Double Spell (13 page)

She laughed at the idea of farmers (although the twins had noticed she was always out and about when Halpern, the hired man, was anywhere in sight).

She liked to poke around and try on Mama’s best finery too, but most of all Hester delighted in causing trouble for the twins. Mama said they had to be kind because she was their cousin. It was Anne’s nature to be kind to people but she found it exceedingly difficult to be kind to Hester. She was finding it difficult now. Lissa had run off when she’d spied Hester arriving, and Anne had been doing her best to be kind and entertaining for over an hour – and it was so unbearably hot. She had listened to Hester talk about her new frock and her four fine muslin petticoats, a new shop
on King Street that sold French bonnets, how elegant the Lieutenant-Governor’s lady was, and other bits of what Anne considered useless conversation.

Bored, and sensing Anne was not as impressed as she thought she should be, Hester wanted to seek out Melissa. Melissa was more interested in gowns and bonnets and would be more easily impressed.

“Where is she anyhow?” demanded Hester. “Why must she be gone so long?”

Anne murmured something about Mrs. Henderson up the road, eggs, back soon, hoping Hester would be satisfied.

“It’s getting dark,” she said, hoping to change the subject. “Perhaps we’ll have rain. Why don’t we go downstairs and help with tea.”

“Don’t be such a goody, always wanting to be mama’s helper. Be glad to get out of a job for once. You’ll be a perfect farmer’s wife, Anne, I declare you will.”

“I like farmers,” Anne said good naturedly. “Come, let’s go downstairs. It’s so hot.”

“I’ll not go looking for work. Why seek work, it finds you fast enough. But go if you like, I’m going to stay here.”

Anne sighed and pushed the hot, heavy hair back from her face. She knew she had to stay with Hester. She wished Melissa would come out of hiding.

As if Hester could read Anne’s mind, she said, “I’m going to hide Lissa’s doll. Serve her right for not being here. Silly dolls anyway. Mama says I’m too old for dolls. You should be too. Let’s just hide it.”

Hester would, too. Anne knew she would, and cross though she herself was at Melissa’s absence, she couldn’t be so unkind. Mama had saved them the scraps from their new blue dresses and Lissa was planning an entire costume for Amelia. She knew how wild she would be if the doll were missing.

“Where is it?” asked Hester.

“Oh, Hester,” said Anne, exasperated at last, “don’t be so … so …”

“So what, Mistress Goody Two Shoes?” Hester struck a light in the now almost totally dark room and held it to the candle. The look on her usually sullen face was mocking. Something about it made Anne shiver.

“Anyway,” Anne brightened, “if Lissa can’t find her doll, she’ll just use mine. So it’s no use hiding hers.”

Hester’s face changed, grew, if possible, more unpleasant.

“I’ll just take yours, then, too.” She started toward the bed where Anne’s little wooden doll was propped primly on the bolster.

“You with your twin dolls. You think you’re so perfect, you two, with never any thought for anyone besides yourself. When I come here, and mercy knows I don’t want to come, one of you runs off and the other makes pretend to be my friend. But I know how you feel. You don’t like me because I’m not like you, all in love with a stupid farm or still playing with those hateful dolls. You don’t need anyone else, you two,
you two
,” she spat out those last
words as though they were sour apples. The mockery was gone from her face. It was a face twisted with envy and hatred. The candle held stiffly in front of her, its flicker highlighting her face, Hester looked a creature of true evil. She started toward Anne.

Anne screamed. Outside it thundered, there was a white flash of lightning.

It was now that Elizabeth began pounding and shouting at the attic door from the other side. “Janie, Janie let me in! Please let me in! It’s Hester in there, let me in!”

Jane’s memory buried beneath the force of Anne’s, began to work. But it was still Anne who cried out passionately, “Don’t hate us, Hester. Why do you hate us so? We don’t hate you. Honestly we don’t. We can’t help being two people, that’s the way we were born.”

“Yes you do, you two, always two of you, hating me, laughing behind my back, making up stories about me.” Hester’s face lost its look of evil and crumpled up in misery. The candle wavered in her hand. Outside the rain began to fall in sheets. Anne walked toward her, to comfort her unhappy cousin.

“Oh, Hester, we can’t help the way we are. You see, we sort of come in two halves. You have to have us both for friends because we’re like that. Please, Hester, don’t cry so.” Just as Anne stretched out her arms toward the sobbing Hester, Hester, consumed by her own woe, forgot she was holding the candle and let it slip.

Outside the door, her calls getting no answer, Elizabeth lost her temper. “Hester,” she bellowed, “What are you
doing? Come out of there. You leave my sister alone. What do you mean haunting us anyhow?” She kicked the door violently with her foot.

Where her anguished pleas had failed, Elizabeth’s shouting succeeded. Jane heard. She remembered who she was – but Anne’s memory went on relentlessly reliving what had happened in that room: remembering the lighted candle falling from Hester’s shaking hand, remembering the sight of her own blue dress suddenly a burst of orange flame, remembering Hester running from the room. Suffocating with terror she was being inched toward the window. It was as though she was under a spell driving her back toward the low sill. She couldn’t help herself. Desperately she wanted to escape the memory of those flames. She had to reach the door, to find Elizabeth. Jane began to fight. With all her will, a thousand times stronger than she had fought that other time in the attic room, Jane struggled against remembering the rest.

“Hester,” yelled Elizabeth, pounding on the door. “Hester, give up. It’s our turn for this house. You give it up. You’re nothing anyhow! You’re absolutely nothing! You’re just a poltergeist, a poltergeist,” she screamed, “a poltergeist!”

Jane, inches from the window sill, came back 180 years to the abandoned attic that had once been a bright flower-painted bedroom for those other twins. And, with the complete return of her own memory, the door swung open. Elizabeth stopped shouting.

Outside, the rain was pouring steadily down. Shaking and chill, Jane knew she was not finished. She spoke carefully into the blackness where Hester had stood.

“We don’t hate you, Hester,” she said. “They didn’t hate you either, but I don’t suppose,” she added honestly, “they loved you either because, you know, you weren’t very nice to them. But they didn’t leave you out of things on purpose. We wouldn’t either. It’s just … it was just there are two of us … were two of them,” she stopped, confused, “two of all of us, I guess. Anne said it, too, we come in two halves. We don’t always like it either.” Jane couldn’t see but she felt tears of misery running down Hester’s face.

“You can’t help it, couldn’t,” she amended, “being the way you were,” Jane sighed, “and we can’t help being the way we are and if we’re more the same than most people we can’t help that either.” She stopped, not knowing what to say next. Suddenly she remembered Joe and his silly story about ghosts haunting until they’re forgiven.

“It was an accident,” she said softly. “You didn’t mean to set the fire. I know you didn’t. It wasn’t your fault. You shouldn’t have run away,” she scolded gently as though she were talking to a baby. “I guess you’ve been well and truly punished for that, though.”

Elizabeth came slowly across the room to stand beside Jane. She was still clutching Great Uncle William’s book she had absentmindedly picked up in the garden. “And if she hated you all her life after that,” Elizabeth explained,
as patiently and gently as Jane had done, and Jane knew, by “her,” Elizabeth meant Melissa, “she couldn’t help it. She shouldn’t have been so mean, but Anne was her twin and she couldn’t help it. She just couldn’t.” There were tears in Elizabeth’s eyes now, too, and tears trickling down her cheeks.

Jane spoke again. “You were scared, I know that, but you didn’t mean to do that awful thing. Please. You can go away now. It was an accident, Hester. I promise you it was an accident.”

She paused for a moment, listening, waiting. Then she said, “Where did you put it, Hester?” and waited again. “After the accident, I mean,” she prompted and although Hester said not a word, in a moment Jane went over to the edge of the room where the sloping roof made a deep triangle with the floor. She felt with her hand way into its corner. There was a hole just there in the floor and under it her hand felt a space and came upon the thing she was looking for. She brought it out and took it over to the window.

Dusty, faded, very dirty, its clothes almost completely eaten away by moths, the little wooden doll was in every way identical to the one Elizabeth still held tightly in her hand.

Together they turned and faced Hester’s corner. Jane spoke. “If you were mean and hateful at all, Hester, it was a long time ago now and it’s all been made right. I’m sure it has.”

“You can rest now,” said Elizabeth.

There was silence in the attic. The rain was falling softly and steadily outside. Horse was waiting by the attic door and, closing it carefully behind them, the twins went with him down the stairs.

I
n the end, it was Aunt Alice who helped the twins sort out the bits and pieces of Anne and Melissa’s story – not the story, they already knew that – but the things that came later, and it took over a month to do it.

They went to her, even though they knew she didn’t believe in ghosts, because they thought she might be able to tell them things about the family.

But Aunt Alice, as she always did, surprised them. She listened closely to their story, raising and lowering her eyebrows a few times, tapping her fingers against the window sill she sat by, and when they were finished she said, “Humph,” and sent Miss Weller to get the old family Bible from the bookshelf.

There they were: Anne and Melissa Sabiston, born January 12, 1825, to William and Phoebe Sabiston, in Raggs Hollow, Yorkshire, England. There were others too,
born to William and Phoebe: a son William, born March 2, 1818 and Patrick, born April 4, 1830.

Anne’s death was entered in the Bible July 22, 1838 (the reading of which caused Aunt Alice to say, “Humph,” again). Melissa wasn’t in the Bible any more – but Hester was: Hester Armitage, born May 21, 1823, died June 4, 1895, and a brother, William Armitage, born June 3, 1832.

“Why,” said Aunt Alice in surprise, “that was old Aunt Hissy! Died when I was five years old.” She put down the book and sat, looking out the window.

“Nobody liked her, remember that, though I don’t remember her much myself – always smelled of lavender, still can’t stand that smell – always black dresses. She was an old maid like me.”

“Oh Aunt Alice, not like you,” Jane said vehemently.

“Well, she never married. Ruled our house like an old witch woman. Lived in that room we used afterward for an attic. Never liked it there, always thought she’d left bits of herself behind – or the memory of them.”

Aunt Alice looked thoughtfully at the two girls sitting on the floor by her chair. “Humph,” she said once more.

“How did that room ever get to be Hester’s in the first place, I want to know,” asked Jane.

“Well, I suppose,” said Aunt Alice, frowning, “the house simply belonged to her.”

“But it didn’t,” Elizabeth jumped up. “It wasn’t her house. It was Anne’s and Melissa’s. She just came to visit, remember?” she turned to Jane.

“Yes,” said Jane, “and besides, if it was her house why did she only live in the attic?”

“Don’t know,” answered Aunt Alice. “You know, you’ve got me curious, stirred my old memories all up, bottom ones all bubbling up to the top. Remember old Aunt Hissy, now, sitting there like an old broody hen – horrible old woman. Children,” she snapped shut the big Bible decisively, “if we want to know things you’ll have to be my legs.”

For the next week or so Aunt Alice sent Jane and Elizabeth to the church her father’s family had always gone to, to the City Hall, to the Ontario archives where old records are kept, and, on a hunch of Elizabeth’s, to the sailing records of ships that sailed out of Toronto in the year 1838.

Among the old church records they found the marriage recorded of Melissa Jane Howarth to William Armitage, October 1, 1870. They couldn’t decide who these two people were because they knew their Melissa’s name was Sabiston, although they thought William Armitage might have been Hester’s brother. The next recording was that these two people had a son, William, born on July 8, 1872.

Jane was delighted to find him there, “I guess that’s the William who wrote the book.” The records went on to tell that William Armitage married Margaret MacGregor and that they had children named Alice, Arthur, Patrick and twins, Julia and Jane.

“Why,” said Elizabeth, “that’s Aunt Alice and old
Uncle Arthur and Grandma and …”

“Well, then Grandma was a twin, too! I’ve never heard her say that.”

They saw why when they read that Jane’s death was recorded three years after her birth.

They were thoughtful for a minute after reading this. “I guess we’re just lucky,” said Jane quickly and read on, bringing the family up to date as far as their mother’s birth.

“We should all be in there,” Jane decided – “and in the old Bible, too,” said Elizabeth and they determined to ask if they could be put in.

They had to write to the National Archives in Ottawa to find what Elizabeth wanted to know. It was not in the year 1888 where she had thought it would be, but on the
Royal Lady,
sailing from Toronto harbor, May 4, 1839, the passenger list included William and Phoebe Sabiston, their son Patrick and their daughter Melissa. “William must have been old enough to stay here,” said Jane.

“So,” said Elizabeth softly to herself, “she went away on the ship.” And she could almost remember being on the ship, clutching the little wooden doll.

The story, or at least the family history, was beginning to fill out. But before they were finished they had to wait for Aunt Alice to write and get an answer from a cousin in Yorkshire, England. The cousin, whose name was Anne (which excited the twins) wrote this: