A Sudden Sun (20 page)

T
HAT NIGHT, LILY could not sleep.

She had arrived back home just in time for dinner, dazed and wary, sure that as soon as Papa looked at her he would know what she had done. But Papa was working late and Mother had gone to bed. Lily sat down in the dining room alone to the slices of roast pork, turnip, and cabbage. “The Mister says you’re not to wait, he’ll have his when he gets home later—about eight,” Sally said.

So Lily was left with her own thoughts, and at first she felt nothing so much as drowsy, warm and tired. She thought she would go up to her room and curl up and sleep at once.

But when she had picked at a little of the pork she went upstairs, barred her door, and undressed. David had done a poor job of lacing up her corset again and she had rolled her hair up in a quick untidy bundle. Now she took it all off. First her blouse and skirt then, with some wriggling and squirming, the loosely laced corset, then her shift, petticoat, even her drawers—let her hair down, and stood looking at herself naked in the watery green mirror over her dressing table.

She had never done this before—stared at her own naked body rather than covering it as soon as her bath was over. She did want a bath, but if she rang for hot water Sal would wonder why she wanted a bath on Sunday evening instead of the usual Saturday night.

It had been a shocking mess. She hadn’t known about that. Who would have told her? Mothers only told their daughters such things before wedding nights. A girl was prepared for a bridal bed, not for a pile of clothes on top of someone else’s parlour rug. David had worried about the blood on her petticoats but she would pass it off as an unfortunate accident during her time of the month. The woman who took in their washing would hardly have cause to comment.

Now that she was here in the bedroom she was no longer sleepy. She washed up with the cold water in the basin and got out her nightdress and clean bloomers but kept drifting back to the mirror, looking at herself undressed, though the room was chilly. All the places he had touched her. It felt like there were warm red handprints all over her body, despite the chill in the air. And inside—somewhere deeper than her soul, she thought, a part of herself she’d never known before—was rubbed, raw and sore. Yet the pain felt triumphant in a way, like she imagined a man’s muscles might feel after a hard day’s work.

She had had, since childhood, a trick of turning one eye lazily inwards, a sight that used to amuse and horrify her playfellows, and when she did it her vision doubled. She did it now and there were two separate mirrors, two naked Lilies, each a little blurred. One was marked with shame and blood: she should have Hester Prynne’s scarlet A on her skin. No, not A but F: Fornicator.

The other Lily was free of shame. She had been kissed, caressed, loved. The other woman bore the loss of her virginity like a badge of pride: a man had valued her so much, had awoken so
much pleasure and delight from her body. She was no longer a child. This was the real marriage, after all: she belonged to David forever, and he to her.

Finally it was too chilly to stand there buck-naked staring at herself. Lily pulled her voluminous flannel nightdress over her head, put on fresh drawers and wrapped herself in a robe. She rang for Sally to build up the fire. “You’re going to bed early tonight, Miss,” Sally said, and Lily realized it was not even eight o’clock.

“I had a long walk this afternoon. I’m tired,” Lily said.

“And you don’t need any help getting ready?” Sally’s quick glance took in the fact that Lily was already in her nightdress. She moved to gather up the discarded clothes from the chair.

“No, I managed on my own tonight. That’ll be all, Sally.”

She curled up on the bed, still in her robe, pulling the quilt over her. The dark outside her window grew deeper, the fire burned down to ashes, the lamp burned out. Queen’s Road was quiet at this hour of night and with the window closed against the biting fall night she could hear no sounds from farther afield, though she knew that just as on summer nights there were dogs barking and people still awake, people laughing and swearing and fighting somewhere in the city.

When David kissed her good-bye in Catherine’s hallway he’d said, “I love you fiercely. I always will. Never doubt it.”

But she was, already, doubting it. She might not have read romances that described these intimate scenes in detail, but she had read plenty that described what happened to a girl once she had given up her virtue. Whether she was a scullery maid or an heiress, the end was always the same. The man who had stolen her virtue scorned her once he had had his way with her. Lily had surrendered her citadel and got nothing in return, not even a name or protection.

That was the bare truth of it. She had wanted it, begged for it even, but in the end he’d taken her virginity and now she was just
an unmarried girl who was no longer pure. If David Reid didn’t marry her—and how could he? Her father would never consider him for a moment—what good would she be to Obadiah Collins or anyone else? And the act they’d done today could get her with child. But how would she know? Was there some way to tell if she had fallen pregnant?

Who would know these things? A married girl asked her mother, but who did a fallen woman ask? She was sure Abby, for all her worldly posturing, knew nothing of such intimate matters. Abby was a little girl playing at being a woman. The time when Abby could be her confidante was over.

What she needed was to talk to some old, wise, anonymous midwife, or to look it up in a book.
What sort of book might have such information?

“Oh God, please, please, if there’s a way to stop it from happening, please let me not be with child. I’m sorry. I promise, I promise it won’t happen again, please forgive me, I know I’ve sinned, but don’t make me bear a child, I couldn’t—I couldn’t.” She pictured herself on her knees at the Rescue Home, scrubbing like Nancy or Agnes, her baby wailing in a cot nearby. Would Mother and Papa really throw her out into the streets?

“Oh God, please,” she begged again, and then was silenced by her own terrible hypocrisy. She was praying to be spared the consequences of a sin she had committed knowingly, eyes wide open, knowing it was a sin and fully intending to do it anyway. And she hadn’t even been truly repentant, not until she thought about the chance of having a baby. Now she was crawling back to God, a shameful hypocrite.

Only with that thought did real repentance come, as if the two Lilies in the mirror had finally merged into one. With her sight clear again Lily saw what she had done, the deceitful, hypocritical creature that love had turned her into. She loved David, truly, but
what was that love against the love of Jesus, the love of One who had died for her? She had believed she was called—had insisted to Papa, even, that she had a work to do for God in this world. And rather than doing that work she had allowed herself to be led astray, into paths of sin.

It took Lily a week to find the right book, after painstaking hours searching the shelves in her own family’s library and then the bookshelves at Abby’s house. She finally found a dusty old volume—
The Doctor’s Home Companion
—at Abby’s house, and spirited it away to her own house where she could read it without fearing someone would come into the room behind her. It told her that when a human female was impregnated, her monthly courses would cease for nine months. Lily knew her visitor was expected again in a few days, so if it came on time, she was safe. Until then, she lived in terror.

“There’s something wrong with you,” Abby insisted on the day she finally coaxed Lily over for a visit, though Lily’s real reason was to return the book she had silently stolen. “You haven’t tried to plan any secret trysts for nearly a fortnight. Have you quarrelled with him?”

“Of course not,” Lily said.

“Because it wouldn’t be entirely bad if you had, would it? I mean, a little romance is a good thing, but in the end, where can it lead? Better to break it off now than let it go any farther, isn’t it?”

“Of course. I’ll marry Reverend Collins, will I? Is that better?”

“Oh, don’t be so cross,” Abby said. “I’m only trying to make you feel better. The problem is that I’m not very good at it. I’m terrible, in fact. I’m so selfish. You’re here, obviously brokenhearted, and all I can think of are my own silly affairs and whether I should say Yes or No to Frank Ayre.”

The eminently eligible young Mr. Ayre had finally proposed, and Abby was taking time to think it over. He seemed to have every
desirable quality—rich, hardworking, generous with his money, extremely respectable and kind to Abby. He wasn’t even half-bad-looking, both girls had agreed in happier times when Lily was in the mood to join in making such judgements. “If only I were even a little bit in love with him!” Abby sighed tragically. “I don’t believe in marrying for love, exactly, but I’m not sure I believe in marrying without it. Oh, there I go again, talking about my own troubles.”

“They’re every bit as real as mine are, and you’ve every right to talk about them,” Lily said. She felt weary of the whole conversation, of Abby’s company, of constantly turning over and over in her mind her fear, her sin, her guilt, and her raging desire to go back to Catherine’s house with David and do it all over again.

She circled November 15th on her calendar—the day her visitor was due to arrive—but it did not come. Lily was usually fairly regular, keeping track of her days so she could plan in advance not to wear a white dress in summer, for example. A day late wasn’t unusual and most months she wouldn’t even have noticed, but that day felt endless. She was going to be cast out, branded as a scarlet woman. Papa would turn her out of the house. Where would she go? She could think of no one, nowhere. Except David, of course. And she hadn’t replied to his notes for nearly two weeks, so surely he would give up soon and forget her.

The next day, she felt the familiar cramping in her lower abdomen, the dull backache. After she went to the lavatory, relief flooded her. She had her reprieve. It was tangible evidence that God had forgiven her.
Washed in the blood
, she thought, and laughed out loud.

The same day, Abby came for an unannounced visit. “I’ve gotten tired of waiting for you to come see me again. I think you’re determined to become a recluse, and I won’t allow it.”

“I’ve told you, Papa’s banned me from everything but church. He’s afraid I’m going to turn into a crazed suffragist and start
marching up and down Water Street with a signpost.”

“Well, please don’t do that, or I won’t admit to knowing you,” Abby said. “I must say, you’re sounding a bit more like yourself today. Made up your quarrel?”

“There never was any quarrel.”

“Ah, that must be why he gave me this.” Abby pulled a small envelope out of her reticule. “I passed your Mr. Reid outside the rink on Parade Street last evening, and he pressed this into my hand.”

Lily took it slowly. There had been two other notes delivered by boys on the street. The notes were short, scrawled, and pleading. She had replied to none of them. How could she explain, on paper, that she knew she had sinned and must never be alone with him again? She felt like a rag soaked in kerosene. She wouldn’t even need to touch the flame, only get close, and it would all be over in a second.

“Are you going to open it?”

She did, but not until after Abby was gone. Lily had insisted there be no more discussion of David or the letter. They talked instead about Abby’s decision, almost definite now, to refuse Frank Ayre.

She read it alone in her room.

That was more than he’d ever committed to paper before—more dangerous, harder to explain if the note fell into the wrong hands. Papa’s hands, of course. And she could end all this, all her
guilt and torment, she could be Papa’s good girl again if only she sent that note.

Three words:
Let me alone
. She could even send back his own note with those words circled; no need to add anything more of her own.

She burned the note. And she thought all night about writing a reply, but finally fell into an uneasy sleep: nothing written, nothing decided.

Sunday morning. The sermon was long and tedious. Lily looked at Reverend Mrs. Pratt, wondering what it would be like to be the minister’s wife, having to sit and look pious and interested through one’s husband’s sermons week after week.

The final hymn over, the parishioners of Cochrane Street filed out through the doors slowly, stopping to shake hands with the minister. Papa, as always, had to stop and talk with half a dozen other men—often, Lily suspected, about business, even though he would have said he didn’t discuss business on Sunday, much less in the narthex of the church.

She felt someone tug at her sleeve and turned around to see the last person she ever expected to see in church—David Reid.

“I’m sorry,” he said, bending close to the brim of her hat. “I had to try. I know you didn’t answer the notes, but…”

“Hush!” Lily looked around. Papa was nowhere in sight, but a few church ladies glanced over with interest. There was that nosy Daisy Gill, a spinster lady who used to teach Lily and Abby’s Sunday School class when they were younger, peering over her fan at Lily and David while she chatted to Papa’s cousin Sadie. “It’s not—it wasn’t because I was angry.”