Back Roads to Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #6): A Novel (19 page)

Quincy grunted and directed Allison back to her room; her parents were still quibbling when Buckle closed the door on them.

Allison’s final moments with her sister were the most painful she was to endure. Sarah’s tears flowed freely.

“Oh, Allie,” was about all she could manage, and this she kept repeating in broken tones.

What was there to say? Of what use were words? Nothing would change their father’s decree. What had been, was; what was to be, would be. No comments were necessary.

But they both understood it was the end of life as they had known it. Sarah, shy and reclusive, would be more alone than ever; Allison would never again experience undemanding love such as her little sister had given.

Locked in each other’s arms, wordless for the most part, it was Buckle’s approach that allowed them to regain a semblance of normality. Allison wiped her eyes and attempted to speak briskly: “Take good care of Fifi for me. When you come to Canada, she can come with you.”

Sarah shook her head in despair, refusing to be cajoled.

Her small face twisted with misery, Sarah thrust into her sister’s hand a small purse—Grandmama’s contributions to her across the years. It was to be a gift more meaningful than they could have imagined.

Standing in the great hall, coated and wrapped, her baggage being carted out to the coach by Buckle, Allison spoke her good-byes to her parents. If her face was white and her eyes large, luminous with unshed tears, her parents were unaffected.

Her father reached a large, white hand and patted her shoulder. “You have Maybelle Dickey’s name and address,” he said. “You have your letters of credit. You have Miss Figg to see that all goes as planned.”

“Yes, Papa,” Allison said, as one frozen in time and place.

“And may this . . .” he began judiciously but, to do him credit, hesitated without adding the useless and pointless and hurtful words
teach you a lesson
.

Her mother, to do her credit, did not pretend grief she did not feel. She planted a cool kiss on her daughter’s brow, as though she were leaving for the season in London. “Be a good girl,” she said, as though sending off her child to an overnight stay with a friend.

With blind eyes Allison turned and walked woodenly through the door of Middleton Grange, down the steps to the coach where Buckle held open the door for her and Jenks held the reins. Stepping inside and taking a seat beside Mrs. Buckle, she left behind everything she knew and faced everything she didn’t.

Eventually she loosed her grip on the farewell gift her mother had handed to her at the last minute and which she hadn’t looked at until now: a generous supply of Cockle’s Antibilious Pills.

O
nce aboard ship, Theodora dropped the respectful form of address, forsaking the “Miss” for simply Allison. Allison, who wouldn’t have thought a thing about it in most circumstances, found herself strangely nonplussed. Since she deemed
Figg
to be a most unseemly name, one that she had trouble uttering without a snicker—a childish reaction that she avoided—she followed her chaperone’s example, promptly dropped the “Miss,” and called Theodora by her given name. Anyone hearing the two of them would have supposed they were friends traveling together. This, too, Allison found unsettling. She had never considered herself a snob, thinking she had little to be uppity about, but she was sorely tempted where Theodora Figg was concerned.

Though she controlled her baser instincts sternly, Allison was enough her mother’s daughter to leave the housekeeping chores to the hired help. And the longer she knew her, the more she considered Theodora Figg hired help. Certainly she was hired, though her help, as the trip progressed, was to
become more and more in question. Allison had no idea of the amount paid for her services, but knowing Theodora a little and having noted her father’s fatuous reaction to her charms, she was sure he had opened his purse generously, perhaps lavishly.

When the steamer trunk had been fitted snugly into its allotted place, Allison escaped the small compartment, leaving Theodora frowning over arrangements, and made for the deck. Though there were busy goings-to-and-fro behind her, the rail was comparatively empty of people. No doubt other passengers aside from herself had made an attempt to peer through the drifting fog bank, found it hopeless, despaired of waving farewell to family and friends on shore, and abandoned the idea in favor of warmer quarters.

It was April at its worst; the fog hung heavy and gray, curling about the small, distant figures on the wharf until they seemed disembodied, unreal, nothing but voiceless actors in a pantomime. Occasionally a shouted word emerged from the gray, shifting curtain; occasionally an unseen boat sounded a warning out of the murky shroud. Waves lapped dismally against the side of the ship; debris slapped against the hull, resembling soiled and tattered petticoats hemming a billowing skirt.

Allison drew her shawl around her shoulders and leaned against the rail, searching, in spite of herself, for some familiar form on the dock. There was none; the family coach was long gone. Jenks had held the horses steady while Buckle assisted Allison and Mrs. Buckle from the coach, and while Mrs. Buckle walked to the designated area and met Miss Figg, Buckle had unloaded the steamer trunk. If the housekeeper had expected Allison to follow her, she was mistaken and no doubt chagrined, when she looked back, to find Allison waiting by the coach. Frowning, Mrs. Buckle led Theodora Figg, into whose hands she was placing her charge, back to the coach. Although Allison couldn’t read the expression on the chaperone’s face, she had a feeling her reaction was much the same as Mrs. Buckle’s—annoyance.

If either woman had expected a meek and sorry girl, humbled by the situation, they were in for a surprise. Allison, more the lady than at any time in her hoydenish life, nodded to Theodora, bade Mrs. Buckle a brief good-bye, managed a smile for the gloomy Jenks, and walked toward the tender that would take her out to the ship. Theodora Figg, with a startled look on her face—after all, she was supposed to be the one in charge—hastened to keep up.

Allison’s one glimpse back had been a revelation. Buckle, having seen to the disposition of the baggage, turned toward her and gave her what appeared to be a brief, crisp salute. Then, stepping up into the coach beside his wife, he shut the door, leaving Allison with the curious sensation of having received an ovation. But why would Buckle, the quintessential servant, applaud her escape to freedom? Allison would always suspect that, at the last moment, he had given her a glimpse of his dissatisfaction with his own status, before, wordless, he turned sternly back to it. Jenks clucked to the horses, and the conveyance lumbered off, out of Allison’s life as quickly as it dropped out of sight.

Not even a memory lingered on the dock.

Every tie was broken, every contact gone. A bell tolled somewhere, a knell that spoke of loneliness and dreariness. Standing on the ship, separated from the shores of England and home, with everything familiar swallowed up in the fog as though it had never been, Allison bowed her head on the railing and struggled with her emotions.

Could such a journey—so coldly begun, so blindly, so futile as to purpose—end happily?

Allison was jarred from her reverie when an elbow bumped hers, someone pressed to the rail at her side, and a voice said hollowly, “It’s impossible to locate anyone in this weather.”

Turning, she saw a young woman not much older than herself. The newcomer’s attention was fixed on the shore, her eyes searching, searching. Like Allison she had a shawl—not as lavish or as lovely as her own—clutched around her shoulders and pulled casually over her head. Even so, Allison could see that the face was slender, the eyes deep set, shadowed with sadness at the moment, wet with a dampness that was not of the fog.

“Yes,” Allison agreed, and she never understood why she added, “but I’m not looking for anyone, so it doesn’t matter, I guess.”

“Well, then,” the stranger said, still straining to see, “you said your good-byes earlier, at home. But my family, God bless ’em, insisted on being here to see me off. And now I can’t see ’em!”

“That’s too bad,” Allison said with sincerity.

“I give up,” the young woman said at last, with a sigh. “Obviously they’ve given up too and are gone. I suppose,” she said thoughtfully, “the sensible thing now is to do what Paul did—”

“Paul?” Allison prompted when the stranger paused as though hesitant to say more.

“The apostle Paul. He said something about forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before.”

Another Sarah!

“And did you,” Allison asked, “have a governess, as I did, who meted out Scripture quotations as a means of discipline or for practice in recitation?”

“No, indeed,” the young woman said with a small laugh. “There was no governess in my life, I assure you. No, I learned that verse and others because I needed them.”

Needed them? Allison didn’t ask for an explanation.

It was too absurd, really, having a conversation at the railing of a ship, with a stranger, about—of all things—Scripture. Perhaps, in a normal moment, it would not have happened, but on this day it was just one more unreal experience.