“Exactly!” Cora screamed. She lowered her voice and said sadly, “Maybe Peter was right. He believed his people came from far away beyond the water's reach. We should have gone up and opened the box before. We could have given Peter the missing piece of flint; then he would have had better luck.”
Realizing that something didn't add up, Clarissa was blunt: “Where did
you
get the flint?”
Cora hung her head and sighed. “You know I was on the beach the day Peter died.” She took a deep breath and confessed in a guilty voice, “The boys were building a bough wiffen tilt. They had just come with a wheelbarrow of posts. I heard the dogs howling, and I dared Peter to hang from the kennel upside down.” Her voice fell until Clarissa could barely hear it. “The dogs grabbed him. I heard him scream. I wanted to run â to tell someone, but I couldn't move at first; my legs were locked up. The next day after the dogs had been shot, I went down to the beach. That's when I saw the flint on the rawhide string. It must have come off over Peter's head when he was hanging upside down. I put it around my neck so I could pray for forgiveness.”
Clarissa's eyes brightened in hope. “That's why you've been so sad and tired. It's not just your cough. But everyone has a choice on a dare. Peter made his.”
Cora seemed relieved. She smiled, and Clarissa was glad they had opened the box. She leaned over to look down into it. There was something white and round, like the base of a jug, among the seaweed left at the bottom.
“I'll get it,” Cora said, laying the two strings of flint on the ground. She reached to lift up the object, grunting as her hands went around it, her fingers slipping into openings. “I should have pulled up extra floorboards. 'Tis hard to reach, but I think it's a jug with holes in it.” She lifted the thing into the light.
As Cora pulled herself up on her knees with the object in her hands, Clarissa shrieked. Cora looked in horror at what she was holding. Her hands went weak and the object rolled from them and down on the trapper's coat and into the beaver hat.
“It looks like someone's head,” Clarissa said faintly, “without any skin.”
“Without any eyes,” Cora added with a shudder.
“Without a tongue to tell us who owned it,” Clarissa ended bleakly.
They sat looking into each other's face, until Cora whispered, in a quavering voice, “It's likely Peter's father's head in that box â got himself murdered by Indians or white trappers for stealing their furs and such. If 'tis so, then Peter's and his father's flints can settle into one piece in the box.”
“Why are you whispering?” Clarissa asked.
Cora stared through the door into the woods that surrounded the Tea House. Without turning her head, she said, “I forgot to bring some bread.”
“I'm not hungry,” Clarissa answered impatiently.
“For the fairies. Sure, I hear them blabbering in the trees. Listen!” Cora's eyes stood still in her head. “You can't see them, but they're dancin' in the woods.”
“Your ears must be keener than my eyes then. A bear is likely talking to itself about having us for supper.” Clarissa rolled her eyes.
“Maybe someone followed us. Jakot! Or Peter's ghost!” Cora whimpered.
“Then let's get out of here,” Clarissa said. “Drop everything back down in the box.”
“Even the coin?” Cora asked in a quivering voice.
“Even the coin.” Clarissa's words pressed down on Cora's.
Clarissa flinched as Cora slipped a stick into an eye socket and lifted the skull. She expected it to break apart like pieces of chainies, but it didn't, and Cora dropped it back down into the box. The coat and beaver hat followed. Then she tossed in the coin and the pieces of flint. “This is where everything belongs,” she said, firmly pressing down the lid. “Too bad we don't have some large nails to clint it.” She covered the box with branches, and fitted the floorboards back in place.
They started down Tea House Hill, passing the Grenfell castle without looking towards it, without speaking, as if some mystery had invaded their beings. Flowers, dancing in the breeze, made everything seem peaceful. But inside, Clarissa felt as if the daylights had been knocked out of her.
As they neared the orphanage, Cora said, “'Tis best for us not to tell anyone about this.”
“Let's not,” Clarissa agreed.
“I'd like to know where that box came from, all the same.”
Clarissa shook her head. “We can imagine what we like, but we can't know everything. Life isn't like books with an end to mysteries. It's best that way. We can spend our lives thinking back and wondering . . . making our own endings, and changing them any way we want.”
“It's good to no longer have to wonder what's in the box,” Cora said in relief. “We don't have to find the nerve to open it and it's nice to have a secret that is still a mystery.”
Clarissa agreed. “One that will lead our minds off in all directions when we have nothing else to do but think.”
As they went towards the orphanage, Clarissa's eyes got a faraway look.
Soon,
she thought,
I'll open a box of words in a
house full of people. I'll enter my family's lives and my family
will tell me why I have been here all this time.
T
he next day dawned at the dormitory window like a silver light shining from Heaven. Clarissa's roommates surprised her this time by waiting until she was ready. Then they all made their way downstairs together.
Clarissa was finishing her breakfast when she felt tears surface. She squeezed her eyes tight; when she opened them, they were wet. As soon as the children were dismissed, she went outside and leaned on the veranda rails. A heavy feeling settled around her heart and rose in her throat, thick as the fog that was beginning to batten the harbour.
She turned around and went inside to her locker. She lifted the lid and looked at her treasures: books, a toy watch from her mother, her beaded necklace, the doll and cradle Miss Brown had given her, a piece of sparkling blue-green stone she had picked up near the beach. Fire rock, the Indians called it.
There were reminders of the caretakers. Clarissa still had the lucky rock Uncle Aubrey gave her. His voice was stronger than a whip, and worked as well as a lashing. Mr. Manuel, the caretaker before Uncle Aubrey, though kind to Clarissa, and the other girls, had often had a crack at the boys. More than once he had made their smiles disappear and their tight lips erupt in a cry. Clarissa had heard him defend himself to Dr. Grenfell. “With so many children to keep reined, we have to be tough.”
The doctor, having a mind for listening to orphans and discerning the truth, dismissed him. His departure had brought a look of relief to the boys' faces and a frown to the mistresses' and housemothers' faces, as if their tasks at hand had widened.
Mr. Manuel had once given her a two-cent copper. “A big, brown cartwheel penny for your thoughts,” he had said with a chuckle, “though I don't think yours can be bought.”
A penny for some buttons
, she had thought. She bought a shiny black French jet button and a calico button at the Grenfell shop. She had given the calico button to Treffie to put on her bracelet of buttons. A few days after Treffie died, Clarissa had noticed that the nail fastening the front of Hipper's overalls was gone; in its place was a large button that looked like the one that had been on Treffie's father's overcoat. It wouldn't be there long. The housemother had sewn a button on Hipper's overalls before; he had twisted it off and gone back to his nail fastener.
“May I have one of Treffie's buttons?” Clarissa asked Miss Elizabeth one day when she was thinking hard on Treffie.
“The buttons have all been put to good use, the same as Peter's belongings,” she was told. “Young Johnny, who is big for his age, is wearing poor Peter's shoes and clothes.”
Clarissa was holding the beads with the cross on them when she heard Cora's voice behind her. âI won't ever see yer again. I won't, will I?”
Clarissa turned slowly towards Cora, who was leaning against the door frame with a sad, questioning look. She faced her, not sure what to say. She could not make promises she might not be able to keep.
“Missus Frances made Suzy and me go to the hospital for tests this morning. I heard the nurses at the hospital talking about tests Suzy had before. They think her lungs are clotted â she'll likely die in a year. I'll likely die too,” Cora added in a resigned voice.
“In a year!” Clarissa reached instinctively to put her arms around her friend. She fell flat on the floor. “You can't ever die!” she cried. “We are sisters in spirit â sisters of the heart.”
Cora reached down to help Clarissa up on her crutches. She drew back as coughing racked her body. Coughs and sobs mingled.
Cora stopped coughing and said in an even tone, “God will take me to Heaven where my father is. I'll just go a little earlier than you.”
“But you have to live here first. There's lots of time to go there. You should be at least as old as Mrs. Grenfell and have as many children.”
Clarissa could understand why Cora's mother sometimes seemed sad. She was likely thinking of her husband gone, thinking of Cora, and little Suzy going. . . . Sometimes Mrs. Payne looked to be fading.
Cora began coughing again and didn't stop until blood foamed on her lips. She dug into her pocket for her brown handkerchief and wiped her mouth. She sighed. “I tried to not to cough in front of the mistresses, but they found out that I've been having coughing spells.”
“You may need to have your turn at the hospital, Cora,” Clarissa said honestly.
“Don't be telling me that. I don't want to go there and then disappear like Treffie.”
“Treffie was run down when she came. Then she got TB meningitis. That killed her quick. I heard Ilish and Georgia talking.”
Sadness closed around the two girls; Cora's eyes bubbled with tears. “I want you to stay here.”
“But I can't, not for long.”
“How long is long?” Cora's voice sounded muffled.
“I don't know. Whenever I'm called to go on the boat. Maybe tomorrow.”
Clarissa had often stood on the wharf feeling dizzy as she looked up at the spar of the
Prospero,
and its flag, the Union Jack, waving in the wind. Now she was going away on the
Meigle,
a big ship that voyaged among icebergs.
The next morning, Cora emptied Clarissa's locker and brought its contents to the dormitory. Georgia was helping Clarissa get ready for home. She was combing Clarissa's hair and prating on about how the mistresses let her grow her hair long enough to swing like a rope now that she was old enough to take good care of it. She was telling Clarissa that Dr. Grenfell was sending her to study nursing in the United States when Miss Elizabeth rushed into the room. “The
Meigle
has come before it was expected. You must hurry.”
“But my corsets! I need to buckle them on!” Clarissa sputtered.
“You don't have time,” the mistress said sharply, grabbing the surgical corsets and shoving them into Clarissa's arms. “Here, carry them. Georgia will take your bag.”
There was no point in arguing. Clarissa tucked the corsets under her arm, feeling as humiliated as if they were her navy drawers. She squeezed her arm against her body, hoping she wouldn't drop the undergarment.
She sweated her way along the gravel road in her heavy coat. She stopped to look back over her shoulder at Cora standing by the orphanage gates, sad and silent.
***
The sun was sitting in a blanket of fog as if it had just awakened and was getting ready to roll out of bed as Clarissa was lifted into a lifeboat, which was winched up to the
Meigle
, a long and ugly steamer. Able-bodied passengers walked up the rope ladder. A gust of wind swung the ropes and Clarissa heard squeals from passengers. A sailor shouted, “Davy Jones, here I come â down into your locker room!”
The
Meigle
, a Union Jack flying from its spar, bid farewell with three blasts of a horn. It was an eight-hour trip to Battle Harbour, where Clarissa would disembark and wait for another boat to take her the rest of the way home. She was glad when the sun broke through the fog, sending clouds drifting across the sky like fluffy little creatures on their own journey somewhere. She wouldn't have wanted rain from a dark, cold sky to mingle with her flowing tears as the schooner voyaged past the orphanage. The orphans had gathered on the banks to wave goodbye. Instead of the brown handkerchiefs they always carried, they lifted white handkerchiefs in the air as if they were sails helping Clarissa on her way. All except Cora, who waved a brown handkerchief.
Standing on the deck high above the waves, Clarissa looked towards the children, letting her tears fall freely. She knew they would miss her. She would miss them terribly, even the ones who had made fun of her and called her a cripple. But she would miss Cora most of all.
As the ship moved out to sea, she stood at the rail, one hand on a crutch, the other holding tightly to a belaying pin. Gulls kliooed above waves swimming in the bay like fish, white finned against dark water.
“Ha, 'twon't be the best night to see the
Titanic
,” predicted a rough-looking sailor who came to stand beside her. He pulled on his overgrown beard. “'Tis a good omen if we do. But it bes always on a calm night, like the April one when she sank. Its ghost bes so big it could knock a ship flat in the water. But it just passes on by.”
The sailor helped Clarissa down dirty stairs to a small seat where someone had laid her bag. She sat down and placed her crutches beside her. Then she pushed her corsets into the bag. She leaned back with the bag in her arms, holding everything that was familiar.