Back Roads to Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #6): A Novel (24 page)

“Well, old girl,” Binky said, “it sounds like a good thing to me; not bad by any means. I believe I’d thank my lucky stars, if I were you. You’ll be much happier without Theodora the Dragon draggin’ around your neck.”

“But, Binky,” Allison said, and her desperation threatened to surface again, “she’s got all my money!”

“Your money?” Binky was taken aback this time. “She’s got your money?” This was a tragedy of major proportions. How could one manage without money? How could one survive? And how could one possibly be jolly, when even with plenty of change in one’s pocket, jollity had to be worked at, at times?

“My . . . my remittance money,” Allison muttered, never having made the confession, the explanation, before.

Her companion’s thought processes showed quite clearly as his usually genial face slowly changed, from the approval he was feeling, to thoughtfulness, to understanding, and back to approval.

Binky Wallingford, family scamp that he was and sent away because of it, understood Allison’s situation perfectly after just
a few moments of groping through her words. His surprise that this adorable acquaintance could possibly be a troublemaker slowed him down a bit in grasping the true state of affairs. But the light dawned, and Binky felt he was face-to-face with a kindred spirit.

Because of Binky’s own escapades and his inability to pass even one of the exams for which he sat, his father had shipped him off, a scapegrace. He had quickly fallen in with other young men in the same category, remittance men one and all; they understood each other, they had a certain camaraderie. Yes, he caught on to Allison’s brief explanation quickly, without the need for her to say more. Perhaps a lot of things fell in place for him at that time—why a young woman, gently raised, of obvious good breeding, would be sent off to Canada, and with someone who seemed, to Binky’s critical eye, entirely inappropriate. Yes, Binky grasped Allison’s halting explanation.

Miss Middleton—Allison—was one of them!

“By Jove,” he said admiringly, “who’d have thought it. A remittance, er, person.”

“It . . . it wasn’t all that bad, what I did,” Allison defended, but she was not a bit sure she convinced the captivated Binky.

“That’s what we all think,” he assured her and was no comfort at all. “Well, welcome to the club! Now then,” he said, getting serious, or as serious as Binky Wallingford ever allowed himself to get, “this Figg individual has all the money, you say? How did that happen?”

“I’m not quite eighteen,” Allison admitted, “though I will be in a couple of weeks, and my father considers me ineffective, silly, ignorant, and helpless, I suppose. Theodora Figg carried everything—the funds to get by on until contact with home could be resumed, the letters of credit, the address of the person I’m going to live with in Toronto—”

“Person?” Binky asked, puzzled.

“A lady—”

Not certain whether or not the “person” was a lady or another such as Theodora Figg, Allison corrected her description: “A woman. A woman I’ve never met.”

Binky whistled. “You don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know the person you’ll be living with, and you have no money. Adzooks!”

“Actually,” she continued with as much dignity as she could muster, “I have some money. I can certainly get myself to Toronto.

“But when I get there—how will I locate this person, this Maybelle Dickey? Theodora has all the correspondence, all the instructions. And did Maybelle Dickey get my father’s letter? You see, he didn’t wait long enough to get an answer back.”

“An unknown destination in an unfamiliar city.” Binky was shaking his head at the thought, and the problems conjured up. “And a stranger to meet you.”

“She’s a relative of a relative, I suppose you’d say,” Allison explained and felt no better for it.

“What a confounded position to be in!” Binky said sympathetically. Then, brightening, he added, “I say! Why don’t you come with us? With me and the other chaps to British Columbia? We’ll just zip—well, probably not zip—trundle by train on through the prairies and the mountains and the backwoods until we reach civilization and our own kind again.”

“It seems quite civilized here,” Allison interjected. “At least they’ve come a long, long way. And I quite like the freshness of the place, the newness.”

What she called fresh and new, others would think of as dust and dirt, raw and makeshift. The finished and the unfinished produced a mix that the land had yet to adjust to, as well as the people involved, for they, too, often seemed raw and crude. Having come a little way, there was much to do, a distance to go.

“Here in eastern Canada,” Binky explained, “or so the guidebooks say, it’s all been tamed into farmlands. Very pastoral, really. Terribly bucolic, if you like that sort of thing. And it’s
tamed so much that there’s small opportunity for adventure, or for business opportunities for that matter, which some chaps need if they mean to survive. So you see, most remittance men head directly to the Canadian West.”

There it was again—the lure of the West. Even social outcasts found it irresistible, loading steamer trunks and boxes of supplies onto the Canadian Pacific Railway as soon as they were unloaded from the ship and rolling westward.

“On the other side of the continent, in British Columbia,” Binky continued, “remittance men are able to live in communities already established by British people. It’ll be like home—tea in the afternoon; games of squash; congenial interaction with people who speak and understand our language.” All of them had commented on the hodgepodge of languages swirling like chaff through the immigrants.

So that’s what Binky had meant by “our own kind,” Allison thought. He’d come all this way simply to settle into another British environment.

“I’m surprised you haven’t heard of them,” Binky said blithely. “Windermere in East Kootenay, Nelson in West Kootenay. Isn’t that name just a scream? Kootenay!”

“I find it rather . . . appealing,” Allison murmured, while Binky talked on.

“We know about these communities, you understand, because they are touted all over Britain. Beautiful places, we are told, paradises where British people can live the lifestyle to which they are accustomed, the aristocratic way of life, so to speak.”

Something in Allison rebelled. Something in her resisted the very thought of recreating the lifestyle to which she had been accustomed. She might as well have remained in England! In the Kootenay communities she would find the same stifling Victorian conformities she had struggled against back home, and they had no appeal for her.

With glad cries of welcome, Freddy and Gilly fell upon them, and when told by Binky of Allison’s difficulties,
repeated his invitation to join them until Allison was bombarded by goodwill and the generous offer of comradeship.

“Wait, wait!” she managed, laughing in spite of herself. “Give me time to think.”

With the three young men posed around her, Allison gave serious thought to the situation. After a few minutes Binky took out his pocket watch, looked at it, and said, “Well? What have you decided?”

Not one whit less confused than she had been, Allison could only sigh and throw up her hands. “I don’t know what to do,” she admitted.

“Choose one of the British communities,” the fellows at her side encouraged. “You’ll be welcomed and made to feel at home.”

“And you’ll be chaperoned by us—at your service!” Three well-groomed heads bowed gracefully.

But did she want to feel “at home”? And wouldn’t thoughtfulness dictate that she not move on without at least contacting Maybelle Dickey? To leave her in the lurch without explanation would be as bad as what Theodora had done.

“I need to get myself to Toronto first of all,” she decided. “This Maybelle Dickey may be the answer to everything.”

Binky and company had to be satisfied with that, though they sighed and shook their heads, expressing their disapproval and disappointment. A remittance person, be it man or woman, could still command a good life if proper plans were laid. For once in their short lives they were in a place to make their own decisions, and unanimously, it was to go on to Kootenay’s British communities.

Shrugging, they made preparations to board the train; there would be no dawdling in Quebec City. They hastened to leave the unknown for the known, the unfamiliar for the familiar. Prepared for adventure, they settled for routine.

Allison was astonished at the amount of luggage Binky and his friends had brought with them.

“We have to be prepared for every contingency,” they explained solemnly, checking on the stack awaiting loading. Allison could see tennis rackets, cricket bats, fishing rods, guns, boxes of games, a chest of medical supplies, an easel and paint boxes, a croquet set, a couple of musical instruments—a violin and tuba—and, pointed out with pride by Freddy, a full tea service of fine china and silver.

In their trunks, they reported, was a veritable repertoire of outfits. First of all, of course, was the formal dinner wear, a necessity wherever one went. Then the supply included polo uniforms, croquet party clothing, hunting wear, and even, in Freddy’s case, a cowboy costume.

It made Allison’s own steamer trunk seem pathetically inadequate to face whatever this land might offer or threaten.

Thus it was that eventually Allison, Binky, Freddy, and Gilly, plus additional “boys” of the remittance variety, found themselves gazing out the windows of a passenger coach chugging relentlessly out of Quebec City and headed west.

Allison had allowed herself to be talked into first-class accommodations, though she flinched at the inroads on her funds. She hoped that Maybelle Dickey would be well fixed, able to extend the financial help she would need until she could write her father, explain the situation, and receive a remittance from home.

The day offered the usual round of drinks, much laughter and good-natured chaffing, an occasional stroll through lounges, corridors, and stately dining rooms set with flowers and crystal and attended by thoughtful stewards. Just a car or two away, second-class passengers, bunched together like a hive of bees, made tea and cooked sausages on the communal stove, changed wet and smelly nappies, consoled their sick and elderly, and did it all with a conglomeration of languages that fell on the ear of the listener like water over Niagara.

But in first-class, civility reigned. Cocooned in the familiar, perhaps they shrank from the reality of what they were facing and the road to reach it.

Talking, strolling, eating, and drinking, their attention was rarely given to the countryside. One young man, glancing out, said uneasily, “I say, it’s deucedly overrun with trees!”

Allison, more attentive, was stirred and awed by what she saw. Trees were everywhere, as far as the eye could see, the greenery laced with silver birches and all untouched by the woodcutter’s axe. She lost count of the lakes, some of them still frozen, dotted with islands. Silently, overhead, passed great phalanxes of geese, drawn by some inner compulsion to the untouched waters of the north. Miles and hours passed without sign of houses or people. They stopped occasionally but saw no stations.

The train was a small caterpillar creeping its way through a vast primeval forest.

P
ale in spite of the summer sun’s relentless battering, shaking in spite of good strong muscles developed from the homestead’s unending workload, Blystone Condon took his place behind the “sacred desk,” knowing it was simply hand-hewn black poplar and he the frailest of clay.

It was his Sunday to fill the pulpit.

In spite of earnest, even desperate, prayer, the interim preacher had not made his appearance between last Sunday and this one, Bly Condon’s appointed day to bring the message.

As full of words as a cloud is of rain when face-to-face personally with any one of the people seated before him, it was another thing to see them in a group, dressed in their Sunday best, their eyes turned on him expectantly. The sight caused Bly’s sturdy knees to knock and his mouth to go dry.

Knowing he was sure to blunder badly, Bly wished he hadn’t been so critical last Sunday of Brother Dinwoody’s sermon, poor as it was. And Brother Dinwoody, in his corner, could
be excused if he had a rather defensive look on his face that seemed to say, “All right, Mister, let’s see how well
you
do.”

Angus Morrison had opened the service; the singing had been spirited, the prayer satisfactory. The offering plates had been passed—all blurred insofar as Bly Condon was concerned. With his Bible clutched between his knees, he had been engaged in one final, desperate prayer, and it wasn’t for words of wisdom and grace, for power to preach the Word unflinchingly, or for high and lofty thoughts to share. It was for deliverance, for some miracle that would keep him from the pulpit.

But God, Bly recalled, had not delivered the beleaguered Daniel from the lions’ den; he had chosen, rather, to bring him through the ordeal. This truth should have been encouraging, could have seen him through. But Bly, certainly no Daniel, pled for deliverance, for bodily translation to some distant place far from the congregation gathered to hear him preach.