Читать книгу Lily Fairchild - Don Gutteridge - Страница 16

Mrs. Edgeworth’s walled garden in May was as beautiful as the East Gate to Eden, as that lady iterated often when the ladies of London gathered there, as they did each Thursday afternoon during the warm season. , Lily was obliged to observe the ritual teas from her room on the second floor of the red-brick mansion. She was not to be seen in public and particularly en silhouette. Those were the principal terms of her confinement. But when it was not Thursday afternoon, Lily was free to roam the gardens at will, protected from prurient view by its fieldstone walls, rampant privet and gothic elms. Hedges of honeysuckle and wild lilac marked out avenues for the eye, arrested by arbours of budded rose, beds of thrusting tulips, and the prodigality of peony and rose-of-sharon. Here Lily whiled away the weeks and hours of her twenty-first spring.

Of London itself she had seen little since that night in mid-April when she had been lifted from a private railway car and placed gently in a closed carriage to be driven through the dark to the Edgeworth home. The full moon allowed her to catch glimpses in outline of the largest, most imposing buildings she had ever seen. The gas-lamps along Richmond Street glittered like amethyst and cast across their path the shadows of railings, newel-posts, pitched gables, and spires. 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 head east, Lily drew in her breath at the sight of two cathedrals whose grand martellos carved the night-sky into Protestant and Catholic halves.

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 ash 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?

“You can’t read? My gracious Godfrey, what havethey 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.”“I had no upbringin’,” Lily said helpfully.

“Well now, that isn’t yourfault. 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 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, taking his leave after his 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!” 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 a great deal of the French she had learned from Maman LaRouche came back to her easily. 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.

When not reading to her, Mrs. Edgeworth took full advantage of her captive pupil 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 letters 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, isn’t it? 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, whom 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, but was more often seen elsewhere in unmentionable establishments. 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 affectionate stranger woman.

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, Lily received a letter from Bridie. She spotted her own name in capital letters on the envelope, and could make out the name of the street and city, but Mrs. Edgeworth had a little difficulty following her aunt’s scrawl.

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 town-site 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. 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.

No more letters came. June arrived and with it the time for her lying-in.

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 patient 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 regaling her “dear-heart.” Dr. Hackney now came once a week to take her pulse, depress her tongue and poke or 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 no 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: on the fourteenth most probably.”

Unbeknownst to Dr. Hackney, his visits were invariably followed by the arrival, through the back-garden gate, 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, velveteened chamber seemed out of tune with the raw 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-first or twenty-second, 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.”

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.”

In the early hours of the morning of June 21, 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 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. When the third contraction gripped and held, Lily reached over to pull the bell-cord.

In the blackness of her pain, Lily was aware that she was surrounded by women. Their faces, their detached, consoling hands floated intermittently above her: Mrs. Edgeworth trying to mask her anguish, Mrs. Crampton too busy to register feeling, Maureen impassively efficient, Lucille agog with fright and devotion. Just after sunrise her body, now totally outside her control, gave one last convulsive heave and banished the little beast forever to the far outports of air, space, time and consanguinity. The pain was now bearable; she released her grip on Lucille’s hand and could feel instead the midwife’s fingers stretching, pulling, yielding.

There was a smack like the crack of a stick, followed by a stuttering wawl that rose to a series of well-defined shrieks before settling into the regular breathing and occasional gurglings of a healthy newborn. “It’s a girl,” said Mrs. Crampton between commands.

“How wonderful!” said Mrs. Edgeworth, almost hiding her disappointment.

Moments later, the baby – wiped clean, its umbilical cord neatly knotted – was laid beside Lily on the linen sheet. On the canopy overhead she noted the cherubs and the lambs and the crenellated walls in the distance. Then she gazed across at the child curling in the arch of her shoulder and breast. The eyes peering back were her own.

You’ve given me great pain, she thought, as its miniature mouth nudged towards the expectant nipple, but you needed the pain to separate yourself from me, to put something between us, to be yourself. Now I can hold you, love you, and give you your name. And she did, saying the syllables in a low murmur over and over as sleep closed in. Soon after, she did not feel her daughter being gently extracted from a mother’s grip.

When Lily woke it was afternoon, of what day she didn’t know. She was fevered and ached all over. She reached for the baby. It wasn’t there. In the hazy light allowed by the curtain, she could make the form of Maureen seated in the armchair across the room. Her blouse was open with one puffed breast shining and stiff-nippled and the other hidden behind the head of the suckling child. The noise of its feeding filled the room.

“Now don’t you worry, dear-heart,” Mrs. Edgeworth soothed a few minutes later, her brow creased with worry. “Everything’s going to be fine. Dr. Hackney says you’ve got a slight infection. I must say he wasn’t too happy arriving late and finding Mrs. Crampton on her way out, but he’s been a dear anyway. He’s left this medicine for you and –”

At last she noticed Lily’s nod towards the baby and its nurse. “Oh, that. Dr. Hackney says with your fever and all, you wouldn’t have enough milk, so Maureen, who God be thanked has more than enough for her own and yours, is helping out, aren’t you, dear?”

Maureen responded by changing breasts and sighing with satisfaction.

“Believe me, love, it’s all for the best.”

“What day is it?”

“You’ve been in and out of a doze for three days now. But you arelooking real good today. Shall I get you something to eat?”

“Could I hold the babe, afterwards?”

Lily wasfeeling better. She ate some soup, then her daughter was laid beside her, and when the women left for a moment, she eased a nipple into the nuzzling lips. She felt their pull upon her, amazed by the strength and depth of the need there, the compulsion of bonding it brought. Together they drifted to their separate sleep.

When she woke the next morning, feeling ravenous and fully alert, the room was empty. Moments later the door opened and Mrs. Edgeworth entered, trailed by a strange man who strode to her bedside and sat down on Lucille’s chair as if it had been set out there especially for him.

“This is Mr. Clayton Thackeray, .,” she said to Lily with a tremor in her voice. “He’s come all the way from Toronto, from the government, to see you, ifyou’re feeling up to it.”

“I’m feelin’ all right,” Lily said, staring at the intruder from the city. He was formally attired in spats and morning coat and stiff collar; his face was obsessively whiskered with a pair of hooded eyes like two chips of anthracite. No amount of girdling could control the overbite of his belly.

“I’m glad to hear it, child,” said the member of the Legislature, as if to the Opposition benches. “We have important business to discuss, vitalbusiness.”

Mrs. Edgeworth closed the door to mute as best as possible the booming rhetoric of his delivery, then stood leaning against it and watching.

“I would like you to listen carefully to what I have to say. While you may find parts of it distasteful, I want you to remember that my communication to you comes from the highest authority in the land, that the decisions which have been taken have been thoroughly and humanely considered, and that the best interests of all concerned will be served by ready obedience.” Lily studied him, conceding nothing, offering nothing. She recognized the official timbre of the voice and braced herself. When he turned slightly to Mrs. Edgeworth for support, she was staring at the carpet.

“Well, then,” he began again, “I’ve been asked by the Honourable Mr. Murchison to convey to you the following information. We have it from the highest authority,”“that the father of the child, a man of pre-eminence as you know, wishes to it raised in the most congenial and appropriate circumstances. With the welfare of the child uppermost in mind, certain investigations, shall we say, were carried out in Port Sarnia. Alas, the results were not favourable. I’m sure I do not need to tell you that the financial and particularly the, ah, moralcircumstances of the Ramsbottom household leave much to be desired.”

Lily looked questioning.

“What the gentleman means, dear-heart, is that your Uncle and Aunt don’t go to church regularly,” said Mrs. Edgeworth.

“What the gentleman means, child, is that the motherof the babe’s father insists that it be raised in the Church of England, a not unreasonable request, you will agree.”

Only Mrs. Edgeworth, faintly, agreed.

“And in this instance the grandmother’swishes are paramount, as only you know,” he said to Lily. “Hence these decisions have been taken in the best interests of all concerned. The child will go to Toronto with its nurse to be adopted by a prominent family there who know generallyabout the circumstances of its conception and birth and, in spite of such, have, in the most magnanimous and humanitarian of gestures, offered to give this poor creature life and hope.”

Lily flinched. “It is all for the best, Lily, I believe that,” said Mrs. Edgeworth near tears.

“Indeed so,” said Thackeray. “The wet-nurse is packed and ready to go, as is the infant itself. Mrs. Edgeworth will have the satisfaction of knowing that she not only saved the reputation of a wayward girl but that the illegitimate offspring of the unfortunate union will be given a second chance at life. You, my child, will suffer briefly at the loss of an infant not yet dear to you, but may return to your own family purified and renewed. As a bonus for any inconvenience, I am also authorized to tell you that a cash settlement in compensation has already been deposited in your Aunt’s account in a Port Sarnia bank.”

Clayton Thackeray sat back waiting for some response , be it tears, rage, or thanks. He got nothing. Finally rising, he said to Mrs. Edgeworth, “Not a soul in Port Sarnia has gained a whiff of this. It’s been handled with the utmost discretion and concern for the feelings of those involved. The girl will return with not a single blot upon her character.” With that, he swept out, Mrs Thackeray following behind to see him properly away.

A moment later Mrs. Edgeworth returned. Lily had not moved.

“Oh, Lily. Mr. Thackeray asked me to find out something important for him. It seems the lady in Toronto who’s going to adopt the babe wants to know, just for herself, the last name of the babe’s mother. I’m to write it down on this card.”

Apparently Lily didn’t hear, her mind far away.

“It will all work out, dear-heart,” Mrs. Edgeworth said, dropping all pretense. “We’ll work it out together.” She took Lily’s hand, its calluses grown smooth, its flesh pink again. “Can you tell me your name? Not Ramsbottom, but the one you had before you were taken in.”

“Fair Child…” Lily said distractedly

Mrs. Edgeworth wrote it down.

It was July 4. If she were home now Lily would be watching the fireworks display across the River as the Yankees celebrated the seizing of their liberty. Many people took the ferry over and stood in the grounds of Fort Gratiot to view the skyrockets soared independently starward, hear the army band strike up a victory march and the guns that had driven the British back where they belonged boom over the non-partisan blue of the fresh-water sea to the north.

According to all observers, Lily was “recuperating nicely.” She left her room for daily walks about the garden. She let Lucille chatter on at will. The colour flowed back into her cheeks; the freckles reappeared with it.

Lily knew this hurt was permanent, like many others before it. It seemed safer, she thought, to stay inside the ache, to let it be continually numbing, and build whatever remained of her life around it. But, as before, the sun rose each day with impudent optimism, the rosebushes stretched and infected the garden with their ungirded profligacy. The wind sweetened her chamber each morning. She ate and grew lithe again. At night she held the jasper talisman in her fist, and waited for a sign of its magic to re-enter the world.

In the meantime, she realized she must write to Bridie. Mrs. Edgeworth helped her, the day after the baby’s swift departure, by writing down Lily’s words and mailing off the letter immediately.

“Dear Aunt Bridie: I love you and Uncle very much. I am fine. The babe was born dead. I will be coming home as soon as I get strong enough. Soon. Love, Lily.”

Despite her careful monitoring Mrs. Edgeworth detected Lily crying only once: the evening after the letter was sent. She was left alone.

Two weeks then passed with no reply from Bridie. She understood why her Aunt had chosen not to write before the birth of the child, but fully expected a response to her terrible news. Lily began to feel that something momentous was about to happen, though she was uncertain whether it would be happy or sad. The talisman was strangely silent, as if it had already spoken on the subject and was surprised that Lily was not able to interpret the obvious.

Lily was about to suggest to Mrs. Edgeworth that she ought to return home as soon as possible when she experienced a slight haemorrhage and was put back to bed with stern warnings. However, in the late afternoon she persuaded Lucille to help her into the wicker wheelchair and push her into the garden, where she sat by the rose arbour in the westering sun, pondering her predicament. What am I doing here? she thought. I want only to belong to some place, to someone besides myself. The young man inside the Prince’s suit was not the one, clearly, but they had created a child together. And what has it come to? What did it bring? “My word, look who it is!” Mrs. Edgeworth’s voice cracked with some of its former zest. “Lucille, come here quick! Tippy’s coming up the walk!”

There was a scurry in the household behind Lily. She turned away, letting the sun warm the nape of her neck. Between female greetings and excited exclamations came the rumble of a man’s response. For a while all was quiet within. Lily grew strangely tense, the hairs on her neck rose. Her heart pitched without reason. 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.