He nodded. “I am quite discreet,” he said. He gestured with his hand.
Her father owned a public house above the waterfront in St. John’s with a large portly man from Devon named Harrow. Harrow was a single man in his early forties who had served for years in the navy and lived in half a dozen countries around the world before settling in St. John’s. There was no time of the day or night when he couldn’t be found pouring drinks at the public house, suffering the drunken harassment of customers with a fierce good humour, clearing the chairs of those who had passed out at their tables to make room for others coming in the door. He had lost an eye in the navy and wore a patch over the dark hole in his face. He slept only three or four hours a night in a tiny room at the back of the tavern and seemed to have no interests or ambition beyond the walls of his desolate little dominion. His immersion in the place gave Cassie’s father more leeway than he would otherwise have had to wander the countryside during the summer, to read as much as he pleased, to drink freely and often. She said, “Mostly to drink, is the honest truth.”
As a result of her father’s habits, the family became an object of speculation and a kind of pre-emptive disdain within the town. Her mother had once enjoyed a modicum of respect as an educated woman, but her work as a tutor and the recognition it garnered her slowly disappeared. People began to avoid them in the way lepers were avoided in biblical stories, as if any physical contact might infect those who touched them. Their only visitors were men her father dragged home from the public house.
Buchan said, “Is this where John Senior comes into it?”
She nodded. This was in the fall, she told him, when the season’s catch was brought to market. John Senior and Harry Miller came to the house with her father in the course of a night of drinking in various taverns above the waterfront. After a round of stilted introductions the two women removed themselves to a room upstairs but they could hear Miller singing bawdy songs and inserting her mother’s name or Cassie’s wherever he could make them fit. He made lewd propositions to the two women, shouting to them through the ceiling.
She saw Buchan’s look of incredulity. It wasn’t an unusual occurrence in their lives at the time, she told him.
John Senior came by the following day while her father was out. She was reading The Rape of Lucrece to her mother. Cassie closed the book and stood from her chair to face him. He smiled awkwardly, like a man confronted with evidence of someone he once was, someone he was now ashamed of. He asked what it was she was reading and how Cassie had come to learn to read and whether she had taken it upon herself to teach others. He nodded as she spoke and couldn’t seem to remove the smirk from his face.
“My husband,” her mother said finally, “is not at home.”
John Senior shook his head. He said, “I come to say my best to both of you and to apologize for Mr. Miller.”
“An apology from Mr. Miller would be more in order,” her mother told him.
He said, “When it comes to apologies, Mrs. Jure, it is sometimes a case of taking them where they can be got.”
Cassie paused in her story there to pour the steeped tea into Buchan’s mug and then into her own. It had been sitting so long it was black and barky. She went to the pantry for sugar and fresh cream. Her movements were slow and slightly distracted, as if she was the stranger in this house and was unsure where things were kept. Buchan was surprised he hadn’t noticed the limp before, the buckle in her step.
“What happened to your leg?” he said when she ’d taken her seat, already sure it was connected somehow to the story she was telling.
She watched the officer a moment, then leaned forward, lifting the heavy layers of the skirts to her knee. She slipped her knee-length stocking to her ankle and traced a finger the length of the purple scar on her shin. When she was twelve, she said, she tried to separate her father from the bottle he was working his way through. He had thrown her down the stairs of their house.
Buchan’s stomach came up into his throat. The fall. The impact. He could see in this revelation the same unexpected forwardness she had shown the night before, wrapping her shawl around his shoulders. There was something childlike about the intimacy she assumed, the disregard for markers of class and station. He felt a sudden flush of embarrassment, as if he had blundered into a room while she was dressing.