Chapter 10 #6
It isn’t him, of course. The hair is longish, wispy, grey, the hunched stature that of an elderly man. Letting out a yelp, Enda tries to leap upright but her legs fail to unbend, stiff as they are with pins and needles, and she falls back to the seat, pushing away the hand.
A voice says something in French, something intended to be soothing, followed by a question. When she doesn’t respond, the man tries again: “Do not be afraid, my child.”
It is the priest of the church, of course, looming over her in his soutane. The light behind him is ashy and bleached by dawn. Enda snatches up her pack, her fiddle, and makes as if to dart around him but the priest holds up his palms, like a man trying to calm a frightened horse.
“Please do not run,” he says. “Let us sit.” He indicates a pew. “Tell me why you are here, in my church.”
Enda doesn’t speak for a while. She sits, however, in the pew, with an eye on the door, and one hand on her bundle.
The priest, beside her, hands laced together, waits with the forbearance of the elderly.
She tells him, haltingly at first, of coming alone to Québec, her savings sewn into a seam (she doesn’t divulge that the papers belonged to her brother).
And she tells him about having ship fever, and about the man who stole her money, and sleeping in the park with the fountain, and the priest listens, his head on one side.
“And now,” he says, “you have nothing and no one.”
Enda flinches at this devastating analysis.
“I have my fiddle,” she mutters, kicking her boot into the pew in front of her.
“Tell me your name, child.”
“Enda.”
“I would like to help you, Enda of the violin, if you will permit it,” the priest says. “Because here it is not easy for a woman alone. Or safe. I would not like to see…” He trails into silence, as if reluctant to divulge what he is imagining.
“There are many in your position who fall into bad ways here,” he says eventually. “I hope you understand me.”
She nods, knowing yet not knowing.
“I would not like to see this happen to you. So, tell me, are you willing to work?”
“Of course.”
“I think, for now, we must also find you a place to sleep. Do you agree?”
“I do.”
“There is a household looking for a hired girl. They have asked me if I know of a God-fearing girl of fine character. It is a good situation, with a respectable family, who come to my church every week. The gentleman is a fur-trader. You will have to work hard but they will treat you fairly, giving you a bed and also a small wage. How would you like to be a hired girl? Can you do this work?”
“What kind of work does a hired girl do?”
“Cleaning, cooking, laundry, taking care of the house.”
Enda closes her eyes briefly. She sees her mother, she sees Rose, sweeping the floors with their brooms, pounding salt into oatmeal, dipping linens in and out of suds, scrubbing at the table, the floor, the hearth.
“I can,” she says.
Enda leaves the church with a letter from the French priest. She steps out into the dawn. She squares her shoulders and sets her course for the house of the fur-trader.
The woman who answers her knock at the back door—Enda mistakenly assumes she is the fur-trader’s wife but later learns she is the cook—looks her up and down with a tsk-ing sound.
Enda has attempted to tidy herself, to smooth down her hair.
She is wearing Liam’s old jacket over the red-embroidered skirt; she has hidden her bundle of possessions and her fiddle behind a bush.
The woman leans against the screen door and crosses her arms. She asks Enda, does she know how to clean and mop, can she do laundry, is she afraid of hard work?
Enda answers, yes, yes and no. She finds she is telling herself to keep Rose at the forefront of her mind, how Rose would comport herself in this situation, how she always charms people on first sight.
Enda breathes evenly, in and out, she tilts her head to the angle of Rose’s, she produces a smile of such radiance and earnestness and trustworthiness—Rose’s smile—that the woman’s misgivings evaporate.
The woman shifts from one leg to the other; she adjusts her apron’s tie, saying that a lot of people won’t let Enda’s people past the door but she herself isn’t like that because her own mother came from County Down.
She is willing to give her a chance. A week’s trial.
There may be an old dress somewhere in the house that could be altered for Enda, for she cannot go about the place like that.
She eyes Enda’s cropped hair but passes no comment, assuming that the girl’s head was cut for sanitation reasons at the quarantine station.
Enda steps in over the threshold. She sheds her jacket, dons an apron and listens as the woman tells her where to find the mop, the polish, the cleaning rags, where the laundry is done, where the vegetables are scrubbed.
She is shown a narrow bed in a room up in the eaves of the house, which is hers and hers alone.
Enda places beneath it her bundle and her fiddle, and rests a hand on the patchwork coverlet, breathing out a long, unsteady breath.
She is a hard worker, of course, but not perhaps in the way the cook and the fur-trader family would like.
Enda is expected to rise at five, rake out the grates, lay the fires, mop the floors, dust the mantels, with their porcelain figures, taxidermied stoats, chiming clocks, inlaid boxes, enamelled vases.
She is later meant to serve the lunch, in a way that is helpful but unobtrusive, then clear the plates, and wash everything up, replacing the china in the cupboards and the pans in the kitchen press.
In the afternoons, while the cook puts up her feet, Enda will do the laundry, clean the upper floors, sweeping the bedrooms, tidying away the family’s clothes; she must make scones and bread for the children’s tea at four o’clock. Then comes the serving of dinner.
The cook takes a shine to Enda, despite her shortcomings as a maid.
The girl is good company; she’ll say that for her.
At the end of the day, when dinner has been served and cleared away, and it’s just the two of them in the kitchen, washing up and tidying for the next morning, most hired girls will be sullen and exhausted.
Not Enda. The girl is always full of chat, will sing made-up songs to make the cook laugh, and often does impressions of the master or his wife or their guests.
I have so many rings on my fingers, Enda will say, in an exaggerated French drawl, draping a dishcloth over her head to imitate the fur-trader’s elderly mother, that it’s simply too much to ask of me to raise my cutlery to my lips. Could you perhaps feed me, mon coeur?
Enda is not constitutionally suited to being a hired girl, the cook privately thinks.
“Unobtrusive” is not an adjective anyone might apply to her.
She doesn’t have a servile bone in her body.
She whistles while she sweeps, which the lady of the house is forced to speak to the cook about, who in turn tells Enda.
She thumps the plates down on the table with a grin, as if they are made of tin, not fine china.
She is sometimes to be found gazing out of the window; once the fur-trader himself is certain he witnesses the girl taking down a book from his library shelves.
She asks far too many questions. Furthermore, she teaches the children songs in some Hibernian dialect, which their parents do not know the meaning of, and do not wish to.
She is found, once, exhorting them to jump over a rope she has tied to a garden fence, which she is swinging in a circle, her sleeves rolled up.
She plays her fiddle, albeit softly, late into the night, up there in the attic where she sleeps, and it may be heard, on windless evenings, in the bedrooms below, giving rise to clamouring from the children, who wish to be allowed to watch.
It comes to the attention of the parents that she has given names to their famed collection of taxidermied animals, which the fur-trader finds disrespectful.
All in all, while they recognise that the girl is a good sort, they find her presence in the house disruptive, oddly distracting.
It is hard to put a finger on why but she makes everyone feel prickling and unsatisfied, as if her spiritedness is somehow contagious.
When summer comes, and the family leave the city for their country house, a large property on an island facing out into the ocean, Enda tells the cook that she thinks she won’t come with them.
She’ll stay in the city; the boy who delivers the coal has told her of an inn that needs a maid.
The cook nods gruffly, flicks her apron.
Well, she blusters, at least I’ll finally get some peace around here.
Always remember, Enda whispers to the cook, as she hugs her goodbye, that the squirrel on the stairs is called Cyril. The cook swats her on the arm and turns quickly away.
Enda works at the inn on the outskirts of Québec for several months, until the summer season is over, then finds a position in the kitchen of a hotel over the winter.
The cold in this country takes her by surprise, she tells the cook, when she visits her on a Sunday afternoon—the fur-trader’s family have returned from their fair-weather house.
She had thought she knew about weather, had considered herself to be brave in the face of it, but the winter here is like nothing she has ever experienced.
True enough, the cook says, her feet resting on the range.
You need a proper coat, my girl, gloves too—you can’t be going about in that thin jacket.