Lily's Story (23 page)

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.

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.