Lily Fairchild. Don Gutteridge
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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