Catherine Snow
by Nellie P. Strowbridge

Rose gazed out an upstairs window of a large, wooden house facing the St. John’s courthouse, her small elbows leaning on the wide sill. Sarah, an elderly servant, rubbed wet, gnarled hands down a white pinafore and came from behind the young girl. She took notice of a white bird chirping on the outside ledge. “Dear, oh dear, oh dear me,” she sighed. “A white bird this July evening! Oh ’tis trouble we’ll be having before this year of 1846 spends itself. Come away from the window before it happens soon and quick.”

Rose stared at the courthouse. She let out a deep breath and spoke in a faint voice. “The strangest feelings come when I look that way.” Her voice rose. “I feel as if I’ll choke on my own gizzard. At night I wake from my dreams startled. There’s someone in them crying in anguish, but she’s only a shadow.” The young girl looked down at the rosary of garnets scattered along the ledge. “I pray every day on those beads that my mind will settle peacefully. Once when I wore them around my neck I felt strangled.”

Sarah knew that, each morning, Rose held the rosary of garnets with its Celtic cross in her hand for prayers. Afterward, she kept them in her little cloth bag. Now the servant righted a white scolly on her head and turned with a scolding eye. “Don’t be tormenting yourself. Sure you’re only a child.”

Rose turned swiftly, her stormy, grey eyes blazing. “An orphan I am – someone who doesn’t know from what tree her forebears sprang, having the name Rose given to me by strangers, a name that doesn’t seem to be mine.”

Sarah answered, “Where did you get the notion that you should know everything? Sure I’ve no more knowledge of me mudder than if I never had one. ’Tis praising God I am that someone raised me.”

“In my dreams I’ve been troubled by strange voices,” Rose cried. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’d like to put faces to the voices.”

Sarah’s eyes held a clouded look, her voice soft. “Sure ’tis staring you bees, girl, and facing Signal Hill. ’Tis it, you’re looking at. Tell me it is, and then thinking too much and feeling the tragedy of people shot, and all the bellies and throats slit between French and English soldiers on that hill.”

“’Tis not,” she answered. “My room window fixes right over the courthouse’s blackened window, meets it like one eye gazing into the other. This eye here is harmless; the other one holds evil. Sometimes I’ve fancied a woman in that square eye, that’s now been put out by fire, and only its socket left. But for that, I’d have a mind to – ” She stopped and shook her head. “Oh never mind.”

Sarah’s voice was sharp. “And end up in the gaol – then you would – if you commit an act against the law. Er, but it’s too much for you. You can’t be telling me all this from some dark place inside your mind.” She lowered her voice and widened her eyes. “The mistress’ll have you taken to that lunatic hole. You’ve heard rumours of it. I’m sure ’tis a true place – below ground and no windows, a place that’ll keep any one of us from ever espying you ag’in.”

Rose looked at her, puzzled. “Why would that be done to anyone?”

Sarah leaned close and said quietly, “I’ve been told on a good word that the law wakes women believed to be witches – wakes them while they’re living. A woman accused of being a witch is stood still. A bridle bit is wedged inside her mouth and fastened with chains to a wall. Then there’s women convicted of murder by tainted laws. . . . So silence yourself and bide alive. The past can’t be unwritten, and if the present is not bearable, sure you could ask the mistress for another room. Your future can bear your own mark.”

Rose turned as her mistress hurried into the room asking, “Who is handling my name in clutter and chatter?”

“’Tis me, ma’am,” Sarah answered meekly. “I’m trying to beat sense into the girl you brought into this place as your own helper. She hankers for her forked relatives. I’m sure you’d be telling her if ’twas fit for her to know.”

The mistress lifted her chin and tossed her words at the servant. “You’ll be going now – and darken the room behind your back.”

“Don’t mind if I do, ma’am,” Sarah replied. She added, aside to the mistress, “She stares so long, cocks her ear and seems to listen. You could swear she knows something, and ’tis the same day too, July twenty-first.” The servant hurried out.

The mistress turned back to the girl. “Now what’s this nonsense?”

Rose stood up, as if trying to pull herself together. “I’m unsettled, that’s it, ma’am. I don’t know why.”

“Well then,” the mistress said, shaking her head, “there’s some cause. What is it? The servants have been complaining about you long enough. ’Tis time to do something about it.”

“It all started with the sight of a man.” Rose, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright, rushed on. “One day down by a fish stage at the harbour’s edge when I went to buy you seal flippers, ma’am, I sensed a presence that made my heart skitter under my bodice. I heard the name Judge Boulton, and the sound was like a strike against my ears. A man spoke to someone standing beside him and his voice slithered up and down my spine. I turned to see his face. Stone-cold eyes, hooded like a monk’s head, glanced my way and I saw that the man’s eyebrows were like a nest of spiders that the hair on his head was creeping away from.”

The mistress said, “It seems to be old Judge Boulton you’re talking about, but he’s long gone from this colony.”

Rose ignored her words. “My strange feelings began then and got worse after I was moved to this room. I fancied I saw a brown-garbed, hooded lady in the window of the courthouse.”

The mistress poked a long, thin finger in Rose’s face. “Now girl, no more talk of this, not to the servants or anyone in the roads. There are things better left to lie.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Rose answered in a defeated voice.