My sisters and I and Mama had been stitching for a whole afternoon in our withdrawing room. Not a word had we spoken for three hours. We were making flannel petticoats for the relief of poor women in the parish, an undertaking against which I had not a word of complaint, but oh! the tedium of it all.
Then, at last, Mama went to the mantel and pushed the magic button that always changed our small world for the better. There was a lull for a few minutes—we continued stitch, stitch, stitching—and then Lucy appeared with cakes and sherry. Eliza folded her petticoat neatly and set it in her basket on the floor near her chair. Mary did the same, and I followed their example, though what I really wished to do with mine was probably best left unrecorded.
At least now we could start talking. “I have good news for you, girls,” Mama said, smiling at us for the first time all afternoon. Oh, oh, I thought . . . Mama’s good news is never good. “Today I received an invitation from the Governor to a December ball at Government House. Dear Mrs. Gore enclosed a note with it. The Woman Small will not be invited, she told me, so we must all attend. The company will be exemplary.”
“As if the company of Mrs. Small would make any difference to anyone,” I said. “She is the one who suffers from the gossip in this place. Perhaps we should worry more about the pernicious influence of our new Surveyor-General. He gets invited to all of the Governor’s soirées even though everyone suspects that he beats his wife. And I know it for a certainty. I talked to Marie at the last subscription ball and she pulled back her glove to show me the bruises on her right hand. Her wrist was covered in horrid purple welts. I daresay the bastard will be present at—”
“Language, language, Anne,” Mama said, her cheeks becoming very red.
“Can we not stick to my point?” I said. “Will the . . . Surveyor-General Wyatt . . . be present at the Governor’s ball? For if he is to be there, I shall stay home.”
“He is a friend of that renegade Thorpe, and I expect he will soon lose his position. I have warned the Governor many times about Wyatt’s insubordination.”
“No doubt you have, Mama. But his friendship with Thorpe is surely not his most important failing. His wife told me—”
“My dear Anne, it is horrible, but what can we do about wife-beating? Only death can separate husband and wife. That is why I have always cautioned you and your sisters to make prudent marriages.”
“Why do you keep harping on prudent marriage, Mama? Who can foretell what kind of a monster a man may become after marriage when the laws of the land allow a man to control all of his wife’s property and leave her subservient with no money of her own?” As I said this, I recognized that I might be heading into deep waters. I had no idea of what Mama brought to her marriage with my father.
I noticed Eliza and Mary exchanging glances. “May I wear my new gown, Mama?” Mary asked.
“Certainly, my dear. And you may borrow my silver-beaded reticule.”
Their diversion worked. Mama, Eliza, and Mary were now in full sail, sweeping through waves of discourse on ball gowns, jewellery, and fans.
I listened, or appeared to listen, but my mind was on my last meeting with Marie Wyatt. She was a pretty girl of seventeen, small and fragile in stature. I had become friendly with her in the last few months since she and her husband arrived in town. I saw her only three days before when Mama and I were looking through rolls of linen at the market. She was beside us, examining the same material. When she stretched out her arms to turn the rolls over, her sleeves slipped up to expose her arms, and I noticed the raw red bands of flesh, almost like bracelets, that stretched from her wrists to her elbows.
“You have hurt yourself, Marie,” I said, thinking perhaps of a scald from a kettle on the hearth.
Her reaction jarred me. She burst into tears. “My husband . . . he . . . tied me with coarse ropes to the bedpost . . .”
I wrapped my arms around her. But I could think of no words to say. No questions to ask.
And the man Wyatt who did this was our Surveyor-General. And now, remembering Mama’s words about his possible suspension by Governor Gore, I could only imagine with horror that the brutality could get worse. He might take out his anger on the defenceless child who was his wife.
“Anne, Anne, pay attention, please.” Mama’s voice brought me back from the nightmare of my thoughts. “You must wear your blue gown. A pity you did not dye it as I suggested. But I have a pretty pink-and-blue paisley shawl that will cover up the worn patch on the back of the neckline.”
“Thank you,” I said in my demurest voice, dreading what must surely come next: a reminder of my perfidy in losing my fan. But she said no more. Mama is not an insensitive woman. Perhaps she recognized that she had exhausted every aspect of that topic.
* * *
It was hot and noisy in the Governor’s ballroom, and the low ceiling served to make the fiddles seem at first overwhelmingly screechy. As I shook hands with the Governor and Mrs. Gore in the receiving line at the entrance to the room, I noticed her fanning herself.
Then I took a second look. It was my fan! “Oh, dear lady,” I said, cooing like a mourning dove, “what a lovely fan. Those are mother-of-pearl blades, are they not? And so many of them! Do I see fourteen?”
“Sixteen, I believe,” the lady said, smiling. By this time, I could hear Mama breathing hard into my right ear, so I passed onward into the ballroom, secretly glad that the accursed thing had found a home where it was appreciated.
Mama, Papa, Eliza, Mary, and I took chairs overlooking the dancers. But Mary and I were not there long. John Macdonell scooped Mary up immediately, and I found myself in the arms of Mr. William Willcocks, who huffed and puffed me through a country dance with three other couples. He was a fat, lascivious old brute and I had to do my best to keep him from squeezing me whenever he joined me in a two-step. Though I loved to dance, at this moment I envied Eliza, alone on her chair beside my parents.
But things got better. I soon found my dance card filled with the names of attractive young soldiers from the garrison. As I grew warm with the exercise, I cast off Mama’s shawl and my hair fell loose from its band. I noticed that the odious St. George pretended not to see me. And I pretended not to notice Mama’s face as Lieutenant Stretton of the 49th Regiment swept me around the floor in a waltz. He was a perfect gentleman, but his hand was around my waist—and that was necessary with this dance—and I know Mama feared that I was letting him make what she would call “untoward advances.” If she could only hear his discourse! He fancied himself an artist and he had just described in boring detail his latest sketch of the garrison blockhouse. “The water in the bay,” he droned on, “so difficult—well-nigh impossible, in fact—to capture the mist over it . . .”
I kept dancing with one partner after another, until finally a footman announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, please join the Governor and Mrs. Gore in the dining-room for supper.” I was ready for food. I had just finished a quadrille with my partner, the young gentleman John Beverley Robinson, and the steps were so intricate, so ever-changing, that I was glad to have an hour to relax.
“May I accompany you, Miss Powell?” Master Robinson asked. He was a handsome lad with pink cheeks, a mere sixteen years of age and newly arrived from Mr. Strachan’s school in Cornwall, but he was already a favourite of our small society here in York.
Being a rather cocky young man, he didn’t wait for an answer, simply offered me his arm. As we joined the crowd moving into the dining-room, we saw Mr. Willcocks at the head of the lineup. He was already patting his stomach in anticipation of what was to come.
Master Robinson turned his head towards me and intoned:
“No wonder Will grows fat, the unwieldy sinner
Makes his whole life but one continual dinner.”
I laughed out loud, causing several heads to turn in my direction. But I didn’t care, it was so funny. I liked this lad. He was quick with a quotation, and though I had no idea where these words came from—and I suspected the name “Will” had been inserted for the occasion—they were a perfect summary of the odious William Willcocks. I once heard from his relation, Miss Russell, that his extensive diary entries were largely a summary of what he ate each day.
“Oh, my God, never oysters,” I said when we got to the buffet table. “I can’t eat them. I’d rather starve!”
“My dear Miss Powell,” the gallant boy said, “I am here to assist you. See those buckets on the floor? I shall crack the oysters open for you and the buckets will receive the shells. Then we can find a table over there by the window where it’s less noisy.”
“No, no, I thank you. The only place I eat oysters is in New York when I visit my Uncle George, Mama’s brother. They’re fresh from the sea in New York. Have you thought about how long it’s taken to bring these oysters here from the Atlantic Ocean?”
“And have you thought about the insult you heap upon me in your suggestion that the food I serve here is not fresh?”
It was Mrs. Gore’s voice. I turned around to see her behind me, her eyes narrowed in anger. She continued, “Surely you must know that Mr. Jordan, owner of that fashionable hotel you and your parents frequent for subscription balls, keeps the oysters in his cellars in beds of damp sea sand. He waters the beds twice a week to keep the creatures alive. Cook purchased them this very afternoon and brought them here in time for serving.”
She gave me this information, all the while waving her closed fan at me, forcing me to remember the language thus imparted: I do not like you. How I wished at that moment to tell her exactly where her fine fan had come from, but I dropped a curtsey and apologized, though my stomach churned.
Master Robinson intervened, grabbed up an oyster knife, cracked several of the creatures open for the lady, put them on a plate, and presented them to her with a flourish. “And now, ma’am,” he said, “please allow me to find you a table where you can enjoy these delicacies.”
He departed on this errand, leaving me at the buffet table to inhale the stink of the oysters and to reflect upon the power of patronage in this town.
As I turned away, I met Mama and Papa. “Insolent girl,” Papa said by way of greeting. “You know I have just been promoted to the Executive Council, a great favour bestowed upon me by the Governor, and yet you take it upon yourself to insult the lady.”
“I was, sir, merely commenting on my dislike of the oysters. I had no intention of insulting the lady. Indeed, I had no idea at all that she would be eavesdropping on a private conversation.”
And then Lieutenant Stretton, standing nearby, came to my rescue. “Oysters are the scavengers of the deep,” he told Papa. “They open their broad lips and lick up the slime at the bottom of the sea. We must not blame Miss Powell for the delicacy of her taste. Please permit me to serve her with some mashed potatoes and a roll or two, and we shall find our way to a table.”
In a flash, he handed me a plate of potatoes, a roll, and a pat of butter in the shape of a pineapple, and taking my elbow, steered me away from my parents.
I was touched by the lieutenant’s kindness, and I felt compelled to sit with him for the next hour while he regaled me with more details of his garrison blockhouse watercolour painting. “So difficult to catch the sunset over the lake behind it . . .” His voice dragged on. My mashed potatoes grew cold on my plate, and as I finished my second glass of port wine and felt myself grow stupid and thick-headed, I made a resolution.
I would endure the tongue-lashing which Mama and Papa would give me that night when we arrived home. Then, as soon as escape was possible, I’d pack my portmanteau and depart for a visit to my brother John in Niagara. There, at least, I could be free of the pettiness of this wretched town for several weeks.