4

Even after all these months, Emma still hesitated every single morning, afraid to open her eyes for fear this new life of hers would turn out to be a dream. Snatched away like it never was real at all. For certain-sure she would wake up on the gritty floor of that squalid little room, curled up tight on a thin straw mattress, shivering with an awful cold that seeped into her very bones. Close beside Emma, her poor mam would be wasting away with disease while both of them longed for a crust of bread to ease their aching hunger.

This morning, the memory of that closet-sized room was so strong Emma tasted the bitter grit of coal dust on her tongue and smelled the stink of open sewers in the streets of Manchester. She shivered in the chill of early morning. Was it true then? Was it out there, waiting for her the very second she opened her eyes? Was her beautiful dream over and the nightmare of real life returned?

Emma half opened one eye, no more than a crack, but the room was solid black around her. She opened both eyes wide and listened in the darkness for the terrifying wheeze of her mother’s breathing. Nothing. Not a sound but the distant rumble of a steam engine.

She allowed herself to hope now, allowed her body to curl into the big, soft mattress. The fear in her belly eased, the quick pounding of her heart slowed to normal. But a stink of coal still hung in the air, and an icy draft from the window made her shiver. She felt around in the dark, found the heavy Hudson’s Bay blanket crumpled beside her on the bed, pulled it over her head and snuggled deep beneath it.

Emma smiled in her dark cocoon because her dream was still alive. She was still here, in this brand new little city, safe in the Douglas family home, where there was always food enough for everyone, even a servant-girl such as herself. Wouldn’t she just love to lie here all morning, so deliciously warm now under her blanket? So content.

So lazy! That annoying little voice piped up inside her head. Lie here all day and see if you don’t lose your job. Mrs. Douglas, kind as she is, would tell you to pack your things and be off. Could be she’d make you leave behind those dresses she altered to fit your tall, scrawny frame. Those few dresses Alice Douglas never did manage to smuggle out before she ran off and got herself married at seventeen.

Lose this job and where will you go then?

Emma stuck her head out from beneath the warm blanket. She would have no choice but to move in with Joe Bentley. Maybe Tall Joe really was her father, like he said, but that didn’t mean she had to move into his house. Emma knew all about fathers. Fathers made you follow a whole string of rules made only to suit their own selves. One mistake and they kicked you out the door and pretended they never did have a daughter at all.

That’s what happened to her mam and would happen to her too if she didn’t watch out. Come spring, and all goes well, she still planned on going off with Tall Joe and his cousin to start that farm in British Columbia he was forever going on about. She told him she would, and that’s a fact. But she never did promise. If that Tall Joe started telling her what to do, she still might change her mind, and that’s for certain-sure. Beneath the blanket she touched her fingertips to her ring, felt the smooth roundness of it. Usually the ring brought comfort. Today it only made her angry.

Emma tossed off the blanket and slid out of bed. The cold floor was a shock to her bare feet. A gust of icy wind blew through the wide open window and she hurried over to close it. She paused there, hands on the sash. High above the bare and twisted twigs of Garry oaks a million stars glittered in an ink-black sky. A fresh blast of frigid air chilled her face and arms.

It was the stink that woke her up, the same thick, choking coal smell that filled every drop of air in Manchester. Not near so bad here, Emma thought. Here it was no more than a hint of coal dust on a clean, crisp breeze. The smell would be blowing this way from the harbour, with all the steamers anchored there. She slammed the window down and locked it tight.

She felt around the dressing table, found her candle and lit it. Its pale glow chased all the shadows into dark corners of her attic bedroom. Emma dressed quickly by its light. So long as she kept her job with Governor and Mrs. Douglas, she would have a room of her own and never go hungry again.

Emma wound her long, dark braids around the top of her head and pinned them in place. She paused to study her pale, narrow face in the tiny hand mirror. She would be fourteen years old next spring and didn’t need some father looking after her, as Tall Joe seemed to think. After Mam died, didn’t Emma stay clear of the workhouse, like she promised? Didn’t she spend three long months cooped up with all those other poor girls in the hold of a steamship with rats and cockroaches for company? If she survived all that, she positively could take care of her own-self in this wild little colony of Vancouver’s Island.

Her candle cast an eerie light on the narrow stairway as Emma made her way down. With every step, her right hip ached and her knee felt as if a nail was being driven into it. Emma almost cried, the pain was that sharp. But worse, she was angry to feel it come back on her after all this time. It was the cold, she knew. Cold always made the pain worse.

Emma limped into the huge kitchen, where she lit a lantern and stoked up the fire in the woodstove. Then she set about making breakfast. By the time Mrs. Douglas appeared, the kitchen was warm, hot porridge bubbled on the woodstove, and the pain had eased up. Emma’s limp was barely noticeable.

By mid-afternoon, with the lunch dishes done and the house cleaned until it sparkled, Emma fetched a broom and hurried outside. She started sweeping the long, narrow verandah, where thousands of crisp brown oak leaves collected in great drifts. That cold dry wind still blew, rushing in from the northeast instead of Victoria’s more usual damp but mild southwest wind. Emma smiled as she tackled the leaves. Even if the cold bit at her nose and ears, it didn’t seep through to her bones. It didn’t make her shiver from the inside out, not like back in England, where she lived most days with her stomach so empty it ached and she hadn’t so much as a pair of shoes to warm her feet.

She might still be thin, but not so half-starved as the day she stepped off that horrible ship. And now she had this lovely warm cloak Mrs. Douglas had given her to replace her thin shawl that never did keep out the wind or rain.

Emma made a neat pile of leaves on the verandah, then swept them down, one step at a time, to the sidewalk. She had no sooner finished than an extra strong gust whipped into the pile and sent a cloud of leaves twisting and swirling back up to the verandah.

“Well an’ wouldn’t you just know it.” Emma stopped working and leaned on the broom. “All that work an’ what’s the use?”

“If you ask me, you’re fighting a losing battle here, my girl,” a voice said from close behind.

Emma froze. She knew that voice. And just like him to come sneaking up, chuckling in his beard, and her talking to herself like she was daft. Emma whirled around. “Well, Tall Joe, an’ just wot’re you doin’ here, then? I gots work to do, don’t you know.”

Tall Joe winced. Emma knew he hated her talking that way, using the language she picked up on the streets of Manchester, reminding him how much she and her mother had suffered while he was off having his great adventure in the new world. She watched his eyes cloud over with hurt, and her anger grew. There was something inside her, something uncontrollable that built up so strong and fast it had to be set loose or she would burst in two. She leaned on the broom and glared up at the man.

Joseph Bentley might want her to call him Father, but the word would never pass her lips, not after more than thirteen years of believing he was dead. Still and all, “Mr. Bentley” sounded much too formal. So she had settled on “Tall Joe” whether he liked it or not. That was the name they called him up in the Cariboo where he found himself a fortune in gold. And that’s the name she would call him.

“You shouldn’t ever come by when I’m workin’, Tall Joe,” she reminded him. “You’ll have me losin’ my job and be stuck with me day and night, like it or not.”

“I wouldn’t mind that, Emma,” he said softly.

“You can say that well enough, but we’d be sick of each other inside of a week.”

“Not if you go to school.”

Emma dropped the broom over a pitifully small pile of leaves and started up the steps, fists clenched tight at her sides. Anger pressed hard against her ribs, bursting to get out. Didn’t they have this argument two times before? The man had a problem with his head, and that’s for certain-sure. Couldn’t remember what a person told him or couldn’t understand it, one of the two. She would never go to school. Not now, not at her great age, and she’d never been to a real school in her whole entire life. Even little Martha Douglas, who attended school every day, could read better than her, and she only a child of eight.

No, Emma did not need any of that. Them sitting at their little desks, laughing at her for being such a great, huge fool. She grabbed the front door handle.

“Emma, please, I’m sorry. I know I promised not to bring it up again, but I still think you’d like to be able to read and write.” He paused, and when she didn’t answer but stood facing the door with her back straight and shoulders tense, he added more gently, “I’m simply trying to be a father to you.”

She turned and glared down at him, eyes blazing. “An’ didn’t I tell you I don’t need takin’ care of?”

“Yes, you did.”

“I can take care of me own-self.”

“Yes, you can.”

“Then why do you keep after me about goin’ to school, I’d like to know?”

Tall Joe studied her face, he rubbed a hand over his thick brown beard and his dark eyes looked up at Emma with a hint of pain in them. “It won’t happen again, I promise. Just let me know if you change your mind, will you?”

Emma shrugged.

“Meanwhile, I have something to show you. Something I know you’ll like.”

She waited, but he said nothing more. “What is it then?”

“Tomorrow is Wednesday, your half day off, correct?”

She nodded.

“I’ll come by for you at one o’clock.”

With that he swung around and strode down the straight sidewalk as fast as he could go without running.

“An’ I never said I’d go with yer!” she called after him.

He laughed, turned his head, and called over his shoulder, “You’re going to love it!”

“Not if I can help it!”

He laughed again.

Emma limped back down the stairs to fetch the broom. And what was so funny, she’d like to know.

At noon the following day, Emma picked up the large, steaming kettle that always sat on the woodstove. As she made tea she thought about Tall Joe. He said he’d fetch her at one o’clock but never bothered to ask if she had plans of her own. If she drank her tea and gobbled her food fast enough, she could be gone before he showed his face. Could be she’d take a stroll up to Beacon Hill or walk through town an’ gape in shop windows at all the expensive goods she never could afford in a lifetime of work.

Mrs. Douglas walked into the kitchen with a wide smile on her broad and friendly face. Eight-year-old Martha and eleven-year-old James, the only two Douglas children at home since Alice eloped last year, spent their days at school, and Governor Douglas was always off doing whatever he did every day over at those Birdcages of his. So there were only the two of them at home come noon.

Emma always felt comfortable with Mrs. Douglas. Her employer was not like those other ladies who flitted about town in their foolish hoop skirts and thought they were better than anyone else, just because they were British and not from the working class. Those ladies in their fancy dresses turned up their noses when Emma walked by, and they didn’t much like Amelia Douglas either, even if she was the governor’s wife. They didn’t care how nice she was; they looked down on her because her mother was Cree and not from good British stock.

There was a quiet sadness about Mrs. Douglas. Most people thought she felt out of place in a British society such as Victoria, but Emma wasn’t so sure. She thought her employer still missed all those babies of hers who died. Mrs. Douglas sometimes talked of them to Emma. Of thirteen babies, only six were still alive and the four older girls had married and left home. Mrs. Douglas loved being a mother and treated Emma almost as another daughter.

“Ah, Emma, I’m glad you’ve made tea. Now if you slice some of that bread we made this morning, I’ll get cheese and cold chicken to eat with it.”

A few minutes later, when they were seated at the kitchen table, Mrs. Douglas said, “You seem in a big hurry today, Emma. Did you make plans for your afternoon off?”

Emma chewed on a mouthful of bread and cheese. She swallowed and took a great gulp of tea. “Nothing special,” she said.

“Emma, a girl your age needs friends. Why not pay a visit to that girl you knew on the Tynemouth? Mary works for Mrs. Steeves now, which isn’t far to walk.”

Well, she never would go near Mrs. Steeves’ house, and that’s for certain-sure. Last time she saw Mrs. Steeves, that woman called her a poor wretch from the brideship, Tynemouth, who was too much of a troublemaker to catch herself a husband. Then she had carried on insulting Mrs. Douglas until Emma couldn’t help but toss back a few words of her own.

“Mary isn’t my friend.” Emma sipped her tea and avoided looking at Mrs. Douglas. “She’s only someone I knew aboard ship.”

And Emma never did need a friend. Start caring about someone and they up and died on you like Elizabeth Buchanan. She shuddered, remembering how all the brideship girls had been locked in the hold of the Tynemouth when it stopped at the Falkland Islands. Emma had watched through the port hole as her only friend’s coffin, small and cheaply made, was carried to shore and disappeared from view.

Mrs. Douglas gazed steadily at Emma for what seemed a very long time but didn’t ask any more questions. That was the best thing about Mrs. Douglas – she never pried. And if Tall Joe showed up later and Emma wasn’t here, she’d never tell Emma it was rude to run off like that.

Even if it was.

And if I run off, I might never know what surprise Tall Joe has for me.

“Or could be I’ll just wait and see if Tall Joe shows up. He said he might come by at one. ‘Course, he might not. He might find something better to do.”

“If he told you he would be here, then he will,” Mrs. Douglas said confidently. “You must not worry so much, Emma. Tall Joe is not going to run off and desert you just because you start to like him.”

Emma shifted uneasily on her chair. She looked past Mrs. Douglas and out the little square of a back window. The sun was shining, but the temperature hung around freezing.

They had not yet finished their meal when someone knocked on the front door.

“That must be Mr. Bentley,” Mrs. Douglas said. “Ask him if he’d like to have a cup of tea with us.”

“No, must be someone else.” Emma got up from the table. “It’s too soon for Tall Joe.”

“He is wise to come early.” Mrs. Douglas, being a woman who never wasted words, said nothing more.

She didn’t need to. Emma understood exactly what the older woman meant. Emma left the warm kitchen and walked down a drafty hall to the front door. She told herself that whoever stood on the other side of that door, would for certain-sure, not be Tall Joe. As for this surprise he went on about, she didn’t trust it. Not at all. Who had ever, in her whole entire life, surprised her with something good?

The textile mill in Manchester surprised her by shutting down just when she needed money most; her mother surprised her by taking sick and dying; Mrs. Barnes surprised her by sending her off to this wild colony, and Elizabeth surprised her by dying before the ship got halfway here. Now Tall Joe had a surprise of his own. She tried to imagine what it could be and decided he must have enrolled her in school in spite of what he had said.

Emma trembled a little as she pulled open the door. Like as not she’d see some messenger come to say Mr. Bentley could not make it today. Something came up. So terribly sorry, but maybe next week if nothing better happens along.

But there he stood, his dark brown hair, the very same shade as her own, neatly combed and a big grin stuck in the middle of his full brown beard. Emma was a tall girl, but she had to put her head back to look up at his face in spite of his standing one whole step down from floor level.

“You’re early!” she accused.

“I didn’t want to miss you,” he said. “I was afraid you might forget and go off to do something else.”

“Don’t think I didn’t consider it.”

“Emma,” Mrs. Douglas came up behind her, “don’t leave poor Mr. Bentley standing on the porch and all the warm air whooshing out the door. Invite him in for tea.”

“That is very kind of you, Mrs. Douglas,” he said, stepping inside. “But I mustn’t stay long, I’m taking Emma out to show her something and we’ll need plenty of time before dark.”

Emma shut the door and followed them to the kitchen. Was the man daft? There was a good long time until dark, and Victoria wasn’t so big you couldn’t walk the length of it and back again in under an hour.