Mist-shi-mus

Chapter 3 Fort Victoria

Chapter 3

 Fort Victoria

 Jeannie stayed with the Parkers for three more days, helping Gladyse unpack and arrange her household, for the Parkers had only arrived a few weeks before from Valparaiso, Chile. Often the women took the air, walking along the shore and through the beautiful woods around the military grounds. Jeannie felt she had found a true friend, a sympathetic older sister. This was confirmed as Jeannie and her uncle prepared to return to Victoria.

 On the wharf Gladyse took her hands. “You must come again, Mrs. Naughton. What a pleasant sojourn we have had together.” She leaned down to Jeremy who was playing with two brightly painted wooden figures carved by one of the enlisted men at the encampment.

 “And you too, darling boy.” She patted his head and sighed. “Come again soon.”

 I will, thought Jeannie. The beauty of the countryside and the masculine order of the place had made an impression on her.

 Back at the Fort, Jeannie settled in the daily routine of the Hudson’s Bay Company. As she was a member of a trader’s family, she had a place of welcome at the company table, but not wanting to be useless, she put herself to work helping her uncle with his inventory. She knew how to keep accounts, something she had learned from her father’s business, Hackmore & Son. She was not allowed to work in the main store as she was a proper woman, but under the pretense of keeping house for him, she attended to his business in his back office.

 Word soon got out that trader Campbell had a niece and a stream of young men began to appear wishing to settle their accounts or to discuss company business. From her perch at Uncle Archie’s desk she often heard,

 “May I inquire on the health of your niece, Mrs. Naughton? Or “How is that lad of yours? Keeping his mother occupied?”

 If she was summoned out, she made her curtsy, making the acquaintance of unusually well-scrubbed and well-mannered gentlemen. If she was not, a card de visite appeared next to her tea table. One of them, Harry Ferguson, a fast-rising clerk in HBC, began to show up at the company store and go over his account books regularly. Jeannie eventually consented to go on a walk with him, but she soon found that though he was well read, he seemed to think female company meant poetry and castles in the air.

 Give me action, Jeannie thought. Still, he was pleasant and as she got to know him better from exchanges at the store, she saw his virtues.

 “He’s hardworking,” Uncle Archie said one afternoon at tea. “And an honest man in his dealings. He has a fair way with Salish people.”

 Jeannie thought he was fair looking in appearances too. His curly brown hair always seemed to be at odds with male fashion which meant plastered down and parted to the side. And he had an endearing laugh.

 When she had free time, she would take tea with Miss McMurray who gave lessons in comportment and elocution to the daughters of HBC workers or leaving Jeremy with her uncle, step out of the company grounds. There were many sights to see outside of the fort. Victoria had shops with excellent assortments of food, clothing, millinery, toys and furniture from London and the English colonies in the Orient. Across the way there was the large longhouse of the Saanich people. Beyond that, the tall masts of the British naval ships could be seen playing hide and seek with the tall stands of fir behind them as they moved out to the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

 But most of all, she relished the time she took aside with Jeremy. When he was not running around with the other children at the fort, together they would paint with water colors, count ships coming into the harbor (“Why is that ship called a bark, Mama? A bark is what a dog does.”) They guessed each ship’s origin in the world or on rainy days practiced writing their names on slates and puzzling over the riddles in old copies of Merry’s Museum: