Lily's Story Read online

  Regardless of party affiliation or ideological bent, Lily learned that there were four elements common to a politician’s life: food, liquor, gossip and sex. Indeed, she soon became adept at identifying parliamentary loyalties not by the swagger and fire of the rhetoric but by the method through which the fourth element was realized. The very first evening she attended one of these salons – radiant in Pamela’s ‘best’, her hair brushed to perfection, her eyes alight with curiosity and undirected intelligence – Lily was standing suitably aloof from a heated exchange about the abomination of separate school rights, intent on following the swing of the argument, when she felt a broad, fingerless appendage slink its way across the stretched silk at her lower back.

  “Don’t let those Orangemen put ideas into your pretty head,” whispered the owner of the errant hand into her left ear. Lily turned to see Dr. Michaelmas, the ardent Reformer, smiling behind his trimmed moustaches.

  “It’s not my head concerns me at the moment,” Lily said, slipping to one side and casting him an ambivalent smile. Without a doubt, she concluded, you could tell a Reformer because they were all sly touch, accidental nudge, a fleshy press in tight corners. She assumed they believed too passionately in the causes of justice and individual liberty to take full-frontal advantage of maids or vulnerable lady’s companions. The Old Tories, on the other hand, because of their advanced infirmities or belief in divine right, where the boldest. Judge Maitland, for example, stalked her in the den on the pretext of discussing recipes and tried to pinch her bum through two layers of crinoline. “My God, you’re a little beauty,” he drooled, aiming a claw at the exposed pink of her bosom, his lust positively aquiline. Lily knew she could scream for help, but instead she curled up her fingers and delivered a muted rebuff to the old scarecrow’s lower abdomen – not hard enough to cripple his intent outright yet insistent enough to make him wheeze, double, clutch his ringing bells, and hobble towards the parlour. She watched him trying to straighten his stride as he headed for the brandy. “Got your limp again?” said McWhinney, the clothier. “Touch of the gout,” whistled his Honour. At the close of the evening Lily came up to the startled jurist and said, “Here’s the recipes you asked for. Mrs. Templeton helped me write them out for you.”

  The radicals, or Clear Grits as they styled themselves, so loved the buzz of their own perorations that they made their passes at her in verbal terms only: innuendo, double entendre, a sotto voce vulgarism when desire overwhelmed – though she had little doubt that, were their sundry propositions to be accepted, they might have flashed the genuine metal. However, they soon discovered that this waif “from the sticks” was unconscionably swift at rejoinder and not as accustomed to “holding her peace” as a real lady would be.

  “Women’ll never play a role in politics,” declared Andrew Plympton, sitting member for Kent. Lily had been nodding politely to his insatiable sermonizing for almost twenty minutes. “You ask them to talk and they gossip; you ask them to act and they dither. Politics is a tough, hard grind to hold your nose to. Women,” he said, lowering his voice and leering into her bodice, “are not up to it, their house is divided, they’re a soft touch, if you get what I mean.”

  “Like this?” Lily said, squeezing a forefinger with unimpeachable naiveté into the pudge of his protruding belly. His blush bordered on rouge.

  “That orphling brat of Templeton’s got a wicked tongue in her head,” he told a consoling judge later. “She needs to be taken in hand.” But of course they had already tried that.

  Not once had she been accosted by any of the Orangemen. They were either uninterested in anything but the eradication of popery or were put off by the gold cross she wore on these occasions.

  Lily’s rebuffs and inventive parries did not escape the notice of Alice Templeton. “You’re learning fast and well,” she said with undisguised admiration.

  “Are they all like that?”

  “Most of them, I’m afraid. It’s the climate.”

  Lily laughed but then said soberly, “Why do we put up with it?”

  Mrs. Templeton sighed deeply enough to accommodate the feelings of most of her sex. “There’s an awful lot more we have to put with,” she said.

  Not me, Lily thought. There must be another way.

  3

  When Mrs. Templeton heard that Lily had never seen the Lake, she was shocked, and set about to remedy the situation. Lily politely refused her offer of a cruise on the Michigan or one of the other steamers now plying the water routes on a regular basis.

  “You mean you wish to walk down there and just look at it?” she said, swivelling on the piano bench to face Lily.

  “Yes, that’s all.”

  “But, pet, why didn’t you do so when you lived at Bridie’s? The sand beach is no more than half-a-mile through the pinery back of your place. You mean to say in all the years you lived there you never once saw the Lake?”

  “Auntie was strict about that,” Lily said defensively. “She was always worried about the fishermen. Besides, she never liked me just traipsin’ off on my own. Could you blame her?”

  “Not at all,” said Mrs. Templeton, closing the sheet music. “Goodness knows a number of the town girls’ve been accosted by the riff raff down there cuttin’ brush for the railway. Fishermen, I hear tell, are even worse.” Her tone was less-than-serious.

  “May I go, then?”

  “Of course, pet. I’m teasin’ a bit. You just follow Front Street until it turns into the train the Slocum people sometimes use to get down to the fishery. Just before it comes out at the swamp below the beach, veer right – you’ll see an Indian trail that’ll take you over the dunes to Canatara beach. Of course, you could also walk up the coast past the fisherman’s shanties, but I wouldn’t advise it.”

  “I’ll go right now, if I may?”

  “Well, all right. But I was tunin’ up here to start your dancin’ lessons,” she said. “We mustn’t wait too long. Never know when a big fancy-ball might be upcomin’.”

  Though it had been seven years since she had walked through thick brush, Lily felt quite at home on the fishery trail with the pines flaring overhead, the undergrowth spare and cushioned – inhabited mainly by shadows and sudden gusts of brilliant light where the sun fitfully penetrated. This trail was worn and clear. Ten minutes or so into it, she heard the shouts of the men with their nets along the river bank sweeping for pickerel. Just ahead the woods brightened, so Lily, her instincts surprisingly sharp, peered to the right and spotted the crossed-blaze – perhaps ten years or more in age – that signaled a Pottawatomie trail. She entered its welcoming shadow and with mounting excitement moved from mark to mark towards the sound of waves breaking in the near distance. She was scanning the trunks at eye-level when she found herself abruptly in the full glare of early afternoon sun. The roaring of the waves was much louder, but when she looked ahead expecting to see the Lake, she saw only a series of sand-dunes about twelve feet in height.

  Lily took off her shoes and stockings, dashed barefoot through the hot sand, fell scampering up the nearest dune, got up – her palms burning, her legs scything until she stood on top and caught her first glimpse of the Freshwater Sea of the Hurons. What she saw initially was a single colour – blue – stretching to the north and west so far that it became indistinguishable from the sky. The sun’s light and the sun’s heat were lost in a greater immensity: the vast, tense energy of water on the move – homeward. When Lily was able to pull her gaze from the vanishing point directly to the north-west – the very spot where Arcturus would find his reflection that night – she saw and heard at last the reach and yearn of the wavelets on the shore. Their sound was the intermittent, quiescent breath of a hibernating bear. Below the brassy surface that lay so placidly across the whole of her vision, Lily could feel the pulse of a cobalt heart whose energies charged the secret and vital and imperishable parts of the earth’s anatomy. There was here, she knew, the sign of some pilgrimage whose spirit she shared.

 
Then, a girl again, she dashed across the crystalline beach and splashed and paddled and strutted and planted her footprints in the permeable sands. It was Indian summer: the air was warm and thin as new wine, the water icy, the sand purging. She did not care to leave.

  When she did, she mounted the highest dune north from the trail and looked back towards the townsite. The houses of Port Sarnia were not yet visible. But she could see – where the Lake poured into the chasm of the St. Clair only half-a-mile across – the shanties in which Slocum’s people kept their nets and cleaned their catch. The north-west breeze blew the stench of dead fish inland. Between the edge of the pinery and the River lay a quarter-mile of swamps full of disheveled cattails and yellowing milkweed. Could they ever build a railroad over that? To the far south-west Lily saw also the palisades of Fort Gratiot, the Stars and Stripes saluting self-importantly above it. Overhead, herring gulls whirled and rehearsed their mating dance.

  As she was about to start looking for the blazed trail, Lily noted that to the north the sand-dunes were thicker, reaching far back into some brush composed of runt alders and hawthorn. Something drew her that way, away from the marked trail. The dunes gradually diminished, as if at one time they had been waves whose reward for such brave and ceaseless repetition had been the blessing of silication. At the last of these unfulfilled crests lay a small, rolling field dotted with dwarf trees. The pinery enclosed it on the three remaining sides. Though there was nothing visible to the unpractised eye to suggest that something unnatural lay here concealed, Lily sensed immediately that she was in a graveyard. The breeze did not penetrate this far but Lily felt the eddies and parabolas of moving, sentient beings occupying space. She stepped carefully ahead. The grave plots were not clearly evident, the knot-grass and hoarhound and sand-burs slightly smaller and less robust than those at the edges of each site. Moreover, the ground had sunk almost imperceptibly, marking the modest dimensions of these nether abodes.

  After a while, Lily spotted the new grave; its sand was piled two inches above ground to accommodate the natural sinking later on; clusters of grass had been replanted to root and flourish and camouflage in the coming spring. Winter would soon provide its own disguise.

  You are here at last, Lily thought. You came under cover of dark and they laid you to rest among the other nameless wanderers and refugees, the outcasts and pariahs and survivors of genocide, the renegades, and the prophets like you, Southener. I haven’t forgotten the jasper heart. Already it has brought me more luck that I ever hoped for. I wish I could tell you about it. And I won’t forget the vows. Somehow I’ll find the sacred place in these woods and return the magic to it. I’ll come here every time I can, and honour your grave. Surely here, with swamps and dunes all around, you’ll be safe. No one would ever want this land for anything. No one but me will ever know you’re here.

  Suddenly she thought of her mother’s headstone, alone in an unfrequented corner of some stranger’s field, the script of her name chipped out by Sounder so crudely no one would recall whose soul sought refuge below it. I must go back there. I will.

  “Lily, pet, you’re back at last,” said an excited Mrs. Templeton.

  “I hope you weren’t worried,” Lily said, embarrassed by the state of her attire.

  “Heavens no, I just couldn’t wait to tell you. It’s all been settled. The new station’ll be ready in a week and the first train is comin’ in on the nineteenth. There’ll be a dinner and a ball.”

  “Are we invited?” Lily said.

  “Invited? We’re givin’ it! And you got exactly two weeks to learn how to dance!”

  4

  A few minutes after the appointed hour, the crowd, gathered on either side of the cleared cut that cradled the tracks, heard the first sound of a locomotive in Lambton. Two thousand necks craned south-eastward where the rails, a mere three hundred yards away, curved past the town’s edge and sank into the gloam of bushland. Nothing was seen but a glint of cold sun on the shine of iron. The dignitaries, more than a hundred of them, pulled their coats tightly over their chests and felt the crushing obligation of having to appear moderately disinterested.

  The sound – when it came – was low, ferric, iron-on-iron, gaining volume and pitch as its mechanical, pistoning repetitions consumed miles and scattered wildlife helter-skelter through the shuddering swamps and fernshaws. Trunk and bole and root quivered like tuning forks in its wake. Its thunder drowned forest-sounds unchallenged since the ice laid down its alluvial silence. Mouse and mole abandoned hollows in the earth eons-old and fled, dizzy and blind, through the slicing light. Unable to recognize its own voice, a trumpeter swan went mad in its music. In unison, the engine shrieked steam.

  The onlookers responded to the steam-whistle as one: a raucous, antiphonal cheer went up from the town choir. It had barely subsided when the first smoke was spotted above the bush, occasioning another cheer which was instantly answered by a blast of steam louder than the first and carrying in its cry the intimations of an irreversible momentum, a manic potency, a hungering for the future on any terms. It was at once a whoop of self-congratulatory joy and a uvular lament for losses not yet discerned. The worshippers at trackside watched the chuffing puffs of woodsmoke smite the air with the force of a behemoth’s breath. Moments later the charred stack itself appeared to float out of the bush before the entire juggernaut hove into full view and, at speeds only dreamt of, roared past their applause and braked towards a stop at the platform where the pooh-bahs dropped all pretense of impassion.

  The locomotive itself was the principal source of wonder and mock terror: with #52 painted in gold letters across its fern-green skin and alongside its name: Prospero. It pounded into the station on four gigantic driving wheels – its sleek cow-catcher bobbing on the smaller bogie-wheels; its open tender plugged with stovewood and swaying behind it like a dervish; its brass headlamp that could embellish sunlight and intimidate darkness with Cyclopean aplomb; its three passenger-cars lurching and hopping to every flinch of locomotive energy. In the unglazed window of the cab, a dwarf of a man was slowly being raised in the grip of a lever bigger than a grenadier’s broadsword. Before the station – an imposing, pseudo-gothic structure of stone, red brick and elm – young Prospero skidded to a halt with a hiss and a screech that stunned the parishioners: a keening skirl of a cry like that of a disembowelled recruit at Culloden. The Great Western Railway had arrived.

  Lily did learn to dance in the two weeks before the event-of-the century. As Mrs. Templeton never tired of saying, “The girl’s a natural!” Natural or not it took some practice to even begin to disentangle the intricacies of the quadrille, galop, valse, polka and inevitable lancers. While Mrs. Templeton played a suitable tune on the piano, his Worship would act as Lily’s partner, then hop to one side and quickly demonstrate what the other couples of the quadrille would be up to – often forgetting where he was or two-stepping inadvertently into the galop. One of the three would invariably begin to laugh, setting the other two off and deflecting the learning process by several rods. In the waltz, or valse as it was then called, his Worship was superb, guiding Lily and his wayward paunch around the parlour in mutual three-quarter delight. Lily could not help humming, though it was apparently a form of impoliteness.

  “Let your feet feel the music,” Mrs. Templeton said, pouncing on the keys.

  “But she is, sweet, she is; her whole body is,” puffed the Mayor, sensing the triphammer pulse of the tune through Lily’s right hand and the small of her back, and marveling at the weightless power of her presence. She will do well, this one, he thought. Suddenly, he loved his wife more than ever, and that night surprised her with his need and its slow, caring aftermath.

  When the train had come to a full and panting stop, it debouched onto the freshly planked platform several squads of V.I.P.’s – some genuine, many self-appointed. The forward platoon consisted of Sir Oliver Steele, vice-president of the Great Western, with Lady Marigold Steele, and the Mayor of London trailed by four
councilors and their wives. Then with a scandalously blonde, unattached female anchored to his right arm came a scandalously handsome figure-of-a-man soon identified as the notorious roue of London and Toronto, Stanley R. Dowling, known abroad as ‘Mad-Cap’. Not only had be debauched a succession of willing virgins, but it was rumoured he had been drummed out of the militia. For reasons no respectable person could understand or commend, he had, from obscure origins, made his way up in the world and in a society whose standards were obviously rotting at the core. He was said to have been made a director of the Great Western and to have speculated recklessly on local railway ventures that left him rich and the towns bankrupt. Of course, one had to make allowances for rumour. And success.

  Lily was looking at Lady Steele as the official party slow-marched towards his Worship’s group, behind which the lady folk of the town were expectantly assembled. Lady Steele was several decades younger than her beknighted husband, with fresh-scrubbed skin and sloe eyes bearing a look of distant, wry amusement and something netherward wanting to be plumbed and disclosed. Dowling, Lily noted, smiling publicly at his tow-haired poppet but cast sidelong glances at Lady Steele, who absorbed them, unreturned. He himself, it was clear, would be lord of any demesne he chose to occupy: with his jet-black hair, browns and side-whiskers; eyes bitumous and smouldering; chin masculine in jut and intent; carriage regal and never without purpose; the flesh full, grateful for the good things life had nurtured it with, with just a hint of puffiness and sag that would later plague his middle years. For now, he was a man in his prime, with poise and presence. His dowry: the future.