Free Miss Elva by Stephens Gerard Malone

sister. Jane was indomitable by nature and unable to move any direction but forward. Once Jane had fixed her mind upon a resolve, she pursued it as a duty with all the advantages inherent with beauty. Elva watched, that was her lot. Everything about Jane fascinated her. She was a light so bright Elva herself cast no shadow, only withered from its heat. Although it was madness to be out again when reason decreed the men who had attacked them might be lurking nearby, Elva pursued her sister, her body palsied by fear, her heart succumbing to its nature.
    The moment when there is as yet no real light, just a lessening of the dark, made Jane’s shadow a bouncing beacon as she reached the end of the slate road by the beach and headed in the direction of Demerett Bridge, past the monastery, cutting inland through fields towards Ostrea Lake with its ring of thick fir-covered hills. The tidal lake was also the home to Ipswich Abbey.
    Elva didn’t know if fabulous cities like Halifax lay claim to unique places that haunt them. She did know that Ipswich Abbey haunted her. Poised on a miniature island in the lake, it was not an abbey at all but a labour of love easily walked to at low tide. Even at high tide, the surrounding waters were only a few feet deep and easily forded.
    Of its owner, John Solomon Purvis, little wasknown. He was from away and had owned the island for decades, spending only the temperate months in Demerett Bridge while transforming the scrubby island. In addition to indigenous plants, Purvis cultivated English seedlings. Over the years oaks, cypress, Japanese maple, Dutch elm, poplars and apple trees grew into lumbering shade-bearing giants that looked as if they might sink the small island, while beds of colour clogged meandering walkways of blue oat grass.
    When the century was very young and in the year before the hurricane, the newly launched schooner
Meghan Rose
sailed into Demerett Bridge, its hold brimming with a special cargo for the island—stones from an ancient kirk somewhere in Scotland that had been demolished. The townies laughed over the expense of such a folly. Sending rocks to Canada! Why it’s like shippin’ coal to Cape Breton! Rumour was, even the altar with the finger joint of some dead saint embedded in it was included. The bits of old church were transformed into garden art, a medieval wonder of turrets—nested by the Ipswich sparrow, which gave the Abbey its name—cloisters, roofless halls and arching bridges over a shimmering pool.
    It’s for the woman he loved, Elva once made up to Jane. “And from the top of the castle, you can see the name Lenore spelled out in apple trees, so beautiful in spring. No one knows who belongs to the name. She had very pale skin.”
    Everyone was white in Elva’s stories.
    Through the screens of the summer kitchen, Jane and Elva could see Rilla enveloped by sheets on the lines, brushing the hair back from her face, adding more pins, getting eaten alive by squares of white.
    “She died of a broken heart.”
    Jane preferred stories about jazz and necking parties and taking baths in tubs full of gin. No way flappers with lapis lazuli hair-bands would ever die of anything, let alone something so stupid.
    “Must be from Cape Sable, then. The crazy ones come from there.”
    Elva thought about it. “From a town called Skyler.”
    “Never heard of it.”
    “Because it’s gone now. Washed away in a hurricane. And that’s how Lenore’s real love perished.” As in all the great romances, Elva knew, no one died. They perished. Wasting away coming a close second.
    The screen door banged shut behind Rilla as she came in with her empty laundry basket, noting that potatoes won’t peel themselves.
    “I’m going as fast as I can do you want me to cut off my fingers and have bloody mash potatoes?”
    “They’d only be pink potatoes,” Elva said. She had put down her pencils and was shucking peas, so had nothing to worry about.
    Don’t say bloody, Rilla