Grant Buday is the author of the novels Dragonflies, White Lung, Sack of Teeth, Rootbound, The Delusionist, and Atomic Road, the memoir Stranger on a Strange Island, and the travel memoir Golden Goa. His novels have twice been nominated for the City of Vancouver book prize. His articles and essays have been published in Canadian magazines, and his short fiction has appeared in The Journey Prize Anthology and Best Canadian Short Stories. He lives on Mayne Island, British Columbia.
Orphans of Empire
A Novel
Copyright © 2020 by Grant Buday
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For more information, contact the publisher at:
Brindle & Glass
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Edited by Claire Philipson
Copy edited by Meg Yamamoto
Cover design by Tree Abraham
Front cover imagery from the following sources:
[Top] The Seven Sisters, Stanley Park [postcard; date unknown] RBSC-ARC-1596-1-03-14.
[Middle] Postcard of man standing on trail. [postcard; 191]. BC_1456_33_012.
[Bottom] Roadway, Stanley Park, Vancouver, B.C. [postcard; 1930]. UL_1628_0045. All reprinted with permission of the University of British Columbia Library, Rare Books and Special Collections.
[Top right; inset] American Black Bear. Lincoln Park Zoo mammal. 1900. Illinois Urban Landscapes Project. Courtesy, Field Museum. Z84222.
[Middle left; inset] Exterior of the New Brighton Hotel [Photograph; 1886]. Photograph shows George Black beside, and G.B. Corbould on, the horse. City of Vancouver Archives. AM54-S4-: Dist P13. Public domain.
Cataloguing Data Available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 9781927366905 (electronic)
TouchWood Editions gratefully acknowledges that the land on which we live and work is within the traditional territories of the Lkwungen (Esquimalt and Songhees), Malahat, Pacheedaht, Scia’new, T’Sou-ke and WSÁNEĆ (Pauquachin, Tsartlip, Tsawout, Tseycum) peoples.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and of the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,— Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin . . . Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating.
—The Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke
The Asia was scarcely out of Liverpool upon the Irish Sea when Moody’s daughters turned a pale green and began opening and closing their mouths like cod on a dock. Whimpering, they clung to their mother who did not look much better. Moody’s son, John, climbed a bollard and vomited over the rail. Patting the eight-year-old’s back, he said, “There, there, John. There, there. Be strong.” This was a disorienting experience, for he heard himself speaking in his own father’s voice, felt his face assume the expression his own father wore during rare moments of sympathy. Moody took care to blow his cigar smoke away so that the lad did not endure its fumes.
Now Mary and the girls staggered to the railing. The girls stood high on their toes but could not reach so knelt side by side and were sick through a scupper.
The tars ran to set more sail. There were whistles and shouts and cursing so visceral, so briny, so strangely imaginative—much of it to do with whores and toads—that in spite of the chill late October wind Moody’s ears did in fact burn. Men ran up the shrouds and along the booms with the agility of apes. Great spreads of canvas were slammed wide by the breeze. What an engine was a ship, what an orchestra. Moody was exalted. The ship heeled hard, and he clung to a rope as fowl flapped and squawked in their cages. The wind came coursing in off the canvas and the sea rushed past the hull like a river through a narrows as the bow surged and then sank and then surged once more.
To port was Holyhead and to starboard Ireland, not that the Green Isle was visible in the mist. The grey sea rose and rolled while the Asia strained and twisted, her ropes aching and sail edges humming as the men continued to shout. A long voyage lay ahead of them, but at least they were not condemned to go around the Horn. They would train across the Isthmus of Panama and then proceed north once again by sea and, God willing, spend Christmas of 1858 at Victoria. A journey of two months. It had taken Moody that long to reach the Falklands in ’41.
Moody stood five foot seven, slight of build, with narrow shoulders. His predominant features were his dense dark wavy hair, parted on the right, and his equally dense dark beard, which reached the top of his sternum. His cheeks were florid and his right eye slightly lidded as though warily gauging everyone he met for loyalty or deceit. Now he positioned one hand on each of his daughters as though his touch bore some power to soothe. He looked at John draped like an empty sack over a lifeboat. He went to Mary who gripped the rail and stared at the horizon—the one stable thing in view—and he put his arm around her shoulders. “Deep breaths,” he murmured, “deep breaths.”
She nodded bravely. “The ginger is helping,” she lied, assuring him, assuring herself. The wind tugged long wisps of her sandy-brown hair from her black bonnet. She tried to smile and almost accomplished it. She was small, like Moody, a figurine of a woman, sharp chinned, smooth browed, her hazel eyes ever focused, refined and yet defiant.
“It will pass,” he said.
Nodding quickly, she said, “Don’t talk,” and renewed her grip on the rail.
Moody tried to take heart in the fact that she did not seem so bad as on the crossing to Malta two years ago. He was about to remind her of that but thought better of talking when she’d asked him not to.
Clive Gosset appeared, ruddy faced and square shouldered, sideburns and hair as thick as pelts. His missing left eyebrow gave him a severely judging appearance.
“Moody,” he said.
“Gosset.”
“Family appears a bit off.”
“It will pass,” said Moody.
“And you? Stomach sound?”
“Perfect.” He drew deeply on his cigar, then tossed it overboard. He’d always been good at sea.
“The roll is light yet,” said Gosset, as if the best were yet before them. He began packing his pipe, tamping the tobacco with his forefinger on which he wore a sizable ring with a square ruby. Turning away from the wind, he struck a pair of lucifers and stoked a good blaze in the bowl. He smoked dryly.
Moody restrained himself from remarking upon his own not inconsiderable maritime experiences, having been to both the South Atlantic and Mediterranean, for Gosset would only smile in amusement.
Over the proceeding days of the voyage, Gosset’s morning calisthenics became a ritual. He did them loudly, for all to see, counting each repetition, breathing in, breathing out, apparently believing that should he sound like a locomotive, he would achieve the power of a locomotive. Squats, lifts, prone presses, abdominal compressions, dumbbells, the Indian club, shadowboxing, even kicking.
“I learned kicking from a Japanese. Kimoto-san. Join me, Moody. Strike with the heel like so. On the exhalation. Ha!”
Moody lit his morning cigar.
“Bad for the wind,” said Gosset.
“The wind will be fine, I am sure,” said Moody, gazing at the sails vibrating under the breeze, and not reminding Gosset that he smoked a pipe.
“You don’t want a repeat of Malta,” cautioned Gosset.
Stung, Moody said, “Malta was food poisoning.”
“Diet is paramount.” Gosset executed lunges, right foot, left foot, thrusting an imaginary bayonet. “Too much fat is bad.”
“It is said that the elephant lives to seventy-five,” said Moody.
“And the tortoise to a hundred. But the last I looked, sir, I was neither an elephant nor a tortoise.”
Tars gathered to watch Gosset’s antics, some smiling, some frowning, many exchanging glances and most smoking clay pipes.
“Be there any pugilists among you?” called Gosset, shaking out his fists and dancing on his toes. “I have an American silver dollar for any man who can tag me.”
By now the foredeck was crowded with sailors as diverse as a barrel of last year’s apples, scarred, scabbed, shrunken. Mary appeared with the girls and John, who had all gained their sea legs. John had his wooden sword in his belt.
“A silver dollar,” called Gosset.
Moody felt his son looking at him and feigned an easy indifference to the challenge. Eventually a man stepped forward. He was a head taller than Gosset and twice as broad across the shoulders.
“Do take off your hat,” Gosset advised. “You wouldn’t want it damaged.”
The man merely smiled a slow smug grin and set it more firmly upon his head. His biography could be read in his face: nose canted to one side, lumpy brow, one eyelid half-closed, torn ear, an absence of certain teeth.
“What is your name, fellow?”
“Dub.”
“Well met, Dub. Are you fit?”
Dub allowed his gaze to roll across the assembled audience of sailors and said he reckoned he was fit enough, earning himself a chorus of snorts and cackles.
“Is that a Manchester accent?”
“Ancoats.”
“Most excellent.” Gosset was enjoying himself immensely. He slipped the ruby ring from his finger and threaded it onto the lanyard around his neck beside the Saint George, shook out his arms one last time, and set his fists at eleven and three.
The two men circled each other. Dub’s fists were bricks in size and shape and colour. The sailors cheered and wagered and elbowed each other.
“I see by your earrings that you’ve crossed the line, Dub.”
Dub swung.
Gosset sidestepped and jabbed, striking Dub’s chin, driving his head back. More shocked than hurt, Dub blinked and grimaced and then bore down, hunching his shoulders higher. He feinted; Gosset rolled away; he feinted again; Gosset smiled.
“You’ve a tell, Dub. Each time you’re about to swing you squint your right eye. Not much, but enough.” This opened a crack of hesitation just wide enough for Gosset to fill with his fist. Dub’s nose bloomed red and a moustache of blood soon covered his upper lip.
Moody heard Mary escorting the children away with John protesting that he wanted to watch. Moody remained, rooting silently for Dub each time the man threw a punch, flinching each time he took a Gosset blow. And he took many Gosset blows. The fight did not last long. All too soon a right hook to the jaw dropped Dub to his knees, where, arms limp, eyes wallowing, he toppled slowly forward. Gosset caught him under the armpits and lowered him gently to the deck, then patted his back as if wishing him sweet dreams.
“Anyone else?” asked Gosset affably.
Moody felt something at his side and saw that John had escaped his mother and returned to the fight. The boy looked inquiringly at his father who led him away, cautioning him about avoiding the antics of the lower orders. Down in their cabin John held up his fists and pummelled an imaginary opponent. His mother and sisters pointedly ignored him while his father broodingly drummed his fingers on the arms of his chair. The following morning John went missing and was found on deck taking boxing lessons from Gosset. Moody corralled his son.
“But it is a valuable skill,” said Gosset, grinning widely.
“I will educate him,” said Moody, smiling thinly.
“You’re an adept in the art?” There was challenge and surprise and bemusement in Gosset’s tone.
If Moody’s face burned, later that day his thigh froze when, sparring with John, the boy heel kicked him square in the quadriceps, leaving Moody limping for the remainder of their Atlantic crossing.
As they sailed into the Caribbean and past the islands it was inevitable that Moody recall Barbados where he’d grown up. Not so much St. Ann’s Garrison but Bridgetown, and the Negroes and Mulattoes who moved like loud shadows that would suddenly pause and turn and regard him. He remembered the smell of a bloom called white-flower, which was like warm sugared milk. Even aboard the Asia, a mile from shore, the occasional scent of earth and foliage reached them. He remembered the smell of rain on hot sand, low tide in the heat, the must of his father’s felt coat.
Dear Father,
What an excellent callisthenic is a sea voyage! It was touch and go at the start for Mary and the children but they are bending well to the life. I am sorry to hear that your gout persists. But if you have taught me nothing else it is that perseverance is all. Perseverance and direction. These qualities—thanks to you—got me through eight years on the Falklands and my year on Malta. Now, God willing, I am ready to meet the challenge to which my life so far has tended: building the new Colony of British Columbia.
My best to Mother, and I hope that she is not too overcome by melancholy due to the sunny skies.
I will write again tomorrow and hope to dispatch the letters when we reach Aspinwall.
In the meantime I remain,
Your son,
RC Moody
That Moody’s father had been dead for sixteen years, and his mother for seven, did not deter him from writing two, sometimes three letters per month.
One evening Moody found himself alone after dinner with Gosset. The portholes were wide open and yet the room smelled of shag and coffee and vinegar and the unwashed bodies of men.
“Great things,” said Gosset.
“Excuse me?”
“Great things are expected of you. Roads. Squares. Boulevards. Will you cause boulevards to be constructed in the wilderness?” The very shape of the word boulevard seemed to please him.
“Derby will begin as a small but functional city,” said Moody. “A base of operations from which to defend the colony. A hub.”
“A hub?”
“As in a wheel.”
“You have a vision, sir.”
“I hope so.”
“And what about McGowan? Will the wheel of this vision roll over him?”
“I will deal with Ned McGowan.”
Gosset widened his eyes, mock impressed. “He’s an agent provocateur who has a force of thousands.”
“First of all I will gather intelligence.”
“Just so. The lay of the land,” said Gosset, his smile revealing teeth that were very long and very grey. He had shed his black felt coat and unbuttoned his collar and rolled his cuffs, revealing formidable forearms. “But you’ll need more than intelligence.”
Moody felt no need to explain or rationalize his methods to Gosset. At the same time the man unnerved him. He still did not know exactly why he was on board. “It’s late. I’ll retire.”
“But you are scarcely begun your great endeavour of creating a capital and defending the colony against the Americans!”
Moody allowed a flicker of a smile as he indulged Gosset’s wit. “Then all the more reason to be rested.”
“Yes,” said Gosset dismissively. “Go to bed.”
Moody halted and faced him. “Just what’s your business in the colony?”
Gosset sat forward and set his hand on the table as though to display his fighter’s knuckles and ruby ring. “It’s a formidable land. Wild animals. Wild men. Trees wide enough to drive a team of horses through.”
“We will go around those,” said Moody, rather pleased with himself, quick wit never having been his long suit.
Gosset sat back. He did not care to be taken lightly. “And behind every tree one of Ned McGowan’s Yankee spies.” He trapped a roach under his palm, then held it between his thumb and forefinger. Moody feared that Gosset would dismember it or, worse, eat it. There had been a man in his corps on the Falklands by the name of Yardley who had gone mad and taken to eating insects. Gosset tossed the roach aside.
“Direct force against a numerically superior enemy is foolish,” said Moody as if quoting a manual.
“Spoken like an administrator, sir.”
“And you are being evasive about your role in British Columbia, Gosset.”
Gosset smiled his smile and sucked his teeth. “Information. Observation. Evaluation. And much else. Reporting directly to Governor Douglas.”
Moody muttered good night and departed with Gosset’s last statement lodged like a pimple in his ear.
The Americans called it Aspinwall and the Spanish called it Colón. By either name the port city on the Caribbean side of the Isthmus of Panama was oppressive. The air was mud and brine, the inhabitants stunned and ragged, and most of its buildings teetered on stilts. The dogs under the houses panted and the chickens blinked and the air was grey with mosquitoes and smoke. A short carriage ride along a gravelled road led to a station where everyone sweated and a locomotive pumped steam into the low overcast. The inescapable Gosset appeared at Moody’s side displaying a saurian smile and pointing to a row of barrels. “Pickled corpses,” he said with the satisfaction a wine merchant might show for a cargo of vintage port. “Shipped to the medical schools of Europe and America. Wogs doing their bit for medical science.”
Children corralled in her arms, Mary turned away from Gosset as though from a stench. John, however, escaped her embrace and asked Gosset, “Are you going to box some more?”
“Ah, young sir.” He winked and grinned and sent a slow left hook through the sultry air to which John responded with his own left hook. To the boy’s profound embarrassment, his mother called him and he reluctantly joined her, leaving Moody and Gosset watching the preparations for departure. Porters humped bags and bales and a gang of navvies squatted by a stack of ties. Beyond the steam and the sheds stood jungle, a dense barrier of nameless weed wood that appeared to watch and wait. Moody envisioned a decisive shove from the train sending Gosset into that jungle, which might chew him up.
A shrill high whistle.
Moody ushered his family to the first-class carriage and was relieved that it was no worse than many another he’d ridden in England, though there was the not insignificant issue of a sizable snake curled on one of the seats. Moody backed Mary and the kids out of the compartment and called for the porter.
“Víbora,” said the man.
“Fer-de-lance,” said Gosset.
“Is it poisonous?” asked John hopefully.
“Among the worst,” said Gosset admiringly.
The porter, sweating richly in his blue and silver uniform, threw his cap at it. When the snake struck the cap, the porter cut the reptile in two with his machete, then shovelled the halves out the window, causing a commotion among the trackside vendors. Another whistle blew, the train lurched, Moody reached to steady Mary, and the carriage began to move and the vine- strangled trees to slide past. Amanda and Abigail sat, their feet not quite reaching the floor, and kicked their heels against the hardwood of the seat-facing whose crimson grain suggested the ripples on a pool of stirred blood. Moody placed his hands on his son’s shoulders—how slim and frail they felt—and gently drew him away from the window. John looked more like his mother than his father and this endeared him all the more to Moody. “Keep your head in, lad.”
“Will we see Clive again?” asked John. “He’s coming, isn’t he? All the way to Victoria?”
Moody and his wife looked at each other and then at their son. “Yes,” said Moody, “Mr Gosset is en route to Victoria as well.”
Satisfied, John took recourse in his stack of penny dreadfuls with their corsairs and gunfighters.
“But he will be quite busy,” cautioned Moody.
John looked up hopefully. “Killing Indians? Boxing Yankees on their ears? Running them through with his sword?”
“I rather doubt anything so dramatic,” said Moody.
“Why does he have only one eyebrow?” asked Abigail and Amanda simultaneously. “He looks queer.”
“Does not,” said John.
“Does.”
“I should like to have only one eyebrow,” said John.
Moody demanded to know why; his son responded that it was manly and the twins tittered.
Soon the train was rolling so loudly that at first Moody did not realize he was also hearing a cuckoo clock calling the hour. He looked to Mary who was equally bemused. He stepped into the corridor and looked both ways, and as the mechanical bird continued to call he went along the aisle past Gosset’s compartment to one in which a pale woman sat in stately solitude in a black lace mantilla and veil, her head turned to watch the jungle, her hands folded on her lap, silver rings on all her fingers, while on the seat opposite sat the cuckoo clock, the door slapping open one final time and the bird emerging on a scissor mechanism—cuckoo!—then clattering back in. They had departed exactly at noon.
Birds fled screeching from the train and Moody believed that he saw faces peering from the jungle, faces staring, frowning, judging, and he felt obscurely indignant even as he felt obscurely aware of some wrong that had been committed, a wrong that he chose not to examine too closely. They passed a man on a horse leading a string of horses laden with sacks and in one case a naked corpse. He shut the canvas blinds and sat back and closed his eyes and tried to rest.
His mother had spent most of her days in shuttered rooms, oppressed by the invasive glare of the Caribbean sun. She had been reclusive and melancholic and perpetually exhausted, lost in the fogs of her own remote gloom, while his father, stalwart, vigorous, rode every day and addressed young Richard as “sir” and expected the same. Moody, hurt by his son’s attachment to Gosset, reminded himself that he had learned boxing and fencing not from his own father but from a Corporal Braddock whom, now, he could scarcely remember.
His father had overseen fortifications and roads and drainage in Bridgetown. When he returned home each afternoon he’d hand young Richard his pith helmet to wipe with a cloth dampened with lemon water and then hang on its peg. The boy would smell the odour of sweat and fabric and hair oil. This small ritual was precious, for his father’s helmet was important; it bore the cross of Saint George, patron saint of England, the greatest country on earth. In the evenings the Moodys sat on the lawn of scrubby grass, careful never to place their chairs beneath the coconut palms. Whenever one of the five-pound nuts dropped, Moody’s father would raise his eyebrows and nod forebodingly as if to say: Let that be a lesson to you on the lurking dangers of the tropics.
The one time he saw his father and mother jolly was at Brighton Beach, in the year 1829. Richard had been four years at school, and his parents had come to England and collected him. They stayed in Brighton’s Queen Anne Hotel and there, in August, his father, in a blue and white striped bathing costume, had pretended to trip and fall into the waves while Moody’s mother, usually averse to heat and sun and display, had slapped her thighs and laughed while sixteen-year-old Richard had run into the water and frolicked with his father, each taking turns at pratfalls and plunges in the glittering green sea. Later, they’d eaten mutton curry and remarked with approval on how red the sun had burnt them, something that never happened in Barbados where they avoided exposure at all costs. Thus Brighton earned a special place in Moody’s heart.
Their arrival at Colón on the east coast had felt like a closing in, whereas the vista of the Pacific on the west was an opening out. The train descended the western slope and passed the port, and Moody set John the task of categorizing the ships: twenty-two of them lighters and tugs, ten sailing vessels, four sternwheelers, and one half-sunk galleon. Moody gave the boy a ha’penny, which, to his father’s bemusement, he tested between his teeth.
That evening the Moodys dined with the acting vice-consul, Charles Toll. The children were delighted by a parrot that recited the alphabet in English and Spanish, as well as by one of the balcony posts that hummed because it was infested by a certain beetle. Toll had held positions in Valparaíso and Lima, and though at forty he was five years younger than Moody, he looked ten years older, suffering a palsy of the right cheek and eye, hair loss, a waxy complexion, wens on his neck, and an array of other tics. They ate strips of braised alligator and drank red wine with lemon juice. Toll spoke slowly and listened with great concentration. He talked of an article he had read on the subject of mould by a Mr Darwin and claimed that Panama City was a glorious location for the stuff, which was everywhere, even in his shoes. The evening ended when Toll fell out of his chair and began to shake uncontrollably and froth at the mouth, much to the fascination of the children.
Two mornings later they boarded a ship north. As the hurricane season was over, the weather was fine with clear skies and a steady warm wind from the southwest. They were all feeling like hardened travellers, and no one was seasick in spite of the different roll of the vessel. San Francisco, in contrast, was heavily fogged and rainy. They boarded a paddle steamer for the final leg to Victoria and were joined by no less than two hundred and thirty gold seekers who filled every inch of deck with their kits, singing, shouting, swearing, brawling, spitting, and performing other bodily functions. Off the coast of Oregon the seas grew rough and many were violently ill. Like a visitor to a prison, Gosset entertained himself by strolling amid the rabble. “Of course,” he remarked to Moody with easy confidence and evident satisfaction, “half will be dead within the year, making our jobs easier.”
New Westminster, Colony of British Columbia
A hand snaked out and pinched Frisadie’s backside, causing her to slop the tea. Laughter erupted around the table until Mrs Frame appeared in the dining room entry drying her red-knuckled hands on a rag. She glared the men into silence and reminded them that she possessed a goodly stock of Hawke’s Rodent Remedy.
“You see,” she said, with a rare display of satisfaction, “the sugar hides the bitterness of the strychnine while the opium sends the rat off to a sleep from which it don’t never return. So you lot keep your filthy mitts to yourselves.”
The lodgers cleared their throats and wiped their faces and scraped back their chairs—or tried not to scrape them for fear of scarring the floor and incurring more of their landlady’s wrath—and fled the table, plucking hats and coats from pegs and heading off to work, most being clerks in the river trade.
When they were gone Frisadie cleared the table and dumped the remaining oatmeal into the pot where it would be added to the evening’s pudding. Then she scrubbed and stacked the dishes and lugged the tub outside and sluiced the front steps. Lingering on the porch she watched two boys not much younger than her pass with fishing poles. They were in rolled pants and shirt sleeves and heading for the river. Across the street the cooper was hammering barrel staves with a mallet. It had rained in the night but now the sun shone and the first flush of April mosquitoes whined in her ears.
“Frisdadie! See to the beds.”
Armed with broom, pan, and rag, she entered the dormitory and slid up the window for the air smelled of armpit, hair oil, and shag, then gave everything a going-over. She gathered the pages of The British Columbian. As usual the lodgers had scrawled all over the business section. There were listings with one, two, or three stars by them. The words buy!!! or sell!!! or bollocks!!! frequently adorned the margins.
“Frisdadie! I’ll have that paper!”
“Right away, Mrs Frame.”
It was slated for fire starter and the thunderbox. Folding it neat, Frisadie went to Mrs Frame’s office, an alcove separated from the kitchen by a weighted sheet hung by tacks from the ceiling.
“Put it there,” she said, tapping the corner of the trestle table that served as her desk, and continued to page through her ledger. Her handwriting was surprisingly stately, even if her hand itself was as cracked and dry as her shoe. Her hair was thin and her teeth yellow, though her chin bore a stylish curve, like the scrollwork on a fancy table leg. There was no evidence of any Mr Frame, no photo or portrait, no ring on Mrs Frame’s finger, and the lodgers never dared ask. If she had children they had fled or died and Frisadie did not inquire. A copy of The Illustrated Police News lay on the desk. On the cover a constable was in the process of apprehending a dusky-hued thief picking the pocket of a gentleman.
Frisadie returned to the lodgers’ room, which smelled better now, and shut the window. It faced north so the light was muted, the plank floor dull and scuffed. She wiped the sconces, then collected the candle stubs that supplemented the gas lighting and added them to a pot for remelting.
“Now take care with them rugs,” called Mrs Frame. “Don’t beat them through. I’ve no intention of buying new ones.”
“Yes, Mrs Frame.” She dragged the rugs onto the back landing and draped them over the rail and gave them a measured thrashing with the paddle. To the left was the outhouse and to the right the riverbank where boys fished and shoved and shouted and boats and barges drifted. The sky was a deep blue with clumps of white cloud, so she left the rugs to air and went inside and got busy sweeping the rat droppings from the corridor. Scarcely a decade old, Mrs Frame’s house already seemed ancient, sagging in on itself like a rain-battered mushroom. The stairs complained under the weight of every footstep, the lath and plaster was swollen, the slats in the wainscot so loose the roaches travelled in and out at will. Along with the smell of river mud there was the smell of fried fat, and something else that Frisadie could never quite name; perhaps it was the odour of the colour grey. At eleven by the cuckoo Mrs Frame invited her to a cup of the Queen’s Blend in the dining room.
“Now about these rats, Frisdadie. Are you laying out the Hawke’s?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I had a Frenchman here who said in many corners of the world rat is rated a delicacy. Did you eat rat in Hawai‘i?”
Masking her indignation, all too used to such notions of island life, she said no, she had not. “Fish and pork and chicken. Though there were many rats on the Cowlitz. Forty-six times I saw a rat. I counted.”
Mrs Frame was alarmed. “The same rat forty-six times?”
“I don’t know. Different rats, I think. It was always dawn or dusk so hard to say, and they were very quick to avoid the ship’s cats.”
“You have led a wide life, Frisdadie.”
“Yes, Mrs Frame.” In fact her life felt as tight as small shoes though she didn’t contradict, just as she never corrected the mispronunciation of her name.
“Now bring those rugs in. I don’t trust this April weather. It’s topsy-turvy.”
Mrs Frame was right; the sky was closing over and the air cooling.
“You’d best get to the market toot sweet if you want to miss the deluge.” She handed her a list.
This was the best part of the day, for she loved exploring the streets and shops of New Westminster. She arranged her shawl of red and black checks and took two gunny sacks and went along Front Street past the wharves and up to Columbia. New Westminster felt different from Victoria, where she’d lived nearly nine years. Victoria was all sea and rock and glare, while New Westminster was all forest and river and mosquitoes, though both were a hodgepodge of people, mostly white, or off-white—it was often impossible to tell due to the filth—as well as many Natives and Chinese, speaking every sort of lingo.
As usual, Frisadie took note of which businesses were lively and which idle. Cran & Sons Barber Shop, smelling of pomade and cologne, did a steady trade, though she wondered at a day spent staring into heads of hair, especially those of men largely indifferent to hygiene. Gleason the cobbler bent goblin-like over his last. Frisadie liked the sweetish scent of leather and paused to look in his window, admiring the strength of his hands as he worked even as she shivered at the thought of being touched by such trollish fingers. He was never short of trade, though. Boots and shoes of all styles and in every state of wear lined his racks. She passed the Grelley brothers’ Colonial Hotel. Their ad ran regularly in The British Columbian: rooms by day, week, or month, a dining parlour welcoming parties and families, a billiard salon, a taproom featuring a full stock of ales and wines and whiskeys, as well as cigars and sundries. The door opened and two men rolled out.
“Hello, my darlin’!”
Frisadie looked away and hurried on.
“No need to run, my brown beauty!”
She took refuge in a chemist’s that smelled of chalk and vinegar and found herself studying the skin whiteners. There was Malablanche’s Emollient, Venetian Cerise, Fair Lady Maiden Soap, Pink Whisper, and Victoria’s Lightener, which provided visual proof of its guaranteed efficacy in the form of cartoons showing the transformation of a distinctly dusky lady—dense cross- hatching indicating her skin tone—into a woman as white as the Queen herself. She touched one jar and then another with no intention of purchasing because in truth she rated her colouring far more attractive than the frog-belly white of the man behind the counter giving her the hard eye lest she pinch something. She was sixteen years old. At five foot eight and eleven stone, she stood out. Her eyes were black, as was her long and wavy hair, the dimples in her cheeks were deep enough to hold pennies, her chin strong, and her teeth would be called perfect but for a gap between the two front candidates. Peering out the chemist’s window, she saw that her pursuers were gone.
“Good day, sir!” she called to the clerk and sailed out. At the market she bought potatoes, squeezing them to find the least spongy, for Mrs Frame did not approve of a spongy spud. On the walk back there was thunder, a burst of rain, and shouts from men in a doorway inviting her with lewd gestures to come hither. One began to follow her and she ran. Fortunately he was drunk and fell in the mud, much to the entertainment of his fellows. Stumbling into the kitchen out of breath, she took a moment to recover, then draped her shawl over the drying rack.
Mrs Frame was sharp eyed and no fool. Seeing the girl’s agitation, she divined the cause. “You’ve got big ’uns, Frisdadie. I’ve told you, bind them tight. And keep your gaze down and be brisk about your business. If louts give you stick send them to me and I’ll put the boot to their arse.” She poured her a cup of tea strong enough to take paint from a hull and they sat by the stove, which had not been fed since breakfast so the tea was all but cold.
“Finish that tea,” she said after a few minutes’ repose. “Now, there’s good dry fir branches up back of the Customs House. I saw them the other day. Fetch them. They’ll be snapped up if we don’t hop to it.”
Shawl still damp, hatchet rolled in the lumber sling, Frisadie headed off. The rain had stopped and the brick walls steamed in the sun. She found the branches and, down on one knee, hacked them into lengths, working with her face averted and one eye shut against chips and splinters. When she had a good stack she hoisted the sling over her shoulder. The wood wasn’t as dry as Mrs Frame thought but it would burn and best of all it was free. On the way back some boys shouted, “Hey, brown Betty, will you hot my pot?” and made queer gestures.
Mrs Frame had the woodbox open and waiting. When it was filled she said, “Now go for your break, Frisdadie. There’s a good ’un.” She said this with the air of a great and noble soul bestowing blessings upon the needy.
Her room was long and narrow with a slanted ceiling. She pulled the window up and leaned out and smelled brick and tree sap and outhouse, as well as the mud of the riverbank where boys threw their arms up in triumph as if at the endless possibilities before them. Truly it was a man’s world. She shut the window and lay on her pallet and pulled the quilt up to her chin and fought back tears. On a shelf sat the carved wooden pineapple that she’d sawn from the newel post in Mrs Mace’s house. Sitting up, she cradled it in her arms. Before coming to New Westminster she’d lived from the ages of seven to fifteen with Mrs Mace in Victoria. Mrs Mace had tutored Frisadie in drawing and needlework with indifferent results. She’d yawned over poetry, played the piano clumsily, danced with leaden feet, and was incontrovertible proof that not all Polynesians could sing.
“This is not a bad thing,” announced the indomitable Mrs Mace one afternoon when the girl had failed to distinguish a C-flat from a C-sharp. Mrs Mace was lean and old, with white hair, bright blue eyes, powdered cheeks, and boundless optimism. “Our aim is not to make you what you are not, but to find out what you are. What are you, Frisadie?”
“I don’t know, ma’am.”
“Then we must search. Close your eyes and look within. Like so.” She raised her chin and shut her eyes and breathed deeply. “Are you looking within, Frisadie?”
“I’m trying.”
“And what do you see?”
“Nothing.”
“Look deeper. Look with all your eyes.”
How exalted that sounded, as if choirs of angels awaited inside of her. She tried but saw only dark.
“This is a practice perfected by the sages of Hindustan, Frisadie. Be diligent. Practise every day, morning and evening, and you shall thrive.”
She did as she was directed, yet her mind wandered and she found herself counting, forward or backward, adding or subtracting, multiplying or dividing, anything to do with numbers.
“Have you found yourself, Frisadie?”
“I think so, Mrs Mace.”
“What are you?”
“A zero.”
“You mean to say that you are nothing?”
“I don’t know; I’m afraid I just don’t seem to add up.”
Mrs Mace had adopted Frisadie and her mother when they’d arrived from Honolulu. They were destitute, her father having sickened and died on the voyage, and his money, admittedly not much, having strangely, inexplicably, vanished. He’d been offered a position with the Hudson’s Bay Company in Fort Victoria, what with the plans to close the post in Honolulu, and saw it as an opportunity, even if it did mean leaving Hawai‘i over his wife’s objections. She had no interest in the Crown Colony of Vancouver Island and was highly skeptical of haole, whom she rated loud, malodorous, and deceitful. All these years later Frisadie could still hear her voice, adamant and pleading: You can’t trust them! Frisadie and her mother had not been three days with Mrs Mace when a boy from the company sought them out. He wore a ragged frock coat and top hat with cards and feathers in the band and presented Frisadie’s mother with a letter informing her that she owed the fantastic sum of fifty-two dollars—twenty per adult and twelve for the child—for their fare from Honolulu to Victoria, which her husband had contracted to work off via his employment. Frisadie’s mother went all but catatonic. In spite of Mrs Mace’s best efforts to placate her, Frisadie’s mother became a ghost, withdrawing into herself and vanishing into the shadows of the house, rarely speaking or eating, drifting along corridors and through rooms, lingering at windows, pausing to touch the wooden pineapple carved atop the newel post at the foot of the stairs. Eventually Mrs Mace’s solicitor negotiated a settlement with the venerable company of twenty-six dollars, which Mrs Mace paid with no thought to compensation. Seven years old, Frisadie was shattered by the loss of her father, stunned and confused at the state of her mother, and terrified by the spectacle of the strange new city of Victoria with its wild gabble of people, all too many of them haole. Seeking something familiar, she was drawn to that pineapple newel post.
Now, eight years later, lying on her mattress in Mrs Frame’s New Westminster boarding house, cradling that very same carved wooden pineapple, which she’d taken with her, it seemed to Frisadie that two paths lay before her. One led to matrimony and motherhood; the other led to money and independence. In short, she had to find a husband or a business. She knew nothing of men, and if the ones she met in the street and in Mrs Frame’s establishment were anything to go by she didn’t much like what she saw, for they were loud and hairy and brutish, and some even piddled the beds.
Yet if not marriage then what business? She had no skills other than washing clothes and swabbing floors. The only natural inclination she seemed to possess was a facility with numbers, taking pleasure in equations and the beauty of a balanced ledger. She knew that Mrs Frame’s lodgers would be happy to pay more per week if her coffee was stronger and her stews contained more meat, that the increase in revenue would far outpace the costs of supplies. An investment in better-quality linen and tableware would also have paid off. Frisadie did not offer her opinion, however, having no desire to begin a war with Mrs Frame, the one person in the world who, since the deaths of her mother and Mrs Mace, looked out for her.
Lying there cradling her wooden pineapple, she stared at the water stains on the ceiling slats and breathed deeply in and out, recalling old Mrs Mace’s advice that it soothed the spirit, which it did, somewhat.
“Frisdadie!”
In the kitchen, Mrs Frame gave her the hard eye and remarked that she was very pleased that she deigned to join her. When Frisadie apologized and said that she’d dozed off, Mrs Frame observed that she was a great one for sleeping. “Now, here’s the evening’s menu.”
Frisadie held the page written out in Mrs Frame’s surprisingly elegant penmanship:
Fish head soup
Pork stew
Roast potatoes
Beet salad in sweet pickle juice
Pease pudding with raisins
Tea or coffee
“They should be grateful.” She returned the menu with both hands as though it was a rare document.