Annie stood behind her son Grant and watched as he thumped his sack of medical equipment down on the parlour floor. He looked at the stitchers intent on their work, and then turned to her. “What is this, Mother? My sister Anne seems perfectly composed. Her face, perhaps, is paler than normal, but she seems able to do her woman’s work.”
“She was hysterical, Grant, I told you that. She slashed my portrait to shreds and screamed at me. But now she sits here holding a needle, she who hates sewing unless I force her to it. Something is up, I know it. It is some sort of ruse these silly girls have got up to in my absence.”
Annie moved closer to her daughters and granddaughters. All seemed well at first, but then she noticed Anne trying to fold up the dress she was working on. She pulled the dress open and looked down at the needle stuck into it. “Ah, now I see what is up. It is a ruse. The girl was supposed to be stitching a new collar on this garment. But look where her needle is. Yes, look. Her needle is poking through the bodice of the garment. It is nowhere near the collar.”
Grant moved close to his sister. “I know nothing about woman’s work, Mother. But I see what you mean. What is going on here, Anne?”
“I am trying to seem normal, Grant, in order to avoid one of the remedies you may intend to wreak upon me. Mama seems to have told you that I was hysterical. Perhaps I was. I did slash that ghastly portrait she chose to hang in the bedchamber, but I do not need your interference in what is simply an altercation between her and me.”
Annie yanked the dress from her daughter’s hands and threw it upon the floor. She turned to Grant. “I say, this girl needs your help, and she must have it.”
“Blistering, I believe, is the best remedy for hysteria.” Grant picked up the sack that lay on the floor, set it on a side table, and opened it. “I have here an ointment made from Spanish fly, pepper, and mustard-seed which I shall apply to the skin on her head, the nape of her neck, and between her shoulders.” He turned towards Anne. “But you must come with me up to your bedchamber, sister, where I can apply it freely to your body away from the gaze of the rest of the family. After a few hours, the blisters will be fully raised; the blood will rise to the surface of your skin and lessen the irritation within your head. By next morning, you should be entirely free of hysteria.”
“I will not move from this chair,” Anne replied. “I will not submit to your quackery. Drag me away by force, if you have the nerve to do it, but I warn you, I will resist.”
She grasped the arms of the chair she was sitting in, prepared to do battle it seemed. What Annie observed next was a complete surprise. Her two granddaughters got up from their chairs and moved in close to their aunt. Mary stood up as well and placed herself in front of Anne as if to protect her from her brother. Only Eliza remained on the piano stool, but she was frowning deeply, and Annie could not readily assess her position in this melee.
Grant shrugged and turned away. “I do not wish to be involved further in this matter. I am sorry, dear Mother, but if the silly girl refuses my treatment, I can do nothing.” He picked up his sack of equipment and left the room. In a minute, he had slammed the front door and disappeared.
“What am I to do with you, daughter?” Annie asked, the palms of her hands turned upwards in a motion of despair. “And what am I to do with the rest of you? You side with a crazy woman, you who live free in this house and who pay not a penny for the room and board my husband and I offer you.”
“Free room and board!” Mary screamed. “But it’s not free. It comes at a price. And that price is the counsel I must listen to, day and night! You want me to marry John Macdonell. You do not care that I do not love him. You and Papa cannot stop yapping about prudent marriages! But I will not marry him! No! No!” She pulled a ring from her finger and threw it at Annie. Then she ran from the room, heading for the back porch and the lawn beyond.
And then it was the little granddaughters who turned on her. “Mama wants us to come back to her!” one of them said. “And we’ll go. Come on,” she said, pulling on her sister’s arm. “Let’s get out of this place. Go back home to Niagara with Mama.”
“And how do you think you will get there, missy?”
The other child stuck out her tongue at Annie. “We’ll get help, you’ll see. And Mama will not make us sit here and do this bloody stitching the whole bloody afternoon. No bloody way!” The two girls, hand in hand, ran after their aunt.
“You observe the havoc you have caused, Anne,” Annie said. She could feel her face turning red and her breath growing constricted. Where had those children got that disgusting language? “What am I to do? What will your father say when he gets home?” She turned to Eliza who was still seated on the stool in front of the pianoforte. “May I count on your support?”
“Support, Mama? Yes, you have my support. I do not think I have a choice.” Eliza rose from the stool and picked up the tumbler that was sitting on the pianoforte. Noticing that it was empty, she set it down again with a thud.
Annie turned away and headed up the stairs. In a moment, she was in her bedchamber. She hastened to her mahogany bureau, pressed a button to open a hidden drawer, and took out a small bottle of laudanum and an accompanying spoon. Holding her nose, she downed two mouthfuls. Over then to her four-poster bed where she climbed up and lay down, pulling the quilt over her. Before oblivion set in, she had to plan the conversation she must have with her husband when he arrived home from his office in the Parliament Building. How in tarnation were they to deal with the wretched insubordination that her daughter Anne had fomented?
Minutes passed. The case clock in the corner struck four o’clock. William might now be making his way towards their house. What was she to do? Calmer now, she began to reflect on the reason she had married the man long ago in Boston. Perhaps she had loved him—she could not truly remember much about those long-ago days of courtship—but her main goal had surely been to escape the humiliation and incompetency she had endured in her Aunt Elizabeth’s millinery shop.
But the marital couch had not been strewn with roses. In the twenty years of her marriage before the turn of the new century, she had endured eight major changes of residence, four transatlantic voyages, and the birth of nine children.
And four of those children were now dead. Baby Anne, the first girl after three boys, had lived only a few months. She remembered looking down at the little bald head suckling at her breast and the smile from the tiny creature as she laid it down to rest. Who could have foreseen the small grey face that met her one day as she picked up the babe for her morning feeding? There had been no close friend to whom she could turn, only that husband who had tried to comfort her by telling her that she would soon bear another child and that meantime he would pay for the cost of an itinerant artist to paint her and the dead babe so that she would forever have the memory.
She had hated that painting, but she could not tell William. She had conceived the idea of removing it from her bedchamber and putting it in another room where it would be out of her sight. And when her sixth child was born—another girl—she had thought immediately of calling her Anne Murray, her own name. That this was also, in part at least, the name of the dead baby had not then been a reckoning.
Well, the painting was now in shreds, and she could not mourn its loss. Nor could she in conscience blame the second Anne for her horror at discovering the identity of the infant displayed in it.
Why then had she gone for help to Grant?
It had been a moment’s response to the anger that her daughter often aroused within her. The girl would not bow to the demands of propriety, but perhaps her insubordination had its source in William’s ever-constant refusal to educate his daughters, though he spared not a thought to the money he had spent in educating his sons and paying their debts.
And now even Eliza had shown a degree of rebellion against her. She had not failed to notice her daughter’s growing dependence on spirituous liquors, perhaps a passive resistance to the discord within the household.
Annie could hear crying now from her granddaughters’ bedchamber and sobs from Mary in the next room. She tiptoed to the head of the staircase. Soft voices came from the withdrawing room. Anne and Eliza were talking, perhaps even now plotting some means of retaliation against her.
She heard the case clock strike the quarter hour. She had time to try to right things if she got to it now. She ran back to her bedchamber, looked in the pier glass, and made quick adjustments to her disheveled hair. Mary first, then the little girls, then . . . well, she wouldn’t apologize to Anne, but she could say something kind to Eliza. What would she do without that daughter’s obedience, however reluctant?
And if her attempts at reconciliation were successful, she would tell William nothing about the events of the afternoon.