Lily's Story Read online

  11

  1

  Mrs. Edgeworth’s walled garden in May was as beautiful as the East Gate to Eden, as that lady iterated often over the irritation of teacups and silver spoons. When the ladies of London were gathered there, as they were each Thursday afternoon during the warm season, Lily had to observe the ritual proceedings from her room on the second floor of the red-brick mansion. She was not to be seen in public and particularly en silhouette. Those were the principal terms of her confinement. But when it was not Thursday afternoon, Lily was free to roam the gardens at will, protected from prurient view by its fieldstone walls, rampant privet and gothic elms. Hedges of honeysuckle and wild lilac marked out avenues for the eye or the weary step, arrested by arbours of budded rose, beds of thrusting tulips, and the prodigality of peony and rose-of-sharon. Here Lily whiled away the weeks and hours of her twenty-first spring.

  Of London itself she had seen little since that night in mid-April when she had been lifted from the caboose of the highball freight and placed gently in a closed carriage to be driven through the dark to the Edgeworth home. The full moon in concert with the spring stars allowed her to catch glimpses in outline of the largest, most imposing buildings she had ever seen. The road beneath them was firm gravel, the horses’ shoes ringing reliably upon it; the gas-lamps along Richmond Street glittered like amethyst and cast across their path the shadows of railings, newel-posts, pitched gables, startling spires and other eccentric castellations alien to the imagination. There appeared to be no trees except for occasional decorative saplings of maple or elm on the steep lawns of the palaces along North Street. As they wheeled onto the latter to go east, Lily drew in her breath at the sight of two cathedrals whose grand martellos carved the night-sky up in Protestant and Catholic halves. She could, if she stood here on the stone bench by the iris-bed, see the many towers of the saints stretched out against the sun: rooted, durable, and unquestioning. In this ‘forest city’ they were petrified trees.

  So this is civilization, Lily thought. This is what the Millars and the Partridges dreamed of as they hacked their trees to death – slashed, burned, pulverized and ground the very ash of them back into the resisting earth. This is what the burghers of Sarnia – with their muddy streets and clanging foundries and clapboard shells – yearned towards? Is this the dream Papa dreamt the night he wrestled with his demons and left forever? What dreams could Mama have ever had, looking as she did each day on her wizening flesh and knowing in the interminable night that death was perched like a leper on her shoulder?

  “You can’t read? My gracious Godfrey, what have they done to you in that dreadful bush-town?” Mrs. Anthony Edgeworth’s questions were usually pointed comments on the deteriorating human condition. “Well, we’ll soon rectify that! We shan`t have a son of the aristocracy grow up in a family of illiterates now, shall we?” She blushed then, as she did easily and often. “Oh, I am sorry, dear-heart. I am expressly forbidden to mention things like that. Walls have ears, you know.” And she dropped her voice a decibel and half-an-octave.

  “I had no upbringin’,” Lily said helpfully.

  “Well now, that isn’t your fault. We’ll just see what we can do in the few weeks at our disposal,” she said with determined cheeriness. Then she released a bosomy sigh. “If only the Colonel were alive, he’d take you in hand.”

  So it was that just as the first lilacs sprang into bloom, drenching the air with the sweet phrases of their perfume, Mrs. Edgeworth donned her best brocade and ushered the freshly attired Lily into the grotto where Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare could be suitably worshipped. “She’s very quick,” Mrs. Edgeworth said consolingly to the vicar after another of his less-than-successful exchanges of catechism with the unlettered and unrepentant girl. “She took an instant fancy to Portia and Rosalind. Isn’t that intriguing?” The vicar thought not. “She can tell you right back, quick as a pedlar’s wink, the whole story of The Tempest, or The Winter’s Tale.” His reverence thought perhaps Pilgrim’s Progress would be more suitable fodder.

  To Dr. Hackney, essaying an escape after the bi-weekly check of the patient, she said, “And yesterday I decided to read her some of the Bard himself. Of course, as you remember, I don’t read nearly as well as the Colonel, but do you know that wisp of a girl understood those speeches! I swear she didn’t know half the words in ‘The Quality of Mercy’ but she got the gist of it all right.” How she wished she could confide in the vicar and the doctor, but only she knew that the father of the child was some important figure-of-state from Toronto and that secrecy was imperative. The doctor, the vicar and Lucille, her servant, were told only that the girl was the daughter of a friend from the country, and that discretion was requested. Lucille was, alas, “dumb as a post but ever so sweet” and fully devoted to her mistress. Lily soon discovered that Lucille was not at all dumb, only French, and that to her own surprise she recalled a great deal of the French she had heard so often so long ago. The two girls, barely a year apart, chatted amiably in both tongues during the drowsy afternoons of early spring with the earth greening around them and the air as clear as claret.

  For the first time ever, Lily found she did not enjoy being alone. She loved to listen to the funny stories Lucille had to tell about her crazy relatives down in Essex; the slither and scrape of her joual was like the low notes on a slow fiddle. Lily sat entranced by the tales Mrs. Edgeworth read to her and she committed to memory some of the strange, cadenced phrases of Shakespeare’s women – all the more powerful because they swam in her head only half-understood, hovering and forever about-to-be. One night she woke up already sitting, and heard a voice say, “The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark when neither is attended.” She lay awake for over an hour trying to feel the meaning under such words.

  When not reading to her, Mrs. Edgeworth took full advantage of her captive pupil, and proceeded to give her a singular history of England from the narrow but no-less-illuminating perspective of her own family and, where verisimilitude demanded, that of the late Colonel’s. “Oh how my Aunt Fanny laughs when I tell her in every letter that I live in London on the Thames in Middlesex County. She’s of the opinion that we all live in log cabins and spend most of our days swatting flies.” Then she would sweep the garden and environs with her Canterbury gaze: “Ridiculous, eh? But the Colonel, bless his memory, helped to make it what it is today. My only worry is that my dear nephew, Tippy, the Colonel’s sister’s boy, who I’ve raised since he was a tot of ten, will not be the kind of man his father and uncle were.” And on she would go about Tippy’s modest indiscretions – his poor grades in school, his truancy, his current “escapade” in Toronto, where he was supposed to be learning the law in a respectable firm there, but was more often seen elsewhere in unmentionable places. Lily listened, quite content to nod assent or demurral as the moment dictated, watching the concern and vulnerable kindness play across the face of this stranger who without doubt was coming to love her. Is this the way it is, the way it’s going to be? Lily thought. These sudden, powerful, random bondings followed by the wrenching of separation, bleak rides in the night towards dawnings we have not even had time or the wonder to dream of?

  Finally, a month after her arrival – with the creature inside her growing increasingly bulbous, lopsided, counterclockwise – Lily got a letter from Aunt Bridie. She spotted her own name in capital letters on the envelope, and could even make out the name of the street and city. But the letter itself was written in Auntie’s scrawl, and even Mrs. Edgeworth had a little difficulty in reading it aloud.

  Port Sarnia, C.W.

  May 2, 1861

  Dear Lily:

  Sorry to be so long in writing to you. Word has been got to us that you are doing fine. Things are so confused here that I ought to wait until the news is good before sending it along to you. Uncle Chester is getting stronger by the day. Old Bill is about the same. We all miss you terrible. Just after you left, some bigwigs from the railroad came over here and made an offer to buy our
property. I told them no, this land was our living, we would never leave it. Then they said the railroad needed the land for the townsite of Point Edward. They now own all of it but our section. They said they would expropriate it; that’s a two-dollar word for taking it and paying us as little as they can get away with. If they take the farm, I don’t know what we’ll do. A friend of Uncle Chester’s has written from London with a business proposition but nothing is about to happen very soon you can rest assured. So we don’t want you to worry, just stay healthy and bring us back the babe. We’ll be here waiting. We’ve always got by and we always will.

  Love,

  Aunt Bridie

  xoxoxo Uncle Chester

  But Lily did worry. Aunt Bridie’s hopes, pinned so precariously to the railway’s expansion, were about to be dashed by the very instrument expected to fulfill them. Whatever happened with the farm, she knew it would not fatten itself at the expense of the Grand Trunk.

  So Lily waited, and was pampered. The form within her prospered. No more letters came. June did, and the time for her lying-in.

  2

  Lily did not lack for either care or advice. Lucille’s household duties were lightened so that she could play the role of nursemaid, a part she relished, though her ministrations in the stuffy, darkened room where the victim was forcibly detained, were more colloquial than therapeutic. Mrs. Edgeworth herself supervised the serving of the meals and spent part of each afternoon and evening reading to or talking at her “dear-heart.” Dr. Hackney now arrived once a week to ceremonially take her pulse, depress her tongue and then poke and stroke the protuberance that used to be her belly. Giving it a farewell pat he turned, on his last visit, to Mrs. Edgeworth and proclaimed: “It will come on time, Elspeth. Of course it’s not great accomplishment to predict the exit day when the entry point, so to speak, has been so accurately documented.” Being a woman of the world, Elspeth did not blush, much. Then seeing the entreaty in Lily’s eyes, he said for all to hear: “A son: one week: the fourteenth most probably.”

  Unbeknownst to Dr. Hackney, his visits were invariably followed by the arrival, through the back-garden gate and woodshed door, of Elsie Crampton, the regional midwife. Elsie’s examination was more probing, inquisitive and jovial than the good physician’s. Lucille and Elspeth followed her in, trailed by her assistant, a buxom, overblown Irish girl named Maureen, who had recently delivered a son to the skeptical world. The midwife’s smile was lop-sided (she had teeth only on the left side) but generous, and Lily felt strangely comforted in her presence, even though her confinement in this canopied, curtained, velveteened chamber seemed out of tune with the raw, rooted germination inside her. Mrs. Crampton held her hand, talked to her, and gave her instructions for the ordeal of the birthing day.

  “It’s gonna be a bit late, I think,” she announced to the curious assembly. “About the twenty-second or twenty-third, I’d say. Which means she’s gonna be a stubborn little cuss, but a genuine beauty.”

  The women of the chorus agreed.

  “On my birthday?” Lily said, looking at Lucille.

  “Could be, dearie, but I wouldn’t pray too hard for it, ‘cause the longer you stay penned up here the paler and weaker you get. I don’t believe in all this lying-in stuff. Why, Maurie here was hoein’ spuds the day before little Mikey popped out.”

  Lily didn’t pray but she hoped, all the same. The fifteenth passed with no signs of the contractions she’d been alerted to. Dr. Hackney arrived for his weekly check, feigned puzzlement, let his fingers linger affectionately on Lily’s pumpkin bulge, and muttered to Mrs. Edgeworth at the door: “No question: I’ll be back before the night’s over.”

  Other than Dr. Hackney, no man had run his hand over her belly except for the Prince himself. Their love-making had been swift and narrow. His Royal Highness had wheezed twice and slumped lengthwise upon her. For Lily there had been pain, cutting and revelatory, her body moving almost on its own, as it did when infused with the music of some dance, though here there was no time to ensure mutual cadence, no culmination except the fierce clutch of skin to skin, a second of total accessibility broken by the boy’s sobs as he rolled away and saw the escutcheon of blood on the duvet. Instinctively, forgetting her own discomfort and sense of incompletion, Lily reached up and brushed the tears across his cheeks. He stared at her in awe; never had she seen such a look in the eyes of another human watching her. For a moment she felt not sundered but whole, not colonized but possessing – extravagant even, imperial. Then she lay back, settled in her own kind of amazement, and let her lover’s hand replicate in minor keys the brute affection of their coupling. Deep down Lily knew it was not her body – with its elastic, cursive allure – that the future king worshipped with his caresses, murmurings and bunting glances, but something beyond it yet not exclusive of it. As the days grew closer to her own birthdate and the high solstice, Lily began to feel at last come connection between those events on the Michigan and this thumping, reciprocal being waiting to be born.

  In the early hours of the morning of the twenty-first, the first spasm struck. Lily was startled by its severity, and not a little frightened. She had been well-prepared for the sequence of calamities to follow: Lucille was the middle child of a family of thirteen and reported graphically upon the numerous, horrific births she claimed to have witnessed. Mrs. Crampton had described to her in clinical terms the necessity of these discomforts and added the assurance that “when you see the babe you’ll have already forgotten the pain.” Cold comfort that was here in the dead of night in a stranger’s house in a foreign town with her belly squeezing her stomach into her throat and her bowels into her spine. She gritted her teeth and let the aftershocks knit their way through her flesh; she would not cry out. She tried to wipe away the images of Lucille’s encephalitic brother ripping his mother’s vagina like a tear in a button hole, or the Jersey’s eyes in the snowy coffin of her stall, but the only picture she could replace them with was that of a shadow-green cove in Papa’s backwoods – with the spread flesh of the faceless squaw, the propulsion of the tiny head treeward, the corolla of flung blood, the silence into which it dropped petal by scarlet petal.

  When the third contraction gripped and held, Lily reached over to pull the bell-cord.

  In the blackness of her pain, Lily was aware that she was surrounded by women. Their faces, their detached, consoling hands floated intermittently above her: Mrs. Edgeworth disguising her anguish, Mrs. Crampton too busy to register feeling, Lucille agog with fright and devotion, Maureen impassively efficient, Maryanne (the new chambermaid) pale and chattering. Lily felt like one of those fish Papa used to catch in Brown Creek, floundering on the grassy bank, its muscles jerking without purpose or hope. Just after sunrise her body, now totally outside her own control, gave one last convulsive heave and banished the little beast forever to the far outports of air, space, time and consanguinity. The pain was now bearable; she released her grip on Lucille’s hand. She could feel the midwife’s fingers stretching, pulling, yielding.

  There was a smack like the crack of a rifle, followed by a stuttering wawl that rose to a series of well-defined shrieks and settled into the universal enunciation of the newborn struck by breath, by the fuel of its own blood.

  “It’s a girl,” said Mrs. Crampton between commands.

  “How wonderful!” said Mrs. Edgeworth, hiding her disappointment excessively.

  “An’ it come real quick an’ easy, eh Maureen?”

  “Like a squaw’s in a corn patch,” said the Irish girl, swabbing up blood and afterbirth.

  Moments later as her pain ebbed, the baby – wiped clean, its umbilical cord neatly knotted – was laid beside Lily on the linen sheet. On the canopy overhead she noted the cherubs and the lambs and the crenellated walls in the distance. Then she gazed across at the child curling in the arch of her shoulder and breast. The eyes peering back were her own.

  You’ve given me great pain, she thought, as its miniature mouth nudged towards the exp
ectant nipple, but you needed the pain to separate yourself from me, to put something between us, to be yourself. Now I can hold you, love you, and give you your name. And she did, saying the syllables in a low murmur over and over as sleep closed in, and she did not feel her daughter being gently extracted from a mother’s grip.

  3

  When Lily woke it was afternoon. Of what day she really didn’t know. She was fevered and ached all over. She reached for the baby. It wasn’t there. Her breasts throbbed, the milk pulsing inside like the Guernsey when Uncle Chester ‘fell asleep’ before milking her. In the hazy light allowed by the curtain she could make out across the room the form of Maureen seated in the armchair. Her blouse was open with one puffed breast shining and stiff-nippled and the other hidden behind the head of the suckling child. The noise of its feeding filled the room. Maureen’s eyes were slitted, glazed with contentment; her thick pelvis was rocking back and forth in an unconscious parody of intercourse.

  “Now don’t you worry, dear-heart,” Mrs. Edgeworth soothed a few minutes later, her brow creased with worry. “Everything’s going to be fine. Dr. Hackney says you’ve got a slight infection. I must say he wasn’t too happy arriving late and finding Mrs. Crampton on her way out, but he’s been a dear anyway. He’s left this medicine for you and –” At last she noticed Lily’s nod towards the baby and its nurse. “Oh, that. Dr. Hackney says with your fever and all, you wouldn’t have enough milk, so Maureen, who God be thanked has more than enough for her own and yours, is helping out, aren’t you, dear?”