Township of Time by Bruce

Author:Bruce [Bruce, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-507-6
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 1986-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

DUKE STREET

1896

Andrew went down the stone steps quickly, countering with a show of briskness the reluctance in his mind.

He was still close enough to boyhood habit to do no work on Sunday, but reading wasn’t work. DeLury had given him a parcel of back numbers of the Mathematical Gazette. He could be at them now, if it weren’t for this call he felt in duty bound to make.

Naomi Harvey. It had taken him a minute to remember.

Dear Andrew—I hear you are at the college. Can you spare an hour to make the acquaintance of an ancient cousin? A real antique? Come Sunday if you can, soon after three—Naomi Harvey.

A minute, until it came back to him. Alec Neill’s great-aunt Nomie. He’d heard of her, of course, in childhood. The Neills got presents from Toronto at Christmas-time. But Andrew hadn’t been home much in recent years. The name had all but slipped his mind.

He took the path across the park, north of the Parliament Buildings, and crossed the Crescent below Victoria and St. Michael’s College to St. Alban’s. The air was crisp and frosty. He tucked his hands into overcoat pockets. The overcoat was all right, cheap but passable, a fawn melton from John Eaton’s. So was the hat, a derby bought two years ago to celebrate his medal at McGill. Collar and cuffs were clean. The suit, though … and the shoes …

And no gloves. A further small wave of irritation gathered in his mind. Facts about the Harveys were coming back to him. Francis Harvey had been a man of position and money. The note gave no hint of what to expect, who might be there. He hadn’t, yet, the clothes for it.

No clothes, and no small talk. What would a person be expected to talk about? Laurier and Mowat? Sound money and McKinleyism? Robert Mantell’s Hamlet at the Opera House? What common ground could he find, with a woman he’d never seen, who had lived in style in Toronto since long before he was born? Not the binomial theorem.

Well, it needn’t take long. It must have been some obscure sense of duty on her part that had caused her to invite him, as duty it was that moved him to obey. Duty done, he could quickly take his leave …

Duke Street. It was a part of town he didn’t know; he’d had to look it up. Straight across Wellesley and down Jarvis should get him there. He stepped out briskly, past the brown fronts of prosperous houses, warming to the walk. A gusty wind stirred skitters of light snow on the street’s packed earth. Down home by now they’d be chopping. Spruce and fir in the back pasture, hardwood across the lake if the frost was in and the swamps would hold.

The thought surprised him slightly. That was all behind him. Not the natural affection for Ma and Pa and Frank and the girls, but the climate, the people, the habit of the place. Six years since he’d

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