The Quintland Sisters(17)

But I’m right, I know I am. I come and go from the farmhouse, and I honestly believe, if you asked anyone other than Ivy or Dr. Dafoe whether they’d seen me, or what my name was, they’d be at a loss to provide an answer.

“And it doesn’t bother me,” I said to Ivy. “I don’t want to be noticed.”

She just kept shaking her head. Even in the stifling humidity of midday, she doesn’t look rumpled and sticky like the rest of us. She glows. “You’ll see, Emma Trimpany,” she said. “One day, you’ll see.”


August 18, 1934

THE NEWSPAPERS SAY the quintuplets are not suitably protected from kidnappers during these desperate times. The Lindbergh baby snatchers are still on the lam more than two years after they found that poor boy’s body. Now the papers are saying it likely wasn’t Italian mobsters who nabbed him, but someone acting alone who might easily have slipped across the border into Canada. Nurse Ellis, a Newfoundlander whose lilting English gives her simple predictions the ring of fabled prophecies, observed that, even if the kidnapper isn’t headed our way, the whole terrible tale is just “giving nasty people an awfully good idea.” She’s right: these babies are the most famous babies in the world and there’s no telling what ransom they’d fetch.

Tonight Ivy and I were on duty together for the predawn shift. I was heating milk on the stove in the nursery when we heard strange sounds coming from the adjoining room. Fearing it was M. Dionne, snooping around in what is now the nurses’ office, Ivy ducked under the sheet separating the two rooms without taking a lamp. The room was empty. She was about to turn back when she spied shadows moving on the porch outside, and, as she watched, one of the shapes took the form of a man, and the window creaked open.

Ivy screamed. I rushed into the room, and, within seconds, it seemed, M. Dionne was hurtling down the stairs in his nightclothes, Mme. Dionne, despite her still substantial girth, only a few steps behind him. The man at the window vanished. M. Dionne dashed barefoot out the door in hot pursuit. There is still no telephone at the farmhouse, no way to summon help, so we lit all the lamps and invited Mme. Dionne to join us in the nursery. I roused everyone from the nurses’ cabin, and the six of us sat nervously awaiting M. Dionne’s return. Sometime later he burst back into the farmhouse saying he was taking the truck to fetch the Mounties, but Mme. Dionne was hysterical, begging him to stay and protect us all until morning. I can’t sleep, none of us can, although the Dionnes have retreated upstairs.


August 20, 1934

TWO RCMP CONSTABLES have been assigned to watch over the Dionne farmhouse, night and day. We are all hugely relieved, although it is two more mouths to feed and two more people tied up in the lives of our five little girls. I was still rattled and spent yesterday and today back at Mother and Father’s and will spend the night tonight. Father isn’t remotely interested in what could have happened out at the farmhouse. He’s ranting and raving about the new president of Germany. I can’t understand why he cares about things so many thousands of miles away when there are real dangers right here, in our own backyard.


August 22, 1934

NURSE ELLIS, THE Anglophone Red Cross nurse, has quit. The tension here is simply too much. I walked into the kitchen earlier in the day when she was having a set-to with Mme. Dionne, having caught Madame lifting Cécile out of the incubator with her bare hands. Nurse Ellis’s French, however, wasn’t up to the task of negotiating.

“No, Madame! Non-non-non. Vous ne . . . You mustn’t!”

I opened my mouth, but before I could say anything Nurse Ellis had lunged toward Mme. Dionne, whose wide face, shiny with perspiration, now flared beet red. She swiveled on her sturdy haunch and snarled, curling her shoulder over the startled Cécile and looking every bit like a bear protecting her cub. Mme. Dionne’s dress, I couldn’t help but notice, was the same one she’d worn yesterday to milk the cows, the skirt dusty from kneeling in the garden plot most of the morning.

Undeterred, Nurse Ellis swooped around the other side of the incubator, grasping Cécile, whose precious face pinched closed as she began bleating like a lamb. This might have turned into a true tug-o’-war, but perhaps Mme. Dionne had been bracing for the challenge, had been seeking it, because she relinquished her little bundle without a struggle and instead burst into a high-pitched defense of her rights. Her French patter, lightning quick, was utterly lost on Nancy Ellis, who countered with a flood of Newfie brogue that even I had trouble understanding, save for the parts that parroted the doctor’s rules and regulations. I slipped quietly out the kitchen door and darted to the nurses’ shack to summon the Captain before Cécile or anyone else got caught in the cross fire. M. Dionne must have gotten wind of the hullaballoo as well, because within minutes he was charging across the back pasture like a bull to a flag.

Nurse Ellis went off shift not long after. I forgot about the exchange, not even thinking to mention it to Ivy when she came back out to the nursery that evening and we got busy settling the girls for the night and catching up on the day’s washing and charts. But sometime after dusk, Nurse Ellis came flapping back to the farmhouse from the nurses’ cabin in her nightdress, very upset, saying she’d woken to the sound of someone trying to jimmy the window. “A man’s arm,” she kept whimpering. “It was a man’s hairy arm.” The policemen were summoned and did a full search of the property but found nothing amiss. We stayed up half the night trying to calm her down, to no avail.