John Senior made his hurried excuses then and left, relieved to be released from a duty he didn’t fully comprehend. But before he went out the door, he ’d looked into the man’s eyes a long moment, searching the alcohol-dampened flicker of them, thinking he might be able to tell just from that. Which one had he gone upstairs for, his wife or his daughter?
John Senior watched the grey water of the cove billow towards the shore, fighting the same surge of nausea he’d felt sitting beside Miller in that room. Feeling the same peculiar heaviness come over him. He’d had no plan to offer Cassie a position in his house and did so on a murky whim, hearing about her mother’s death on his way through St. John’s years later. Soon after Cassie came north, it seemed likely to him that she and John Peyton would make a pair, so he let the question he’d been asking himself lie. It was sometimes better, he had learned, not to know. He left the two of them on their own when he could, sent them across to Reilly’s for the haying alone. Matchmaker is how he saw himself. The good father.
He shook his head at the thought now. The good father. He’d been on a round of his salmon rivers a summer some years after Cassie’s arrival, inspecting the cure, the state of the weirs. He was meant to stop in at Charles Brook, then go on to Richmond’s river, but had foregone the last leg of the trip for an omen of weather. There was no one on the stagehead when he arrived, John Peyton and the hired men hand-lining for cod in shoal water at the backend of Burnt Island. He went up to the house and walked in on Cassie in the wooden tub in front of the fireplace. She was standing in water to her knees, a cloth in one hand, her hair pinned up at her neck. He stared a moment, stunned, as if someone had clapped the breath from his lungs. Sunlight slanting through the windows, dust motes moving in a slow waltz through the air.
It had never before that moment occurred to him he might have her himself. That he wanted her. She made no attempt to cover herself, just stared back at him with a fierce, knowing look. Her breath hard through her nostrils, her wet skin glowing like a pane of glass facing a sunset.
The memory of that look still made John Senior’s chest clutch helplessly about his lungs. He turned away from the steady thrum of the water and walked in off the stage. He felt ashamed of himself and fearful, as if he’d just woken from his nightmare. His wife or his daughter? He set out towards the hills behind the summer house. The ground beneath his feet seemed hardly more solid than the ocean and he could sense the earth’s dark, inevitable undertow. Eventually the earth opened up and swallowed a person, body and soul. Cassie’s father gone now and they were all, every one of them, being pulled along in his wake.
Peyton came back from the pantry with glasses. He poured two small shots of rum and added a splash of water to both. He sat back in his seat. “You woke up beside the fireplace,” he said.
“Two more things,” Cassie said.
The old woman was already up and about the tilt, a fire burning to boil water. The smoke vented through a wooden barrel fashioned into a kind of chimney. Margaret squinted down at Cassie, at the blur of movement in the place where Cassie had been sleeping. Her eyes were nearly shut with peering. “Child,” she said and she held a hand in Cassie’s direction. Both men were still asleep on opposite sides of the room. Margaret took her hand at the wrist and smiled suddenly, staring off into the air as if there was something clandestine about physical contact between them.
“Now,” she said. “I wonder would you ever do us a small favour?”
Cassie shifted where she stood, resisting the urge to pull her hand away. Her feet burned where the skin had been galled from the heels, the toes.
Margaret said, “Tell me your name for real.”
“Miss?”
“You’re no lad, even I can see that.”
“Are you blind, miss?”
“Almost and nearly. Tell an old blind woman your name now.”
She stepped nearer. She was almost the same height as Margaret and lifted herself on her toes to speak directly into her ear. She felt as if she was betraying a confidence, putting herself at risk somehow. “Cassie,” she whispered. “Cassandra.”
The Irishwoman was still smiling and patted her arm. “I won’t tell a soul,” she promised.