ix. In which Charlotte has an unexpected visitor
Charlotte may have made her brother promise to return safely, but she was mortified to learn how much she’d come to rely on
him in the last six months. He’d only left this morning; already she felt like everything was falling apart without him.
She’d been all right initially, except for the worry needling her insides. She’d made the children an early lunch and gone
down to the village alone with her cane and her medical kit. That had been quite bad enough: People stopped talking abruptly
when they saw her.
At first, she’d thought they were talking about her, not that she knew why they’d have cause to; she’d always worked hard
to make sure they didn’t. Then she’d heard her brother’s name and Cormac Young’s—together. She didn’t know why that should
be, either, since Cormac had never paid Arthur much mind. She’d turned her attention toward today’s patients, but the whispers
persisted.
A village like Seacliff, small as it was, always had plenty of patients. Someone pregnant, someone ill, someone who’d sprained
or broken or lost a limb. No one ever stopped to let their various injuries and illnesses heal properly. Grit your teeth and press on. That was what the villagers believed. They’d gossiped about Charlotte’s mother for that very reason; she’d descended into
grief rather than pushing through it. If one didn’t press on through whatever ills life threw at them, one would never get
on at all. Who would pay the bills, mend the nets, cook the supper, repair the roof?
Although she knew bodies needed rest, Charlotte struggled not to feel that way herself. She knew of at least three medical
crises she likely could’ve helped with had she not been laid up with her own illness for weeks. At the time, she’d barely
cared, so sick she wasn’t sure she’d recover. Now she couldn’t stop thinking of them.
The sea was a violent provider. The cannery possibly even more so, as Charlotte was reminded late this afternoon by a factory
worker whose hand was so lacerated as to be unsavable. He was fourteen and had smaller hands than the grown workers, so when
a gang knives machine jammed up, he’d been told to stick his hand into it to fix the jam. The bosses had been loath to shut
production down to examine the machine properly.
Anger simmered in Charlotte’s gut. The injury had been entirely preventable.
The hand had to come off. The boy’s work would slow, and probably he’d lose his job. He was unbearably cheerful about it,
although she sensed an undercurrent of tension as she worked up toward telling him he would lose the hand. Seacliff hadn’t
yet beaten him into the gruff, grim village man he would one day be, as all the village men were. All of them but Arthur,
because he spent more time buried in books and his own head than reality.
Perhaps that was one of the reasons the villagers disliked him; he didn’t push through life’s ills so much as ignore them.
Nonetheless, Charlotte sometimes envied him.
Her best semblance of a defense against the realities of their lives was determined practicality.
It only worked until life wrenched control from her hands, reminding her that practicality could never overcome things like bosses who cared more for profit than people or the slow poisoning of the sea at the hands of the cannery and the distant, wealthy men who had built it.
Daydreaming couldn’t overcome those things, either, but it might have given her an occasional respite.
She did what needed to be done, bandaged the boy’s stump, and gave his mother instructions for his care, promising to return
in the next few days to make sure it was healing. Then she headed home. She’d intended to make more house calls but couldn’t
bear it after that one.
Leaning on her cane, she limped back through the village. Her father’s bone saw weighed heavy in her bag. Early evening sunlight
unspooled in thin strands, weak, but it hurt her eyes. The hill loomed before her. The steps seemed impossibly steep.
Charlotte’s vision swam. She sat on a stump and cried, angry at the bosses, angry at herself for not being able to climb the
hill alone, angry at Arthur for leaving her to her own devices. Angry at herself all over again, because she’d refused to
tell him to stay, though he’d given her ample opportunity, and because she ought not to have needed him so deeply in the first
place.
“You all right?”
A short, stocky person stood over her, dressed in a working man’s clothes: shirt, trousers, braces, and boots, with a cloak
under their arm and knives at their belt. But it was a woman around Charlotte’s age, with tawny skin, black hair slung in
a braid over her shoulder, and serious dark eyes.
“I’m fine.” Charlotte wiped her eyes on her apron. “I was taking a rest before heading uphill. That’s all.”
The woman rubbed her chin. “Sure of that, are you? Looked to me like you were weepin’.”
Charlotte’s fists clenched in her skirt. “I wasn’t.”
“No matter.” The woman shrugged. “C’mon, give me your arm.”
Charlotte glared at her.
“Need help getting uphill, don’t you?” the woman asked. “Must be your cottage I passed back there. Give me your arm. I’ll
help you home.”
Charlotte flushed but begrudgingly allowed herself to be pulled to her feet. The woman took her medical bag over one arm and
offered Charlotte the other.
Breathing hard, Charlotte leaned against the woman with her cane in her other hand. Despite the weak sunlight, the warmth
made her dizzy and winded.
“All right?” the woman repeated, but Charlotte couldn’t respond until she’d caught her breath.
“Fine,” she gasped. “Let’s go.”
They made their way uphill. Although her cane helped, Charlotte was grateful for the support. Her father hadn’t thought to
build handrails alongside the stairs all those years ago. She hadn’t thought about it, either, until her illness.
At the door of the cottage, the woman turned to go, but Charlotte said, “Half a moment.”
“Need help getting in?”
“No, but if you’re going down to the village, let me grab you a hat.”
“The sun ain’t so bad.”
“It isn’t that.” Charlotte considered the woman’s clothes, thinking uncomfortably of Agnes and her supposed cousin. When hunting,
Gracie Buchanan might’ve gotten away with trousers by virtue of her riches, but this woman didn’t look rich. “Seacliff isn’t
likely to take kindly to a woman running about in trousers. It’ll do you better to disguise yourself as a man, if you can.
If you won’t be here long.”
The woman looked her up and down, like she was trying to decide or communicate something, but Charlotte couldn’t imagine what.
Seeming satisfied, the woman nodded and followed her into the cottage. “I won’t be here long. Two, three days at most.”
The children’s voices trailed from the kitchen as Charlotte led the woman into the sitting room.
“. . . going to see if she’s on her way back,” Jonas was saying anxiously. They relaxed when they caught sight of their mother,
but their brow furrowed at the stranger by her side.
Sasha, on the other hand, delighted in their unexpected visitor.
“Why are you wearing trousers?” she asked, eyeing them enviously.
The woman chuckled. “Because I don’t much care for frocks.”
“Me neither,” Sasha said, “but Mama and Uncle Arthur make me.”
Charlotte started up the attic stairs. “Please don’t encourage my children.”
Head spinning, she paused with her hand on the wall. The stairs were open on one side, and she had a sudden, horrible vision
of herself falling off of them and breaking her neck.
Jonas appeared at her side. “What do you need, Mama?”
“That old flat cap, love. The one your uncle never wears.”
Jonas nodded, scrambled up to the attic, and returned with cap in hand. It was a hideous brown thing Charlotte’s mother had
bought for her brother when he turned seventeen because, as she’d said, every young man needs a cap. Arthur had tried it on, thanked her politely, hung it on a peg in the attic, and never worn it. Their mother hadn’t noticed.
Charlotte handed the cap to the woman. “Here.”
“Awful ugly,” the woman said, but she set Charlotte’s medical bag on the floor, coiled her braid on her head, and jammed the cap on over it.
Charlotte’s chest stabbed with annoyance, though she and Arthur had always thought it ugly, too. “All the more likely to do
the trick, then. The village men don’t choose their hats for looks.”
The woman tugged at her clothing, pulled the cap low over her eyes, and adjusted her stance. When she had finished, her figure
was more or less hidden in folds of fabric, and what was visible of her face might’ve belonged to a boy.
Her voice dropped half an octave. “Thanks.”
Sasha giggled. The woman tugged one of her pigtails with a grin. Despite herself, Charlotte liked that grin.
Her mouth twitched. “I’m not sure that will fool anyone for long. You might want to avoid talking too much.”
The woman shrugged and said, in her normal voice, “Too bad. I’ll be asking plenty questions.”
Charlotte escorted her back to the stoop. “Why?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
The woman thumbed the cap farther up her forehead, contemplating the slate roofs of the village. The setting sun reflected
in her gaze.
Charlotte’s breath caught at the sight of those serious dark eyes. Good thing the woman had said she wouldn’t be here long.
Otherwise, lonely as she was without her brother, Charlotte might have invited her to supper to get to know her.
Not for the first time, she wished she didn’t need Arthur so much. Needing people was how one got hurt. She’d learned that
first from her mother, then her husband. She didn’t intend to learn the lesson again.
The woman pulled the cap off, turning to Charlotte. “The name Maggie McIntire mean anything to you?”
Charlotte was taken aback. “Bess Little’s friend, isn’t she? The one who was visiting from Port Lorne.”
The woman nodded. She turned the cap over in her hands. “You know by any chance what happened to her?”
“She went home, didn’t she? That’s what I’ve heard.”
“You see her go?”
Charlotte’s skin prickled. She thought uneasily of the dark trees into which her brother had vanished only this morning. “No.”
The woman didn’t seem to share her unease.
“Shame. Thought you might’ve seen her, if she headed that way, what with your house practically right up against the trees.”
She jammed the cap back on and started downhill. “Thanks again.”
Charlotte didn’t respond. She stood on the stoop, chest heaving, until the ugly brown cap vanished downslope, lost amidst
the rolling heather.
She stepped inside and slammed the door.
“Mama?” Jonas slipped to her side, Sasha hot on their heels. “Who was that?”
Charlotte closed her eyes. “No one. She helped me up the hill, that’s all.”
“I liked her,” Sasha said. “And I liked her trousers.”
Charlotte said nothing. She staggered to the sitting room, shrugging Jonas off when they tried to help, sank into her armchair,
and didn’t get up again the rest of the day.