Lily's Story (29 page)

Of London
itself she had seen little since that night in mid-April when she
had been lifted from the caboose of the highball freight and placed
gently in a closed carriage to be driven through the dark to the
Edgeworth home. The full moon in concert with the spring stars
allowed her to catch glimpses in outline of the largest, most
imposing buildings she had ever seen. The road beneath them was
firm gravel, the horses’ shoes ringing reliably upon it; the
gas-lamps along Richmond Street glittered like
amethyst and cast across their path the shadows
of railings, newel-posts, pitched gables, startling spires and
other eccentric castellations alien to the imagination. There
appeared to be no trees except for occasional decorative saplings
of maple or elm on the steep lawns of the palaces along North
Street. As they wheeled onto the latter to go east, Lily drew in
her breath at the sight of two cathedrals whose grand martellos
carved the night-sky up in Protestant and Catholic halves. She
could, if she stood here on the stone bench by the iris-bed, see
the many towers of the saints stretched out against the sun:
rooted, durable, and unquestioning. In this ‘forest city’ they were
petrified trees.

So this is
civilization, Lily thought. This is what the Millars and the
Partridges dreamed of as they hacked their trees to death –
slashed, burned, pulverized and ground the very
as
h of them back into the
resisting earth. This is what the burghers of Sarnia – with their
muddy streets and clanging foundries and clapboard shells – yearned
towards? Is this the dream Papa dreamt the night he wrestled with
his demons and left forever? What dreams could Mama have ever had,
looking as she did each day on her wizening flesh and knowing in
the interminable night that death was perched like a leper on her
shoulder?

“
You
can’t
read
? My gracious Godfrey, what
have
they
done to you in that dreadful bush-town?” Mrs. Anthony Edgeworth’s
questions were usually pointed comments on the deteriorating human
condition. “Well, we’ll soon rectify
that
! We shan`t have a
son of the aristocracy grow up in a family of illiterates now,
shall we?” She blushed then, as she did easily and often. “Oh, I am
sorry, dear-heart. I am expressly forbidden to mention things like
that. Walls have ears, you know.” And she dropped her voice a
decibel and half-an-octave.

“
I had no
upbringin’,” Lily said helpfully.

“
Well now,
that isn’t
your
fault. We’ll just see what we can do
in the few weeks at our disposal,” she said with determined
cheeriness. Then she released a bosomy sigh. “If only the Colonel
were alive, he’d take you in hand.”

So it was that
just as the first lilacs sprang into bloom, drenching the air with
the sweet phrases of their perfume, Mrs. Edgeworth donned her best
brocade and ushered the freshly attired Lily into the grotto where
Lamb’s
Tales From
Shakespeare
could be suitably
worshipped. “She’s very quick,” Mrs. Edgeworth said consolingly to
the vicar after another of his less-than-successful exchanges of
catechism with the unlettered and unrepentant girl. “She took an
instant fancy to Portia and Rosalind. Isn’t that intriguing?” The
vicar thought not. “She can tell you right back, quick as a
pedlar’s wink, the whole story of
The Tempest
, or
The Winter’s Tale
.” His reverence thought perhaps
Pilgrim’s Progress
would be more suitable
fodder.

To Dr.
Hackney, essaying an escape after the bi-weekly check of the
patient, she said, “And yesterday I decided to read her some of the
Bard himself. Of course, as you remember, I don’t read nearly as
well as the Colonel, but do you know that wisp of a girl understood
those speeches! I swear she didn’t know half the words in ‘The
Quality of Mercy’ but she got the gist of it all right.” How she
wished she could confide in the vicar and the doctor, but
only
she
knew that
the father of the child was some important figure-of-state from
Toronto and that secrecy was imperative. The doctor, the vicar and
Lucille, her servant, were told only that the girl was the daughter
of a friend from the country, and that discretion was requested.
Lucille was, alas, “dumb as a post but ever so sweet” and fully
devoted to her mistress. Lily soon discovered that Lucille was not
at all dumb, only French, and that to her own surprise she recalled
a great deal of the French she had heard so often so long ago. The
two girls, barely a year apart, chatted amiably in both tongues
during the drowsy afternoons of early spring with the earth
greening around them and the air as clear as claret.

For the first time ever,
Lily found she did not enjoy being alone. She loved to listen to
the funny stories Lucille had to tell about her crazy relatives
down in Essex; the slither and scrape of her
joual
was like the low notes on a
slow fiddle. Lily sat entranced by the tales Mrs. Edgeworth read to
her and she committed to memory some of the strange, cadenced
phrases of Shakespeare’s women – all the more powerful because they
swam in her head only half-understood, hovering and forever
about-to-be. One night she woke up already sitting, and heard a
voice say, “The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark when neither
is attended.” She lay awake for over an hour trying to feel the
meaning under such words.

When not reading to her, Mrs. Edgeworth took
full advantage of her captive pupil, and proceeded to give her a
singular history of England from the narrow but
no-less-illuminating perspective of her own family and, where
verisimilitude demanded, that of the late Colonel’s. “Oh how my
Aunt Fanny laughs when I tell her in every letter that I live in
London on the Thames in Middlesex County. She’s of the opinion that
we all live in log cabins and spend most of our days swatting
flies.” Then she would sweep the garden and environs with her
Canterbury gaze: “Ridiculous, eh? But the Colonel, bless his
memory, helped to make it what it is today. My only worry is that
my dear nephew, Tippy, the Colonel’s sister’s boy, who I’ve raised
since he was a tot of ten, will not be the kind of man his father
and uncle were.” And on she would go about Tippy’s modest
indiscretions – his poor grades in school, his truancy, his current
“escapade” in Toronto, where he was supposed to be learning the law
in a respectable firm there, but was more often seen elsewhere in
unmentionable places. Lily listened, quite content to nod assent or
demurral as the moment dictated, watching the concern and
vulnerable kindness play across the face of this stranger who
without doubt was coming to love her. Is this the way it is, the
way it’s going to be? Lily thought. These sudden, powerful, random
bondings followed by the wrenching of separation, bleak rides in
the night towards dawnings we have not even had time or the wonder
to dream of?

Finally, a month after her arrival – with
the creature inside her growing increasingly bulbous, lopsided,
counterclockwise – Lily got a letter from Aunt Bridie. She spotted
her own name in capital letters on the envelope, and could even
make out the name of the street and city. But the letter itself was
written in Auntie’s scrawl, and even Mrs. Edgeworth had a little
difficulty in reading it aloud.

Port Sarnia, C.W.

May 2, 1861

Dear Lily:

Sorry to be so long in writing to you. Word
has been got to us that you are doing fine. Things are so confused
here that I ought to wait until the news is good before sending it
along to you. Uncle Chester is getting stronger by the day. Old
Bill is about the same. We all miss you terrible. Just after you
left, some bigwigs from the railroad came over here and made an
offer to buy our property. I told them no, this land was our
living, we would never leave it. Then they said the railroad needed
the land for the townsite of Point Edward. They now own all of it
but our section. They said they would expropriate it; that’s a
two-dollar word for taking it and paying us as little as they can
get away with. If they take the farm, I don’t know what we’ll do. A
friend of Uncle Chester’s has written from London with a business
proposition but nothing is about to happen very soon you can rest
assured. So we don’t want you to worry, just stay healthy and bring
us back the babe. We’ll be here waiting. We’ve always got by and we
always will.

Love,

Aunt Bridie

xoxoxo Uncle Chester

But Lily did worry. Aunt Bridie’s hopes,
pinned so precariously to the railway’s expansion, were about to be
dashed by the very instrument expected to fulfill them. Whatever
happened with the farm, she knew it would not fatten itself at the
expense of the Grand Trunk.

So Lily waited, and was pampered. The form
within her prospered. No more letters came. June did, and the time
for her lying-in.

2

Lily did not lack for either care or advice.
Lucille’s household duties were lightened so that she could play
the role of nursemaid, a part she relished, though her
ministrations in the stuffy, darkened room where the victim was
forcibly detained, were more colloquial than therapeutic. Mrs.
Edgeworth herself supervised the serving of the meals and spent
part of each afternoon and evening reading to or talking at her
“dear-heart.” Dr. Hackney now arrived once a week to ceremonially
take her pulse, depress her tongue and then poke and stroke the
protuberance that used to be her belly. Giving it a farewell pat he
turned, on his last visit, to Mrs. Edgeworth and proclaimed: “It
will come on time, Elspeth. Of course it’s not great accomplishment
to predict the exit day when the entry point, so to speak, has been
so accurately documented.” Being a woman of the world, Elspeth did
not blush, much. Then seeing the entreaty in Lily’s eyes, he said
for all to hear: “A son: one week: the fourteenth most
probably.”

Unbeknownst to Dr. Hackney, his visits were
invariably followed by the arrival, through the back-garden gate
and woodshed door, of Elsie Crampton, the regional midwife. Elsie’s
examination was more probing, inquisitive and jovial than the good
physician’s. Lucille and Elspeth followed her in, trailed by her
assistant, a buxom, overblown Irish girl named Maureen, who had
recently delivered a son to the skeptical world. The midwife’s
smile was lop-sided (she had teeth only on the left side) but
generous, and Lily felt strangely comforted in her presence, even
though her confinement in this canopied, curtained, velveteened
chamber seemed out of tune with the raw, rooted germination inside
her. Mrs. Crampton held her hand, talked to her, and gave her
instructions for the ordeal of the birthing day.

“
It’s gonna be a bit late,
I think,” she announced to the curious assembly. “About the
twenty-second or twenty-third, I’d say. Which means she’s gonna be
a stubborn little cuss, but a genuine beauty.”

The women of the chorus agreed.

“
On my birthday?” Lily
said, looking at Lucille.

“
Could be, dearie, but I
wouldn’t pray too hard for it, ‘cause the longer you stay penned up
here the paler and weaker you get. I don’t believe in all this
lying-in stuff. Why, Maurie here was hoein’ spuds the day before
little Mikey popped out.”

Lily didn’t pray but she hoped, all the
same. The fifteenth passed with no signs of the contractions she’d
been alerted to. Dr. Hackney arrived for his weekly check, feigned
puzzlement, let his fingers linger affectionately on Lily’s pumpkin
bulge, and muttered to Mrs. Edgeworth at the door: “No question:
I’ll be back before the night’s over.”

Other than Dr. Hackney, no
man had run his hand over her belly except for the Prince himself.
Their love-making had been swift and narrow. His Royal Highness had
wheezed twice and slumped lengthwise upon her. For Lily there had
been pain, cutting and revelatory, her body moving almost on its
own, as it did when infused with the music of some dance, though
here there was no time to ensure mutual cadence, no culmination
except the fierce clutch of skin to skin, a second of total
accessibility broken by the boy’s sobs as he rolled away and saw
the escutcheon of blood on the duvet. Instinctively, forgetting her
own discomfort and sense of incompletion, Lily reached up and
brushed the tears across his cheeks. He stared at her in awe; never
had she seen such a look in the eyes of another human watching her.
For a moment she felt not sundered but whole, not colonized but
possessing – extravagant even, imperial. Then she lay back, settled
in her own kind of amazement, and let her lover’s hand replicate in
minor keys the brute affection of their coupling. Deep down Lily
knew it was not her body – with its elastic, cursive allure – that
the future king worshipped with his caresses, murmurings and
bunting glances, but something beyond it yet not exclusive of it.
As the days grew closer to her own birthdate and the high solstice,
Lily began to feel at last come connection between those events on
the
Michigan
and
this thumping, reciprocal being waiting to be born.

In the early hours of the morning of the
twenty-first, the first spasm struck. Lily was startled by its
severity, and not a little frightened. She had been well-prepared
for the sequence of calamities to follow: Lucille was the middle
child of a family of thirteen and reported graphically upon the
numerous, horrific births she claimed to have witnessed. Mrs.
Crampton had described to her in clinical terms the necessity of
these discomforts and added the assurance that “when you see the
babe you’ll have already forgotten the pain.” Cold comfort that was
here in the dead of night in a stranger’s house in a foreign town
with her belly squeezing her stomach into her throat and her bowels
into her spine. She gritted her teeth and let the aftershocks knit
their way through her flesh; she would not cry out. She tried to
wipe away the images of Lucille’s encephalitic brother ripping his
mother’s vagina like a tear in a button hole, or the Jersey’s eyes
in the snowy coffin of her stall, but the only picture she could
replace them with was that of a shadow-green cove in Papa’s
backwoods – with the spread flesh of the faceless squaw, the
propulsion of the tiny head treeward, the corolla of flung blood,
the silence into which it dropped petal by scarlet petal.