In through the back door, Esmeralda following on tiptoe, as if afraid of disturbing something fragile. Crossing Hetty’s threshold she sheds wisdom and sophistication as she would a cloak. Now she’s a child, exploring. Hetty stands aside and watches fascinated as this new Esmeralda pores through her house, touching things and lifting them up to look underneath, as if she half expects to find a story or explanation printed there, a price tag. But then Hetty would probably have acted similarly aboard the Esmeralda if her introduction to the schooner and its crew had been under more social circumstances. Esmeralda lurches. I’m still finding my land-legs,” she says and giggles. Hetty, shackled by alarm, by how off-kilter Esmeralda seems — what if she breaks something? — feels suddenly years older.
Open doors may be welcoming, but there’s none so intriguing as one that is closed. Now that she’s finished inspecting the kitchen and front parlour, Esmeralda heads instinctively for Peter’s study.
“Ah-ha. The lion’s lair.” She turns and grins wickedly as the door swings open with an obligingly theatrical creak. Though it’s a room Hetty herself rarely steps foot in, she follows Esmeralda inside. How does Peter’s world look through the sea-girl’s eyes?
“My mother has a pair of these,” Esmeralda says, moving towards the mantel. Her voice sounds soft and far away. She picks up the leather case and removes a pair of field glasses.
“Is she a bird watcher?” Hetty has no idea to whom the glasses once belonged — Peter’s father or his mother — or whether they were employed for bird watching or for observing ships in the bay. The Douglases could have spied on their neighbours regularly for all she knows.
“She uses them to track the wind.” Esmeralda seats herself in Peter’s leather wing chair, the glasses at arm’s length. She stares at them intently, as if this might somehow make her mother materialize in front of her.
“And why would she want to track the wind?”
“It’s part of her job.”
“Tracking the wind?
“Actually, selling it. She’s a wind seller. You know, a witch. she sells wind to sea captains — which is how she met my father, of course.” Esmeralda raises one dark and handsome eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of wind sellers?”
“Well, of course I have. ‘I’ll give thee a wind,’ the three witches in Macbeth.”
“Right, wind sellers.”
“But they’re not exactly selling the wind. They’re more controlling it. Using it for revenge.”
“My mother is descended from a long line of Scottish witches who worked mostly for pleasure in an ancient art, calling up favourable winds for sailors’ routes. Or unfavourable, as whimsy took them. They sold only enough to pay the bills. Which set them apart from other witches who would use their powers to accumulate great wealth. And that of course made them more feared — they couldn’t be bought.”
Hetty pauses and peers at her new friend. Where did she come from, this sailor-girl with her bookish vocabulary, her apparent education? “Esmeralda, they’re just lines from a play.”
“A figment of someone’s imagination?”
“That’s right.”
“So sirens and harpies, sea monsters and sprites, they don’t exist?”
“Of course not.” Hetty searches Esmeralda’s face, looking for signs of lunacy. Her patients sometimes babbled nonsense, those whose minds had been bent in sickness or accident. She conjures a mental picture of Esmeralda’s flowing green dress, her father’s elaborately dated jacket.
“Seamen have been buying magic hawsers from wind sellers for as long as anyone can remember. You think this is all just superstition?”
“We live in modern times. How many ships today rely solely on the wind?”
“A steam engine is more powerful than the wind?”
“That’s hardly the point.”
“What is the point then?”
Hetty pushes the ball of her thumb against the point of the heart-shaped ring. The empty claws leave matching deep red imprints. “You don’t really expect anyone to believe in witches and wind sellers today, do you?”
“No.” Esmeralda smiles, and the tension between them dissipates. “Of course I don’t.”
“So your mother isn’t really a witch?”
“My mother is a school teacher on the Isle of Skye.”
“And do you live with her when you’re not sailing around the world?”
“My mother’s temperament changes with the wind.” Esmeralda winks. “Or perhaps it’s the other way around. She isn’t the easiest person to live with.”
“Nor is mine,” Hetty agrees, anxious to keep the conversation from straying back to the weird and the occult. “Mothers like to interfere, always thinking they know best. They’d arrange our lives for us indefinitely if we let them.”
“Like your mother arranged your marriage.”
Hetty’s smile stretches taut across her face. “What makes you say that?”
“Why else would you marry Mr. Peter Douglas of Kenomee village? Anyone can see you’re not in love with him.”
Anyone? She reaches to take the field glasses from Esmeralda and put them back before they get broken. “You’re imagining things.”
“I don’t think I am.” Esmeralda’s gaze is so level Hetty can feel fingers of red creeping about her neck and into her face. She fusses with the mantel’s other ornaments, rearranging their order, checking for dust Laura might have missed.
“Since when has love been a prerequisite for marriage?”
“So I’m right?”
“You’re direct, I’ll say that much.”
“Sorry. It must be the company I keep.” Again the disarming smile. “It’s a fascinating story, though.”
“As is yours.”
Esmeralda scribbles a headline in the air. “City girl thrown out of nursing, banished to a village miles from anywhere, married off to an older man.”
Stated so baldly, how grim it sounds. “Peter is scarcely thirty-five.”
“Which makes him at least ten years older than you.” If only pinning an age on Esmeralda was so easy. One minute she’s green, the next she has the wisdom of Adam. Or would that be Eve?
“Age isn’t so important.”
“Of course it isn’t. So long as you’re happy lying to your self.”
I wasn’t the one just prattling on about witches and wind sellers, Hetty thinks. But whenever she suspects Esmeralda might be goading her, the girl turns on her smile. Her shadows vanish instantly.
“Your mother must have been pleased. Her little embarrassment safely out of the way of gossiping friends and acquaintances.”
“I thought we were talking about your mother.”
“Talking about yours is so much more interesting.”
“I find that hard to believe.” Hetty folds her arms and glances out the window.
“Why is that? I covet your life, you covet mine. Not that either of us would truly change places if the choice were presented to us. But it’s fun to dream, isn’t it?”
“It just feels as if you’re making fun of me.” Pulling at the loose threads. Unravelling the stitches.
“I’m not. I promise. It’s just that, well, when you spend all your time with men, you forget that girls, women, speak differently. Behave differently. Walk in my shoes for a while. My wardrobe is from another era and I live on a wooden sailing ship with a bunch of misfits — all lovely people, in their own way, but, let’s be honest, they’d be barred from polite company in most countries. Of course the rules and obligations of your life are fascinating to me.” Esmeralda looks up at Hetty. “I find you fascinating. I can’t help myself. Curious as a cat. It’s just my nature. Do you forgive me?” Hetty doesn’t think she’s ever met a woman who can use her beauty to such advantage. Especially on another woman.
“Of course.” This time when Esmeralda smiles Hetty has to look away. She pulls at the neck of her dress, feeling warm.
“So tell me” — mischief creeping back into her voice — “what’s in it for Mr. Peter Douglas of Kenomee village?”
“Sorry?”
“It isn’t as if he has a harelip or a hunchback, is it? Quite handsome really, if you’re willing to overlook the cold fish qualities. And so many women are, aren’t they?” Hetty can feel two bright discs of colour warming her cheeks and the disconcerting sense that Esmeralda has taken a walk through her head. “I mean, just look at this fine house and all your lovely clothes.” She gestures at the room — female gestures with her man-hands. “All the mothers of marriageable daughters for miles around must have had Peter in their sights.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“What’s the rest of the story?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” But she does. Not that it had bothered her so much in the beginning. Hetty wasn’t the first bride to be offered up with a dowry; her marriage wasn’t the first ceremony to be part of a financial arrangement. But at least she wasn’t marrying a total stranger. Peter Douglas was Aunt Rachel’s husband’s sister’s boy. A distant relative in, as it turned out, every sense of the word. They’d met at weddings and funerals over the years, he tall and gangly while she was barely in school. Peter had often been left in charge of the younger children at such events and had devised games and tasks to keep them busy. She remembered him as inventive and fun. Gradually his chest and arms had filled out, the planes of his face had shifted and thickened. Suddenly he was a man while she was still a child. He stood with the adults.
Once war broke out his likeness graced the mantel in a silver frame, the entire family inordinately proud of his uniform, his officer’s stripes. So proud that when the V.O.N. committee began wagging their fingers in her mother’s front parlour and Aunt Rachel suggested Peter Douglas as a husband, Hetty’s mother leapt at the chance. The picture came down from the mantel. “look how handsome he is in his officer’s uniform.” If Vivian had understood the irony in her approach she might have rethought her tactics.
But Hetty, as anxious as her mother to ease the situation, took the bait. Peter seemed the perfect road out of Halifax and the disgrace she’d suddenly found herself in. His mill was in a little financial trouble, nothing her father’s bank couldn’t see to, and so everyone would benefit. The wedding plans were drawn up and executed inside a month, their official line that Hetty had given up her job for marriage. She even began to believe it herself. And if Peter seemed a little stand-offish, she was willing to overlook this; after all the man had spent four years on the front lines, witness and perpetrator of all manner of horrors. Familiar with the vagaries and aberrations of shell shock, she knew she could warm him up.
And in those first weeks her enthusiasm, her willingness to please, to flirt, to pour her passion for nursing into her marriage,proved enough for the two of them. The coolness of her reception in the village didn’t upset her. After all, it was simply proof she’d made the right choice. Wasn’t it? Still smarting from her expulsion from nursing and preoccupied with how much her mother really knew, Hetty never thought to question how, in a world filled with girls and widows and not enough men to go round, handsome Peter Douglas had managed to make it into his thirties without finding a wife. She wound her days and nights around coaxing warmth and cajoling tenderness and never asked herself what was wrong with him. She simply skated on the surface of her marriage, growing fond of the awkward but gentle man, until the ice cracked in December and she found herself head first in icy waters. When she surfaced again, she and Peter were stranded on different floes, a lost baby between them.
“So what is Peter’s deep dark secret?”
“I don’t wish to talk about this any more.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll change the subject, I promise.” Esmeralda glances around the room as if looking for inspiration. Hetty holds her breath.
“I know. How about we try on all your clothes?”
“What a good idea.” Hetty almost laughs aloud in relief. So eager is she to leave Peter’s study she practically turns her ankle again lunging for the door.
“When would you wear something like this?” Esmeralda asks, holding up a cream and yellow dress with three-quarter-length sleeves. Against the olive tones of her skin, the colours seem discordant, the dress rendered drab and dated.
“Church, probably, or a luncheon.”
“And this?” A navy blue and white sailor-style. Esmeralda wiggles her eyebrows and Hetty laughs at the absurd juxtaposition of her sailor outfit and the sailor-girl.
“Maybe you should try something on,” she says. Clothes hang differently on a person. And darker, richer colours might be better, possibly more feminine styles; she’s thinking of the dress Esmeralda had been wearing last night. Yet still, in skirts of chartreuse chiffon, scarf draped alluringly around her neck, Esmeralda looks strangely ordinary. Her beauty, like her wardrobe, seems to belong to another time and place. Esmeralda, running the fabric through her fingers and admiring herself in the mirror, doesn’t appear to see what Hetty sees.
“Try this.” Hetty hands her an evening dress. Perhaps Esmeralda’s exotic beauty requires a touch of glamour. Esmeralda jiggles the dress on its hanger and giggles. Sequined and fringed in off-white, the not-quite-knee-length number swishes and shimmers. Daring, a little cheeky even. Most definitely a Halifax item. Or Montreal, new York, London, Paris. Hetty has had neither the occasion nor the inclination to wear it herself. Quickly Esmeralda sheds her male regalia and steps into the dress, but not before Hetty’s sideways glance takes in the girl’s lean legs, the way the muscles on her back ripple under her skin as she first bends and then reaches to hook up the side fastenings. Esmeralda spins, delighted, but to Hetty the result is the same: oddly disappointing. Current fashions sit ill on her new friend.
“It’s great for doing the Charleston in,” she offers. “the fringe swings back and forth in time to the music.”
“The Charleston.” Esmeralda begins moving her feet. Hetty pulls out a pair of shoes, and Esmeralda forces her feet into them. She minces over to where she’s thrown her own clothes. “now it’s your turn.”
Hetty shakes her head. “No. I don’t think so.” Esmeralda and noble Matheson banging on the front door. Had they seen something? could Esmeralda have possibly guessed what Hetty was up to that afternoon? Esmeralda pushes her shirt and pants into Hetty’s hands. Though the twill of the pants is quite coarse, no doubt for practical reasons, the much-washed cotton of the shirt feels almost silky in its softness. The clothes smell like her, sweet and spicy.
“Go ahead, try them on.
“Oh, no. I couldn’t.” Hetty places the garments back on the bed.
“Please. Try them on for me. You’d look good with your short hair, more like a man.”
Oh, who would know? It’s only a bit of fun. Shy of changing in front of Esmeralda, Hetty turns away to slip on the pants and shirt and then faces the mirror. Is this the transformation she was looking for the other day? Esmeralda reaches over and ruffles her hair. Hetty regards the young man in the mirror. Esmeralda’s clothes fall a little loosely on her. The two stand side by side. The gypsy and the lady. But Esmeralda is two or three inches taller than Hetty, so some of the effect is lost. Esmeralda looks about her, opens the door to Peter’s wardrobe, and pulls out a wooden shoebox.
She places the box at Hetty’s feet. Hetty steps onto it and grows from boy to man. “Now you may take my arm.” Esmeralda holds out her arm for Hetty to link. The girl’s skin feels so soft against her own the very idea of it makes Hetty uncomfortable. She stares at the couple in the mirror, the stiff young man with his face bleached of colour, a mild look of panic in his eyes; the long-haired beauty in a dress that is somehow all wrong for her. Hetty grows warm, can feel dampness in the hollow of her throat. Time stretches till she believes it might break, and then without warning, or maybe she’s had all the warning in the world, Esmeralda turns towards her, cups her hands around Hetty’s face and kisses her. Such a surprise, the softness of her girl’s lips, the fullness of them, the curves of her face and the gentle down on her skin, so different from the resistance of a man’s planes and angles, the pumice of bristles. Hetty feels Esmeralda’s tongue dart across her lips and, when she parts them, the tease of tongue against her teeth, her gums, her own tongue.
Alarmed, Hetty draws back sharply. Esmeralda’s mouth is drawn up in a sideways smile. A look of challenge? Conquest? Hetty steps from the box, turns her back, pulls Esmeralda’s shirt over her head, undoes the waistband and buttons and shakes the pants from her legs as if they were crawling with ants. Everything is blurry. She yanks her own dress up over her shoulders and the sound of tearing fabric rips the air. She stares at the box on the floor, unable to risk a glace at Esmeralda. “Would you mind putting that back where you found it?”
“It was a bit of fun. Don’t take it so seriously. It was a kiss. No harm done.” Esmeralda reaches to take her hand but Hetty flinches and draws away. She stares at the window. No one can see in, she feels sure, and anyway the sun is beginning to set. Whatever is the time? Peter might be back any moment.
“You can have the dress.”
“Do you mean it?”
“I have no use for it.” She pushes past Esmeralda to her wardrobe, runs her hand across the myriad dresses and outfits her mother had, in a fit of relief or guilt, bought in Halifax and ordered from Montreal and new York last spring. She can afford to give up one or two. She selects a couple, places them on the bed, and when Esmeralda falls upon them exclaiming, pulls out a couple more. She won’t miss them. “You don’t even need to bother getting changed. Just leave in it. And here” — she selects another evening dress — “you can take this too. I don’t need it.” she begins folding Esmeralda’s boy’s clothes. “You should get going, it’ll be dark soon.”
“It’s barely six o’clock.”
“There’s a fog on its way in. If you don’t leave now you won’t be able to see to cross through the fields and woods, not knowing your way.”
“You could come with me. Hold my hand.”
“Now I know you’re making fun of me.” Esmeralda opens her mouth to protest but Hetty holds up her hand. She’s heard enough.