A Sudden Sun (30 page)

When I have a daughter of my own, which may be sooner than you think
, Lily thought.
When my daughter has grown up, perhaps we will live in a different world. Where a girl can love whom she chooses,
and go where she wants, and make her own choices
. It seemed like a fairy tale she was telling herself, an enchanted land where the princess could become heir to the kingdom.

“I think a winter in New York would do me a world of good, Papa.”

“No. No, I can’t allow it.”

“Won’t you please think about it, at least?”

“Absolutely not. Lily, you know I’ve never thought Abigail Hayward was a good influence. I’ve only allowed you to be friends with her because I respect her parents. But I don’t agree with their choice to send her off to New York. Apparently it fits with the life they want for their daughter, but it has nothing to do with the kind of life we’re preparing you for. Your problem has been too much freedom, and that certainly won’t be remedied by sending you off to stay in a foreign city with a flighty and reckless girl, under the chaperonage of an aunt we don’t know. If I fear for your safety and good judgement here on the streets of St. John’s, why on earth would I ever let you go to New York?”

Tears welled up, but Lily fought them back. It was, after all, only to be expected. She had made the best case she could but she had always known he must say no. She dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief.

Papa’s voice was gentle and low. “Lily, I agree that the existence you’ve been leading these past months is not good for you—moping about the house, being always alone. I miss your spark, your spirit. You are the only thing that keeps this house from turning into a mausoleum. But running away to New York, trying to copy Abby Hayward’s life, which can never be yours, is not the answer. The answer is to turn your thoughts to your own future, to the kind of life we have always prepared you for. Marriage to a good, godly man. It’s time to think of being a wife and mother, Lily.” He waited but Lily said nothing to fill the silence for him. The mantel
clock ticked, ticked away the moments. How little time she had left before the whole mess was out in the open!

“Reverend Collins is coming to town again in November, while the steamers are still running,” Papa said.

“He seems to make a great many trips to town,” Lily sniffled, reaching for the handkerchief again. “Are you sure he’s not neglecting his parish?”

Papa smiled but said, “He is a very conscientious young clergyman. He is coming to town because he hopes you will have a different answer to his question. I understand that you didn’t feel ready, the last time he asked. You weren’t prepared. But you have had time to think. Think and pray about it, Lily. It is time to move ahead.”

She thought. She prayed. She wondered if there was a plan that would somehow get her to New York with no money for a steamer ticket. She prayed by the hour, looking for signs, reading the Bible, waiting for anything that might tell her where to turn.

She took out David’s postcard, tucked away in the same drawer with Abby’s. He loved her. He wanted to help. He wanted to be with her. But he hadn’t said the one thing she most needed to hear. He hadn’t said, “I’m coming home at once.”

That was what it came down to. What she needed from him was so simple. Not an invitation to come to a faraway city when she had no means or money to get there. What she needed was for the father of her child to come home and take care of her.

She would not write to beg him to return. What kind of basis for a marriage would it be, if she asked him to make a great sacrifice, unwilling? The marriage would begin with Lily always under a great burden of debt.

One could begin a marriage that way, but it would not be, never could be, a love match. Sometimes it might be the only choice.

As promised—or threatened—Reverend Collins came to town
in November. The air was raw with northeast winds by then, the sky a perpetual ceiling of grey. Lily had begun to choose looser, high-waisted dresses: no-one could yet have guessed, glancing at her, but she could see it herself, feel it in the tightening of her waistbands. More than four months along, now.

Reverend Collins took her to a choir concert at St. Thomas’s Church. It was the first time she had been out of the house, except for church, since that day in July. But Papa didn’t seem to mind trusting her reputation, her girlish purity, to the Reverend Collins.

They went for a drive after the concert, though it was chilly and Lily huddled inside her fur coat. “Thank you for that,” she said, with at least a little sincerity. “I haven’t been out much at all these past months. It’s been quite dull.”

“It’s lovely to see you enjoy yourself again, my dear,” the Reverend said. “How I’d like to see roses bloom in those pale cheeks! I know a life in Greenspond would not offer you much in the way of diversion, but it would be a life of useful work and companionship. Have you given anymore thought to my offer?”

“I have,” said Lily. She shivered, possibly from the cold, but she did not want to have this conversation in her parents’ parlour.

She told him everything. Everything, except David’s name. She did not try to colour the truth, or not very much. She told him that she had fallen in love with someone else, a young man who was kind to her but whom her parents would have considered an unsuitable husband. She had been tempted, and fallen into sin. “And now I am going to have a child,” she said. “A child with no father. I am a sinful woman, Reverend Collins. I want a new start, and a father for my child, but I cannot ask you to take on such a burden, especially since it will seem to others that the child is yours.” She had rehearsed the words over and over, like a part in a play.

She watched his face change as she told her story. His eyes widened. A frown creased his brow. The corners of his mouth,
upturned in what he must have thought an appealing smile when he started to speak, turned down, and his eyes faltered away from hers when she finished speaking.

“I ought to take you home,” he said after a moment. “I should speak with your father.”

“Mr. Collins, I beg you—my father and mother know nothing of this. I have kept it a closely guarded secret, and I have trusted only you with it.”

“No one else? Not even this—this man? The father of your child?” The word “father” seemed distasteful on his tongue.

“Of course I did tell him. But he isn’t—I can’t marry him. He has gone away, and he won’t return home to care for me and for his child.” She felt disloyal as she said it, painting David as a man who would shirk his responsibility. But at bottom it was nothing more or less than the truth.

It was likely that Reverend Collins would withdraw his offer of marriage and tell her father at once. She was surprised when he said, “It would be like Joseph.”

Lily knew what he was thinking immediately, but prompted him. “Like Joseph?”

“Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, had to take on not only the responsibility of Mary and her baby, but the shame of having people think he was the father—that he was the one who had sinned in having relations with her before they were married. But he bore it all with grace.”

“But I am not the Virgin Mary,” Lily said. “Only a girl who has sinned.”

“Yes, yes,” he said, his eyes still on the road and not on her. “So in a way it would be more like Hosea and Gomer.” He turned to her. “Lily, I won’t speak to your father tonight. I won’t deny to you that I’m deeply disappointed, that you’re not the girl I thought you were. It’s a heavy blow, to be sure. But I must go home and think and pray
on this—be sure of what God is calling me to do.”

Lily had always disliked the book of Hosea—or ’Osea, as Mr. Collins pronounced it—and thinking of it now she felt sorry for Gomer. Hosea’s sinful wife had run away from her husband and become a harlot, and he took her back. But for the rest of her life Gomer would have had to live with that burden of gratitude, of knowing that he had stooped into the gutter to lift her up.

He came the next day. Lily had not slept all night. In the morning she stood at the window and thought,
David could come home
. He might return on a steamer, without sending a letter or a cable because he knew it might not be safe, and at any moment he might walk up to her front door and rescue her. He might say, “You must marry me” and she would have to say yes. It would be so wonderful, not only to see him again but to have someone else take away the awful burden of deciding what to do.

Instead it was Reverend Obadiah Collins who came to the door at eleven o’clock in the morning. Lily had touched nothing except tea on the breakfast tray that Sally brought up. He walked up the street with his head down and his hands clasped behind his back, like a man going to do something serious and important.

Lily took out the contents of her dressing-table drawer and looked through them: not just David’s postcard and Abby’s but the copies of the
Water Lily
, the leaflets, the scraps and pieces of a life she had almost lived but then abandoned. Then a knock came. Sally said, “Your Papa would like to see you in his study,” and he was down there with the Reverend, the two of them on either side of the desk, and neither of them looked happy. But the Reverend was there. Happy or not, he was there.

“Sit down, Lily,” her father said, indicating a chair. “Reverend Collins and I have been having a long talk, heart to heart.” Lily sat in the chair next to Reverend Collins, which made it feel like they were two naughty children called into the headmaster’s office in school.
“He has confessed something that surprised me greatly, that seems entirely out of character with what I know of him, and of you too. You have been headstrong, Lily, but I never thought you wicked. However, I understand that you are an innocent young girl, easily led astray, and the greater blame rests on Reverend Collins’ shoulders.”

Lily looked from her father to the Reverend, waiting. The Reverend reached over and took her hand. “Lily, my dear, I’ve confessed to your father that when I came to town in July, that you and I—that we were indiscreet, and did what we should not have done, when our engagement was not yet even settled, much less our marriage. That we want to be married very quietly and quickly, before the baby comes, and that I will endeavour to do all I can before God to atone for this error by taking care of you, and of our child.”

It was the most natural thing in the world that Lily should burst into tears at that moment. There could be any number of reasons for it.

“I need not say again how disappointed and surprised I am,” Papa said, “especially as you are a clergyman, Mr. Collins. But I think it is a failing that people are apt to forgive and forget if the marriage is made promptly afterwards.”

When she was alone with the Reverend, Lily said, “I suppose I ought to thank you.”

The Reverend looked a bit taken aback. “I…I had thought you would be grateful.”

I am
, Lily thought.
I have to be. And I will have to be, every day of my life.

The word was out in church the next day. “Oh, you should have a Christmas wedding!” cried Daisy Gill, when Lily said only that they would be married “Quite soon.”

But it was not a Christmas wedding. It was a twenty-fourth of
November wedding in the parlour of the bride’s parents’ home. A week had passed since the marriage proposal; Reverend Collins wanted to be married and back in Greenspond while it was still possible for a boat to travel there, before the weather closed in. He had cabled home to tell them he would be away an extra week, but would bring his bride when he returned. Lily’s father and mother were present. There were no other guests, no wedding supper, no celebration.

Before the wedding she had written a long letter to Abby, explaining what she was doing.

Her note to David was much shorter. She sent a telegram.

She could, of course, have written to him after it was all done. But she cherished that thread of hope that there was in David Reid some spark of Young Lochinvar, that he would batter at the door and tear her from the arms of Obadiah Collins even as the vows were being said. He could claim Lily and his child and carry her off to—where? It hardly mattered anymore.

I
T BEGAN TO snow almost the minute they landed in Greenspond, or so it seemed to Lily. The parsonage was small but it felt cold, bare, and empty. She knew that her job was to make a home of it, to grace it with a woman’s touch, but a weight of lassitude had fallen on her as soon as she stepped off the steamer. When she accompanied the Reverend to church on Sunday, people crowded round to shake her hand and welcome her. Nobody seemed to feel there was anything hasty about the wedding: they knew their young minister had been going into town to court a girl there. Lily caught no covert glances at her waistline, even from the older women. There was nothing to see anyway. Unclothed, she could see a slight roundness to her belly, but under a corset, petticoat and dress there was no hint at all.

She got a keener glance from the Reverend’s mother when they went over to Wesleyville to visit his parents. They presented their son and his wife with a handsome set of china that must have been ordered long before the wedding was confirmed. Mrs. Collins was nothing like Lily’s own mother. She reminded Lily more of
Abby’s mother or of Mrs. Ohman, women filled with an alarming energy. But where Mrs. Hayward’s energy was dedicated to moving in the right society, and Mrs. Ohman’s to bettering the world, Mrs. Collins’s energy appeared to be directed towards setting other people straight and pointing out the errors of their ways. In a three-hour visit Lily heard from her all about what was wrong with the Ladies’ Aid, why the Sunday School was being run improperly, and who was wearing inappropriate hats to church. What would this woman do when she discovered a real sinner, right under her nose, in her son’s house?

December. Snow, rain, sleet, snow again. Visits from parishioners with small wedding gifts. At night Lily slept in the master bedroom alone; the Reverend slept, as he had done before marriage, in a little closet of a bedroom off his study. “Of course, when your child is born,” he had said, looking down at his feet, “we shall, ah, be together as man and wife. I hope we will have more children. I want children of my own, you understand.”

Christmas Eve. One month since her marriage. Lily woke while it was still dark. She had had trouble sleeping for months now, but usually managed to fall into an exhausted sleep sometime in the early hours of the morning. Now she was awake at five, cramps twisting in her stomach. The pain was sharp and red-hot. She cried out, then muffled her face in the pillow.

August, September, October, November, December. Five months, nearly six. Was the baby coming already? She almost laughed—even in April there would have been no hope of convincing people it was so very premature. But now? It was a joke, another of God’s little jokes.

By the time the sky lightened, Lily knew she had to call the Reverend. She gritted her teeth to keep from screaming. She didn’t want the housemaid to know. Then she remembered they had given the girl Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off to spend with her
family. Maybe the baby was coming, or maybe something else terrible was happening. She had never seen a doctor or a midwife. It struck her for the first time that she had entered upon this whole marriage on the grounds that she was expecting a baby and no one had ever told her for certain that was the case. Maybe there was no baby. Maybe she was dying.

She dragged herself to the door, doubling over as another wave of pain rolled over her. “Reverend Collins!” she called. She had never yet called him Obadiah.

He came and told her to get back in bed, then went himself to fetch the midwife. Lily lost track of time under waves of pain. Then the midwife was there, an old woman who muttered and shook her head. “This don’t look good,” she said. “How far along do you say you are, Missus?”

“July 8,” Lily said through gritted teeth. That one thing she knew for certain. On the eighth of July she had lain down in a bed with her lover and conceived this child. She tried to lock her jaws against the screams but the midwife said, “Have a good holler, my love, it’ll do you good. Not much else will, now.”

She had thought the wedding day was the worst of her life but that was only because she was a little fool, an ignoramus. An innocent girl, as her father had said. Could she be a fallen woman and an innocent girl at the same time? Now she was innocent no longer, but still falling, falling through pain and darkness and horror, screaming and pushing like a barnyard animal to give birth to something the midwife had told her would not, could not live. No one had even guessed she was having a baby. She had sold her life away for nothing. If this had happened a month earlier, on the morning of the twenty-fourth of November instead of December, everything would have been different—no wedding, no husband, no chilly parsonage in Greenspond.

It wasn’t over ’til midnight, as Christmas Eve turned to
Christmas Day. Her whole day, her child’s whole life, had been bordered by this one room, this bloody bed, this square of streaky window glass that grew light and then rain-covered and then dark again.

“’Tis all over now, Missus,” said the midwife. She had taken the thing away to dispose of—Lily didn’t ask where or how—got Lily out of bed when she was able and scrubbed up, changed the sheets, changed Lily’s bedclothes. The room looked tidy again; a fire burned in the grate, and the midwife sat next to Lily with a bowl of beef broth, spooning it into her mouth.

“You’ll need to rest now, a good few days. Don’t be up and about too soon. I’ll drop back Saturday or Sunday. And don’t worry—the Reverend give me extra money, but he didn’t need to, I been at this business long enough to know when to hold my tongue. Nobody will know nothing but what the minister’s wife was laid up with some female trouble. The Reverend thinks we can make it like nothing ever happened.” Another spoonful of broth. The midwife wasn’t really as old as Lily had thought. Middle-aged at best. Her dark eyes were shrewd. “There’s no better skill than learning when to keep your mouth shut and I knows it better than most. All the same, you can’t really make it like a thing never happened, especially if the thing is a baby. Whatever you does after this, however many more you has, it always happened.”

“Yes,” Lily said. She had hoped for so long that some miracle would come along and make it un-happen. But the miracle had come too late.

Her husband came in when the midwife had gone. He stood by the window, hands in his pockets, bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet.

“How are you feeling?”

“Tired. Sore. Exhausted.” Did it feel the same, Lily wondered,
to birth a living child? But then you would feel full instead of empty, surely.

“It’s a great pity. But it may prove to be for the best in the end. God moves in mysterious ways.”

The cup that had held the beef broth was still on the side table. Lily had her hand around it before she stopped to think. She hurled it straight at his head, but he dodged aside and it shattered on the wall, shards of white crockery splintering around the room.

“You’re very upset,” he said. His tone had not changed at all. After a moment he said, “I told Mrs. Cuff—no one needs to know about this. After you’ve recovered, it will be like a fresh start for us both. We’ll begin again.”

“Go away.” She buried her face in the pillow. When she looked up again he was squatting on the floor, picking up pieces of the broken cup. The sight moved her for a moment, ’til she thought,
He won’t want the maid to see this tomorrow, to know I’m going mad.