That Forgetful Shore (14 page)

She smiles at the name, still unfamiliar to her. “I am well, Mr. Bishop. Did you have any more books come in lately?”

“In fact I've got one here tonight; I brought it up thinking I might see you, or else I might have dropped it in at your door as I passed.”

Triffie takes the book and turns it over in her hands.
Ivanhoe
. “A friend of mine in town sent out a box of the novels of Sir Walter Scott,” Mr. Bishop said. “I wonder what you think of them for the children.”

“I've only read
Waverly
– there used to be an old copy in the schoolroom, wasn't there? I think the boys would like this one, though,” Trif says, leafing through it.

“Perhaps
Rob Roy
as well?” Joe suggests.

“I'll read this one first and tell you what I think. But if I like it, some of them might hear it from me before they hear it from you in school.” She holds it up across the room for Will to see, a promise for future Sunday afternoons.

Joe Bishop laughs. “I don't mind,” he says. “You're better at reading to them than I am, and the boys are lucky to have you. Young Char has already given up on school, you know, and I don't see Will or Isaac staying at it much longer, once they've gone fishing. But having you read to them is an education in itself. I wish we could still have you back in the classroom – but married life agrees with you, for all that.”

“It might agree with you too, if you found yourself a woman,” Trif says, surprised at her own brazenness. Being a married woman has made it possible for her to talk to a man like Joe Bishop as an equal, to tease him about his still-unmarried state. The man is well into his thirties, starting to go bald on top of his high-domed forehead, and still no woman in sight. His neck and cheeks colour a little as he laughs off her comment. “Sure, who'd have me?” he asks, as Uncle Jed starts another song.

Some lucky woman
, Trif thinks, and that thought surprises her as much as her earlier bold words. She never had the schoolgirl crush on Mr. Bishop that Kit did, maybe because she never dared imagine herself growing up into a girl that a schoolteacher might court and love. And indeed, she didn't; she is a fisherman's wife, as she was always fated to be. But now that she is a wife, she allows herself a daydream of sharing a house with Joe Bishop, the both of them reading by lamplight at night, stopping to read aloud a line or two to each other, to discuss the meaning of a poem or talk about what he was teaching in his classroom.

Then she firmly lays such thoughts aside. This is not the sin of lust, exactly, but something very like it. Coveting, perhaps – not thy neighbour's husband, but a man other than her own husband.

The thoughts flit through her mind as she watches Joe Bishop's face while Jabez Badcock picks up the fiddle and plays a mournful “Barb'ry Allen.” Occasionally he interrupts his own playing to sing a verse, in his fine tenor voice that was once heard leading the hymns at the Methodist Chapel.

Young Willie died for me today,
And I'll die for him tomorrow.

The fiddle plays out its last sad notes and the singer echoes the final lines:

And the rose…grew ‘round…the briar.

In the silence following the song, Joe turns back to her. “Mrs. Russell should give us a recitation,” he suggests. When Trif shakes her head no, he says, “The best student I ever had for recitations and poems? How can you say no?” and a chorus of her neighbours' voices joins in.

It's Will's plea that finally convinces her: “Give us that Highwayman, Trif. That's some good poem, that is.”

So Trif sits up a little straighter on her chair, clears her throat and begins.
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor…

There are eyes on her: Joe Bishop's eyes, warm with pride; the eyes of Will and his friends, wide with interest. Her husband's eyes, but she cannot read his expression, and she turns away from his gaze, back to the boys.

The highwayman came riding, riding, riding,
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

Kit

Halifax, Nova Scotia
February, 1910

My dearest Posy,

I am sure that when you think of my life here in Halifax, you imagine it to be one of Great Glamour, but I can assure it is Not At All as you might picture. I say this because of my own Phantasies, before I came here, of what University life must be like, and how little that accords with
Reality
.

It is true, we do have the opportunity to study with some very Learned Professors, almost all of them Male, and it can be heady stuff to hear a college lecturer holding forth upon, let us say, Hamlet or Othello. But the reality is that it is, after all, schoolwork and more schoolwork, with higher expectations than ever I had placed on me at Spencer. This week alone I have two long Themes due, and three books to read. I find myself burning the lamp
till
 
the
 
midnight
 
hour
trying to keep up with everything, and I hope this excuses my lack of correspondence of late!

Some of these same learned men are most Condescending towards the women students, as I have discovered. The same professor who holds forth with such knowledge on the subject of Hamlet and his Fatal Indecision, has in his lecture hall some thirty-five young men, and six women. He addresses himself entirely to the men, to the extent of calling the whole class “Sirs” as he lectures – till he remembers himself, and adds with a chuckle, “oh, and ladies, of course.” He was most dismissive of Ophelia, and said that she was a person of no true Weight or Substance, nor had any real impact upon the action of the play, but that her only goal was to fall in love and seek a husband – “not unlike a modern young lady attending a University!” he added, to a chorus of great laughter all around.

Yet, much as it shames me to say it, there is some truth to his condescension. Along with some of my classmates who are, like me, quite dedicated to the Serious Business of getting an education, there is certainly a class of young women, I have discovered, whose parents can afford to send them to University simply to capture a University man as a husband. I cannot think but that there must be simpler and less expensive ways for a girl of good family to meet a man of similar background. Do these sort of people not have parties and teas and dances? Do they not go to church, or visit in one another's homes?

But no, nothing must do but that Priscilla or Annabelle must be packed off to Dalhousie with a dozen fancy gowns, and aim herself for a target among the pre-medicine or pre-law students, for nothing but a doctor or a lawyer will do – one already wealthy enough that he need not work for a living, but will take up a profession, it seems, merely to further the cause of Medicine or the Law, by his own brilliance.

Oh dear, will you read this letter and think that your darling Peony has become most Sarcastic and Cynical? Remember if you do, that these seeds were planted in me at the earliest possible age, only that there is something in the climate of Canada that brings them to Germination!!

Ever your dearest,
Peony

The time it takes to write a letter severely cuts into Kit's study time. She has cut back correspondence to only the most essential people, relegating old friends from Missing Point, newer friends in Elliston, and classmates from Spencer, to the occasional postcard. Only her mother and Triffie get proper letters anymore, and never as often as they would like. But at least the letters to Trif, unlike the carefully worded ones to her mother, are something of a release.

The only two people she feels she can be honest with are Triffie and Ben, though even there she has to be cautious. With Triffie, she doesn't want to make her life sound too interesting, lest Triffie be sunk in despair and jealousy, for even college life on its worst and most crushing days has to be better than being stuck back on the Point with Jacob John Russell. With Ben her trouble is the opposite: she cannot truly tell him how tired, how overwhelmed, how insignificant she often feels in the whirl of college life, for she never wants him to regret making it possible for her to be here.

Balancing her letters to Triffie and conversations with Ben allows her to be, on average, tolerably honest: she can talk about the pleasures of her life with Ben, and the hardships with Triffie. To her mother she composes tidy little screeds that indicate that she is healthy, eating well, studying hard enough to get good marks and keep her scholarship, but not hard enough to tax her brains and lose her looks. She assures her parents she is cleaning her teeth and moving her bowels regularly, since her mother asks about these things.

She lives in a boarding house. Her life since leaving home thus far has been marked by boarding houses: first the eerie quiet of Cousin Ethel's home in St. John's, where she lived out her nun-like existence at Spencer and seldom had a conversation above a whisper. Then came her hard-working stint as Mrs. Chaulk's boarder and servant girl in Elliston. In both those cases Kit was the sole boarder; here in Halifax she is one of four young ladies renting rooms from a Mrs. Peabody, who takes in young women students although she makes it very clear she does not approve of higher education for women.

“I'm only trying to do what your poor mothers would do if they were here,” she told the girls around her dining room table on the night Kit arrived. “If all was as it should be, you would be home with them, or married already, but in this day and age when young girls go wandering so far from home, as Eve wandered from Adam's side in the garden of Eden, I can only hope to shield you from the worst of temptation.”

“She seems very determined we won't eat from the Tree of Knowledge, anyway,” Maggie Campbell says to Kit later, recalling the Adam-and-Eve lecture. Mrs. Peabody's rules preclude staying up past ten o'clock, even in your own room making no noise: if she notices the lamp burning she raps sharply on the door. This is meant to save both lamp oil and their health, for it is not good, Mrs. Peabody assures them, for young ladies to sit up too late.

Maggie, a farm girl from Prince Edward Island, is Kit's closest friend among her fellow co-eds. She is a hearty, buxom redhead with a broad freckled face. Maggie and Kit formed an alliance in their first days at Mrs. Peabody's, recognizing their similarity in background and a shared sense of humour. The other two girls in the house are prime examples of the society daughters who so annoy Kit. Louisa Arthur is the daughter of a doctor in Saint John, while Felicity MacTavish's father owns a shipyard in Lunenberg.

Neither is empty-headed, Kit is forced to admit; Felicity is, in fact, quite brilliant, and Louisa is clever enough. Neither of them would have gotten to university if she were stupid. But the academic aspect of college life is clearly secondary to the social, in their minds. Serving on committees, meeting the right people and getting invited to various dances and teas by the right young men are their preoccupations. Louisa and Felicity dominate dinner conversation with their gossip and flirtations, while Kit and Maggie roll their eyes at each other.

Kit excuses herself from such dinners as quickly as possible and goes to her room to study. Sometimes she and Maggie study together, but Mrs. Peabody disapproves of girls gathering in their rooms and talking, even to study.

They have to be in the house by nine, which means if they want to go the library, they have to leave immediately after supper. Often, Kit will go, by herself or with Maggie, to meet Ben in the library for a few hours' study before curfew.

Despite the snobbish society girls, despite the long hours of work and the landlady who seems determined to make those hours as difficult as possible, Kit is having a wonderful time. Better than she would ever want to admit to Triffie, or to her mother. Only to Ben, in their rare moments alone, can she say, “Thank you. This is what I wanted…this is where I wanted to be.”

“I know,” he says into her hair, his lips tracing a path from her temple, down the line of her jaw. His fingers move as lightly, from her shoulders to her waist, pulling her closer to him.

This particular moment is being stolen in a dusty corner of the library, between tall stacks of books. Ben's courses keep him studying around the clock, and he warns her things will be even worse when he's in law school. He has promised his parents, and the great-uncle who is helping with his tuition, that he won't get married until he has his law degree.

Sometimes, Kit is grateful for this promise. She wants to finish her own degree, to teach a few more years, in some place bigger and more cosmopolitan than Missing Point or Elliston. She pictures herself as a mistress in a girl's school somewhere – not Spencer, perhaps – not yet – but she knows her teaching career will end when she marries Ben. She is enjoying this stage of life, is usually in no hurry to move onto the next.

Then he pulls her close, touches her, breathes against her skin, and she wonders how they can wait even a day, much less four or five years.

There is a way around this, of course – a way to have the delicious bliss of Ben's touch without the responsibilities of married life, just yet. But whatever might have happened in the past, Kit has no intentions of making that suggestion to Ben. He is a modern man in many ways – approving of education for women, wanting her to have her own career in the years until she's ready to be a lawyer's wife. But she suspects his morals are very traditional in most important ways. If he were to dally before marriage, it would be with some lower-class girl, some bit of fluff who meant nothing to him. Not with the woman he sees as an equal, the woman he intends to marry.

Unless she's wrong about him. Sometimes, Kit hopes she's wrong.

But it's not as if they'd have much opportunity to find out, with Kit living under the keen eye of Mrs. Peabody. College women are closely watched, and not just by their landladies, for the slightest hint of improper behavior. Some people still feel that having women in the university lowers the tone, makes immorality more likely. Modern women who seek to step out of their proper roles seem to be inherently suspect, their morals loose.