“Late or not, you could have at least finished dressing before you graced us with your presence.” Vivian is upon Hetty before she’s taken one step into the drawing room. One barefooted step. Feet burning, blisters wet with grief. The air fizzes and swirls around her mother’s head.
She’d spent the afternoon walking the length and breadth of the city, anxious to shake the spectre of Spoon, free her skin of the prison stink.
“Dinner is almost ruined.”
“You’re looking well, my dear,” her father booms from his perch before the fireplace. Vivian steps aside. “You have good colour in your cheeks.” Hetty crosses the room to give him a hug and a kiss. “It must be all that fresh air and good country living.”
“You should come and visit us then,” Hetty says, noting how grey and drawn he looks. The dark circles that shadow his eyes.
“That would be nice. I’m busy with work at the moment, though your mother might be able to manage a trip out. You should have a word with her.” Hetty smiles as if she considers her father’s suggestion a good one. The sight of Vivian in gumboots squelching through sticky red mud might almost be worth the strain of her mother’s undiluted company. But not quite. She leans towards him.
“I need to speak with you about something. Do you think after dinner we could — ?”
“Hello, Hetty.” Peter. She sets her face and turns to greet him, place a kiss on his cheek, but with Esmeralda’s grisly warning still ringing in her ears, she can’t quite meet his eyes.
“How are you?”
“I’m well.”
“I had no idea where you’d gone. I was frantic for a while.”
Hetty can’t imagine Peter frantic about anything. “I can take care of myself.” Can you? Spoon’s eyes, cold and glassy, bore through the back of her neck. Why can’t she just open her mouth and warn him?
“Laura wanted you to know she’s missing your morning chats.”
“I only left yesterday, Peter.”
He pulls at the cuffs of his shirt, inspects his fingernails. “She finished weeding your garden for you. We both did.”
“I wanted —” to weed it myself. She hesitates to finish her sentence, knowing Peter will take it as proof she’s planning on returning to the village with him. Why can’t he ever leave her alone to do something for herself? Why does he feel the need to prescribe every moment of her day?
“Did you take the train?” Her face is beginning to ache. Is her father still standing behind her, listening? What about her mother and Aunt Rachel? she feels cornered by their sharpeyed silence, her every move, every word monitored.
“Noble Matheson gave me a ride.”
“I see. Your feet look sore.”
“Feet and hands.” She spreads them in front of her. “I’m a mess of blisters.”
Peter takes her left hand. “Your wedding ring. Hetty, where’s your wedding ring?” His voice, tight and, yes, fearful, echoes strangely inside her head. “Did you lose it?”
“No,” she says quickly, pulling her hand back and checking her earlobes. Naked. “I didn’t lose it.”
“Then where is it?”
She massages the telltale finger, the groove the ring has left in her flesh. “I took it to the Jeweller’s. It doesn’t fit anymore.”
“We could get you another ring if you like.” His eyes have a ragged, helpless cast.
“It isn’t necessary, Peter.”
“Time for dinner,” Vivian trills, hand on her son-in-law’s arm, leading him away. “Come, come, everyone.”
Hetty slouches towards the dining room, dreading the small talk, the air already thick with her family’s need for peace between herself and Peter. Her appetite sharpens as Frances lifts the lid from the soup tureen. When did she last eat a decent meal? But no sooner does she reach towards the basket of warm fragrant rolls than there’s a knock at the door. Moments later Frances reappears.
“There’s a constable at the door, sir.” Peter cups her elbow, and Hetty is dimly aware of her father reaching towards the knot of his tie, Aunt Rachel leaning towards him, Vivian patting his arm. Their mouths move, but Hetty can hear nothing over the whoosh of blood in her ears.
“He says he’s here to see Mrs. Douglas, sir.”
They turn on her then, sisters with identical eyes — how has she never noticed before?
“I’ve shown him to the study, sir. Ma’am.” She nods at Hetty, who is uncomfortable with Frances’s newfound formality. They were practically playmates when Hetty was growing up.
Hetty stands. Peter follows. “Would you like me to come with you?”
“No — thank you,” she adds at a sharp glance from Aunt Rachel. “I’ll be fine.”
“May I ask what this is about, constable?” Hetty’s father says, holding open the door to his office. “Your timing leaves a lot to be desired. My family and I were in the middle of our evening meal.” He steps behind his desk but remains standing.
“Our apologies, sir. The constabulary is conducting some enquiries into the death of a young boy aboard a pirate schooner that was laid up at Kenomee village this past week.”
Richard Piers grips the back of his chair. “What kind of nonsense is this?”
“We have it on good authority, sir that Mrs. Douglas was aboard the schooner in question.”
Her father’s eyes are turning rheumy. He must have aged a decade in the past year. Little wonder her mother resents her. “I sincerely hope you’re going to tell me that the constable is mistaken.”
“I’m afraid not.” Wringing her hands. “They came to me for help.”
“And you just consented to get yourself involved? Where the devil was Peter? What does he think he’s — ?”
“It was nothing to do with Peter.” Then. Now his neck is on the line. “It was my decision entirely. I thought they were harmless. Fishermen blown off course.”
“If you’ll allow me, ma’am,” the policeman says. “I think there’s some facts you mighten’t be aware of. Sir.” He nods at Hetty’s father, clears his throat and pulls out a notebook for reference. “A ruthless lot of brigands they are, sir. The crew. They set upon the rum-runner Alchemist, stole her cargo, shot the bo’sun’s feet off, and made the captain chuck him overboard.” Hetty feels faint. What might Spoon do to Peter?
“The crew from the steamship were lucky the U.S. Coast Guard happened upon ’em so soon. They gave the schooner chase a good while, but then the weather came up in the Bay of Fundy and it got away from them.
“Rum-runners are a bad enough blight on our society, sir. But rum pirates are always armed and doubly dangerous. We wouldn’t normally bother ourselves about it. You know, thieves stealing from thieves. But they murdered the bo’sun. And now with the boy’s death and all, it’s a Dominion matter now, sir.”
“And how exactly is my daughter supposed to be involved?”
“According to our reports, sir, Mrs. Douglas amputated the boy’s leg.”
His heart. If it gives out now Hetty will never forgive herself. Her mother will hold her responsible.
“My daughter is a trained nurse. She obviously knew what she was doing.”
“What she did isn’t at issue, sir; it’s what she saw aboard the schooner that’s concerning the magistrate. Sir. Ma’am” — the constable turns to Hetty — “you will probably be called as a witness when the trial proper begins.”
“Oh, now, I don’t think there’s any need for that, constable, do you?”
“Until such time I must advise you to stay away from visiting with any of the accused.”
“As if the thought would even cross her mind.”
The constable licks the end of his pencil. “And if Mrs. Douglas wouldn’t mind answering a few questions?”
“I’ll try my best.”
“Just dates and times and anything that stands out in your mind. Any evidence of liquor onboard, that sort of thing.”
“None.”
“None?”
“Absolutely.”
“And how can you be so sure, ma’am?”
Hetty’s glance flits to the window, evening clouds pressing in from the ocean. “The woman who comes in to clean the house — she told me. Her husband’s a fisherman. She said the schooner was sitting too high up in the water to be carrying anything but her ballast.”
They watch his laboured note-taking, willing his pencil across the page. “The court requires that you inform them if and when you leave the city and return to your residence, ma’am. If you leave the province or the country without advising the authorities, you could be charged with contempt.”
“Close the door, Hetty, please,” her father says once they are alone. He sits and steeples his hands before his face. Her parents share the same gestures. Perhaps that comes from twenty-seven years of marriage. And what will she adopt from Peter? His bread-buttering habit? Or his throat-clearing? The way he worries his hangnails when lost in thought? Can Hetty envision twenty-seven years with Peter? she could be a widow before the weekend is out.
“Why did you lie to that policeman?”
“What makes you think I was lying?”
“You’re my daughter. I know when you’re lying. What I want to know is who you’re protecting and whether you think any brigand ruffian is worth throwing your marriage away for.”
“I’m not throwing my marriage away.”
“Then what are you doing here, Hetty?”
“There was a young woman aboard the schooner. Her name is Esmeralda.” Sensing a long explanation ahead of her, Hetty pulls a chair up to her father’s desk. “I visited with her today. In jail.”
“Go on.” He has his bank manager’s voice on.
“She’s terrified. And the thing is, she shouldn’t be there. She’s too young to be in prison. Esmeralda is the kind of person who has never had any choice about what she wants to do in her life. Her father is the captain of a pirate ship, her mother is . . . her mother abandoned her when she was a baby. She’s just an innocent victim in all this.”
“This is what she’s told you, is it? Prisons are filled with innocent people, Hetty. It’s a wonder there’s any room for the criminals.”
“Esmeralda is a good person. I can feel it in my bones.”
“She’s a pirate. She’s involved in violent crime.”
“You don’t trust my judgment?”
“Frankly? No. You’re being dangerously naïve. This Esmeralda person is charged with a serious offense. She’ll likely spend a very long time in prison, if she doesn’t hang for her crimes. Rum pirates! Hetty, whatever possessed you? And what is she to you but a passing acquaintance? A flirtation with danger? The world doesn’t need another of your damn crusades. God knows this family doesn’t. If you weren’t a married woman I would forbid you to have anything more to do her.”
If I weren’t a married woman, Hetty thinks, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
“I’ll deal with your mother,” he says as they leave his office. Hetty makes for the stairs.
Bathed and wrapped in a towel, she pads across the hallway from the bathroom and stops at the door to her old room. Hand on the doorknob, she starts to turn it, then changes her mind. Why pick at her scabs?
The guest bedroom has been dusted and aired, the covers on the bed turned down. Frances has even laid out Hetty’s old brush and comb set on the vanity. On a hook on the back of the door hangs a navy silk peignoir and matching nightdress Hetty has never seen before. Something of her mother’s? Or had Vivian, up to her old machinations, purchased these items today? Had Aunt Rachel?
She opens the drawers and then the closet, seeking something less alluring and romantic to put on. A surprise. Her nurse’s uniform is hanging inside. She runs her fingers over the blue cape, its solid sensibleness. Her shoes, which would have saved her feet today, are lined up beneath. Why wouldn’t her mother have tossed it out or given it to the rag and bone man? Had Frances burn it in the kitchen range? And who moved it from her old room? Had it been hanging here over Christmas?
Hetty slips on the uniform and beholds herself in the mirror. Nurse Piers. Older. She looks for signs that the past year’s events have marked her in any way. A crease around her mouth perhaps? A line on her forehead. She steps closer and there it is a hint of shadow in her eyes to mark the sadness and the changes. If she had known the far-reaching consequences of her behaviour back when she was at nursing school, would her life have veered down the same path? Or would she have acted differently and changed her destiny?
She removes her cape, touches her fingers to her reflection. All those poor boys with their broken bodies. If she closes her eyes she can remember the feel of their skin, the rough weave of the blankets that tucked them in. She had only ever wanted to make them feel better. Only ever wanted to help them forget. Brian had been the first. Brian Binns, a prairie boy from Brandon, Manitoba. While Brian had escaped outright disfigurement, his appearance was strangely unsettling: blue eyes in a gunpowder-reddened face, hair the colour of sun-bleached straw. He looked permanently startled.
But in the anonymity of darkness it was his large farmer’s hands, his thick, ropy arms that unmoored her, cast her adrift in a sea of her own longing, her own undoing.
“Nurse?”
She moved over to his bed, stepping through the long rectangle of moonlight pouring through the window, then into shadow again.
“Yes?”
“Could you talk to a lonely fellow?” And he patted the bed. Hetty sat, first smoothing out the seat of her uniform, as her mother had trained her to as a child. Now it was a reflex.
“And what would you be wanting to talk about at this hour of the night?” she chided, a smile in her voice.
He set his hand in the crook of her waist, fingers hugging her hipbone. Heat rushed through her.
“Do you mind?”
Hetty closed her eyes a moment and brushed her fingers across her throat, grateful he couldn’t see the flush of colour she could feel in her cheeks. “No,” she said slowly. “No, I don’t mind.” His hand began kneading at her hip. She drew in a long and ragged breath and then Brian Binns moaned softly in the back of his throat. He took her left hand and placed it on his groin, his penis straining under the thin hospital blanket, the shiny over-washed sheet. Hetty had only ever imagined this moment. She grasped its hardness and began moving her hand back and forth. Brian Binns’s hand slid down her leg and up under her nurse’s uniform. Hetty shifted and his fingers slid inside her underwear and found her slippery wetness. They rocked together there a moment, a minute, a measure of time, and when Brian shuddered in release and his fingers stilled, Hetty was left trembling and unsated, her heartbeat clamouring in her throat, her body pulsing for something else, something more.
Corporal Brian Binns pulled her to him and kissed her hair, her lips, her cheeks. “You’re a good girl,” he whispered hoarsely. “A very good girl.”
There had been so many lovely lonely boys after Brian Binns, and she’d made them whole again, if only briefly, seeking to make herself whole.
Not every young man was Brian Binns, though. Some were angry and hammered out their spleen on her body. Beneath her uniform she’d hidden her bruised chest and pinched thighs, the black marks on her buttocks. And once a ragged line of tiny blood blisters across her neck, which she’d explained away as too much starch in her collar. The soldier with the choking hands, Frank, a Cape Breton boy whose family had moved to Halifax in the mining slump and had all been killed in the Explosion, had taken out the remainder of his grief with a knife. He’d slit his wrists that night and been found the next morning by the duty nurse. The soldier in the bed next to his had complained all night of the smell of blood as Frank’s veins had slowly emptied into his bed. Soldiers often complained they could smell gas and other impossible things, so no one had paid any attention until it was too late.
“You must miss it. Nursing.”
Peter stands in the doorway where the light from the bedside lamp doesn’t quite reach. “You gave me a fright.” hand over her heart.
“I’ve never seen you in your uniform. You look very efficient and professional.”
“I was,” she says to her reflection. The comfort nursing had been but a stage. A short-lived temptation. A heart-thudding addiction.
“Your patients were lucky to have such a beautiful, conscientious nurse.”
“You came all this way to flatter me?” Hetty’s words sound oddly familiar.
Peter steps into the room and stands behind her, a shadowy consort in the mirror.
“I was hoping to take you home.”
Hetty would like to change out of her uniform, climb into bed and go to sleep. But something in Peter’s voice gives her pause. He brushes a hand down the front of his suit, clears his throat again.
“I once sent a man under my command on a dangerous reconnaissance mission I knew he had no hope of surviving. I tried to pretend I had no choice, that he was the only man for the job, that the job was imperative. But the truth was I couldn’t stand him.” Hetty watches the shadows shift across her husband’s face. “He was disruptive. I could always hear his voice above anyone else’s. He never took an order without grumbling or backchat. He was happiest sowing doubt in the other men’s minds, stirring discontent, inciting trouble. I’d had enough and saw a way of ending my discomfort.”
“Did it work?”
“He never came back.”
“And how did you feel?”
“I wasn’t surprised. I knew it was an impossible mission. As did the rest of the outfit. They kept their distance afterwards. I never knew if I’d become someone they respected or someone they feared.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“The army expects you to make decisions that aren’t based on your emotions. They assume you don’t have any.”
Hetty holds Peter’s gaze in the mirror. He moves closer.
“Sometimes people do the right things for the wrong reasons.”
“Is this a confession, Peter? Are you saying you regret turning in my friends?”
“I regret what it’s done to us.”
“We were in trouble long before the Esmeralda and her crew showed up.”
He reaches out and places his hand in the small of her back. The air contracts around them. “I wanted it too, you know.”
“What did you want, Peter?”
“The baby.”
“Why did you leave me here by myself?”
“I thought it was for the best, that it was what you wanted.”
“Why didn’t you ask me what I wanted?”
“I was scared. You were bleeding so heavily. I thought I was going to lose you too.”
He looks so vulnerable in the soft yellow glow from the bedside lamp that Hetty turns from the mirror to perch on the end of the bed.
“May I?” She nods and he sits on the edge opposite, leaving an expanse of candlewick bedspread between them. “The house felt very empty last night.”
“No emptier than it must have felt at Christmas.”
“I wish I’d acted differently, Hetty. I should never have left you alone like that. If I had known it would mean losing my wife . . .”
“You surprise me, Peter. I wasn’t aware you ever wanted a wife. Not nearly as much as you wanted a financial backer for your mill.”
He glances down at his hands as if checking to see they’re still the same length, that they haven’t grown on him, or shrunk. “Your reasons for marrying me were no more noble than mine, but I don’t keep flogging you with them.”
She falters. It has never been clear how much he knows of her past, how much her parents or Aunt Rachel might have told him. God knows she could never bring herself to ask.
“No, you’d rather play the family martyr who married the fallen woman.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Why did you marry me, Peter? What could a restrained man like you possibly see in someone like me?”
“This.” He gestures towards her, hands open.
“What?”
“Your fire. Your passion. You live in the moment. Impulsively. Even recklessly at times. But I guess that’s part of what attracts me so much.”
“You have a strange way of showing it.”
“Hetty, you frighten me to death half the time.”
“I frighten you? Are you sure it isn’t something else?”
“Quite sure.”
“But I did things with other men, Peter.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. You must have had your reasons.”
“What if it was more than that?”
“It was a different time, Hetty, a different world.”
“I don’t care.” He reaches for her waist.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe me.” His hand travels the bodice of her nurse’s uniform, his fingers stroke the inside of her arm.
“Shameful things.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he says, finding the nape of her neck, kissing her face.
“I touched them.”
Hot breath on her neck, his voice gravelly in her ear. “Show me.”
Heat twists through her. A damp pulse between her legs. She shifts into his arms, catching her breath as Peter’s tongue grazes her skin. A soft moan escapes his lips, and as he buries one hand in the back of her hair, the other travels, rough and urgent, up her leg and under her nurse’s uniform.