She pulled her stocking up her leg and ruffled the skirts back into place. She had brown eyes so dark they seemed to be all pupil.
The tibia had snapped and come through the skin. Where it protruded the bone was tinged a pale green and flecked with blood. Her mother sat crying at her head, holding Cassie’s clenched hands while her father knelt over her to examine the wound. “What have you done?” her mother said. “What have you done to our child?” She went on repeating the question, her voice escalating with each repetition until she was nearly hysterical with rage and her father began shouting back. “Shut up, Myra. Shut up.” Even after she had stopped he pointed a finger and repeated himself one more time. Both her parents were visibly shaking. “Shut up,” he said. He poured a glassful of rum then and handed it to Cassie. “Drink as much of that as you can,” he said. Then he topped up the glass and drank it straight off himself. “You hold her good,” he told his wife.
Her mother mixed a paste of egg and flour to cover the wound after the bone was set and two straight sticks were wrapped tight to either side of the leg with cloth. The scar and the limp were not as severe as they might have been, she said, given the circumstances.
“On the weight of your witness alone,” Buchan said quietly, “your father sounds like a beast.”
Cassie stared at him with a bald look that was almost accusatory. “A man should be what he seems,” she said and then shrugged helplessly. “I knew him a different person when I was a girl. Before the drink got the better of him.”
He had to turn away from her for a moment, staring down into his mug.
She said, “My mother gave up everything for him, you understand.”
Buchan nodded. “Are they still in St. John’s?” he asked.
“My father,” Cassie said. “My mother died before I left, after an illness that kept her bedridden for the better part of a year. She had a head of black hair when she went to that bed and it was grey before the year was through.” Her arms and legs atrophied, the muscles beneath the skin slack and toneless as the flesh of a cod tongue. Her heels turned black against the mattress with blood blisters. Cassie said, “I never thought a bed could do so much damage to a person.”
Buchan set his mug down on the table and folded his hands in his lap.
“Near the end she wanted me with her through the night, she was afraid of dying alone in the dark, I imagine. If I fell asleep in the chair, she’d wake me, ask me to light a candle, to read to her.”
Buchan uncrossed his legs and crossed them in the other direction. “I know what it is to lose a mother,” he said.
Cassie tipped her head side to side. “It didn’t seem real, honestly. The stories I read to her seemed more real than her dying.” She seemed embarrassed by this notion and went on quickly. “I was at a loss as to what to do afterwards. I thought of moving to Nova Scotia, I thought of America. But I hadn’t the means.”
“And John Senior arrived at this time? The white knight?”
“It doesn’t suit you to scoff,” Cassie said, but she managed a smile. She said, “He’d heard news of Mother’s death on his way through St. John’s in October. He offered to take me to the northeast shore to teach his son and keep house when he returned in the spring. He told me Harry Miller was five years dead. He said I could take the winter to consider the offer. But I’d already made up my mind. I packed Mother’s books into a trunk and had it carried to the postmaster’s above the harbour. Then I wrote to John Senior in Poole.”
“You’ve never returned to visit?”
Cassie shrugged. “I have my memories of my mother. The rest of the life I lived in St. John’s is not worth revisiting.”
“So,” Buchan said quietly, “is this a penance of some kind?” He motioned around the kitchen with his arm.
“A very Catholic sentiment, Lieutenant.” She smiled across at him again.
“Perhaps,” he agreed and nodded. “Perhaps I have spent too much time among the Irish.” It was her entire face, he decided. The lines from her temples to the tip of the chin. By the tiniest of margins they were asymmetrical. As if a traumatic birth had skewed the shape of her face and it had nearly but not quite recovered itself.
Cassie said, “I have everything here I want.” She said it slowly, and it seemed to Buchan she was warning him not to question or contradict her.
“Your books,” Buchan said, lifting one from the table. “Your poetry.”
She shrugged and looked away from him. “A good book will never disappoint you,” she said.