Lily's Story Read online

  Why didn’t you come, Tom? Lily thought, listening to the last of the toasts. She was as puzzled as she was hurt. The talisman had pulsed as she had held it; its augury was as clear as a proclamation. How had she mis-read it?

  “Great news, pet! I just knew the Prince had an’ eye on you! We’ve been invited aboard the Michigan! And –” Mrs. Templeton lowered her voice theatrically, “that old snoop of a Duke ain’t comin’.”

  But Lily knew whom the royal glance had favoured whenever discretion permitted. Seated two chairs from her at the woman’s table, the dark lady occupied her own special kind of throne.

  3

  Alice Templeton and Lily sat apart from the others on scarlet-striped deck chairs letting the warm September breeze ruffle their tea and parasols, and watching the guests preen and promenade before the princely presence. The ladies coasted by like bevies of exotic sea-birds looking for land. The men gathered for serious gossip around a ring of cigars. The Prince himself had changed into a smart blue tunic of only faintly military character with gilded epaulettes and splendid brass buttons. He stood in his proud accoutrements on the foredeck of the ship for all the world like a Viking commander daring the horizon to drop away or a Nelson staring down the two-eyed French. Surreptitiously he munched on a cookie as the conversation of Cap Dowling and his party of monopolizers drifted insubstantially around him. Undaunted, the young ladies, loosed from chaperones and made valiant by their fletched and crinolined finery, tacked and jibbed past the Commodore in hope that he might cast a mariner’s eye upon an unguarded throat, a careless ankle, a shameless coup d’oeil. The Prince hove to his duty.

  Ahead of them Lily could see only a vague horizon of mixed blue – sky and water – as if out here the elements were permitted to blend their irreconcilable properties, the ordinary bonds of space being temporarily forfeit. Behind them and to the west the vee of the shoreline grew faint. Lily began to feel queasy. She quit staring out at the water and turned back to catch Mrs. Booth-Pickering’s bitter denunciation of the Dowlings of this world. Lily noted that said apostate was engaged in an animated monologue with His Highness. A few feet away Lady Marigold – her luxuriant sensuality limned by a white hat and dress – observed her lover’s gestures with cunning impassivity, with the patience of instinct and chastening experience. While the debutantes and duennas fought against the debilitating sea-breeze by clutching hats to head, manning bumbershoots, and wheeling astern whenever it was propitious, Lady Marigold removed her hat and hair-pins and let the wind have its way. Lily remarked with some satisfaction that the Prince took every opportunity to glance over at the bereaved widow, though she gave no signal to either man.

  Dowling suddenly turned away from the Royal Guest and came over to the Templeton clique. “His Highness has had a long day,” he proclaimed. He’s going to take a nap in his quarters.”

  No one would have been terribly surprised if Cap had trailed His Eminence and joined him in his nap, but he did not. The Prince moved alone towards the cabin deck with the stiff grace of an aging monarch who relies more and more on his tunic and brass to carry the burden of noblesse oblige. There was a flutter and rearranging of plumage among the ladies, fresh cigars and configurations appeared amongst the men, and the ship – almost beyond landfall – circled and headed south-east towards civilization. A low mist had come up, blurring the horizon on all sides; the afternoon sun glowed carmine, shimmered and bled into the mist, eerie and menstrual.

  Lily was waiting to see if Lady Marigold would make her move when someone touched her sleeve and she turned round to find the Prince’s valet: “His Highness would like to see you in his suite,” he said as if announcing supper.

  It took a few seconds for the import of the message to reach Lily. When it did, she glanced about, saw that the Templetons were engaged, and followed the valet’s trails to the royal rooms. Actually the captain’s quarters had been hastily re-tailored in Detroit to fit the Royal Personage. When the man-servant opened the little varnished door with the brass knobs, Lily entered what would normally have served the skipper as office and sitting room. A large desk, a brocade settee and purplish Queen Anne chair struck Lily’s eye immediately. The Prince was not at home.

  “This way, miss,” the valet said, using his usher’s voice.

  Lily stepped through the opened door and entered a small chamber. The Prince was seated on an undersized, embroidered chair before an escritoire beneath the porthole. Smoky light poured in through it and fell diagonally across a twin to the Prince’s chair, across an oval Oriental rug on which Samurai contended with a specie of giant in defence of several robust, semi-clothed virgins, and over a vermillion-and-white scrolled quilt which made no pretense of hiding the silk sheets beneath it. This was, incontestably, a bedroom.

  Set up on the escritoire was a table cloth on which had been placed a silver bucket sprouting a bottle of champagne and two crystal glasses that would sing at the merest hint of a fingernail. A black cigar, cut but unlit, lurked in a gold ashtray.

  “Please, come in,” said the Prince rising and extending his hand with careless elegance towards the unoccupied chair. “It’s Lily, is it not?”

  Lily was so struck with the English orotundity of his voice – at once formal and casual, distant and ingratiating, a voice that would deliver speeches-from-the-throne as if they were Elizabethan sonnets – she did not immediately reply. “Yes, Your Highness,” she said. Then: “Lily Fairchild.”

  The Prince looked puzzled for a moment. “Please, sit down. Let me take your gloves and hat.”

  Lily sat on the edge of the chair. When she peeled off her elbow-length gloves, she tried to keep her palms down. In removing her hat she pulled out not only the hat-pin but the barrette that held her hair in check. It tumbled forward. She heard the royal breath indrawn. She didn’t look up again until he said, “Will you join me in a glass of champagne?”

  “Yes, please, Your –”

  “Call me Albert,” he said. “My mother does.”

  Lily laughed. “I don’t think I could,” she said.

  “Please forgive my informality,” he said, referring, Lily assumed, to the fact that he had removed his tunic, vest, collar and ties, and was seated in evident comfort in his trousers and open shirt. “Uniforms, I’m afraid, offer more pleasure to the adulating crowds than to the objects of their worship.”

  Lily smiled, quite aware that this was a quip used on many an occasion – in part to disguise the shyness, perhaps even uncertainty, she was sure she detected in his demeanour when she herself grew brave enough to look directly at him. He was popping the champagne cork with practised aplomb, but when he came to pour it, Lily saw his hand shake a little.

  “Damn!” he said when the bubbly hopped over the escritoire and down one of its legs – fizzing and exuberant. He was about to say he was sorry for the damn when Lily’s giggle cut him off. He grinned boyishly, then stared at her, puzzled but powerfully attracted.

  “What do we toast?” Lily said.

  “Well, that Dowling fellow told me they’re going to name the village where the station is after me: Point Edward. In my honour.”

  “Some honour,” Lily said, lifting her glass.

  He hesitated, gazed at her, then released his mirth, spilling champagne on his shirt. “Some honour, indeed. Some village: a hostelry that would make a Montparnasse madam blush and a row of rundown navvy’s huts.”

  “And it’s not even your name,” Lily said.

  He laughed again. “To Point Albert, then!” he said merrily.

  They clinked glasses, marvelling that each struck the self-same note – high and sweetly diminuendo. The Prince, a bit hastily perhaps, filled the glasses again. Lily got up and took a step towards the door.

  “Please don’t go,” he said. “I just wanted to talk,” he added. “Really.”

  Lily paused, her back still to him – the sunburnt, freckled skin of her neck, the undisguised calluses on her palms reminding him that she was no mere chate
laine. “I get so sick of all that polite chatter, all that hypocritical handshaking and endless palaver about the weather and the crops and the engines of progress, and –”

  “Are you gonna help me?” Lily said jauntily.

  “And here I am, only...twenty,” he lied.

  Lily took a step backwards and the Prince, using all eighteen and three quarters of his years to maintain his composure, moved up and began to unhook her dress. “Thank you,” she said when he had finished. She drew her arms out of the liberated sleeves, then let the vast folds descend gratefully over the layered crinolines. “Help me get these cages off,” she laughed, and joining in the game, he hoisted them over her head and let them clatter to the floor where they rolled away like lopsided tankards.

  “I hope you don’t mind the informality, Your Highness,” she said. “Back home, this is the way we dress, proper.” And she sat down again clad in her full-length muslin slip, stockings and camisole that might have been mistaken for a simple housedress in the less cosmopolitan confines of the province.

  The Prince tried to take in all of this blemished beauty – the burned-flaxen hair irreconciled to ringlets, the rough-tender hands, the freckled buff of cheek, her flecked hazel-green eyes, the timidity and jut of each movement, the unawakened wonder of poised womanhood – but he was eighteen not twenty, and he lit up another cigar.

  “Shall I open the window?” he offered.

  “No, please. Smoke don’t bother me none. I like it.” It wasn’t pipe-smoke in a wigwam, but it would do.

  He puffed and temporized, casting sideways glances in her direction, like a puritan at a peep show. Lily finished her champagne. She poured herself a third glass, emptying the bottle. Just as well, the ice had wilted. The second that the valet had touched her arm she had known what was expected of her. She had followed him in full knowledge. She put down her empty glass, rose, and pulled the cigar from between the Prince’s teeth. She dropped it in its gold groove, the live end white-hot. She grasped the young man’s hands in her own, surprised at their fleshiness. He raised up, then watched her back over to the bed, sit for a second, then stretch languidly across the comforter. Her shoes struck the floor with a do-or-die ring.

  Lily closed her eyes. Yes, she thought, it’s time to act, to make something happen, anything. She heard the rustle and clink of His Highness at the extreme edge of dishabillement. She reached down and drew her slip, then her camisole over her head, feeling the rush of air on her nakedness like a lover’s breath. She looked out at the world.

  The Prince was arched over her, pale and trembling, his muscled alabaster flesh as vulnerable and omnipotent as a Lancelot stripped of armour. Lily assessed the reticence and the lust in his eyes, and blessed them both.

  “My God,” he said, his regimental swordgrip bracing her breasts, “you’re the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.”

  Lily reached up, seized the engorged sceptre with both hands and guided the royal seed-pod home.

  10

  1

  Lily was cleaning out the stalls of Benjamin and the Guernsey – as well as that of Gert, the little Jersey they’d acquired from Old Bill. Both cows had been bred to an itinerant bull who showed up at their gate one day with his master in tow, but it appeared as if only the Jersey was about to bear the fruits of that brief, awesome fusing. Lily poked at the mess in front of her. At least in January there was little smell, and the frozen manure and straw could be forked rather than shovelled. Aunt Bridie and Old Bill were in the woodlot see-sawing the stiff pine logs into portable lengths – finding the packed snow and tightened earth a convenient, almost hospitable, environment in which to labour. Uncle Chester, walking, unaided now, would be keeping himself “useful” by replenishing the wood in both stove and fireplace, and peeking out the window every once in a while in order to be amazed by the filigreed snow on boughs he was now seeing as if for the first time.

  As Lily jerked a forkful of manure onto the sled, she felt a twinge in her lower abdomen. She stood stock-still as the wavelets of pain worked themselves ashore. She leaned on her fork, catching her breath and waiting for worse. Something fibrous and alien cramped in her, seeking expulsion. I’m going to faint, she thought, I’m going to fall face-first into that cow-shit and smother, and then maybe the thing will abandon me.

  The sharp air in her lungs brought her steadily upright again. Well, she thought, I can’t do this sort of work anymore. I’ll have to tell Aunt Bridie. The question is no longer when but how much?

  Lily waited until Old Bill had tucked Uncle Chester into his robes and set off in the cutter with him for a leisurely ride through the oak ridge to Little Lake, where it was reported the town’s best mingled with the township hopefuls upon the ice-pond. Uncle Chester had even talked of fitting himself out with skates. “So’s he can sprain his other wrist an’ his neck to boot,” Auntie said not unkindly when they had disappeared into the snowy woods.

  Not having spent long enough in polite society to become practiced in its subtle arts, Lily could think of no indirect way of conveying her news. “I got somethin’ I have to tell you,” she said when they had settled at opposite ends of a half-finished quilt.

  “I figured so. You ain’t stopped fidgetin’ once since dinner. A body’d think you’d contracted St. Vitus’ Dance or somethin’.”

  “I’m pregnant,” Lily said. “Four months and three days.”

  Whatever story Bridie Ramsbottom had braced herself for, this one was not it. Over the next hour her responses, largely monologic, bridged the generational silences in that intense woman’s room.

  “That’s not possible! What on earth do you know of such things?”

  Then, following the succinct disclosure of certain irrefutable biological events: “My lord, child! Do you know what you’ve done? You got a babe inside of you, growin’ away in there. Do you have any idea what that means? What that can do to you?”

  Lily said she assumed she was going to be a mother, in June.

  “You feelin’ all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Don’t you go shovellin’ manure now, you promise me?”

  “I can’t work in the barn no more. I’m sorry.”

  “I knew I never should’ve let you go with that woman. Look at what she’s done! I told you the city ways’d destroy you, didn’t I? But I don’t blame you, child, I really don’t. I put the blame onto the shoulders of Alice Templeton, I do. An’ somethin’ll be done about it, I promise you.”

  The life and mores of the Templetons were recounted at length.

  “But want can we do, eh? You an’ me? If I go rantin’ an’ ravin’ across town, everybody’ll know, an’ your life’ll be in tatters. I warned you, Lily, I did, why didn’t you listen to me, why didn’t you listen to your…Auntie?”

  As simply as she could, Lily suggested that no one had seduced or deceived her.

  “Who was the scoundrel, then? You can’t tell me a girl of your age an’ your innocence wasn’t abused by some blackguard bent on corruption. You forget, child, I lived in Toronto an’ London, I went out to service with no family to back me up. There’s nothin’ you can tell me about ‘gentlemen’ I don’t already know twice over. Why do you think I tried so hard to keep you here? An’ I went an’ trusted that woman who calls herself a Mayor’s wife, with her fancy flowers an’ her fancy manners an’–”

  Lily refused to divulge the name of her seducer.

  “Every girl who’s ever been in your position – an’ I say plenty in Toronto – has said the same thing, at first,” Aunt Bridie said with surprising gentleness. “But there’s no other way out of the mess, lass. He will have to make amends. We’ve got the law, such as it is, on our side. You are still a minor after all. If you can stand him, then he must marry you. If not, then other arrangements can be made.”

  “I can’t tell, ever,” Lily said. “No one’d believe me anyways.”

  “Not the Mayor?” Aunt Bridie went white.

  “Not a
nybody you know; besides, he’s gone off to another country, where he’s from. I’ll never see him again.”

  “Not a Yankee?” She went green. “One of them visitors from the Port?”

  “He’s gone, Auntie,” Lily said firmly. Then: “I don’t want to see him again.”

  “Don’t talk such drivel! Look at me. Look me straight in the eye. I’m goin’ to tell you what it means if we can’t get redress from the father of this babe. You are an unmarried young woman, a minor, an’ you are pregnant. In another month your belly will swell up an’ stick straight out for all the world to see. An’ when it’s seen, the tongues of the town will start waggin’, an’ you can’t dream in your worst nightmare what they’ll say as they pass along the ‘gospel truth’ from one to the other – they’ll whisper that your Uncle is the father or Old Bill or worse, they’ll say you’ve been seen down by the railroad shacks just like Violet hangin’ round them navvies an’ deservin’ everythin’ you got from your sinnin’.”

  Lily had no reply.

  “You won’t ever be able to go into town without bein’ accosted by ruffians believin’ you’re a scarlet woman an’ free game. Your Uncle an’ me will have people whisper an’ snicker behind our backs when we’re in Cameron’s or McWhinney’s. Now you know I don’t give a sweet fig for the opinion of such people, but will you ever get used to them churchin’ ladies thinkin’ an’ callin’ your child a bastard an’ keepin’ it out of school an’ makin’ it an outcast. What I’m sayin’ to you, Lily – you are the most precious thing that’s happened to me since ever I was born – what I’m tellin’ you is as long as we stay right here on this plot of land, our lives are our own, but as soon as we step off, they belong to those people out there.” For a moment she looked weary, beyond recovery. “We are women, Lily, an’ poor; the world’s not ours to make.”