Lily's Story Read online

  As his Worship shook hands with the worthies from London and Toronto, the band struck up a martial air and the crow, crushing in around the train and dignitaries, applauded wildly. If they had any doubts about the intrusion of railways into their lives, they did not express them on this occasion. As the formal introductions and exchange of greetings were taking place, Lily looked anxiously at the throng of faces about her. Just as they were turning to pass through the station to their carriage, she spotted them. Uncle Chester grinned and waved excessively; Aunt Bridie, apparently, did not see her.

  A dinner was served at six o’clock for the more than one hundred and fifty well-wishers and their guests. All were men. In 1858 and for some years to come, the wives and darlings of celebrities did not grace the tables of such public colloquies. Hence, the ‘intelligence’ emanating from the event had to be derived from second-hand sources. Fortunately the ladies of the town had access to a number of impeccable, though not coincident, accounts of what transpired. Since this was the largest dinner ever held in Port Sarnia, the only room big enough to accommodate the guests and their appetites was in the Orange Lodge near the St. Clair Inn. Thus it was that Mrs. Josephine Salter, whose kitchen was called upon to cater the meal, was able to store up enough gossip to feed her habit for a year; likewise, at a lower level, for Char Hazelberry whose own kitchen provided the tarts and trifle, and who luckily was required to bring along her best girls, Betsy and Winnie, to aid in the service thereof and in the dissemination of news thereafter.

  No less than eighteen toasts were proposed and replied to – with claret for the elect and water for the saved. His Worship led the way with one to the Queen Herself, followed rapidly by those to the president of the Great Western, his board of directors, his English backers and the British Parliament. A toast was even offered to the President of the United States of America and responded to at length by the Mayor of Port Huron, Michigan, whose country also had a stake in these enterprises. According to the report in The Observer his American Worship emphasized that two things were held in common by both peoples – republicans and monarchists – a tradition of fair play and justice as well as an unshakeable belief in progress, a progress rendered visible and demarcated by the march of iron through the untracked wastes of the continent. Indeed, he concluded, the password of both great nations was identical: onward. The applause was deafening. Lily heard it, sitting in her room – with Bonnie and Mrs. Templeton fussing over her with pins and thread, and thinking only of Aunt Bridie there at the station in the midst of such commotion: staring at nothing.

  The ball, in the concourse of the new station, began at nine in the evening and through its twenty-two dances endured until almost three in the morning. The town band of Goderich, who had come down by steamer in the afternoon, provided a passable imitation of its betters at Osgoode in Toronto. The gentlemen of Port Sarnia – attired in the severe, black formality of that period – offered a striking contrast to the uninhibited exfoliation of the wives and young ladies. All agreed that it was a heaven-blessed sight to see against the drab umbers of late autumn such butterfly hues as danced in the gowns, coifs and cheeks of the weaker sex. The only exceptions, on the stronger side, were a handful of elder townsmen who had dusted off their faded militia uniforms from the time of the rebellion, and five young rakes from London, three of them in the scarlet-gold-and-white of the British regular and the other two in the blue tunics of the new militia unit just formed in Middlesex. Needless to say, their military vigour and courtly manners did not go unappreciated by at least half of those assembled.

  Mrs. Templeton, flush with excitement and her first sip of French champagne, her lashes aflutter under the sizzling gas-jets, taxied up to Lily and said, “It’s filled already, pet. They saw you in the promenade and near trampled me to death to sign up.” She was waving Lily’s dance-card which she herself had two-thirds filled out – before their grand entrance – with local worthies and beaux and, as she called them, “regrettable necessaries”. “Including”, she now added, “several of the nicest catches from London.”

  Lily, too, had been keeping her eyes and ears open. She watched Lady Marigold in earnest conversation with Sir Oliver, and nearby Mad-Cap Dowling was chatting animatedly with one of the smooth-cheeked young soldiers and pouring assent into the upturned gaze of his blonde devotee, but managing all the same to cast little semaphores of affection towards the dark lady. She in turn would incline her ringlets slightly in his direction, lending him part of a damask cheek and the pip of one of her sloe-eyes. It was during such an exchange that Lily noticed for the first time one of the two militiamen standing beside Dowling. Next to the regulars and to Dowling himself, the young corporal certainly seemed non-descript: he was of medium height, his hair a sandy tint in the uncertain light, the face oval, beardless but for a thin moustache, fine-boned, housing two eyes that darted about, she thought fancifully, like curious bluebirds avid for the high air. She could see him straining to fill out the tunic, to accommodate its formal projection of power, but there was a restlessness in the very way he stood with his weight on one foot and his hands fretting for a place to light. When he turned in her direction, Lily saw the force of his glance, felt a vulnerable masculinity upon her, and realized with a start that she had been staring at him for no less than five minutes. He gave her a polite across-the-room smile and rejoined the conversation at hand. No matter. The cause was already won. That strange sense of knowing-for-sure, of seeing the thing-before-its-shadow – which she had given up as a lost jewel of her childhood – came back with a rush of blood to her cheeks and a thumping of her heart in its bower. I will share my life with this man; he will love me as no other.

  The band from Goderich had just struck up a quadrille.

  “Here comes your first admirer,” said Mrs. Templeton. Gratefully Lily let herself be swept into the square by his Worship. Her beloved was not among the set.

  Once the dancing actually began, Lily found herself completely engaged in it. She couldn’t think when there was music in her, she could only feel, and mime that feeling with her feet and arms and the bow of her body in the will of the dance – as if, hobbled by cadence, her spirit could soar. She galloped and polka-ed and waltzed and quadrilled. Her black-suited partners – so cordial, so deferential in their requests – became faceless extensions of her own need to make shapes in the smoky night-air, to bend them to the same obedience gripping her. Between dances, however, where couples chattered, sipped champagne, nibbled sandwiches for solace, or dampened their fantasies in the public loos – Lily felt anxious and drained. With only two dances left, her beloved had not by chance appeared in the same set nor was he, as Fate ought to have allowed, one of her partners. Delicately she asked Mrs. Templeton if she knew the names of any of the military gentlemen from London. “Oh yes, pet. Mr. Carleton and Mr. James are both lieutenants in the fuseliers.” “Oh.” “The others I don’t know.” “Oh.” “Though one of them, mind you – I can’t recall which right off – did ask for a place on your card.” Lily’s hopes slipped a notch. The waltz in the middle group had been taken by the militiaman she had earlier seen beside her lover, and she had been too shy to ask him any question – even his name after she’d forgotten it – despite the fact that they were dancing together, that he pulled her cheek close to his own sweaty one, and that he averred she was the prettiest girl in the room, etc. That’s that, then, she thought.

  She looked up from her card to see just who “Mr. Marshall” might be when he said, not a foot from her, “I believe I have the honour of this dance. My name is Tom Marshall. I’m from London.”

  The penultimate dance was the fast-paced lancers with eight couples pacing through the military complexity of its steps and manoeuvres and musical stratagems. There was little opportunity to converse – even if Lily had been able to think of anything to say, though she ruefully noted that one couple – obviously lovers – managed a series of looks and touching that were more eloquent than any tête-à-têt
e. Nonetheless, she felt Tom’s arms momentarily about her waist, her hand clasped in his, and confirmed her premonition of his vulnerable strength, his erratic energy, his need for collaboration. She placed her face naked before his gaze, released to him for scrutiny and care a locked part of herself through the dance as far as it might flow. He smiled at her when they were apart and possessed her with his grasp when they sashayed or twirled in linked curves. He wafted words to her and she nodded as if they were real.

  When the lancers ended, he ferried her towards the table where the punch was wilting in the heat. Now they would talk and it would begin. He placed a crystal goblet in her hands. She drank thirstily.

  “Lily, you’re the best dancer of the lot. Surely you can’t be from Port Sarnia,” he said with a twinkle.

  She was about to reply when his eye was caught by some movement to their left. “Damn,” he muttered to himself. “Would you please excuse me, Miss Ramsbottom; I’m wanted by my party. It’s been a pleasure meeting you. I hope we’ll meet again.”

  We will, Lily thought. She thanked him and watched him walk over to the Dowling group. Lady Marigold and her husband had joined them. When the music started for the last dance, a Strauss waltz, she saw His Nibs take the withered fingertips of the judge’s wife; then Dowling put his arm about the waist of the dark lady and they strolled with utmost ease to wait for the music to stir and legitimate their illicit lusts. So engrossed was Lily in this minor melodrama that she almost missed seeing Corporal Marshall provide a military escort for Miss Platinum to stage-centre where, the second the music began, he clasped her pliant bodice and pulled the bullets of her breast against the blue shield of his own.

  You will come back, Tom Marshall. I know.

  I hope.

  Lily was in a deep, daylight sleep – following a night of restless dreams and near-dreams – when she was awakened by Mrs. Templeton gently shaking her hand. She blinked at the invading light. “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “It’s your Auntie,” Mrs. Templeton said.

  Lily saw Aunt Bridie hovering behind Mrs. Templeton, her face ashen.

  “Are you all right, Auntie?”

  “Yes, love. It’s your Uncle Chester.” Her voice was close to breaking. “His heart give out,” she said.

  8

  1

  The year was born in hope. For the County’s farmers, after the ‘black frost’ of 1859, there was not much else left. In the days before welfare and government subsidies, those who tilled the soil were left with charred blossom, shrivelled root and wizened leafage to mock them through the hot summer of ’fifty-nine with little chance that they could afford even to buy seed for next year’s planting and some chance in the back townships that they might starve or chew their way through a winter of turnip, chicory and hazelnut. But then it must be remembered that death was more common, more random and variegated in those days. Typhus, cholera and diphtheria trimmed the infant population with regular and reliable horror, and struck down among the adults those who were weakening, unwary or conspicuously wanton. Moreover, the high cost of progress – of living up to the County’s adopted motto, ongoing – appeared to be routinely accepted by the populace. Certainly the 440 shipping disasters listed for 1859, at a cost of $668,565.00 and 105 lives, offered no deterrent to the expansion of water commerce – the taming of the Great Lakes – nor did it in any wise discourage excursionists and pleasure-seekers from boarding hundreds of cruiser-craft and heading out ‘into the blue’. In September 1860 the excursion boat Lady Elgin went down with a loss of 287 lives. The disasters on the new, often jerry-built, railroads, though not as calamitous, were as frequent and as cavalier. Notwithstanding, the Great Western moved more than 800,000 passengers per annum in Upper Canada in these years. And the Grand Trunk had designs of its own on the landscape. Elsewhere, bridges were being dreamed and flung across the St. Lawrence at Quebec and at Lewiston, swing ferries wobbled and broke in the St. Clair rapids, canals deepened and widened – each leap forward taking its routine toll in killed and maimed, the latter being cast upon the public charity, to be pitied as freaks or shunned as exiles in their own land.

  One of the more curious cataclysms occurred in the backwater township of Enniskillen, where a recently arrived homesteader, in desperate search for water to keep his stock and kin alive through the drought, dug straight into the earth and struck, not a spring, but a suppurating ooze of molasses-like ‘goo’ which no amount of packing could staunch. Naturally he abandoned the place for more healthful terrain. Though the significance of the latter event would not be appreciated for several more years, and only then by the prescient and the daring, few politically aware citizens of the County missed the import of John Brown’s aborted uprising at Harper’s Ferry in the fall of 1859: to the Tories it signified the folly of all rebellious acts however noble their cause; to the Reformers it was a painful reminder that the passion to be free, though universal and irrepressible, was – like love itself – rarely a direct, simple, unadulterated affair.

  But the following spring of 1860 seemed blessed by that same Providence whose hand was ever on the tiller and the throttle. Sun and rain collaborated so that the wheat throve and the fruit trees blossomed on cue. Even Aunt Bridie began once again to entertain the notion of a future. She had become resigned to the fact that all of their efforts had now to be put into maintaining a few cash crops to be sold, at outrageously low prices, at the farm gate. Nonetheless, she persevered through two long winters with her quilting despite the onset of arthritis, which she mocked as “a little twinge or two to remind me I’m gettin’ old an’ to keep me honest.” Much of their precious cash had to be used for them merely to survive the ravages of the black frost, but as Auntie often said, “We’re holdin’ our own with our heads up, lass, don’t ever forget that.” But Lily sensed a new hollowness to Auntie’s aphorisms, a whisper of world-weariness in them. Many times before the glorious spring of ’sixty, in the daylight dark of the cottage as they sat sewing with Uncle Chester snoring anonymously in his wicker, Lily glimpsed the panic in her Aunt’s smile, and found it so painful, so terrifying that she had to look away, ashamed and aching. She knew that Auntie Bridie could not live long without hope: her resignation – so deeply a part of her Celtic heritage and uncontaminated by Christianity – was in her only a temporary manifestation designed to help her endure momentary, even prolonged, setbacks. But it was not constitutional: she would die rather than succumb to the orthodox debilitations of her pioneering sisters.

  With Uncle Chester now an invalid, there was no talk of Lily’s going back into service even though that expedient would have helped them a great deal. Someone had to nurse poor Uncle Chester, night and day, summer and winter. His heart attack had been real, and he was fortunate enough to have the doctor arrive from town too late to be of immediate assistance, and thus managed to survive. For several months he lay on Lily’s bed (she now slept on a cot in the kitchen) barely able to flick his eyes at her in appreciation as she fed him with a spoon, emptied his festering bedpan, bathed his bleached flesh, or ‘read’ to him the few stories from Mrs. Templeton’s Arabian Nights she had been able to memorize. By the spring of 1859 he was able to whisper “Thank you” in a hoarse guttural, like a wraith calling from some shallow part of purgatory.

  “I don’t pray much, Lily, as you know,” Bridie said. “But if I did, I’d ask my maker to take Chester back. Nobody oughta suffer like that.”

  Lily knew which of those two was suffering the most. Uncle’s eyes welled with tears of constant gratitude; they opened up at her with the unaffected love of a puppy; they had regained a kind of innocence. However, early in the summer of ’fifty-nine, even as the black frost’s legacy deepened, Chester murmured, moved, sat up, smiled, and became impossible. Aunt Bridie stared at him as if he had, for a second and more unforgivable time, betrayed her. But she did her duty. They bought him a wicker chair with feather pillows and wheels so that he could sit by the stove or on the flagstones in the sun or
be ferried about on short excursions through the garden and woodlot. His gratitude alas was not continuous nor his appreciation perfect. He whined and wheedled, threw tantrums and dinner plates, cried like a baby and grumbled like an octogenarian, and generally wallowed in self-pity.

  “I should’ve gone, like that,” he’d say, failing to make his fingers snap, “the world’d be a better place without old Chester in it.” Auntie would sever him with a stare, then relent and say without conviction, “But you’ll be up an’ walkin’ soon. Is there anythin’ special Lily can fix you for supper?”

  “Well, rhubarb tart’d be nice, but I expect it’s too late for that.” It invariably was, and he then had to be mollified with whatever second-best offer could be effected.

  If it hadn’t been for Bachelor Bill, the farm itself would have collapsed. When his wheat crop was wiped out by the black frost, he came to Aunt Bridie and asked her to buy his fields, leaving him only his shanty and garden, and to let him work as her hired hand for his food and a dribble of cash. Sniffing the scent of a future on the wind, Bridie went into town that very day and removed most of her life’s savings from the Bank of Upper Canada and doubled her land holdings when everyone else was retrenching or going under. Of course, a second killer frost and they would have lost everything.