November 1797
In spite of his resolutions to be a better husband in this new world, John White finds it hard to stifle his irritation with Marianne’s views and behaviour. When he first saw her on the wharf at Quebec, he had for a moment felt happy, picturing the joy of having a warm body beside him in bed. Then as he kissed her, he’d become aware of the paint on her cheeks and those damnable artificial eyebrows she always wore in London—made of mouse skin.
And then, he had noticed his children. It was clear at once that Charles and William did not remember him. They clutched each other’s hands and stood by the baggage, not moving an inch towards him. But Ellen had made up for this disappointment. “Papa, Papa,” she cried, throwing her arms around his waist and stretching up to receive his kiss. Ellen alone had sustained him on the long trip up the St. Lawrence and into Lake Ontario.
* * *
Tonight Marianne is harping away on one of her standard topics. He sits in his favourite withdrawing-room chair and tries not to hear her over the pages of his newspaper. But she gets up from her chair, comes over to him, peers over his raised paper and speaks down to him from above. There is no escape. At least, he reflects, she has got rid of the eyebrows and the paint on her cheeks. That much he has accomplished.
“Why can we not have more company, husband? We live next door to the Smalls, but we have yet to invite them to sup with us. Why?”
“Small is not as many rungs up the social ladder as I am, my dear, and in this place, the rungs of the ladder are all-important. And lately he has begun to put on airs which I find intolerable. Why do you not content yourself with our friends the Russells?”
“Mr. Russell is old and fat, and that sister of his, so doleful. I wish to meet people of my age. Mrs. Small is attractive, is she not, and if you worry about the rungs of the social ladder, is she not a bosom friend of Mrs. Elmsley who is right at the top?”
What am I to say? I cannot risk the chance of having the Woman Small anywhere near me. Though she curries favour with the Chief Justice’s wife and appears to be working to restore her reputation, who knows what she might get up to if we meet at an intimate gathering? She is quite capable of talking to me behind her hand or making a cryptic allusion to Niagara days.
“If Miss Russell is ‘doleful,’ as you put it, perhaps you might consider the great loss she has suffered.”
“Oh, she must get over it, move on. I can scarcely refrain from telling her so. But why do you seek to distract me by talking about Eliza Russell? I want to have the Smalls for supper. It’s not natural to ignore close neighbours. I know our house is not as pretty as theirs, but that’s not my fault. I do have a nice walnut teapoy inlaid with mother of pearl, and those flowered cups and saucers with the orange border would make the lady sit up and take notice.”
“No.” White shakes the pages of his paper, causing Marianne to move back out of range.
“I’m to sit around here, am I, while you go drinking at the garrison? I might just as well have stayed in England with that devil of a nanny your sister and brother-in-law set upon me. Night and day, day and night, she scrutinized my every move, treating me like a seven-year-old. Now I want some society. I will invite the Smalls myself if you do not.”
“You shall do nothing of the kind. If you dare to do such a thing, I will throw you onto the first boat leaving for Lower Canada. You can fend for yourself. But before that day comes, I must ask you to empty the chamberpots. They stink.”
“Why does that slattern you hired not do these loathsome tasks? What am I to do with the slut? She told me this very day she intends to leave soon to marry a German farmer in the place they call Markham. ‘When I marries my man,’ she said to me, I be going into my own house and farm. And damned be to service and the paltry sums I gets from the likes of youse and them other folk from over the lake.’ That’s the way the slut talks to me.”
Well at least I’ve got her off the topic of the Smalls onto another one of her favourites.
He reaches for the decanter again. Oblivion may be what he must seek. But Marianne leaves the room in a huff, so at least he no longer has to listen to her infernal nattering. She goes up the stairs, slams the bedchamber door with a crash, and silence descends, mercifully.
Laughter from the kitchen reminds him of his children. The three of them have been in the warmth of the hearth putting a puzzle together. Charles and William now call him ‘Papa’ and seem to be quite at home in York. Though he has not always been a good husband, he has been more successful in his resolutions to be a good father, and he now remembers the commitment he has made to his children’s education. He looks at the decanter of wine. He has drunk most of it, yet he feels coherent enough for the task of helping them with their studies.
He calls to them, and they come into the withdrawing room, laughing and flushed from the heat of the kitchen fire.
“Look, Papa,” Ellen says, showing him a large wooden puzzle of Europe which they have put together. Ellen is now thirteen years of age, a slight, pretty child with her mother’s fair complexion. White is happy she seems to enjoy Miss Russell who has been teaching her to crochet. William, who was a baby when he left England, is now a chubby six-year-old. Charles is eight, a quiet lad who has said very little in the weeks he has been in York. But White has watched him observe things, his large brown eyes fixed on his mother and father during their quarrels. What has our acrimony done to him?
He seats them at the dining-room table and reads them Goody Two Shoes, an old book of Mary’s which Miss Russell has given him. The boys never tire of the tale, but he sees Ellen fiddling with the ribbons on her dress and senses she is bored. When he finishes the story, he sets Charles, who knows his alphabet, to making words that match familiar ones from the story they have just heard. He doesn’t know what to do with William, except to take him on his knee and get him to write WWWWW with a quill, spattering ink all over his new buff breeches in the process. As for Ellen, Miss Russell, bless her, has given him an idea.
“You like puzzles, my dear?”
“Oh yes, Papa, but we have already conquered that one.” She points to the map of Europe.
“Try this.” He shows her a square piece of paper with twelve holes drawn onto it. “Miss Russell has drawn these,” he tells her. “Now see if you can cut the paper into four pieces of the same shape. The catch is that each piece of paper must have three holes in it.”
With the children occupied, he has time to reflect. This slapdash approach to education, while better than nothing, has few positive merits. Perhaps he can scrape together enough money to enrol the lads in William Cooper’s school in George Street. The man provides instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, and English grammar with, as he says in an advertisement in The Upper Canada Gazette, “great attention paid to virtue and morals.” That would be a godsend. They get no training from his wife.
His head aches from the argument with Marianne and from the burden of his children. And now Ellen is crying. “I can’t get it right, Papa. You’ll have to help me.”
He takes up the puzzle and tries to remember what his friend showed him. But the wine has dulled his intellect. “I can’t get it straight myself,” he says. “We’ll have to ask Miss Russell. Why don’t you go over to her house tomorrow morning and ask her?”
Ellen mops her eyes with the back of her hand and starts to laugh. “Oh, Papa, I feel so much better knowing you can’t figure it out either.”
He laughs with her, feeling a spurt of happiness to have his daughter with him again. She is so much like Mary, spirited and funny. “Why don’t you read me Goody Two Shoes?” he asks. “Your voice will be so much better than mine for the orphan girl.”
Ellen reads. That English nanny of Sam’s was a godsend in spite of what Marianne claims.