“I know,” Lily said.
“Then there’s no hope of the father bein’ found?”
“No, Lily said softly. Then more strongly: “I want to have the baby. Here. At home.”
Bridie saw in the girl’s face the very strength and determination and fragile naiveté that had coalesced early in her own life and led to rebellion, flight, engagement and exile. For the first time in two years she felt a surge of the old, lost, pure anger uncorrupted by doubt or the angst of repeated failure. Once again her girl’s mind was abuzz with plans and stratagems.
“We’ll keep the babe,” she said. “No one, not even Old Bill will know it’s yours. We’ll move you into the kitchen for the winter, make you some large housedresses, keep Chester in the dark as long as we can. An’ after it’s born, we’ll say the child belongs to my cousin, an’ I’ll…go off to London an’ pretend to come back with it an’ –”
Auntie’s eyes glinted with intrigue.
“Oh, Lily, we’ll manage,” she said. “We always have.”
Lily fell against Aunt Bridie’s chest, pulling her arms about her, wanting to feel in the mere closeness of flesh some mutual future. For a second Bridie permitted the contact – a brief transfer of energies and vulnerabilities – then drew resolutely back.
“We’ll have to be strong, little one,” she whispered.
Moments later – pretending to stir the fire, her back turned – she released her tears. But these were not the now-familiar sobs of rage and recrimination that shook through her bones in the deep of the night; these were a woman’s fresh, unguarded, outwelling tears of sadness and joy-of-being and irretrievable regret. They poured unabashed down the unfamiliar terrain of Bridie’s cheek as she turned to marvel again at the slight marrowing swell of the girl’s abdomen.
“After that thing with Bertie,” she said. “I wanted so bad for Chester an’ me to have a babe of our own.”
2
Two days later as Lily was preparing a mustard plaster for the cold Uncle Chester had caught while travelling to the ice-pond, the patient whispered behind her: “Love, if you have anythin’ you need to tell your Uncle, go right ahead. You can trust me. And if I need to, I can handle your Auntie.” The last remark was qualified somewhat by a spasm of coughing. But the import of his commentary was clear. That evening when Aunt Bridie shuffled in wearily from the woodlot, Uncle was sworn to secrecy and taken into the conspiracy. He beamed for days.
The plot went well throughout the winter. The ruse of having Lily work exclusively indoors was quite plausible, though few of the stray accidental visitors who found their gates in the muffling snows of that season bothered to persevere with their inquiries, and Old Bill simply had none of any ilk. Ever since Violet had been taken away, he had become even more taciturn and withdrawn, though his work for Auntie was done with a conscientious concern verging on the sycophantic. Occasionally he would consent to take Sunday dinner with them, but most of the time he ate on the job or took Auntie’s offerings back to his hermitage. Two or three times that autumn they heard the discordant strains of the mouth-organ seeking some elusive harmonies, and would know that he had ‘fallen off the wagon’ again. Mostly though he slept off his excesses and popped up a day later at dawn ready for work as if nothing had happened. One December night after an exhausting day with Aunt Bridie in the woodlot, Old Bill went to his hut, downed a couple of slugs of ‘rheumatism juice’, and took up his instrument. The disjunctive jangling of tones startled him more than it usually did, and be blew all the more stridently – desperate for some chording, some key he could recognize as his own. But the discordances mocked him, skirled to a mad laughter – their decibels jarring and random. Old Bill’s wild shriek brought Lily upright in her sleep. It was followed by two sharp howls of pain, then the long silence of the nether solstice. Aunt Bridie marched across to his hut first thing in the morning, expecting the worst. Old Bill was slumped on a pile of filthy rags some of which had been his clothes. Dried blood coated his mouth, jaw and throat. He saw Bridie and gave a clenched grin. The stumps of his last two teeth flashed at her jaggedly, their blackening nerves adrift in the icy air like sprung lute strings.
“They fell out,” he laughed, and winced horribly.
If old Bill, in seeing Lily shuffle flat-footed about the kitchen, had any suspicions, he kept them locked away with all the other secrets, precious and malign, he stored away for a future he’d already given up on. Nor did the occasional traveller caught in a January squall or one of the ice-storms of February, do anything more than smile their gratitude for the warmth of Lily’s hospitality. In fact the only visitors to arrive with a predetermined purpose were three gentlemen who said they were from “the railway” and asked to see Aunt Bridie alone. Lily and Uncle Chester went for a slow walk through the arbours of snow, holding each other upright and sending their laughter skyward. When they got back, Aunt Bridie forced a smile to acknowledge their evident happiness, but Lily recognized the subtle signs telling her the news was grim. “They wanted to buy us out,” she scoffed. “I told them where to go, and it ain’t cool there.”
One of the side-effects of the conspiracy was that more quilts – some with an interesting new design that could have been interpreted as either a mushroom or a baby’s fist – got made that winter than last, and the woodlot was cleared on the north-east side right back to the Grand Trunk property. Only a windbreak of pines on the north-west side separated them from the village-to-be. Auntie could now cut and saw and haul and also keep an appraiser’s eye on the phantom townsite wherein so many of her hopes now lay. In March during a great snowsquall, Bridie was called from her woodlot and Lily from her stove to attend the birth of the Jersey’s first calf. Lily took a more than usual interest in the event.
Old Bill was already in the stall, thick with fresh straw, part of which was dusted with snow blown in through several cracks in the planking. Gert, the Jersey, was bawling out great wrenching cries, pelvic and vascular. Her eyes alternately lolled and stabbed. Her legs quivered, registering each spasm. Aunt Bridie hurried to help Old Bill who was trying to jam his hand into the cow’s slavering vagina.
“Quit the jumpin’, Gert,” Old Bill yelled. “I ain’t the bull!”
Gert wheezed as if she’d been kicked in the stomach; Old Bill’s wrist disappeared. Aunt Bridie went around to Gert’s front end, grasped her by the neck and began to murmur into her ear. The next cry shook the planks of the barn. Lily felt her blood curdle; she couldn’t swallow. Uncle Chester left.
“Comin’ out feet first,” Old Bill announced. “I can feel its little hooves.” He gave a yank, as if he were trying to jerk his axe out of an oak. Aunt Bridie was thrown against the wall.
“Here she comes!” Old Bill hollered.
Lily saw the spasmic undulations of Gert’s belly muscles, heard the fierce dry-heaving of her breath; and then riding as it were on the death-scream of its mother, the calf slid into the world on a toboggan of blood, mucous and membrane that splattered across the snow and the straw. Old Bill looked like he had been shot with ruby-glass. The calf, wobbling in the pool of its afterbirth, peeked up at the snowy universe. Gert dropped to her knees, reached for breath and, unable to ask why, died.
What surprised Lily about the baby taking shape in her body was how disconnected its existence seemed to be with the event that initiated it and with the life of the person housing it and feeding it. Certainly the pleasures of the Prince during their lusty encounter and the gentle, almost effeminate, afterword, did not have this end in view. Nor did her own surrender have any purpose but the immediacy of its joy and pain, the need to feel that something mattered. Not only had the creature inside her proclaimed its own existence, it continued to evolve in a manner that was both impudent and independent.
It lay in her womb like a young vegetable marrow with a nozzle attached, hose-like, to the host-vine. Her abdomen, as Auntie predicted, puffed outward and inward as well, pressing against her back. Her belly felt like a rind
or a casing that might harden and burst without warning in the night. It cared little that she could walk or sit or lie with ease. Moreover, when she wanted to sleep, it decided it wanted to swim. One of its errant back-strokes would jar her out of a dream. Huffing and panting at the end of a day’s work, she could feel it sucking on her flagging energies, pulling the best of her blood into its own. Always she referred to the thing as “it”, never him or her. And not simply because she couldn’t see it to know or fantasize: even her dreams reminded her that it was a creature, a tadpole seeking out a shape for its eventual humanness, and more powerful than any ordinary infant – boy or girl – because it was still ungoverned potential, raw ribs-and-blood with no future yet to lose. For Lily it had organs and cartilage and nerves – but no face. I will bear you, she thought often, then I will name you, and love you. Forever.
By mid-April the snows had vanished. The crocuses and stove-pipes dotted the lawns and gardens of the town by the River and the Lake. The rains fell, gentle and inevitable. The surveyors arrived to lay out the streets and lots of yet another village destined to germinate and bloom within a single season. Aunt Bridie looked on this event and at the unswaddled belly of her niece, and permitted her heart to leap – once – in expectation.
3
No one at the great western station that April evening took any particular notice of the impeccably attired, distinguished gentleman – complete with an entourage of well-dressed but undistinguished lackies – as he disembarked from the first-class Toronto car and crossed to the livery at the east end of the building. After all, Sarnia was an important town: moguls and politicians and pretenders of all sorts stepped off the 6:40 almost every day of the week. Such anonymity seemed to be to this visitor’s liking for the exchange which resulted in the rental of a democrat – sans local driver – was done with despatch and discretion. One of the lesser apostles took the reins, while the two secretaries and the Honourable Charles Gunther Murchison settled down into leather and velvet, and studiously ignored the regional scenery. Little notice was taken of them as they turned north-east up the Errol Road and drove into the dusk of early spring. It was almost dark when the driver, following some route previously committed to memory, veered into the lane of the Ramsbottom place.
Only the Honourable Charles Gunther Murchison remained in the kitchen. The others, having been courteously introduced, were banished to the democrat, where they were stared at by Old Bill as if they had just dropped from the moon. Inside, Uncle Chester perched on the edge of his chair and watched in awe as Bridie and the distinguished arrival occupied the middle of the room. In her bedroom Lily was just waking from a restless doze.
“I have come on the most urgent of matters, Mrs. Ramsbottom, straight from the office of the Governor himself. I apologize again for the suddenness of our appearance so late in the day, but when you hear what news I bring, you will understand our need for covert action. Several lives are at stake.”
Uncle Chester leaned forward; Bridie blinked but gave no ground. “Whose lives?” she asked evenly.
“Before I am permitted to offer detailed explanations, I must talk with your...niece.” He was like a bald eagle at home in this strange eyrie, his bronze pate feathered at the sides with grizzled whiskers, his aquiline beak and assayer’s eyes piercing every shadow in the coal-oil gloom, his bearing regal as befitting a man who has twice been a cabinet minister, who stared down a dozen rebel guns in ’thirty-seven and prevailed.
“My niece isn’t well,” Bridie said. “She’s not available to you, sir, nor to Sir Edmund Head himself.”
Murchison took no offense. “I’m afraid she must be. The orders I am under, you see, come from Her Majesty.”
Uncle Chester fell part-way off his chair and barely recovered in time to abort the trick in his back. Lily opened her eyes.
“Queen Victoria?”
“Yes. Directly from the palace, through His Excellency in Quebec. I have been asked to seek out and speak with your niece on a matter of the utmost delicacy and urgency.”
A glimmer of insight reached Bridie’s eyes, they faded in disbelief.
“With all respect, sir, my niece is ill and can’t be disturbed. If you tell me what you need, of me or her, I’ll talk to her in the morning. Surely even our Queen would understand the need not to upset a sick child.”
Lily’s legs cramped to the bedstead.
“I appreciate your desire to protect your niece, Mrs. Ramsbottom, and I know His Excellency and Her Majesty would applaud your loyalty and solicitude. But it is imperative that I at least see your niece. If she is ill, I can return to speak with her tomorrow.”
“Please, sir,” Uncle Chester said, his voice quavering, “Lily ain’t well. An’ that’s the truth.”
“Chester, you keep –”
“It’s all right, Auntie,” Lily said coming slowly into the shadowy light.
Aunt Bridie was now sitting down in the straightback chair by the stove. Her face was ashen.
“You see,” Murchison was explaining in lower but no-less-formal tones, “I had no idea whether the girl had informed you of the possible paternity of the child. Indeed, we did not know for sure that the girl was ‘enceinte’, though one of our sources, a young man disguised as a lost traveller and sitting now in my carriage, reported the possibility to us two months ago. All this was carried out, you understand, at the request of the Monarch Herself after a belated confession on the part of her son. Then, of course, we had to use the utmost discretion possible to ascertain the moral character of the girl. It proved, as I’m sure you know, ma’am, to be unimpeachably stainless.” He was speaking directly to the stunned Aunt Bridie, averting his eagle gaze from the lumpish, squat figure seated to his right.
“It is the Prince’s babe,” Lily said again.
The Honourable Mr. Murchison shifted tone and stance, as if he were a lawyer changing from defense to prosecution. “Now that these most difficult and delicate matters are clear, I have the awful duty to inform you of the decisions taken, as I have said, at the highest levels of state. I have been commanded to explain to you that these decisions have been reached after full consideration of the best and just interests of all parties concerned. The Prince, you will be pleased to know, is contrite and eager to make amends for his youthful indiscretion.” He looked about for some confirmation, but only Uncle Chester was nodding ritually.
“Now that we know the babe will have royal blood in his veins, we are under the strictest obligation, as citizens and subjects of the Empire, to treat that fact with the awe and respect it deserves. Her Majesty expressly wishes the child to be born in circumstances most conducive to its general health, including the utmost care of the mother during the crucial days of her lying-in. The best doctors and midwives are to be consulted; a hospital or surgery must be close at hand in case of emergencies.”
“We got no hospital here,” Aunt Bridie said.
“Precisely. You take my very point,” the solicitor said, wheeling to face the invisible jury. “We have come to take Lily to a place where all of these conditions obtain, where both her well-being and that of the child will be assured. Moreover, we are not insensible of the social difficulties associated with a child born out of wedlock; the Prince himself was particularly concerned about this point. Hence, the immediate and secret removal of the girl to a house we have arranged in London will be of benefit to all concerned.”
“And after the babe is born?” Aunt Bridie said coldly into the ensuing silence.
“Mother and child can be returned here, of course. Not right away naturally. Perhaps a husband can be found for her, or a reasonable story concocted to account for the exceptional circumstances. Whatever arrangements are decided post partum,” he said relishing the Latin, “Her Majesty has commanded Her viceroy here in the dominion to disburse appropriate funds for the maintenance of the child till he comes of age. Furthermore –”
“We don’t want any of your money,” Aunt Bridie said.
“Now, sweetie –” Uncle Chester said, but was cut dead by a stare.
“Would you kindly get the girl’s things together as soon as possible? There’s a freight train leaving here in an hour; we’ve arranged a special caboose to be attached.”
Aunt Bridie stood up. “The girl, as you call her, only goes if she wants to. Please tell Her Majesty that we are quite capable of taking care of our own – royal blood or not. An’ we don’t take charity.”
“May I see Lily alone, then?”
Lily nodded to her Aunt.
“If you must.”
The privy-councillor and ex-Grenadier was disconcerted by the way the girl stared directly at him while he lectured her, with just the slightest hint of impending disrespect. Moreover, the thumping of the foetus on the drum of her abdomen was scandalously audible.
“We understand your reluctance to leave home, but we ask that you reflect on all the advantages that will accrue to a positive decision to go to London. The lady who has agreed to care for you is a woman of the highest quality and discretion. We also recognize that you are part of a working family and that your loss over the next three months or so will impose serious hardships on your Aunt and Uncle. Thus, though your Aunt sees it as charity, His Excellency will, with or without her consent, deposit a hundred dollars in her account at the Bank of Upper Canada for each month you are away, for as long as it takes to resolve matters in a satisfactory manner.”
When Aunt Bridie and Uncle Chester were waved back in, they found Lily standing by the stove, her eyes brimming with tears.
Lily's Story Page 20
