A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [97]
Her brother glanced at the figures in her hands. One was made in the likeness of Napoleon, the other was a bare-breasted woman. “It’s not likely,” he said, “that Father would have allowed Napoleon to be fixed to the prow of one of his schooners. I remember a woman similar to this, though, and some kind of animal … a griffin, I think.”
“I expect he brought the models home simply because he liked them. But all that’s gone now, anyway,” Annabelle murmured. “Along with everything else.” She returned the models of the figureheads to the shelves. “What do you think would have happened to those young men who were trained to do nothing but carve figureheads?” she asked Branwell. “Once the ships that bore them were scuttled? No one knows the moment when something that seems permanent will simply cease to exist.” She thought of the last day in the sail loft, of the sea of canvas that was abandoned there, seams half-sewn, threaded needles halted in mid-stitch. Her father, she remembered, would not allow the half-completed sails to be removed. “They’ll find out they’re wrong to bring all the ships to full steam,” he had insisted. “And we’ll need the canvas for the return to sail.” But the needles had rusted and eventually the thread had begun to fray, to rot.
“What I remember,” she told Branwell, “was that you had been made to sit between the life-sized mermaids in the coach on the way back while Father and a griffin faced you.” Annabelle smiled, picturing the scene: the patriarch, the small frightened boy, two mermaids, and a griffin enduring the bumpy track and the deteriorating weather of a mid-nineteenth-century November.
“The money Father left to Maurice?” she asked suddenly.
“He still has some of it, apparently … enough, I suppose, to survive.”
“Good. Then he must sell immediately. Move down the lake a bit to the next County. Set himself up in another house and run for office.” How she longed to voice her opinion of her nephew’s wife, but instead she said, “Caroline will be content to be the wife of a politician once she knows there is no other choice. You can count on that. She’ll like the power, the attention. How’s her father’s company faring through all this, by the way?”
Branwell sat down again. “Almost completely out of business,” he said. “Or at least out of the business of transporting barley. The Americans slapped an enormous tariff on his shipments last month. On everyone’s shipments. They want to use their own barley now … and barley,” he lifted his eyes to his sister’s face, “the price of Canadian barley fell to twenty cents a bushel last week.” He raised one hand, then let it drop. “He still builds ships, of course. Gilderson was clever enough to change to steam early on. And steamships will go on forever.”
“I doubt it,” said Annabelle, removing a ledger from the edge of Dereen Bog and watching the map slowly curl back into a cylindrical shape. “Nothing goes on forever.”
As an old man, during his last visit to the hotel, while he and Branwell were sitting on the porch on a summer’s night, Joseph Woodman had put down the paper he was reading and had turned to his son. It’s odd, he had said, but we have no raft on the river tonight. Not one raft. And Branwell, who by then had nothing at all to do with the timber business, had experienced, to his astonishment, a feeling of loss so profound that tears jumped into his eyes, for it was the first time in decades that, when the river was open, that no Timber Island raft was making its way to Quebec. The cargoes of logs, you see, would have been arriving at the quay less and less frequently, the numbers of coureurs du bois thinning out as the men drifted to more dependable forms of employment. Branwell reported in his journal that while he and his father sat on the porch, one of the season’s spectacular full moons was hovering over the dark water and because that water was so uncharacteristically still (“nary a zephyr disturbed