Galore - Michael Crummey [44]
—You seem awfully pleased with yourself, Selina said one afternoon.
—I’m happy to be going home.
Selina shook her head. They stopped near the stern of the vessel and stared out at the ship’s wake, the empty expanse of ocean between them and England. —Your father, Selina said, won’t ever allow it.
—Allow what? Lizzie asked. She glanced back at Virtue standing six feet behind them, her gaze carefully averted. And in that moment it was obvious to Lizzie her secret was no secret now, if it had ever been one.
Her mother reached up to take the porcelain brooch from Lizzie’s bonnet. —Mark my words, Selina told her. She weighed the brooch in her hand a moment. —There’s your Callum Devine, she said, and tossed it over the rail. —You say your goodbyes now or your heart won’t ever be your own.
Lizzie glanced back at the servant a second time but Virtue had turned away.
Virtue Clouter was the only servant in King-me’s employ who lived in Selina’s House, sleeping in a new room built off the kitchen with its own door facing the outbuildings so she could collect the morning’s eggs and carry in firewood. She was inconspicuously competent in her work. She was modestly pretty and her prettiness went unnoticed by all but the most familiar. Harry and George both announced their childish intentions to marry Virtue, and Selina came to depend on her in all household matters. But there’d been no talk of hiring a housekeeper before Lizzie locked herself away in her room in Poole and the timing made Virtue suspect.
In the first weeks after their return Virtue sometimes followed Lizzie when she left the house on her wanders, keeping a discreet distance behind just as she’d tracked behind Selina aboard the vessel. It was a clumsy attempt at spying but Lizzie refused to give her the satisfaction of a confrontation, leading her a chase over half the shore, across rattling brooks that soaked their feet, through the thickest tuckamore on the hills.
Eventually Virtue relented and Lizzie was left to her own devices, though the simple fact was she had nothing to hide. No clandestine meetings in the spruce above the Gaze, no secret trysts on a bed of moss out by Nigger Ralph’s Pond. Lizzie was forced to make do with the barest glimpses of Callum sculling in off the fishing grounds with Daniel Woundy or carting a sack of flour from King-me’s store down to the harbor. It was her father’s meddling that kept Callum at a distance, she was certain, the threat of losing credit with Spurriers which would drive him off the shore altogether. He offered his modest bow if they crossed paths but not so much as a word passed between them.
Months went by in this fashion and years on top of those. Her only reassurance came in rare encounters with Father Phelan, who offered the details of Callum’s recent confessions. —Still lusting after a young girl he can’t have, the priest told her. —Tormented, he is. The places he imagines kissing the child, it would make the Devil blush.
—But not yourself, Father.
—The Lord gives me strength, he said.
She spent her life in a state of unrelieved anticipation that made her flighty and unreliable and increasingly reclusive. Her family treated her as a kind of retarded child they expected would carry on in the same perpetual half-life. She roamed as she wished and reported to no one and grew wild in her habits, spending days at a time alone with the plague of yellow nippers and blackflies in the woods, snaring rabbits in the backcountry or fishing for trout at Nigger Ralph’s Pond.
When King-me’s eldest boy turned eighteen, the family planned a return to England to find him a wife. King-me was afraid Lizzie’s strangeness would ruin Harry’s chances and was