Chapter Seventeen
FLORA
5 January 1931
Quebec City
The room was low-lit and shadowy, red cloths thrown over round tables, people sitting on rush-back chairs and leather banquettes as waiters slunk through like cats. James surveyed the room, quickly finding Landon sitting in a corner. There was a newspaper in front of him, but he wasn’t reading it. A tendril of cigarette smoke curled from his lip as he watched them approach.
‘Mr Landon,’ James said as they approached. ‘Thank you for your note.’
Several days of silence had passed since their initial meeting, and Flora had grown increasingly terrified that Tucker had somehow ‘got’ to Landon and warned him off.
‘Y’ found it all right, then?’ the man asked as they sat down opposite him.
‘Indeed. A well-chosen spot.’
His gaze dragged over her like thorns as she fidgeted beside James, trying to control her nerves. She fiddled with the prized gold wedding ring that now sat beside her sapphire, the ultimate token of respectability. They were legitimately married at last, man and wife...and ready to become a family of three.
The moment was upon them.
A waiter came over and they ordered some red wine that would doubtless be too sweet or too cool, but drinking it was beside the point. They merely had to go through the motions to get to the reason for being here.
Landon seemed especially unhurried, watching the waiter disappear, taking another drag of his cigarette before he looked back at them.
‘So,’ he said finally. ‘Your friends, the widows.’
‘Yes.’ James managed to make the word sound like a confirmation and not an eager question.
‘It’s not a straightforward picture.’
Flora felt her heart dive to her boots but forced herself not to outwardly react. She watched as Landon ground the cigarette stub into the ashtray, but she knew what he was going to say – they had boarded a train and disappeared.
‘One of them’s been quarantined. Typhus.’
Flora gasped so loudly that James had to take her hand in his own. ‘Who?’
‘Lorna MacDonald. She was infected on the crossing over. She actually passed the first two medical checks after disembarkation, but there was a query to the other one’s papers—’
‘Mary’s?’
‘Yes. Her paperwork was irregular on first inspection.’
Flora could guess why. Pepper had taken it upon himself to arrange her passport for her to travel over to Paris, but that had been a lucky exception. Upon evacuation, the islanders hadn’t been issued with any formal travel documents. A census had been taken as they disembarked, and of course the minister had always recorded births, deaths and marriages in the kirk register. But passports and visas were down to each islander to sort for themselves...It would have been easy for something to go amiss for international travel.
‘They were held in civil detention for a few days till it was all checked out, but in the meantime the MacDonald woman came down with symptoms. Lucky for us, or they’d have been stamped through.’
‘So where is she now?’
‘Ordinarily she’d have been sent to Grosse ?le, the quarantine island thirty kilometres from here, but by that time it was cut off by the ice, and the only way in or out is by boat. She’s in the isolation unit here.’
‘...And Mary? Where is she while Lorna’s being held?’ James asked.
‘She’s currently in the Red Cross nursery with the baby.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Still in the Port. She can’t go through without her companion.’
Flora and James looked at one another in disbelief. They were still in the city? The two women’s misfortune was their good luck: paperwork and weather had conspired to keep them here in the city. If they had been able to go straight through when they’d docked, they could have been on a train within three hours and ended up who knew where?
Flora squeezed James’s hand, trying to keep her excitement in check.
‘...I don’t understand. Why can’t Mary go through?’
‘She can’t work with a newborn. The companion stated in her papers that she’s a nurse and will be the financial provider. So until she’s cleared from quarantine, the other one has to wait in civil detention.’
Detainment. Flora couldn’t bear the thought of her child’s first months of life being spent like this. He was seventeen weeks old, and six of those had been spent on board ship and in civil detention. Was it much different from a prison? Their hours regulated, movements restricted...
‘But they’ve got money, haven’t they?’ Flora knew that Mary had stolen the money Donald had earned selling the ambergris.
‘Not enough. Not under the new rules the government’s bringing in. It hasn’t been fully rubber-stamped yet but we’ve already been told to crack down. Things are bad here, and getting worse; we don’t need more burdens on the state.’
‘Is Lorna still unwell?’ James asked. ‘She must have been in over a month now. Either she’s actively recovering or she’s actively dying.’
Landon shrugged. ‘I don’t have eyes on the medical files, only the landing cards and papers. That’s all I know.’
‘What will happen to Mary and the baby if Lorna dies?’
‘The mother won’t have any way to earn, and they’ll be deported on the first boat in spring.’
Flora was alarmed by the thought of Lorna dying – she was still a young woman. She would never forgive Lorna for what she’d done, but that didn’t mean she wanted to see her dead.
The waiter appeared with their drinks and James sat back in his seat, deep in thought, as they were set down. He waited for the man to walk away. ‘The nursery – can we go there?’ he asked, keeping his voice low.
‘No,’ Landon said bluntly.
‘Not even for an inducement?’
‘It’s next to impossible. They’re not yet free citizens of Canada. They’re in detention – that means they’re being held in a secure space and guarded.’
Flora remembered the barred windows.
‘The quarantine unit then?’ James pressed, undeterred.
Landon scoffed. ‘Even worse. You do understand they’re trying to contain hazardous, highly infectious diseases that could lead to epidemics if they were to get into the general population? Authorized personnel is small and entry to the building is highly restricted. I can’t even get in there, and I have access nearly everywhere.’
‘Well, that’s very useful to know, Mr Landon.’ James glanced around the room quickly before reaching into his jacket pocket for the wad of bank notes and discreetly slipping them under Landon’s newspaper. ‘That’s for the information you’ve provided so far,’ he murmured.
‘So far?’ Landon enquired. But he didn’t look disappointed.
‘Yes. I have another proposition for you: get us a meeting with Mary.’
‘I’ve already told you—’
‘Next to impossible doesn’t mean impossible. There’s always a way.’
Landon stared. ‘The risks would be much higher. I could lose my job—’
‘I’ll pay double.’
There was a pause, an angry flash of green eyes. Landon didn’t like being pushed around, but he wanted their money. Flora could see him weighing up the odds. ‘I sense you’re a versatile man, otherwise Tucker wouldn’t have pointed us in your direction.’
The fresh mention of Tucker made Landon look up. For all Tucker’s personal shortcomings, he was clearly a skilled businessman, his interests reaching to every corner – and port – of the world.
‘...All right,’ he said finally. ‘Meet me outside the immigration building on Louise Embankment tomorrow evening—’
‘Evening?’ Flora asked. ‘Couldn’t we go in the morning?’ It was hard to imagine waiting another night and another day. She didn’t know how long she could stand the unrelieved anticipation; every minute that passed felt like a month.
‘The detainees are given access to the roof gardens between eight thirty in the morning and six in the evening. The guards and matrons patrol up there during those hours, and there are several hundred other immigrants who’d clock you as soon as you stepped outside...Meet me at quarter to seven, when it’s quiet, and I’ll arrange for her to be up there—’
‘With the baby,’ Flora urged.
Landon hesitated, and she knew she’d betrayed something of her urgency. Worse, her story.
She felt James’s foot press against her own under the table and she sank back.
‘With the baby, if that’s possible. It might not be. It’ll be dark and we won’t have long before they count everyone in for dinner. Whatever you have to say to her, say it quickly.’
‘Understood,’ James nodded as Landon got to his feet.
Both of them watched him cross the room and disappear into the city’s depths. Flora could feel her heart pounding so hard, she knew her body must be quivering.
When she turned to her husband, he was already looking intently at her, his eyes burning with hope. ‘One more night,’ he said, taking her hand and clasping it in his own.
‘One more night,’ she whispered back.
Flora stared down at the reflection of the full-bellied moon shimmering on the black water of the docks. From the roof of the three-storey building, she had a clear view of the entire port: deep-water docks, huge storage sheds, miles of administration buildings, the slink of the railway tracks right up to the water’s edge. There was no longer any traffic in the seaway – the ice had become fully impassable and the Empress of Scotland was now couched in her winter berth. At the height of the crossing season, this place would process several thousand immigrants a day, but now the lights shone on only a few wharves as some pre-docked grain ships were unloaded. She heard the whirr of cranes, the clanking of steel upon steel...This was the epicentre of industrialization – which only made the garden in which she was standing all the more surprising. Thousands of plants were potted all around the vast roof space in a surprising antidote to the heavy industry that surrounded them, and all but disguised the fencing that kept the detainees prisoner here.
Flora was standing in a corner, hidden behind a large evergreen shrub; James stood alone in the open space as they waited for Landon to return with Mary. He felt it would be better not to startle Mary outright. If she saw Flora, she might immediately run. James was as good as a stranger to her, so they didn’t anticipate her remembering him, or at least not outright; it had been eighteen months since his trip to St Kilda. That would give him time to start ‘negotiating’ with Mary, as he had put it. Getting their son back was a business deal that needed to be brokered.
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to calm herself. It was snowing lightly, but she barely noticed the cold as the minutes ticked past. She could think of nothing but seeing her baby at last. How much had he grown? How long was his hair?
They heard footsteps, voices...a familiar scowl carried on words in a kindred accent. Flora looked up sharply as Crabbit Mary came into view, the same as she ever was. She drew a deep breath. Just like that, after crossing a continent and an ocean, Flora was reunited with her past.
Mary was holding the baby closely so that there was little to see of him from this vantage point, but he was bigger, so much bigger than when he’d last left Flora’s arms, not even a day old. The world fell away. She could see his gleaming shock of dark hair, exactly as she’d remembered; she could remember the smell of it...
Instinctively she startled, impelled towards him, but James made a slight turn in her direction as if he anticipated her instincts, telling her to hold back. In that tiny gesture, he reminded her she was not out of mind, just out of sight. She had to trust him.
‘...going to tell me what’s going on?’ Mary asked Landon, looking from him to James and back to Landon again.
As James had hoped, she didn’t seem to recognize the well-dressed gentleman standing before her. She would assume him to be some sort of government official, perhaps. Something to do with her immigration application. Or perhaps one of Lorna’s doctors...
Landon looked only at his paymaster. ‘Make it quick. They’ll be doing the dorm rounds shortly.’
James nodded. Landon sank back into the shadows, his footsteps retreating quickly on the stairs.
‘What’s going on?’ Mary asked, looking more concerned now and clutching the baby closer to her bosom.
‘Mrs McKinnon,’ he said, stepping forward. ‘Time is against us, so I’ll be blunt. I’ve come to reclaim my son.’ James’s voice was cold, utterly toneless, as he stood tall. Even standing six feet away from Mary, he towered over her.
‘...Your what?’ she gasped.
‘I am James Callaghan, the child’s father.’
A moment of blankness was followed by gasping recognition. ‘But...you’re...you’re dead!’
‘Come now, Mrs McKinnon. We both know I’m nothing of the sort. That was the lie concocted by you and Miss MacDonald to put Flora into distress, induce the birth and convince her to give the baby up to you.’ His words were brusque and unforgiving, none of his usual deference or polite euphemism.
Mary took several steps back, her mouth agape. ‘I dinna’ know what y’re talking about.’
‘Denials are pointless. We both know the truth. And the truth is you’re in a sore predicament, Mary. If Lorna doesn’t recover from the typhus, you’re going to be deported back to the UK.’
Her mouth opened and closed as she tried to keep up with him. Flora could see Mary trying to work out how he could know all these things as she struggled to believe her eyes that he was actually standing here: that he had not only followed her to and found her in Quebec, but somehow negotiated a way in here to confront her.
‘...She’s almost well again,’ Mary stammered. ‘We’ll be gone from here within the week.’
‘Not according to my sources,’ James lied.
‘But she wrote to me last week.’
‘Then perhaps she’s sparing you the distress.’
Flora saw Mary’s shock at the bluff. She wasn’t sure what to believe. He clearly had these ‘sources’; how else had he come to be standing here?
‘Of course, once you’re back home, I’m sure it wouldn’t be difficult to persuade the police to take an interest in you. You stole the money to get here, after all.’
‘It was our money! I’m his wife. What’s Donald’s is mine.’
‘It suits you to be married to him now, does it? Even though you deserted him by coming here?’
Mary’s eyes narrowed, and Flora could see her beginning to get to grips with the situation unfolding before her. If there was one thing she knew about the woman, it was that Mary had never been one to back down from a fight.
‘And then, of course, you stole my child by deception and left the country with him. That’s kidnapping. These are far more serious offences.’
‘You can’t prove them.’ Mary’s chin jutted defiantly into the air as she began to rock the baby in her arms, almost in a taunt. ‘His birth certificate has my name down as the mother. His passport lists me as his mother. I’ve a registered nurse ready to testify on oath that she delivered me of this child the night before we evacuated. My neighbours in St Kilda saw me confined throughout the pregnancy, they visited me in bed holding my newborn. My neighbours in Oban will swear on the Bible they saw me with the child, day and night, tending to him as my own...Who’s to say he’s not mine?’
Her rationale was like a spray of bullets hitting them in the chest, one after the other...
‘Donald. The other person whose name is on the birth certificate.’
‘Pah!’ she scoffed. ‘He’s a known liar and a cheat! He’s gone on record to the police saying he deserted me in the hours after the birth to lie with that harlot! Why should anyone believe a word he has to say?’
James didn’t reply and, as a silence stretched, Flora looked over at him in growing horror. They had banked on a strategy of surprise, intimidation, capitulation. Say something else , she willed him.
But what else was there to say? They didn’t have proof. Lorna had constructed a cast-iron alibi in which their entire community had unwittingly served as witnesses. Flora and Mhairi themselves had gone to great lengths to hide their pregnancies on the other side of the isle, and none of the villagers had had cause to doubt Lorna when she said Mary’s pregnancy was precarious and advised lengthy bed rest. There was no reason for the minister to have doubted that Mary was the birth mother when Lorna had told him she’d delivered the baby herself. The only person – besides Donald and James – who had ever known, seen , the truth was Frank Mathieson.
And he was dead.
‘Tell me your price,’ James said finally.
‘What?’ Mary looked bewildered by the question.
‘How much to give up the child? Take a number, double it, I don’t care. How much?’
There was a long silence. For a moment, Flora thought she really was choosing one. But then Mary began to smile. ‘You think there’s a number for this?’ And she pulled the baby closer to her, kissing his head and nuzzling him affectionately.
Flora had to look away, her hand pressed over her mouth. It took everything she had not to leap out from her hiding place and rip the baby from Mary’s arms.
‘Do you really think I’ll ever be able to buy myself another one of these ?’ she asked, angling the baby so that they could finally see his face.
James flinched as he saw his son’s face for the first time – in the moonlight, in the snow, in a foreign country, in another woman’s arms.
The baby squirmed, giving a sudden cry as he felt the cold upon his skin.
Flora thought she was going to throw up.
Mary pulled him back in again, soothing his cries by pushing her crooked pinky into his mouth. ‘What do you think it’s like, eh, for women like us? We’re denied, always on the outside...But your mistake – yours and hers! – gave us an opportunity to be a family. A proper family!...And it’ll never come again, we both know that.
‘Just think what we had to do to get here. To get off St Kilda first and then all the way over here – enduring conditions animals wouldn’t live in. Losing our freedom as we bide our time, patiently waiting to start living the rest of our lives together...No, there is no number. There’s nothing more you can give me – not beyond what you’ve already given.’
A smirk played on her lips, and Flora burst forth from the shadows.
‘You bitch!’ she cried, flailing like a fury as the worst curse she knew fell from her lips.
Mary staggered back in fright as Flora lunged for her son, but James caught her, holding her so that she fell a few agonizing feet short.
‘Darling, no!’
‘Give him to me! Give him to me!’ Flora cried as James struggled to restrain her.
‘Well, well, Flora, y’ came too, I see,’ Mary gasped, recovering. Her eyes travelled over Flora’s expensive coat, the plush fur collar. ‘He made a rich woman of y’ after all then, did he? Too bad he’ll never make a lady of y’.’
‘That’s enough!’ James barked, making both women flinch. Flora had never heard him raise his voice before. He stared at Mary with open disgust. ‘Where’s your compassion, woman? Can’t you see how unnatural this is?’
‘Unnatural?’
‘Yes! A mother separated from her child! You tricked her! You told her I was dead and convinced her that she had no way of supporting the child!’
‘And where’s the compassion for me ?’ Mary demanded, the whites of her eyes showing, a vein in her forehead bulging as her rage finally surfaced. ‘Who’s ever cared about how I’ve suffered? Having to lie with a man who made my skin crawl! Having to endure his body on mine, when it was all for naught anyway? Who’s ever cared that I’ve had to hide the only love I’ve ever known? That the world – and God himself – would forsake me and think me diabolical if they knew the truth of what I am?’
She took several steps away from them, seeing how Flora grew limp in James’s arms, tears streaming down her beautiful face.
‘I’m not moved by her wretchedness. She’s a spoilt brat and always was, but she’s your problem now. If she wants a baby so bad, then give her another one – but you’re not taking mine. Because he is mine. The law itself says so, and I’m never giving him back! I’m all he knows and I’ll die before I let you take him from me—’
And before they could even breathe, she had turned on her heel and was hurrying back down the stairs, disappearing into the building she had called home for the past five weeks.
‘No!’ Flora screamed, feeling her legs give out under her as her baby was taken away again. He had been there, right there , and she had still failed. She collapsed to the ground, feeling a wail erupt from her, an empty sound she had never known her body could even make, as James sank down beside her. His arms kept trying to scoop her up, but it was like holding water. She was undone, let apart at the seams. No stuffing, no shape, no form.
‘Flora, no, my darling. This isn’t the end,’ he cried, his voice thick and split with distress. ‘There’s still more we can do. There’s always another way.’
But she shook her head from side to side; she was unable to form words, but she knew Mary was right. There was nothing they could do to prove the baby was theirs. Flora had given him away and created a perfect cover story that even she could no longer disprove. These were the consequences of her own actions. She had no one to blame but herself.