xvii. In which Charlotte makes a promise she might not be able to keep
By Friday, Charlotte was desperate. She stopped at the general store to see whether any telegrams had arrived for her. None
had. Of course. Without the horse, Arthur couldn’t have reached Port Lorne yet, if indeed he reached it at all.
Friday was market day. Shopping and trading for seafood, meat, and produce in the village square, villagers and visiting farmers
crowded into the general store for goods they couldn’t get from each other. Busier than usual, Mrs. Armstrong, the wife of
the owner, had been annoyed at Charlotte’s insistence on checking for a telegram that couldn’t have come.
“Perhaps it’s for the best,” she said now, unpacking a shipment lately arrived from Glenwhistle.
Charlotte stiffened. “I beg your pardon?”
Sasha and Jonas clung to her hands. Sasha had been uncharacteristically quiet since Maurice’s return without her uncle.
“Not meaning any offense—” Mrs. Armstrong slotted new bolts of fabric into place on the shelves behind the counter “—and Mr.
Throckmorton was nice enough in his way—”
Anger boiled in Charlotte’s blood. Sasha’s hand tightened on hers.
“—but you’ve got two mouths to feed as is, and it’s not as if he was much help, was he? If he’d been a half-decent fisherman, or any good in the cannery, it would’ve put you in an awful spot, his being gone, but—”
She broke off, turning aside to help a farmer’s wife who wanted some thread.
Charlotte’s jaw clenched. That was all they’d ever thought of Arthur. He’s an odd one, the villagers said, when they said anything. After childhoods in which they’d bullied him, they’d spent adulthood ignoring
him—until whatever had happened with Cormac Young. She was almost angry at herself for having expected them to help find him
in the first place.
“Not that it isn’t a tragedy.” Mrs. Armstrong returned to her bolts of fabric. “And your weans without their father all these
years—”
Charlotte’s eyes prickled at the unexpected mention of John. The second Mrs. Armstrong drew breath, she’d take the children
and go home with their shopping undone. She couldn’t bear any more of the villagers’ heartless sympathies.
“—I understand what a loss it is to you as a personal matter, of course, but you can’t expect our men to go risking their
lives for the likes of him.”
“Don’t talk about my uncle that way,” Sasha said, far too loudly. A hush fell over the shop.
Mrs. Armstrong peered down at her. “Not meaning any offense, lassie, but—”
“You’re mean.” Tears welled in Sasha’s eyes. “All of you! You won’t even look for him!”
“Dearest,” Charlotte said, reaching for her, but Sasha broke away, hands balling into fists.
“I hate you!” she cried at Mrs. Armstrong, the surrounding villagers, the visiting farmers, every adult in the shop. “I hate
all of you! I hope you get lost in the forest!”
“Sasha,” Jonas said, sounding panicked, but Sasha shoved past an old woman and ran off. The bell over the door jingled in her wake. Charlotte’s heart twisted.
“Go after her, love, will you?” she said to Jonas. “Make sure she gets home all right. I’ll catch up.”
They nodded and went. With the children gone, everyone stared at Charlotte instead. Her skin prickled, but she drew herself
up and gazed icily at Mrs. Armstrong.
“Thank you for checking on that telegram for me. Good day.”
Mrs. Armstrong looked surprised. “Don’t you want your kerosene?”
Charlotte left without responding. She’d meant to buy several things, and she’d have to come crawling back later to get them.
Right now, she couldn’t stand people staring or take another casually cruel comment.
She wanted to shout at them and cry as her daughter had. All that kept her from doing it was the fact that she was thirty-six
years old and a mother. Suddenly, being a grown-up felt intolerable. No wonder Arthur spent so much time daydreaming.
Outside, in the square, temporary stalls and carts offered mollusks, small and scanty fish, minimal squid, apples, lamb, grouse,
and berries. Charlotte staggered past without stopping, grateful for her cane.
A man with a flat cap raised his hand in greeting; she blinked, not recognizing him, then realized it was Elspeth McIntire.
She nodded back but was relieved when Elspeth returned to her shopping.
Since she no longer had the children with her, Charlotte stopped to check on Jean Crawford, a skittish newlywed expecting
her first, then Rosie Young. Mrs. Young was out front, tending the chickens and weeding around the stoop.
“Reckon she’s all right now,” she said, when Charlotte asked after Rosie, “but I’d not say no to you taking a look. That cough did linger something fierce. I never seen anything like it, leastways not in a hearty girl like our Rosie.”
Charlotte had; her own illness back in February had been like that. Mrs. Young nodded her inside. Charlotte thanked her and
went, hoping she wouldn’t find Rosie laid up in bed like she’d been for so long.
She needn’t have worried. Rosie was at her father’s feet in the sitting room, with a fluffy chick asleep in her arms, nattering
on about what her mother had brought back from the market and what the chick might look like when it grew up. In his chair,
repairing a fishing net, Cormac nodded at her periodically. His lips twitched.
At six, Rosie talked more and faster than anyone Charlotte had ever met; she hardly drew breath between words. Her color was
better than it had been in church on Sunday.
Charlotte smiled. “Feeling better, I see,” and what a relief that was, in a week during which nothing had gone right.
Scrambling to her feet, Rosie presented the chick, which peeped sleepily at the disturbance. One of its feet was deformed.
“This is Pippin,” Rosie said proudly.
“She’s lovely.”
“He.”
“Rosie, lass,” Cormac said, “take Pippin and help the boys out back, eh?”
“Nuh-uh. They’re mean to him.”
“Help Mam out front, then. He ought to be around other chickens anyhow.”
“Okay.”
Rosie skipped from the room, hugging her chick.
Cormac huffed a laugh. “Back to her old self, as you see.”
“I’m glad of it. She seems fond of her new pet.”
Cormac’s smile faded. “It’ll be a trick getting that chick away from her. We would’ve culled it, its foot being how it is, but she’s hardly let it go since it hatched. One of these days she’ll have to learn.”
Charlotte’s eyes prickled foolishly; it wasn’t as if she weren’t used to such things. The episode at the general store thorned
at her, making her emotional. That was all.
She cleared her throat. “She’s not short of breath? Doesn’t tire easily?”
Cormac shook his head. “Just as you seen her. She’s about driving her brothers up a wall. But her mam and I sure are grateful,
Mrs. Prentice.”
He fiddled with his net. Glanced toward the window, where his wife, in apparent exasperation, tried to stop Rosie from telling
a passing couple all about her chick.
“You’ve not heard from your brother?” Cormac asked.
Charlotte’s breath hitched. “No.”
“How’re you holding up?”
Charlotte twisted a hand in her apron. No one had asked. Everyone expected her to carry on—she’d expected it herself—because
that was what one did, through grief or pain or any upset at all.
Her lip trembled. “I’ll be better when he’s home.”
If he came home. She dabbed at her eyes.
Cormac avoided her gaze. “Hope he’ll be all right.”
Charlotte staggered toward him. “Would you go? Would you look for him? If people knew you were going, others might—”
He shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Please. I’d go myself, but there’s my—” Charlotte ground it out, unused to drawing attention to it “—my condition, and my
children—”
Cormac was on his feet. “And my own children? How d’you think my Anna’d manage without me? Besides—” he raised his voice as Charlotte tried to object “—if I went looking for him . . . I can’t have folks thinking—”
“Thinking what?” Charlotte’s fist clenched on her cane. “What happened between you and my brother?”
Cormac’s ears pinkened. “Nothing.”
“I know that,” Charlotte snapped. “I mean, what happened that’s made the villagers talk as if something happened between you
and my brother?”
“Nothing.” Cormac dropped back into his chair. “I taught him his way around a horse-cart, is all. Folks saw us driving together and
thought there was something to it.”
Like what? Charlotte wanted to ask, but she didn’t. She wanted to tell him how kind he’d been, teaching Arthur to drive the cart, to
ask him, again, to look for Arthur and convince others, but Mrs. Young stepped in.
“Mr. Neely’s outside,” she said to Cormac. “Wants a word. I told him you were engaged, but he’s awful keen if—”
“Mrs. Prentice was just leaving,” Cormac said, with a terrible air of finality. “See her out, would you?”
He stalked outside. Charlotte papered over her distress, told Mrs. Young Rosie seemed right as rain but to come up to the
cottage if her symptoms reemerged, and left. The journey uphill was slow and painful, and Charlotte collapsed into her armchair
the moment she made it home.
Sasha was shut away in the children’s bedroom. Jonas had put away the laundry Charlotte had left by her armchair the day before,
intending to sit for only a moment. Now she was home, Jonas made her tea and brought a salve for her joints without being
asked. Charlotte wanted to cry.
Jonas turned on the radio and tuned it to her favorite program.
If romance novels were Arthur’s guilty pleasure, Tales of Terror from the Radio Waves was Charlotte’s.
She liked knowing that, however bad life got, at least she wasn’t trapped in a Gothic mansion with a man she was both attracted to and afraid of or a becoming young woman who was secretly a hungry supernatural monster.
After the day she’d had, such things didn’t comfort her nearly as much as usual.
She wondered if this was how it would be if Arthur never returned: Jonas growing up too soon because she spent so much time
exhausted and in pain that her children would have to take care of her. The way Eileen had gone after George’s death, Charlotte
had been determined not to do that to her own children. But now—