Lily's Story (31 page)

“
My word, look
who it is!” Mrs. Edgeworth’s voice cracked with some of its former
zest. “Lucille, come here quick! It’s Tippy coming up the
walk!”

There was a scuttle and scurry
in the household behind Lily. She turned away, letting the sun
caress the nape of her neck. Below the female greetings and
oohhing-and-ahhing came the rumble of a man’s response. For a while
all was quiet within. Lily grew tense. The hairs on her neck rose.
Her heart pitched and yawed. She heard the slap of the screen door,
the steady step, the coolness of the shadow blotting out the light
behind her. She turned in her chair to face the silhouette framed
by the setting sun.

“
Tom,” she
said, steadying her voice.

12

1

“I
don’t remember much about my parents
except my mother was beautiful and my father was tall and stern in
his uniform. It was him who got sick first, consumption according
to my Aunt, then mother went down with it and I was torn away from
them. For my own good, of course. I remember my mother’s face in
the window too weak to smile or cry or comfort my screaming. Weeks
later I was taken by the Colonel and Aunt Elspeth to their funeral.
All of London was there, she said. Except my parents. They’re over
there.” He pointed vaguely south-west to where the pink spire of
St. Paul’s glinted bravely through the trees below which the
granite, engraved stones proclaimed steadfastness.

Lily lay her head back on the
pillow behind her head, half-closing her eyes. Along the ambling
lane and its weathered zig-zag fences, hollyhocks flung their
petticoats shamelessly into the sun’s gaze. The breeze, perfumed by
a penultimate rose, eased her lids shut. Some beneath in the shape
of a hand fluttered on her own.

“I
guess you could say I was rich and
spoiled. Aunt Elspeth finally got the child the Colonel was too
busy to provide her with, and she made the most of it. She had an
enseign’s uniform made for me to prance about in when I was barely
eleven and very small for my age. But rich, no. My father left me a
small sum to be given out as an annuity from my eighteenth to my
twenty-sixth year. That ends this fall.”

Lily squeezed his arm to get a
firmer grip as they started north on Colborne Street, on this her
first excursion around the block.

“
Take it
easy,” Tom said. “Nurse’s orders.”

“
Your Auntie
bought you the wrong costume,” she said lightly.

“I
was a real rebel; I must’ve come
close to breaking my Aunt’s heart. Especially after the Colonel
died in ’fifty. I hated school. I hated Latin. I hated Greek. I
wouldn’t do my sums or the dusty old histories of the Empire. I
played hookey to go fishing or help the boys build huts and forts
and kites. I was pretty good with my hands then. I liked those
scruffy, bad-mouthed kids...”

Lily stumbled and gave a
stifled cry at the sudden pain. Two powerful arms held her until
she forced back the tears, found her sea-legs and peered up at him
wanly.

“
You try to do
too much,” he said. “You want to get better soon, don’t
you?”

Lily gave him an ambiguous
smile. Letting go his arm, she teetered up the path – confident,
bathed in the green praise of the high summer.

“I
t’s funny, don’ t
you think, that even though I loved to scuffle and carry on mock
battles with the ruffians down by river – we even built rafts and
men-o-war – my Aunt decided I was too undisciplined to follow in
the footsteps of my father and uncle. She decided I was to be a
scholar, she had an eye on the law or the new university in
Toronto. But, of course, you know enough of Aunt Elspeth to see
that she just couldn’t ever be too firm or mean enough to corner a
character like me. But she kept me in school, one way or another,
mostly through bribes or long bouts of weeping and sighing and
calling up the ghost of the Colonel.”

In the field before the Thames
where they were walking for the first time, wild daisies with
single-eyed resolve contended with the twitch grass and
still-stemmed blue devil.

“
But I got
even, I guess.”

“
You joined
the militia,” Lily said, holding a daisy under her chin as if it
were a dandelion.

“
Yes,” he said
after a pause. “Major Bruce’s Volunteer Corps.”

“
Do I have
butter on my throat?” Lily said, raising her face dangerously close
to the voltigeur’s. He took command – though the kiss was brief,
almost brotherly.

“W
e drilled every
other Saturday over there in Cricket Square,” Tom said. “I was
determined to show the world I could make a soldier out of
myself
and not my upbringing.”

“
I had no
upbringin
’,” Lily
said.

Tom
released her arm. “Why do you say
things like that?” he said with that mixture of hurt and anger she
was growing accustomed to.

“
Because
they’re true,” Lily said, walking ahead with a steadiness that was
now only partly feigned. She leaned back against the fence for
support, letting the bough of the overhanging apple tree – its
fruit as hard and tiny as buckshot – fall across her shoulder, her
white dress and her freckled arms set against the last spray of
hollyhocks, the sun incendiary in her hair.

“
Are you
comin’, Sir Tom?” Lily called.

Tom
was starting in her direction. At
last he came up to her, but when they resumed their stroll, he kept
rigidly to her left as if he were marching in rank. Lily, sensing
the change, made no move to touch him.

“I
t’s all right,” Lily
laughed, skipping and tilting her way down the steep river bank
below Westminster Bridge. “I won’t break!” To prove her point, when
she got to the bottom she fell face-forward into the consenting
grass, as if she were making angel-figures in the snow. When she
bounced back up, though, there was little record of her daring.
Breathless, Tom reached her side, his eyes wide with
disbelief.

“
For God’s
sake, Lily –” he said with an edge of anger, then softened and
finished: “please, please be careful.”

“
I’m not
fragile, you know,” Lily laughed, doing a little jig and whirling
in the breeze to some inaudible fandango.

“
I don’t
know
anything
about you,” Tom said, sitting on the
bank and staring sulkily into the water.

“
You know I
had a baby,” Lily said in that tone which left him puzzled and
occasionally seething. “And I got no husband. And I’m your Aunt’s
charity case.”

“
For God’s
sake, quit talking like that! It’s... it’s –”

“
True?”

“–
disgusting
and...reeking of self-pity.”

Lily stared at her face in the
shivering water. With his blue epaulettes flashing in the light, a
kingfisher broke the surface with the bayonet of his beak.

Tom
’s arms were around
her in a most unbrotherly fashion. They gripped her like braces;
she let him pull both her softness and her strength against his
rigidity. Some of the tension flowed her way. His lips brushed her
eyelids, her cheeks, then met her own rising. They simply held each
other that way for a long time, as if there were a question to be
raised and no one to utter the first syllable of the
answer.

Tom
let go first. “I’m sorry,” he
lied.

“
I’m not,”
Lily said. “An’ what for?”

“
You’re in my
care,” Tom said feebly. “My Aunt, she’s trusted me, she’s
–”

“
An’ you,”
Lily said, “have taken advantage of a fallen woman.”

“
Why
do
you say things like that?” he said.

“N
ow that we’ve
kissed,” Tom was saying as he dropped the sour cherries into Lily’s
apron, “you must tell me more about yourself. Fair’s
fair.”

“
Nothin’ to
tell, really,” Lily said. “I’m a farm girl, born an’
raised.”

“
You were no
farm girl that night we danced in Sarnia.” He held a cherry aloft
and she captured it with her teeth, the tart juice
stinging.

“
Even farm
girls dance,” Lily said equivocally, and saw right away that he was
hurt.

“W
e’ve come too far,”
Tom said. “You sit right here and I’ll fetch the buggy.”

“
Let’s just
rest a bit,” Lily said, puffing and laughing from their run down
the lane.

They sat. In the thicket
a veery’s note soared and sighed, surrounding solitude.

Tom
said, “Don’t you...don’t you, ever,
well, feel sad –”

Lily turned her solemn eyes his
way, puzzled.

“
About the
baby, I mean.”

“
It died,”
Lily said.

“
That’s what I
meant,” he said, patting her wrist.

“
All the
time,” she said.

It wasn’t the answer he
expected.

“Y
ou’ll find it hard
to believe but I’m known among my cronies as the strong and silent
type,” Tom said. They were walking hand in hand in the countryside
just north of the city after a pleasant ride in the surrey. The
country lane was fringed with young goldenrod and late-blooming,
orange-throated lilies.

“
I’ll be goin’
back home soon,” Lily said. “I ain’t heard from Auntie in a month.
I’m worried about her. Things ain’t been goin’ good for us the last
while.”

Keep talking, Lily, his
eyes said.

“
Why do you
want to be a soldier?” she said.

A
fter their picnic
under a huge elm beside the creek, Tom reached for her but she drew
back ever so slightly.

“
Well, I guess
I started out just wanting to prove something to my Aunt and her
friends. I was never too good at it, even then. By the time I was
eighteen I was running around with Mad-Cap Dowling and that fast
crowd, drinking and...carrying on.”

“
With fallen
women,” Lily added.

“
Scarlet women
is the term used in polite society,” Tom said, scanning her face.
“I had my own money at last and spent it as fast as it came in. So
when my Aunt suggested I go off to Toronto, not to the University
but to clerk in a law firm, I said yes. I wanted to travel, to see
the country and the big city. I discovered that the Dowlings of
this world are not confined to London.”

“
An’
then?”

“
Then I
decided one morning last fall that with my income about to be ended
this year, I had to look at my life, my future. And I did. I joined
the Canadian Rifles volunteer brigade the next day. I attended all
the drills, read the manuals, bought my own uniform and was made a
corporal. Then I heard that the British Army was going to allow
Canadians to join regular units to serve here and
abroad.”

Overhead, cicadas announced
mid-afternoon August with a reedy voluntary. In the meadow
grasshoppers dozed in the heat.

“
What do
soldiers do,” Lily asked, “besides killing people?”

Tom
was taken aback, then sprang forward
at the ready. Her directness was something he could find no
antidote for. Had she just asked a question or made a cutting
appraisal? Nothing in her steady gaze could help him. He gathered
his dignity and said overly loud: “The British Army and our militia
do not kill people. Our job is to protect the lands and homes and
lives of our citizens – ordinary people like your Uncle and Aunt
who would be prey to thieves, murderers and foreigners. None of us
would be safe without them. None of us would be
here
without them. Surely you’ve heard of the Rebellion? The
Patriot’s War?”

“
I had no
schoolin’,” Lily said.

He pretended to ignore this
remark. “Even now there’s rumblings of a war between the states
over there, a big fight over slavery. We’ve been put on alert at
all the border points. The boys are growing real excited about it.
There’s a good chance I’ll get into the regulars by September.
That’s what I want. To be a defender of my country. That’s what
putting on the uniform is about.” His eyes were glistening, and in
spite of herself Lily was held by the brilliant, earnest,
frightened power in them. “The army’s about the things that are
most important to any man anywhere: honour, duty, loyalty, service
and patriotism.”

He sought the confirmation of
Lily’s hand; she allowed him to take it, but said after a bit:
“I’ve heard of them words.”

He gave her a grateful, jittery
smile.

“Where’s Tom?” Lily said
to Mrs. Edgeworth at breakfast.

“
Tippy’s been
called away to Toronto,” said the good lady, her face reflecting
both the panic and bemusement with which she had been observing the
month-long convalescence of Lily and her nephew.