A Sudden Sun (22 page)

She read it over and over. She loved his letters, even the hastily scrawled notes. She wished she could lock them in a secret drawer and read them over and over. Her actual time with him was so short and his notes were like being with him for the few moments they took to read. But while she had kept a few—the most noncommittal ones she could find, in which no eyes but her own would ever see anything compromising—she burned almost everything he sent. What if Papa were to find this—or, more likely, Sally, who could not read, found it and felt duty-bound to turn it over to Papa on the strength of the fact that it looked like a man’s writing? The signature alone would damn her. D as in Desire! Lily knew
desire
was a word she should not even think, nor should anyone think it in connection with her. “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you,” God had told Eve in the garden. No husband, no desire. Unruled and unruly desire was a dangerous thing, and it flamed through her like the tongues of fire that licked and consumed David’s note as she burned it in the grate before bedtime.

I
F I SIT on the lid of the trunk, do you think it will close?” Abby “ wondered. “No. I’m too delicate, aren’t I? Maybe I’ll call Wilson up and have him sit on the lid. That would work. He’s quite hefty.”

“Or you could just pack fewer things,” Lily suggested.

“Oh, you
are
adorable. Although, now that you mention it, I suppose it’s a bit silly to pack gowns from St. John’s to wear in New York. I’ll probably toss them all on the fire my first week in the city.”

Abby was off to New York in the height of summer. “Hot and dirty, but better than cold and dirty, which it will be if I stay here,” she pointed out. She was staying until at least Christmas, “If not forever,” she told Lily. “I fully intend to find a millionaire and marry him. Aunt Sarah has half a dozen picked out for me to sample.” Two years of flirting and coquetry among the well-off young Methodists of St. John’s had earned her proposals from Frank Ayre, Norman Winsor, and two others so inconsequential Lily couldn’t even remember their names. But Abby had rejected them all.

“What will I do here alone? Without you?”

“Poor thing. You’ll pal around with Martha Withycombe ’til you expire of boredom, I suppose. But soon I’ll be married and in an apartment of my own, and you could come to stay. You will come, won’t you? When I’m married? If you’re not married yourself by then?”

“I can’t see how I will be,” Lily said.

Abby stopped flitting around the room, sat down on the still-unclosed trunk lid, and took Lily’s hand. “Darling, you know I never speak seriously because I believe serious talk is a kind of death. Don’t contradict me: it is. But I will, just this once, because I’m going away tomorrow and I don’t know when I’ll see you again. You must give this up—this thing with David Reid. You know it can’t go anywhere, and as long as it goes on you won’t even look at any other perfectly suitable man. And there are other men, not just the Reverend. Remember, wherever there’s a Mr. Collins, there’s a Mr. Darcy lurking somewhere near by.”

“And you mean to tell me David Reid is no Darcy.”

“Darling, I’m afraid he’s more of a Wickham, and meanwhile there are perfectly nice boys from good families who would love to court you. We’re twenty years old, Lily. The future is upon us.”

“It all sounds very easy and practical when you put it like that.”

“It is easy and practical. Everything is. You just have to put aside your feelings, or pretend you don’t have any.”

Papa still suspected nothing. All his parental wrath was focused upon Mrs. Ohman and the spectre of women’s rights agitators. As Lily had expected, he heard about Mrs. Ohman’s stalking out of the WCTU and chastised Lily for going even though he had given her permission. Mrs. Ohman’s attempts to start a Suffrage League had failed over and over. Bookings for halls were refused, ladies failed to show up when a hall was booked, and no new copies of the
Water Lily
had been printed since November of last
year. Meanwhile, Lily had managed two more secret meetings with David—once to the boarding house where, again, she proved unable to resist temptation, and once just to walk about by Rennie’s River on a chilly grey day. That had been the previous Sunday, and she was sure everything would be better if they stayed clear away from the possibility of transgression. But instead they’d had a terrible argument—she had actually shouted at him—and though they both apologized, she had been in tears when they parted.

“I won’t even have to end it,” she told Abby now. “It will end of its own accord, for without you to cover for me, how will I ever see him again?”

“It’s all for the best,” Abby said. “Please say you’ll come see me in New York.”

“I will,” Lily said, but it seemed as unreal as saying that someday she would die and go to heaven and pluck the strings of a golden harp. It could happen. It might happen. It was impossible to feel that it really would happen, at least anytime soon. Everything felt remote and distant. From the first time she had succumbed to David’s embraces she felt her life had been held in abeyance, unable to move forward or back.

Or perhaps that feeling had begun even before the affair with David; perhaps she had become suspended, like a fly in a spider’s web, the night she sat in the gallery of the House of Assembly and heard the learned men strike down the bill for women’s votes. Until then Lily had believed she was working for something, that she was part of a movement that would eventually prevail, that would change the world. Now here was the world unchanged, and Lily unable to fit into it. She had girded herself to ride into battle in a war that had not been declared, after all: her army had withdrawn from the field and she was left with armour and a useless sword.

Pretty metaphors, of very little use. She stood up. “I’d better get home. Mother said four o’clock.”

“Kiss me. And don’t forget to write,” said Abby.

Three days after Abby’s departure on the steamer for New York, Lily was shopping with her mother, who for once felt well enough to go out, in the Royal Stores. She saw Mrs. Ohman looking at bolts of cloth and went up to her, since Mother was absorbed in trying on boots.

“Did you go to last week’s WCTU meeting?” Mrs. Ohman wanted to know.

“No, Papa’s forbidden it again, after you made your grand exit the last time.”

“Well you know, you’re not missing anything. I didn’t go myself, but I’m sure it was more of the same. Mrs. Withycombe and her crusade to make the WCTU so respectable that no one dare disapprove. Whoever changed society by trying to be respectable? Name me one person.”

Lily could not.

“Anyway I don’t think the politics of my hometown will concern me much longer,” Mrs. Ohman said. “Mr. Ohman is in Montreal, looking at a business opportunity there. I’m sick of this town and everyone in it—except for you, Lily darling, and a few others.”

“I’ll be sorry to see you go, even though I’m not supposed to be talking with you at all. Papa doesn’t like your influence.”

“Your Papa and others like him will wake up someday,” Mrs. Ohman said. “I only fear it will be too late. But what about you, dear Lily? You mustn’t languish. If we can’t work for the vote we must find other work to do. And you have prospects, haven’t you? What about that nice young minister friend of yours—is he coming to town again? You know, a minister’s wife can have a great influence within the community.”

Abby was gone. Mrs. Ohman was thinking of going. David was kept busy reporting political stories: the fall election had given Premier Whiteway a majority but results were overturned in more
than a dozen districts, so by-elections were being held almost every week. The end result was that there would likely be a new premier and government, and anyone who made his living reporting on politics was busy attending meetings and writing about them at all hours. He still sent notes by way of Johnny every few days, most of which Lily dutifully burned after reading.

Summer came, finally. Grey skies with cool sunshine filtered through rain. It wasn’t much of a summer, but it was July now and the days were as fine as they were going to get.

“Things happen in threes,” her mother said one day, opening the mail. Eleanor often spoke in clichés. Lily wondered was it because it took less energy than inventing original things to say. The news that things happened in threes—bad things of course; there was no need to modify the noun—was often coupled with the observation that this life was a vale of tears. The letter announced the death of an ancient great-aunt—ninety-five if she was a day—in Harbour Grace.

“Well, poor Aunt Hepsie gone—things do happen in threes, they say.”

Lily rarely challenged her mother, but she was so restless that even an argument with someone so completely yielding seemed possible. “Why, Mother, what were the other two?”

“The other two?”

“You said things happen in threes. If Aunt Hepsie was the third thing, what were the first two?”

“Uncle Tom Gill, in the spring, and then your grandfather’s storehouse catching fire.”

The storehouse, like Uncle Tom and Aunt Hepsie, was in Harbour Grace, so it hardly seemed an immediate crisis, especially as no one had been hurt. But Eleanor said she had a dread of fire, even hearing about it, since the terrible one here in town two years ago. Two years! Had it really been so long?

“Ah well, this life is a sad vale of tears,” she said, folding the letter.

“Then you must be glad Aunt Hepsie is free of it,” Lily said.

“Glad? No, I can’t quite be glad, but she’s better off, poor soul.” Eleanor stood, tucking the letter into her skirt pocket, and went upstairs. Papa was in the study; Lily was alone again in the parlour. She was reading Emerson’s essays, which she found pretty slow going. Emerson had come up in an argument she’d had with David a few weeks ago—the last time she saw him in fact—and she wanted to understand his writing for herself rather than just hearing about it second hand from him. Most of the books he mentioned she wouldn’t have dared bring in the house. Imagine if Papa caught her reading Darwin or Karl Marx! But Mr. Emerson seemed safe enough, and David had loaned the book to her, so it was like holding a little piece of him.

She had taken to writing longer letters in response to his notes. After all, he had no need to burn her letters—she could be as indiscreet as she liked, as long as she kept the letter safe from discovery between the time of writing and the time of sending.

Thinking of David, and letters, and Johnny the messenger boy, drove her out into the garden to read, though it was a bit chilly and she had to go back for a shawl. It really was not a very promising July. She thought almost with longing of the July day of the fire, how hot and dry it had been. Certainly a fire starting today would have a harder time devouring the town, with everything so damp and soggy.

Sure enough, after she’d been out there about an hour grappling with
The Over-Soul
, she heard, “Hsst! Miss—I got sumpin’.”

“Hush,” she said, going down to the back fence where Johnny waited in the lane. “I’ve told you to be quiet.”

“I am bein’ quiet. You got a letter for me? I got one fer you.”

Lily had written three pages to David the other day and sent it
off with the boy: she never allowed herself to write until she’d heard back from him. She didn’t want to seem like some pathetic lovelorn girl, badgering him because she had nothing better to do than sit around writing love letters.

The boy passed an envelope through the slats of the fence to her. As always she shivered a little, taking it from him. Her father had never wandered out into the garden or glanced out a window during one of these exchanges but she was always aware that he might do so. If he were to appear, demand she hand over the letter, the game would be up.

D as in Desperation?
She had told him before of the need to be discreet in letters and he had taken that as an excuse to make up silly codes—“butterfly” for Abby was suitable enough, she supposed—while leaving the most damning sentence of all—“I must see you alone”—blazing on the paper. She twisted the note into a knot in her hands while she walked back and forth in grass still damp from the morning’s rain, the hem of her dress getting soaked. What kind of golden opportunity did he mean?

He wanted to meet at Catherine’s house. She had never been in that house since the first time they met there, months ago. All that time she had been living a life of sin, telling herself it would be all be redeemed when he was redeemed. Now he spoke of desperation,
and of an opportunity he could not pass up.

The message came on Thursday. Where could she claim to be going on Saturday afternoon, when no one would lie for her? Lily still had no plan when she came down to dinner on Friday evening to find her father chatting to Reverend Obadiah Collins.

“Ah, here’s Lily,” said Papa in a tone that indicated she had been the subject of their conversation. “Lily, Reverend Collins came to town on today’s steamer. He’s staying ’til the middle of next week. I’ve invited him to have dinner with us, and given him permission to take you and your mother for a drive tomorrow afternoon. Mother thinks she’ll feel well enough to pay a call on cousin Sadie, so you and Reverend Collins can drive out there with her. She has a lovely garden and you young folks can have a pleasant stroll while Mother and Sadie visit.”

Saturday was the nicest day they’d had yet this summer. Two years to the day, Lily thought, since that scorching July day of the fire, the day she had met David. Today was warm, not hot, a model day for a drive out to the far western reaches of the city, where Cousin Sadie lived in a large house at Riverhead. She did have a lovely garden; the roses were budding and the rhododendrons and laburnum in full bloom. Mother looked pale and drawn but she and Sadie sat on the back verandah wrapped in shawls, discussing the shocking story in last week’s newspaper about a young woman who, against parental warnings, had been seen riding a new-fangled bicycle about the streets in company with a young man. “They’ll be wearing bloomers in public next, you mark my words,” Cousin Sadie said. She shot a sharp look at Lily as if to ensure she was not about to strip down to her drawers and hop onto a bicycle.