Everfair (3 page)

“Rubber,” Wilson pronounced, in accents usually reserved for the vilest of epithets. “Raw rubber, a substance bidding fair to replace ivory as the Dark Continent's most profitable export.” He lifted from the basket a single, uneven ball of the stuff and held it up as a Hamlet might hold his Yorick's skull. “A substance noteworthy for its strength, flexibility, and capacity to shed water. Vital to the production of tires for automobiles, bicycles, omnibuses—modes of transport to which I, and many of you also, owe
our presence here tonight
.” Sounding now as if he choked on his barely contained fury, Wilson managed to continue. “Also used in waterproofing
boots
and
mackintoshes
”—here Jackie felt himself flush with guilt—“rubber is harvested in the wild at great effort. A basketful such as I here display for your edification is the result of many days of grueling and dangerous work performed by dozens of desperate men. Desperate, desperate men, driven by such inducements as I have already outlined for you. And if”—Wilson turned now to gaze upon his audience, offering them the grey lump on his open, outstretched palm—“if they fail, then God above must help them, He must show them mercy, for no man on Earth will do so. For the wives are
killed
—
strangled,
generally, as bullets are too dear to spend on such a task. And the empty baskets are then
filled,
filled to overflowing with their husbands'
severed hands
!”

Now the conflagration. Now the fires of outrage burnt freely as the audience rose to its feet, crying aloud for justice. Jackie stood with them. Marvelous! To be part of such a mob, to feel its unstoppable power for
good
. It must be for good …

But the fire Wilson had lit did not burn entirely beyond his control. When the crowd's bellows had crested, the dark figure on the stage lifted its arms as if supplicating Heaven. Quiet fell.

“I hear you,” the speaker declared. “I hear your words clearly; you say with our Lord, ‘As you have done unto the least of these, so have you done unto me.'”

Jackie would not have put it that way, but a chorus of “Aye”s and “Hear! hear!”s came in response. “How, then,” Wilson asked, “shall we right this wrong?”

The reverend lieutenant explained his program and the fire flickered, died to embers. Letter-writing and petitions to Parliament was what he asked of them. A movement along the lines of Abolitionism. Which had been well and good in its time.

But Jackie had a better idea.

 

Brussels, Belgium, August 1891

Did she, Lisette Toutournier, actually love this man Laurie Albin? Or was it merely that she so hated this city that she welcomed the excuse his company gave her to leave it?

Under the hood of the barouche she regarded her newfound lover critically. Despite his blond hair Laurie was fully fourteen years her senior. Not that thirty-two was
old,
exactly … And his moustaches, so foolish! The ends turned up wildly, without gathering themselves into points first, like toothbrushes found at a sudden disadvantage. Now his hot, damp hand clasped hers in the darkness afforded by their conveyance. Hot, and eager, whatever conventional wisdom might say about the English.

“Having second thoughts?” His breath tickled her ear and she drew away.

“No,” she answered, and that was not at all a lie. First thoughts, one ought to call them, for her decision to elope had had naught to do with thinking. Even now the caress of his soft fingers upon her naked neck brought with it an unwanted shiver of sensual delight. Oh, why had no one warned her?

The carriage wheels slowed. Lisette leaned forward and saw that they had reached the Gare du Nord. At last. She gathered her two meager boxes and let the coachman help her to the pavement, let Laurie pay his hire. They passed beneath one of several tall arches. Lisette loitered as obscurely as she might, her head down, facing a long and boring wall of polished marble while Laurie hurried to purchase their tickets. But here they confronted an obstacle: the train was delayed in its arrival. Laurie explained the problem in French rendered less intelligible even than usual by his nervousness: There would be a wait of nineteen minutes, no more, till they could board and leave this detestable town. He was taking her away with him, to England, to Kent, to a countryside far removed.

Lisette seated herself on the hard bench Laurie had selected for them, removed from the majority of other passengers. Nineteen minutes. Not enough time for her two uncles to find and rescue her from this rash venture. Enough time, however, for her to regret it.

Her lover was a married man. Had he admitted as much to her? No! And yet, inexperienced though she was, Lisette had a presentiment that this was so, despite his promises to take her to his home. How not? A gentleman; pleasant to look at, if she were to be honest; well-off enough that work had never marred his hands, softer than her mother's; with an affable and easy air that sought to ingratiate itself to women—and very nearly always succeeded.

She remembered the first time she had seen him, her Laurie, hovering at the front door of the journal's offices. Smiling and removing his so obviously English hat as she produced the key to unlock it, thanking her politely as she held it open but insisting that she proceed him. And then, realizing that they two were alone in the dusty, disordered offices, he
blushed
! His vulnerability had pierced her to her heart.

But what had absolutely won her was the honor he paid her by posing to her the questions he had come to investigate for essays he would write to appear in the newsletter of his Fabian Society: matters of state, international treaties, conventions and accords between the governments of Europe concerning the wealth of Africa—he had refrained from assuming her to be unimportant, setting aside her youth, her femininity—or so she had believed at the time.

So she had believed. But see him now, possessive, as passionate as one could show oneself in public. See with what difficulty he restrained himself from stroking her wrist as it lay beside him on the bench's arm.

No one else had taken her seriously. It was because of this that she had fallen for her lover's pretense of doing so.

On the breakup of her home, a dissolution her parents had seen fit to protect her from till the last possible minute, till the day the house and its contents were advertised as going on auction, there was the question of how to dispose of Lisette. A question she had no part in deciding, for her wishes had been consulted in nothing—nothing! They had even sold her beloved bicycle …

Her mother and Captain Toutournier, her father, were to be taken under the wing of her half-brother, Hermes. They and Lisette's older brother Jules resided now with Hermes and his wife in a village not far from where the family once had lived so happily.

Hermes was a doctor with a flourishing practice. Jules studied to become a chemist, so that was all right. But Lisette—who had attended Hermes on his rounds when he was just starting out!—should not be tempted to pursue such an unladylike career. A teacher, or better yet a housewife, that was what Lisette was meant to be, naturally … It was with great reluctance her family allowed itself to be persuaded of the suitability of sending her here, to stay with her maternal uncles, both journalists.

Yes, Lisette had begged, had cried and pleaded to come here, to this sty of a city! With its unlucky river penned beneath heavy cobblestones and fed unending streams of muck, Brussels had a sewer for its heart. And all
les Bruxellois
were pigs, and glad to feed from that trough.

But not she.

All this while Lisette's feet were throbbing. Out of sight, on the platforms to the station's rear, trains came and went. She felt their rhythms through her bootsoles, heard the hiss and thunder of their arrival above the din of her thoughts. Then it was time, and as in a trance she rose, Laurie linking his arm in hers and guiding her forward. A maze of tracks opened beyond a glassed partition. Engines of might! To left, to right—on all sides of her they gathered, but Laurie knew where to walk between their steel shoulders.

Then an empty stretch and she saw a ways ahead to where one locomotive waited alone, steam wrapping him like a cape. A tall stack rose from his round black tank, a lantern blazing at the base like a jewel on a turban. A magician who would whisk them away from this ugliness, who would carry them on his broad, strong back to the land's end, to the very edge of this continent.

And then they would sail beyond, to England.

They were seated. Lisette's confusion dissipated and she realized that Laurie had paid for the accommodation of a sleeping coach. Touched, she smiled at him—but quickly understood that this was likely done for his own convenience.

Soon her understanding was confirmed. In the middle of the afternoon. Eager, yes, her Laurie; barely had they left Brussels before he importuned her to “take a little rest.” On thin white sheets Lisette lost the last vestige of her girlhood. Then it was her lover who needed “a little rest.” Lying awake in the last light stealing by the tops and bottoms of the blinds, she found comfort in the rocking motion of the train's carriage, so regular, and the lilting undersong of its wheels.

 

Kent, England, February 1893

Daisy Albin didn't object to Lisette Toutournier. To the contrary. It was Ellen who had sulked on her arrival and who still, almost two years later, seemed to chafe at the situation. Ironic, as Ellen was
not
dear Laurie's
legal
wife, as Daisy was.

But they all contrived to rub along together. Even in early February, with the days so brief and cold and wet, the nights so ridiculously lengthy. With the new, larger house nonetheless rather small for four adults and an equal number of children. Really, it was a blessing that Laurie had taken Ellen with him on this latest business trip, though it saddened little Lisette.

Daisy wrote the end of the last line and allowed herself a glance up from the verse-covered pages on her desk blotter. With a shock she saw that the dark had advanced enough to turn the window to a looking glass. Her lamp glowed bravely against the blackness. Her hair blent with it, framing her face in short curls that melted without fuss into the air. Her long nose, which she described to others as making her look like “a particularly sagacious sheepdog,” was in good evidence.

But where were the children? It must be almost half five. Still out-of-doors with their
tante
Lisette?

As if she had wished upon a talisman for their presence she heard them come in by the side entrance: the clump of boots, the piping soprano of little Laurie Junior, Georgie's voice awkwardly seesawing, laughter rising from Lily and Rosalie. Lisette shushed them with reminders that “Mama wrote herself”—the dear girl's grasp of English had grown steadily, but it slipped when she became excited.

There was nothing more Daisy truly needed to accomplish here. She left her desk and opened her study's door, calling out, “Darlings! Is it time for tea already?”

“Mama!” The four children climbed the stairs as she descended and they met halfway in a joyous tangle. Daisy loved them all, the two youngest Ellen had borne just as well as their older siblings.

Lisette stood on the bottom step, having entrusted their wraps to one of the housemaids, probably Harriet, since this would be Thursday, Mary's afternoon off. “In the playroom, ch
é
rie?” Daisy half-asked, half-invited.

Those disconcertingly wide grey eyes smiled. “But of course,” said Lisette, continuing up the stairs and catching Daisy by the hand. She laced their fingers and lifted their arms ceilingward. They danced a mock-solemn figure in the children's wake, curtseying to one another on the braided rag rug where they ended. It would puzzle anyone watching, Daisy knew, her evident pleasure in the company of a girl most would call her rival. So beautiful, and so young: a few weeks ago, in January, Lisette had turned a mere twenty years old.

While they arranged the children's blue-enameled chairs around the big circular table, Daisy heard the tale of the afternoon's walk: hare tracks sighted in the snow that yet remained along one stretch of privet; an owl spotted in the spinney behind the abandoned henhouse; a small pile of apples that must have fallen from a cart on its way to the cider mill and that “very well might still be good to eat!” as Rosalie pronounced with a six-year-old's optimism. The apples in question, produced from pockets and pinafores, looked and smelt as if they had started to ferment.

Nurse and Harriet entered then with milky tea and trays of sliced ginger cake and bread-and-butter. For a while Daisy was too busy pouring and serving to worry about the apples. As the hungry explorers feasted, Lisette lobbied for the apples to be “put out for the deer,” a proposal attracting far more favor than would have attached to Daisy's first impulse of pitching them in the rubbish.

After assisting Nurse in preparing the children for bed, Daisy and Lisette returned to the playroom rather than waste the fire still burning there. Blessing the day she had stopped wearing her corsets, Daisy knelt on the hearth as easily as if she were her own daughter.

Lisette pulled a low stool up beside her. “When will they return?” She spoke French. Daisy and Lisette often did when alone together.

She sighed. “No word. What have you—”

“Me? I have heard nothing, ch
é
rie. He does not write.” The firelight showed Lisette's touchingly stoic face.

“You would have liked to go?” Laurie had of course taken Ellen with him on this trip, because she was his secretary, as he was the Fabian Society's. That was why.

“To London?” Lisette shrugged. “Perhaps. It has been a few months since my last visit. There may be new things to see … But, no. It is better here. With you.” One of her surprisingly large hands rested softly on Daisy's cropped curls. Her hair stirred gently. So gently. As if touched by the lightest breeze.