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By Root 1233 0

light his pipe and the stuffed bird under the glass dome. She glanced around the room at the bronze gas jets with their fluted glass shades, at her father’s favorite burgundy-velvet chair, sunken in the middle from years of sitting, and the embroidered white linen antimacassar over the back that she changed for a clean one each morning. She looked at the shiny brown linoleum and the big fringed rug, faded and worn over the years to a muted maroon, and at the pine table covered in red-checkered oilcloth where she baked and prepared their meals. And at the wheelback Windsor chairs they sat on to eat; at the deep pot sink with its gleaming brass taps, the dresser stacked with blue and white dishes, and hanging over her head, the wooden clothes rack with its rope and pulley where every day of her life freshly washed or ironed clothes hung to air in the warmth from the fire. The big sash window looked out onto a paved backyard surrounded by drooping rhododendron and laurel bushes, and come summer she would fix up a window box with a few colorful petunias and busy-lizzies.

Annie closed her eyes and sighed. She had no need to look, it was all indelibly imprinted on her brain, as were the ticking of the mahogany clock and its sweet Westminster chimes, the faint whistle of the kettle perpetually steaming on the hob ready to brew a pot of tea for the visitors who nowadays never came, the hiss of the gas jets, and the blustering roar of the coal fire that was lit every day of the year, regardless of summer’s warmth, to heat the big oven.

In her mind she could hear the click of her own knitting needles and see her father puffing on his eternal pipe as they sat silent evening after silent evening with the heavy velvet curtains drawn and the long hours stretching interminably ahead till bedtime and dawn and another identical day.

She sighed. It had been over a year now that Josh had been gone and hardly a minute went by that she did not think of him. The only communication she had from him was a picture-postcard of a saloon on San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. It had arrived five months ago, carefully concealed in a brown manila envelope and said simply, “I am all right, do not worry about me. I did not do those terrible things. Please believe me. Your loving brother.” She had read it and reread it a thousand times. Josh had been the one who brought life to this house and she had lived vicariously through him. When he had gone she had grieved like a mother for a lost son and she had never, never, believed what they said about him. Though most everyone else did. His brothers were so shamed they rarely came around anymore even to see their dad, and their wives kept his grandchildren firmly away, unwilling to be tainted by Josh’s wickedness. Though they were not afraid to be tainted by Frank Aysgarth’s money. In fact, it had got so that every time she saw Bertie or Ted coming up the path she knew what it was they were after.

“The old man’s gone soft in the head,” Bertie had told her. “It’s best for us to get the business away from him or it’ll go right down the hill. He’ll not make decisions one way or t’other, and how can we build houses if he won’t say yea or nay?”

She knew he was right, but she also knew they were taking over Frank’s finances. Still, there was nothing she could do about it and her dad simply did not care, so she just went on knitting endless little jackets and bonnets in the finest, softest angora wool for the steady procession of babies that filled her brothers’ households. And no one ever so much as mentioned the name Josh Aysgarth out loud.

She jumped up as she heard her father’s footsteps on the stairs, quickly stirring fresh creamy milk into a saucepan of porridge oats and adding a pinch of salt the way he liked it. She put it on the hob to simmer while she sliced up the crusty white loaf she had baked yesterday, setting the jar of strawberry jam and the morning paper next to his plate as she always did, though he had never glanced at another newspaper since those first terrible headlines about his son. But she