A Sudden Sun (11 page)

“They’re a grand bunch of bairns, but they do get wearing after a few hours,” he admitted.

“You’re very good with them. I’ve hardly ever seen a man so much at ease with little children.”

“Ah, it’s only that I’m hardly grown up myself.”

They were walking so close she could feel the heat of his body. The triangle of skin at his bare throat was sunburned and so was the bridge of his nose: his fair skin coloured easily and it made him look even more boyish.

“I don’t think your Mrs. Ohman likes me very well,” he said after a minute.

“She thinks my father would disapprove of you walking me home, so she disapproves too.”

“And me such a supporter of her cause.”

“Only one cause. She told me to beware because you are not a temperance man.” The silver flask, so briefly glimpsed earlier in the day, was an unspoken presence between them.

“I’ve already confessed to that.”

“Why are you not, though?”

“There’s worse things a man can do than have a glass of spirits to refresh him at the end of the day. I think the temperance crowd makes too great a fuss over a little thing.”

“Are there worse things a man could do than beat his wife, neglect his family, drink away his pay packet at the tavern before he buys food for his family?”

He smiled, as if delighted she was debating him. “You’re right of course, those are terrible things. But why not attack the problems themselves and the men who cause them, instead of punishing all the poor fellows who enjoy the odd glass?”

“Many a man says he only enjoys a sociable drink, but how many of those end up becoming drunkards?”

“Fewer than you’d think, Miss Hunt. And that sentence sounded like it came straight out of one of Mrs. Ohman’s serial stories.”

Lily couldn’t deny that. How strong and determined Mrs. Ohman’s heroine Alida had been, refusing to marry James, who was perfect in every other way, until he signed the temperance pledge!
Lily could imagine herself as Alida, but Mr. Reid, unlike James, was hardly the perfect suitor even if he could be persuaded to take the pledge.

“Reverend Collins would like to come call on you the next time he’s in town,” her father had said, after that awkward dinner at Reverend Pratt’s house.

Why should he? What would we ever have to say to each other?
Aloud she had said, “Yes, if you wish, Papa.”

Yes, Papa. Yes, Mother. Whatever you say. If you think that’s best.
The phrases that had been bred into her from birth came naturally to her lips. She was, had always been, a dutiful daughter.

“I don’t understand how you can be so backward-thinking on this one issue and so forward-thinking on others,” she said now to David Reid. There was something thrilling, as thrilling as deceiving her father, in arguing with Mr. Reid. She’d never spoken this way to a man before.

“It’s because I see things differently than you do. I’ve listened to different lecturers, read different sorts of books. I’ve read Karl Marx; have you?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Well, when you do hear of Marx, some preacher or temperance lady will tell you he’s a terrible infidel with dangerous ideas. But the truth is he’s very right about some things, and there are a lot of people in the world who think so. The world is going to change a good deal in the next few years, Miss Hunt, and I intend to do more than just watch and write about it.”

“That’s what your sister says—that you think you can change the world.”

“Why can’t I? Why can’t you? Would you be sitting up in the gallery of the Colonial Building with a crowd of lady suffragists if you didn’t think it would change the world?”

“You saw me?”

“I did, and admired you. In all possible senses.”

“Much good it did us, sitting up there to watch them vote down our bill.”

They passed the ruins of Gower Street Church and the Anglican Cathedral: both were busy sites now with men picking through the rubble for anything that could be salvaged and sold to finance the rebuilding efforts. Business owners worked more quickly than churches: while the congregations worshipped in temporary structures as the great churches started to slowly rebuild, most shopkeepers had already cleared the rubble of last summer’s fire and some had erected new structures back in the fall. Now, with the good spring weather, new shops and houses were sprouting up everywhere. On Queen’s Road, as they neared Lily’s house, men were working on the new Congregational church that would replace the old Stone Chapel.

“Come, let’s take a shortcut,” said Mr. Reid. He took her by the hand and led her down behind the ruins of the old chapel. The lane was very dim and smelt strongly of horse manure.

“I don’t think this is a shortcut. My house is just down the road there.”

“I’m about to do something inappropriate, Miss Hunt.” He turned to face her, put his arms around her, ran his large hands up and down her back as he drew her to him. Lily knew all the things she ought to say and do, knew it was a girl’s duty to safeguard her virtue. But all she wanted was for him to go on touching her.

“Perhaps you should call me Lily,” she said.

He laughed, a low laugh deep in his throat. “Well, that would be very improper indeed.” He turned her face up toward his, leaned down, and kissed her.

She was unprepared in every way for his kiss, had never imagined how it might feel to have his mouth open a little and the warmth of his breath inside her own mouth. Her head was tilted
so far back that her hat slipped off and she made no move to catch it.

David—impossible to think of him as Mr. Reid now—buried his hands in her hair, pulled loose a hairpin so that a long, thick rope of her hair fell down across her face and shoulder as she pushed closer to him. Every place he touched felt like it was on fire.

When he pulled out another hairpin she finally drew back, breathing hard. “I’ll look dreadful!” she said, with a weak laugh. Everything in her felt broken, shattered, but what was shattered was a vessel that had held something delicious and warm, something that had now spilled out to flood her whole body.

“Here, I’ve rescued this anyway,” David said, holding up her hat.

“That’s no good on its own, I need my pins.” He handed her one; it had landed on her blouse. She tried to put her hair back in place and shove the pin in but her hands were shaking. He took it from her, awkwardly skewered the pin through her hair.

She looked straight into his green eyes, as she might stare into the heart of the sun, to see how long she could without having to look away. She found she could hold his gaze, though it sobered her at once.

“Don’t apologize,” she said.

“I’d no intention of it.”

F
OR THE NEXT week Lily went around in a cloud of mingled delight and confusion. She was upset about the defeat of the bill, and especially about the divisions it created among the WCTU ladies, most of whom seemed to feel it was time to abandon the franchise fight. Many of them felt, and said, that it had been a mistake ever to push the issue of the women’s vote. At the Tuesday evening meeting a quarrel broke out between Mrs. Ohman and Mrs. Withycombe, and everyone left in a bad mood.

But outside the door was David Reid waiting to walk Lily home, though she had been promised a ride in Mrs. Ohman’s carriage. “Tell her you’re walking home,” David urged.

“I can’t –she’ll see you there—you know she won’t think it’s proper that I’m walking with you.”

“Better than walking alone, isn’t it? It’s coming on duckish. No time for a young lady to be on the streets alone.”

“And no time for a young lady to be on the streets with a man who is not known to her family,” said Mrs. Ohman, appearing beside Lily’s elbow. “Come along, Lily.” Her tone was sharp and
clipped; she was still irritated with Mrs. Withycombe.

Despite the way she kept reliving David’s kiss over and over in her memory, Lily could not imagine defying Mrs. Ohman yet again to go off with him. There was no convenient sister or niece or nephews around, nor could she pretend any longer that his intentions were entirely honourable.

“I’m sorry, I must go,” she told David, and climbed into the carriage beside Mrs. Ohman. The older lady fumed the whole way home about the scolding she’d gotten from the Sons of Temperance, who had told her that the WCTU was tarnishing the good name of the temperance cause by agitating for women’s votes. When the carriage pulled up in front of Lily’s house, Mrs. Ohman told her driver to wait while she went in and called on Lily’s parents. “Tell them I’d like to see them both, if your mother feels well enough. Just us older folks,” Mrs. Ohman added with a nod that was hard to mistake.

Lily waited an agonizing hour in her room, wondering if she should concoct further lies or confess everything. Finally Sally tapped on the door. “The Mister would like to see you down in the study, Miss,” she said.

Papa sat in his big wingback chair, papers and books all over his desk. Printing was a practical trade with him but also a passion. He loved books and reading, and collected first editions of books when his budget allowed. It made Lily sad to see the bare shelves in his rebuilt study; so many of his prized volumes had been destroyed in the fire, and he was just beginning to rebuild the collection. Papa’s old study with its book-lined walls had been a favourite place when she was allowed in there as a child, but today Lily felt as nervous as she had when she was ten years old, the day she had accidentally torn a page in Papa’s big Shakespeare book. She took a seat in a straight-backed wooden chair across from her father.

“Mrs. Ohman has told me that you have—not a suitor in the
proper sense, but an impertinent young man who has made your acquaintance. Do you know who I mean?”

“I suppose she is talking about Mr. Reid, Father.”

“Yes, that’s the fellow. I’ve met him of course, in the way of business. He knows quite well I would never consider him worthy to call upon my daughter. He’s a nobody, no family, a young upstart with radical ideas. He’s neither a regular churchgoer nor a temperance man.” He paused, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Of course, you may not have known all these things about him.”

“Mrs. Ohman told me he was…not someone you could approve of.” Lily kept her hands knotted in her lap. She looked down at them, studying the little knobs of her own knuckles and the tiny hollows between, glancing up at her father’s eyes only once for each sentence she spoke. Against the dark green fabric of her skirt her hands looked very tiny and white. She remembered pressing them against Papa’s big hand, not so very long ago—she might have been, what, eleven or twelve?—to see how big and strong he was compared to her. Then she remembered David’s hand tangling in her hair, pulling her close to him.

“Lily?” Father said, and she knew she had missed the last question he asked her.

“I beg your pardon, Father? I didn’t hear you.”

“I asked if you have any feelings for this young man, or if he has just been bothering you with his presence. Either way, I will warn him to stay away from you, but if you have any fancies about him, it makes my task more painful.”

“He hasn’t bothered me. I only ever spoke to him because he was interested in the WCTU work; he wrote a piece for the paper about it, and I talked to him a little. I’ve been polite to him, but nothing more than that.”

“Yes, but has
he
been polite to you? Are you sure he hasn’t said
or done anything improper?”

“No, not at all,” she said, and then she did look him in the eye. She had never told Papa a direct lie before, though ever since becoming involved with the suffrage cause, not to mention since meeting David Reid, she had certainly misled him. It seemed important to look him right in the eye as she lied.

“You’ve always been a good girl, Lily. You know I’ve worried about your friendship with Mrs. Ohman. She’s a good woman, but I don’t approve of all her ideas and I was sorry to hear she had brought that petition before the House. Women have no place in politics. But Mrs. Ohman, regardless of her errors, is a good Christian woman and she was entirely right in coming to speak to me about this.”

Lily was back to looking at her hands, at the little half-moons on the base of each nail. When she was little, she had used to bite her nails but Mama had painted them with iodine and broken her of the habit. “Mrs. Ohman has been very kind to me,” she said.

“You know young Reverend Collins admires you. I hope you will come to like him too, as you get to know him better.”

“He seems…very…
nice
.” That was not as barefaced a lie as the other one but it was, at best, stretching the truth. And it seemed to content Papa, at least for now; he dismissed Lily and told her to go to bed.

Two days later, Abby Hayward came to call. “You have an admirer,” she told Lily, her mouth drawn down as if trying to mask amusement with disapproval.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well if there’s a young man who’s brazen enough to walk up to a girl he doesn’t know on the street and slip her a note with no more introduction than, ‘I hear you’re friends with Lily Hunt,’ then I’d call him an admirer.”

“What sort of young man?”

“Threadbare. Barely respectable. I don’t know him at all, and you know if I don’t know him, then he’s nobody. Red hair. Looks Irish. Might be a papist, for all I know. He’s certainly not a Methodist, nor from any family worth talking about. Saucy manner. Why am I telling you this? It’s perfectly clear you know who I mean!”

“You saw him once before, in the park, the day after the fire.”

Abby shrugged and picked up her needlepoint. She had been working at this same sampler of roses and a pious motto ever since before she went to New York last winter: she was not much of a needlewoman. “I can’t remember anything about the fire—that’s all such a blur. Can you believe we camped all night in Bannerman Park? Anyway, it’s clear you’re not concerned about this fellow, so it’s just as well I threw away his note.”

“You what?”

“Ha, caught you out there!” Abby’s smile broadened into a grin that made her look like a freckled schoolgirl again.

“I won’t tell you a thing ’til you hand over that note.”

“No, I won’t hand over the note until you tell me a thing or two. And you know I’ll win at this game, because you want the note more than I want the information.” Abby pulled a small white envelope from a pocket of her blouse and held it up before her face. She pulled away, giggling, when Lily made a grab for it.

“There’s nothing to tell. He’s only someone I met.”

“Indeed. A man without a name?”

Under pressure, and the desire to obtain the note, Lily finally admitted to David Reid’s name and to their handful of previous meetings. She did not tell Abby about the kiss, nor about the conversation with her father.

To Abby’s disappointment, Lily waited ’til she was alone to open the note. She took it up to her room and closed the door firmly. Papa was not even home but she somehow imagined that
downtown, in the printshop, he could sense the presence of David’s letter, tucked in its envelope, as if it radiated heat and light.

Her fingers trembled as she sliced open the note with her silver letter opener. The letter opener slipped and scratched the palm of her hand, and she dropped it on the bed beside her as she took the slip of paper from the envelope.

She read it again, twice, and noticed that her hand shook more rather than less with each reading. Was she really thinking of going, meeting with him secretly?

No, this was entirely wrong. He was handsome—moderately—and clever, and charming. And something else, something she could not put into words but that made her think of him all the time. But Papa had made it clear David Reid would never be allowed to call on her.

She tucked the letter inside her pillowcase, thinking she must find a safer place for it before Sally changed the beds again. Downstairs, a bell rang for dinner.

When the meal was over Papa pulled Lily aside. “You’ve thought about what we spoke of on Tuesday night?” he said. “After Mrs. Ohman’s visit?”

“Of course, Papa. You know best.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Do I have your promise that you will not see or speak to this young man again?”

He had not asked her to promise that before. That he asked
now, in plain words, while the letter burned a hole through her pillowcase, must be a sign from God.

“I promise, Papa.”

“My good girl,” he said.

Up in her room, Lily lit a candle. She took David’s note out and read it once more, then laid it in her washbasin. She touched the candle to the corner of the paper, saw the flames eagerly lick at the lines of his handwriting, swallowing up David Reid and any possibility of meeting him in Bannerman Park at four o’clock on Saturday.

When it was all gone she tipped the ashes into the grate and wiped out the wash basin. No one would suspect a thing.