. Weakness, she thought, was the answer to that question. Weakness combined with ambition and greed. Spinelessness and, of course, the chains of romance.
Branwell shrugged and shook his head. He rose from the chair and began to pace up and down the room. “The hotel is Marie’s life. The only life we know, the only life we have. But my son, our son, is so wrapped up in his marriage, and so controlled by his father-in-law, he has given no thought at all to what is happening to his mother. She feels that she’s lost him. She suspects that we have lost the hotel. It’s as if she is being depleted along with the soil.”
“Depleted?” she said. “Marie?” Annabelle didn’t want to imagine this.
Branwell said nothing.
“Do you remember,” Annabelle asked eventually, “do you remember the time father took you with him to pick up the figureheads?”
“I remember that it was a long, long journey, and that we travelled by coach.” Branwell paused, shook his head. “And I remember the figureheads. But that’s about all.”
“He wanted you to see the workshops,” said Annabelle. “You were seven years old. It was the only time that he ever, ever considered doing something that might be of interest to a child. And it is wonderful, when you think about it, that there were men in Quebec who devoted their lives almost entirely to the carving