The Ebbing Tide by Elisabeth Ogilvie Read Free Book Online Page B

certain. Perhaps he hadn’t bought it yet, anyway. Who ever heard of anyone with money to spend paying it out on something sight unseen? No, he was coming out to look it over, and then decide, and for a Mainlander the Island in March would be a bitter, barren place; the buildings needed repairs and it was next to impossible to get materials. For a little while, just before she went to bed, she felt a faint stir of relief, a lightening of heart. And then, when the lamp was out, and the finality of Nils’ absence was a flat, irrevocable fact, the heaviness came back and stayed with her, pressing on her like the windy dark, until she fell asleep.

5
    A UNT M ARY’S FINAL WORD , ornamented lushly with many thanks, said that “the man” would arrive on a date set in the first week in April. He was simply “the man” to Joanna and Owen, since they couldn’t read the writing when she told them his name. Variously, Owen called him “that gink,” “that son of a gun,” and “that beggar,” until Joanna felt constrained to tell him it wasn’t really the stranger’s fault. In all fairness, he wasn’t to be blamed. But she knew even while she was speaking that she resented him as furiously as Owen did and perhaps more, for Owen’s rages burned up in him like a fire in dry driftwood, and went out in a cloud of steam like the very same fire when smothered with wet rockweed. Her own anger burned long and steadily . . . and she had always had a more ardent, deep-rooted kinship for the Island anyway.
    No one else knew what was about to happen. Joanna forebore from writing the news to her older brothers and her mother at Pruitt’s Harbor. She prepared Ellen’s room for the boarder, and because there were certain rules of hospitality that had to be followed, her most beautiful quilts came out of the chest to blow for a day in the sunshine and wind.
    Nora Fennell, Matthew’s wife, came down on one of her rare visits that day, and her eyes widened at the sight of the prismatic colors glowing against the dull background of the barn. “They’re beautiful! Are you cleaning house so soon, Jo?”
    â€œJust airing quilts,” Joanna said briskly.
    â€œGram’s made some nice ones.” Nora stood by the line fingering the corner of the Log-Cabin quilt. In her slacks, and with her thick glossy chestnut mop tied back by a ribbon, she looked barely twenty instead of almost thirty. Her gray eyes and wide, laughing mouth had made her irresistibly attractive when she had first come to the Island. Now there were two little dents at either corner of her mouth, from holding it so firmly, and her laughter came slowly. “Gram made some really lovely ones, but I won’t use them.”
    â€œWhy?” Joanna shooed Jamie off the rug she wanted to sweep, and he stepped doggedly to one side.
    â€œBecause she made them, of course. Anything to annoy the old—” She stopped, and took out her cigarettes. “She hates this too. I’m a scarlet woman. Married, smokes, and won’t have children.”
    â€œBecause she wants you to have children,” Joanna added, and Nora nodded. Joanna went on sweeping, aware of the aura of helpless resentment that hung around Nora. There was a hardness, too, about the girl that she didn’t like. At first Nora’d been hurt or embarrassed by Gram’s frankness. This was much worse. And Matthew was apparently unaware.
    â€œI’ve heard about having children since before I married Matthew. She started talking about it then. Well, I wasn’t going to have one at the end of the frrst nine months! If she’d kept quiet . . . honestly, Joanna, I think the devil’s in her! She’s eighty-eight, and she can make me mad enough to want to strangle her!” Joanna looked up, because the hardness had been replaced by something like panic. “She about drives me crazy! I don’t