Lily's Story

by Don Gutteridge

  About ten o’clock, an hour before the ceremony, as Prudie was putting the final touches on her stitchery, Granny saw three figures coming along the sidewalk towards her house. Prudie spotted them, too, and dropped her pins, said, “Oh my, Cora, it’s time for me to go and get ready. I’ll just let myself out the back way.” And she did.

  Sunny Denfield turned into her yard, resplendent in his uniform. Beside him, keeping pace, was a young woman of medium height whose brown hair, straight nose and curious dark eyes suggested close kinship with the Reeve. Ruth-Anne, she thought, the cousin from Toronto. The tailored clothing and confident bearing at once bespoke a woman from the city, with breeding and inherited urbanity. Between them, and struggling to keep pace with a sort of dancing skip-and-a-jump, was a waif of a creature, blond as a Viking water-sprite, with freckles as big as her blue eyes, in a flounced yellow dress as bold as a butterfly wing, out of which the narrow, tapered little-girl limbs sashayed with all the awkward grace of an apprentice ballerina.

  Granny let them in, unable to take her eyes off the little girl. When she finally met Sunny Denfield’s gaze, she knew something had happened since his last visit three days before, something more profound and unsettling than the arrival of a cousin and her daughter. He was in turn staring at her in a way which suggested that some long-suspected truth had been confirmed, though not unattended by surprise. The young woman was also staring at her with a mixture of curiosity and awe. The little girl hopped up and down on the spot between them. She couldn’t have been more than six years of age.

  These exchanges took seconds only, and Sunny said, “Mornin’. I brought you someone I know you’ve been anxious to meet.”

  She nodded to indicate that she knew who they were and was happy to receive them. When Sunny paused mysteriously, like a bad tragedian before a soliloquy, his cousin made as if to speak on her own behalf and he cut in quickly. “I’d like you to meet my first cousin, Ruth-Anne MacEnroe. Ruth-Anne, this is Mrs. Coote, my longtime friend, an’ your long-lost grandmother.”

  Ruth-Anne opened her mouth to speak, but could not. What she had already seen, whatever form it had taken, had confirmed the impossible, and she let several unladylike tears escape through her astonished smile.

  Sunny pressed ahead. He put his hand on the little girl’s shoulder and she looked up at the old woman. “An’ this is –” he said, his own voice on the verge of breaking...Victoria, Granny said to herself in a rush before Sunny said, “Victoria, your great granddaughter.”

  At fifteen minutes before eleven, just as the first strains of the drum-and-bugle corps were carried southward on the soft breeze of that special day, four figures emerged from the new house and crossed the street to join the host of villagers already assembled before the monument.

  3

  Over the next two weeks, and before Ruth-Anne and Victoria had to return to Toronto, the stories on both sides were gradually and lovingly told. Granny wrote out her responses to the questions of her granddaughter and her ‘foster nephew’ – as Sunny now called himself – in a cramped hand that only gradually began to flow and curve with the urgency and excitement of the impossible narrative.

  When Mrs. Edgeworth in the spring of 1861 had written down ‘Lily Fairchild’ on a calling card and given it to the government man who had come to repossess the Prince’s daughter, no one had any idea of the consequences of the act. Apparently the card accompanied the child, whom Lily had secretly named Victoria, to her new home in Toronto with Olive and Parker Macdonnell. Macdonnell was a busy minister in the Baldwin-LaFontaine cabinet and thus left the raising of their adopted daughter mainly to his wife. The little girl was christened Grace and a year later, as often happens in such cases, a natural daughter was born to the Macdonnells, and called Faith. Faith and Grace were raised together, without prejudice. Both married, Faith to a barrister named Harvey Denfield and Grace to an entrepreneur named Bramwell Beattie. Just before she died in 1890, Olive Macdonnell summoned Grace to her bedside and told her that she was an adopted child, and that even though she had promised on her husband’s grave not to break her vow of silence, she felt compelled to do so now that she faced her own death. She gave to Grace, who was pregnant with Ruth-Anne at the time, the note revealing her true mother’s name – Lily Fairchild. She added that she had been able to discover only two other facts about her identity: she had aristocratic – perhaps even royal – blood in her veins and her mother came from Lambton County, probably Sarnia. While Grace was shocked by the revelation, her life was too crowded with feeling and activity to do much about it. For a long time, watching over her own daughter and her orphling nephew, Sunny, kept her thoughts entirely away from her royal lineage, but as she neared the end of her own life, just as her stepmother had done, she called her daughter to her and passed along the only scraps of information in her possession. Ruth-Anne has asked for Sunny’s help in tracing any existing Fairchilds in the County. Mitch Strong, the postmaster, and a librarian friend of his in Sarnia, got hold of several old directories and gazetteers, and Sunny himself searched the registry records. No Fairchild of any sort had ever lived in Lambton. There were, of course, a thousand Lilys. The search came to an abrupt end.

  Then only three days before the memorial ceremony, Granny had given Sunny Denfield a gift, a Testament with an inscription made by her father: ‘To my dearest princess, the Lady Fairchild’. Excited but hardly knowing what to make of the discovery, Sunny tried to think of someone still alive who might have known Granny Coote or Cora Burgher in the distant past. Prudie suggested Duckface Malloney down at the Sunset Glades in Sarnia. Sunny went to see him and after several hours of frustrating interrogation, he learned conclusively that Cora had once been Mrs. Lily Marshall and before that Miss Lily Ramsbottom, and what-is-more she had lived on a farm near Sarnia about the time of the strange events of 1861. He didn’t know why or how yet, but he knew. When Ruth-Anne arrived and he took a good long look at his ‘niece’, he had no more doubt. After all, blood was blood.

  4

  Reeve Denfield was about to speak. Moments before, the MLA for Lambton West, awed by the monumental stillness and the hushed crowd, had spoken briefly and from the heart, his prepared speech untouched in his pocket. Granny stood with the wreath in her hand, haloed by the perfume of uprooted flowers, and listened.

  The Reeve spoke quietly with a gentle earnestness, the way people do in the sunshine after Sunday service. He reminded them of the things that had gone before: the days when the Attawandarons had roamed freely over territory still unmapped, when the land they were now standing on had been some sort of sacred grave or shaman’s ground where prayers and incantations and holy relics had been offered in a language now lost to time and history. He recalled the days when the village site was a mere ordnance ground before the great railroad adventure began. He talked of the coming of the Grand Trunk and the first labourers who hacked a right-of-way through the bush, laid their cross-ties, slept in shacks and stayed on to found a community. He spoke of high hopes, the building of churches and schools, the passion for politics and nation-making, the movement towards villagehood. His tone darkened as he recalled the treacheries of railroad amalgamation, tunnel-construction, the removal of the car-shops. Many in the audience would remember the wagons with their human cargo moving sadly through the secretive mists of early morning, and the vacant neighbourhoods and boarded-up churches. The Reeve went on to talk about the long recovery, the heroic contributions of specific citizens, the struggles against annexation, the new pride of place at last gathering momentum as they faced the second decade of a new century. Sunny’s voice continued on as she had heard it so many times over the years and he spoke those sentiments about the War and what it meant in the way he had inadvertently rehearsed them for her.

  She too would remember all of these things. But what she would remember most, in whatever years remained to her, was placing around the neck of the little girl now clutching her hand the silver pendant and its cameo sketch of one s
aid to have been a grandmother of her own blood in a far country. Something squeezed her hand. She glanced down. The cameo was turning tenderly on the child’s tiny fingers, and as the sunlight struck the ivory profile there from a momentary quartering angle, you might have taken it for a replica of her own. The child’s touch then trembled on the silhouette, circled some memory hidden there, and took possession.

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