The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (660 page)

The Home for Incurables was located across the street from Grandpa Lundy’s house in Parkdale. On the evenings of concerts, Mazo and Caroline watched the members of the band pass by with their instruments. They watched twilight deepening to darkness. When they heard the first strains of music in the placid air, they crossed the street and hastened toward the gardens of the Home, watching for the flare of the torches against the blackness of the trees and the glint of the brass of the horns.

Mazo and Caroline submerged themselves in the sauntering crowd. They joined a decorous little group of other young people. When the band broke into “Soldiers of the Queen,” their hearts surged with patriotism. Soon Queen Victoria would celebrate her Diamond Jubilee!

Often, as Mazo and Caroline were strolling among the formal flower beds filled with red geraniums and purple asters, they met one of the neighbour boys with his friends. The neighbour boy was named Gordon McGrath. Gordon had a tennis court. Admittedly it was only a lumpy grass court, but Gordon and his friends had fun playing on it. Gordon’s widowed mother would sit in the shade of the trees, with a friend or two her own age, watching the young people play.

Although Mazo and Caroline saw Gordon almost every day, it was Gordon’s oldest brother that Mazo and Caroline adored. This brother was as remote as a Greek god, and he looked like a god too. He had been in a regiment in Ireland. He played polo. He was tall and athletic. He wore Irish tweeds. The sight of this Adonis always sent Mazo and Caroline scurrying to the windows to rhapsodize over his looks. Once when they were spending an evening playing Crokinole with Gordon and his mother, this brother came in. He showed the girls his stopwatch. Everything he did was perfect! Eventually he married a very rich wife.

The fat pony clopped lazily up the narrow dirt road, stopping now and then to crop a few mouthfuls of long, juicy, green grass. The pony was pulling a small, light cart that easily carried two slender young women.

In the summers of their late adolescence, Mazo and Caroline still vacationed at the south end of Innisfil Township, beside Lake Simcoe. Today, although the young women had set out immediately after breakfast, the late-August sun was already becoming hot by the time they reached the wrought-iron fence of the pioneer cemetery. The heat bugs were buzzing.

The spoiled pony had taken over one hour to travel just four kilometres from Lake Simcoe to the cemetery that Caroline’s Grandfather Clement had donated to the old Cherry Creek district more than sixty years earlier.

Mazo, tall and auburn haired, was holding the reins. She halted the pony in the shade of a row of lofty pines, climbed down from the cart, and tied the reins to the fence. Caroline, short and platinum blond, was holding a bouquet of flowers. She slid down from her seat, opened the iron gate, and walked purposefully to a huddled cluster of tombstones at the far end of the graveyard. Like Mazo, Caroline was wearing a simple but pretty cotton dress that reached to her ankles.

Caroline halted first before the small, grey, rectangular gravestone of Mary Jane Clement. She read, “died Oct. 1842, aged 14 years, two months, 23 days.” Strange that both Caroline and her father had an older sister named Mary who died young.

Caroline did not stir as Mazo caught up with her and stood silently by her side.

“I remember looking at Mary Elizabeth’s grave back when I was six or seven in Grand Forks,” said Caroline. “It was a warm spring day, and I stood there wondering when she would wake up. After all, the flowers always woke up in the spring.”

“’Wakefield’ is a name on one of the tombstones in Newmarket near Grandfather Roche’s stone,” mused Mazo.

Caroline walked slowly toward the grave of her father’s parents. Their stone was by far the tallest in the family plot. It was an obelisk. It was white, while the other, humbler tombstones were grey.

“Grandfather Clement was very domineering from what everyone says,” murmured Caroline. “He was a big man with a bushy white beard.”

“Lewis James Clement ruled over his wife and ten children like a biblical patriarch in the wilderness,” said Mazo. “Innisfil Township was truly wilderness when your grandparents came here. As everyone says, they built the first frame house.”

“Grandmother Clement died at ‘49 years, eight months, 1857,’ said Caroline. “Probably worn out from having so many children. Of course Grandfather Clement lived a good long life. He was seventy-five when he died in 1873. Five years before I was born.”

Caroline moved toward a small grey grave.

James Clement
… Caroline read silently.

“Father’s tombstone isn’t much bigger than Mary Jane’s,” said Caroline in a tight voice. “Yet he lived to be sixty-four years old, married, had children, and… did things.”

Caroline began to cry. Mazo cried in sympathy.

When the cousins returned to the cart in the shade, they sat for a while without speaking. While Caroline recovered her poise, Mazo looked at the magnificent view from this fragment of what had once been a vast estate owned by Caroline’s Grandfather Clement. He had truly been the squire of the district! Why each of his eight surviving children had received at least forty hectares of land – or the equivalent in cash.

Across the road was a wooded ravine: the land sloped downward toward Cherry Creek and then rose to the Willson farm where Hiram and Caroline Willson had homesteaded. Mazo wondered whether Caroline’s parents, Martha Willson and James Clement, had met in the ravine for secret trysts when they were young lovers. She couldn’t imagine Aunt Martha and Uncle James as young lovers! Aunt Martha was over sixty! Her hair was grey!

Grandma Lundy had been raised on that farm from the age of nine. Caroline had been born on it. The farm was called “The Maples.” Cattle and horses grazed in its green meadows lined by stately leafy trees.

Beyond the Willsons’ forty hectares, the shimmering land rose gradually toward the horizon, about three kilometres away. On that horizon Mazo could make out the steeple of the little red-brick Anglican church where Hiram and Caroline Willson were buried: Caroline’s maternal grandparents and Mazo’s great-grandparents. The church, St. Peter’s, had been built in the 1850s, but the pioneers had arrived much earlier. The Clements had come in 1829, the Willsons about ten years later.

Caroline’s only inheritance would be her share of twenty hectares of land adjacent to St. Peter’s. The land had once been owned by Grandfather Clement, of course. Caroline and her brother would sell the land as soon as they could. They needed the money. Grandfather Clement’s will said they could not receive the land until the youngest child, Caroline, turned twenty-one. Another two years to wait.

Mazo could see the narrow old Yonge Street road rising northward up the hill to St. Peter’s. In a few moments, the pony would clop up the road past the Willson homestead, turn east, and go back towards Lake Simcoe to Aunt Mary’s house. This Mary was Mary Catherine, born Willson, now Mrs. Richard Rogerson.

Mazo could just make out a corner of Uncle Richards forty hectares. Carolines widowed mother, Martha, boarded with Aunt Mary now. At the age of seventeen, the beautiful, high-spirited Martha Willson had married the eldest son of the richest man in the neighbourhood of Cherry Creek: James Clement, son of Lewis James Clement. But Marthas life with James Clement had not been easy.

Today Mazo and Caroline were to have dinner with the whole family at Aunt Mary’s house. Then they would travel back to Toronto by train.

“We must go now,” said Caroline finally. “I’ll be all right.”

What enormous dinners most of the family ate! No matter whose house it was. Rogersons, Willsons, Clements, Lundys, Roches, Bryans – they were all the same. Year in and year out. Everyone sat around the table talking, squabbling, and eating.

The table was always set with heavy plates and vegetable dishes, squat cruets and large English cutlery. A huge roast of beef, thick gravy, mounds of mashed potatoes and turnips. Strawberry shortcakes, raspberry tarts, pumpkin pies… Everything washed down with endless cups of hot, English-style tea with cream and sugar.

Heavy furniture in the dining room. A dark, polished sideboard. Inside shutters and long curtains of yellow velour, caught back by cable-like cords with tassels at the end. Family portraits in oil, heavily framed…

Today Grandpa Lundy was in a particularly jovial mood. He and Uncle Bryan had gone to the circus together! Grandmother Roche’s older brother, Abraham Bryan, was a fast friend of Grandpa Lundy. A childless widower, Uncle Bryan officially lived in Whitby, but he often visited the Danford Roche home in Newmarket and the Daniel Lundy home in Parkdale.

“As you know, Louise, I have not been to a circus in many years, and I care nothing for them, but the old gentleman was anxious to go, and I didn’t see how I could get out of accompanying him,” said Grandpa Lundy, surveying his full plate.

“Not so, Louise! I’ve given up circuses and all that sort of thing. I don’t take any interest in them,” Uncle Bryan objected. “But Daniel would have been terribly disappointed if he didn’t see this circus, and I promised to go with him.”

Everyone at the table laughed.

“What a pair!” said Grandma Lundy with a smile and a shake of the head as she poured the strong, blackish-brown, scalding-hot tea.

Mazo and Caroline were also in a good mood today. After supper, while the older people played cards in the sitting room and the girls washed and dried the dishes, they kept giggling helplessly. They were planning to punish Gordon for confessing to them that he longed to meet an American girl named Lilly Stacy who had recently moved into the neighbourhood.

Still giggling, Mazo and Caroline got ready for Gordon’s regular evening visit.

Mazo put on a new sailor hat that Gordon had never seen. She put the hat on her head at a jaunty angle and then added a veil – something else Gordon had never seen her wear.

When the girls saw Gordon approaching, Mazo sat in a dim corner of the porch where the flowers and vines from a window box filled the air with their scent. She struck the pose of a well-travelled woman of the world.

As Gordon entered the porch, Caroline introduced him to the strange woman.

“Lillian, I should like you to meet our friend, Mr. McGrath,” said Caroline. “Gordon, meet Miss Stacy.”

The pretend Miss Stacy languidly gave Gordon a limp hand to shake. Gordon seated himself on the porch steps and politely conversed with Miss Stacy, who spoke with a refined American accent. Gordon gave Miss Stacy admiring looks that he had never given Mazo.

The quiet of the street, the scent of flowers, and the moonlight glimmering through the leaves were all very romantic. The trouble was that Mazo and Caroline dared not look at each other in case they began laughing.

After a decent interval, Miss Stacy said she must be going. Gordon at once offered to escort her home.

“I’ve been wanting so much to meet you, Mr. McGrath,” Miss Stacy cooed when she had Gordon to herself.

“I feel just the same about you,” Gordon sighed.

“I hope you’re not disappointed in me,” Miss Stacy twittered.

“Oh no,” Gordon protested. “I think you’re wonderful.”

Never had Gordon said anything like this to Mazo!

“You’re so different from any of the men I meet abroad,” murmured Miss Stacy.

Gordon bent to peer beneath the brim of Miss Stacy’s hat. He met the malicious glitter in Mazo’s eyes. Mazo burst out laughing. Caroline was laughing so hard that she had to support herself against a pillar of the porch. Gordon wheeled away and strode home.