Come to the Window
April 1918, Elizabeth Frame murders her new husband, Everett Dewis, hours after the wedding. Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, is a small fishing community by the Bay of Fundy, where journalist Tobias Havenshaw has been dispatched to report on the hearing.
Elizabeth is tall and “slim as a Christmas candle.” Wearing her wedding dress to her hearing, her “speech can seem like a pastiche of antiquities” as the judge halts the hearing to search for a dictionary. She describes the evening when, following their marital activities, she looks out on Parrsboro Harbor at a whale washed up on the beach and says, “come to the window.”. He wants to wait until morning, so she shoots him. Then Elizabeth drops a bombshell on the stunned court – weeks before marrying Everett, she married Oscar Asch in Halifax and now carries his child. Oh, and he gave her the wedding dress she wears. The hearing is interrupted by an explosion as the whale is dispatched with explosives. This hearing, very entertaining but resolving nothing, has been suspended when Elizabeth and the stenographer, Peter Lear, go on the lam.
While we check in periodically on Elizabeth and Peter, it is primarily Tobias’s story that threads throughout the novel with the final year of WWI and the raging Spanish flu as a backdrop. His wife, Amelia, arrives home from France, where she has been in working as a surgeon at the front; she continues working as a doctor in Halifax doing restorative surgeries on soldiers and battling the flu epidemic. Amelia and their marriage are very modern – too much for the time. But their relationship is so loving and delightful, and their banter has an exuberant energy. We meet many quirky characters whose uniqueness brings amusement to a story rich in language and description. A delightful, heartwarming novel.
