Down Jasper Lane (Amherst Island Trilogy)

PART ONE

ONE

“There she is, Ellen. There she is.” Douglas Copley put an arm around his daughter’s shoulders as they stood at the rail of the third class deck of the RMS Carpathia. In the harbor before them, under a glittering summer sun, the Statue of Liberty stood, one elegant arm raised, ready to greet yet another shipload of hopeful immigrants to the shores of America, and the streets of gold fabled to lie beyond.

Passengers jostled at the railings, eager for this first view of their new country. After a week on the crowded steamer, the close air and the poor food, most were ready to step onto land, and into the dreams they’d spun for themselves. Ellen Copley couldn’t wait.

“What do you think to it, Ellen?” Douglas asked as he looked down at his daughter. Her hair had blown loose from its ribbon and framed her face in chestnut tendrils. Laughing, she held it away from her eyes and squinted into the sun.

“It’s wonderful, Da. Truly wonderful.”

He nodded in satisfaction. “It’s about time we had something wonderful, lass.”

Ellen merely nodded. She didn’t want to think about the past, about her mother’s grave only three months old, left in Springburn. She didn’t want to remember the months tending her in the stale air of the sickroom, the way hope slid so slyly into despair, and how Mam turned her face to the wall, an invalid these many years and far too ready to die.

At twelve years old, Ellen was ready to live. The future lay before them, as shining as the sea that stretched to a crowded shore, and it held a promise she couldn’t wait to see fulfilled.

The Copleys had been planning to emigrate to the United States since Ellen was four years old. Back then Douglas had talked about starting again with his older brother Hamish and their younger sister Rose. There was opportunity in America, fortunes to be made, or so you would believe if you listened to Douglas as he and Hamish spun their dreams in the flat’s tiny kitchen, sucking on their pipes, their booted feet stretched out to the little coal stove.

Ellen never understood just exactly what the Copley brothers planned to do; she heard snatches of conversation, talk of opening a shop, a factory, making decent money, breathing clean air. Douglas kept it all vague, waving his arms in the air, talking about things he’d heard or read in the paper.

“There’s a fellow in New York who made his fortune in irons. Irons. They’re electrical or some such. And then there’s that bloke in Georgia who’s made a mint off his nerve tonic. Coca-Cola, he calls it.”

Even as a small child Ellen understood that her father, who had spent his whole life working on the rail lines, could not hope to compete with inventors of electric irons or nerve tonics. But in truth she didn’t care what the nature of her father’s dreams were; she just liked the way he smiled and would sometimes suddenly snatch her into his arms, throwing her so high in the air that her mam scolded that she’d hit her head on the ceiling.

She watched her Da drop a handful of coins into the old, dented flour tin on the shelf above the cooking range nearly every Friday night, after he’d been paid from his job repairing locomotive engines at the Eastfield Running Sheds. She heard the sound of them hitting the bottom of the tin, and then later the more pleasing sound of them hitting and settling among the other coins. Sometimes, when Da was at work and Mam was having her afternoon nap, Ellen would push a kitchen chair next to the range and stare into the tin. The sight of all those farthings, half-pennies and even a few shillings made her heart beat hard. Da had said it cost four pounds to cross the ocean. Ellen could not fathom such an amount, yet surely the tin half-full of coins was nearly enough. She didn’t dare get it all out and count it; Mam was a light sleeper.

Then Hamish and his wife Ruth announced they had enough money at last. They’d take the Columbia Furnessia sailing from Glasgow on the sixth of June and they’d be in New York in just a week. From there they planned to head upstate to the Catskills or even Albany; they’d no desire to stay in another big city like Glasgow, amidst the choking coal dust of the Springburn railways. Rose, Ellen’s aunt and Douglas’ younger sister, a pretty, laughing girl who operated a stranding machine at Craigpark Cable Company, would go with them.

Ellen was only five then, but she remembered the way Hamish had raised his eyebrows at her father as they sat in front of the coal stove. It was a rainy evening in April and it had been a cold spring, and the stove still gave out a comforting heat. Ellen had scooted closer to it even though Mam often scolded her that she’d singe her plaits. There had been a girl a street over who had died from her hair catching fire from the stove, and her mother’s nerves were shattered from hearing the screams. But Mam didn’t scold her that night; Mam hadn’t scolded her in months. She just laid in bed, drifting in and out of sleep when she wasn’t racked by coughing.

“Well, Douglas?” Hamish asked, and Ellen saw her father’s gaze slide away. She felt her heart sink because she knew what that sliding look meant. It was the same look her father gave her when she asked for real bacon instead of bread and dripping, the same way he wouldn’t meet her eyes when she asked why there was no money for the tin this week. Usually it was followed by a warning look from her mother and a little sorrowful shake of her head.

Now Douglas sucked long and hard on his pipe and said, his gaze still not meeting his brother’s, “I don’t rightly know, Hamish. We might wait awhile, see if a better fare comes along.”

Even at five years old Ellen knew there was no better fare. How could there be? The next day, when her mam had her usual sleep—they’d been getting longer, sometimes lasting hours—she resolutely pushed the chair towards the stove and took down the tin from the shelf. It was heavy, promisingly so, and Ellen nearly lost her balance on the chair. She set the tin on the table and slowly, methodically, counted the money out into neat piles. She checked and counted again.

The tin held just a little over two pounds. Half, Ellen knew—it took her a moment to work it out, for she’d never been good at sums—of one fare. She sat there for a moment, staring o