Nova Scotia 1796. Cora is an orphan recently arrived from Jamaica with her adoptive parents, Leah and Silas, who took her in after her mother died in childbirth. Her first experience of snow is something she is going to have to get used to. She has never felt this cold.
“This new, muffled world does strange things to sound. Her heels kick up snow as she walks and it is easy to imagine that soft noise as it lands is something else creeping behind her, close as a shadow. She looks around. Nothing. She is alone.”
Cora frequently reminisces about life in Jamaica. Her birth father left when her mother fell pregnant. Despite this, life back then was filled with warmth, both metaphorically and in terms of the climate.
“Plentiful meat — chickens and cattle roaming. Hunts for wild hogs in the forest that they roasted over a roaring bonfire. Sturdy houses with provision plots, the bounty of cayenne pepper, Trees weighed down with coconuts. Fish from the nearby river. Days of even length and always warm. The changing of the seasons marked only by the coming and goings of the rain. A hundred families living in peace and plenty.”
Back in Jamaica Silas didn’t drink, but now they’re in Nova Scotia he does and Cora resents his unpredictable moods, feeling both afraid and angry about what he might do. Leah grows quieter by the day, maintaining her duty of being a traditional, obedient Jamaican wife, even though they find themselves in the small northern community of Preston on the other side of the world, where things work very differently from home. Cora decides to patiently bide her time through the cold Canadian winter and into the following spring. Then she will run away:
“A chance comes in March. Old Joe, their neighbour, falls sick. Leah goes round for the day to help his wife tend to him. Silas heads out to Maroon Hall for a meeting with Colonel Montague James and [their little boy] Benjamin goes for lessons at the chapel. Cora is alone for the day. The forest calls to her. Slipping into it feels like unfurling stiff wings.”
And once Cora is in the midst of it, she is overcome by the wondrous nature contained within it:
“It rained that morning, but little patches of snow still dot the ground. She understands, as she goes on, that in all her previous walks she was moving too quickly. Stamping the ground, sending the creatures of the forest scattering. If she stands still for a moment, considering her next path, that’s when she sees what secrets the woods have kept. A fox, its fur a shock of red against the brown and silver bark of the trees. A muskrat, a long-tailed rodent that scuttles along the edge of a half-frozen lake. And even a hare, its fur as white as the snow, almost invisible until it leaps, dashes fleet-footed amongst the rocks and tree roots, its little body stretched long with each bound.”
Cora doesn’t know why she returns to her guardians’ house. A subconscious gesture, perhaps, to support Leah who is caught in the crossfire of acrimony between Silas and Cora. Instead she only spends a few snatched hours each day with the girl she has felt herself being watched by during her walks. Agnes, as she eventually reveals her name is, has been living alone in the forest for some time — a few months she thinks — as she tells Cora. Drawn to each other by their respective precarious positions, the two girls become friends, a relationship that grows strong enough for Cora to feel hurt when, one day, she arrives at the clearing where Agnes has been camping only to discover her gone. But while she is still standing there, overwhelmed and confused, looking at the scorched patch of grass left by the cooking fires Agnes made, she appears from between the trees. Explaining that she is moving to where she usually stays over the summer months, Agnes invites Cora to join her. Cora is tempted, but is unsure about living out in the wild.
Things come to a head one night when, returning home from a ball at the Governor’s mansion which local society deems it’s mandatory to attend, Silas, drunk on rum, shouting abuse at her hits Cora across the face, making her fall into the mud. On picking herself up, she runs off into the forest to find Agnes.
Over time Cora learns to appreciate nature in a whole new way. As though by osmosis, she absorbs Agnes’ understanding and knowledge of this different world. She is awed by its sense of peace.
“Down by the sea a mist blankets everything. Dew, not frost on the ground. Cora is struck by the signs of new life — small shoots springing from the soil, buds unfurling. Somewhere in the forest will be moose calves and bear cubs stumbling after their mothers. The seasons are a cycle of death and rebirth. Cora thinks she understands more about the people she has met here, Thursday [an enslaved farm labourer] and Agnes. Now that she has lived through winter and spring into summer, she sees why, for all their differences, they are alike. They have a watchfulness about them. A patience. It must come from this thawing time. Waiting for warmth again.”
When Leah, under pressure from Silas, reveals that Cora’s birth mother had been born into slavery and had not been free, as she had been led to believe, Cora feels betrayed. She has been living a lie, no longer sure of who she is. Cora decides the time has come to break ties with Leah and Silas and finally join Agnes in the forest. Slowly Agnes’ and Cora’s relationship turns into love — a love they can be open about, living alone in the forest, but that on their rare visits to nearby towns, they need to keep secret.
The scene relating the novel’s final twist, which results in a protracted court case, is rather uninspired and dull. The story reaches a natural conclusion once the trial’s outcome is known. The author, however, chooses to add another three chapters describing what happens to the characters after the trial ends — all things which can easily be gleaned from everything that has already taken place. It seems a shame for the reader to be left no room to use their imagination and personal perspective.
Any Cop?: A slow-burn of a novel, possessing a kind of refined quietude lacking in Eleanor Shearer’s much more story-driven début, River Sing Me Home (2023).
Carola Huttmann
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