The Lemon Tree
The Lemon Tree
Helen Forrester
A compelling novel of Liverpool and Canada, from the bestselling author of Liverpool Daisy, Three Women of Liverpool and Thursday’s Child.For Helena Al-Khoury, life as an immigrant has been full of loneliness and despair. On the long road that has taken her from her family home in the Lebanon to the bustling port of Liverpool, the slums of Chicago, and finally to the Canadian wilderness, the struggle to overcome heartbreak, loss and cruel hardship has taken a heavy toll. Now, at last, with the constant support of Joe, her devoted lover, she has developed into a strong, independent woman.When unexpected circumstances take her back across the Atlantic to Liverpool, Helena is offered the chance to take over the family business, and to become a success in her own right. Yet with her love far away on another continent, she feels torn apart. Soon the tragedies of the past and the challenges of the future threaten to overwhelm her…
HELEN FORRESTER
The Lemon Tree
Copyright (#ulink_831aae6a-c054-5662-b21a-182e211c048a)
HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
This paperback edition 1995
Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1991
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1990
Copyright © Helen Forrester 1990
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Ebook Edition © JULY 2012 ISBN 9780007392155
Version 2017-11-14
Contents
Cover (#u0f90a340-3366-5a36-ae36-12ea3bc5e646)
Title Page (#u6e09698f-66dc-5e65-9f2f-cdce7cc2c122)
Copyright (#u8bbb40df-1573-5131-b8d5-45e60411245c)
Chapter One (#uc16b5f83-1621-5cbd-b7a6-eeafbe3e4c72)
Chapter Two (#u15a82147-f3d7-5b1b-ab06-9e94e4c75c7d)
Chapter Three (#ua15ebd01-7c77-5c9a-8616-0fb5912e5e09)
Chapter Four (#u643aff3a-e694-5d3c-b28a-a836dadfac93)
Chapter Five (#ue906237f-fa66-5db9-a35d-b89be2a426c1)
Chapter Six (#u5170262c-c4a9-53f0-8f41-2c7c54f8fbe7)
Chapter Seven (#uabd6907b-f09e-5e10-9c75-b6b8bbd46036)
Chapter Eight (#uf24b6d4e-dfeb-58b2-810f-c2a0f1a66134)
Chapter Nine (#ua85c49bc-18d9-5d23-8ac1-889549fc6427)
Chapter Ten (#u1b90d155-8c85-5015-a868-b401303fa8ff)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#ulink_3a7af2f8-6c6a-5588-a15e-cefb2086fea4)
‘He’s a woman,’ Mr George Tasker announced lugubriously to Sarah, his wife of thirty years. He pushed the dog off the easy chair by the fire and sat down to take off his boots; they were very wet and were covered with wavy lines of white sediment. He put them neatly in the hearth to dry, as he continued, ‘I’m workin’ for a woman.’ His thick Liverpool accent made him sound as if he had a heavy cold in the head.
‘George, you know better than to walk on me new coconut matting with your dirty boots,’ Sarah scolded. ‘And what do you mean – he’s a woman?’
‘Wallace H. Harding is a woman!’
‘Never!’
‘He is – that is, she is. The Ould Fella’s niece – not a nephew, like we imagined. She come into our department this morning, large as life, with the lawyer, Mr Benson, and Mr Turner, the chemist.’ He stood up and rubbed his cold hands before the glowing fire. ‘She stopped and shook hands with me, seeing as I’m the Soap Master,’ he added with obvious satisfaction.
Sarah Tasker paused in the act of getting a casserole of tripe and onions out of the oven. She looked up at him through a burst of steam. ‘Well, I’m blowed! How queer!’
She turned and laid the casserole on a white-scrubbed deal table. On a wooden board lay a loaf of bread with several slices ready cut; beside it, sat a small dish of butter. She said mechanically, ‘Come and have your tea, luv.’ She picked up a brown teapot from the hob of the kitchen range and put it on the table, beside two heavy pint mugs and a pitcher of milk. Then, from a built-in shelf, she lifted down the pride of her kitchen, a green glass sugar basin won at a fair. She put it by the teapot.
In anticipation of George’s return from his job in the Lady Lavender Soap Works, she had laid his slippers on the fender to warm. George now put them on. He rose and stretched himself, a big, corpulent man, with a ruddy, kindly face boasting three generous chins. He sat himself at the table, surveyed the dish of tripe with approbation, and then said to Sarah, ‘Nobody makes tripe better’n you do, luv. I can always savour a bit of tripe.’
He invariably made a similar remark, no matter what she cooked for this main meal of the day, and, equally invariably, she beamed as if she had never heard it before. It was what made George so nice to live with, she reflected. He always appreciated what you did.
‘What’s she like?’ Sarah asked him, as she ladled generous dollops of tripe onto his plate.
Before answering, he considered the question carefully. Then he said, as he stuffed a forkful of tripe into his mouth, ‘She’s furrin – she’s almost yellow. She int a lady like we understand one – and yet she is, if you know what I mean. And she’s smart, no doubt about that.’
Sarah did not understand what he meant. She served herself, however, and commenced her meal, despite the flutter of worry in her stomach. This woman, whoever she was, could make or ruin their lives, she considered anxiously. When old Mr James Al-Khoury had died suddenly in November, 1885, they had heard that he had bequeathed the whole soap works, in which George had toiled for nearly twenty-five years, to his brother in the United States. Then Mr Benson, the lawyer, had discovered that the brother had also died, leaving everything he possessed to his wife. It had taken him some time to find out that she had moved to Canada, where she, too, had died, leaving as her sole legatee, Wallace H. Harding.
When George Tasker heard the name, whispered to him by Mr Helliwell, old James Al-Khoury’s secretary, he had assumed that the new owner was a nephew of his late employer; Mr Helliwell, priding himself on his secretarial discretion, had not enlightened him further.
And now George was saying that it was a niece!
With a feeling that she was about to choke on her tripe, Sarah realized that this foreign woman from the Colonies, who wasn’t a proper lady, would not, of course, be able to run the works, since she was a woman. Presumably she would sell it – and what happened to employees when a firm was sold over their heads, she dreaded to think. Too often, the older men found themselves out on the street. And then what would happen to them, with George out of work at fifty years of age?
George himself was ruminating over the same threat, but it did not deter him from eating his way steadily through his supper. His silent wife leaned forward and filled a mug with tea. She handed it to him. ‘Like some more tripe?’ she asked mechanically.
George wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said he would. Then, while Sarah served him, he confirmed her fears by saying heavily, ‘Rumour is she’ll sell the place ’cos she couldn’t run it – being a woman, like.’
‘Aye, that’s what I were thinkin’.’ Then she asked warily, ‘Who’d buy it?’
‘Well, it has gone down a bit, since the Ould Fella died,’ George acknowledged. ‘But there’s some as would buy it, I think, though times are bad. There’s that Mr Lever what has started up by Crosfield’s in Warrington. Soap mad, he is. And there’s Crosfield’s themselves. They might like it, seeing as it’s close to the Brunswick Dock and the Brunswick Goods Station – very handy, it is, for shipping and receiving.’ He sipped his tea and moved uneasily in his straight wooden chair.
‘Would you keep your job?’
‘It all depends,’ he answered gloomily. ‘I’m the Soap Master and they can’t make soap without someone like me. But they could buy it and then shut it down – to get rid of a competitor.’
‘Well, we’ll worry about it when we get to it,’ Sarah responded, determined to be brave and not increase her spouse’s misgivings.
She wondered how far their savings, hidden under the loose board in the bedroom above them, would stretch if he were unemployed. With jobs so hard to find, he would hardly be likely to get another at his age, even though his mates always said he had a wonderful feel for soap.
‘What’s she like to look at?’ Sarah felt very curious about this strange woman who had come all the way from Canada. Since she was the Ould Fella’s nearest relative – except for his illegitimate son, Mr Benjamin, who didn’t count, poor lad – she must be an Arab, like he had been. George had told her that James Al-Khoury had come from Lebanon, the same Lebanon that she had read about in her Bible. Did that really make him an Arab, she wondered suddenly, and was Miss Harding, therefore, an Arab lady, for all that she had a Western name? She smiled gently. The Ould Fella had been more like a friend than an employer. Many were the times when he had sat in this very kitchen, talking about the soap works. Always talked to George, he did, before making any changes. George and him got on like two o’clock.
With a sigh she pushed her plate of tripe to one side; she would try to eat it later. Arab or not, Mr James Al-Khoury and George had been happy together. Tears welled inside her, but she crushed them back; she must not let George know how worried she was.
While he ruminated over Sarah’s question about Miss Harding, George took another slice of bread and spread it thinly with butter.
Eventually, he replied, ‘Well, she’s tall; same height as me, I should say. Thin as a rake. But when she smiles she’s got a lovely face – and great brown eyes like a young heifer. She don’t smile much, though. She were talkin’ quite sharp to Mr Turner, the chemist. I didn’t hear what she said, but I could see Turner didn’t like it. He can be a bit uppity, and he wouldn’t like being put down by a woman.’
‘What was she dressed like?’
‘Oh, she were all in black, in mourning, with a black veil thrown back from her face. She’d great rings on her fingers, all gold. No stones. She’d a ring on her marriage finger what looked roughly made; ugly, it was – not much polished. Never seen one like it before.’ He picked up his mug of tea and held it between his great hands. ‘She int married, though. I heard her correct old Bobsworth, when he called her Mrs Harding. She’s got a proud, cold way with her and she said as tart as a lemon to old Bob, “Miss Harding, if you please, Mr Bobsworth.”’
Sarah knew Mr Bobsworth quite well and she smiled, despite her forebodings. The strange lady rose in her estimation. Though she would not have hesitated to call Mr and Mrs Bobsworth her friends, they did tend to put on airs, because he was the firm’s head bookkeeper and forwarding clerk. ‘And her only the daughter of a stevedore,’ thought Sarah sourly.
George was speaking again, his heavy, grey brows knitted in puzzlement
‘As I said. Miss Harding shook hands with me, and then with everyone – even Alfie. She asked Alfie if he were born in Liverpool.’
Alfie was the seventeen-year-old mulatto labourer who swept the soap-boiling area. He also fetched and carried for the temperamental soap boilers, who sometimes dared not leave their soap pans, for fear they might miss the moment when the soap must be proved, or brine added or the boiling mixture turned off and carefully left to cool. The soap boilers were like housewives producing fine sponge cakes – everything had to be done exactly right. Sarah knew that a few people still regarded Mr Tasker as a magician, because he said he could feel how his great cauldrons of soap were getting on. He knew, they said. What he knew they did not specify – it appeared to them to be magic.
‘She told me she makes her own soap on her farm in Canada,’ expanded Mr Tasker. He put down his mug, leaned back from the table and belched. ‘She told me as the nearest soap works is hundreds of miles off and there’s no proper roads to it. Proper surprised I was, when she said it.’ His three chins wobbled, as if to indicate agreement with his remarks.
Sarah omitted to remind him that she never used any soap at all on her face, because she believed that soap spoiled her skin. As a country girl, she had always scrubbed her face with a rag dipped in water from the rain barrel at her father’s cottage door, and the present velvety smoothness of her complexion, despite her age, indicated that the natural oils of her skin had never been removed. Her five married daughters thought she was terribly old-fashioned and said that she owed it to her husband to use the soap he made. But she stubbornly refused, and told them that if they followed her example, they would not have to put that new-fangled cold cream on their faces every night. Lucky, they were, she thought, to be married to men with regular jobs, who could afford falderals like an occasional pot of cold cream.
‘It’s terrible she int a man,’ George said with feeling. ‘The Ould Fella was a good master, though he never paid out a penny he didn’t have to. Young Benji takes after him – pity the lad’s illegitimate; he could have followed him very nicely.’ He paused toget a bit of bread from between his stained front teeth with his finger. ‘Now, if she were a man, she’d be the same – a real firm hand on the tiller, she’d have. Backbone, she’s got, by the sound of her. But a woman? What can a woman do? In a soap works?’
He paused, as he contemplated in his mind’s eye the woman who now held his future in her slender fingers. Though she was so thin, he thought, she’d a nice waistline – and breasts like it said in the Bible, like pomegranates. Her long black dress fitted so closely, it stirred thoughts in a man, it did, he chided himself ruefully.
‘What about Mr Benji?’ inquired Sarah, interrupting his contemplation of the new owner’s charms.
‘Well, I’m sure James Al-Khoury were training him up to take his place when the time came, as a son should. But he only made one Will in his life, according to Mr Helliwell, and that were before Benji were born – and he were born on the wrong side of the blanket, so he int entitled to anything by law, poor lad. His dad could have left him everything in a Will and he would’ve got it all right. His mam and him and the lawyer has hunted everywhere, looking for another Will; but Mr Benson told Mr Helliwell that he’d have known if there was another Will – the Ould Fella would have come to him about it, ’cos Mr Benson used to vet all the firm’s legal papers, contracts and such – James Al-Khoury didn’t trust ’is own knowledge of English, so anything major he were goin’ to sign, he got Mr Benson, his lawyer, to check first.’
‘I suppose Mr Al-Khoury thought he’d plenty of time before he’d die.’
‘Oh, aye. He weren’t yet fifty. He never thought of a heart attack, that I’m sure; it come as an awful shock to all of us. Proper sad it is for Benji and his mam. And him a smart lad, too.’
That night, in many tiny homes round the Brunswick Dock, Wallace Helena Harding was the subject of anxious discussion; times were so bad that the very hint of the loss of a regular job was enough to cause panic. Even Alfie, the mulatto casual labourer, who slept in the back hallway of a nearby warehouse, courtesy of the nightwatchman of the building, and who had endured bitter hardship all his life, viewed with equal terror the possibility of starvation or, the only alternative, the workhouse.
The warehouse watchman was an old seaman with a wooden leg who had known Alfie and his slut of a mother all the young man’s short life, but as he sat beside him on the bottom step of the stone stairs of the great warehouse, a candle guttering in a lantern beside them, he could offer the lad little comfort.
‘She’ll ’ave to sell the soapery,’ he said finally. ‘It don’t mean, though, that the new master won’t take you on. Master Tasker’ll speak for you, I’ve no doubt.’ He paused to repack his clay pipe and then pulled back the shutter of his lantern to light it from the candle. He puffed thoughtfully for a few minutes. Then he said shrewdly, ‘A new master could buy it and then shut it down, to put an end to it. Sometimes happens when shipping companies is sold – every bleedin’ seaman that worked for the old company is out on the street – and the company what’s done the buying puts its own men in.’
Alfie, who at best was permanently hungry, sat numbly silent, and then nodded agreement. He foresaw a long vista of petty theft to keep himself alive, unless he was prepared to seek out the homosexuals who roamed the streets in search of entertainment; either way, he could land in gaol. He hung his head so that the nightwatchman could not see the despair on his face.
Chapter Two (#ulink_15a97257-926a-5dd8-9401-d71ecd8d28d3)
Unaware of the stir She had caused in the heart of Mr Tasker, her soap master, or the depth of the fears she had raised in all her employees, the thin, yellow woman from the wilds of Western Canada sat at a cherry-wood desk in the bay window of her bedroom in a house in nearby Hill Street. She was in the process of writing a letter to Joe Black, her partner on her homestead in western Canada.
She stared dismally at the soaking July downpour pattering against the glass. The room smelled damp and was unexpectedly cold. What a grey and black city Liverpool was and, yet, how exciting it was with its glittering gas-lamps and heavy traffic. And how alien she felt in it.
This proud Lebanese lady, who carried a man’s name and then the name of the patron saint of Beirut, St Helena, and who normally feared nobody, was, for once, feeling intimidated by men. ‘If you can call them men,’ she muttered. ‘Self-complacent barrels of lard.’
She scolded herself that she must not prejudge. ‘You’re tired with the journey, and the confinement of the ship. And being indoors all day. You must be patient.’
She leaned back and began to tug the hairpins out of her tight bun. ‘I don’t feel patient,’ she informed herself through gritted teeth.
‘Come on, now,’ encouraged her cooler self. ‘If you can make friends with miserable and angry Blackfoot and Crees, and cope with rebellious Metis – not to speak of Oblate Fathers with the power of God behind them – you can cope with an indifferent chemist named Turner, a Benjamin Al-Khoury, head of Sales and Assistant Manager, rude enough not to be here when the new owner of his company arrives – and a lawyer you don’t trust too much.’ She pressed a tanned fist hard onto the desk, as if to emphasize her thoughts.
Then she absently spread out her fingers to look at her gold, handmade rings. Her eyes gleamed, and she laughed sardonically.
What would these stuffy Englishmen think if they knew that she lived with Joe Black, the son of a freed Ontario black slave and a Cree woman? He would make two of any of them, she thought with quiet pleasure; a big man with a face filled with laughter lines, lines that could harden when he felt insulted, till his jaw looked like a rat trap and his huge black eyes with their back-curling lashes lost their gentleness completely. He rarely struck anybody with his great fists, but when he did it was with the punishing skill of a Cree guard warrior. He had a clear, uncluttered mind, well able to assess a situation, an ability to reason, to negotiate with patience, before he struck.
These latter gifts were invaluable, she reflected, in a country full of wrathful native people; the Hudson’s Bay Company had frequently used him as peacemaker between the Indians and themselves – and even missionaries were not past using him as an interpreter.
With one finger, she touched tenderly her gold rings. When Joe had discovered that she valued jewellery, he had panned for gold in the North Saskatchewan River and had fashioned the rings for her. Lots of men had subsequently tried to find the mother lode of the river’s gold, but no one had succeeded; it was the rich, black soil which held the real wealth of the Northwest Territories.
She laughed again. ‘These pink Englishmen would have a fit,’ she told the raindrops on the windowpanes. ‘But I’ll teach them to patronize a woman,’ she promised herself. ‘I will decide the future of the Lady Lavender Soap Works!’ In which remark, she was a little too optimistic.
As she met the various people in the new world she had entered in Liverpool, she had become slowly aware that she was shabby and out of date, almost a figure of fun – a small snigger from a messenger boy, hastily stifled, a raised eyebrow, a stare in the street. She found the crush of people round her difficult enough, after the emptiness of western Canada, and this added attention had bothered her; it was the first time since she had left Lebanon that she had thought of clothes as anything else but covering against the elements.
She was unaware that, despite her clothes, she had a formidable presence. She moved swiftly with a long effortless stride, and she had responded in cold, clear sentences to the explanations given her by her escorts through the soapery. When, later, she had asked for further explanation, she had surprised them by recalling exactly what had been said.
Most of the men in the soapery wore a head-covering of some kind; but only Mr Tasker, the Soap Master and key man in the whole soapery, had doffed his bowler hat, when she had been introduced to him by Mr Benson, the lawyer. He had answered her questions carefully, his blue eyes twinkling amid rolls of fat as he endeavoured to watch the great vats steaming and heaving, and occasionally said, between his answers to her queries, ‘Excuse me, Miss’, while he instructed one of his assistants in the delicate task of producing excellent soap.
After meeting Mr Tasker and his helpers, Mr Benson had handed her over to Mr Turner, the chemist, who was, in the lawyer’s opinion, in the absence of Benjamin Al-Khoury, the most refined of her employees. He should, therefore, know how to treat a lady.
A shy, retiring man, who wanted to get back to his little laboratory, Mr Turner’s conversation was strained and desultory and did not particularly impress Wallace Helena. She was interested, however, when he told her that Mr Tasker was probably the best soap man in south Lancashire and could probably have gone to a bigger company.
‘You mean they would’ve paid him more?’
‘Yes.’
‘I wonder that he did not move.’
‘He and Mr James Al-Khoury were great friends. I believe they were together from the first establishment of the soapery. And there’s no doubt that he and Mr Benjamin get on very well.’
Wallace Helena murmured approbation.
They went into the Power House together, to meet Mr Ferguson, the Steam Engineer, a middle-aged man with a ruddy face and an air of great self-confidence and dignity. He was dressed in immaculate blue overalls. He was attentive and informative to his lady visitor, well aware that he belonged to a newly emerged class of employee able to cope with the mechanization of industry and was, therefore, a prized servant of the company. He was a trifle defensive with Mr Turner. Wallace Helena noticed this and wondered why. She had yet to discover the subtleties of class in British society; Mr Ferguson was exceedingly proud of his abilities, but he remained a working man; Mr Turner was also a highly trained man – but he was middle-class – a man of privilege as well as ability.
As she walked slowly round the works, she had noted carefully the reactions of her employees to herself and also reactions between them. After watching for years the body language of the Indians who passed over her land, to judge whether they were hostile or friendly, she had learned to observe the slightest shrug, the curve of a lip, the smallest move of hip or hand. She had quickly picked up the general nervousness of the men to whom she was introduced and she had felt sorry for them. In return, she had tried to show herself as a confident, capable person, and she felt that some of them had liked her.
Only Mr Benjamin Al-Khoury had failed to turn up.
According to Mr Bobsworth, the bookkeeper and forwarding clerk, he was in Manchester and would return in a few days’ time. ‘Life has been very hectic for Mr Benjamin since Mr James passed away, him being Assistant Manager to Mr James, like. Everything fell on him.’ Mr Bobsworth heaved a sigh deep enough to make every inch of his five feet quiver.
She had nodded, and remarked that Uncle James’s death must have been a shock to everyone.
‘Indeed, yes, Miss Harding.’ His eyes blinked behind his small, gold-rimmed spectacles, and then he said, ‘I should tell you, Ma’am, that Mr Benjamin asked me to convey his regrets to you at not being here today; he’s investigating the unexpected refusal of a customer to renew his contract with us – in the cotton trade, they are.’
‘I see,’ she had replied noncommittally, and Mr Bobsworth had begun to worry that young Benji had offended the lady deeply by his absence.
Now, seated in her stuffy bedroom, she made a face as she recalled the conversation.
If, as she suspected, Mr Benjamin Al-Khoury was her illegitimate cousin, a product of Uncle James’s love affair with an English woman, about which she had heard vaguely as a young girl when she was living in Chicago, he was probably suffering from an acute bout of jealousy because she had inherited his father’s business.
She was fairly sure that, if he had been a legitimate child, he could have claimed, in law, at least a part of his father’s Estate, no matter what his parent’s Will had said about leaving all his property to his brother, Charles, her own father. Mr Benson had, however, assured her that there were no other claimants to the Estate, and she presumed that Mr Benson knew his law.
It was possible, of course, that Benjamin Al-Khoury was some very distant relative, whose parents had also managed to survive the massacre of Christians in 1860.
With a wry smile at the foibles of his own youth, Mr Benson had explained to her that, when he was first setting up his law practice and was badly in need of every penny he could earn, her Uncle James had consulted him about the exact meaning of a contract he was about to sign. Afterwards, in pursuit of a small additional fee, he had inquired if Uncle James had a Will and, since he had not, he had been persuaded to make one.
At that time, Uncle James had had no one else to whom to leave his modest possessions, so, at the age of twenty-three, he had left everything to his brother, Charles, in Chicago. And now, as the residual legatee of her father’s and her mother’s own Wills, Wallace Helena found herself inheriting a well-run soap manufactory.
‘Why didn’t Uncle James make a more recent Will?’ she had asked Mr Benson.
‘Dear lady, I do not know. I did mention the matter to him once or twice; but he was a tremendously busy man – and, like all of us, he did not anticipate dying at forty-nine.’ He had smiled indulgently at her. ‘Do you have a Will, Miss Harding?’
‘No, I don’t,’ she had admitted, a note of surprise in her voice; she had never thought of dying herself, despite the hazards she faced daily in her life as a settler. Mr Benson’s question had made her suddenly aware of the problems Joe Black might face if, indeed, she did die. She smiled a little impishly at the lawyer, and then said gravely, ‘I’ll attend to it.’
She reverted to the matter of her uncle’s Will. ‘Perhaps Uncle James really didn’t have anyone else to leave his money to, except Papa – or me?’ In view of her surmises about Benjamin Al-Khoury, the question was a loaded one, and she watched carefully for her lawyer’s reaction.
Mr Benson was not to be drawn, however, and he answered her noncommittally, ‘Possibly not.’ She was left to puzzle about her Uncle James’s private life.
Now, as she took up her pen and dipped it into the ink, preparatory to continuing her letter to Joe Black, she decided philosophically that she would deal with Mr Benjamin whenever he decided to turn up.
She wrote in English, a language she had learned in Chicago and from her stepfather, Tom Harding: ‘Dear Joe, how I wish you were with me! I need your brains – and I need your love to sustain me.’
Should she tell this man, whom she loved with a passion and depth which sometimes frightened her, how nervous she felt?
No. He would only worry, and worry never solved anything.
With deliberate cheerfulness, she continued, ‘Thanks to Messrs Cunard, I arrived safely in Liverpool yesterday morning. At Montreal, Mr Nasrullah, Grandpapa Al-Khoury’s friend – a very old man – saw me and my baggage safely transferred to the ship, as we arranged. He was worried that I was travelling steerage, alone; but everyone was very friendly to me, though it was not very comfortable. I gave Mr Nasrullah a hasty note to post to you, and I hope you received it safely. Now that the railway line has reached Calgary, it should make a vast difference to the speed with which we can send and receive letters, even from as far north as Edmonton. (I wonder if Edmonton and St Albert will ever be served by a railway line?)
‘My dearest, it was good of you to accompany me in the stage all the way down to Calgary, to see me onto the train. I shall never forget the wonderful night we spent in that dreadfully noisy hotel! How I miss you now!
‘When the train moved out and your dear figure receded into the distance, I wished I had never set out on such a wild adventure – and yet the English lawyers sounded so eager to sell Uncle’s business that I smelled a rat; as I said to you, the works could be more valuable than they would have me know. Could the lawyers make a gain by selling to someone with whom they had made a private agreement?
‘Today, I did a fairly thorough inspection of the plant. I have not yet seen the company’s books, nor do I know enough to say how well it is doing. I am, however, uneasy that Mr Benjamin Al-Khoury, the Assistant Manager, was not here to greet me; I felt snubbed!
‘He was left nothing in Uncle James’s Will, and I suspect that he is his illegitimate son. No matter which side of the blanket he was born on, however, I am excited at the thought that I may actually have a blood relative. You know how shorn I feel because I have no family – and, without your support, I am sure I would have given up on life long ago – bless you, my dearest one.
‘I must bear in mind, though, that this man may be very jealous that I, and not he, now own the Lady Lavender.
‘Mr Benson, the lawyer, has found me two rooms near the works, in the house of Mrs Hughes, a widow – the address is at the top of this letter. The rooms are clean and her cooking is good, though I am feeling the sudden change in diet.
‘I wish you were with me. The city is very lively. I confess that I doubt if you would enjoy the noise and confusion – or the heavy smoke in the air – near the works, the filth of it is overwhelming.
‘The products of the soapery put our home-made efforts to shame. They are sweet-smelling tablets, light brown or blue-grey in colour. To scent them, they use lavender oil, caraway or cinnamon. They have, also, a fuller’s earth soap for very delicate skins. They do make plain bars of soap for laundry and for the cotton industry, and these do not smell much better than the ones we make at home!
‘The lavender oil is produced by a lady in the south of England. She also makes a perfume of it by diluting it with spirits of wine and bottling it. We act as her northern distributor for these little bottles of scent and they are sold side-by-side with our lavender soap. It is very pleasant to dab a little on my wrist and sniff it.
‘The whole operation is so interesting that I am already questioning whether I should sell it. If it is financially sound, I could, perhaps, find a knowledgeable man to run it.’
She stopped writing, and chewed the end of her pen. She knew already what she would like to do, she considered longingly. She had been born and spent her childhood in a city, and she would like to settle in Liverpool, rain and dirty air notwithstanding, and run the business herself. After all, she ruminated, she knew the centre of Liverpool quite well; she and her parents, as refugees, had spent some weeks in it, waiting for an immigrant ship to the United States – and she remembered with pleasure the pool crowded with sailing vessels which had given Liverpool its name.
‘With all that Papa taught me, I could learn to manage the Lady Lavender – it’s obviously got some good employees,’ she assured herself. ‘I suspect that before I was ten I’d learned more than some of these fat Englishmen know. I don’t know the detail of their work, but I can organize people – I can sell. But what on earth would Joe think of it – of coming to a city?’
She considered the question seriously; he wasn’t getting any younger; it was possible that he might enjoy the sheer comfort of city life after the remorseless struggle they faced on their homestead.
Wishful thinking! she chided herself, and slowly dipped her pen into the ink.
‘If we drew income from the soap works,’ she continued, ‘we could accumulate more riverside land, as it becomes available, and increase our grain crops – the minute a railway crosses the North Saskatchewan and reaches Edmonton, eastern markets would be opened up to us – and we might even have money to spend!’
She paused in her writing and wondered how many more terrible winters they would have to endure before they made enough to, perhaps, move south to a better climate. And it’s not only winter, she considered sadly, it’s clouds of merciless mosquitoes, forest fires, unsettled Indians and Metis, floods – and hunger – gnawing hunger – and the endless, endless physical work.
She bit her lips, and continued to write, asking him how the crops were doing. She hoped the cougars were not being a nuisance again this year – that was a huge pair he had shot last year.
Cougars? Bobcats? Wolves? They were a curse when one had livestock. She grinned suddenly at the idea of a cougar sniffing its way comfortably into the yard of the soap works, and then went on to give him a different piece of news.
‘Yesterday, in the street, I heard Arabic being spoken, and, frankly, I was surprised that I still understood it – though it is my childhood tongue. Three men definitely from the East, probably seamen, were talking together at a street corner; they had lost their way, but being a stranger myself to this end of the city, I could not help them so I passed on. While I am here, I hope to get some accurate news of the present situation in the Lebanon.’
She put down her pen and slowly stretched herself. It had been good to hear the language of her family. She would give a great deal to walk the ancient streets of Beirut or sit quietly in her parents’ courtyard, if it still existed, and listen to cheerful Arab voices.
But there were no familiar voices left, she reminded herself; she would have to sit by herself under the old lemon tree.
She shivered, and a sense of awful aloneness engulfed her, the ghastly loneliness of a sole survivor, with no one else alive to understand completely the horrors she had seen. For a moment she did not hear the horses’ hooves in the street outside or the rain on the window or feel the chill of her room; she was lost in a misty ebb of consciousness, through which she heard the roar of a mob out of control and the screams of the dying.
She sat perfectly still in her stiff little chair, her white face covered with perspiration, until the moment passed. Then she got up and stumbled to the washstand, to pick up a damp face flannel and press it to her temples.
Chapter Three (#ulink_b7b12cac-ae6c-5094-8b32-69ecdf881adc)
Feeling a little better after the damp coldness of wiping her face with a flannel, Wallace Helena sat down on the edge of the bed and slowly unlaced her neat black boots. She hauled them off and thankfully flexed her toes. On the homestead she wore soft Indian moccasins and gaiters, for which she traded barley with a Cree woman each year. She kept her precious boots for formal occasions, like visiting Mr Ross’s hotel in the settlement by Fort Edmonton. In the hotel, she was sometimes able to contact small groups of travellers in need of supplies, like flour, meat or, perhaps, a horse; they were also occasionally glad to buy well-salted butter or sour cream. The visitors were usually surveyors and miners passing through, but increasingly there were well-to-do British hunters, who had simply come to enjoy a new wilderness and hunt big game. Most of them dealt with the Hudson’s Bay Company or one or two other suppliers, who could provide coffee, sugar and salt, tobacco, alcohol and other imports. Wallace Helena, however, kept her prices low and she could usually find someone with little money only too thankful to buy cheaply. They were surprised, and sometimes amused, to be approached by a woman, particularly one who did not fit the usual mould. With her tall, spare figure and her long, mannish stride, her carefully calculated prices and her ability to strike a bargain, she was a well-known local character round Fort Edmonton, particularly disliked by the other suppliers.
Now, she longed to rest on the feather bed, but she felt she must finish her letter to Joe; she had promised to write frequently; and, even with the new railway, a letter would take some time to reach him. She made herself return to the tiny desk in the window.
After the quietness of the bush, it felt strange to be back in the hurly-burly of a city and be immediately plunged into the complexities of a factory, the first modern one that she had ever seen; it was stranger still to realize that, as soon as her uncle’s Will had been probated, she would actually own the soap works.
Pen in hand, she stared thoughtfully out of the bedroom window. Already, she had casually remarked to Mr Turner, the chemist, that it might be cheaper for the Lady Lavender to buy seed and themselves press the oil they used, rather than import it.
Mr Turner had replied superciliously that to make it pay, they would probably have to find a market for the residual solids.
It was probably the most sensible remark he had made to her that day, but she had snapped him up promptly. ‘The solids can be used for winter food for steers. Don’t your farmers know that?’
Mr Turner had gulped and failed to reply immediately; he knew little about farming. What did women know about cattle?
When he had recovered himself, he pointed out that a new venture like that would need capital. ‘Presses,’ he added vaguely, ‘and – er – men who understand farming, to sell the residue.’
‘Right.’ She had stopped to take a small black notebook and pencil out of her reticule, and made a quick note. She might, she thought, cost it out in years to come, when she understood more about the business.
Playing at her father’s feet in his large silk warehouse in Beirut or cuddled by her mother’s side when the family was gathered together in the evening, she had absorbed a great deal of the discussions going on over her head. Amongst much else, she understood the importance of estimating cost and return – and the ever-present risks of undertaking something new. During her long tour of the soap works, she had felt, at times, as if her father were whispering to her, telling her what to look for, giving her quiet advice.
And then there was the glycerine, which, the chemist had informed her, was left over after the soap was made. He had mentioned that, when properly refined, it was a good base for salves for the skin and for certain medicines; he and Benjamin Al-Khoury were working on a scented lotion for chapped hands, to market alongside the lavender perfume and toilet soaps. At present, he had informed her, the glycerine was sold to explosives manufacturers.
Explosives were used for war, she ruminated, as she enclosed her letter to Joe in an envelope and licked the flap; and she had had enough threat of that round her farm near Fort Edmonton, when the Metis had risen in defence of their land rights. It was only last year that their leader, Louis Riel, had been hanged for rebellion.
Her mind wandered to the problems of her life as a settler. The rebellion had been very frightening; and yet, she considered uneasily, Louis Riel had had a rightful cause. His people were descendants of early European settlers and their Indian wives, and they had been dispossessed of their land further east by the rush of new immigrants from Europe. In despair, they had moved westward to squat on the undeveloped lands of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Unlike her stepfather, who had himself been a squatter on the Company’s holdings, many of them had not succeeded in establishing their right to remain on the land. She thought smugly that it was thanks to her stepfather’s and her own sagacity that she now owned the land she farmed.
A squatter’s legal rights were tenuous, she knew; she herself had once not hesitated to try to overset a Metis squatter’s right to a riverside homestead which she had coveted.
‘But at least I finished up by paying him for it,’ she had said defensively to one of the Oblate Fathers from St Albert, when he had dared to criticize her ruthless business methods. ‘It cost me all I had at the time,’ she had added, hatred in every inch of her. ‘I could have hounded him off – like the Hudson’s Bay tried to do to my stepfather.’
Her eyes, long, oriental, heavily fringed with thick black lashes, were half-closed and averted from him, as she had continued, ‘When I first came to Fort Edmonton, a young innocent girl, that man shouted obscenities after me, because I’m sallow-skinned and he thought I was a Chinese – a man’s plaything. And I would prefer not to repeat what he used to call my stockman, Joe Black. Why should I care about him, Father?’ She had given a dry little laugh, and had turned and left the discomfited priest standing in the middle of the spring mud of the Fort’s yard.
The priest had sighed. He had been warned by an older priest that this wilful, proud, strayed member of the Christian flock, a lone Maronite Christian survivor of the 1860 massacres in Lebanon, had endured a lot of sorrow. She was now in her late thirties, and, in her business affairs, she had the reputation of being as merciless as an Iroquois woman – and when he considered what Iroquois women had done to captured Jesuit priests in earlier times, a faint shudder went through his thin, bent frame, as if the devil had touched him on the shoulder.
Yet, as he trudged along the trail to his Mission in St Albert, he had to admit that during the Metis uprisings she had been one of the few to remain calm. She had prepared to defend her homestead with more common sense than other settlers, many of whom had panicked – even he and his fellow priests, who ministered to the Metis, had been very frightened.
‘Nobody has to worry about Wallace Harding or Joe Black,’ one of his parishioners in St Albert had assured him. ‘They’re the best shots in the district and she’s got that cabin well defended; the rebels’ll go for easier loot.’
Then, of course, there was Joe Black himself, the priest reflected; Joseph Black, the only negro in the district. Joe had a history, too.
According to Father Lacombe, who knew almost everything about everybody, he was the son of a Cree woman and a freed slave who had accompanied John Rowand on his exploration of the Bow River, further south.
He had been brought up in his maternal grandfather’s lodge and had then gone to work on one of the early ranches. In consequence, he had a wonderful way with horses – with any animals, if it came to that. Later, he had trapped for a time, following the animals northward, and had finally met up with Tom Harding, an American miner. The young priest had never met Tom Harding, but the story was well known; Tom had been a squatter on undeveloped Hudson’s Bay Company land a few miles east of Fort Edmonton.
Disregarding the splutters of rage from the Hudson’s Bay Factor at the Fort, who was rapidly becoming less and less able to enforce his company’s rights to the immense territory they were supposed to control, Tom Harding and Joe Black had, with sporadic aid from Joe’s Cree relatives and a couple of temporarily stranded miners, slowly opened up several square miles, much of it forest. Based on what he had observed in the United States, Tom Harding sowed grass and clover, as well as barley, oats and potatoes. It was backbreaking work and, in addition, they had had the difficult task of protecting their first few animals and hens, not only from predators but also from increasingly hungry parties of Indians.
Despite Joe’s abilities as a hunter and trapper, game was scarce and in the early years they were often hungry themselves. Each year, when the ferocious winter descended on them, they would ask themselves why they bothered and would become irritable with each other. But the first sound of water dripping from the snow-covered roof would raise their spirits, and they would begin to plan the coming year. The Hudson’s Bay Factor, aware of whispers from eastern Canada and from London about the Hudson’s Bay mandate being withdrawn, gave up on them and was thankful, occasionally, to buy or trade for some of their crops, to feed the increasing number of people living in and around the Fort.
The trust between the two men became absolute.
As the early winter cold bit into the priest’s own underfed body during his long walk back to the Mission, he secretly envied Joe Black’s physical strength. Over six feet tall, Joe was, and built to it, with wiry grey hair, teeth discoloured by tobacco, and big black eyes surrounded by innumerable wrinkles; those eyes, thought the priest, could be cold and watchful, like those of a cougar he had once seen; at other times they could dance with amusement, and his deep rumbling laugh would roll across the room. An old clerk at the Fort had told him that Joe had been a fine, handsome man until he had caught the smallpox. The dreadful disease had left its marks on his cheeks and forehead, the priest reflected with compassion, and probably on his character as well.
To the priest, Joe seemed quieter than his general reputation at the Fort would indicate. Men always said that he and Tom Harding were formidable in a fight, but it did not seem to the young priest that he ever tried to pick a quarrel.
He’s very astute – and he’s older now – perhaps that’s why, guessed the priest; he must be at least fifty. But whatever a hard life had done to him, he was alert and quick to grasp a concept; you never had to explain anything twice to the man. And his looks did not seem to bother Miss Harding, Tom’s stepdaughter; it was said that she slept with Joe every night.
They were always together, riding their range, branding, setting traps in the autumn, sowing, reaping, or out shooting for the pot – not that there was much left to shoot these days. Sometimes they would be down at the Fort bargaining for sugar, coffee and tobacco, anything they could not grow or get from the Indians, the tall woman with the marks of suffering on her face and Joe with his wide grin like a steel trap.
Wallace and Joe were notorious for never parting with a penny, if they could do a deal any other way, ruminated the priest, though it was said they often gave food from their slender store to hungry Crees and Blackfoot. Tom Harding had owed his life to a Blackfoot; and his half-Cree partner, Joe, fed his own people.
Now, one of the subjects of the priest’s idle thoughts undressed slowly in a damp, cold bedroom in faraway Liverpool. She thankfully unlaced the tight corset she had bought in Montreal on the advice of the daughter of Mr Nasrullah, with whom she had stayed whilst waiting for the boat to Britain to arrive. She shivered in the unaccustomed dampness as she slipped on a cotton shift. At the washstand, she poured cold water from a pink, flowered jug into a matching bowl and slowly washed her face and hands with a piece of Lady Lavender toilet soap.
Earlier, her Welsh landlady, Mrs Hughes, had kindly put a stone hot water bottle in the feather bed, and when she climbed into the bed it was still warm. The British summer was abominably chilly, Wallace thought irritably, and she pulled the hot water bottle up from her feet and clasped it against her stomach. It was hard and uncomfortable. Fretfully, she pushed it away from her.
Without thinking, she turned over and opened her arms to the other side of the bed. But there was no one there; and again she felt encompassed by an overwhelming loneliness. What was she doing here? Her life was with Joe, she told herself.
Still shivering slightly under the linen sheets, her mind, nevertheless, wandered to the new world of the soapery and its all-male managers and workers.
From her father she had learned that employees were to be treated like family. You scolded them and kept them in line with threats of unemployment; but you looked after them, and they looked after your interests. In fact, most of her father’s employees had been blood relations, distant ones, sometimes – but related all the same.
Were some of the men in the soapery related to her? Or, regardless of that, did they think of themselves as being equivalent to her family? To be protected and cared for by her through good times and bad? It was a formidable thought.
She felt fairly certain that Benjamin Al-Khoury was a blood relation. She remembered vaguely, when her family had been living in Chicago, her father tut-tutting that her Uncle James appeared to be living with an English woman, without benefit of marriage. Such a misalliance would cast a bad name on the Lebanese community, he felt. She believed that he had written to Uncle James, saying that he should marry the lady. Wallace Helena could not recall that her uncle had ever replied to that particular point.
When, after her father’s death, Uncle James had offered her mother and herself a home, her mother had explained that he was not married to the lady who lived with him; and this could make life difficult for them, if they joined his household.
Benjamin Al-Khoury was an employee like any other employee. Yet, if he were her cousin, should she treat him differently? If he were highly resentful that she, instead of himself, had inherited his father’s Estate, how could she placate him, without losing her status as employer?
As she lay amid the unaccustomed softness of the feather bed, she began to think very carefully about how she could retain her authority and yet convey to him that she understood his probable unhappiness.
To her knowledge, she had no other blood relative and that would make him unique to her, someone very special in her estimation. It would put him on a completely different level from everyone else connected with the soapery.
A tiny thrill of hope went through her. To have a real relation implied a reciprocal obligation. Here might be a person of whom one could ask help and reasonably expect assistance as a duty, as from a brother. One could hope for consideration and affection, given freely. It was a wonderful idea to a woman who had faced as bravely as she could her uprooting from her native soil. And, when she had put down tenuous new roots in alien Chicago, she had been uprooted again, to face a life in Canada so harsh that she had expected to die. But, somehow, she had lived, a lonely refugee, misunderstood and disliked.
‘And why I should survive, God only knows,’ she thought wearily, with an odd sense of having been left out.
Amid the turmoil of new impressions collected through the day, it did not strike her that she had been thinking of the Lady Lavender Soap Works as an enterprise she would run herself. She had simply been annoyed when her lawyer, Mr Benson, had suggested that she should leave the selling of the works to him; she had brushed the suggestion off as an insult to her as a helpless woman. The fact that the original reason for her visit had simply been to assess the value of the business had been pushed to the back of her mind by the thrilling possibilities she had immediately seen, as she walked soberly round the buildings.
The straggling collection of sheds, which made up her late uncle’s factory, suggested to her not only a means of livelihood but also the chance to live in a city again, a place of fine new buildings, and homes full of lively enterprising people – literate people. They might even know where Lebanon is, she considered soberly – even have commercial ties with Beirut; Liverpool ships probably docked in Beirut sometimes.
Could one visit Beirut from Liverpool, she wondered suddenly. By this time the city might have settled down again and be safe for a Christian to visit.
As she lay staring at the moulded ceiling of the bedroom, a tightness from a long, sternly suppressed anguish seemed to grow in her chest. She breathed deeply in an effort to stop it engulfing her, and gradually, like some threatening shadow, it retreated.
She sat up and took a sip of water from a glass on the bedside table. Then she lay down again and curled herself up into a tight, foetal position, as if to protect herself from feelings too painful to be unleashed.
Chapter Four (#ulink_756675f4-a482-5c29-8539-5985a31d3f96)
She slept uneasily and suffered a familiar nightmare, though some of the hazy, sadistic faces which seemed to peer at her out of the darkness were, this time, reminiscent of the men she had met in the soapery.
She cried out frantically to them, ‘I’m not Wallace Harding, I’m not! I’m Helena Al-Khoury – and I hate the Territories. I want to go home to Beirut. Let me go! I want to go home.’
It seemed as if she pulled herself away from restraining hands, and floated easily along a seashore; and then she was in her father’s courtyard amid the perfume from the blossom of the lemon tree. Uncle James was picking her up and saying she was as sweet as the flowers on the tree. She laughed in his swarthy, cheerful face, and he was gone. Instead, her mother was there, her blenched face beaded with sweat, as she held Helena’s hand and pulled her along. ‘Hurry, my darling. Run!’
1860 and she was nearly twelve. As her terrified mother pulled her along behind her father, Charles Al-Khoury, she heard his startled exclamations at the hideous sights which each turn in the narrow streets revealed, the carnage left by a mob gone mad.
Before turning into a narrow alley leading down to the waterfront, they crouched close to the side of the blank wall of a warehouse, to catch their breath, while Charles Al-Khoury peered down the lane to make sure it was clear.
It was already darkened by the long shadows of the evening and the smoke from the ruins of old houses further down, but there was no sound, except for the crackle of fire; the looters had been thorough. The little family flitted silently down it. As they crossed another alley they heard men shouting in the distance, and Charles Al-Khoury increased his pace.
Almost numb with fear, his wife and daughter followed closely after him. Suddenly, he half-tripped over a dark shape lying on the ground. His women bumped into him and clung to him.
They stared down in horror. A woman had had her clothes torn off her. She had been butchered like a dead cow, and the child of her womb lay smashed against a house wall. A horribly mutilated, decapitated man lay near her, and further down the alley were other pitiful bundles, blood-soaked and still.
Leila Al-Khoury vomited, the vomit making her fluttering black head veil cling to her face. Young Helena began to scream in pure terror.
Her father clapped his hand over her mouth. ‘Helena!’ he whispered forcefully. ‘Be quiet.’
She swallowed her fear and nearly choked with the effort.
As they continued to scurry down narrow lanes, leading seaward, her father held her close to him, so that she would see as little as possible of the carnage; dogs were already nosing cautiously at the corpses of the Maronite Christians and being challenged by venturesome birds. One or two dogs had entered little homes through smashed doorways and could be heard growling over the spoils inside.
Wallace Helena, the grown woman, stirred in her bed, and cried out to the only person left to assuage her nightmares. ‘Joe, darling! Joe!’ But she was not heard and plunged again into her scarifying dreams, her heart beating a frantic tattoo.
Much later on, when they had established themselves in Chicago, she had asked her mother how the massacre had come about. She had been sitting cross-legged on her parents’ bed, watching her mother struggle into Western clothes.
Her mother had explained that the Muslim Turkish rulers of Lebanon did not like Christians very much; neither did another sect called Druze.
Egged on by the Turks, the Druze set out to eradicate their ancient enemies, the Maronite Christians, some of whom were enviably richer than they should be. In Beirut, they struck on July 9th, 1860.
‘We had heard rumours of unrest amongst the Druze, for some time before,’ her mother told her, ‘but neither your father nor your grandfather – my father – believed that we should be disturbed.
‘Our family had always lived in or near Beirut; it was such a pleasant little place – and you’ll remember our visiting our kin nearby. Our courtyard wall was high and strongly built – quite enough, we believed, to protect the house. And we were well-to-do; we could always placate the tax collectors and the servants of the Sultan, Abdul Mejid – may he be eternally accursed!’ She sounded vicious, as she lashed out at the hated Turkish ruler. Then she said more calmly, ‘You know, it’s usually the less powerful, and the poor who can’t pay, who are attacked.’
In the hope of obliterating her sickening memories, Helena had screwed up her eyes and covered them with her hands; yet there was a morbid desire to know more.
‘Well, why did we run away then?’
‘The rabble – Druze and Turks alike – swept right into our neighbourhood – you heard them and saw them. And your respected father knew then that this uprising was much more serious than usual; he had not believed an earlier warning which his brother had had whispered to him by a kindly Turkish official – he had felt the warning was part of a campaign by the Turks to get the Maronites to move out of their own accord.
‘So when the mob came in like a flight of angry bees – they were mad with hashish, I suspect – he knew in a flash that the warning had been a genuine act of kindness. He heard the screams and the gunshots, and he ran upstairs from his office to the roof, to confirm his fears.’ She paused, her voice harsh from unshed tears. ‘You and I’d been sitting under the lemon tree, by the well – so quiet and peaceful. But from the roof Papa could really see what was happening. Dear Grandpa’s house was already a great bonfire and the shrieking crowd was pouring into the square at the bottom of our street; he said the menace of the swords and guns flashing in the evening sun was terrifying.’
Helena said hesitantly from behind her hands, ‘I remember Papa leaning over the parapet and yelling to us to come up immediately. I’d never seen Papa really frightened before.’
It was the moment when my whole world fell apart, she thought wretchedly; I simply didn’t understand how it could be so.
She watched her mother buttoning her shabby black blouse, getting ready to go to work as a menial in a foreign city, and apparently accepting with fortitude what the Turks had done to her.
Leila continued her story. ‘We didn’t know it then,’ she said, ‘but Christians were suffering all over the Turkish Empire.
‘When our servants heard the noise, they rushed into the courtyard to ask what was happening. They heard your father shout, and they panicked. Instead of running up to the roof themselves, they followed Cook, who ran to the main gate and opened it! I suppose he thought they would be able to escape before the mob reached us. For a second, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing – it was so stupid – our gate was very stout; it might have held.
‘As I whipped you indoors, I could hear their screams.’
Helena shuddered. ‘I heard them.’
Leila ignored the interjection, as she sat head bowed, her fingers on the top button of her blouse. ‘Well, after I’d bundled you into the house, I slammed the front door and turned the beam which locked it. That, and the barred windows, halted the crowd when they rushed into the courtyard, just long enough to allow us to escape.’
Helena sighed deeply. ‘I remember the smoke – the yells – men pounding on the door – and the smell of gunpowder – and blood.’
Her mother put her arm around her and held her close.
‘We were lucky, child, that we had an indoor staircase, not an outside one like many people have; if it had run straight up from the courtyard, the mob would have come up after us and killed us on the roof.’
‘Papa had a piece of rope on the roof, I remember. I was so scared we’d fall, when he lowered first you and then me down into the tiny alley at the back of the house.’
Her mother nodded. ‘I think he’d stored the rope up there, in case we needed an escape from fire,’ she said absently. Then she added, ‘The alleyway saved our lives by giving us an exit to another street.’
‘I wonder why we were saved, Mama? Was our neighbour’s family at the back saved?’
‘Not to my knowledge, dearest. I was told that by the time the Druze and the Turks had finished, the whole area was one big funeral pyre.’
‘Why does God allow such terrible things, Mama?’ the young girl asked piteously.
Her mother looked shocked. ‘We’re not here to question God’s Will, child.’ Her pretty lower lip trembled. ‘I didn’t ask that even when your brothers died.’
Helena laid her head on her mother’s shoulder. ‘Of course not, Mama,’ she said contritely. ‘It was a wrong question to ask.’
Leila looked down at the child cuddled beside her, and she sighed. Her husband had always said that Helena was too clever to be a woman. She hoped he was wrong; women were supposed to accept, not ask questions.
Helena fingered a small pendant embossed with the head of the Virgin Mary that hung on a fine gold chain from her mother’s neck. ‘Did you bring this from Beirut?’ she asked.
‘Oh, yes, dear. For months and months that year, Papa insisted that I wear all my jewellery all the time. He must’ve been more nervous about the situation than he allowed us to think.’
‘It’s important for a lady to have lots of jewellery, isn’t it, Mama?’
‘Yes, dear – and small gold coins, easily carried. You never know what life has in store for you – life is very precarious. Jewellery is easy to carry – you can trade it anywhere – though at a great loss, of course.’
Helena nodded, and her mother hugged her again.
Leila thought with apprehension of a clouded future; but the child digested the lesson that good jewellery can be an important financial reserve – and that a collection of small gold coins is probably even better.
After a few minutes, Helena lifted her head and said heavily, ‘We must’ve run for ages; I was so puffed.’ Her young face was grim, and she swallowed. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget the ghastly cruelty – how can men do such dreadful things?’ She looked at her mother as if begging for some reasonable explanation of what she had seen.
Leila Al-Khoury had resumed easing herself clumsily into black woollen stockings, while sitting on the end of her bed. Now she turned again to her troubled little daughter and put her arms round her. She wished she had an answer to the child’s question.
‘My darling, I don’t know. Sometimes men seem to go mad.’ She stroked Helena’s silky black hair. ‘In time the memories will go away, my love. And life is not all cruelty. All kinds of nice things will happen to you in your life, you’ll see.’ She felt Helena give a shuddering sigh, and she added, ‘I wish we had foreseen what would happen, so that you could have been spared what you saw. And we might have been able to clear the warehouse and transfer some money – so that we wouldn’t be in quite such dire straits. But we lived in a good district; we’d never been disturbed before.’
Helena shut her eyes tightly and wanted to be sick, as she remembered a young boy lying sobbing in the dust, one arm severed, the rest of him terribly cut about as he had tried to protect himself from sword or bayonet. Her mother had paused instinctively, bent on helping him, but her husband caught her arm to propel her forward.
‘You can’t leave him! He’s alive!’ she had protested.
He did not answer her. Terrified of what the rampaging rabble would do to his lovely wife and little daughter if they were caught, he dragged her onwards.
The dying boy haunted Wallace Helena’s dreams all her life, returning like some eternal ghost to cry out to her in his agony, telling her that even loving fathers could have hearts of stone.
She had clear memories of reaching her father’s silk warehouse, as yet untouched by vandals, though deserted by its panic-stricken nightwatchmen, and of meeting a youth of about fifteen when they entered the wicket gate. He was the bookkeeper’s son, set to unlock the gate for any members of the family who might not have a key.
In answer to Charles Al-Khoury’s inquiry, the boy said that nobody had come, except his own parents and younger brothers and Mr James Al-Khoury.
Charles Al-Khoury told him to continue to keep watch through the grating in the main door and to hurry to the boat if he heard or saw anything suspicious.
The whey-faced boy had nodded assent, and Charles hurried Helena and her mother between bales wrapped in cotton cloth and through the silk carpet section, which smelled of hemp and dust.
They had emerged onto a covered wharf on the seaward side of the building, where a small sailing boat with an Egyptian rig bobbed fretfully on the sunlit water.
Charles’s brother, James, was already in the boat. He looked up at the new arrivals and exclaimed fervently, ‘Thank God you’ve come! Nobody came to work this morning – I tried to get back to the house to warn you that something was up; but the whole town seemed to be rioting – and drunk. So I returned here to alert the boatman to be ready. I guessed you’d hear the racket in the town and be warned.’ He gestured towards the bookkeeper, and added, ‘Then Bachiro, here, brought his family.’
‘We got out by a hair’s breadth,’ Charles responded sombrely, as he took the hand of the Nubian boatman and jumped into the little craft. He turned to help his wife into the boat, and went on, ‘I’m afraid Leila’s family is lost.’
As James stared unbelievingly up at him, Leila balked and held back, as she cried out in horror, ‘Mama and Papa dead? Oh, no! And my sisters – and Auntie and my cousin?’
James said gently, ‘We’ll wait a while; they may have got out.’ He hoped fervently that her women relations were burned in their house rather than thrown to the mob.
Petrified and exhausted, Leila allowed her husband to lift her down into the boat. Uncle James turned to a benumbed Helena. ‘Come on, my little lemon blossom, you’re safe now.’
Without a word, she sat down on the edge of the wharf and jumped into her uncle’s arms. He caught and held her to him for a moment, while the boat bounced unhappily on the water. Then he put her down beside her weeping mother, who snatched her to her. Bachiro’s wife began to wail and was hastily hushed by her husband.
‘When I went to see him this morning,’ Charles muttered to James, ‘Leila’s father said it wouldn’t be the first riot he’d seen, nor would it be the last. I reminded him that I’d had this felucca standing by for a week, in case of emergency, and he as good as told me I was a craven fool.’
His back to Leila, James made a rueful face, while Charles berated himself that he had not transferred money abroad.
‘With the Turks watching every move, it would have been almost impossible,’ James comforted him.
The wind showed signs of changing, and the boatman said it would be dangerous to linger any longer; the Turks would undoubtedly soon arrive to sack the warehouses along the waterfront. Better to leave while the wind held.
‘For Jesus’ sake, make him wait,’ Leila whispered urgently to her husband. ‘Mama – Papa – somebody – may come.’
Charles agreed, and argued heatedly with the stolid black seaman until, encouraged by some silver coins, he agreed to wait until the sun had set.
They waited anxiously through the afterglow, until shouts from the landward side of the warehouse and the sound of heavy thuds on wood brought Bachiro’s eldest son speeding to the wharf. ‘They’re coming,’ he shouted breathlessly, as he leapt into the little craft, his eyes starting out of his head with fright.
The felucca slipped seaward, while Leila crouched on a coil of rope and wept unrestrainedly for parents and sisters she would never see again. Charles Al-Khoury stared dumbly landwards. He was numb with horror, unable, as yet, to accept his parents’ fiery death.
Seated on the end of her bed in a small apartment in a Chicago slum, putting on her garters over her black stockings, Leila had pointed out in defence of her husband that he had done quite a lot to protect his family. Her deep, vibrant voice shook as she told Helena, ‘Papa arranged that a shipment of French silk he was expecting be redirected to our friend, Mr Ghanem, here in Chicago – and he began to wear his special moneybelt with gold coins in it, as did Uncle James. I wore my jewellery all the time.’
Helena sighed, and then she asked wistfully, ‘When will we be able to go home, Mama?’
Her mother stood up and shook down her long black skirt. ‘Some day, perhaps, dear.’ She did not tell her that there was nothing and nobody to go home to. Her courage faltered for a moment, as she said, ‘It was a terrible massacre – it’ll never be forgotten.’
Helena rubbed her face wearily, and remembered again how they had sailed all night, seasick and then hungry.
As they worked their way from Beirut to Cyprus, there to be sheltered by business friends of her father’s, all the certainties of her life had vanished. She had been an ordinary middle-class young girl, happy in a gentle routine of lessons from her mother and social occasions shared with her uncle and grandparents. There had been books to read, festivals to keep, music to listen to and to learn to play, forays into the mountains and walks beside the sea; and, in her father’s warehouse, fabulous fabrics and carpets to be admired and carefully caressed, until one could unerringly recognize quality and fine workmanship. And tentatively, beginning to be mentioned in her mother’s conversation, was the excitement of deciding who she should marry in a couple of years’ time.
Instead, she was being shifted nightly from one alien house to another, in an effort to stay hidden from the ruling Turks. Then, when she began to think she would go out of her mind, they sailed one night in a stinking fishing boat to Nice, where they were, at last, safely outside the Turkish Empire. From there, they had travelled by train across France to Hamburg, where a Jewish friend of her father obtained a passage to Liverpool for them.
They had waited several anxious weeks in Liverpool in a boarding house packed with other immigrants, while a passage for America was arranged. Charles and James Al-Khoury, with Helena pattering along behind them, had filled in the time by exploring the city. In the course of their walks, Uncle James had been most enthusiastic about the modern, gaslit city, and despite his elder brother’s advice against it, he decided to remain in it. Partly because of the valuable consignment of silk awaiting him in Chicago, which would help him to start a new business there, and the fact that there were already Lebanese refugees in that city, Charles Al-Khoury stuck to his original plan of settling in the United States.
Leila had nearly died during the passage to America in the steerage section of the cramped immigrant ship. Their small funds had dwindled during their journeying and Charles dared not spend any more than he did. Tended by other Christians who had fled the Turkish Empire, Greeks, Cypriots and Armenians, as well as Lebanese, her mother had lain weeping helplessly and muttering with fever. Huddled together in an unventilated hold, on a straw palliasse spread on a shelflike fixture above another family, Helena was very seasick. She wanted despairingly to die herself, as she watched her father grow more haggard each day, and listened to the horrifying stories of other refugees, of wholesale murder all over the Middle East.
When her nausea eased, her father took her up on deck and they walked together, too exhausted to say much.
After that, there was the incredible noise and smell in the great immigration shed, while the United States Immigration authorities worked their way through the anxious, pressing crowd washed up on their shores. Leila kept a firm hold on Helena’s hand, in case, by some awful misfortune, they should become separated, so Helena sat by the listless bundle in black which was her mother and listened to the jabber of a dozen languages round her, amid the maelstrom of noisy, smelly humanity.
The three of them had made an effort to learn a few words of English while in Liverpool. The immigration officials, though harried, were not unkind, and eventually a bewildered Helena was hustled onto the Chicago train by a father who, for the first time, seemed more relaxed. The bookkeeper had decided to stay in New York with another Lebanese family from the same immigrant ship. They said an impassioned farewell and vanished into the turbulence of the great port.
It was only towards the end of her time in Chicago, when her life was again about to change completely, that Helena realized that, to her parents, Chicago had been yet another nightmare. Being young, she had herself begun to adapt to her new life. As she went to the shops for her mother, and helped her father as he tried to establish a little business in wholesale dress materials, she began to pick up some English.
In contrast, her gently nurtured mother, though educated, was used to being much at home, secure in the knowledge that her parents had married her to a comfortably placed, kindly man. She had rarely been stared at by strangers, never been hungry, never done much except to order her servants and adapt herself to her husband. In Chicago, she was, at first, shattered, unable to make much effort.
Another refugee, arriving after them, confirmed the death of Leila’s parents and sisters and, indeed, it seemed of everyone they had known. As she mourned her loss, the fever she had suffered aboard ship returned to her, and Charles Al-Khoury’s face grew thinner and grimmer. Helena tried to comfort her mother and not to cry herself. She closed her mind off from any thought of Beirut, feeling that if she allowed herself to contemplate what had happened, she would go mad. In those early weeks in America, the child grew into a stony-faced young woman, physically hardly formed, but mentally aged beyond her years.
Not daring to part with so much as a garnet from his wife’s jewellery, unless he was starving, Charles Al-Khoury used the remainder of his little store of gold coins to augment his bales of silk with some dress lengths in other good materials. He found a tiny niche of a store on a main street crowded with immigrants. The door was strong and the windows had good wooden shutters. He paid a week’s rent on it to a Greek immigrant, who had been in Chicago rather longer than he had.
Before opening his precious purchases, he bargained for cleaning help from a young negress who lived nearby.
Sally earned her living as a daily cleaning lady, and she came for two successive evenings to give the store a thorough scouring. As Helena said to her, ‘You can’t sell material for clothes if it’s got dusty.’
A quick grin flashed across the black woman’s lined face, as she agreed. On her second evening, she brought a toffee apple with her for Helena, and she watched with pleasure when the grim little face lit up at the sight of the gift.
Sally enjoyed working for people who treated her politely. She became interested in the fortunes of the tiny store and continued to clean it, though sometimes Charles Al-Khoury had to defer paying her during bad weeks. She would tease him good-naturedly about his broken English, which he took in good part, being anxious to improve it. She drilled Helena in the English names of everything around her, and Helena became devoted to the strong, graceful woman.
Mr Ghanem, the Lebanese who had kept Charles’s bales of silk for him, was very nearly as poor as Charles himself. He had been in the States for a number of years with his own small business as an importer. He had, however, speculated in land and had gone bankrupt. He now had a small fruit and vegetable shop. Because they had been at school together, he had kept in touch with Charles sporadically over the years, and it was his presence in Chicago that had first given Charles the idea of beginning life again in that city.
It was Mr Ghanem who had met them at the station and had taken them in a borrowed horse-drawn delivery van to a room he had obtained for them. When Charles’s shop was ready, Mr Ghanem’s half-grown sons helped the new immigrant move the consignment of silk from their family’s basement onto the shelves of the new store. Mrs Ghanem had done her best to comfort poor Leila Al-Khoury, and she gradually emerged from her prostration, white and thin, but in her right mind.
Much later on, Leila told Helena, ‘I thought I’d go mad. There we were, in this strange country; nobodies, lost in a sea of nobodies. God curse the Druze – and may the Turks burn in hell!’ The words seemed extraordinary, coming from a beautiful seductive woman, once again restored to health; but Helena understood, and thought burning was too good for Turks.
Leila had continued sadly, ‘Outside that tiny room in which we existed, so few spoke Arabic – and nobody seemed to have heard of French! And the noise of screaming women and howling children in the other rooms seemed unending.’
Helena nodded agreement. Watching immigrant children struggle for existence had made her feel that the last thing she wanted in life was to be a mother.
‘When Mrs Ghanem suggested that I go to work like she did, I was really shocked,’ Leila confided. ‘But we needed ready money so badly that finally I agreed. It distressed your father very much.’ She giggled suddenly, at the memory of her hard-pressed husband’s agitation at the suggestion.
She giggled again, and then added, ‘I must’ve looked a sight. I wore a second-hand black skirt, a black blouse and second-hand boots. I wore a head veil, like I had done in Beirut, and I felt terrible. It seemed to me that every man I passed stared at me.
‘The attic we worked in was so badly lit that I could hardly see how to thread my needles. There, Mrs Ghanem and I sat on a piece of sacking for ten hours a day, stitching on buttons and finishing the buttonholes on men’s suits. I’ve worked harder since then, but never in such confinement; I had to watch that my tears didn’t fall on the fine cloth. What a time!’ She threw up her hands helplessly.
Helena put her arms round her mother’s neck. ‘Poor Mama,’ she said.
‘Well, I lived,’ responded her mother philosophically. ‘But I didn’t want you to be confined like that, so your dear father took you to help him in the store.’
‘And he taught me how to run a business,’ Helena had remembered gratefully. ‘How to organize it and be neat and methodical. Buy cheap; sell dear. Have the patience of Job. Have a first-class product for the money. Keep two sets of books – one for the tax collector, and one which tells you what’s really happening. Make friends – which I haven’t done very well. Do favours and collect on them when you need to. Never forget a name – and smile, child, smile.’ He would grin at her from under his black moustache. ‘And don’t trust anybody, unless you have to,’ he would reiterate pithily in Arabic.
She would laugh back at him. But she learned, and never quite trusted anyone – except Joe Black.
Afraid to trust a bank, afraid of his wife being attacked in the street if she wore it, Charles hid some of Leila’s jewellery in various spots in his tiny shop, a necklace wrapped in a scrap of black silk under a beam in the ceiling, several rings under a floorboard, a pair of hair ornaments in a box stuck to the underside of his long counter. He instructed Helena that, if he were out, she was never to leave anyone alone in the shop for a single second, including Sally.
Leila sewed two gold chains into the waistband of her ugly serge skirt, and her best emerald necklace was carried in a linen moneybelt round her husband’s waist. Spread out like this, they agreed, they were less likely to be robbed of all of it; it was capital, partly inherited and partly carefully bought since their marriage; it was not to be used, except in the expansion of the dress material business, if they had some success with it; or, if that failed, to keep them from starvation.
In the store, Helena was in her element. She watched with care how her father set about establishing his new business, learned how to set up the bookkeeping, how to find suppliers and, most important of all, how to find customers. She would sit unobtrusively in the background while he bargained for bankrupt stock from other businesses or cajoled a lady who wanted the price of a dress length reduced, and when his English failed him, she quietly translated – though her own grasp of the language was not very good. When they had a quiet hour, he would reminisce about the family business in Beirut, and, when he found she was interested, would go into detail about its organization, its employees, and its links with distant countries. He was astonished that she knew and understood much of its detailed running already. She laughed at his astonishment and reminded him how he used to take her down to the warehouses to give her a change. ‘I used to listen to you talking to people – and when I grew bigger, I used to ask Bachiro to show me the papers that seemed to be like oil flowing to facilitate the movement of everything coming in and going out.’
Her father laughed. ‘You did? You nosy little person!’
‘I wasn’t nosy,’ she replied indignantly. ‘I was really interested in what you and Uncle James and Grandpa were doing. I kept thinking that if I had been a boy, you would have begun to keep me by your side and teach me everything.’
‘Well, you’re a great help to me now, little flower. I don’t know how I would manage without you.’
Her big eyes shone at the compliment, and he thought that he should get her married as soon as he could, before the harshness of their life in Chicago toughened her too much. Men liked gentle amenable women; a ruthless trader would not appeal to them.
But, without realizing that he was doing it, he had already inculcated in her the basic principles of organization, enterprise, forethought and quick decision-making which were to be her strength in times to come.
Chapter Five (#ulink_6dcd309b-e6eb-5835-a142-f1d758056ec5)
The two rooms above Charles Al-Khoury’s shop in Chicago were occupied by Polish immigrants. When they moved out, he again bargained with his Greek landlord and succeeded in renting the rooms for little more than he was already paying for the shop. Triumphantly, he got Sally to clean the rooms and then he installed his wife and daughter in them.
The tiny store and the flat above it became Helena’s world.
She carried samples of materials to the houses of well-to-do ladies, when requested; and in the shop she made tea for women who began to discover the fine quality of Charles’s stock. They sat by his counter and talked haughtily to him, under the impression that they were bargaining successfully for a better price than others obtained; dressmakers, who also came, always got materials at a better price, but they always received a lower grade silk. As her father warned her, ‘Dressmakers are always poor; you can’t get more money out of them than they have. Remember that!’
Helena was allowed to handle swatches from the fat bales on the shelves, and she soon learned what constituted a good dress length. Her English rapidly became better than his, so he encouraged her to write his business letters for him and then to keep the accounts. Though she did not write her father’s letters in Arabic to Uncle James, she sometimes saw them. It was apparent that her father felt that Uncle James was quite mad; he was boiling soap in his landlady’s wash boiler and was selling it door-to-door in Liverpool.
The bales of material were heavy, and Charles lifted them himself. Helena watched with anxiety the sweat pour down his face, as he moved the cotton-swathed rolls from shelf to counter to show them to customers, and, later, lifted them back onto the shelf.
One day, when he had gone with swatches of material to see a particularly high-class dressmaker and Helena was watching the shop for him, Sally remarked to her, ‘Your pa’s doing too much.’ She was polishing the old wooden counter to a fine sheen, as she spoke, and did not appear to expect a reply.
Helena’s heart seemed to miss a beat, as the implied threat of illness sank in. From then on, she insisted that she be allowed to help with the tidying-up of the shop, but she was a skinny youngster without much power in her arms; and he would laugh and take the bundles from her to lay them on the shelves.
Apart from his stock, American women found the Lebanese shopkeeper charming and they recommended the store to their friends. The tiny business began to prosper. The Al-Khourys hoarded every cent they could.
At the end of six months, Charles insisted that his wife give up her job with the tailor and stay at home. ‘If we are very, very careful, we can manage,’ he assured her. ‘I don’t like you doing menial work.’
Helena took her mother for granted; she did not realize that she possessed unusual beauty, and that, as she learned to dress in Western clothes, her father felt jealous when other men looked at her. He wanted her at home, not veiled like a Muslim woman but decently bundled up like a good Maronite.
Leila Al-Khoury was thankful to be released from the tailor’s stuffy attic, but she refused to wear her native dress or veil her hair. She had fallen in love with hats and bought herself a plain black straw which she trimmed with shreds of silk from her husband’s shop.
With this imaginative concoction on her head, she pressed herself lovingly against her husband and assured him that he had nothing to worry about. He was partially mollified, though the flowerlike face framed by the hat’s brim was, he felt uneasily, very attractive.
Helena had not inherited her mother’s beauty. Though she was not ugly, she had her father’s strong nose and wide mouth. She was sallower than Leila and there was no hint of pink in her cheeks; and her long oriental eyes with their secretive, sidelong glances were too foreign for Western taste. The tumbling black mass of her hair was restrained in a bun at the back of her head and gave little hint of its richness. Amid the babble of thousands of immigrants, as a skinny young girl she passed unremarked. Until she met Joe Black.
Curled up alone in a feather bed in Liverpool, her dream passed from the nightmares of the Lebanon and Chicago, to Joe.
She smiled in her sleep, as she seemed to hear herself saying to him cryptically, ‘You never gave me toffee apples.’ And his laughing back at her and saying, ‘I never thought of them. Want one?’
Joe had his own ideas of gifts. In her dream, she saw him lounge into their living-room, the original log cabin in which her stepfather had first lived in Canada. Peeking out of his jacket was a tame grey fox, a birthday gift.
One Christmas, he had brought her a muff made from a marten fur he had trapped; his mother had cleaned and tanned the skin and he had then given it to another Cree woman who had fashioned it for him. Sometimes, when he had been south to see his grandfather, he brought her a little opium to smoke, bargained from a lonely Russian farmer who had established his own patch of poppies, or, at other times, a small packet of tobacco from Virginia, passed from hand to hand across a continent, in trade.
The rising sun began to push long fingers between the heavy velvet curtains of her bedroom in Liverpool, and she sleepily stretched out to touch him. But he was six thousand miles away, harvesting a hay crop.
Chapter Six (#ulink_3e21c00f-12fb-5120-b114-5f149da0fc71)
Leila Al-Khoury lamented bitterly that it was Mr and Mrs Ghanem who had brought the typhoid into their Chicago home. The infection had, in fact, sneaked through the tumble-down, crowded neighbourhood like a smouldering fire; but Mr Ghanem was the first person to die from it.
The local inhabitants were used to illnesses which ran their course, and the patients were nursed at home. Though guesses were made, no name was put to the sickness. Immigrants had little money, so doctors were rarely called.
Charles Al-Khoury, worked to a shadow of his former self, was in no state to withstand such a virulent infection. The Al-Khourys knew that Mr Ghanem was also ill. His wife told Leila that it was ‘Something he’s eaten.’ It was assumed that in both cases the fever would go away and the diarrhoea would ease, if the patients were kept on a liquid diet. Meanwhile, Helena served in their tiny shop and Leila nursed her husband.
When Mr Ghanem died, leaving a widow with five sons to feed, Leila realized, in a panic, that this was no ordinary illness. She sent for a doctor, only to be scolded by him in English she barely understood for not calling him earlier. Charles died in her arms.
Once more, Leila tore her clothes, and the household rang to shrieks of mourning. Both she and a terrified Helena were devastated, as was Mrs Ghanem in her tiny home. Other neighbours, afraid of being infected themselves, left small gifts of food at the shop door, but refused to come in.
Only Sally walked briskly up the stairs to the Al-Khoury flat, to bring some common sense into their lives. Hiding her own sorrow for a man she secretly adored, she instructed a grief-stricken Helena to get back to the store and mind it. ‘I’ll look after your ma.’
Helena had obeyed, but she quickly found herself in difficulties. Men delivering cotton and silk her father had ordered through middlemen refused to leave the goods without her father’s signature. ‘You’re too young to sign for it. You can pay cash, if you like,’ she was told.
‘Could Mother sign for it?’ she asked, afraid of parting with the small sum in the secret drawer of the old till.
A man delivering a roll of silk had hesitated at this suggestion, but finally said uneasily that he did not think his company would accept a woman’s signature, and went away with the roll still on his shoulder.
Beating down her increasing terror, she served customers from the existing stock with her sweetest smile, as she struggled with the heavy rolls. She knew that, unless she could buy replacement materials, the business was doomed.
Oblivious of the impending end to their sole source of income, Leila sat cross-legged on her bed, allowing Sally and Helena to minister to her. Occasionally, she would fling herself down on the pillows in a fresh burst of weeping.
Between bouts, Helena asked her urgently, ‘Couldn’t you run the business, Mama? I believe if you took it in hand, the suppliers would accept you – or perhaps we could import some silk direct from China?’ She sighed, and got up to pull back the closed curtains to let in the evening sun.
Leila put down the coffee her daughter had brought her, turned her blotched face away from the light, and began to cry again.
Helena went back to her, to sit beside her and put her arms round her. ‘Mama, dear, listen to me, please. If you can’t help me, we’ll have to close the shop – we don’t make anything like enough to employ a manager, even supposing we could find an honest one.’
Leila wept on.
As she patted her mother’s back in an effort to comfort her, Helena said savagely, ‘I know what to do – but nobody will trust me. The salesman from Smithson’s chucked me under the chin this morning, as if I were a baby. He actually said, “Pity you’re not a boy!”’
‘Mama, could we sell something to get money, so that I can pay cash for stock?’
‘I don’t know anything about business,’ her mother sobbed, and continued to moan into the pillows.
In despair, Helena held a big sale and then shut the shop. She made just sufficient to pay their debts, except for one.
‘Sally, dear. I don’t have any money left to pay you. Instead, I saved these for you.’ She proffered a package containing several pretty ends of rolls that she had been unable to sell.
Sally bent and hugged her. She sniffed, and then said, ‘You don’t have to worry about me, hon. There was many a time when your pa couldn’t pay me. You and your ma are welcome to anything I can do.’
Before letting her out of the door, Helena clung to her. ‘Thank you, Sally. Thank you.’
Left alone, she searched the little shop to retrieve the remaining bits of jewellery hidden there. ‘I’d better take a good look upstairs, as well,’ she thought, as she wrapped the pieces up in a scrap of cotton. ‘If we don’t pay the rent we’ll be thrown out fast.’
As she tucked the little parcel well down into her skirt pocket, she cried helplessly. She was nearly fourteen years old, tall for her age and very thin, with eyes that were sadly old for one so young and feet that seemed too big for her stature.
Since her mother was in no state to do it, Helena sat down at their rickety table in their tiny apartment and wrote to her only surviving blood relative, Uncle James in Liverpool, to tell him of his brother’s death and the penury of his widow. Tears blotted her shaky unformed Arabic script
By the time they received a reply six weeks later, the landlord, a kindly man, had grown tired of a tenant who was not paying him rent, even though she was a pretty widow, and told them they had another week in which to start paying again, plus something towards the arrears.
If it had not been for a large bag of rice, which her father had obtained shortly before his death, and the kindness of their neighbours, Helena and her mother would have starved.
In his reply, Uncle James wrote that, if they could manage to pay their fares to England, he would be happy to give both mother and daughter a home. Unfortunately, he was not yet earning enough to send them their fares; he had just leased a small factory building and installed his first soap boiler, and this had drained his reserve and his credit.
He did not know how to express his own grief at the loss of a well-loved brother, so contented himself with the usual polite phrases. Leila’s troubles were great enough without his adding to them.
He did not mention that the home he offered would actually be in a house owned by his English mistress, Eleanor. As he wrote, she was sitting on a chair opposite him, nursing their year-old son, Benjamin.
It had taken a great deal of coaxing on his part to persuade this downright little Liverpudlian that he owed shelter to his sister-in-law, Leila, and her daughter, Helena. It was a duty he could not evade, he assured her, and he would have to find another place to live if Eleanor could not help him.
‘She’s foreign,’ Eleanor had protested.
James had looked up from his letter and responded dryly, though with a twinkle in his eye, ‘So am I.’
‘You’re different, luv,’ she told him, and smiled at him.
James’s eyes were bloodshot from private weeping on top of long hours of work. He looked so drained that she impulsively got up from her chair and leaned over the baby to kiss his cheek. ‘Well, never mind. Don’t you fret,’ she said kindly. ‘I suppose I could give ’em the second-floor back room to theirselves. I’d have to give Mr Tomlinson notice, though, so as he can find somewhere else.’ Mr Tomlinson was one of her three gentlemen lodgers, other than James Al-Khoury himself. She sighed heavily, as she sat down and rearranged Benjamin on her lap. ‘I’d have to ask you for a bit more housekeeping to help out, like, ’cos I’ll have two more mouths to feed – and I won’t have Mr T’s rent.’
‘Of course I’ll give you more,’ he assured her, without any idea of where he was going to get the extra money from. He put down his pen and got up to embrace both mother and child; Eleanor was a wonderful comfort to a lonely man, a real help – and she had given him a son. He prayed to God that his new venture with George Tasker, the Soap Master, would prosper.
Eleanor told herself she would do anything she could for him; she’d never again meet a man like him. Mr T must go; she could not imagine her despair if James left her. She wasn’t getting any younger; and now there was little Benji to think about.
In Chicago, a surprised Leila read his kind letter. Puzzled, she looked up from her meagre lunch of boiled rice and weak coffee, and asked Helena, ‘Did you write to Uncle James?’
Having seen the English stamp on the letter, Helena was tense with anxiety, as she said eagerly, ‘Yes.’
Leila sighed. ‘I should have done it.’
‘I did ask you, Mama. But you didn’t listen.’
In the seven weeks since her husband had died, Leila had grown quieter. Though she did not cry so much, she was very listless. Nothing that Helena could do or say seemed to rouse her to the realization that, unless they did something quickly, they would die of starvation.
Now, seeing the letter, a wild hope surged in Helena. ‘May I read Uncle’s letter, Mama?’ she asked eagerly.
Leila handed it to her without comment.
As the girl read, a tremendous relief made her want to shout with joy, the first sense of wellbeing since her father had died. ‘Isn’t he good, Mama? And his wife, too. We’ll have to sell your jewellery – or some of it, Mama?’ A hint of doubt had crept into her voice. Despite their desperate position, Leila had sullenly refused to part with the last of her chains and brooches. Her husband’s declaration that he would only sell them in extremis had meant, to her, only in the case of death. A Lebanese, longer established than the Al-Khourys, had accepted a gold chain from her and had arranged Charles’s funeral. That to her had constituted a time to sell.
Leila did not immediately reply to her daughter; she sat fretfully toying with her coffee cup.
‘To get the fares to go to England, Mama – we have to get the fares from somewhere.’
Leila felt morosely that fate had dealt her an unbearable blow in the loss of her husband. In these last seven weeks of prostration, she had been waiting for that same fate to compensate her in some way. Her brother-in-law’s kindly letter did not appear to do that, and she said capriciously, ‘I don’t want to go.’
‘But, Mama, what else can we do? Uncle James is a dear – you know that.’
‘He’s kind,’ Leila admitted reluctantly. She was quiet for a moment, and then, as if to justify her refusal she added, ‘I simply can’t change countries again. It would be too much; I couldn’t bear it.’ She buried her face in her hands.
Helena swallowed, and replied carefully, ‘It wouldn’t be much different from America, would it, Mama? I liked Liverpool when we passed through it’
‘It would be quite different,’ her mother replied shortly. She rose from the table and, dragging her bare feet on the planks of the floor, she went to Helena’s small bed at the back of the room. She lay down on it, her face towards the wall, as if to shut out a life which was a burden to her.
Helena went to sit at the foot of the bed and continue the argument.
Without looking at her, Leila protested, ‘Helena, you can’t imagine what it would be like to be penniless in Uncle James’s house. No matter how kind he is, we would be dependent upon the whims of his – er – wife. She’s bound to resent us – or she’d make use of us as servants. It would be insupportable.’
Helena took another tack. ‘I always imagined that Uncle James wasn’t married?’ she queried.
Leila bit her lower lip. She was not sure how to explain Uncle James’s domestic affairs. She said cautiously, ‘Some men have a woman friend who lives with them. Uncle James’s situation could make it harder for us.’ She turned slightly, to look at the frightened girl. ‘In the West, it’s not quite honourable, though I’m sure your uncle has his reasons for not marrying her …’
‘If she’s not his wife, couldn’t he send her away? Then we could look after him.’
‘I doubt he wants to be rid of her. They’ve been together a long time.’
‘I see,’ Helena muttered. But all she really understood was that her mother seemed totally incapable of doing anything. It was to be a number of years before she became aware of the profound effect her uncle’s lack of a marriage certificate was to have on her own life.
Chapter Seven (#ulink_4771604e-7f85-500a-935f-9c5ce67603a4)
Helena continued to sit by her mother on her bed and to beg her to reconsider her uncle’s offer. She got no response, except for peevish monosyllables. Hope died in the girl and was replaced by dread.
Finally, in search of comfort, she went out into the street and made her way, through crowds on their way home from work, to Mrs Ghanem’s tiny home. Perhaps another widow would be able to help her rouse her mother.
Mrs Ghanem was still at work, her five-year-old told her solemnly. He was helping Mama by looking after his little brother. He pointed to a crawling child behind him.
The children were filthy and the house stank. Poor Mrs Ghanem, thought Helena compassionately; her children and her home had always been immaculate before Mr Ghanem’s death.
She promised the child that she would come again another day, and, feeling suddenly very weak, she walked towards home.
As she turned into the familiar narrow street, she caught a glimpse of Sally coming towards her, and her depression lifted a little. She ran towards her.
Sally caught her in a bear hug. ‘Where’ve you been?’ she inquired. ‘I was just dropping by to see how your ma is.’
‘I went to see Mrs Ghanem – but she’s still at work.’ She turned back towards her home, arm-in-arm with the cleaning lady.
‘Uh-ha. So what’s new with you, hon?’
Helena hastily told her about her uncle’s letter. Then she added uneasily, ‘I’m scared, Sally. Mama won’t do anything. And we haven’t paid the rent for weeks – and in a few days there won’t be even rice to eat. At least Uncle James would feed us, and perhaps I could find some work in Liverpool; it’s a very busy city.’
Sally paused on the ragged doormat at the foot of the stairs leading up to Leila’s living quarters. ‘Want me to talk to her?’ she asked.
‘She’d never forgive me for telling you.’
‘I guess you’re right.’
As they came up the last step, they were both surprised to see that Leila was up. Her hair had been combed and pinned up; she had put on a clean white blouse and her black stockings and boots. She had lifted the nearly empty sack of rice onto the table and had spread some of the grains on a tray in order to pick out any small stones in it.
Helena was astonished. It looked as if Uncle James’s letter had had an effect, she decided thankfully.
Sally said to Leila, ‘My, you do look pretty! How’re you doing?’
The pale, delicate mouth quivered and the eyes were full of pain, but she answered Sally quite firmly, ‘I’m better, thank you. Sit down.’ She pulled out a chair for her visitor. ‘Coffee?’
Sally accepted the proffered chair. Knowing how short they were of everything, she said she did not need coffee. Leila, however, was suddenly aware of neglected social obligations, and she insisted on using the last of their coffee to make a decent cup for her friend.
Helena went quietly to the table and took over the cleaning of the rice. She was afraid that if she said anything she would upset Leila again. Let Sally do the talking.
Sally did talk. She brought in all the polite gambits of the state of the weather, the price of vegetables and the latest news of the war raging further south, while she gravely sipped her coffee and Leila sat with her hands clasped in her lap, barely attending to the rich musical voice.
Finally, Sally told her, with real excitement in her voice, that she had managed to get a full-time job as a waitress in a new coffee shop being opened by Italian immigrants. It was close to the Al-Khourys’ old shop.
Leila was genuinely pleased, and congratulated her. Then she sat looking at her hands for a moment, before she went on to say determinedly, ‘Tomorrow, Helena and I, we go to tailor to ask for sewing work. Helena sew as good as me.’
‘Well, that would keep you going for a bit.’ Sally smiled at her, and then said very gently, ‘With your looks you could get a healthier job, a clerk in a store, say.’
Leila smiled wanly back. ‘Later. Tailor give job now.’ She shrugged. ‘Nobody give me good job now. English so bad.’
‘You’re doing just fine,’ Sally assured her robustly.
Helena looked up from the rice. She was dumbfounded at her mother’s decisiveness. A quick warning glance from Sally told her to be careful what she said.
She deftly picked out a piece of chaff from the rice. ‘I’d love to work with you, Mama,’ she said softly.
Her mother turned and smiled at her. ‘Would you? That’s good. We’ll manage, darling, won’t we?’
Thankfully, Helena got up and went to her. Leila took her warmly in her arms, and Helena wanted to burst into tears with relief.
The Civil War had caused an insatiable demand for uniforms. The tailor was very glad to have two skilled sewers for finishing work, though he bargained the wages down to near-starvation levels, on the grounds that Leila’s English was poor and that, at nearly fourteen, Helena was not yet entitled to a woman’s wage.
The two clung to each other and managed to continue to exist, two tiny boats bobbing along in a sea of other immigrants, all competing for jobs, cheap rooms and cheap food, in a country where war had caused prices to skyrocket. Their Greek landlord was appeased, and the shop beneath their small nest was re-rented, to a locksmith and his family, who both worked and slept there. Because they had a side entrance, the two women were not disturbed by them.
Helena had never in her life felt so exhausted. Underfed, she also lacked sunlight, diversions, and exercise. One day, on their return from work, she fainted.
Leila bathed her daughter’s pinched, white face, and decided desperately that she would sell her best gold chain. In that way, she could pay the landlord his arrears instead of having to give him extra money each week. They could then spend more on food. She herself felt apathetic and intensely weary, and she thought, with real horror, of what might happen to her daughter if she herself should die.
She took the necklace to a jeweller in a better area of the city, and it was in the jeweller’s shop that she met Tom Harding.
Tom was a widowed settler from Fort Edmonton, a Hudson’s Bay Company Fort on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River in western Canada, an area as yet barely explored. Though Tom claimed to be a settler, he was, in fact, a squatter on land owned by the great fur-trading Company which had established the Fort. To the Company’s annoyance, he also trapped, and, having once been a miner, was apt to dig Company coal out of the banks of the river and to pan small amounts of gold out of the river itself.
His younger brother owned a prosperous grocery shop in Chicago, and their acerbic old mother lived with him. Tom had received an urgent letter from his brother, via the Hudson’s Bay Company, saying that the old lady was in very frail health. She had several times expressed a strong desire to see him before she died, and he should hurry.
When he received the letter, Tom thought wryly that his brother had obviously no idea of the distances involved or the difficulties of the journey. He was, however, extremely depressed himself. He had recently lost his Cree Indian wife and his infant son in childbirth. An Indian wife was an enormous asset, besides which he had been quite fond of her and had been looking forward to the child. He wondered if he should return to Chicago and settle there.
After discussing the matter with his friend, Joe Black, who worked with him on his illegally held piece of land, it was decided that Joe could manage to look after the farm, while Tom made the journey. ‘And mind you come back!’ Joe shouted after him, as he prepared to leave. ‘We haven’t built this place out of nothing, just to see it go back to forest again. You’ll feel a lot better when you’ve had a change – and I know lots of Cree women who wouldn’t mind being Mrs Harding Number Two.’
Tom grinned and saluted him, as he turned his horse onto the trail which led to the Fort, where he expected to join the Company’s boats going down the river to Lake Winnipeg. Then another boat down to Fort Garry – about a thousand miles, he believed, and he’d still be in Canada.
As he rode, he chewed one end of his moustache and considered the fragile hold he had on the precious piece of land for which he had struggled so hard. It was certainly Company land, but he reckoned that Joe was far too useful to the Company for them to try to dislodge him from it while he himself was away.
Joe was half Cree, half negro, and he knew the languages of the area. Slow to anger and trusted by both sides, he was frequently used by the Chief Factor at the Fort as a negotiator between the Company and the recalcitrant Blackfoot and Cree Indians. Though he had been known to get involved in fights which occasionally broke out amongst the Company’s employees, when all concerned had drunk more than usual, and was consequently sometimes out of favour with Company men ruefully rubbing bruises he had inflicted, he was a godsend to a company which was not always able to keep control in the land over which it was supposed to rule.
In his heart, Tom felt that he himself was tolerated on the Company’s land solely because Joe worked for him, that Chief Factor Christie did not have him removed because, if he did, Joe would probably drift back south to rejoin his Indian grand-father, of whom it was said he was very fond; and the Company would lose its best defence against the resentment of the displaced Indians.
Tom did not consider that he, as well as Joe, had built up a friendship with a number of Blackfoot families, because he owed his life to one of them, and that Factor Christie was aware of this useful relationship between a white man and a very proud and angry group of native people.
Tom certainly did not enjoy the hardships of the long voyage in a York boat down the North Saskatchewan to Lake Winnipeg and through the lake to Fort Garry. He was expected to make himself useful on the voyage; and he decided that his own life might be hard, but, being a voyager faced with portages and little but pemmican to eat, he preferred the hardships of a squatter’s life.
From Fort Garry, he sailed in a small American trading boat down the Red River, then went by stagecoach to La Crosse and, thankfully, the rest of the journey by train.
Now, he wanted to return home before the winter set in, though his frail ghost of a mother begged him to remain in Chicago. Despite her invalidism, her tongue was as malicious as ever; and she had made him feel a sense of guilt at his decision to desert her once again. To soften the blow of his departure, he had decided to buy her a present.
His finances were limited and, as he pushed open the door of the local jewellery store, he had scant hope of finding what he wanted at a reasonable price.
Instead of a present, he found Leila Al-Khoury bargaining with the jeweller over the sale of a fine gold chain which had originally belonged to her mother-in-law; it had been given to Leila on the birth of her first son, who had died of a fever when he was six. Leila firmly tried to remember the old lady’s delight at the child and to forget the gentle woman’s terrible death at the hands of the Beirut Muslims. She spoke to the jeweller in the firmest tone she could muster.
Her voice rose and fell, as, in broken English, she refused to reduce the price that she wanted. The jeweller had assayed the gold and knew that the price she asked was not unreasonable, but he was in no hurry, so he let her rattle on.
While Tom loitered behind her, Leila whined and begged and pointed out the flawless workmanship of the Beirut goldsmith, until the jeweller became fed up with her; if he turned her away today, she would probably return tomorrow willing to accept his offer.
Tom shifted his feet uneasily, as he looked idly over a case of brooches. At the slight noise, the lady turned her head to look at him. She wore a plain white summer dress she had made herself and her face was framed by a cheap straw hat. Tom found himself looking into a pair of enormous, sad brown eyes – like a little spaniel’s, he thought. A cupid’s bow of a mouth trembled, as if tears were near. Under the white dress, a generous bosom heaved slightly.
The whole stringy six feet of Tom Harding shook with desire. What was a woman like that doing on her own? Was she a whore?
As he stared into the eyes of the pretty Lebanese, the argument with the jeweller appeared to have reached an impasse. The jeweller huffily banged the drawers of his counter shut and locked them. Tears glistened on the long black lashes of the lady. The necklace, a handsomely worked heavy chain with several red stones pendant from it, lay on the counter.
The jeweller moved slightly towards Tom. ‘Can I help you, Sir?’ he inquired politely.
Uncomfortably aware that he was roughly dressed in riding boots, a plaid shirt and a big felt hat, in a city which was quite full of prosperous people more formally attired, Tom looked down at Leila and replied soberly, ‘I got plenty of time. Finish with the lady.’
Still looking up at him, Leila scooped up the necklace and put it back into her reticule. ‘It finish,’ she told him tragically, the words coming out in softly accented English. She bowed her head and began to move slowly and despondently towards the door, her white skirt swaying gently round her.
Tom jerked to attention. Once she was outside that door, he would probably never see her again.
He took off his big felt hat and bowed to her. ‘Excuse me, Ma’am.’
She looked doubtfully up at him with a slight frown.
He swallowed. ‘I’m in the market for a necklace, Ma’am. Would that necklace be for sale privately?’ He paused, waiting for some response, but she had not fully understood what he said and was mentally translating his remarks. He hastened to add, ‘It’s a mighty smart chain – I believe my mother would like it – if you’ll forgive me for being so forward, Ma’am.’
The jeweller threw up his hands and went to tidy a cabinet. He knew when a man was hooked. Nevertheless, a woman should not show a stranger a necklace which was worth twice what he had offered for it; she could be robbed. Then he shrugged. If she were that foolish, it wasn’t his business. He took up a feather duster and began to dust the clocks in the cabinet.
At the mention of his mother, Tom was treated to a smile so delicious that he never quite recovered from it. He handed Leila out of the door and down the steps as if she were made of glass and then into a coffee shop two doors down the street.
Between coffee and pieces of pie and regrets that the necklace was too expensive for him to buy, he learned who she was and about her widowhood, her life in Beirut and in Chicago, and that she had a fourteen-year-old daughter. She told him frankly that she and her daughter both worked ten hours a day in a tailor’s garret; she had had to beg the afternoon off in order to see the jeweller.
In return, he told her that he had been a miner and had gone west from Chicago, to work in gold mines. Then he had heard a rumour of gold easily panned in the North Saskatchewan River, in Canada. Hoping to stake a claim, he had travelled north with four men also bent on instant wealth.
‘We knew that there was at least one Hudson’s Bay Fort on the North Saskatchewan, and we reckoned we could make that our jumping-off place. A few other Americans had travelled part of the route before us; they sold liquor to the Injuns for furs.
‘The trail wasn’t very clear, and it was rough going. We did O.K., though, and we were well north, when we had to make a detour round a huge slough. I was lagging behind because I had to – well, Ma’am, relieve myself.’
There was a hint of impishness in her understanding smile.
Encouraged, he continued, ‘And I’d got my eyes to the ground, watching where I trod between the bulrushes on one side and a lot of willows on the other – I guess they were willows. One minute I could hear the others shouting at me – and the next minute I couldn’t; and the next thing I know the darned horse got mired, and I called and called to ’em to come help me out. And no answer.
‘I couldn’t get the animal out – the more it struggled, the deeper it went. Finally, I had to watch it drown.’
‘Terrible, terrible,’ Leila sympathized.
‘I called and called to the other men. I was scared, I can tell you. Finally, I picked my way round the slough, but I’d no idea where I was. I couldn’t find a hint of the trail; and I’d nothing – gun, blanket, beans and tools, all went down with the horse. When I couldn’t even find the track of the others’ horses, I must’ve gone stark mad. When the Blackfoot found me, I was clean out of my mind.’
‘Blackfoot?’ queried Leila, wide-eyed, her mouth open.
‘Yeah. Injuns. A hunting party. They fed me and put me on a horse. I don’t remember much about it – I was too far gone, I guess. Next thing I know truly is I’m in bed in Fort Edmonton, with a Cree woman nursing me better. She told me the Blackfoot simply dumped me at the gate of the Fort and rode away. She was a medicine woman sent for by the Cree wife of one of the Hudson’s Bay clerks. I tell you, that old woman had me on my feet and sane very quick. I owe a lot to the Injuns up there – and I never forget it.’
‘What happened to your friends?’
‘Dunno. When I inquired around the Fort, they’d never arrived. Never heard of one of them from that day to this. Maybe they struck another Fort – or joined up with a group of whisky-runners. Or maybe they got lost, as well – and died.’
Leila nodded her head from side to side in wonderment. ‘Terrible,’ she repeated, it being the one word she knew in English to describe his experiences.
‘We were plumb crazy to go north without a guide. We were miners, not explorers or even trappers.’
‘What happen next?’
‘Well, to be honest, I was afraid of the bush for a long time. So I stayed put, worked on the farm belonging to the Fort for a while, and got to know the land around so I wouldn’t get lost again. Then I found a piece of land upriver, which the Bay seemed to have forgotten they owned. Somebody’d been there before – there was an old cabin there and I reroofed it, made a place to live. And I started clearing the land round it. After a while, I met up with a guy called Joe Black – and we worked together. We’ve got quite a homestead now – he’s looking after it while I’m down here.’ He took out a pipe and, without asking whether she minded the smoke, he lit up.
‘You find gold?’ she asked.
‘Nope. I pan a bit out of the river sometimes – but nobody’s ever found the mother lode.’
‘Mother lode?’ she queried in puzzlement, her smooth brow wrinkling slightly.
‘The main vein of ore – gold, Ma’am.’ He watched her delicately sipping her coffee. What a beauty she was! He wondered if she could endure a wilderness home, and told himself not to be a fool. She must be able to pick and choose the men she would take up with.
He plunged into conversation again. ‘I don’t make much in cash,’ he admitted. ‘But one way and another we mostly eat O.K. The worst years are over. We’ve two other men helping us now – both Crees. And Joe Black’s mother came from working at the Fort, to help in the house. She’s Cree, too.’
She dimpled, and inquired coyly, ‘You’re not married?’
‘I was, Ma’am. Married a Cree lady – a nice, intelligent woman. But about a year ago, she died giving birth.’ He sighed heavily.
‘And the baby?’
‘Little Wallace? He died too; it was a bitter winter and a lot of kids died – and old folk round the Fort.’
Remembering her own dead sons, Leila felt an overwhelming compassion for the man before her. Impulsively, she put out her hand and touched his arm. ‘You suffer much.’
‘I think you have, too, Ma’am.’
She nodded sad agreement.
He called for more coffee, and then began to describe the country he lived in, its superb beauty, the summers hot and comforting; he omitted to mention the myriads of mosquitoes and blackfly in summer, the problems of getting water into the house during the harsh winter, the vast unexplored territory round the tiny settlement
She listened in wonderment. It was obvious that the man loved his adopted home. She visualized it as country rather like that she had passed through on the train between New York and Chicago, which had seemed very empty to her in comparison with the Lebanon or even Britain. She watched his face which was leathery with exposure to the weather, and noted the grey in his moustache. He was a fine man, she felt, and her sex-starved body cried out with need, though she was thirty years old – quite old, she told herself.
By the time the fresh coffee had been consumed, Tom was telling himself there was no way he was going to let her go. She could adapt, like other immigrant women to the United States had done. ‘She can take one more step in her life,’ he assured himself, hope overwhelming his doubts.
He accompanied her home and left her on her doorstep, after agreeing to meet the following evening. Leila went up the stairs in a dream. She slowly took off her hat and laid it on the table. Helena was not yet home from work, so she flung herself on her daughter’s bed, spread out her arms as if to embrace the world, and for the first time since she had come to Chicago, she laughed with pure joy.
Chapter Eight (#ulink_8268ab89-f562-5c37-98a1-551129c4a082)
A week later, Leila broke it to her daughter that she was seriously considering remarriage. Since Leila had already mentioned that she had met a very nice man, a Canadian, and had gone out to meet him every evening for the past week, Helena received the confidence without too much surprise. It did, however, sadden her that her own beloved father was to be replaced.
‘It hurts, Sally,’ she confided to her old friend, as they sat together on the bottom step of the staircase leading to Leila’s tiny flat. The weather was thundery and the rooms upstairs stifling. Leila was out with Tom.
Sally took a pull at the cigarette hidden in the palm of her hand and slowly blew out the smoke. ‘Your mother is a very beautiful person; it’s bound to happen. She must like this guy particularly, though, because I know one or two who’ve approached her and she’s turned them down.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure. I don’t suppose your mother told you, because she wouldn’t want to disturb you.’ She did not say that the indignant young widow had probably turned the men down because their offers did not include marriage. Mrs Al-Khoury had asked Sally if such offers were customary, and Sally had replied, with a grin, that they were common enough, but you didn’t have to accept them. Now Sally put her arm round Helena and reminded her that, when she herself married, Leila would be alone. ‘I suppose,’ Helena had replied uneasily, and had tried to accept the possible change in her life.
Leila stitched her necklace back into her black skirt. Then she told Helena that she had accepted Tom’s offer of marriage, and that they would all be moving to western Canada, probably within the month.
‘But, Mama!’ Helena gasped. ‘You said before you couldn’t move to another country! What are you thinking of? Couldn’t Tom live here?’
Leila’s agitation was immediately apparent. ‘He says he can’t, dear; he’s too much at stake in Canada – and he loves the country.’ She lifted her hands in a small helpless gesture and let them sink into her lap.
‘Well, you don’t have to marry him! There’re other men in Chicago, surely, Mama? I’ve got used to Chicago now – and so have you.’
‘I don’t want to marry anyone else,’ Leila replied, almost crossly. ‘Marriage is very special, very personal.’
‘I know that!’ Helena’s pinched little face was taut with suppressed fear of the unknown. ‘If he wants you, he can stay here,’ she said resentfully.
‘I’ve asked him, dear. But he either won’t or can’t. And I can’t let him go.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I love him very, very much.’
This silenced Helena. Falling in love was something that occurred in books. It had never occurred to her that it might happen to her mother – or, possibly, to herself. In Lebanon, you accepted gratefully the husband chosen for you by wise parents and then hoped he would be kind to you.
Emboldened by her daughter’s sudden quiet, Leila said, ‘Consider, my darling, how very poor we are. Where will I get the chance again to meet a really nice man – and he is nice.’
Stifling a desire to cry, Helena nodded dumbly. Their current life was very hard and seemed to lack all hope of change, at least until her mother’s command of English improved. She could understand that, to her mother, Tom Harding offered an escape from total penury. But to what?
‘Has he told you about where he lives?’ she asked dully.
‘Yes, he has. And it sounds possible, with a good future for you.’
Three weeks later, a numbed Helena found herself in a Registrar’s office, standing behind her mother and acting as her bridesmaid, while next to her was Glenn, a rotund version of Tom Harding, acting as his brother’s best man. Behind them stood Sally and Mrs Ghanem and one or two friends of Tom and Glenn. Seated in a chair specially set for her was Tom’s scary old mother, anxiously attended by plump, harassed Ada Harding, Glenn’s wife.
Old Mrs Harding had already told her besotted son, in front of his new fiancée and her daughter, that he was a fool and always had been one; these women would be no use to him in a pioneer settlement. She had been a pioneer herself and knew what it was like.
Helena had listened to her with growing disillusionment. Leila had been as terrified as if she had been cursed by a witch, and it had taken all Tom’s cajolement to assure her that his friend Joe’s mother lived on the homestead and would come every day to help her. To beguile her, he said he had a little sleigh which she could learn to drive in winter, and that Helena could go to school, either in St Albert, where there was a Roman Catholic Mission, or in the Fort.
On the eve of the wedding, Helena had sat with her mother in their bare, tiny living-room, while Leila unpacked a beautiful, embroidered head shawl, delivered by Mrs Ghanem’s eldest son, with the family’s good wishes for the marriage. Helena, seeing the fine Lebanese handiwork of the shawl, had put her head down on the table and wept.
‘Couldn’t we go home to Beirut, Mama? Please, Mama.’ She spoke, as usual when addressing Leila, in Arabic, and the words seemed all the more poignant because of the language used.
‘Darling child, you know I’ve thought of that often, but the times are bad. Even if we weren’t murdered by either the Druze or the Turks, a widow woman, with no family to protect her, wouldn’t stand a chance.’ She put down the shawl and moved round the table, to hold Helena in a warm embrace.
With her head resting on her child’s thick black hair, she said frankly, ‘I don’t know what life holds for us, my love. But I feel Tom is honest and kind; and he has high hopes of giving you a better life. He says there is a great shortage of women round the Fort, so you should be able to make a good marriage when the time comes.’ Her voice trailed off, but she continued to hold the girl close to her. She was herself very nervous. She was also desperately in love – and she had no conception of wilderness barely touched by human hands.
Helena did not reply to her mother’s assurances. She wept for her father. Through her tears, she looked down at her hands. Her left forefinger was raw from constant pricks from blunted pins and needles at the tailor’s workroom, and she remembered the long, dreary days she spent penned up there. If she stayed in Chicago, would that go on forever?
She raised her head. ‘How do we know he’s even got a farm?’ she asked, as she fumbled in her skirt pocket for her handkerchief.
‘Well, I’ve done my best to confirm it. You know that young lawyer on Main Street? He’s originally from Lebanon. I asked him if he could inquire for me.’
Surprised at her mother’s temerity, Helena glanced up at her. ‘What did he find out?’
‘Well, he confirmed that Tom’s brother has a good reputation – it’s been known for years that he had a brother homesteading in Canada. There’s nothing to prove it, of course, but a neighbour told him that a few years back Tom asked his mother to join him. She didn’t go because her health’s so bad. The neighbour also said that the old lady is all against the marriage, because she says I won’t be able to work hard enough; I’ll be a burden to him.’
A small smile curved Helena’s mouth. ‘I doubt that, Mama. I think you’ll make him very happy.’
Her mother bent and kissed her. ‘Thank you, dear.’ She paused, and then said, ‘The lawyer also advised that Tom should make a Will, to be signed at the end of the wedding ceremony, leaving everything to me, if he should die – which God forbid. Tom’s going to do this, so at least we’d have a farm, dearest.’
Though Tom agreed to the Will, he omitted to tell her that he was, as yet, still a squatter and that the Hudson’s Bay Company still owned the land; he hoped sincerely that he would gain ownership before he died.
Later on that evening, when Tom came to spend an hour or two with Leila, he tried to reassure the girl.
‘The Fathers will teach you school,’ he told her. ‘And Joe Black or me – we’ll teach you how to skate and ride. And you can have a pup if you’d like one.’
She replied heavily, ‘I can already read and write in French and Arabic. English is coming. And Papa taught me arithmetic and how to keep accounts – some geography, as well. And how to buy and sell – and judge silk.’
‘Then you’re a very accomplished young lady,’ responded Tom patiently. ‘I could use your help, if you’d give it me.’
Though he had caught her interest, Helena looked at him with suspicion. ‘Help you?’
‘Sure. I can get folks to do all kinds of chores – but Joe and me – neither of us is good at accounts, keeping records and such. And, one of these days I reckon the British Government’s going to reach out and take over from the Hudson’s Bay Company, which rules us now – and we’ll have a pack of Government officials on our backs – and we’ll need everything down in pen and ink.’
Helena smiled involuntarily. ‘Just like the Turks?’ she asked with sudden interest.
Tom did not understand what she was referring to and turned to Leila for enlightenment. Leila told him about the avaricious tax collectors of the Turkish Emperor, and he laughed. ‘You’ve hit it right on,’ he told Helena, which made her smile again.
Realizing that much of his and Leila’s happiness depended upon Helena being reasonably content, he spent until midnight telling her about the Fort and his homestead. He also told her that he had married a Cree wife, and that the loss of her and of his son had been hard to bear. ‘Cree women know how to preserve meat, and how to make clothes out of skins – and how to cure sickness,’ he said. ‘Joe’s Ma is a Cree, and she came to help us when my wife died – and she’ll help your Mama, so that it won’t be too hard for you.’ In the back of his mind, he fretted that two more mouths to feed that winter could be a problem, and he hoped the pig had produced a good litter.
Watching the man as he spoke, Helena felt a sense of pity creep into her. He, also, had lost people he loved, she realized, and she felt a hint of kinship.
He was saying to her, ‘I can’t make up to you for your pa – I wouldn’t presume to. But I’ll take care of you as much as I can. You could be the only youngster your mama and I’ll have.’
The inference that her mother could have more children shocked Helena. She looked up at her mother, who smiled quietly back. It could happen, she realized. She turned to Tom. His expression was quite sad. He said suddenly, ‘I’d like to give you an extra name, in memory of my little boy. Then you’d be real special to me. I’d like to call you Wallace Helena.’
She was immediately offended. ‘That’s a boy’s name.’
‘It’s a boy’s or a girl’s. We called the baby after my mother – she’s Wallace Harding.’
‘I don’t need another name.’ The wide mouth compressed in disapproval.
‘Aw, come on, now. Indulge an old man’s fancy.’
Helena looked up at her mother again. ‘Do I have to, Mama?’
Her mother’s mouth began to tremble, as it always did when she was in doubt. Helena saw it and remembered suddenly how close her mother had come to a complete breakdown after her father’s death. She considered warily what might happen if she refused Tom’s absurd idea. For a moment, she thought that if she raised a tremendous fuss about it, the whole engagement might be broken off, something she had been praying for for the last four weeks.
The silence between the three of them became tense. Helena’s hands were clenched, her mother’s eyes wide and despairing.
She understood her mother’s passion for this man, and that if the couple married she herself would be dependent upon Tom’s goodwill – not something she desired at all. But if she succeeded in breaking the liaison, what else was there? A dreadful servitude, unless she herself could marry decently – and she, like her mother, had discovered that in Chicago she ranked as a coloured girl, not suitable for marriage to a white man. She bit her lips as she bitterly considered this fact, and that there were few boys of her age within the Lebanese community and probably none who would want a penniless girl. She was poor and plain and yellow, she told herself, and without any alternative future worth having.
She took a big breath, and said unsmilingly, ‘I don’t suppose it makes much difference.’
‘Well, that’s nice of you,’ Tom told her, thankful that he had not alienated her; he had regretted his impulsive request the moment he had made it. Leila had, however, been strangely silent when he had casually mentioned the children they would have.
When pressed, she had said, with a faint smile, ‘Let’s not worry – see what God sends.’
He wanted another son, but it seemed suddenly possible to him that he would not have one. At the thought, he had urgently wanted to perpetuate the memory of the small brown innocent buried with his mother in the black earth of the north pasture. It had occurred to him that he could give the child’s name to his stepdaughter and make her Wallace Helena.
When he was leaving, he shook the girl’s hand, then held it for a moment, as he looked down at her. ‘You won’t regret it, honey,’ he said warmly.
Wallace Helena smiled up at him wanly. He seemed to her a simple, honest man – but she wanted to cry.
Chapter Nine (#ulink_5e54ad08-1f4f-5744-9606-0603411222cf)
Glenn and Ada Harding provided a modest wedding breakfast in their back garden. Since it was a second marriage, only a few neighbours had been invited over to join the party. All of them were curious to see the bride. The men thought she was very pretty and congratulated Tom; the women tended to side with old Mrs Harding in saying that she was not strong enough to be the wife of a homesteader – and they whispered disparagingly that she looked like a Jewess. Acutely embarrassed by their stares, Leila held the soft brim of her summer hat close to her face and stayed very close to Tom.
The bride’s daughter sat, almost unnoticed, on a bench under a tree. Sally, who was herself totally ignored by the other guests, saw the forlorn young girl, and came over to join her. She saw tears on Wallace Helena’s cheek and she immediately handed her the glass of wine she was carrying. ‘Drink it down, hon. You’ll feel better.’
As Wallace Helena silently drained the glass, Sally carefully arranged the skirts of her dress; she had made it out of the bits of black silk Wallace Helena had given her. She looked over at the bride, who was also wearing black silk. ‘Gee, your mama looks pretty,’ she exclaimed, as if she was seeing Leila for the first time.
‘Yes,’ agreed Wallace Helena, without enthusiasm. Far more astute than her mother, she foresaw problems arising like thunderclouds – and probably considerable hardship in an unexplored country like Canada. Yet, what could she do?
When she had suggested to Sally that perhaps she should remain by herself in Chicago, try to earn enough to keep herself, Sally had been very explicit about what was likely to happen to a fourteen-year-old left alone in a city.
Sally had added sharply, ‘You be thankful your ma’s found a decent man to take care of you both; I wish I could find someone like him. There isn’t nothing to fear about Canada; slaves run away to it, so as to be free.’
‘Do they? Could you come with us, Sally? Could you?’ Her voice was suddenly wild with hope.
The black woman had laughed down at her. ‘That Mr Harding don’t need another mouth to feed, baby. And I got my mother to keep. I’m no slave – I’m free.’ She had given Wallace Helena a playful shove with her elbow, as she said the last words. ‘He’s O.K. Be thankful he’s willing to take you in.’ She hesitated, and then said, ‘He’ll take care of you; he’ll never touch you, I truly believe.’
Wallace Helena did not understand the import of Sally’s last words; she was still overwhelmed at having to face another new country.
Old Mrs Harding did one very sensible thing for them. Realizing that she could not talk sense into Tom, as she put it, she persuaded Leila and Wallace Helena to buy a solid pair of flat-heeled boots each and enough veiling to attach to their hats, so that they were protected in some degree from blackfly and mosquitoes – and she ordered Tom to pay the bill.
In the course of their journey, which took weeks, both Leila and Wallace Helena had reason to be thankful to her: mosquitoes and blackfly plagued them most of the way. They went by train to La Crosse, then by stage to the Red River, and, despite the threat of yet another Sioux uprising, by paddle steamer to Fort Garry. There they rested for a couple of days, while Tom made inquiries. They were not very impressed by what they saw of their first Hudson’s Bay Fort, and awaited with anxiety Tom’s decision as to how they were to proceed. Their landlady, the wife of a miner who ran a small general store, was aghast when told where they were going; as far as she knew, only one white woman had ever travelled that far, and she was the wife of a Hudson’s Bay man.
Leila wept, and Wallace Helena begged Tom to take them back to Chicago. Tom laughed, cheered them up and said they would travel by York boat. Several expeditions had gone out recently from Fort Garry to Fort Edmonton by land; but he was not going to chance such a dangerous journey.
The sail up Lake Winnipeg was not unpleasant. But the rest of the journey was done by York boat up the Saskatchewan River, a long dreary drag with little but pemmican to eat, cooped up in a tiny boat, one of a Company brigade returning to Fort Edmonton with stores.
To Leila’s horror, the boats were from time to time dragged out of the river, their cargo unloaded and transported on the backs of the voyageurs, to bypass waterfalls or rapids. The boats themselves were hauled along rough tracks, sometimes made of tree trunks and sometimes a well-trodden path. During these portages, Leila and Wallace Helena stumbled along as best they could, following the crew for mile after mile. Despite the heavy veiling protecting their faces and necks, they were badly bitten by mosquitoes and blackfly, which rose like a fog around them at every step; Tom and the other men seemed to have a certain immunity – their bites did not swell so badly. The crew were Metis, short, tanned, muscular men who cursed in fluent French, as they waged their usual battle against the flow of the huge river.
Leila was not a heavy woman, but what fat she had fell off her. She looked so gaunt that both Wallace Helena and Tom began to wonder if she could survive the journey.
Wallace Helena had, at first, thought that she herself would not survive, but the arduous exercise and adequate rations of pemmican actually began to improve her health. She was filthy dirty and nearly insane from the incessant insect bites, and she longed for some privacy, if only to wash herself down in the cold river water. The men did try their best to provide a little privacy, inasmuch as they turned their backs when the women had to relieve themselves, but they had a tight, fixed schedule to follow, and very little time was spent ashore. No special allowance was made for the fact that they had women with them. The party was soaked through by rain and, on one occasion, by sleet. ‘Lucky it hasn’t hailed,’ remarked one man to Wallace Helena. ‘Sometimes it hails heavy enough to bruise you.’
When the wind was in the right quarter, sails were rigged to ease the amount of poling which the men had to do; it also temporarily scattered the mosquitoes. Wallace Helena thought that she had never seen men work so hard for a living; yet they remained fairly good-humoured with each other. They were surprised that both women spoke French, admittedly very different from their own patois, but nevertheless enough for both sides to make rueful jokes about their suffering.
Towards the end of the journey, Leila showed signs of having a fever, and Wallace Helena’s heart sank. Wrapped in a blanket, she lay shivering beside her daughter, talking sometimes of the old days in Beirut or of her worries about Wallace Helena’s future, her mind wandering so that she did not know where she was.
It seemed to Wallace Helena that she had been crammed in the hated boat for months and that the journey would never end. She felt furiously that Tom had embroiled them in an expedition that nobody should be expected to make.
‘What if Mother dies?’ she asked him desperately.
Dog-tired himself, Tom could not answer her. Although he knew the journey to be gruelling, he had not realized how profoundly different was the strength of his late Indian wife compared with that of city-bred women. He had expected his new wife to complain about the hardship, but he had not thought that it would be unbearable. Wallace Helena had only to see the anguish in his eyes to know that her dread of losing Leila was shared.
Then, when both women had nearly given up hope, it seemed that an air of cheerfulness went from man to man, an excited anticipation. The man in charge of their craft told Wallace Helena, ‘Tomorrow, we’ll land for a little while – get a chance to wash and stretch ourselves.’ He looked at Leila, lying wrapped in a blanket in an acutely uncomfortable position towards the stern of the boat, and added kindly, ‘We’ll get a fire going when we’re ashore, and I’ll make a bit of broth for your mother.’
Wallace Helena smiled her gratitude; the man himself looked exhausted. ‘Why are we stopping?’
‘We have to make ourselves look decent – for when we arrive at the Fort!’
‘You mean we’re nearly there?’ Her filthy face lit up.
‘Be there tomorrow night, God willing.’
‘Thank God!’ Wallace Helena said, and meant it. ‘Would you tell my stepfather?’ she asked, pointing towards the rowers, where Tom had taken an oar and was rowing with a kind of deadly mechanical rhythm, his eyes half-shut; it was heavy work, and he was almost oblivious of what was going on around him.
He nodded, and she turned round and carefully eased herself closer to the tiny moribund bundle which was her mother, to tell her the good news.
As promised, the voyageur made a soup for Leila. While Tom built a fire, the man cut up some pemmican and put it into an iron pot with water and some bits of chopped-up greenery which he had hastily gathered. A tripod was rigged over the fire and the pot hung on it. When he considered it ready, he added a little rum; and Wallace Helena spooned the resultant soup into her barely coherent mother lying by the fire.
There was much scrubbing of faces and hands in the chilly waters of the river; one or two men sharpened their knives and roughly shaved themselves. Then, fortified with rum, they poled the last few miles. Several canoes came out to greet them, and there was a small crowd waiting for them when they landed at the foot of an escarpment.
The crowd was dumbfounded when Wallace Helena stepped ashore, followed by Tom carrying her mother.
The Factor was furious when he heard that he had two women from Chicago resting for the night in his fort; didn’t his boatmen know that settlers were not to be encouraged? Tom Harding had been a big enough nuisance, an American carving out a piece of Hudson’s Bay land to farm. Now he’d brought a white wife – and her daughter. Other women would follow them; there was already a rumour that a missionary’s wife would be arriving in the district one of these days. Settlers would clear the land, ruin the fur trade. What were his men about?
Leila was put to bed in a comfortable cabin by the Indian wife of an acquaintance of Tom’s, and, afterwards, she brought Wallace Helena a bucket of hot water in which to wash herself. Tom was sent for immediately to attend the Factor at the Big House.
Tall and silent, an exhausted, worried Tom was harangued in the man’s office. Both men were aware, however, that it was largely bombast; the British Government had left the renewal of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Charter up in the air, when it had been discussed in 1858; and already Government survey parties were beginning to penetrate the Bay’s kingdom; a few people, some American, had begun to settle.
Despite the hardships of his life, Tom loved his land and dreaded being driven off it by the Company; so, when the Factor had finished what he had to say, Tom politely told him that he missed his dead wife and son, and now sought to rebuild his family. He would be transferring his wife to his cabin in the morning – he carefully did not use the word homestead which would have implied his ownership of a piece of land claimed by the Company as their own.
The Factor had kept Tom standing and had offered him no hospitality, so Tom felt free to turn on his heel and walk out.
Chapter Ten (#ulink_a5088d66-99f4-5e26-9f21-71987663c872)
Word of the arrival of the brigade was brought to Joe while he was bringing the small herd of cattle he and Tom possessed closer in to the homestead. He had heard a rumour of a party of Blackfoot roaming the area, and he assumed that they had penetrated so far into Cree country because buffalo were getting scarce and they were hungry. He had no desire to have his precious beasts eaten by them.
The boy who brought the message was a Metis, the son of a friend of Joe’s working as a cooper in the Fort. While he got his breath after jogging most of the way, he hung on to Joe’s stirrup. Then he burst out, ‘Mr Harding’s with them. Brought a new wife, a white woman, and her daughter. Says to ask your mother to have the place neat and prepare some food. One woman’s sick.’
‘You’re kidding?’ exclaimed Joe, well aware of the Crees’ sense of humour – and this youngster was half-Cree.
The lad was offended. ‘I’m not,’ he responded crossly. ‘I saw them. They’ll be at your place about midday tomorrow.’
Joe sat on his horse and stared down at him. ‘I’ll be damned!’ he muttered.
He roused himself, and drew out a wad of chewing tobacco from his top pocket He took out his knife and cut a generous piece of it which he handed down to the boy, with his thanks. ‘Like to go down to the cabin and have something to eat?’ he asked.
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Helen Forrester
A compelling novel of Liverpool and Canada, from the bestselling author of Liverpool Daisy, Three Women of Liverpool and Thursday’s Child.For Helena Al-Khoury, life as an immigrant has been full of loneliness and despair. On the long road that has taken her from her family home in the Lebanon to the bustling port of Liverpool, the slums of Chicago, and finally to the Canadian wilderness, the struggle to overcome heartbreak, loss and cruel hardship has taken a heavy toll. Now, at last, with the constant support of Joe, her devoted lover, she has developed into a strong, independent woman.When unexpected circumstances take her back across the Atlantic to Liverpool, Helena is offered the chance to take over the family business, and to become a success in her own right. Yet with her love far away on another continent, she feels torn apart. Soon the tragedies of the past and the challenges of the future threaten to overwhelm her…
HELEN FORRESTER
The Lemon Tree
Copyright (#ulink_831aae6a-c054-5662-b21a-182e211c048a)
HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
This paperback edition 1995
Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1991
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1990
Copyright © Helen Forrester 1990
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Ebook Edition © JULY 2012 ISBN 9780007392155
Version 2017-11-14
Contents
Cover (#u0f90a340-3366-5a36-ae36-12ea3bc5e646)
Title Page (#u6e09698f-66dc-5e65-9f2f-cdce7cc2c122)
Copyright (#u8bbb40df-1573-5131-b8d5-45e60411245c)
Chapter One (#uc16b5f83-1621-5cbd-b7a6-eeafbe3e4c72)
Chapter Two (#u15a82147-f3d7-5b1b-ab06-9e94e4c75c7d)
Chapter Three (#ua15ebd01-7c77-5c9a-8616-0fb5912e5e09)
Chapter Four (#u643aff3a-e694-5d3c-b28a-a836dadfac93)
Chapter Five (#ue906237f-fa66-5db9-a35d-b89be2a426c1)
Chapter Six (#u5170262c-c4a9-53f0-8f41-2c7c54f8fbe7)
Chapter Seven (#uabd6907b-f09e-5e10-9c75-b6b8bbd46036)
Chapter Eight (#uf24b6d4e-dfeb-58b2-810f-c2a0f1a66134)
Chapter Nine (#ua85c49bc-18d9-5d23-8ac1-889549fc6427)
Chapter Ten (#u1b90d155-8c85-5015-a868-b401303fa8ff)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#ulink_3a7af2f8-6c6a-5588-a15e-cefb2086fea4)
‘He’s a woman,’ Mr George Tasker announced lugubriously to Sarah, his wife of thirty years. He pushed the dog off the easy chair by the fire and sat down to take off his boots; they were very wet and were covered with wavy lines of white sediment. He put them neatly in the hearth to dry, as he continued, ‘I’m workin’ for a woman.’ His thick Liverpool accent made him sound as if he had a heavy cold in the head.
‘George, you know better than to walk on me new coconut matting with your dirty boots,’ Sarah scolded. ‘And what do you mean – he’s a woman?’
‘Wallace H. Harding is a woman!’
‘Never!’
‘He is – that is, she is. The Ould Fella’s niece – not a nephew, like we imagined. She come into our department this morning, large as life, with the lawyer, Mr Benson, and Mr Turner, the chemist.’ He stood up and rubbed his cold hands before the glowing fire. ‘She stopped and shook hands with me, seeing as I’m the Soap Master,’ he added with obvious satisfaction.
Sarah Tasker paused in the act of getting a casserole of tripe and onions out of the oven. She looked up at him through a burst of steam. ‘Well, I’m blowed! How queer!’
She turned and laid the casserole on a white-scrubbed deal table. On a wooden board lay a loaf of bread with several slices ready cut; beside it, sat a small dish of butter. She said mechanically, ‘Come and have your tea, luv.’ She picked up a brown teapot from the hob of the kitchen range and put it on the table, beside two heavy pint mugs and a pitcher of milk. Then, from a built-in shelf, she lifted down the pride of her kitchen, a green glass sugar basin won at a fair. She put it by the teapot.
In anticipation of George’s return from his job in the Lady Lavender Soap Works, she had laid his slippers on the fender to warm. George now put them on. He rose and stretched himself, a big, corpulent man, with a ruddy, kindly face boasting three generous chins. He sat himself at the table, surveyed the dish of tripe with approbation, and then said to Sarah, ‘Nobody makes tripe better’n you do, luv. I can always savour a bit of tripe.’
He invariably made a similar remark, no matter what she cooked for this main meal of the day, and, equally invariably, she beamed as if she had never heard it before. It was what made George so nice to live with, she reflected. He always appreciated what you did.
‘What’s she like?’ Sarah asked him, as she ladled generous dollops of tripe onto his plate.
Before answering, he considered the question carefully. Then he said, as he stuffed a forkful of tripe into his mouth, ‘She’s furrin – she’s almost yellow. She int a lady like we understand one – and yet she is, if you know what I mean. And she’s smart, no doubt about that.’
Sarah did not understand what he meant. She served herself, however, and commenced her meal, despite the flutter of worry in her stomach. This woman, whoever she was, could make or ruin their lives, she considered anxiously. When old Mr James Al-Khoury had died suddenly in November, 1885, they had heard that he had bequeathed the whole soap works, in which George had toiled for nearly twenty-five years, to his brother in the United States. Then Mr Benson, the lawyer, had discovered that the brother had also died, leaving everything he possessed to his wife. It had taken him some time to find out that she had moved to Canada, where she, too, had died, leaving as her sole legatee, Wallace H. Harding.
When George Tasker heard the name, whispered to him by Mr Helliwell, old James Al-Khoury’s secretary, he had assumed that the new owner was a nephew of his late employer; Mr Helliwell, priding himself on his secretarial discretion, had not enlightened him further.
And now George was saying that it was a niece!
With a feeling that she was about to choke on her tripe, Sarah realized that this foreign woman from the Colonies, who wasn’t a proper lady, would not, of course, be able to run the works, since she was a woman. Presumably she would sell it – and what happened to employees when a firm was sold over their heads, she dreaded to think. Too often, the older men found themselves out on the street. And then what would happen to them, with George out of work at fifty years of age?
George himself was ruminating over the same threat, but it did not deter him from eating his way steadily through his supper. His silent wife leaned forward and filled a mug with tea. She handed it to him. ‘Like some more tripe?’ she asked mechanically.
George wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said he would. Then, while Sarah served him, he confirmed her fears by saying heavily, ‘Rumour is she’ll sell the place ’cos she couldn’t run it – being a woman, like.’
‘Aye, that’s what I were thinkin’.’ Then she asked warily, ‘Who’d buy it?’
‘Well, it has gone down a bit, since the Ould Fella died,’ George acknowledged. ‘But there’s some as would buy it, I think, though times are bad. There’s that Mr Lever what has started up by Crosfield’s in Warrington. Soap mad, he is. And there’s Crosfield’s themselves. They might like it, seeing as it’s close to the Brunswick Dock and the Brunswick Goods Station – very handy, it is, for shipping and receiving.’ He sipped his tea and moved uneasily in his straight wooden chair.
‘Would you keep your job?’
‘It all depends,’ he answered gloomily. ‘I’m the Soap Master and they can’t make soap without someone like me. But they could buy it and then shut it down – to get rid of a competitor.’
‘Well, we’ll worry about it when we get to it,’ Sarah responded, determined to be brave and not increase her spouse’s misgivings.
She wondered how far their savings, hidden under the loose board in the bedroom above them, would stretch if he were unemployed. With jobs so hard to find, he would hardly be likely to get another at his age, even though his mates always said he had a wonderful feel for soap.
‘What’s she like to look at?’ Sarah felt very curious about this strange woman who had come all the way from Canada. Since she was the Ould Fella’s nearest relative – except for his illegitimate son, Mr Benjamin, who didn’t count, poor lad – she must be an Arab, like he had been. George had told her that James Al-Khoury had come from Lebanon, the same Lebanon that she had read about in her Bible. Did that really make him an Arab, she wondered suddenly, and was Miss Harding, therefore, an Arab lady, for all that she had a Western name? She smiled gently. The Ould Fella had been more like a friend than an employer. Many were the times when he had sat in this very kitchen, talking about the soap works. Always talked to George, he did, before making any changes. George and him got on like two o’clock.
With a sigh she pushed her plate of tripe to one side; she would try to eat it later. Arab or not, Mr James Al-Khoury and George had been happy together. Tears welled inside her, but she crushed them back; she must not let George know how worried she was.
While he ruminated over Sarah’s question about Miss Harding, George took another slice of bread and spread it thinly with butter.
Eventually, he replied, ‘Well, she’s tall; same height as me, I should say. Thin as a rake. But when she smiles she’s got a lovely face – and great brown eyes like a young heifer. She don’t smile much, though. She were talkin’ quite sharp to Mr Turner, the chemist. I didn’t hear what she said, but I could see Turner didn’t like it. He can be a bit uppity, and he wouldn’t like being put down by a woman.’
‘What was she dressed like?’
‘Oh, she were all in black, in mourning, with a black veil thrown back from her face. She’d great rings on her fingers, all gold. No stones. She’d a ring on her marriage finger what looked roughly made; ugly, it was – not much polished. Never seen one like it before.’ He picked up his mug of tea and held it between his great hands. ‘She int married, though. I heard her correct old Bobsworth, when he called her Mrs Harding. She’s got a proud, cold way with her and she said as tart as a lemon to old Bob, “Miss Harding, if you please, Mr Bobsworth.”’
Sarah knew Mr Bobsworth quite well and she smiled, despite her forebodings. The strange lady rose in her estimation. Though she would not have hesitated to call Mr and Mrs Bobsworth her friends, they did tend to put on airs, because he was the firm’s head bookkeeper and forwarding clerk. ‘And her only the daughter of a stevedore,’ thought Sarah sourly.
George was speaking again, his heavy, grey brows knitted in puzzlement
‘As I said. Miss Harding shook hands with me, and then with everyone – even Alfie. She asked Alfie if he were born in Liverpool.’
Alfie was the seventeen-year-old mulatto labourer who swept the soap-boiling area. He also fetched and carried for the temperamental soap boilers, who sometimes dared not leave their soap pans, for fear they might miss the moment when the soap must be proved, or brine added or the boiling mixture turned off and carefully left to cool. The soap boilers were like housewives producing fine sponge cakes – everything had to be done exactly right. Sarah knew that a few people still regarded Mr Tasker as a magician, because he said he could feel how his great cauldrons of soap were getting on. He knew, they said. What he knew they did not specify – it appeared to them to be magic.
‘She told me she makes her own soap on her farm in Canada,’ expanded Mr Tasker. He put down his mug, leaned back from the table and belched. ‘She told me as the nearest soap works is hundreds of miles off and there’s no proper roads to it. Proper surprised I was, when she said it.’ His three chins wobbled, as if to indicate agreement with his remarks.
Sarah omitted to remind him that she never used any soap at all on her face, because she believed that soap spoiled her skin. As a country girl, she had always scrubbed her face with a rag dipped in water from the rain barrel at her father’s cottage door, and the present velvety smoothness of her complexion, despite her age, indicated that the natural oils of her skin had never been removed. Her five married daughters thought she was terribly old-fashioned and said that she owed it to her husband to use the soap he made. But she stubbornly refused, and told them that if they followed her example, they would not have to put that new-fangled cold cream on their faces every night. Lucky, they were, she thought, to be married to men with regular jobs, who could afford falderals like an occasional pot of cold cream.
‘It’s terrible she int a man,’ George said with feeling. ‘The Ould Fella was a good master, though he never paid out a penny he didn’t have to. Young Benji takes after him – pity the lad’s illegitimate; he could have followed him very nicely.’ He paused toget a bit of bread from between his stained front teeth with his finger. ‘Now, if she were a man, she’d be the same – a real firm hand on the tiller, she’d have. Backbone, she’s got, by the sound of her. But a woman? What can a woman do? In a soap works?’
He paused, as he contemplated in his mind’s eye the woman who now held his future in her slender fingers. Though she was so thin, he thought, she’d a nice waistline – and breasts like it said in the Bible, like pomegranates. Her long black dress fitted so closely, it stirred thoughts in a man, it did, he chided himself ruefully.
‘What about Mr Benji?’ inquired Sarah, interrupting his contemplation of the new owner’s charms.
‘Well, I’m sure James Al-Khoury were training him up to take his place when the time came, as a son should. But he only made one Will in his life, according to Mr Helliwell, and that were before Benji were born – and he were born on the wrong side of the blanket, so he int entitled to anything by law, poor lad. His dad could have left him everything in a Will and he would’ve got it all right. His mam and him and the lawyer has hunted everywhere, looking for another Will; but Mr Benson told Mr Helliwell that he’d have known if there was another Will – the Ould Fella would have come to him about it, ’cos Mr Benson used to vet all the firm’s legal papers, contracts and such – James Al-Khoury didn’t trust ’is own knowledge of English, so anything major he were goin’ to sign, he got Mr Benson, his lawyer, to check first.’
‘I suppose Mr Al-Khoury thought he’d plenty of time before he’d die.’
‘Oh, aye. He weren’t yet fifty. He never thought of a heart attack, that I’m sure; it come as an awful shock to all of us. Proper sad it is for Benji and his mam. And him a smart lad, too.’
That night, in many tiny homes round the Brunswick Dock, Wallace Helena Harding was the subject of anxious discussion; times were so bad that the very hint of the loss of a regular job was enough to cause panic. Even Alfie, the mulatto casual labourer, who slept in the back hallway of a nearby warehouse, courtesy of the nightwatchman of the building, and who had endured bitter hardship all his life, viewed with equal terror the possibility of starvation or, the only alternative, the workhouse.
The warehouse watchman was an old seaman with a wooden leg who had known Alfie and his slut of a mother all the young man’s short life, but as he sat beside him on the bottom step of the stone stairs of the great warehouse, a candle guttering in a lantern beside them, he could offer the lad little comfort.
‘She’ll ’ave to sell the soapery,’ he said finally. ‘It don’t mean, though, that the new master won’t take you on. Master Tasker’ll speak for you, I’ve no doubt.’ He paused to repack his clay pipe and then pulled back the shutter of his lantern to light it from the candle. He puffed thoughtfully for a few minutes. Then he said shrewdly, ‘A new master could buy it and then shut it down, to put an end to it. Sometimes happens when shipping companies is sold – every bleedin’ seaman that worked for the old company is out on the street – and the company what’s done the buying puts its own men in.’
Alfie, who at best was permanently hungry, sat numbly silent, and then nodded agreement. He foresaw a long vista of petty theft to keep himself alive, unless he was prepared to seek out the homosexuals who roamed the streets in search of entertainment; either way, he could land in gaol. He hung his head so that the nightwatchman could not see the despair on his face.
Chapter Two (#ulink_15a97257-926a-5dd8-9401-d71ecd8d28d3)
Unaware of the stir She had caused in the heart of Mr Tasker, her soap master, or the depth of the fears she had raised in all her employees, the thin, yellow woman from the wilds of Western Canada sat at a cherry-wood desk in the bay window of her bedroom in a house in nearby Hill Street. She was in the process of writing a letter to Joe Black, her partner on her homestead in western Canada.
She stared dismally at the soaking July downpour pattering against the glass. The room smelled damp and was unexpectedly cold. What a grey and black city Liverpool was and, yet, how exciting it was with its glittering gas-lamps and heavy traffic. And how alien she felt in it.
This proud Lebanese lady, who carried a man’s name and then the name of the patron saint of Beirut, St Helena, and who normally feared nobody, was, for once, feeling intimidated by men. ‘If you can call them men,’ she muttered. ‘Self-complacent barrels of lard.’
She scolded herself that she must not prejudge. ‘You’re tired with the journey, and the confinement of the ship. And being indoors all day. You must be patient.’
She leaned back and began to tug the hairpins out of her tight bun. ‘I don’t feel patient,’ she informed herself through gritted teeth.
‘Come on, now,’ encouraged her cooler self. ‘If you can make friends with miserable and angry Blackfoot and Crees, and cope with rebellious Metis – not to speak of Oblate Fathers with the power of God behind them – you can cope with an indifferent chemist named Turner, a Benjamin Al-Khoury, head of Sales and Assistant Manager, rude enough not to be here when the new owner of his company arrives – and a lawyer you don’t trust too much.’ She pressed a tanned fist hard onto the desk, as if to emphasize her thoughts.
Then she absently spread out her fingers to look at her gold, handmade rings. Her eyes gleamed, and she laughed sardonically.
What would these stuffy Englishmen think if they knew that she lived with Joe Black, the son of a freed Ontario black slave and a Cree woman? He would make two of any of them, she thought with quiet pleasure; a big man with a face filled with laughter lines, lines that could harden when he felt insulted, till his jaw looked like a rat trap and his huge black eyes with their back-curling lashes lost their gentleness completely. He rarely struck anybody with his great fists, but when he did it was with the punishing skill of a Cree guard warrior. He had a clear, uncluttered mind, well able to assess a situation, an ability to reason, to negotiate with patience, before he struck.
These latter gifts were invaluable, she reflected, in a country full of wrathful native people; the Hudson’s Bay Company had frequently used him as peacemaker between the Indians and themselves – and even missionaries were not past using him as an interpreter.
With one finger, she touched tenderly her gold rings. When Joe had discovered that she valued jewellery, he had panned for gold in the North Saskatchewan River and had fashioned the rings for her. Lots of men had subsequently tried to find the mother lode of the river’s gold, but no one had succeeded; it was the rich, black soil which held the real wealth of the Northwest Territories.
She laughed again. ‘These pink Englishmen would have a fit,’ she told the raindrops on the windowpanes. ‘But I’ll teach them to patronize a woman,’ she promised herself. ‘I will decide the future of the Lady Lavender Soap Works!’ In which remark, she was a little too optimistic.
As she met the various people in the new world she had entered in Liverpool, she had become slowly aware that she was shabby and out of date, almost a figure of fun – a small snigger from a messenger boy, hastily stifled, a raised eyebrow, a stare in the street. She found the crush of people round her difficult enough, after the emptiness of western Canada, and this added attention had bothered her; it was the first time since she had left Lebanon that she had thought of clothes as anything else but covering against the elements.
She was unaware that, despite her clothes, she had a formidable presence. She moved swiftly with a long effortless stride, and she had responded in cold, clear sentences to the explanations given her by her escorts through the soapery. When, later, she had asked for further explanation, she had surprised them by recalling exactly what had been said.
Most of the men in the soapery wore a head-covering of some kind; but only Mr Tasker, the Soap Master and key man in the whole soapery, had doffed his bowler hat, when she had been introduced to him by Mr Benson, the lawyer. He had answered her questions carefully, his blue eyes twinkling amid rolls of fat as he endeavoured to watch the great vats steaming and heaving, and occasionally said, between his answers to her queries, ‘Excuse me, Miss’, while he instructed one of his assistants in the delicate task of producing excellent soap.
After meeting Mr Tasker and his helpers, Mr Benson had handed her over to Mr Turner, the chemist, who was, in the lawyer’s opinion, in the absence of Benjamin Al-Khoury, the most refined of her employees. He should, therefore, know how to treat a lady.
A shy, retiring man, who wanted to get back to his little laboratory, Mr Turner’s conversation was strained and desultory and did not particularly impress Wallace Helena. She was interested, however, when he told her that Mr Tasker was probably the best soap man in south Lancashire and could probably have gone to a bigger company.
‘You mean they would’ve paid him more?’
‘Yes.’
‘I wonder that he did not move.’
‘He and Mr James Al-Khoury were great friends. I believe they were together from the first establishment of the soapery. And there’s no doubt that he and Mr Benjamin get on very well.’
Wallace Helena murmured approbation.
They went into the Power House together, to meet Mr Ferguson, the Steam Engineer, a middle-aged man with a ruddy face and an air of great self-confidence and dignity. He was dressed in immaculate blue overalls. He was attentive and informative to his lady visitor, well aware that he belonged to a newly emerged class of employee able to cope with the mechanization of industry and was, therefore, a prized servant of the company. He was a trifle defensive with Mr Turner. Wallace Helena noticed this and wondered why. She had yet to discover the subtleties of class in British society; Mr Ferguson was exceedingly proud of his abilities, but he remained a working man; Mr Turner was also a highly trained man – but he was middle-class – a man of privilege as well as ability.
As she walked slowly round the works, she had noted carefully the reactions of her employees to herself and also reactions between them. After watching for years the body language of the Indians who passed over her land, to judge whether they were hostile or friendly, she had learned to observe the slightest shrug, the curve of a lip, the smallest move of hip or hand. She had quickly picked up the general nervousness of the men to whom she was introduced and she had felt sorry for them. In return, she had tried to show herself as a confident, capable person, and she felt that some of them had liked her.
Only Mr Benjamin Al-Khoury had failed to turn up.
According to Mr Bobsworth, the bookkeeper and forwarding clerk, he was in Manchester and would return in a few days’ time. ‘Life has been very hectic for Mr Benjamin since Mr James passed away, him being Assistant Manager to Mr James, like. Everything fell on him.’ Mr Bobsworth heaved a sigh deep enough to make every inch of his five feet quiver.
She had nodded, and remarked that Uncle James’s death must have been a shock to everyone.
‘Indeed, yes, Miss Harding.’ His eyes blinked behind his small, gold-rimmed spectacles, and then he said, ‘I should tell you, Ma’am, that Mr Benjamin asked me to convey his regrets to you at not being here today; he’s investigating the unexpected refusal of a customer to renew his contract with us – in the cotton trade, they are.’
‘I see,’ she had replied noncommittally, and Mr Bobsworth had begun to worry that young Benji had offended the lady deeply by his absence.
Now, seated in her stuffy bedroom, she made a face as she recalled the conversation.
If, as she suspected, Mr Benjamin Al-Khoury was her illegitimate cousin, a product of Uncle James’s love affair with an English woman, about which she had heard vaguely as a young girl when she was living in Chicago, he was probably suffering from an acute bout of jealousy because she had inherited his father’s business.
She was fairly sure that, if he had been a legitimate child, he could have claimed, in law, at least a part of his father’s Estate, no matter what his parent’s Will had said about leaving all his property to his brother, Charles, her own father. Mr Benson had, however, assured her that there were no other claimants to the Estate, and she presumed that Mr Benson knew his law.
It was possible, of course, that Benjamin Al-Khoury was some very distant relative, whose parents had also managed to survive the massacre of Christians in 1860.
With a wry smile at the foibles of his own youth, Mr Benson had explained to her that, when he was first setting up his law practice and was badly in need of every penny he could earn, her Uncle James had consulted him about the exact meaning of a contract he was about to sign. Afterwards, in pursuit of a small additional fee, he had inquired if Uncle James had a Will and, since he had not, he had been persuaded to make one.
At that time, Uncle James had had no one else to whom to leave his modest possessions, so, at the age of twenty-three, he had left everything to his brother, Charles, in Chicago. And now, as the residual legatee of her father’s and her mother’s own Wills, Wallace Helena found herself inheriting a well-run soap manufactory.
‘Why didn’t Uncle James make a more recent Will?’ she had asked Mr Benson.
‘Dear lady, I do not know. I did mention the matter to him once or twice; but he was a tremendously busy man – and, like all of us, he did not anticipate dying at forty-nine.’ He had smiled indulgently at her. ‘Do you have a Will, Miss Harding?’
‘No, I don’t,’ she had admitted, a note of surprise in her voice; she had never thought of dying herself, despite the hazards she faced daily in her life as a settler. Mr Benson’s question had made her suddenly aware of the problems Joe Black might face if, indeed, she did die. She smiled a little impishly at the lawyer, and then said gravely, ‘I’ll attend to it.’
She reverted to the matter of her uncle’s Will. ‘Perhaps Uncle James really didn’t have anyone else to leave his money to, except Papa – or me?’ In view of her surmises about Benjamin Al-Khoury, the question was a loaded one, and she watched carefully for her lawyer’s reaction.
Mr Benson was not to be drawn, however, and he answered her noncommittally, ‘Possibly not.’ She was left to puzzle about her Uncle James’s private life.
Now, as she took up her pen and dipped it into the ink, preparatory to continuing her letter to Joe Black, she decided philosophically that she would deal with Mr Benjamin whenever he decided to turn up.
She wrote in English, a language she had learned in Chicago and from her stepfather, Tom Harding: ‘Dear Joe, how I wish you were with me! I need your brains – and I need your love to sustain me.’
Should she tell this man, whom she loved with a passion and depth which sometimes frightened her, how nervous she felt?
No. He would only worry, and worry never solved anything.
With deliberate cheerfulness, she continued, ‘Thanks to Messrs Cunard, I arrived safely in Liverpool yesterday morning. At Montreal, Mr Nasrullah, Grandpapa Al-Khoury’s friend – a very old man – saw me and my baggage safely transferred to the ship, as we arranged. He was worried that I was travelling steerage, alone; but everyone was very friendly to me, though it was not very comfortable. I gave Mr Nasrullah a hasty note to post to you, and I hope you received it safely. Now that the railway line has reached Calgary, it should make a vast difference to the speed with which we can send and receive letters, even from as far north as Edmonton. (I wonder if Edmonton and St Albert will ever be served by a railway line?)
‘My dearest, it was good of you to accompany me in the stage all the way down to Calgary, to see me onto the train. I shall never forget the wonderful night we spent in that dreadfully noisy hotel! How I miss you now!
‘When the train moved out and your dear figure receded into the distance, I wished I had never set out on such a wild adventure – and yet the English lawyers sounded so eager to sell Uncle’s business that I smelled a rat; as I said to you, the works could be more valuable than they would have me know. Could the lawyers make a gain by selling to someone with whom they had made a private agreement?
‘Today, I did a fairly thorough inspection of the plant. I have not yet seen the company’s books, nor do I know enough to say how well it is doing. I am, however, uneasy that Mr Benjamin Al-Khoury, the Assistant Manager, was not here to greet me; I felt snubbed!
‘He was left nothing in Uncle James’s Will, and I suspect that he is his illegitimate son. No matter which side of the blanket he was born on, however, I am excited at the thought that I may actually have a blood relative. You know how shorn I feel because I have no family – and, without your support, I am sure I would have given up on life long ago – bless you, my dearest one.
‘I must bear in mind, though, that this man may be very jealous that I, and not he, now own the Lady Lavender.
‘Mr Benson, the lawyer, has found me two rooms near the works, in the house of Mrs Hughes, a widow – the address is at the top of this letter. The rooms are clean and her cooking is good, though I am feeling the sudden change in diet.
‘I wish you were with me. The city is very lively. I confess that I doubt if you would enjoy the noise and confusion – or the heavy smoke in the air – near the works, the filth of it is overwhelming.
‘The products of the soapery put our home-made efforts to shame. They are sweet-smelling tablets, light brown or blue-grey in colour. To scent them, they use lavender oil, caraway or cinnamon. They have, also, a fuller’s earth soap for very delicate skins. They do make plain bars of soap for laundry and for the cotton industry, and these do not smell much better than the ones we make at home!
‘The lavender oil is produced by a lady in the south of England. She also makes a perfume of it by diluting it with spirits of wine and bottling it. We act as her northern distributor for these little bottles of scent and they are sold side-by-side with our lavender soap. It is very pleasant to dab a little on my wrist and sniff it.
‘The whole operation is so interesting that I am already questioning whether I should sell it. If it is financially sound, I could, perhaps, find a knowledgeable man to run it.’
She stopped writing, and chewed the end of her pen. She knew already what she would like to do, she considered longingly. She had been born and spent her childhood in a city, and she would like to settle in Liverpool, rain and dirty air notwithstanding, and run the business herself. After all, she ruminated, she knew the centre of Liverpool quite well; she and her parents, as refugees, had spent some weeks in it, waiting for an immigrant ship to the United States – and she remembered with pleasure the pool crowded with sailing vessels which had given Liverpool its name.
‘With all that Papa taught me, I could learn to manage the Lady Lavender – it’s obviously got some good employees,’ she assured herself. ‘I suspect that before I was ten I’d learned more than some of these fat Englishmen know. I don’t know the detail of their work, but I can organize people – I can sell. But what on earth would Joe think of it – of coming to a city?’
She considered the question seriously; he wasn’t getting any younger; it was possible that he might enjoy the sheer comfort of city life after the remorseless struggle they faced on their homestead.
Wishful thinking! she chided herself, and slowly dipped her pen into the ink.
‘If we drew income from the soap works,’ she continued, ‘we could accumulate more riverside land, as it becomes available, and increase our grain crops – the minute a railway crosses the North Saskatchewan and reaches Edmonton, eastern markets would be opened up to us – and we might even have money to spend!’
She paused in her writing and wondered how many more terrible winters they would have to endure before they made enough to, perhaps, move south to a better climate. And it’s not only winter, she considered sadly, it’s clouds of merciless mosquitoes, forest fires, unsettled Indians and Metis, floods – and hunger – gnawing hunger – and the endless, endless physical work.
She bit her lips, and continued to write, asking him how the crops were doing. She hoped the cougars were not being a nuisance again this year – that was a huge pair he had shot last year.
Cougars? Bobcats? Wolves? They were a curse when one had livestock. She grinned suddenly at the idea of a cougar sniffing its way comfortably into the yard of the soap works, and then went on to give him a different piece of news.
‘Yesterday, in the street, I heard Arabic being spoken, and, frankly, I was surprised that I still understood it – though it is my childhood tongue. Three men definitely from the East, probably seamen, were talking together at a street corner; they had lost their way, but being a stranger myself to this end of the city, I could not help them so I passed on. While I am here, I hope to get some accurate news of the present situation in the Lebanon.’
She put down her pen and slowly stretched herself. It had been good to hear the language of her family. She would give a great deal to walk the ancient streets of Beirut or sit quietly in her parents’ courtyard, if it still existed, and listen to cheerful Arab voices.
But there were no familiar voices left, she reminded herself; she would have to sit by herself under the old lemon tree.
She shivered, and a sense of awful aloneness engulfed her, the ghastly loneliness of a sole survivor, with no one else alive to understand completely the horrors she had seen. For a moment she did not hear the horses’ hooves in the street outside or the rain on the window or feel the chill of her room; she was lost in a misty ebb of consciousness, through which she heard the roar of a mob out of control and the screams of the dying.
She sat perfectly still in her stiff little chair, her white face covered with perspiration, until the moment passed. Then she got up and stumbled to the washstand, to pick up a damp face flannel and press it to her temples.
Chapter Three (#ulink_b7b12cac-ae6c-5094-8b32-69ecdf881adc)
Feeling a little better after the damp coldness of wiping her face with a flannel, Wallace Helena sat down on the edge of the bed and slowly unlaced her neat black boots. She hauled them off and thankfully flexed her toes. On the homestead she wore soft Indian moccasins and gaiters, for which she traded barley with a Cree woman each year. She kept her precious boots for formal occasions, like visiting Mr Ross’s hotel in the settlement by Fort Edmonton. In the hotel, she was sometimes able to contact small groups of travellers in need of supplies, like flour, meat or, perhaps, a horse; they were also occasionally glad to buy well-salted butter or sour cream. The visitors were usually surveyors and miners passing through, but increasingly there were well-to-do British hunters, who had simply come to enjoy a new wilderness and hunt big game. Most of them dealt with the Hudson’s Bay Company or one or two other suppliers, who could provide coffee, sugar and salt, tobacco, alcohol and other imports. Wallace Helena, however, kept her prices low and she could usually find someone with little money only too thankful to buy cheaply. They were surprised, and sometimes amused, to be approached by a woman, particularly one who did not fit the usual mould. With her tall, spare figure and her long, mannish stride, her carefully calculated prices and her ability to strike a bargain, she was a well-known local character round Fort Edmonton, particularly disliked by the other suppliers.
Now, she longed to rest on the feather bed, but she felt she must finish her letter to Joe; she had promised to write frequently; and, even with the new railway, a letter would take some time to reach him. She made herself return to the tiny desk in the window.
After the quietness of the bush, it felt strange to be back in the hurly-burly of a city and be immediately plunged into the complexities of a factory, the first modern one that she had ever seen; it was stranger still to realize that, as soon as her uncle’s Will had been probated, she would actually own the soap works.
Pen in hand, she stared thoughtfully out of the bedroom window. Already, she had casually remarked to Mr Turner, the chemist, that it might be cheaper for the Lady Lavender to buy seed and themselves press the oil they used, rather than import it.
Mr Turner had replied superciliously that to make it pay, they would probably have to find a market for the residual solids.
It was probably the most sensible remark he had made to her that day, but she had snapped him up promptly. ‘The solids can be used for winter food for steers. Don’t your farmers know that?’
Mr Turner had gulped and failed to reply immediately; he knew little about farming. What did women know about cattle?
When he had recovered himself, he pointed out that a new venture like that would need capital. ‘Presses,’ he added vaguely, ‘and – er – men who understand farming, to sell the residue.’
‘Right.’ She had stopped to take a small black notebook and pencil out of her reticule, and made a quick note. She might, she thought, cost it out in years to come, when she understood more about the business.
Playing at her father’s feet in his large silk warehouse in Beirut or cuddled by her mother’s side when the family was gathered together in the evening, she had absorbed a great deal of the discussions going on over her head. Amongst much else, she understood the importance of estimating cost and return – and the ever-present risks of undertaking something new. During her long tour of the soap works, she had felt, at times, as if her father were whispering to her, telling her what to look for, giving her quiet advice.
And then there was the glycerine, which, the chemist had informed her, was left over after the soap was made. He had mentioned that, when properly refined, it was a good base for salves for the skin and for certain medicines; he and Benjamin Al-Khoury were working on a scented lotion for chapped hands, to market alongside the lavender perfume and toilet soaps. At present, he had informed her, the glycerine was sold to explosives manufacturers.
Explosives were used for war, she ruminated, as she enclosed her letter to Joe in an envelope and licked the flap; and she had had enough threat of that round her farm near Fort Edmonton, when the Metis had risen in defence of their land rights. It was only last year that their leader, Louis Riel, had been hanged for rebellion.
Her mind wandered to the problems of her life as a settler. The rebellion had been very frightening; and yet, she considered uneasily, Louis Riel had had a rightful cause. His people were descendants of early European settlers and their Indian wives, and they had been dispossessed of their land further east by the rush of new immigrants from Europe. In despair, they had moved westward to squat on the undeveloped lands of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Unlike her stepfather, who had himself been a squatter on the Company’s holdings, many of them had not succeeded in establishing their right to remain on the land. She thought smugly that it was thanks to her stepfather’s and her own sagacity that she now owned the land she farmed.
A squatter’s legal rights were tenuous, she knew; she herself had once not hesitated to try to overset a Metis squatter’s right to a riverside homestead which she had coveted.
‘But at least I finished up by paying him for it,’ she had said defensively to one of the Oblate Fathers from St Albert, when he had dared to criticize her ruthless business methods. ‘It cost me all I had at the time,’ she had added, hatred in every inch of her. ‘I could have hounded him off – like the Hudson’s Bay tried to do to my stepfather.’
Her eyes, long, oriental, heavily fringed with thick black lashes, were half-closed and averted from him, as she had continued, ‘When I first came to Fort Edmonton, a young innocent girl, that man shouted obscenities after me, because I’m sallow-skinned and he thought I was a Chinese – a man’s plaything. And I would prefer not to repeat what he used to call my stockman, Joe Black. Why should I care about him, Father?’ She had given a dry little laugh, and had turned and left the discomfited priest standing in the middle of the spring mud of the Fort’s yard.
The priest had sighed. He had been warned by an older priest that this wilful, proud, strayed member of the Christian flock, a lone Maronite Christian survivor of the 1860 massacres in Lebanon, had endured a lot of sorrow. She was now in her late thirties, and, in her business affairs, she had the reputation of being as merciless as an Iroquois woman – and when he considered what Iroquois women had done to captured Jesuit priests in earlier times, a faint shudder went through his thin, bent frame, as if the devil had touched him on the shoulder.
Yet, as he trudged along the trail to his Mission in St Albert, he had to admit that during the Metis uprisings she had been one of the few to remain calm. She had prepared to defend her homestead with more common sense than other settlers, many of whom had panicked – even he and his fellow priests, who ministered to the Metis, had been very frightened.
‘Nobody has to worry about Wallace Harding or Joe Black,’ one of his parishioners in St Albert had assured him. ‘They’re the best shots in the district and she’s got that cabin well defended; the rebels’ll go for easier loot.’
Then, of course, there was Joe Black himself, the priest reflected; Joseph Black, the only negro in the district. Joe had a history, too.
According to Father Lacombe, who knew almost everything about everybody, he was the son of a Cree woman and a freed slave who had accompanied John Rowand on his exploration of the Bow River, further south.
He had been brought up in his maternal grandfather’s lodge and had then gone to work on one of the early ranches. In consequence, he had a wonderful way with horses – with any animals, if it came to that. Later, he had trapped for a time, following the animals northward, and had finally met up with Tom Harding, an American miner. The young priest had never met Tom Harding, but the story was well known; Tom had been a squatter on undeveloped Hudson’s Bay Company land a few miles east of Fort Edmonton.
Disregarding the splutters of rage from the Hudson’s Bay Factor at the Fort, who was rapidly becoming less and less able to enforce his company’s rights to the immense territory they were supposed to control, Tom Harding and Joe Black had, with sporadic aid from Joe’s Cree relatives and a couple of temporarily stranded miners, slowly opened up several square miles, much of it forest. Based on what he had observed in the United States, Tom Harding sowed grass and clover, as well as barley, oats and potatoes. It was backbreaking work and, in addition, they had had the difficult task of protecting their first few animals and hens, not only from predators but also from increasingly hungry parties of Indians.
Despite Joe’s abilities as a hunter and trapper, game was scarce and in the early years they were often hungry themselves. Each year, when the ferocious winter descended on them, they would ask themselves why they bothered and would become irritable with each other. But the first sound of water dripping from the snow-covered roof would raise their spirits, and they would begin to plan the coming year. The Hudson’s Bay Factor, aware of whispers from eastern Canada and from London about the Hudson’s Bay mandate being withdrawn, gave up on them and was thankful, occasionally, to buy or trade for some of their crops, to feed the increasing number of people living in and around the Fort.
The trust between the two men became absolute.
As the early winter cold bit into the priest’s own underfed body during his long walk back to the Mission, he secretly envied Joe Black’s physical strength. Over six feet tall, Joe was, and built to it, with wiry grey hair, teeth discoloured by tobacco, and big black eyes surrounded by innumerable wrinkles; those eyes, thought the priest, could be cold and watchful, like those of a cougar he had once seen; at other times they could dance with amusement, and his deep rumbling laugh would roll across the room. An old clerk at the Fort had told him that Joe had been a fine, handsome man until he had caught the smallpox. The dreadful disease had left its marks on his cheeks and forehead, the priest reflected with compassion, and probably on his character as well.
To the priest, Joe seemed quieter than his general reputation at the Fort would indicate. Men always said that he and Tom Harding were formidable in a fight, but it did not seem to the young priest that he ever tried to pick a quarrel.
He’s very astute – and he’s older now – perhaps that’s why, guessed the priest; he must be at least fifty. But whatever a hard life had done to him, he was alert and quick to grasp a concept; you never had to explain anything twice to the man. And his looks did not seem to bother Miss Harding, Tom’s stepdaughter; it was said that she slept with Joe every night.
They were always together, riding their range, branding, setting traps in the autumn, sowing, reaping, or out shooting for the pot – not that there was much left to shoot these days. Sometimes they would be down at the Fort bargaining for sugar, coffee and tobacco, anything they could not grow or get from the Indians, the tall woman with the marks of suffering on her face and Joe with his wide grin like a steel trap.
Wallace and Joe were notorious for never parting with a penny, if they could do a deal any other way, ruminated the priest, though it was said they often gave food from their slender store to hungry Crees and Blackfoot. Tom Harding had owed his life to a Blackfoot; and his half-Cree partner, Joe, fed his own people.
Now, one of the subjects of the priest’s idle thoughts undressed slowly in a damp, cold bedroom in faraway Liverpool. She thankfully unlaced the tight corset she had bought in Montreal on the advice of the daughter of Mr Nasrullah, with whom she had stayed whilst waiting for the boat to Britain to arrive. She shivered in the unaccustomed dampness as she slipped on a cotton shift. At the washstand, she poured cold water from a pink, flowered jug into a matching bowl and slowly washed her face and hands with a piece of Lady Lavender toilet soap.
Earlier, her Welsh landlady, Mrs Hughes, had kindly put a stone hot water bottle in the feather bed, and when she climbed into the bed it was still warm. The British summer was abominably chilly, Wallace thought irritably, and she pulled the hot water bottle up from her feet and clasped it against her stomach. It was hard and uncomfortable. Fretfully, she pushed it away from her.
Without thinking, she turned over and opened her arms to the other side of the bed. But there was no one there; and again she felt encompassed by an overwhelming loneliness. What was she doing here? Her life was with Joe, she told herself.
Still shivering slightly under the linen sheets, her mind, nevertheless, wandered to the new world of the soapery and its all-male managers and workers.
From her father she had learned that employees were to be treated like family. You scolded them and kept them in line with threats of unemployment; but you looked after them, and they looked after your interests. In fact, most of her father’s employees had been blood relations, distant ones, sometimes – but related all the same.
Were some of the men in the soapery related to her? Or, regardless of that, did they think of themselves as being equivalent to her family? To be protected and cared for by her through good times and bad? It was a formidable thought.
She felt fairly certain that Benjamin Al-Khoury was a blood relation. She remembered vaguely, when her family had been living in Chicago, her father tut-tutting that her Uncle James appeared to be living with an English woman, without benefit of marriage. Such a misalliance would cast a bad name on the Lebanese community, he felt. She believed that he had written to Uncle James, saying that he should marry the lady. Wallace Helena could not recall that her uncle had ever replied to that particular point.
When, after her father’s death, Uncle James had offered her mother and herself a home, her mother had explained that he was not married to the lady who lived with him; and this could make life difficult for them, if they joined his household.
Benjamin Al-Khoury was an employee like any other employee. Yet, if he were her cousin, should she treat him differently? If he were highly resentful that she, instead of himself, had inherited his father’s Estate, how could she placate him, without losing her status as employer?
As she lay amid the unaccustomed softness of the feather bed, she began to think very carefully about how she could retain her authority and yet convey to him that she understood his probable unhappiness.
To her knowledge, she had no other blood relative and that would make him unique to her, someone very special in her estimation. It would put him on a completely different level from everyone else connected with the soapery.
A tiny thrill of hope went through her. To have a real relation implied a reciprocal obligation. Here might be a person of whom one could ask help and reasonably expect assistance as a duty, as from a brother. One could hope for consideration and affection, given freely. It was a wonderful idea to a woman who had faced as bravely as she could her uprooting from her native soil. And, when she had put down tenuous new roots in alien Chicago, she had been uprooted again, to face a life in Canada so harsh that she had expected to die. But, somehow, she had lived, a lonely refugee, misunderstood and disliked.
‘And why I should survive, God only knows,’ she thought wearily, with an odd sense of having been left out.
Amid the turmoil of new impressions collected through the day, it did not strike her that she had been thinking of the Lady Lavender Soap Works as an enterprise she would run herself. She had simply been annoyed when her lawyer, Mr Benson, had suggested that she should leave the selling of the works to him; she had brushed the suggestion off as an insult to her as a helpless woman. The fact that the original reason for her visit had simply been to assess the value of the business had been pushed to the back of her mind by the thrilling possibilities she had immediately seen, as she walked soberly round the buildings.
The straggling collection of sheds, which made up her late uncle’s factory, suggested to her not only a means of livelihood but also the chance to live in a city again, a place of fine new buildings, and homes full of lively enterprising people – literate people. They might even know where Lebanon is, she considered soberly – even have commercial ties with Beirut; Liverpool ships probably docked in Beirut sometimes.
Could one visit Beirut from Liverpool, she wondered suddenly. By this time the city might have settled down again and be safe for a Christian to visit.
As she lay staring at the moulded ceiling of the bedroom, a tightness from a long, sternly suppressed anguish seemed to grow in her chest. She breathed deeply in an effort to stop it engulfing her, and gradually, like some threatening shadow, it retreated.
She sat up and took a sip of water from a glass on the bedside table. Then she lay down again and curled herself up into a tight, foetal position, as if to protect herself from feelings too painful to be unleashed.
Chapter Four (#ulink_756675f4-a482-5c29-8539-5985a31d3f96)
She slept uneasily and suffered a familiar nightmare, though some of the hazy, sadistic faces which seemed to peer at her out of the darkness were, this time, reminiscent of the men she had met in the soapery.
She cried out frantically to them, ‘I’m not Wallace Harding, I’m not! I’m Helena Al-Khoury – and I hate the Territories. I want to go home to Beirut. Let me go! I want to go home.’
It seemed as if she pulled herself away from restraining hands, and floated easily along a seashore; and then she was in her father’s courtyard amid the perfume from the blossom of the lemon tree. Uncle James was picking her up and saying she was as sweet as the flowers on the tree. She laughed in his swarthy, cheerful face, and he was gone. Instead, her mother was there, her blenched face beaded with sweat, as she held Helena’s hand and pulled her along. ‘Hurry, my darling. Run!’
1860 and she was nearly twelve. As her terrified mother pulled her along behind her father, Charles Al-Khoury, she heard his startled exclamations at the hideous sights which each turn in the narrow streets revealed, the carnage left by a mob gone mad.
Before turning into a narrow alley leading down to the waterfront, they crouched close to the side of the blank wall of a warehouse, to catch their breath, while Charles Al-Khoury peered down the lane to make sure it was clear.
It was already darkened by the long shadows of the evening and the smoke from the ruins of old houses further down, but there was no sound, except for the crackle of fire; the looters had been thorough. The little family flitted silently down it. As they crossed another alley they heard men shouting in the distance, and Charles Al-Khoury increased his pace.
Almost numb with fear, his wife and daughter followed closely after him. Suddenly, he half-tripped over a dark shape lying on the ground. His women bumped into him and clung to him.
They stared down in horror. A woman had had her clothes torn off her. She had been butchered like a dead cow, and the child of her womb lay smashed against a house wall. A horribly mutilated, decapitated man lay near her, and further down the alley were other pitiful bundles, blood-soaked and still.
Leila Al-Khoury vomited, the vomit making her fluttering black head veil cling to her face. Young Helena began to scream in pure terror.
Her father clapped his hand over her mouth. ‘Helena!’ he whispered forcefully. ‘Be quiet.’
She swallowed her fear and nearly choked with the effort.
As they continued to scurry down narrow lanes, leading seaward, her father held her close to him, so that she would see as little as possible of the carnage; dogs were already nosing cautiously at the corpses of the Maronite Christians and being challenged by venturesome birds. One or two dogs had entered little homes through smashed doorways and could be heard growling over the spoils inside.
Wallace Helena, the grown woman, stirred in her bed, and cried out to the only person left to assuage her nightmares. ‘Joe, darling! Joe!’ But she was not heard and plunged again into her scarifying dreams, her heart beating a frantic tattoo.
Much later on, when they had established themselves in Chicago, she had asked her mother how the massacre had come about. She had been sitting cross-legged on her parents’ bed, watching her mother struggle into Western clothes.
Her mother had explained that the Muslim Turkish rulers of Lebanon did not like Christians very much; neither did another sect called Druze.
Egged on by the Turks, the Druze set out to eradicate their ancient enemies, the Maronite Christians, some of whom were enviably richer than they should be. In Beirut, they struck on July 9th, 1860.
‘We had heard rumours of unrest amongst the Druze, for some time before,’ her mother told her, ‘but neither your father nor your grandfather – my father – believed that we should be disturbed.
‘Our family had always lived in or near Beirut; it was such a pleasant little place – and you’ll remember our visiting our kin nearby. Our courtyard wall was high and strongly built – quite enough, we believed, to protect the house. And we were well-to-do; we could always placate the tax collectors and the servants of the Sultan, Abdul Mejid – may he be eternally accursed!’ She sounded vicious, as she lashed out at the hated Turkish ruler. Then she said more calmly, ‘You know, it’s usually the less powerful, and the poor who can’t pay, who are attacked.’
In the hope of obliterating her sickening memories, Helena had screwed up her eyes and covered them with her hands; yet there was a morbid desire to know more.
‘Well, why did we run away then?’
‘The rabble – Druze and Turks alike – swept right into our neighbourhood – you heard them and saw them. And your respected father knew then that this uprising was much more serious than usual; he had not believed an earlier warning which his brother had had whispered to him by a kindly Turkish official – he had felt the warning was part of a campaign by the Turks to get the Maronites to move out of their own accord.
‘So when the mob came in like a flight of angry bees – they were mad with hashish, I suspect – he knew in a flash that the warning had been a genuine act of kindness. He heard the screams and the gunshots, and he ran upstairs from his office to the roof, to confirm his fears.’ She paused, her voice harsh from unshed tears. ‘You and I’d been sitting under the lemon tree, by the well – so quiet and peaceful. But from the roof Papa could really see what was happening. Dear Grandpa’s house was already a great bonfire and the shrieking crowd was pouring into the square at the bottom of our street; he said the menace of the swords and guns flashing in the evening sun was terrifying.’
Helena said hesitantly from behind her hands, ‘I remember Papa leaning over the parapet and yelling to us to come up immediately. I’d never seen Papa really frightened before.’
It was the moment when my whole world fell apart, she thought wretchedly; I simply didn’t understand how it could be so.
She watched her mother buttoning her shabby black blouse, getting ready to go to work as a menial in a foreign city, and apparently accepting with fortitude what the Turks had done to her.
Leila continued her story. ‘We didn’t know it then,’ she said, ‘but Christians were suffering all over the Turkish Empire.
‘When our servants heard the noise, they rushed into the courtyard to ask what was happening. They heard your father shout, and they panicked. Instead of running up to the roof themselves, they followed Cook, who ran to the main gate and opened it! I suppose he thought they would be able to escape before the mob reached us. For a second, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing – it was so stupid – our gate was very stout; it might have held.
‘As I whipped you indoors, I could hear their screams.’
Helena shuddered. ‘I heard them.’
Leila ignored the interjection, as she sat head bowed, her fingers on the top button of her blouse. ‘Well, after I’d bundled you into the house, I slammed the front door and turned the beam which locked it. That, and the barred windows, halted the crowd when they rushed into the courtyard, just long enough to allow us to escape.’
Helena sighed deeply. ‘I remember the smoke – the yells – men pounding on the door – and the smell of gunpowder – and blood.’
Her mother put her arm around her and held her close.
‘We were lucky, child, that we had an indoor staircase, not an outside one like many people have; if it had run straight up from the courtyard, the mob would have come up after us and killed us on the roof.’
‘Papa had a piece of rope on the roof, I remember. I was so scared we’d fall, when he lowered first you and then me down into the tiny alley at the back of the house.’
Her mother nodded. ‘I think he’d stored the rope up there, in case we needed an escape from fire,’ she said absently. Then she added, ‘The alleyway saved our lives by giving us an exit to another street.’
‘I wonder why we were saved, Mama? Was our neighbour’s family at the back saved?’
‘Not to my knowledge, dearest. I was told that by the time the Druze and the Turks had finished, the whole area was one big funeral pyre.’
‘Why does God allow such terrible things, Mama?’ the young girl asked piteously.
Her mother looked shocked. ‘We’re not here to question God’s Will, child.’ Her pretty lower lip trembled. ‘I didn’t ask that even when your brothers died.’
Helena laid her head on her mother’s shoulder. ‘Of course not, Mama,’ she said contritely. ‘It was a wrong question to ask.’
Leila looked down at the child cuddled beside her, and she sighed. Her husband had always said that Helena was too clever to be a woman. She hoped he was wrong; women were supposed to accept, not ask questions.
Helena fingered a small pendant embossed with the head of the Virgin Mary that hung on a fine gold chain from her mother’s neck. ‘Did you bring this from Beirut?’ she asked.
‘Oh, yes, dear. For months and months that year, Papa insisted that I wear all my jewellery all the time. He must’ve been more nervous about the situation than he allowed us to think.’
‘It’s important for a lady to have lots of jewellery, isn’t it, Mama?’
‘Yes, dear – and small gold coins, easily carried. You never know what life has in store for you – life is very precarious. Jewellery is easy to carry – you can trade it anywhere – though at a great loss, of course.’
Helena nodded, and her mother hugged her again.
Leila thought with apprehension of a clouded future; but the child digested the lesson that good jewellery can be an important financial reserve – and that a collection of small gold coins is probably even better.
After a few minutes, Helena lifted her head and said heavily, ‘We must’ve run for ages; I was so puffed.’ Her young face was grim, and she swallowed. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget the ghastly cruelty – how can men do such dreadful things?’ She looked at her mother as if begging for some reasonable explanation of what she had seen.
Leila Al-Khoury had resumed easing herself clumsily into black woollen stockings, while sitting on the end of her bed. Now she turned again to her troubled little daughter and put her arms round her. She wished she had an answer to the child’s question.
‘My darling, I don’t know. Sometimes men seem to go mad.’ She stroked Helena’s silky black hair. ‘In time the memories will go away, my love. And life is not all cruelty. All kinds of nice things will happen to you in your life, you’ll see.’ She felt Helena give a shuddering sigh, and she added, ‘I wish we had foreseen what would happen, so that you could have been spared what you saw. And we might have been able to clear the warehouse and transfer some money – so that we wouldn’t be in quite such dire straits. But we lived in a good district; we’d never been disturbed before.’
Helena shut her eyes tightly and wanted to be sick, as she remembered a young boy lying sobbing in the dust, one arm severed, the rest of him terribly cut about as he had tried to protect himself from sword or bayonet. Her mother had paused instinctively, bent on helping him, but her husband caught her arm to propel her forward.
‘You can’t leave him! He’s alive!’ she had protested.
He did not answer her. Terrified of what the rampaging rabble would do to his lovely wife and little daughter if they were caught, he dragged her onwards.
The dying boy haunted Wallace Helena’s dreams all her life, returning like some eternal ghost to cry out to her in his agony, telling her that even loving fathers could have hearts of stone.
She had clear memories of reaching her father’s silk warehouse, as yet untouched by vandals, though deserted by its panic-stricken nightwatchmen, and of meeting a youth of about fifteen when they entered the wicket gate. He was the bookkeeper’s son, set to unlock the gate for any members of the family who might not have a key.
In answer to Charles Al-Khoury’s inquiry, the boy said that nobody had come, except his own parents and younger brothers and Mr James Al-Khoury.
Charles Al-Khoury told him to continue to keep watch through the grating in the main door and to hurry to the boat if he heard or saw anything suspicious.
The whey-faced boy had nodded assent, and Charles hurried Helena and her mother between bales wrapped in cotton cloth and through the silk carpet section, which smelled of hemp and dust.
They had emerged onto a covered wharf on the seaward side of the building, where a small sailing boat with an Egyptian rig bobbed fretfully on the sunlit water.
Charles’s brother, James, was already in the boat. He looked up at the new arrivals and exclaimed fervently, ‘Thank God you’ve come! Nobody came to work this morning – I tried to get back to the house to warn you that something was up; but the whole town seemed to be rioting – and drunk. So I returned here to alert the boatman to be ready. I guessed you’d hear the racket in the town and be warned.’ He gestured towards the bookkeeper, and added, ‘Then Bachiro, here, brought his family.’
‘We got out by a hair’s breadth,’ Charles responded sombrely, as he took the hand of the Nubian boatman and jumped into the little craft. He turned to help his wife into the boat, and went on, ‘I’m afraid Leila’s family is lost.’
As James stared unbelievingly up at him, Leila balked and held back, as she cried out in horror, ‘Mama and Papa dead? Oh, no! And my sisters – and Auntie and my cousin?’
James said gently, ‘We’ll wait a while; they may have got out.’ He hoped fervently that her women relations were burned in their house rather than thrown to the mob.
Petrified and exhausted, Leila allowed her husband to lift her down into the boat. Uncle James turned to a benumbed Helena. ‘Come on, my little lemon blossom, you’re safe now.’
Without a word, she sat down on the edge of the wharf and jumped into her uncle’s arms. He caught and held her to him for a moment, while the boat bounced unhappily on the water. Then he put her down beside her weeping mother, who snatched her to her. Bachiro’s wife began to wail and was hastily hushed by her husband.
‘When I went to see him this morning,’ Charles muttered to James, ‘Leila’s father said it wouldn’t be the first riot he’d seen, nor would it be the last. I reminded him that I’d had this felucca standing by for a week, in case of emergency, and he as good as told me I was a craven fool.’
His back to Leila, James made a rueful face, while Charles berated himself that he had not transferred money abroad.
‘With the Turks watching every move, it would have been almost impossible,’ James comforted him.
The wind showed signs of changing, and the boatman said it would be dangerous to linger any longer; the Turks would undoubtedly soon arrive to sack the warehouses along the waterfront. Better to leave while the wind held.
‘For Jesus’ sake, make him wait,’ Leila whispered urgently to her husband. ‘Mama – Papa – somebody – may come.’
Charles agreed, and argued heatedly with the stolid black seaman until, encouraged by some silver coins, he agreed to wait until the sun had set.
They waited anxiously through the afterglow, until shouts from the landward side of the warehouse and the sound of heavy thuds on wood brought Bachiro’s eldest son speeding to the wharf. ‘They’re coming,’ he shouted breathlessly, as he leapt into the little craft, his eyes starting out of his head with fright.
The felucca slipped seaward, while Leila crouched on a coil of rope and wept unrestrainedly for parents and sisters she would never see again. Charles Al-Khoury stared dumbly landwards. He was numb with horror, unable, as yet, to accept his parents’ fiery death.
Seated on the end of her bed in a small apartment in a Chicago slum, putting on her garters over her black stockings, Leila had pointed out in defence of her husband that he had done quite a lot to protect his family. Her deep, vibrant voice shook as she told Helena, ‘Papa arranged that a shipment of French silk he was expecting be redirected to our friend, Mr Ghanem, here in Chicago – and he began to wear his special moneybelt with gold coins in it, as did Uncle James. I wore my jewellery all the time.’
Helena sighed, and then she asked wistfully, ‘When will we be able to go home, Mama?’
Her mother stood up and shook down her long black skirt. ‘Some day, perhaps, dear.’ She did not tell her that there was nothing and nobody to go home to. Her courage faltered for a moment, as she said, ‘It was a terrible massacre – it’ll never be forgotten.’
Helena rubbed her face wearily, and remembered again how they had sailed all night, seasick and then hungry.
As they worked their way from Beirut to Cyprus, there to be sheltered by business friends of her father’s, all the certainties of her life had vanished. She had been an ordinary middle-class young girl, happy in a gentle routine of lessons from her mother and social occasions shared with her uncle and grandparents. There had been books to read, festivals to keep, music to listen to and to learn to play, forays into the mountains and walks beside the sea; and, in her father’s warehouse, fabulous fabrics and carpets to be admired and carefully caressed, until one could unerringly recognize quality and fine workmanship. And tentatively, beginning to be mentioned in her mother’s conversation, was the excitement of deciding who she should marry in a couple of years’ time.
Instead, she was being shifted nightly from one alien house to another, in an effort to stay hidden from the ruling Turks. Then, when she began to think she would go out of her mind, they sailed one night in a stinking fishing boat to Nice, where they were, at last, safely outside the Turkish Empire. From there, they had travelled by train across France to Hamburg, where a Jewish friend of her father obtained a passage to Liverpool for them.
They had waited several anxious weeks in Liverpool in a boarding house packed with other immigrants, while a passage for America was arranged. Charles and James Al-Khoury, with Helena pattering along behind them, had filled in the time by exploring the city. In the course of their walks, Uncle James had been most enthusiastic about the modern, gaslit city, and despite his elder brother’s advice against it, he decided to remain in it. Partly because of the valuable consignment of silk awaiting him in Chicago, which would help him to start a new business there, and the fact that there were already Lebanese refugees in that city, Charles Al-Khoury stuck to his original plan of settling in the United States.
Leila had nearly died during the passage to America in the steerage section of the cramped immigrant ship. Their small funds had dwindled during their journeying and Charles dared not spend any more than he did. Tended by other Christians who had fled the Turkish Empire, Greeks, Cypriots and Armenians, as well as Lebanese, her mother had lain weeping helplessly and muttering with fever. Huddled together in an unventilated hold, on a straw palliasse spread on a shelflike fixture above another family, Helena was very seasick. She wanted despairingly to die herself, as she watched her father grow more haggard each day, and listened to the horrifying stories of other refugees, of wholesale murder all over the Middle East.
When her nausea eased, her father took her up on deck and they walked together, too exhausted to say much.
After that, there was the incredible noise and smell in the great immigration shed, while the United States Immigration authorities worked their way through the anxious, pressing crowd washed up on their shores. Leila kept a firm hold on Helena’s hand, in case, by some awful misfortune, they should become separated, so Helena sat by the listless bundle in black which was her mother and listened to the jabber of a dozen languages round her, amid the maelstrom of noisy, smelly humanity.
The three of them had made an effort to learn a few words of English while in Liverpool. The immigration officials, though harried, were not unkind, and eventually a bewildered Helena was hustled onto the Chicago train by a father who, for the first time, seemed more relaxed. The bookkeeper had decided to stay in New York with another Lebanese family from the same immigrant ship. They said an impassioned farewell and vanished into the turbulence of the great port.
It was only towards the end of her time in Chicago, when her life was again about to change completely, that Helena realized that, to her parents, Chicago had been yet another nightmare. Being young, she had herself begun to adapt to her new life. As she went to the shops for her mother, and helped her father as he tried to establish a little business in wholesale dress materials, she began to pick up some English.
In contrast, her gently nurtured mother, though educated, was used to being much at home, secure in the knowledge that her parents had married her to a comfortably placed, kindly man. She had rarely been stared at by strangers, never been hungry, never done much except to order her servants and adapt herself to her husband. In Chicago, she was, at first, shattered, unable to make much effort.
Another refugee, arriving after them, confirmed the death of Leila’s parents and sisters and, indeed, it seemed of everyone they had known. As she mourned her loss, the fever she had suffered aboard ship returned to her, and Charles Al-Khoury’s face grew thinner and grimmer. Helena tried to comfort her mother and not to cry herself. She closed her mind off from any thought of Beirut, feeling that if she allowed herself to contemplate what had happened, she would go mad. In those early weeks in America, the child grew into a stony-faced young woman, physically hardly formed, but mentally aged beyond her years.
Not daring to part with so much as a garnet from his wife’s jewellery, unless he was starving, Charles Al-Khoury used the remainder of his little store of gold coins to augment his bales of silk with some dress lengths in other good materials. He found a tiny niche of a store on a main street crowded with immigrants. The door was strong and the windows had good wooden shutters. He paid a week’s rent on it to a Greek immigrant, who had been in Chicago rather longer than he had.
Before opening his precious purchases, he bargained for cleaning help from a young negress who lived nearby.
Sally earned her living as a daily cleaning lady, and she came for two successive evenings to give the store a thorough scouring. As Helena said to her, ‘You can’t sell material for clothes if it’s got dusty.’
A quick grin flashed across the black woman’s lined face, as she agreed. On her second evening, she brought a toffee apple with her for Helena, and she watched with pleasure when the grim little face lit up at the sight of the gift.
Sally enjoyed working for people who treated her politely. She became interested in the fortunes of the tiny store and continued to clean it, though sometimes Charles Al-Khoury had to defer paying her during bad weeks. She would tease him good-naturedly about his broken English, which he took in good part, being anxious to improve it. She drilled Helena in the English names of everything around her, and Helena became devoted to the strong, graceful woman.
Mr Ghanem, the Lebanese who had kept Charles’s bales of silk for him, was very nearly as poor as Charles himself. He had been in the States for a number of years with his own small business as an importer. He had, however, speculated in land and had gone bankrupt. He now had a small fruit and vegetable shop. Because they had been at school together, he had kept in touch with Charles sporadically over the years, and it was his presence in Chicago that had first given Charles the idea of beginning life again in that city.
It was Mr Ghanem who had met them at the station and had taken them in a borrowed horse-drawn delivery van to a room he had obtained for them. When Charles’s shop was ready, Mr Ghanem’s half-grown sons helped the new immigrant move the consignment of silk from their family’s basement onto the shelves of the new store. Mrs Ghanem had done her best to comfort poor Leila Al-Khoury, and she gradually emerged from her prostration, white and thin, but in her right mind.
Much later on, Leila told Helena, ‘I thought I’d go mad. There we were, in this strange country; nobodies, lost in a sea of nobodies. God curse the Druze – and may the Turks burn in hell!’ The words seemed extraordinary, coming from a beautiful seductive woman, once again restored to health; but Helena understood, and thought burning was too good for Turks.
Leila had continued sadly, ‘Outside that tiny room in which we existed, so few spoke Arabic – and nobody seemed to have heard of French! And the noise of screaming women and howling children in the other rooms seemed unending.’
Helena nodded agreement. Watching immigrant children struggle for existence had made her feel that the last thing she wanted in life was to be a mother.
‘When Mrs Ghanem suggested that I go to work like she did, I was really shocked,’ Leila confided. ‘But we needed ready money so badly that finally I agreed. It distressed your father very much.’ She giggled suddenly, at the memory of her hard-pressed husband’s agitation at the suggestion.
She giggled again, and then added, ‘I must’ve looked a sight. I wore a second-hand black skirt, a black blouse and second-hand boots. I wore a head veil, like I had done in Beirut, and I felt terrible. It seemed to me that every man I passed stared at me.
‘The attic we worked in was so badly lit that I could hardly see how to thread my needles. There, Mrs Ghanem and I sat on a piece of sacking for ten hours a day, stitching on buttons and finishing the buttonholes on men’s suits. I’ve worked harder since then, but never in such confinement; I had to watch that my tears didn’t fall on the fine cloth. What a time!’ She threw up her hands helplessly.
Helena put her arms round her mother’s neck. ‘Poor Mama,’ she said.
‘Well, I lived,’ responded her mother philosophically. ‘But I didn’t want you to be confined like that, so your dear father took you to help him in the store.’
‘And he taught me how to run a business,’ Helena had remembered gratefully. ‘How to organize it and be neat and methodical. Buy cheap; sell dear. Have the patience of Job. Have a first-class product for the money. Keep two sets of books – one for the tax collector, and one which tells you what’s really happening. Make friends – which I haven’t done very well. Do favours and collect on them when you need to. Never forget a name – and smile, child, smile.’ He would grin at her from under his black moustache. ‘And don’t trust anybody, unless you have to,’ he would reiterate pithily in Arabic.
She would laugh back at him. But she learned, and never quite trusted anyone – except Joe Black.
Afraid to trust a bank, afraid of his wife being attacked in the street if she wore it, Charles hid some of Leila’s jewellery in various spots in his tiny shop, a necklace wrapped in a scrap of black silk under a beam in the ceiling, several rings under a floorboard, a pair of hair ornaments in a box stuck to the underside of his long counter. He instructed Helena that, if he were out, she was never to leave anyone alone in the shop for a single second, including Sally.
Leila sewed two gold chains into the waistband of her ugly serge skirt, and her best emerald necklace was carried in a linen moneybelt round her husband’s waist. Spread out like this, they agreed, they were less likely to be robbed of all of it; it was capital, partly inherited and partly carefully bought since their marriage; it was not to be used, except in the expansion of the dress material business, if they had some success with it; or, if that failed, to keep them from starvation.
In the store, Helena was in her element. She watched with care how her father set about establishing his new business, learned how to set up the bookkeeping, how to find suppliers and, most important of all, how to find customers. She would sit unobtrusively in the background while he bargained for bankrupt stock from other businesses or cajoled a lady who wanted the price of a dress length reduced, and when his English failed him, she quietly translated – though her own grasp of the language was not very good. When they had a quiet hour, he would reminisce about the family business in Beirut, and, when he found she was interested, would go into detail about its organization, its employees, and its links with distant countries. He was astonished that she knew and understood much of its detailed running already. She laughed at his astonishment and reminded him how he used to take her down to the warehouses to give her a change. ‘I used to listen to you talking to people – and when I grew bigger, I used to ask Bachiro to show me the papers that seemed to be like oil flowing to facilitate the movement of everything coming in and going out.’
Her father laughed. ‘You did? You nosy little person!’
‘I wasn’t nosy,’ she replied indignantly. ‘I was really interested in what you and Uncle James and Grandpa were doing. I kept thinking that if I had been a boy, you would have begun to keep me by your side and teach me everything.’
‘Well, you’re a great help to me now, little flower. I don’t know how I would manage without you.’
Her big eyes shone at the compliment, and he thought that he should get her married as soon as he could, before the harshness of their life in Chicago toughened her too much. Men liked gentle amenable women; a ruthless trader would not appeal to them.
But, without realizing that he was doing it, he had already inculcated in her the basic principles of organization, enterprise, forethought and quick decision-making which were to be her strength in times to come.
Chapter Five (#ulink_6dcd309b-e6eb-5835-a142-f1d758056ec5)
The two rooms above Charles Al-Khoury’s shop in Chicago were occupied by Polish immigrants. When they moved out, he again bargained with his Greek landlord and succeeded in renting the rooms for little more than he was already paying for the shop. Triumphantly, he got Sally to clean the rooms and then he installed his wife and daughter in them.
The tiny store and the flat above it became Helena’s world.
She carried samples of materials to the houses of well-to-do ladies, when requested; and in the shop she made tea for women who began to discover the fine quality of Charles’s stock. They sat by his counter and talked haughtily to him, under the impression that they were bargaining successfully for a better price than others obtained; dressmakers, who also came, always got materials at a better price, but they always received a lower grade silk. As her father warned her, ‘Dressmakers are always poor; you can’t get more money out of them than they have. Remember that!’
Helena was allowed to handle swatches from the fat bales on the shelves, and she soon learned what constituted a good dress length. Her English rapidly became better than his, so he encouraged her to write his business letters for him and then to keep the accounts. Though she did not write her father’s letters in Arabic to Uncle James, she sometimes saw them. It was apparent that her father felt that Uncle James was quite mad; he was boiling soap in his landlady’s wash boiler and was selling it door-to-door in Liverpool.
The bales of material were heavy, and Charles lifted them himself. Helena watched with anxiety the sweat pour down his face, as he moved the cotton-swathed rolls from shelf to counter to show them to customers, and, later, lifted them back onto the shelf.
One day, when he had gone with swatches of material to see a particularly high-class dressmaker and Helena was watching the shop for him, Sally remarked to her, ‘Your pa’s doing too much.’ She was polishing the old wooden counter to a fine sheen, as she spoke, and did not appear to expect a reply.
Helena’s heart seemed to miss a beat, as the implied threat of illness sank in. From then on, she insisted that she be allowed to help with the tidying-up of the shop, but she was a skinny youngster without much power in her arms; and he would laugh and take the bundles from her to lay them on the shelves.
Apart from his stock, American women found the Lebanese shopkeeper charming and they recommended the store to their friends. The tiny business began to prosper. The Al-Khourys hoarded every cent they could.
At the end of six months, Charles insisted that his wife give up her job with the tailor and stay at home. ‘If we are very, very careful, we can manage,’ he assured her. ‘I don’t like you doing menial work.’
Helena took her mother for granted; she did not realize that she possessed unusual beauty, and that, as she learned to dress in Western clothes, her father felt jealous when other men looked at her. He wanted her at home, not veiled like a Muslim woman but decently bundled up like a good Maronite.
Leila Al-Khoury was thankful to be released from the tailor’s stuffy attic, but she refused to wear her native dress or veil her hair. She had fallen in love with hats and bought herself a plain black straw which she trimmed with shreds of silk from her husband’s shop.
With this imaginative concoction on her head, she pressed herself lovingly against her husband and assured him that he had nothing to worry about. He was partially mollified, though the flowerlike face framed by the hat’s brim was, he felt uneasily, very attractive.
Helena had not inherited her mother’s beauty. Though she was not ugly, she had her father’s strong nose and wide mouth. She was sallower than Leila and there was no hint of pink in her cheeks; and her long oriental eyes with their secretive, sidelong glances were too foreign for Western taste. The tumbling black mass of her hair was restrained in a bun at the back of her head and gave little hint of its richness. Amid the babble of thousands of immigrants, as a skinny young girl she passed unremarked. Until she met Joe Black.
Curled up alone in a feather bed in Liverpool, her dream passed from the nightmares of the Lebanon and Chicago, to Joe.
She smiled in her sleep, as she seemed to hear herself saying to him cryptically, ‘You never gave me toffee apples.’ And his laughing back at her and saying, ‘I never thought of them. Want one?’
Joe had his own ideas of gifts. In her dream, she saw him lounge into their living-room, the original log cabin in which her stepfather had first lived in Canada. Peeking out of his jacket was a tame grey fox, a birthday gift.
One Christmas, he had brought her a muff made from a marten fur he had trapped; his mother had cleaned and tanned the skin and he had then given it to another Cree woman who had fashioned it for him. Sometimes, when he had been south to see his grandfather, he brought her a little opium to smoke, bargained from a lonely Russian farmer who had established his own patch of poppies, or, at other times, a small packet of tobacco from Virginia, passed from hand to hand across a continent, in trade.
The rising sun began to push long fingers between the heavy velvet curtains of her bedroom in Liverpool, and she sleepily stretched out to touch him. But he was six thousand miles away, harvesting a hay crop.
Chapter Six (#ulink_3e21c00f-12fb-5120-b114-5f149da0fc71)
Leila Al-Khoury lamented bitterly that it was Mr and Mrs Ghanem who had brought the typhoid into their Chicago home. The infection had, in fact, sneaked through the tumble-down, crowded neighbourhood like a smouldering fire; but Mr Ghanem was the first person to die from it.
The local inhabitants were used to illnesses which ran their course, and the patients were nursed at home. Though guesses were made, no name was put to the sickness. Immigrants had little money, so doctors were rarely called.
Charles Al-Khoury, worked to a shadow of his former self, was in no state to withstand such a virulent infection. The Al-Khourys knew that Mr Ghanem was also ill. His wife told Leila that it was ‘Something he’s eaten.’ It was assumed that in both cases the fever would go away and the diarrhoea would ease, if the patients were kept on a liquid diet. Meanwhile, Helena served in their tiny shop and Leila nursed her husband.
When Mr Ghanem died, leaving a widow with five sons to feed, Leila realized, in a panic, that this was no ordinary illness. She sent for a doctor, only to be scolded by him in English she barely understood for not calling him earlier. Charles died in her arms.
Once more, Leila tore her clothes, and the household rang to shrieks of mourning. Both she and a terrified Helena were devastated, as was Mrs Ghanem in her tiny home. Other neighbours, afraid of being infected themselves, left small gifts of food at the shop door, but refused to come in.
Only Sally walked briskly up the stairs to the Al-Khoury flat, to bring some common sense into their lives. Hiding her own sorrow for a man she secretly adored, she instructed a grief-stricken Helena to get back to the store and mind it. ‘I’ll look after your ma.’
Helena had obeyed, but she quickly found herself in difficulties. Men delivering cotton and silk her father had ordered through middlemen refused to leave the goods without her father’s signature. ‘You’re too young to sign for it. You can pay cash, if you like,’ she was told.
‘Could Mother sign for it?’ she asked, afraid of parting with the small sum in the secret drawer of the old till.
A man delivering a roll of silk had hesitated at this suggestion, but finally said uneasily that he did not think his company would accept a woman’s signature, and went away with the roll still on his shoulder.
Beating down her increasing terror, she served customers from the existing stock with her sweetest smile, as she struggled with the heavy rolls. She knew that, unless she could buy replacement materials, the business was doomed.
Oblivious of the impending end to their sole source of income, Leila sat cross-legged on her bed, allowing Sally and Helena to minister to her. Occasionally, she would fling herself down on the pillows in a fresh burst of weeping.
Between bouts, Helena asked her urgently, ‘Couldn’t you run the business, Mama? I believe if you took it in hand, the suppliers would accept you – or perhaps we could import some silk direct from China?’ She sighed, and got up to pull back the closed curtains to let in the evening sun.
Leila put down the coffee her daughter had brought her, turned her blotched face away from the light, and began to cry again.
Helena went back to her, to sit beside her and put her arms round her. ‘Mama, dear, listen to me, please. If you can’t help me, we’ll have to close the shop – we don’t make anything like enough to employ a manager, even supposing we could find an honest one.’
Leila wept on.
As she patted her mother’s back in an effort to comfort her, Helena said savagely, ‘I know what to do – but nobody will trust me. The salesman from Smithson’s chucked me under the chin this morning, as if I were a baby. He actually said, “Pity you’re not a boy!”’
‘Mama, could we sell something to get money, so that I can pay cash for stock?’
‘I don’t know anything about business,’ her mother sobbed, and continued to moan into the pillows.
In despair, Helena held a big sale and then shut the shop. She made just sufficient to pay their debts, except for one.
‘Sally, dear. I don’t have any money left to pay you. Instead, I saved these for you.’ She proffered a package containing several pretty ends of rolls that she had been unable to sell.
Sally bent and hugged her. She sniffed, and then said, ‘You don’t have to worry about me, hon. There was many a time when your pa couldn’t pay me. You and your ma are welcome to anything I can do.’
Before letting her out of the door, Helena clung to her. ‘Thank you, Sally. Thank you.’
Left alone, she searched the little shop to retrieve the remaining bits of jewellery hidden there. ‘I’d better take a good look upstairs, as well,’ she thought, as she wrapped the pieces up in a scrap of cotton. ‘If we don’t pay the rent we’ll be thrown out fast.’
As she tucked the little parcel well down into her skirt pocket, she cried helplessly. She was nearly fourteen years old, tall for her age and very thin, with eyes that were sadly old for one so young and feet that seemed too big for her stature.
Since her mother was in no state to do it, Helena sat down at their rickety table in their tiny apartment and wrote to her only surviving blood relative, Uncle James in Liverpool, to tell him of his brother’s death and the penury of his widow. Tears blotted her shaky unformed Arabic script
By the time they received a reply six weeks later, the landlord, a kindly man, had grown tired of a tenant who was not paying him rent, even though she was a pretty widow, and told them they had another week in which to start paying again, plus something towards the arrears.
If it had not been for a large bag of rice, which her father had obtained shortly before his death, and the kindness of their neighbours, Helena and her mother would have starved.
In his reply, Uncle James wrote that, if they could manage to pay their fares to England, he would be happy to give both mother and daughter a home. Unfortunately, he was not yet earning enough to send them their fares; he had just leased a small factory building and installed his first soap boiler, and this had drained his reserve and his credit.
He did not know how to express his own grief at the loss of a well-loved brother, so contented himself with the usual polite phrases. Leila’s troubles were great enough without his adding to them.
He did not mention that the home he offered would actually be in a house owned by his English mistress, Eleanor. As he wrote, she was sitting on a chair opposite him, nursing their year-old son, Benjamin.
It had taken a great deal of coaxing on his part to persuade this downright little Liverpudlian that he owed shelter to his sister-in-law, Leila, and her daughter, Helena. It was a duty he could not evade, he assured her, and he would have to find another place to live if Eleanor could not help him.
‘She’s foreign,’ Eleanor had protested.
James had looked up from his letter and responded dryly, though with a twinkle in his eye, ‘So am I.’
‘You’re different, luv,’ she told him, and smiled at him.
James’s eyes were bloodshot from private weeping on top of long hours of work. He looked so drained that she impulsively got up from her chair and leaned over the baby to kiss his cheek. ‘Well, never mind. Don’t you fret,’ she said kindly. ‘I suppose I could give ’em the second-floor back room to theirselves. I’d have to give Mr Tomlinson notice, though, so as he can find somewhere else.’ Mr Tomlinson was one of her three gentlemen lodgers, other than James Al-Khoury himself. She sighed heavily, as she sat down and rearranged Benjamin on her lap. ‘I’d have to ask you for a bit more housekeeping to help out, like, ’cos I’ll have two more mouths to feed – and I won’t have Mr T’s rent.’
‘Of course I’ll give you more,’ he assured her, without any idea of where he was going to get the extra money from. He put down his pen and got up to embrace both mother and child; Eleanor was a wonderful comfort to a lonely man, a real help – and she had given him a son. He prayed to God that his new venture with George Tasker, the Soap Master, would prosper.
Eleanor told herself she would do anything she could for him; she’d never again meet a man like him. Mr T must go; she could not imagine her despair if James left her. She wasn’t getting any younger; and now there was little Benji to think about.
In Chicago, a surprised Leila read his kind letter. Puzzled, she looked up from her meagre lunch of boiled rice and weak coffee, and asked Helena, ‘Did you write to Uncle James?’
Having seen the English stamp on the letter, Helena was tense with anxiety, as she said eagerly, ‘Yes.’
Leila sighed. ‘I should have done it.’
‘I did ask you, Mama. But you didn’t listen.’
In the seven weeks since her husband had died, Leila had grown quieter. Though she did not cry so much, she was very listless. Nothing that Helena could do or say seemed to rouse her to the realization that, unless they did something quickly, they would die of starvation.
Now, seeing the letter, a wild hope surged in Helena. ‘May I read Uncle’s letter, Mama?’ she asked eagerly.
Leila handed it to her without comment.
As the girl read, a tremendous relief made her want to shout with joy, the first sense of wellbeing since her father had died. ‘Isn’t he good, Mama? And his wife, too. We’ll have to sell your jewellery – or some of it, Mama?’ A hint of doubt had crept into her voice. Despite their desperate position, Leila had sullenly refused to part with the last of her chains and brooches. Her husband’s declaration that he would only sell them in extremis had meant, to her, only in the case of death. A Lebanese, longer established than the Al-Khourys, had accepted a gold chain from her and had arranged Charles’s funeral. That to her had constituted a time to sell.
Leila did not immediately reply to her daughter; she sat fretfully toying with her coffee cup.
‘To get the fares to go to England, Mama – we have to get the fares from somewhere.’
Leila felt morosely that fate had dealt her an unbearable blow in the loss of her husband. In these last seven weeks of prostration, she had been waiting for that same fate to compensate her in some way. Her brother-in-law’s kindly letter did not appear to do that, and she said capriciously, ‘I don’t want to go.’
‘But, Mama, what else can we do? Uncle James is a dear – you know that.’
‘He’s kind,’ Leila admitted reluctantly. She was quiet for a moment, and then, as if to justify her refusal she added, ‘I simply can’t change countries again. It would be too much; I couldn’t bear it.’ She buried her face in her hands.
Helena swallowed, and replied carefully, ‘It wouldn’t be much different from America, would it, Mama? I liked Liverpool when we passed through it’
‘It would be quite different,’ her mother replied shortly. She rose from the table and, dragging her bare feet on the planks of the floor, she went to Helena’s small bed at the back of the room. She lay down on it, her face towards the wall, as if to shut out a life which was a burden to her.
Helena went to sit at the foot of the bed and continue the argument.
Without looking at her, Leila protested, ‘Helena, you can’t imagine what it would be like to be penniless in Uncle James’s house. No matter how kind he is, we would be dependent upon the whims of his – er – wife. She’s bound to resent us – or she’d make use of us as servants. It would be insupportable.’
Helena took another tack. ‘I always imagined that Uncle James wasn’t married?’ she queried.
Leila bit her lower lip. She was not sure how to explain Uncle James’s domestic affairs. She said cautiously, ‘Some men have a woman friend who lives with them. Uncle James’s situation could make it harder for us.’ She turned slightly, to look at the frightened girl. ‘In the West, it’s not quite honourable, though I’m sure your uncle has his reasons for not marrying her …’
‘If she’s not his wife, couldn’t he send her away? Then we could look after him.’
‘I doubt he wants to be rid of her. They’ve been together a long time.’
‘I see,’ Helena muttered. But all she really understood was that her mother seemed totally incapable of doing anything. It was to be a number of years before she became aware of the profound effect her uncle’s lack of a marriage certificate was to have on her own life.
Chapter Seven (#ulink_4771604e-7f85-500a-935f-9c5ce67603a4)
Helena continued to sit by her mother on her bed and to beg her to reconsider her uncle’s offer. She got no response, except for peevish monosyllables. Hope died in the girl and was replaced by dread.
Finally, in search of comfort, she went out into the street and made her way, through crowds on their way home from work, to Mrs Ghanem’s tiny home. Perhaps another widow would be able to help her rouse her mother.
Mrs Ghanem was still at work, her five-year-old told her solemnly. He was helping Mama by looking after his little brother. He pointed to a crawling child behind him.
The children were filthy and the house stank. Poor Mrs Ghanem, thought Helena compassionately; her children and her home had always been immaculate before Mr Ghanem’s death.
She promised the child that she would come again another day, and, feeling suddenly very weak, she walked towards home.
As she turned into the familiar narrow street, she caught a glimpse of Sally coming towards her, and her depression lifted a little. She ran towards her.
Sally caught her in a bear hug. ‘Where’ve you been?’ she inquired. ‘I was just dropping by to see how your ma is.’
‘I went to see Mrs Ghanem – but she’s still at work.’ She turned back towards her home, arm-in-arm with the cleaning lady.
‘Uh-ha. So what’s new with you, hon?’
Helena hastily told her about her uncle’s letter. Then she added uneasily, ‘I’m scared, Sally. Mama won’t do anything. And we haven’t paid the rent for weeks – and in a few days there won’t be even rice to eat. At least Uncle James would feed us, and perhaps I could find some work in Liverpool; it’s a very busy city.’
Sally paused on the ragged doormat at the foot of the stairs leading up to Leila’s living quarters. ‘Want me to talk to her?’ she asked.
‘She’d never forgive me for telling you.’
‘I guess you’re right.’
As they came up the last step, they were both surprised to see that Leila was up. Her hair had been combed and pinned up; she had put on a clean white blouse and her black stockings and boots. She had lifted the nearly empty sack of rice onto the table and had spread some of the grains on a tray in order to pick out any small stones in it.
Helena was astonished. It looked as if Uncle James’s letter had had an effect, she decided thankfully.
Sally said to Leila, ‘My, you do look pretty! How’re you doing?’
The pale, delicate mouth quivered and the eyes were full of pain, but she answered Sally quite firmly, ‘I’m better, thank you. Sit down.’ She pulled out a chair for her visitor. ‘Coffee?’
Sally accepted the proffered chair. Knowing how short they were of everything, she said she did not need coffee. Leila, however, was suddenly aware of neglected social obligations, and she insisted on using the last of their coffee to make a decent cup for her friend.
Helena went quietly to the table and took over the cleaning of the rice. She was afraid that if she said anything she would upset Leila again. Let Sally do the talking.
Sally did talk. She brought in all the polite gambits of the state of the weather, the price of vegetables and the latest news of the war raging further south, while she gravely sipped her coffee and Leila sat with her hands clasped in her lap, barely attending to the rich musical voice.
Finally, Sally told her, with real excitement in her voice, that she had managed to get a full-time job as a waitress in a new coffee shop being opened by Italian immigrants. It was close to the Al-Khourys’ old shop.
Leila was genuinely pleased, and congratulated her. Then she sat looking at her hands for a moment, before she went on to say determinedly, ‘Tomorrow, Helena and I, we go to tailor to ask for sewing work. Helena sew as good as me.’
‘Well, that would keep you going for a bit.’ Sally smiled at her, and then said very gently, ‘With your looks you could get a healthier job, a clerk in a store, say.’
Leila smiled wanly back. ‘Later. Tailor give job now.’ She shrugged. ‘Nobody give me good job now. English so bad.’
‘You’re doing just fine,’ Sally assured her robustly.
Helena looked up from the rice. She was dumbfounded at her mother’s decisiveness. A quick warning glance from Sally told her to be careful what she said.
She deftly picked out a piece of chaff from the rice. ‘I’d love to work with you, Mama,’ she said softly.
Her mother turned and smiled at her. ‘Would you? That’s good. We’ll manage, darling, won’t we?’
Thankfully, Helena got up and went to her. Leila took her warmly in her arms, and Helena wanted to burst into tears with relief.
The Civil War had caused an insatiable demand for uniforms. The tailor was very glad to have two skilled sewers for finishing work, though he bargained the wages down to near-starvation levels, on the grounds that Leila’s English was poor and that, at nearly fourteen, Helena was not yet entitled to a woman’s wage.
The two clung to each other and managed to continue to exist, two tiny boats bobbing along in a sea of other immigrants, all competing for jobs, cheap rooms and cheap food, in a country where war had caused prices to skyrocket. Their Greek landlord was appeased, and the shop beneath their small nest was re-rented, to a locksmith and his family, who both worked and slept there. Because they had a side entrance, the two women were not disturbed by them.
Helena had never in her life felt so exhausted. Underfed, she also lacked sunlight, diversions, and exercise. One day, on their return from work, she fainted.
Leila bathed her daughter’s pinched, white face, and decided desperately that she would sell her best gold chain. In that way, she could pay the landlord his arrears instead of having to give him extra money each week. They could then spend more on food. She herself felt apathetic and intensely weary, and she thought, with real horror, of what might happen to her daughter if she herself should die.
She took the necklace to a jeweller in a better area of the city, and it was in the jeweller’s shop that she met Tom Harding.
Tom was a widowed settler from Fort Edmonton, a Hudson’s Bay Company Fort on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River in western Canada, an area as yet barely explored. Though Tom claimed to be a settler, he was, in fact, a squatter on land owned by the great fur-trading Company which had established the Fort. To the Company’s annoyance, he also trapped, and, having once been a miner, was apt to dig Company coal out of the banks of the river and to pan small amounts of gold out of the river itself.
His younger brother owned a prosperous grocery shop in Chicago, and their acerbic old mother lived with him. Tom had received an urgent letter from his brother, via the Hudson’s Bay Company, saying that the old lady was in very frail health. She had several times expressed a strong desire to see him before she died, and he should hurry.
When he received the letter, Tom thought wryly that his brother had obviously no idea of the distances involved or the difficulties of the journey. He was, however, extremely depressed himself. He had recently lost his Cree Indian wife and his infant son in childbirth. An Indian wife was an enormous asset, besides which he had been quite fond of her and had been looking forward to the child. He wondered if he should return to Chicago and settle there.
After discussing the matter with his friend, Joe Black, who worked with him on his illegally held piece of land, it was decided that Joe could manage to look after the farm, while Tom made the journey. ‘And mind you come back!’ Joe shouted after him, as he prepared to leave. ‘We haven’t built this place out of nothing, just to see it go back to forest again. You’ll feel a lot better when you’ve had a change – and I know lots of Cree women who wouldn’t mind being Mrs Harding Number Two.’
Tom grinned and saluted him, as he turned his horse onto the trail which led to the Fort, where he expected to join the Company’s boats going down the river to Lake Winnipeg. Then another boat down to Fort Garry – about a thousand miles, he believed, and he’d still be in Canada.
As he rode, he chewed one end of his moustache and considered the fragile hold he had on the precious piece of land for which he had struggled so hard. It was certainly Company land, but he reckoned that Joe was far too useful to the Company for them to try to dislodge him from it while he himself was away.
Joe was half Cree, half negro, and he knew the languages of the area. Slow to anger and trusted by both sides, he was frequently used by the Chief Factor at the Fort as a negotiator between the Company and the recalcitrant Blackfoot and Cree Indians. Though he had been known to get involved in fights which occasionally broke out amongst the Company’s employees, when all concerned had drunk more than usual, and was consequently sometimes out of favour with Company men ruefully rubbing bruises he had inflicted, he was a godsend to a company which was not always able to keep control in the land over which it was supposed to rule.
In his heart, Tom felt that he himself was tolerated on the Company’s land solely because Joe worked for him, that Chief Factor Christie did not have him removed because, if he did, Joe would probably drift back south to rejoin his Indian grand-father, of whom it was said he was very fond; and the Company would lose its best defence against the resentment of the displaced Indians.
Tom did not consider that he, as well as Joe, had built up a friendship with a number of Blackfoot families, because he owed his life to one of them, and that Factor Christie was aware of this useful relationship between a white man and a very proud and angry group of native people.
Tom certainly did not enjoy the hardships of the long voyage in a York boat down the North Saskatchewan to Lake Winnipeg and through the lake to Fort Garry. He was expected to make himself useful on the voyage; and he decided that his own life might be hard, but, being a voyager faced with portages and little but pemmican to eat, he preferred the hardships of a squatter’s life.
From Fort Garry, he sailed in a small American trading boat down the Red River, then went by stagecoach to La Crosse and, thankfully, the rest of the journey by train.
Now, he wanted to return home before the winter set in, though his frail ghost of a mother begged him to remain in Chicago. Despite her invalidism, her tongue was as malicious as ever; and she had made him feel a sense of guilt at his decision to desert her once again. To soften the blow of his departure, he had decided to buy her a present.
His finances were limited and, as he pushed open the door of the local jewellery store, he had scant hope of finding what he wanted at a reasonable price.
Instead of a present, he found Leila Al-Khoury bargaining with the jeweller over the sale of a fine gold chain which had originally belonged to her mother-in-law; it had been given to Leila on the birth of her first son, who had died of a fever when he was six. Leila firmly tried to remember the old lady’s delight at the child and to forget the gentle woman’s terrible death at the hands of the Beirut Muslims. She spoke to the jeweller in the firmest tone she could muster.
Her voice rose and fell, as, in broken English, she refused to reduce the price that she wanted. The jeweller had assayed the gold and knew that the price she asked was not unreasonable, but he was in no hurry, so he let her rattle on.
While Tom loitered behind her, Leila whined and begged and pointed out the flawless workmanship of the Beirut goldsmith, until the jeweller became fed up with her; if he turned her away today, she would probably return tomorrow willing to accept his offer.
Tom shifted his feet uneasily, as he looked idly over a case of brooches. At the slight noise, the lady turned her head to look at him. She wore a plain white summer dress she had made herself and her face was framed by a cheap straw hat. Tom found himself looking into a pair of enormous, sad brown eyes – like a little spaniel’s, he thought. A cupid’s bow of a mouth trembled, as if tears were near. Under the white dress, a generous bosom heaved slightly.
The whole stringy six feet of Tom Harding shook with desire. What was a woman like that doing on her own? Was she a whore?
As he stared into the eyes of the pretty Lebanese, the argument with the jeweller appeared to have reached an impasse. The jeweller huffily banged the drawers of his counter shut and locked them. Tears glistened on the long black lashes of the lady. The necklace, a handsomely worked heavy chain with several red stones pendant from it, lay on the counter.
The jeweller moved slightly towards Tom. ‘Can I help you, Sir?’ he inquired politely.
Uncomfortably aware that he was roughly dressed in riding boots, a plaid shirt and a big felt hat, in a city which was quite full of prosperous people more formally attired, Tom looked down at Leila and replied soberly, ‘I got plenty of time. Finish with the lady.’
Still looking up at him, Leila scooped up the necklace and put it back into her reticule. ‘It finish,’ she told him tragically, the words coming out in softly accented English. She bowed her head and began to move slowly and despondently towards the door, her white skirt swaying gently round her.
Tom jerked to attention. Once she was outside that door, he would probably never see her again.
He took off his big felt hat and bowed to her. ‘Excuse me, Ma’am.’
She looked doubtfully up at him with a slight frown.
He swallowed. ‘I’m in the market for a necklace, Ma’am. Would that necklace be for sale privately?’ He paused, waiting for some response, but she had not fully understood what he said and was mentally translating his remarks. He hastened to add, ‘It’s a mighty smart chain – I believe my mother would like it – if you’ll forgive me for being so forward, Ma’am.’
The jeweller threw up his hands and went to tidy a cabinet. He knew when a man was hooked. Nevertheless, a woman should not show a stranger a necklace which was worth twice what he had offered for it; she could be robbed. Then he shrugged. If she were that foolish, it wasn’t his business. He took up a feather duster and began to dust the clocks in the cabinet.
At the mention of his mother, Tom was treated to a smile so delicious that he never quite recovered from it. He handed Leila out of the door and down the steps as if she were made of glass and then into a coffee shop two doors down the street.
Between coffee and pieces of pie and regrets that the necklace was too expensive for him to buy, he learned who she was and about her widowhood, her life in Beirut and in Chicago, and that she had a fourteen-year-old daughter. She told him frankly that she and her daughter both worked ten hours a day in a tailor’s garret; she had had to beg the afternoon off in order to see the jeweller.
In return, he told her that he had been a miner and had gone west from Chicago, to work in gold mines. Then he had heard a rumour of gold easily panned in the North Saskatchewan River, in Canada. Hoping to stake a claim, he had travelled north with four men also bent on instant wealth.
‘We knew that there was at least one Hudson’s Bay Fort on the North Saskatchewan, and we reckoned we could make that our jumping-off place. A few other Americans had travelled part of the route before us; they sold liquor to the Injuns for furs.
‘The trail wasn’t very clear, and it was rough going. We did O.K., though, and we were well north, when we had to make a detour round a huge slough. I was lagging behind because I had to – well, Ma’am, relieve myself.’
There was a hint of impishness in her understanding smile.
Encouraged, he continued, ‘And I’d got my eyes to the ground, watching where I trod between the bulrushes on one side and a lot of willows on the other – I guess they were willows. One minute I could hear the others shouting at me – and the next minute I couldn’t; and the next thing I know the darned horse got mired, and I called and called to ’em to come help me out. And no answer.
‘I couldn’t get the animal out – the more it struggled, the deeper it went. Finally, I had to watch it drown.’
‘Terrible, terrible,’ Leila sympathized.
‘I called and called to the other men. I was scared, I can tell you. Finally, I picked my way round the slough, but I’d no idea where I was. I couldn’t find a hint of the trail; and I’d nothing – gun, blanket, beans and tools, all went down with the horse. When I couldn’t even find the track of the others’ horses, I must’ve gone stark mad. When the Blackfoot found me, I was clean out of my mind.’
‘Blackfoot?’ queried Leila, wide-eyed, her mouth open.
‘Yeah. Injuns. A hunting party. They fed me and put me on a horse. I don’t remember much about it – I was too far gone, I guess. Next thing I know truly is I’m in bed in Fort Edmonton, with a Cree woman nursing me better. She told me the Blackfoot simply dumped me at the gate of the Fort and rode away. She was a medicine woman sent for by the Cree wife of one of the Hudson’s Bay clerks. I tell you, that old woman had me on my feet and sane very quick. I owe a lot to the Injuns up there – and I never forget it.’
‘What happened to your friends?’
‘Dunno. When I inquired around the Fort, they’d never arrived. Never heard of one of them from that day to this. Maybe they struck another Fort – or joined up with a group of whisky-runners. Or maybe they got lost, as well – and died.’
Leila nodded her head from side to side in wonderment. ‘Terrible,’ she repeated, it being the one word she knew in English to describe his experiences.
‘We were plumb crazy to go north without a guide. We were miners, not explorers or even trappers.’
‘What happen next?’
‘Well, to be honest, I was afraid of the bush for a long time. So I stayed put, worked on the farm belonging to the Fort for a while, and got to know the land around so I wouldn’t get lost again. Then I found a piece of land upriver, which the Bay seemed to have forgotten they owned. Somebody’d been there before – there was an old cabin there and I reroofed it, made a place to live. And I started clearing the land round it. After a while, I met up with a guy called Joe Black – and we worked together. We’ve got quite a homestead now – he’s looking after it while I’m down here.’ He took out a pipe and, without asking whether she minded the smoke, he lit up.
‘You find gold?’ she asked.
‘Nope. I pan a bit out of the river sometimes – but nobody’s ever found the mother lode.’
‘Mother lode?’ she queried in puzzlement, her smooth brow wrinkling slightly.
‘The main vein of ore – gold, Ma’am.’ He watched her delicately sipping her coffee. What a beauty she was! He wondered if she could endure a wilderness home, and told himself not to be a fool. She must be able to pick and choose the men she would take up with.
He plunged into conversation again. ‘I don’t make much in cash,’ he admitted. ‘But one way and another we mostly eat O.K. The worst years are over. We’ve two other men helping us now – both Crees. And Joe Black’s mother came from working at the Fort, to help in the house. She’s Cree, too.’
She dimpled, and inquired coyly, ‘You’re not married?’
‘I was, Ma’am. Married a Cree lady – a nice, intelligent woman. But about a year ago, she died giving birth.’ He sighed heavily.
‘And the baby?’
‘Little Wallace? He died too; it was a bitter winter and a lot of kids died – and old folk round the Fort.’
Remembering her own dead sons, Leila felt an overwhelming compassion for the man before her. Impulsively, she put out her hand and touched his arm. ‘You suffer much.’
‘I think you have, too, Ma’am.’
She nodded sad agreement.
He called for more coffee, and then began to describe the country he lived in, its superb beauty, the summers hot and comforting; he omitted to mention the myriads of mosquitoes and blackfly in summer, the problems of getting water into the house during the harsh winter, the vast unexplored territory round the tiny settlement
She listened in wonderment. It was obvious that the man loved his adopted home. She visualized it as country rather like that she had passed through on the train between New York and Chicago, which had seemed very empty to her in comparison with the Lebanon or even Britain. She watched his face which was leathery with exposure to the weather, and noted the grey in his moustache. He was a fine man, she felt, and her sex-starved body cried out with need, though she was thirty years old – quite old, she told herself.
By the time the fresh coffee had been consumed, Tom was telling himself there was no way he was going to let her go. She could adapt, like other immigrant women to the United States had done. ‘She can take one more step in her life,’ he assured himself, hope overwhelming his doubts.
He accompanied her home and left her on her doorstep, after agreeing to meet the following evening. Leila went up the stairs in a dream. She slowly took off her hat and laid it on the table. Helena was not yet home from work, so she flung herself on her daughter’s bed, spread out her arms as if to embrace the world, and for the first time since she had come to Chicago, she laughed with pure joy.
Chapter Eight (#ulink_8268ab89-f562-5c37-98a1-551129c4a082)
A week later, Leila broke it to her daughter that she was seriously considering remarriage. Since Leila had already mentioned that she had met a very nice man, a Canadian, and had gone out to meet him every evening for the past week, Helena received the confidence without too much surprise. It did, however, sadden her that her own beloved father was to be replaced.
‘It hurts, Sally,’ she confided to her old friend, as they sat together on the bottom step of the staircase leading to Leila’s tiny flat. The weather was thundery and the rooms upstairs stifling. Leila was out with Tom.
Sally took a pull at the cigarette hidden in the palm of her hand and slowly blew out the smoke. ‘Your mother is a very beautiful person; it’s bound to happen. She must like this guy particularly, though, because I know one or two who’ve approached her and she’s turned them down.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure. I don’t suppose your mother told you, because she wouldn’t want to disturb you.’ She did not say that the indignant young widow had probably turned the men down because their offers did not include marriage. Mrs Al-Khoury had asked Sally if such offers were customary, and Sally had replied, with a grin, that they were common enough, but you didn’t have to accept them. Now Sally put her arm round Helena and reminded her that, when she herself married, Leila would be alone. ‘I suppose,’ Helena had replied uneasily, and had tried to accept the possible change in her life.
Leila stitched her necklace back into her black skirt. Then she told Helena that she had accepted Tom’s offer of marriage, and that they would all be moving to western Canada, probably within the month.
‘But, Mama!’ Helena gasped. ‘You said before you couldn’t move to another country! What are you thinking of? Couldn’t Tom live here?’
Leila’s agitation was immediately apparent. ‘He says he can’t, dear; he’s too much at stake in Canada – and he loves the country.’ She lifted her hands in a small helpless gesture and let them sink into her lap.
‘Well, you don’t have to marry him! There’re other men in Chicago, surely, Mama? I’ve got used to Chicago now – and so have you.’
‘I don’t want to marry anyone else,’ Leila replied, almost crossly. ‘Marriage is very special, very personal.’
‘I know that!’ Helena’s pinched little face was taut with suppressed fear of the unknown. ‘If he wants you, he can stay here,’ she said resentfully.
‘I’ve asked him, dear. But he either won’t or can’t. And I can’t let him go.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I love him very, very much.’
This silenced Helena. Falling in love was something that occurred in books. It had never occurred to her that it might happen to her mother – or, possibly, to herself. In Lebanon, you accepted gratefully the husband chosen for you by wise parents and then hoped he would be kind to you.
Emboldened by her daughter’s sudden quiet, Leila said, ‘Consider, my darling, how very poor we are. Where will I get the chance again to meet a really nice man – and he is nice.’
Stifling a desire to cry, Helena nodded dumbly. Their current life was very hard and seemed to lack all hope of change, at least until her mother’s command of English improved. She could understand that, to her mother, Tom Harding offered an escape from total penury. But to what?
‘Has he told you about where he lives?’ she asked dully.
‘Yes, he has. And it sounds possible, with a good future for you.’
Three weeks later, a numbed Helena found herself in a Registrar’s office, standing behind her mother and acting as her bridesmaid, while next to her was Glenn, a rotund version of Tom Harding, acting as his brother’s best man. Behind them stood Sally and Mrs Ghanem and one or two friends of Tom and Glenn. Seated in a chair specially set for her was Tom’s scary old mother, anxiously attended by plump, harassed Ada Harding, Glenn’s wife.
Old Mrs Harding had already told her besotted son, in front of his new fiancée and her daughter, that he was a fool and always had been one; these women would be no use to him in a pioneer settlement. She had been a pioneer herself and knew what it was like.
Helena had listened to her with growing disillusionment. Leila had been as terrified as if she had been cursed by a witch, and it had taken all Tom’s cajolement to assure her that his friend Joe’s mother lived on the homestead and would come every day to help her. To beguile her, he said he had a little sleigh which she could learn to drive in winter, and that Helena could go to school, either in St Albert, where there was a Roman Catholic Mission, or in the Fort.
On the eve of the wedding, Helena had sat with her mother in their bare, tiny living-room, while Leila unpacked a beautiful, embroidered head shawl, delivered by Mrs Ghanem’s eldest son, with the family’s good wishes for the marriage. Helena, seeing the fine Lebanese handiwork of the shawl, had put her head down on the table and wept.
‘Couldn’t we go home to Beirut, Mama? Please, Mama.’ She spoke, as usual when addressing Leila, in Arabic, and the words seemed all the more poignant because of the language used.
‘Darling child, you know I’ve thought of that often, but the times are bad. Even if we weren’t murdered by either the Druze or the Turks, a widow woman, with no family to protect her, wouldn’t stand a chance.’ She put down the shawl and moved round the table, to hold Helena in a warm embrace.
With her head resting on her child’s thick black hair, she said frankly, ‘I don’t know what life holds for us, my love. But I feel Tom is honest and kind; and he has high hopes of giving you a better life. He says there is a great shortage of women round the Fort, so you should be able to make a good marriage when the time comes.’ Her voice trailed off, but she continued to hold the girl close to her. She was herself very nervous. She was also desperately in love – and she had no conception of wilderness barely touched by human hands.
Helena did not reply to her mother’s assurances. She wept for her father. Through her tears, she looked down at her hands. Her left forefinger was raw from constant pricks from blunted pins and needles at the tailor’s workroom, and she remembered the long, dreary days she spent penned up there. If she stayed in Chicago, would that go on forever?
She raised her head. ‘How do we know he’s even got a farm?’ she asked, as she fumbled in her skirt pocket for her handkerchief.
‘Well, I’ve done my best to confirm it. You know that young lawyer on Main Street? He’s originally from Lebanon. I asked him if he could inquire for me.’
Surprised at her mother’s temerity, Helena glanced up at her. ‘What did he find out?’
‘Well, he confirmed that Tom’s brother has a good reputation – it’s been known for years that he had a brother homesteading in Canada. There’s nothing to prove it, of course, but a neighbour told him that a few years back Tom asked his mother to join him. She didn’t go because her health’s so bad. The neighbour also said that the old lady is all against the marriage, because she says I won’t be able to work hard enough; I’ll be a burden to him.’
A small smile curved Helena’s mouth. ‘I doubt that, Mama. I think you’ll make him very happy.’
Her mother bent and kissed her. ‘Thank you, dear.’ She paused, and then said, ‘The lawyer also advised that Tom should make a Will, to be signed at the end of the wedding ceremony, leaving everything to me, if he should die – which God forbid. Tom’s going to do this, so at least we’d have a farm, dearest.’
Though Tom agreed to the Will, he omitted to tell her that he was, as yet, still a squatter and that the Hudson’s Bay Company still owned the land; he hoped sincerely that he would gain ownership before he died.
Later on that evening, when Tom came to spend an hour or two with Leila, he tried to reassure the girl.
‘The Fathers will teach you school,’ he told her. ‘And Joe Black or me – we’ll teach you how to skate and ride. And you can have a pup if you’d like one.’
She replied heavily, ‘I can already read and write in French and Arabic. English is coming. And Papa taught me arithmetic and how to keep accounts – some geography, as well. And how to buy and sell – and judge silk.’
‘Then you’re a very accomplished young lady,’ responded Tom patiently. ‘I could use your help, if you’d give it me.’
Though he had caught her interest, Helena looked at him with suspicion. ‘Help you?’
‘Sure. I can get folks to do all kinds of chores – but Joe and me – neither of us is good at accounts, keeping records and such. And, one of these days I reckon the British Government’s going to reach out and take over from the Hudson’s Bay Company, which rules us now – and we’ll have a pack of Government officials on our backs – and we’ll need everything down in pen and ink.’
Helena smiled involuntarily. ‘Just like the Turks?’ she asked with sudden interest.
Tom did not understand what she was referring to and turned to Leila for enlightenment. Leila told him about the avaricious tax collectors of the Turkish Emperor, and he laughed. ‘You’ve hit it right on,’ he told Helena, which made her smile again.
Realizing that much of his and Leila’s happiness depended upon Helena being reasonably content, he spent until midnight telling her about the Fort and his homestead. He also told her that he had married a Cree wife, and that the loss of her and of his son had been hard to bear. ‘Cree women know how to preserve meat, and how to make clothes out of skins – and how to cure sickness,’ he said. ‘Joe’s Ma is a Cree, and she came to help us when my wife died – and she’ll help your Mama, so that it won’t be too hard for you.’ In the back of his mind, he fretted that two more mouths to feed that winter could be a problem, and he hoped the pig had produced a good litter.
Watching the man as he spoke, Helena felt a sense of pity creep into her. He, also, had lost people he loved, she realized, and she felt a hint of kinship.
He was saying to her, ‘I can’t make up to you for your pa – I wouldn’t presume to. But I’ll take care of you as much as I can. You could be the only youngster your mama and I’ll have.’
The inference that her mother could have more children shocked Helena. She looked up at her mother, who smiled quietly back. It could happen, she realized. She turned to Tom. His expression was quite sad. He said suddenly, ‘I’d like to give you an extra name, in memory of my little boy. Then you’d be real special to me. I’d like to call you Wallace Helena.’
She was immediately offended. ‘That’s a boy’s name.’
‘It’s a boy’s or a girl’s. We called the baby after my mother – she’s Wallace Harding.’
‘I don’t need another name.’ The wide mouth compressed in disapproval.
‘Aw, come on, now. Indulge an old man’s fancy.’
Helena looked up at her mother again. ‘Do I have to, Mama?’
Her mother’s mouth began to tremble, as it always did when she was in doubt. Helena saw it and remembered suddenly how close her mother had come to a complete breakdown after her father’s death. She considered warily what might happen if she refused Tom’s absurd idea. For a moment, she thought that if she raised a tremendous fuss about it, the whole engagement might be broken off, something she had been praying for for the last four weeks.
The silence between the three of them became tense. Helena’s hands were clenched, her mother’s eyes wide and despairing.
She understood her mother’s passion for this man, and that if the couple married she herself would be dependent upon Tom’s goodwill – not something she desired at all. But if she succeeded in breaking the liaison, what else was there? A dreadful servitude, unless she herself could marry decently – and she, like her mother, had discovered that in Chicago she ranked as a coloured girl, not suitable for marriage to a white man. She bit her lips as she bitterly considered this fact, and that there were few boys of her age within the Lebanese community and probably none who would want a penniless girl. She was poor and plain and yellow, she told herself, and without any alternative future worth having.
She took a big breath, and said unsmilingly, ‘I don’t suppose it makes much difference.’
‘Well, that’s nice of you,’ Tom told her, thankful that he had not alienated her; he had regretted his impulsive request the moment he had made it. Leila had, however, been strangely silent when he had casually mentioned the children they would have.
When pressed, she had said, with a faint smile, ‘Let’s not worry – see what God sends.’
He wanted another son, but it seemed suddenly possible to him that he would not have one. At the thought, he had urgently wanted to perpetuate the memory of the small brown innocent buried with his mother in the black earth of the north pasture. It had occurred to him that he could give the child’s name to his stepdaughter and make her Wallace Helena.
When he was leaving, he shook the girl’s hand, then held it for a moment, as he looked down at her. ‘You won’t regret it, honey,’ he said warmly.
Wallace Helena smiled up at him wanly. He seemed to her a simple, honest man – but she wanted to cry.
Chapter Nine (#ulink_5e54ad08-1f4f-5744-9606-0603411222cf)
Glenn and Ada Harding provided a modest wedding breakfast in their back garden. Since it was a second marriage, only a few neighbours had been invited over to join the party. All of them were curious to see the bride. The men thought she was very pretty and congratulated Tom; the women tended to side with old Mrs Harding in saying that she was not strong enough to be the wife of a homesteader – and they whispered disparagingly that she looked like a Jewess. Acutely embarrassed by their stares, Leila held the soft brim of her summer hat close to her face and stayed very close to Tom.
The bride’s daughter sat, almost unnoticed, on a bench under a tree. Sally, who was herself totally ignored by the other guests, saw the forlorn young girl, and came over to join her. She saw tears on Wallace Helena’s cheek and she immediately handed her the glass of wine she was carrying. ‘Drink it down, hon. You’ll feel better.’
As Wallace Helena silently drained the glass, Sally carefully arranged the skirts of her dress; she had made it out of the bits of black silk Wallace Helena had given her. She looked over at the bride, who was also wearing black silk. ‘Gee, your mama looks pretty,’ she exclaimed, as if she was seeing Leila for the first time.
‘Yes,’ agreed Wallace Helena, without enthusiasm. Far more astute than her mother, she foresaw problems arising like thunderclouds – and probably considerable hardship in an unexplored country like Canada. Yet, what could she do?
When she had suggested to Sally that perhaps she should remain by herself in Chicago, try to earn enough to keep herself, Sally had been very explicit about what was likely to happen to a fourteen-year-old left alone in a city.
Sally had added sharply, ‘You be thankful your ma’s found a decent man to take care of you both; I wish I could find someone like him. There isn’t nothing to fear about Canada; slaves run away to it, so as to be free.’
‘Do they? Could you come with us, Sally? Could you?’ Her voice was suddenly wild with hope.
The black woman had laughed down at her. ‘That Mr Harding don’t need another mouth to feed, baby. And I got my mother to keep. I’m no slave – I’m free.’ She had given Wallace Helena a playful shove with her elbow, as she said the last words. ‘He’s O.K. Be thankful he’s willing to take you in.’ She hesitated, and then said, ‘He’ll take care of you; he’ll never touch you, I truly believe.’
Wallace Helena did not understand the import of Sally’s last words; she was still overwhelmed at having to face another new country.
Old Mrs Harding did one very sensible thing for them. Realizing that she could not talk sense into Tom, as she put it, she persuaded Leila and Wallace Helena to buy a solid pair of flat-heeled boots each and enough veiling to attach to their hats, so that they were protected in some degree from blackfly and mosquitoes – and she ordered Tom to pay the bill.
In the course of their journey, which took weeks, both Leila and Wallace Helena had reason to be thankful to her: mosquitoes and blackfly plagued them most of the way. They went by train to La Crosse, then by stage to the Red River, and, despite the threat of yet another Sioux uprising, by paddle steamer to Fort Garry. There they rested for a couple of days, while Tom made inquiries. They were not very impressed by what they saw of their first Hudson’s Bay Fort, and awaited with anxiety Tom’s decision as to how they were to proceed. Their landlady, the wife of a miner who ran a small general store, was aghast when told where they were going; as far as she knew, only one white woman had ever travelled that far, and she was the wife of a Hudson’s Bay man.
Leila wept, and Wallace Helena begged Tom to take them back to Chicago. Tom laughed, cheered them up and said they would travel by York boat. Several expeditions had gone out recently from Fort Garry to Fort Edmonton by land; but he was not going to chance such a dangerous journey.
The sail up Lake Winnipeg was not unpleasant. But the rest of the journey was done by York boat up the Saskatchewan River, a long dreary drag with little but pemmican to eat, cooped up in a tiny boat, one of a Company brigade returning to Fort Edmonton with stores.
To Leila’s horror, the boats were from time to time dragged out of the river, their cargo unloaded and transported on the backs of the voyageurs, to bypass waterfalls or rapids. The boats themselves were hauled along rough tracks, sometimes made of tree trunks and sometimes a well-trodden path. During these portages, Leila and Wallace Helena stumbled along as best they could, following the crew for mile after mile. Despite the heavy veiling protecting their faces and necks, they were badly bitten by mosquitoes and blackfly, which rose like a fog around them at every step; Tom and the other men seemed to have a certain immunity – their bites did not swell so badly. The crew were Metis, short, tanned, muscular men who cursed in fluent French, as they waged their usual battle against the flow of the huge river.
Leila was not a heavy woman, but what fat she had fell off her. She looked so gaunt that both Wallace Helena and Tom began to wonder if she could survive the journey.
Wallace Helena had, at first, thought that she herself would not survive, but the arduous exercise and adequate rations of pemmican actually began to improve her health. She was filthy dirty and nearly insane from the incessant insect bites, and she longed for some privacy, if only to wash herself down in the cold river water. The men did try their best to provide a little privacy, inasmuch as they turned their backs when the women had to relieve themselves, but they had a tight, fixed schedule to follow, and very little time was spent ashore. No special allowance was made for the fact that they had women with them. The party was soaked through by rain and, on one occasion, by sleet. ‘Lucky it hasn’t hailed,’ remarked one man to Wallace Helena. ‘Sometimes it hails heavy enough to bruise you.’
When the wind was in the right quarter, sails were rigged to ease the amount of poling which the men had to do; it also temporarily scattered the mosquitoes. Wallace Helena thought that she had never seen men work so hard for a living; yet they remained fairly good-humoured with each other. They were surprised that both women spoke French, admittedly very different from their own patois, but nevertheless enough for both sides to make rueful jokes about their suffering.
Towards the end of the journey, Leila showed signs of having a fever, and Wallace Helena’s heart sank. Wrapped in a blanket, she lay shivering beside her daughter, talking sometimes of the old days in Beirut or of her worries about Wallace Helena’s future, her mind wandering so that she did not know where she was.
It seemed to Wallace Helena that she had been crammed in the hated boat for months and that the journey would never end. She felt furiously that Tom had embroiled them in an expedition that nobody should be expected to make.
‘What if Mother dies?’ she asked him desperately.
Dog-tired himself, Tom could not answer her. Although he knew the journey to be gruelling, he had not realized how profoundly different was the strength of his late Indian wife compared with that of city-bred women. He had expected his new wife to complain about the hardship, but he had not thought that it would be unbearable. Wallace Helena had only to see the anguish in his eyes to know that her dread of losing Leila was shared.
Then, when both women had nearly given up hope, it seemed that an air of cheerfulness went from man to man, an excited anticipation. The man in charge of their craft told Wallace Helena, ‘Tomorrow, we’ll land for a little while – get a chance to wash and stretch ourselves.’ He looked at Leila, lying wrapped in a blanket in an acutely uncomfortable position towards the stern of the boat, and added kindly, ‘We’ll get a fire going when we’re ashore, and I’ll make a bit of broth for your mother.’
Wallace Helena smiled her gratitude; the man himself looked exhausted. ‘Why are we stopping?’
‘We have to make ourselves look decent – for when we arrive at the Fort!’
‘You mean we’re nearly there?’ Her filthy face lit up.
‘Be there tomorrow night, God willing.’
‘Thank God!’ Wallace Helena said, and meant it. ‘Would you tell my stepfather?’ she asked, pointing towards the rowers, where Tom had taken an oar and was rowing with a kind of deadly mechanical rhythm, his eyes half-shut; it was heavy work, and he was almost oblivious of what was going on around him.
He nodded, and she turned round and carefully eased herself closer to the tiny moribund bundle which was her mother, to tell her the good news.
As promised, the voyageur made a soup for Leila. While Tom built a fire, the man cut up some pemmican and put it into an iron pot with water and some bits of chopped-up greenery which he had hastily gathered. A tripod was rigged over the fire and the pot hung on it. When he considered it ready, he added a little rum; and Wallace Helena spooned the resultant soup into her barely coherent mother lying by the fire.
There was much scrubbing of faces and hands in the chilly waters of the river; one or two men sharpened their knives and roughly shaved themselves. Then, fortified with rum, they poled the last few miles. Several canoes came out to greet them, and there was a small crowd waiting for them when they landed at the foot of an escarpment.
The crowd was dumbfounded when Wallace Helena stepped ashore, followed by Tom carrying her mother.
The Factor was furious when he heard that he had two women from Chicago resting for the night in his fort; didn’t his boatmen know that settlers were not to be encouraged? Tom Harding had been a big enough nuisance, an American carving out a piece of Hudson’s Bay land to farm. Now he’d brought a white wife – and her daughter. Other women would follow them; there was already a rumour that a missionary’s wife would be arriving in the district one of these days. Settlers would clear the land, ruin the fur trade. What were his men about?
Leila was put to bed in a comfortable cabin by the Indian wife of an acquaintance of Tom’s, and, afterwards, she brought Wallace Helena a bucket of hot water in which to wash herself. Tom was sent for immediately to attend the Factor at the Big House.
Tall and silent, an exhausted, worried Tom was harangued in the man’s office. Both men were aware, however, that it was largely bombast; the British Government had left the renewal of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Charter up in the air, when it had been discussed in 1858; and already Government survey parties were beginning to penetrate the Bay’s kingdom; a few people, some American, had begun to settle.
Despite the hardships of his life, Tom loved his land and dreaded being driven off it by the Company; so, when the Factor had finished what he had to say, Tom politely told him that he missed his dead wife and son, and now sought to rebuild his family. He would be transferring his wife to his cabin in the morning – he carefully did not use the word homestead which would have implied his ownership of a piece of land claimed by the Company as their own.
The Factor had kept Tom standing and had offered him no hospitality, so Tom felt free to turn on his heel and walk out.
Chapter Ten (#ulink_a5088d66-99f4-5e26-9f21-71987663c872)
Word of the arrival of the brigade was brought to Joe while he was bringing the small herd of cattle he and Tom possessed closer in to the homestead. He had heard a rumour of a party of Blackfoot roaming the area, and he assumed that they had penetrated so far into Cree country because buffalo were getting scarce and they were hungry. He had no desire to have his precious beasts eaten by them.
The boy who brought the message was a Metis, the son of a friend of Joe’s working as a cooper in the Fort. While he got his breath after jogging most of the way, he hung on to Joe’s stirrup. Then he burst out, ‘Mr Harding’s with them. Brought a new wife, a white woman, and her daughter. Says to ask your mother to have the place neat and prepare some food. One woman’s sick.’
‘You’re kidding?’ exclaimed Joe, well aware of the Crees’ sense of humour – and this youngster was half-Cree.
The lad was offended. ‘I’m not,’ he responded crossly. ‘I saw them. They’ll be at your place about midday tomorrow.’
Joe sat on his horse and stared down at him. ‘I’ll be damned!’ he muttered.
He roused himself, and drew out a wad of chewing tobacco from his top pocket He took out his knife and cut a generous piece of it which he handed down to the boy, with his thanks. ‘Like to go down to the cabin and have something to eat?’ he asked.
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Helen Forrester
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A compelling novel of Liverpool and Canada, from the bestselling author of Liverpool Daisy, Three Women of Liverpool and Thursday’s Child.For Helena Al-Khoury, life as an immigrant has been full of loneliness and despair. On the long road that has taken her from her family home in the Lebanon to the bustling port of Liverpool, the slums of Chicago, and finally to the Canadian wilderness, the struggle to overcome heartbreak, loss and cruel hardship has taken a heavy toll. Now, at last, with the constant support of Joe, her devoted lover, she has developed into a strong, independent woman.When unexpected circumstances take her back across the Atlantic to Liverpool, Helena is offered the chance to take over the family business, and to become a success in her own right. Yet with her love far away on another continent, she feels torn apart. Soon the tragedies of the past and the challenges of the future threaten to overwhelm her…