With Love from Bliss Page 2

  But once again Kerry was prepared, and she continued. “Well, anyway, in case you wonder what this has to do with my name and the way it’s spelled, the last three daughters were called Jemima, Kezia, and Keren-happuch. I’ve always been grateful I wasn’t named Kezia. There’s no way to make Kezia sound soft and pretty is there? It’s that zzzz in there. My papa always said it sounded like a buzz saw. That’s when I said I didn’t like the happuch part of my name. Papa said it reminded him of ‘happy,’ and his little Kerry made him happy.”

  The child’s eyes were enormous and almost purple in color in the late afternoon light. Her face, already pale, was white, and the look of strain on it was frightening.

  Sister Bernadine jiggled the hand she held, and said, when the child’s face turned up to her, “And he was so right. I’m sure little girls are made to make people happy. So, Keren-happuch, shall we gather your things together so you may start on the first leg of a new adventure?”

  The purple-black eyes turned slowly toward Charlotte Maxwell, whose pale eyes blinked, and who couldn’t seem to collect herself enough to speak coherently. Her niece spoke again.

  “So that’s why I’m called Keren with two e’s. It’s all on account of Job, you see.”

  Her audience didn’t look as though she “saw” at all.

  “Poor Job,” Kerry continued, as though she were a watch wound tightly and not about to run down, “to lose all those loved ones at one time. I feel ever so grateful that I have only lost one person—two, actually, though my mama died a long time ago. But sometimes it’s hard to be grateful, isn’t it?”

  Kerry at last fell silent, perhaps because Sister Bernadine’s hand was, now, pressing her shoulder. She watched her aunt’s flaring nostrils with fascination. Sister Bernadine had the fleeting thought that those nostrils and that flare might be a meaningful signal across the years, if Kerry but knew it.

  Apparently the taut silence was more than the child could stand. “I find it hard,” she said, taking a deep breath, “that though I have her name, I don’t look like Keren-happuch. You see,” she went on, “in all the land no women were found as fair as the daughters of Job. Wouldn’t you just love to be the fairest in all the land, Aunt? I certainly would.

  “Do you think fair means light complected?” she asked. “I hope it doesn’t, ’cause I’m dark. When I asked Mrs. Peabody, our landlady, about it, she didn’t know. That’s a funny word, isn’t it—landlady? Mrs. Peabody was always saying ‘My lands!’ and she did own the land and the house. But Miss Perley, who had the room next to ours, always said ‘My heavens,’ and she didn’t own any of the heavens, did she? When I talked to Papa about it, he laughed and said Miss Perley was a heavenly body—”

  Sister appeared to be tongue-tied; Charlotte Maxwell was mopping her brow with the tea-stained serviette. Kerry took a breath and continued.

  “I think fair means beautiful, and of course I’m not the fairest in the land, even though Papa said—”

  “That’s all very interesting, I’m sure,” Charlotte Maxwell was finally able to interject. “I trust we are not to be subjected to the patriarch Job’s history on a continuing basis.”

  “But it’s a story with a happy ending—I do so love happy endings, don’t you? Job ended up with twice as much as he had before, did you know that? Except it was the same amount of sons and daughters . . . well who would want fourteen sons, anyway?”

  “Well, Keren with an e—excuse me, two e’s—we won’t dally any longer over names and spelling and fair maidens, be they dark or light complexioned. Stories with happy endings, indeed! It’s not a storybook world, my girl.” Thus spoke the woman of high degree, with her rings on her fingers, her furs around her shoulders, her carriage at the door, and a mansion full of treasures awaiting her return home.

  “Now then,” the aunt said, indicating the boxes and bags clumped at her feet, “are these your . . . things?”

  For a moment Kerry was downcast. But not for long. Her eyes brightened, she drew in a full breath of air, and responded in true Kerry fashion: “It’s a good thing that man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth, isn’t it, Aunt?”

  Aunt Charlotte’s face, to the watching Sister, was a study in aggravation and curiosity.

  “Consisteth . . . possesseth?” With some of the abundance of her possessions on full display—modish ensemble, jewels in her ears and on her fingers—Charlotte Maxwell murmured the question faintly.

  “She’s quoting the Bible,” Sister Bernadine supplied quickly. “She seems to know a good portion of it by heart. We’ve been, er, privileged to hear some of it.” No one had ever accused Sister Bernadine of a sense of humor, but one would have wondered now, noting a certain mischievous gleam in her eye and the upward tug of the corner of one lip.

  “Gracious me,” Charlotte Maxwell murmured and caught herself immediately lest her niece, whose eyes had indeed brightened at the small expletive, should feel led to rate her aunt along with the utterers of “My land” and “My heavens.” If truth were told, Charlotte Maxwell wasn’t feeling all that gracious at the moment.

  This was rectified, however, a little later when she placed a generous check in the hands of Sister Bernadine as the ill-matched pair—small, shabby girl and elegantly gowned woman—made their departure, the carriage driver having been summoned to carry out Kerry’s meager possessions.

  Sister Bernadine closed the door behind them and turned to find nuns creeping from hiding places, with inquiring faces.

  “There goes the most unusual child I’ve come across in a long time, perhaps ever,” Sister commented, and her opinion was confirmed by a dozen nodding heads. Nodding, or shaking, in wordless wonder.

  “But—has she met her match in Mrs. Sebastian Maxwell, not to mention the formidable Maxwell clan? Or as Kerry might say, is it possible that a little child shall lead them?”

  “Either that,” Sister Claude said with a shake of her head, “or they’ll hang a millstone about her neck and drown her.”

  The Scripture-quoting Sisters looked at one another with a certain grim humor mixed with astonishment that they should have found themselves so influenced by one small girl in so short a time.

  The last trace of anything familiar was gone, shut forever from her by the closing of the heavy convent door and the finality of Sister Bernadine’s encouraging pat. Kerry’s small moment of panic faded before the imposing turnout awaiting her on the graveled drive—a pair of matched grays, a shining rig, a uniformed attendant. Her sense of curiosity, well developed though fed thus far on the husks and fish heads of life, caused her eyes to brighten and her unquenchable spirit to surface.

  “Is this yours, Aunt? I always dreamed of riding in a surrey. Papa and I walked, mostly, or caught the trolley, which was awfully crowded and smelled bad. I’m small, you see, and shorter than most of the riders, and Papa said it brought my nose direckly in contack with parts of the anatomy that were ’specially arrow-matic.”

  “I don’t wish to hear such rubbish repeated, Kerry. Avery Ferne never did have a discerning bone in his body. No, nor a discriminating one, either. Now get into the rig, which is by the way—though why I bother to explain I’ll never know—a carriage, not a surrey. I can see,” Charlotte Maxwell added with a sigh, “that there’s much, so much, you need to learn. Where have you been, child, and what have you been doing, that you know Scripture by the ream and nothing about conveyances?”

  “Why,” Kerry said, and her sigh almost equaled her aunt’s, “Right here in Toronto. All the time. Nine years.” It sounded like nine l-o-n-g years, a lifetime of years.

  “And where,” she asked, with an innocence that could not make it offensive, “have you been, Aunt?”

  “First off,” that lady said, buttoning her glove carefully, the end of her nose pink, a sure indication, to Kerry, of extreme aggravation and a mighty effort to control it, “don’t call me ‘Aunt’ like that. Charlotte is my name, and it seems I am your aunt, so t
he glorious result of such an association must be Aunt Charlotte, right?”

  “I can tell you’re upset, Aunt Charlotte, because your nose is pink. Papa’s nose did the same thing. It was a sign to me.”

  “A sign?” Charlotte couldn’t keep from asking, though she looked at the child sharply.

  “A sign to beware. And that’s when I’d get something to read and go sit on my bed or on the footstool in a corner. That’s how come I memorized so much Scripture.”

  The picture the child conjured up was not a good one; even Charlotte could see that, and for the moment her heart, not really hard but extremely given to vexation, suffered a twinge of sympathy for the small figure at her side. And more than that, the fact that she reminded the child of Avery, whose ways she abhorred, was like a knife point at the throat—threatening and frightening. Was she so much like him after all? Had she really climbed so short a distance up the social scale?

  With an unconscious twitch of the telltale nose, Charlotte turned to the liveried man standing at the horses’ heads with his eyes fixed on a point somewhere in the far distance, his face impassive.

  “Gideon, put Miss Keren—with two e’s—into the carriage, please.” The tone of her voice was not humorous, but Kerry’s eyes smiled, her mouth quickly rejecting the grin that tugged at its corners.

  Gideon approached smartly and reached for the youngster at his mistress’s side, to hoist her onto the carriage step. He paused as Kerry looked up at him and said brightly, “Gibeon—I love the sound of that name. One of my very most favorite stories is when the Lord delivered up the Amorites—don’t you just love the sound of ‘delivered up’? It gives me the goose pumps.” Kerry’s joyous laughter was like a flash of light cleaving the late afternoon sky. “My papa always said goose pumps and goose bimples. Once I saw a naked goose—Mrs. Peabody was going to roast it for Christmas dinner—and it was very pimply.”

  “Keren—” Charlotte Maxwell couldn’t have imagined in her wildest dreams that she would ever be conversing, on a public thoroughfare, in front of a servant, about the texture of a goose’s skin.

  But Kerry, not about to be deflected, stepped back a pace, flung out her arm, pointed dramatically heavenward, and trilled grandly: “‘Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and’” here her finger changed its direction, “‘thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.’”

  Even the usually expressionless Gideon looked startled, and Charlotte Maxwell, caught off guard again, failed to speak quickly enough to stem the drama being enacted before her eyes.

  “So,” Kerry delivered, with the eyes of a zealot, “‘the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.’”

  Slowly her arm dropped to her side, her gaze lowered from the lofty heights it had been contemplating, and she said, “I tried to get a miracle once. I certainly needed a miracle. Cordelia, that’s Mrs. Peabody’s daughter, said that her mama would throw us out in the street if we didn’t pay up our rent. I kicked her, and even Papa didn’t understand, though I explained about Joshua smiting the hindmost of his enemies, and that I was just doing the biblical thing.”

  “Kerry!” Charlotte Maxwell said in terrible voice. “That will be enough of that! Let it be understood here and now that you are not Joshua. Neither are you David, so don’t think about heaving a slingshot at some nonexistent giant. And neither are you Elijah, to run before the chariot. Now get into the carriage! And,” she added as an afterthought, “the name isn’t Gibeon, it’s Gideon, so all those histrionics were wasted.”

  Kerry was encouraged over someone conversing with her about the Scriptures. “Yes, but Aunt,” she answered, forgetting the admonition about addressing her relative properly, “don’t you just get little thrills all up and down your backbone over the part that says the hand of the Lord was on him? I just love that part. What do you suppose it’s like to have the hand of the Lord on you? Once when Miss Perley—”

  “She of the heavenly body,” Charlotte Maxwell found herself muttering, much to her astonishment and chagrin, and forgetting entirely to chastise her niece for discussing so freely a private and unmentionable part of one’s anatomy—thrills up one’s backbone, indeed!

  “When Miss Perley was in our room and I was told to go to sleep, she put me to bed and patted me. But I think the hand of God would be even more comforting, don’t you?”

  Mrs. Sebastian Maxwell finally found herself outmaneuvered, outwitted, and outtalked. “Just—get—into—the—carriage,” she managed, with more restraint than she could have imagined speaking to any living soul aside from her venerable queen.

  Finally, somewhat chastened—either that or dry of further inspiration—Kerry submitted to Gideon’s help and stepped up into a carriage so trim and smart that she was immediately tempted to new heights of eloquence.

  Running her hand over the tufted seat, she said, “I love this machine-buffed leather, don’t you, Aunt? I find it very satisfying to the soul, as well as to the hindmost.” And she jounced up and down a few times as her aunt seated herself.

  Charlotte Maxwell’s sallow face seemed to pale, and her eyes closed. But when she spoke, she said only “buffed?” faintly. “Hindmost” she simply couldn’t deal with.

  “Yes. And the back and seats are prob’ly built of the best selected yellow poplar panels. Do these look like best selected yellow poplar, Aunt?”

  “Yellow . . . poplar . . . panels . . .” Charlotte was half whispering, with a dazed look upon her face.

  “The sills are prob’ly second-growth ash. And they’re put together in the very best possible manner, screwed and plugged from inside and outside. But what bothers me, Aunt, is that I don’t even know what that means. Do you see anything that looks like it’s plugged? It’s s’posed to be good, though, not bad, like a plugged nickel.”

  The redoubtable Gideon, in the process of stowing the young person’s shabby belongings, seemed to be battling against a change of expression—a most unusual event.

  “Including,” Kerry was continuing, “full silver-plated hub bands, prop nuts, dash rail, etcetera. That’s the way the catalog ended that part—etcetera.”

  “Et-cet-era? Catalog?” Something was wrong with Charlotte’s voice.

  “When I wasn’t reading the Bible, I was reading the catalog,” Kerry explained. “Oh, I could furnish an entire house with everything you would need, from the ‘Highest Grade Acme Dining Room Sideboard and Refrigerator Combined’ to a ‘Planished Coffee Pot,’ the same as the Planished Tea Pot, except it has a lip spout. Oh yes, Aunt Charlotte, there’s many an hour of good reading in a catalog. Mine, though, was several years old. The fashions have prob’ly changed. I’m not sure,” she said doubtfully, “if you’re dressed in the latest for spring and summer, but,” she hastened on, seeing her aunt’s darkening brow, “I think you prob’ly are. Miss Perley kindly gave the catalog to me one day after I guess I had quoted too much Scripture. She knows Scripture, too, Aunt Charlotte. She asked me if I’d ever read the one that said, ‘I was dumb, I opened not my mouth.’ And then she dug around in her trunk and found the catalog and gave it to me, and said, ‘Here, read this.’ Wasn’t that kind of her?”

  “I think I’ve heard quite enough of the estimable Miss Perley, thank you. Now, if you’ll just settle down, we’ll start what will be a long journey home.” Charlotte Maxwell added with a sigh, “A very, very long journey home.”

  “But I’m so happy to be riding in a Maythorn & Son carriage! I think this is a Victoria, exhibited at Biggleswade. Don’t you just love that word—Biggleswade? Aunt Charlotte, what is pumice?”

  “Why, it’s a powder,” Charlotte found herself saying in spite of herself, “glass, volcanic glass, used for smoothing. But what possible reason could you have for asking?”

  “This rig is painted in the ‘highest style of the art in thirteen coats, the first coats rubbed out with pumice.’ Why would they rub out what they painted?”

  “Thirteen coats? My goodness�
�” Charlotte was speaking faintly again.

  “See, you’re doing it, too.”

  “Doing? Doing what, pray tell?”

  “What Mrs. Peabody did. My lands, she said, and she was a landlady. Miss Perley said my heavens, and she was a heavenly body. You say my goodness, and you are good, Aunt Charlotte, else you’d never come all this way just to get your poor relative.” Kerry looked up at her newfound aunt with her dark eyes shy and shining with something that closely resembled tears. If Sister Bernadine had seen and heard, she would never have believed the change—from a fierce, black-browed antagonist, to an eager, chatting companion, Kerry Ferne had come full circle in a few moments.

  Charlotte Maxwell did something far, far out of character: With a similar sheen to her own eyes, she put a gloved hand over the little one beside her on the richly tufted, machine-buffed Columbus seat; her grim mouth seemed to cooperate by loosening its disapproving lines, and her rigid posture seemed to settle and soften. In spite of herself and her grudging, reluctant response to the call to do her duty and provide a home to her graceless brother’s child, she found herself squeezing the hand. Charlotte Maxwell had come full circle.

  It took the remainder of the afternoon and into the long-light evening to cross the city. Toronto was a fast-growing city nearing 86,000 in population, sprawling from the Lunatic Asylum on the west to the Don River on the east. Its fashionable homes were located on Jarvis Street, and toward this highfalutin area the carriage steadily bounced and shook. The first frost, or “roadmaker,” was still two months away, and their passage was marked by thick gray dust rising and settling on horses, carriage tufts, people, and all. At one point a distant train was clearly heard. Since Kerry didn’t pick up her ears and remark that she “just loved” the comparatively new sound, Charlotte supposed, and rightly so, that her brother and his child had lived where the raucous wonder was a regular part of their hearing—and smelling.