style="font-size:15px;"> ‘The lavender oil is produced by a lady in the south of England. She also makes a perfume of it by diluting it with spirits of wine and bottling it. We act as her northern distributor for these little bottles of scent and they are sold side-by-side with our lavender soap. It is very pleasant to dab a little on my wrist and sniff it.
‘The whole operation is so interesting that I am already questioning whether I should sell it. If it is financially sound, I could, perhaps, find a knowledgeable man to run it.’
She stopped writing, and chewed the end of her pen. She knew already what she would like to do, she considered longingly. She had been born and spent her childhood in a city, and she would like to settle in Liverpool, rain and dirty air notwithstanding, and run the business herself. After all, she ruminated, she knew the centre of Liverpool quite well; she and her parents, as refugees, had spent some weeks in it, waiting for an immigrant ship to the United States – and she remembered with pleasure the pool crowded with sailing vessels which had given Liverpool its name.
‘With all that Papa taught me, I could learn to manage the Lady Lavender – it’s obviously got some good employees,’ she assured herself. ‘I suspect that before I was ten I’d learned more than some of these fat Englishmen know. I don’t know the detail of their work, but I can organize people – I can sell. But what on earth would Joe think of it – of coming to a city?’
She considered the question seriously; he wasn’t getting any younger; it was possible that he might enjoy the sheer comfort of city life after the remorseless struggle they faced on their homestead.
Wishful thinking! she chided herself, and slowly dipped her pen into the ink.
‘If we drew income from the soap works,’ she continued, ‘we could accumulate more riverside land, as it becomes available, and increase our grain crops – the minute a railway crosses the North Saskatchewan and reaches Edmonton, eastern markets would be opened up to us – and we might even have money to spend!’
She paused in her writing and wondered how many more terrible winters they would have to endure before they made enough to, perhaps, move south to a better climate. And it’s not only winter, she considered sadly, it’s clouds of merciless mosquitoes, forest fires, unsettled Indians and Metis, floods – and hunger – gnawing hunger – and the endless, endless physical work.
She bit her lips, and continued to write, asking him how the crops were doing. She hoped the cougars were not being a nuisance again this year – that was a huge pair he had shot last year.
Cougars? Bobcats? Wolves? They were a curse when one had livestock. She grinned suddenly at the idea of a cougar sniffing its way comfortably into the yard of the soap works, and then went on to give him a different piece of news.
‘Yesterday, in the street, I heard Arabic being spoken, and, frankly, I was surprised that I still understood it – though it is my childhood tongue. Three men definitely from the East, probably seamen, were talking together at a street corner; they had lost their way, but being a stranger myself to this end of the city, I could not help them so I passed on. While I am here, I hope to get some accurate news of the present situation in the Lebanon.’
She put down her pen and slowly stretched herself. It had been good to hear the language of her family. She would give a great deal to walk the ancient streets of Beirut or sit quietly in her parents’ courtyard, if it still existed, and listen to cheerful Arab voices.
But there were no familiar voices left, she reminded herself; she would have to sit by herself under the old lemon tree.
She shivered, and a sense of awful aloneness engulfed her, the ghastly loneliness of a sole survivor, with no one else alive to understand completely the horrors she had seen. For a moment she did not hear the horses’ hooves in the street outside or the rain on the window or feel the chill of her room; she was lost in a misty ebb of consciousness, through which she heard the roar of a mob out of control and the screams of the dying.
She sat perfectly still in her stiff little chair, her white face covered with perspiration, until the moment passed. Then she got up and stumbled to the washstand, to pick up a damp face flannel and press it to her temples.
Feeling a little better after the damp coldness of wiping her face with a flannel, Wallace Helena sat down on the edge of the bed and slowly unlaced her neat black boots. She hauled them off and thankfully flexed her toes. On the homestead she wore soft Indian moccasins and gaiters, for which she traded barley with a Cree woman each year. She kept her precious boots for formal occasions, like visiting Mr Ross’s hotel in the settlement by Fort Edmonton. In the hotel, she was sometimes able to contact small groups of travellers in need of supplies, like flour, meat or, perhaps, a horse; they were also occasionally glad to buy well-salted butter or sour cream. The visitors were usually surveyors and miners passing through, but increasingly there were well-to-do British hunters, who had simply come to enjoy a new wilderness and hunt big game. Most of them dealt with the Hudson’s Bay Company or one or two other suppliers, who could provide coffee, sugar and salt, tobacco, alcohol and other imports. Wallace Helena, however, kept her prices low and she could usually find someone with little money only too thankful to buy cheaply. They were surprised, and sometimes amused, to be approached by a woman, particularly one who did not fit the usual mould. With her tall, spare figure and her long, mannish stride, her carefully calculated prices and her ability to strike a bargain, she was a well-known local character round Fort Edmonton, particularly disliked by the other suppliers.
Now, she longed to rest on the feather bed, but she felt she must finish her letter to Joe; she had promised to write frequently; and, even with the new railway, a letter would take some time to reach him. She made herself return to the tiny desk in the window.
After the quietness of the bush, it felt strange to be back in the hurly-burly of a city and be immediately plunged into the complexities of a factory, the first modern one that she had ever seen; it was stranger still to realize that, as soon as her uncle’s Will had been probated, she would actually own the soap works.
Pen in hand, she stared thoughtfully out of the bedroom window. Already, she had casually remarked to Mr Turner, the chemist, that it might be cheaper for the Lady Lavender to buy seed and themselves press the oil they used, rather than import it.
Mr Turner had replied superciliously that to make it pay, they would probably have to find a market for the residual solids.
It was probably the most sensible remark he had made to her that day, but she had snapped him up promptly. ‘The solids can be used for winter food for steers. Don’t your farmers know that?’
Mr Turner had gulped and failed to reply immediately; he knew little about farming. What did women know about cattle?
When he had recovered himself, he pointed out that a new venture like that would need capital. ‘Presses,’ he added vaguely, ‘and – er – men who understand farming, to sell the residue.’
‘Right.’ She had stopped to take a small black notebook and pencil out of her reticule, and made a quick note. She might, she thought, cost it out in years to come, when she understood more about the business.
Playing at her father’s feet in his large silk warehouse in Beirut or cuddled by her mother’s side when the family was gathered together in the evening, she had absorbed a great deal of the discussions going on over her head. Amongst much else, she understood
