“Thank you, I will,” Duke said. “It's a stamp collecting term.”
“What is?”
“A dead country. It's the term for a place that has ceased to be a country and, as a result, is no longer producing its own stamps. That's where we're headed, you see. I believe Sir Robert knew that and it sent him to an early grave.”
“It's hardly the time or place to be so dramatic, Arthur.”
Duke ignored the comment. “It must be very sad and tragic,” he continued, “to watch what you've devoted your life to dying, as you slowly do the same.”
William was struck by Arthur's willingness to embrace this rather ephemeral tragedy, while he'd reacted so coldly to the more real and vivid pain of Leona Merrigan. Out of respect for the gathering, however, he remained silent on the point.
“I've been meaning to call you, actually,” Duke said, suddenly letting the matter drop. “I need you to come by my office next week. I have something important I want to show you.”
“Important? Why?”
“Well, it's hardly the time or place, as you say. It concerns the matter we spoke about at our last meeting. When we're done we'll have tea and
speculate on the future of the country. Let me fill you in. The civil servants are always the first to know what's really going on.”
William didn't relish the thought of yet another encounter, but felt it best to know what the fellow was up to and agreed.
“I'll stop in on Tuesday next, then, say at one?”
“Good. Until then, William.”
The Reverend Dr. Bond, the chief mourner and Sir Robert's older brother, emerged at that point and invited both men to a closed ceremony in the drawing room. The Whitbourne crowd was asked to bide in the hallway as a set of sliding doors closed on the more select group of mourners inside. William joined sincerely in the solemn chorus of “How Great Thou Art,” yet couldn't help but notice how the gathering seemed to suggest that Bond, and not the Almighty, was the subject of the verses.
The wake was followed by a bleak passage to the chapel that took a full thirty minutes. William walked with the others behind the horse-drawn hearse. The calendar said spring had arrived but it was clear, even though the snow was reduced to thin patches, that winter had not released its icy grip. Its best promise was a large bed of dry roadside thistles that William imagined nodding with purple heads in about three months time. A brief shower of hailstones fell when they were about halfway there, sudden and swift, the white balls riding in on a bone-chilling wind to scatter like ruined armies over the hard grey ground.
All hands were grateful to attain the cozy chapel. The strains of the small local choir rose gently into the nave as silver censers were waved about the casket. A haze lingered over it as the bittersweet smell of the incense spread. A Whitbourne boy pumped away at the church organ, first with one hand and then, tiring, with the other. This time the full congregation sang “How Great Thou Art” and, William thought, gave the old hymn a more honest and heartfelt rendering. He glanced several times across at Arthur Duke who watched the proceedings with a grim focus and gave him no sign of acknowledgement.
At last, the final stage, the walk up the thin rocky trail to the graveyard on the hill behind the chapel. There, Sir Robert Bond was humbly laid to rest, as he would have it, forever overlooking his beloved Grange.
Later, on the train going home, William looked out the window at the naked larch trees beside the railway bed, each one a thin, scraggy finger bent permanently to the northeast by the prevailing winds, and at the dark spruce trees that fell away into a wall of solid black as night descended. His thoughts drifted uneasily back to the wake, to the long
avenue leading to the stately home, to Bond in the casket, to Arthur Duke and his smouldering resentments, and, somehow most disturbing of all, to the other end of the long hallway where that maid had been sobbing quietly, alone.
William went to see Arthur, as promised, the following Tuesday. He watched as Arthur slid open a drawer, took out a small unopened envelope and tossed it like a playing card on the desk.
“I've wanted to show you this for some time,” he said.
“A letter.” William glanced down at it. It was small and helpless-looking. A thin purple scrawl on the outside.
“Should it be of interest to me?” he asked.
“I should say so. It's from a âdear friend' of yours on the Cape Shore.”
“Leona Merrigan? Why would she be writing to you?”
“It's not addressed to me, William.”
William picked up the letter. It was addressed to the Halifax School for the Deaf. He looked at Duke for an explanation.
“I intercepted it,” he said.
“Jesus Christ!” William eyed him in disbelief. “What are you playing at now?”
“Don't worry. I'd never tamper with it. I needed to take a quick look at it, that's all. I'll forward it tomorrow, now that you've seen it.”
William scowled. It was clear to him that Maisie Tobin had been up to no good.
“Why do you persist in bothering Leona, Arthur? What can you possibly hope to gain by it?”
Duke's shoulders curled mischievously and his effete hands gestured as if to suggest he was at a loss to explain his own behaviour. He reached for the letter and William handed it back to him.
“For some reason, I feel I must convince you of the truth of my suspicions.”
“How do you plan to do that? Even if you opened that letter, and I know you wouldn't do that, it wouldn't prove anything.”
“You're quite right I won't open it. That would be against the law and make a hypocrite of me under the circumstances.”
William noticed tiny ridges on Duke's luminous fingernails as they toyed with the white envelope.
“I've been waiting a long time for this letter,” he said. “It's one of the very few she's mailed in the last twenty years. I find that incredible, as a man whose very stock-in-trade is letter-writing.” He looked at William
with an unsettling gratitude in his face. “It's actually your doing that I have it. It's here precisely because of your involvement with the girl. You see, every year at Christmas the School for the Deaf invites the parents of the students,
every
student, government-sponsored or not, to make a donation, no matter how small, to the school. No doubt Mrs. Merrigan's contribution is inside.”
William laughed out loud. “So you think there's a small fortune in that envelope, do you? This proves that Leona is sitting on bags of money from the illegal sale of stamps, or is it rum? How much do you think is in there, Arthur? Realistically. A few dollars? Even the poorest family has a little cash, you know.”
“Oh, I'm sure it's a modest amount. No, William, I'm as convinced as you are now that Mrs. Merrigan has never made a penny off the sale of my stamps. Incredibly, and against all logic, she still has them. All but one, that is. Look at this, William.”
He held the letter toward William. The sleepy-eyed portrait of Edward VII stared at him from the postage stamp.
“It's the two-cent from the Royal Portrait Issue,” William said. “So? You think it's from the shipwreck?”
“I do.”
“There are thousands of those stamps available all over the country.”
“No, not
all
over the country, they're not,” Duke replied. “I made a point of asking the postmistress in Knock Harbour to sell only the Map Stamp for letters. She's obliged me, for a very long time. I guarantee you this two-cent did not come from that post office.”
William shrugged. “Leona probably bought the stamp in Placentia. She doesn't get along with the postmistress, as you probably know.”
“I checked with the post office in Placentia and, wouldn't you know it, they were all out of the Edward VII, as well.”
“She might have bought it ages ago.”
“True. But you've got to admit that it's an interesting coincidence. I think you know I'm right, but you just won't admit it. Why do you insist on making excuses for her?”
“I don't care if you are right, Arthur! What if
your
stamps, as you call them, are somewhere in Knock Harbour! That's still no reason to spy on the poor woman in order to settle a personal vendetta.”
“I am a civil servant doing my job. It's Mrs. Merrigan's behaviour that's baffling.”
“The woman lost three children in one night, Arthur. Can you or I even imagine what that must have been like?”
“It was a terrible thing. Yet, she's made the most of it. She robbed the government and now she's making us pay for her child's infirmity. You can't be taken in by people like that, William. Adversity hardens them.”
“That may be so, but what has hardened a privileged person like you, Arthur? That's what I'd like to know.”
Arthur scowled deeply at this remark and William guessed that, for today at least, tea was out of the question.
Now that she was gone, Leona found it ever more difficult to place herself inside Dulcie's silent world. She discovered it was never really quiet when you listened; early mornings brought birdsong, evenings carried the toss of surf and the hiss of undertow right into the house. Winter was better than summer, though, she'd learned, because the snow had a dampening effect. That's why she took to long winter walks on days with no wind when the snow lay everywhere silent and still. On one such day, she put on her snowshoes and set out on the woods road toward the barrens. A perfect white-green pattern of snow and evergreen branches flowed across the valley before her. She drank it in before heading into the trees.
The road began to climb and her body sought the rhythm that the land required. She saw the parallel skid marks of a hand-cat with a horse's hoofprints in between. Tailings of bark and twigs were embedded in the hardened snow. She pictured her own horse, Dan, and remembered Dulcie. She had to remind herself not to recollect too quickly. She had to learn to open the door on memory slowly, then to navigate the pain.
It was a good year for rabbits. She saw sign everywhere, footprints and droppings. She imagined what it would be like to sit on a fallen tree in a clearing and watch the woods awaken at night, to see the rabbits taking to their leads, or a night owl swooping in for the kill.
Her tread grew heavy and her breathing became audible. She came out of the trees onto the first marsh and saw where the wind had lifted tiny statues out of the snow drifts and frozen them into delicate poses. The sun played across her face. The sky sang, its blue was so deep and clear. Her ears were ringing with cold as she headed across the open marsh. There was a lot of snow down. It would have been rough going without snowshoes and the broken path of the woodsmen.
The trail re-entered the woods on the other side of the marsh. She crossed a grey railing bridge at the head of a pond and, soon after, came
upon the remains of a moose that had been killed beside the path. There was not much left to see. Green and red traces of intestine were frozen into the snow. There were short brown hairs from the hide, four hooves cast aside, and blood. But the amazing thing to see was the severed head, so incredibly real, so suggestive of the whole animal, the living breathing thing that had rendered up its life on this spot. It seemed a sin to leave it lying on the ground like that. She imagined the animals and birds feeding on it, the slow ceremonies of weather cleaning it, leaving it to linger years before, green and crumbling, it disappeared into the earth.
She reached the height of the land and felt pulled along the path as if caught in the flow of a river. A turn in the trail and she found herself at last in a wide clearing. She crossed to a tree stump and sat down.
Now the silent country was hers. It would be several minutes before the cold penetrated, made her shiver and forced her to move again. She took off her hat and shook her hair free. She slowed her breathing until it seemed to disappear and emptied her thoughts into the clear air. She was perfectly still, yet alert as a small animal. She listened at first for sound, heard the absence of sound, went beyond that until, at last, in that ever-widening silence, the terrible longing inside her was eased.
The lights in the small girls' dormitory flicked on and off, teasing Dulcie out of her dreams and into another day at school. She lined up with the other sleepy-eyed girls with her towel and soap and toothbrush and paste, got herself washed and groomed and dressed, and paraded downstairs to the cafeteria for breakfast. Dulcie took care to see that her favourite friend, Mary McGrath, the little six-year-old from St. John's, had the place in front of her in the line. Dulcie was amazed at this tiny creature, so brave to have come all this way to school, who never complained at being so far away from home. During the first week at school, she had taken Mary under her wing. How good it felt to have someone to look after and protect!
Dulcie had speech class right after breakfast today and she was not looking forward to it. There were many things she liked about school, but Miss McLean was her least favourite teacher and speech was her least favourite class. She didn't like it when Miss McLean took her by the jaw and forced her to move her mouth and tongue this way and that; she urged Dulcie to breathe out in little gusts and make the tickling feeling, called sound, in her throat. Dulcie hated it when her spit escaped and left wet stains upon her tunic. Other times, Miss McLean put a pencil cross-ways into Dulcie's mouth and made her blow air against her hand that way, too. It was all very unpleasant. Speech class was the only time in Halifax when she was reminded of the little building in Knock Harbour, the one where they made her keep her palms on the table and wouldn't let her move.
Miss McLean didn't seem to like Dulcie, for some reason, and that made Dulcie afraid of her. Sometimes, Miss Batstone came to the class and Dulcie was lucky enough to have her hands help with speech instead of Miss McLean's. Maybe she would come today.