His father took a silver pocket watch from the folds of his greatcoat. He was working in the open air with bare hands and his fingers were bright with blood in the morning chill. “Half eight,” he said. “You’d best say your goodbyes to Cassie. And don’t tarry.”
The floor of the kitchen was strewn with damp sand and Cassie was on her knees, scrubbing the boards with a long, hard brush. She had tied her dress in a knot about her thighs. She sat back on her heels when he came in and looked up at him where he stood in the doorway.
Peyton’s mouth was dry and his breath stuttered in shallow gasps. The strength of his emotion surprised him. He’d been concealing his feelings for so long he managed to underestimate them himself, and they surfaced so sharply now his chest hurt. He coughed into his fist to try to clear the unexpected tightness. “We’ll be off,” he said. He thought Cassie might be able to hear his heart drumming under the layers of his clothing and he folded his arms firmly across his chest.
She raised a forearm to wipe her forehead and cheeks, the brush still in her hand. She said, “Mind yourself out there, John Peyton.”
“Don’t worry your head,” he said and he looked down at his boots, disappointed. Even her most soothing, affectionate words had an edge to them, as if she was trying to hold down another’s panic. She was like a person leading a skittish horse that could bolt at the least provocation. Something dogged and steady in her, like a hand gripping the bit.
It occurred to him Cassie might not even stand to see him off and the thought of this made the months in the woods ahead of him suddenly repellent. She had always been oddly disposed to him, her manner a mixture of aloofness and concern. As if she was waiting for him to prove himself somehow. She was six full years his senior. For the first two years they knew one another she was taller than Peyton, and for several more after he finally surpassed her in height she remained, officially, his tutor. It was taking much longer than he hoped to overcome the distance those things had set between them. His one comfort was the distance she maintained between herself and everyone else around her. There were few women on the northeast shore and every year Cassie received proposals from men who could not spell their own names, who had lived by themselves all their adult lives and spent no more than an hour alone in the company of women since leaving their mothers. It was clear in Peyton’s mind that Cassie was saving herself for something that promised more than these men could offer.
The dog barked outside, harnessed and anxious to set out.
“I should make a start,” Peyton said, already moving through the door.
Cassie dropped the brush then and he turned back to see her get to her feet and unknot the dress, the layers falling around her stockings. “Hold on,” she said. She went out through the hallway to her room off the kitchen and came back with six candles tied up in a strip of paper.
Peyton lifted the candles to his face to smell the beeswax. Cassie made them herself and used them to read by in the evenings. The wax threw a cleaner light, she said, and lasted hours longer than tallow. John Senior thought it was a ridiculous undertaking and even Peyton felt the labour involved in collecting the wax and turning the candles was out of all order with the rewards. He had been brought up to think of reading as a leisure activity, but it was clear that in Cassie’s mind it was something else altogether. She read and reread Goldsmith and Fielding and Milton, fat novels by Fanny Burney all named for the main character: Camilla and Cecelia and Evelina. She knew many of Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart and sometimes had Peyton listen as she quoted a few lines aloud. He wanted to acknowledge her enthusiasm, to share in it with her, but the most he could offer in response was to say, “That’s pretty, I guess.” She shook her head. “You’re hopeless, John Peyton,” she told him. And there was an admission of helplessness in the statement that he was sorry to continually drag her back to.
He held the candles out to her. They were an extravagant gift and would be wasted on him. “I never packed any reading,” he said.
Cassie smiled at him and shrugged. She said, “The light is good for close work, if you’re mending your rackets or sewing a rent in your clothes.”
Peyton nodded. A quiver nearly buckled his legs. His feet felt heavy, as if he had just overtopped his boots in water. He looked at her steady and said, “You look after John Senior while I’m away.”
Cassie turned away from him, retying her dress around her thighs. “I always do,” she said. She knelt on the floor, leaning all her weight on the brush to scrub at the boards as he pulled the door closed behind him.