Lakeland Lily (25 page)

‘What if you lose that lovely husband of yours through spending too much time worrying over the state of summat you can’t do aught to change?’

‘But we are changing it, and Bertie’s in favour.’

‘And Edward Clermont-Read?’

Lily couldn’t help but smile. ‘Growing poorer by the minute.’

Hannah, ever wise, raised her eyebrows in an unspoken query. ‘He’s not a bad man. Thoughtless happen. A bit put upon by that wife of his, and too trusting with his agent, but he means well. The Clermont-Reads won’t thank you for wasting their money in this way.’

‘If The Cobbles had been a decent place, happen our Emma would still be alive today.’

‘That was God’s will. If she was called, what could we do to save her?’

‘We can at least make The Cobbles a clean place for her sisters to live in, then they won’t be called too.’

Seeing her mother’s wince of pain, Lily wanted to offer comfort but Hannah had as quickly gone all tight-lipped again. In her opinion bemoaning one’s lot was a sign of weakness and only made matters worse.

Lily made her excuses and left fairly soon after that, but as she swung down the hill away from the sanatorium she harboured no regrets for her campaign. Nor could she feel any sympathy for Hannah’s grim acceptance of whatever life brought. To see the Clermont-Reads suffer as Dick, Emma and everyone else in The Cobbles had suffered, and, yes, as Hannah herself had suffered as a result of poverty, wasn’t that what she wanted? Sweet revenge? Justice? Surely it was worth any price?

The price, however, proved more than even Lily had bargained for.

Mrs Greenholme met her at the door. This was so unusual that Lily knew at once something was wrong. Had Bertie suffered the much-dreaded relapse? She broke into a run and flew up the steps. ‘What is it?’ Tell me.’

The kindly cook took hold of Lily’s hands and led her with tender care, not to Bertie’s room as expected, but to Amy’s.

Lily gazed with dawning horror upon the tiny figure of her daughter lying so still in bed, a maid sponging the frail body with cool water. ‘She took sick this morning, just after you’d gone.’

‘Why didn’t you send for me?’ There seemed to be a roaring in her ears and Lily fell to her knees beside the bed, her world collapsing about her.

Mrs Greenholme’s voice seemed to come from some far distant place, hushed and respectful, filled with the same fear that held Lily now in its cruel grip. ‘Betty was the only one willing to go to The Cobbles, but she couldn’t find you. We sent for the doctor. He says we’re to get down the fever, fast as we can. That’s what we’ve been about all day. He says the epidemic might be largely over, but there are still one or two outbreaks.’

Lily struggled to take in the woman’s words, as if they came from a long way off. One thought dominated all else in her brain.
Why did Amy have to be one?
She hadn’t even been near the place.
But I have,
the relentless voice continued.

The roaring came again, seeming to paralyse every part of her body. Lily could not move a muscle, could barely speak or think. Dear God, what had she done? Had her crusade for revenge led her to put her own child in danger?

She must make Amy better, that was the answer. Not stand here doing nothing. Amy didn’t live in The Cobbles, did she? She lived here, safe and warm in a rich man’s house. As a strange unearthly calm descended upon her, Lily called for ice, and blankets to be brought up, though this had already been done. She took the cold cloths from Betty and started work on her precious child. But her efforts were to no avail. The nightmare was over frighteningly quickly. By midnight Amy’s temperature soared. By dawn she was dead and Lily inconsolable.

She did not weep or shed a single tear. The tears she’d wept for Emma, and for Dick could not help her now. They failed to break through the pain that held her heart like an iron vice.

How could she go on living without her child? It wasn’t possible. What right had the sun to shine, the world to keep on turning? Lily walked to her room and carefully closed the door. She washed her face and cleaned her teeth, put on her cotton nightdress and climbed into bed as if everything were perfectly normal.

She would wake tomorrow and find Amy asleep as usual in the make-shift cradle at the foot of her bed, soft pink mouth puffed out gently in sleep. But in the night when she woke, disturbed as she often was by Amy’s cry, she found the cradle empty, a silent rebuke to her failure as a mother to protect her child. Then, giving a terrible guttural cry, she smashed it to pieces and with her bare hands ripped the fine linen sheets to shreds.

Lily sat in her room for days, emerging only to walk behind the tiny coffin and see her child put to her final rest. Still no tears fell. Even in the depths of her devastation, Lily took sanctuary in anger, not sorrow. It was the only emotion that could keep her free from the emotional abyss waiting to swallow her up. She did not seek sympathy or pity. She wanted none, knowing they would unhinge her.

Not that either was offered to her at Barwick House.

Margot considered it inappropriate to mourn for a child who might or might not have been her granddaughter. She told her grieving son quite bluntly where he should lay the blame: with the child’s mother.

He believed Margot when she told him Lily had taken Amy to The Cobbles, and for the first time in their married life Bertie turned away from her.

He wept, a man broken by grief. Lily could hardly bear to watch him, for how could she deny her responsibility? Neither Bertie nor Selene would ever have set foot in The Cobbles if it hadn’t been for her, nor been ill as a result.

Her penance now was that she’d lost the person who’d mattered most to her in all the world. Amy had paid the ultimate price for Lily’s own folly.

And all because of her quest for revenge.

Days after the funeral, grim-faced and against all advice, Lily returned to The Cobbles. Proving, in Margot’s eyes, that she was indeed an unfeeling mother.

Builders, joiners and plumbers had been sent in by the dozen and Lily worked beside them like a mad woman. She mixed cement, installed guttering, laid water pipes and sewers for the taps and lavatories that sprang up in every back yard, even carried blocks of stone. No one dared deny her the right to help or she would turn on them in spitting fury, fierce as a tiger. Nor did she allow the men much time to rest.

‘Why are you taking a tea break? Work harder. It must be finished by winter,’ she stormed every time they stopped for a breather. Rose steadfastly struggled to keep everyone’s spirits high. ‘Give ‘em a chance. They’re only human, for God’s sake. At least now we won’t have to trek miles in search of a privy, with our legs crossed and our bums frozen stiff.’

Once, Lily might have giggled at the crude but wondrous picture this conjured up. Now she had lost any ability to smile. Amy would never laugh again, so how could she?

The task was enormous, could take months, and they didn’t have months. Other babies might fall sick and die. Even Edward no longer protested that she was leading him to the brink of bankruptcy but silently handed over whatever money she demanded.

Lily resolved to finish the work, no matter what the cost, so that Amy would not have died in vain. She no longer found any pleasure in it. Bitterness and cynicism now clouded any sense of achievement. But everyone else was beginning to appreciate the miracle she had wrought.

‘The Cobbles’ll be the best part of Carreckwater before we’re done,’ Rose told Edward. ‘The nobs’ll be queuing up to buy houses here. And Edward Clermont-Read will be its greatest benefactor.’

This seemed to please him, but to Lily, her arms still aching for want of her child, it seemed yet another bitter irony, proving once more the folly of her quest.

Surprisingly, Dora Ferguson-Walsh proved to be a tower of strength. Knowing Lily could not bear to work with the children, she set up a fund to collect money for clothing and shoes then lined up scores of urchins in the street, dosed them with medicine, shaved off their lice-ridden hair, and sent them away reeking of disinfectant and happily sucking on a mint ball.

‘It’ll only grow again and the lice come back,’ Lily bluntly told her, and Dora’s plump face broke into a smile.

‘Then we’ll have to come and do it all over again, won’t we?’

Lily didn’t say she was grateful for Dora’s efforts, she couldn’t. Instead, she demanded to know why she was bothering to help. ‘Don’t say because I asked you to.’

‘For Bertie. Who else?’

The sense of guilt which pierced Lily’s heart at this simple statement added still further to her pain. Dora should have married Bertie, not herself. She would have made him a better wife.

Lily grew thin and pale and both Rose and Dora urged her to take more rest, which only made her strive all the harder. Lily wanted to put right everything she had made wrong, but couldn’t. It was far too late.

The only answer to her pain was work.

She was attempting to lift a huge block of limestone one morning when a harsh voice rang out.

‘That isn’t your job, Lily Thorpe. You’re making a grand effort here, but leave that for the men.’

Staggering beneath the weight of the stone, Lily stubbornly clung on. ‘I can manage. It’s no business of yours what I do.’ Without even glancing up she knew it to be Nathan. In her mind she could see him before her, standing so straight and tall, arms folded, face dark and condemning. She dragged the stone inch by inch, sweat pouring down her face, soaking her cotton frock, as with gritted teeth she stubbornly held on. She might have succeeded too, she decided, if she hadn’t come over all peculiar. The top of her head seemed to lift off as pain shot up her arms and gripped her by the back of her neck, even as her shoulders seemed to be dragged from their sockets by the weight of it.

Then her knees buckled and Nathan caught her as she fell, pushing aside the offending piece of masonry to grasp her tightly in his arms. He whispered her name, laid his cheek against hers. It was smoothly shaven, like cool silk against her burning skin. The familiar scent of him enveloped her as surely as his arms enfolded her, and Lily gave herself up to the bliss of it. No one else had held her so throughout the terrible weeks of her grieving. Now, suddenly, it was too much to bear.

All her carefully built defences collapsed.

Tears welled up from a place deep inside that Lily hadn’t known existed. At first they came in great dry racking sobs, breaking from her like shards of broken glass. Then despair overwhelmed her in great gulps of anguish. She wept, she sobbed, she railed, she raged. The pain was indescribable, like nothing she had ever known, nothing she would ever wish to know again. She wanted to lash out and destroy everything, as if in that way she could dispel the pain. Nathan held her fast, preventing her.

When the storm finally subsided into heartbreaking but sorely needed tears, he wiped them away with the palm of his hand, cradling her close on his lap as if she were a child - or his very dear love. And in that instant, Lily wished that she were.

From the day Lily finally broke down and wept on Nathan Monroe’s shoulder she kept away from The Cobbles. The hard work, even the anger, had been an essential part of her grief. Now she couldn’t bear to go near. It was up to others to carry on without her.

All very right and proper, according to Margot. ‘Life must go on, and it was a doomed enterprise from the start.’

‘It’s not doomed. I just need a rest.’

If Lily was as concerned with avoiding Nathan as The Cobbles, she made no mention of that fact. She recalled her bargain with Edward and used this as an excuse to stay away, expressing herself willing to carry out Margot’s bidding. ‘I want to be a good wife to Bertie. Show me how.’

‘Well, well. So we may make a human being of you yet.’

With more resignation than she had ever intended, Lily submitted to Margot’s tutoring with gritted teeth. As expected, Margot rose to the challenge with an almost sadistic pleasure. Day after day she had Lily walking up and down stairs and passageways with huge volumes upon her head.

‘The proper deportment is essential to straighten your back.’ In Lily’s opinion it wasn’t crooked.

She lectured and hectored her daughter-in-law upon the gentility of a lady’s existence, the protocol of paying social calls, working for charity, acquiring social chit-chat, and of course such niceties as the correct method of pouring tea, lifting a cup and saucer without spilling it, and filling hours of each day with perfect cross-stitch.

‘You must pay a call upon all the young wives in the district.’

‘Why?’ Lily was driven to ask, and Margot’s eyes widened.

‘In order that they will call upon you, of course. My dear, if you do not pay calls when they are due, you will be cold-shouldered, even cast out, by society.’

Lily longed to ask how she could be cast out from a society which still did not recognise her existence, but Margot was still talking.

‘If you wish to be included in all the many entertainments next season, you must do your duty. For Bertie’s sake, if not your own. Hasn’t he sacrificed enough?’

Lily’s heart sank as, too late, she recognised the trap. Bertie was a sweet and kind husband and she had brought him nothing but unhappiness with her ill-fated quest for revenge. She’d given him sickness, poverty, and the death of their only child. Nothing else must be allowed to spoil his life. Certainly not Nathan Monroe. She vowed to be the wife Bertie needed.