Among the Lilies

by Daniel Mills

  V.

  Justice and Edward were in the library.

  They hunched over a high reading table with half-a-dozen volumes open before them, including legal texts and handwritten diaries, a treatise on botany.

  Clemency and I had already agreed to say nothing of our engagement. She wished to speak with her brother in private, which I could understand, and I was likewise unsure of my uncle’s reaction.

  Justice looked up, unsmiling.

  “Ah,” he said, mockingly. “The prodigals return.”

  Clemency responded with the same forced cheer. “Where, then, is the feast, dear brother? The fatted calf? You’ve had hours to prepare.”

  “The whole of an afternoon, in fact.”

  “I fear I have kept your brother overlong,” my uncle said, “but he was good enough to indulge this old man’s vanity. I only hope I did not presume too much upon his kindness.”

  “Not at all,” Justice said. “I found the experience… stimulating.” He glanced at Clemency. “My sister, I’m sure, would say much the same.”

  His tone was acid, but Clemency only smiled.

  “I would,” she said. “Undoubtedly.”

  Seven o’clock. My uncle took his leave of us, muttering about eagles and the Teutoborg. His words mingled with the patter of rain on the windows, falling soft at first then harder for the wind behind it, and Asaph ran to fetch the covered buggy. Clemency and I had no chance of a proper goodbye. The old man drew up outside and Justice rushed his sister to the buggy.

  They vanished into a fog of rain, and I returned to the library as the storm broke over the property. Lightning flickered in the windows with thunder following close, as if the light itself would shake the house to its foundations. I read, or tried to read, but the hours crept past, and the storm still raged when I heard a tapping at the door.

  “Come in,” I said.

  My uncle entered. He moved as silently as a ghost, carrying a candlestick with his hand cupped about the naked flame. My reflection shivered in the window glass, splintering to pieces of shadow as Edward crossed the room with the light. He sat down opposite me and set the candle on the table between us.

  “It is time we talked,” he said.

  “Uncle?” I asked. “Is something the matter?”

  “There is, yes. But not for much longer.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m sleeping poorly,” he said. “My dreams are troubled, and every morning, I am weaker. One morning, I am told, I shall not awaken at all, and that will be an end of things. Until then, however, I must work. I must finish my manuscript if I am to be remembered. No children will survive me. Jane is dead and Asaph is older than I am. When you are gone, Henry, there will be no one left to think of me.”

  “You mustn’t talk in this way.”

  “I assure you that I must. Because I am dying. And because you are my heir.”

  Silence fell between us. I could not hear the rain.

  Edward continued. “In exchange I ask of you one service. Publish my study of the Teutoborg when I am gone. Your grandfather was a man of means. He left his fortune to me, but I squandered it all on this house. A wedding present, you understand, but you may do with it as you will. I don’t care. I was happy here, once, but that was long ago. Forty-four years. I remember every detail, cannot forget.”

  Lightning, thunder. The candle went out, and we were in the dark. Edward stood, as if to leave, and I reached across the table, finding his sleeve, his hand, his fingers all bone.

  “Please,” I said. “Wait.”

  “Henry?”

  “I am engaged to be married.”

  Married. The word struck my uncle like a blow. He sagged, bracing himself with both hands against the table.

  “Miss St. James,” he said, weakly.

  “I didn’t realize what would happen,” I said, “or how quickly. Please believe that. I had no intention of deceiving you.”

  He groaned and collapsed into the chair. Lightning flooded the library and his head was in his hands, fingers kneading his scalp.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “No, Henry,” he said, lifting his head. “I should apologize to you. There is so much I should have told you before tonight, but I am, in the last analysis, a coward. Even at this late hour I had hoped I might avoid speaking of her. I see now that is impossible.”

  “Jane,” I said.

  But he shook his head. “There is a grave on the estate,” he began, “that of a young woman. Lily Stark. She was the only child of the man who built this house. He was a ship’s captain, a slave-trader, but his daughter was said to be as gentle as he was cruel. She planted the gardens and the vines that give this house its name. Then she died.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Suicide,” he said. “They buried her in unconsecrated ground. Her father died and left the house to a cousin who sold it to me, but Lily is not at rest. She is as much a part of this house as the bittersweet vines she planted. Her presence pervades this house, her agony. The desperation of her final moments. Her rage. That above all.”

  “You seem to imply the house is—well, haunted.”

  “If you like. Something abides after such horror, whatever name we give it.”

  “You cannot be in earnest.”

  “Why not? Skepticism is a privilege afforded only to the young. I was your age when I married. Jane was younger even than Miss Clemency. An old woman called at the house soon after we arrived. She had worked for Cyrus Stark decades before and attempted to warn us away. We didn’t believe her, naturally, but skepticism didn’t save us. Jane sickened and could not eat. The doctors were of no use. Her innards rotted. The pain she experienced… the blankets caked in blood and filth… I was helpless even to understand. It was only when I learned the story of Lily Stark that I began to see. By then, it was too late.”

  The storm had passed: no more lightning, thunder fading into the sound of the rain. My uncle exhaled heavily and rose from the chair.

  “The house is yours,” he said. “But I will tell you now that you must sell it. Under no circumstances are you to bring Miss Clemency here. She will be your bride, Henry. Let that be enough. Marry her and take her back to Boston—and may your lives be filled with happiness.”

  VI.

  The days passed and Clemency and I remained apart. It was for the best, she said, and perhaps it was, but the next week evaporated in a haze of summer heat and we were forced to content ourselves with words alone, hiding letters in the hedge outside her cousins’ cottage. I wrote to her of my uncle’s bequest and of his warning to us, but she refused to treat his concerns with any seriousness, replying, Surely you would not allow Death to spoil our Arcadia?

  The end of my stay approached, but I saw my uncle only rarely. He spent his days and nights writing, sleeping late then working into the early hours, taking meals in his study. One evening I chanced to encounter him in the hall outside the disused parlor. “Uncle?” I ventured, but he only patted my arm and said my name softly and passed into his study.

  That same night, I walked to Westerly and found a letter from Clemency in the hedge outside the cottage. Her message was brief, a single line. Justice knows, it read, Phyllis and Edith as well. Come for dinner tomorrow, won’t you?

  I scribbled my response in pencil. Of course I’ll come, I wrote, refolding the note and thrusting it behind the lilac leaves.

  The moon was up. The road shone with its silver.

  Outside of town, I turned back toward Westerly with its huddled cottages and plunging roofs and a lone lamp burning in an upper window. Clemency’s, I thought, but it could have been anyone’s. “Goodnight,” I said.

  The light wavered and went out.

  The next afternoon, my last in Westerly, I returned to the village and knocked at the door of the Misses Evans. Phyllis and Edith met me in the doorway and welcomed me inside, taking it in turn to clutch me at their chests and offer their congratulations while Clemency looked on w
ith no small amusement. Justice did not come down, not even at dinner, and Phyllis explained he had taken to his room. “A summer cold, he says. We’ve scarcely seen the boy.”

  Clemency and I had a few moments alone after dinner, and I asked after her brother’s health, if he were truly ill?

  She laughed. “Hardly.”

  “He is angry, then.”

  “No—he is frightened.”

  “Of what is he afraid?”

  “Mother is dead,” she replied. “Father has time only for his case studies. Soon Justice will have no one. You and I will be married and he will be alone. The prospect terrifies him.”

  “But surely he might find a wife?”

  She shook her head. “Marriage is a state for which my brother has never shown the slightest inclination.”

  The cousins returned, and again, we passed a happy evening in the parlor. Around ten o’clock, I wished the cousins goodnight, and Clemency accompanied me outside, her elbow in mine as we stole behind the hedgerow.

  We could not be married until the spring. Clemency would not receive her legacy from her mother until her twenty-first birthday while my own prospects were rather worse. At Clemency’s urging, I had composed a letter to her father in which I described my expectations and asked for his blessing. “As promised,” I said, producing the letter, but Clemency only glanced at it. She slipped it into her corset and took me in her arms.

  I reached Bittersweet Lodge around midnight.

  My uncle was accustomed to keeping late hours but that night, as I recall, the study was dark, and I wondered if he had, at the last, fallen asleep. I retired to my room but woke early the next morning that I might call on Edward before my train was due.

  He wasn’t in his study. The room curdled with a smell like sickness. I went in search of Asaph and found him at the table in the kitchen slurping watery porridge from a tin cup.

  I inquired after my uncle.

  “Sleeping,” he replied. “He said I was to take you to the station.” He squinted to see the clock on the wall. “The 8:05, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Better be off, then.”

  He heaved himself from the chair and limped toward the door. I hesitated. I had hoped to speak with my uncle again, if only to thank him for his kindness, but it was half-past-seven, already, and my train would not wait.

  The morning was crisp, autumnal. Asaph brought the buggy round and I took a seat beside him. He whistled to the horse and sent us clattering down the drive. I didn’t look behind me, didn’t want the backward view.

  The wheels rattled. The seat shook beneath me, and I closed my eyes, recalling fog-damp fields and junipers, locust trees and Clemency, the smell of her hair. I slipped into dreaming and did not awaken till we reached the station.

  Two weeks after my return to Boston, I received a letter from Clemency’s father.

  Opinion of the Court delivered by ST. JAMES, R. This is a petition by Henry Feathering of Boston, Massachusetts to wed Miss Clemency St. James of Concord, New Hampshire. Evidence supporting the petition was presented by Miss St. James herself and by Miss Phyllis Evans of Westerly, Maine. Evidence against the petitioner was presented by Mr. Justice St. James of Concord, New Hampshire, who voiced considerable misgivings concerning the petitioner’s character and prospects. A telegram was sent to Mr. Edward Feathering of Westerly. His legal will was produced and submitted into evidence. Upon examination the will was determined to support the petitioner’s case. PETITION GRANTED.

  Clemency’s letter came by the next post. Her father had given us his blessing, she said, but we must wait until after her twenty-first birthday in April. The wedding would be in Concord with Phyllis and Edith making the arrangements. Her father looked forward to making my acquaintance as well that of my uncle, as he believed the two men, anchorites alike, would have “much to discuss.”

  They were never to meet. My uncle died in his sleep on December 2nd. His condition had deteriorated in the months since my visit, and the end, when it came, was peaceful. The town was informed and Edward was interred in the village cemetery beside his wife.

  Phyllis wrote to tell me of his passing. She herself hadn’t learned of the death until after the burial when she chanced on Asaph sleeping propped against the cemetery fence.

  I knelt beside him, Phyllis wrote. The man reeked of rye whiskey and it was plain that he had drank himself into a stupor. I attempted to wake him before the constable might learn of his indisposition but succeeded only in dislodging him from the fence and dropping him hard upon the ground. His eyelids fluttered open. He must have recognized me as a relation of Clemency because he asked me to write to you. It seems your uncle experienced a premonition on the evening of his death and pleaded with his manservant to send you a message after his death. “Remember the lilies,” he said. At least, I believe that was the message Asaph was intended to communicate, though I admit I had no little difficulty in understanding the man.

  I understood my uncle’s meaning perfectly: not “lilies” but “Lily.” He wanted me to remember Lily Stark, Jane Feathering, our final conversation. The house is yours, but I will tell you now that you must sell it. Under no circumstances are you to bring Miss Clemency here.

  That same day I wrote to Clemency to express my misgivings, though I did not go so far as to suggest selling the Lodge as my uncle had urged. I thought instead we might rent the house while auctioning the remainder of the property. The proceeds of such a sale would suffice to support us in Boston or Concord or wherever we wished to make our home together.

  Her response arrived the next evening.

  I have read your letter, Henry, and it does you credit, but please try to remember your uncle was an old man at the end of his life. Our acquaintance was only brief, but even so, I sense your uncle’s life was defined by love but limited by grief—and grief, as you know, can be a kind of madness.

  Which brings us to Lily Stark. Phyllis has told me something of her story, and I am now entirely certain the woman is deserving only of our pity and understanding. Her life was a sad one, yes, but she is now at peace. You yourself must have felt something similar or you would not have been moved to quote from Miss Bronte: “How anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

  I think of that day, the things you said, and it occurs to me that we have a certain obligation to Lily's memory, and indeed, to the place where she is buried. The stone leans badly and must be righted, while the planting of white lilies strikes me as an appropriate gesture. We will have need of a gardener, of course, but you mustn't think of the expense; consider it instead a debt repaid.

  Clemency’s mind was quite made up: I did not press her. In April I gave up the lease of my rooms in Boston and sent on my few belongings to Westerly. Then I packed my best suit into a carpetbag and traveled by train to Concord to present myself at the home of Reginald St. James. Clemency met me in the doorway.

  “Henry,” she whispered.

  Dinner was served, and afterward, I was granted an audience with Clemency’s father. The retired judge proved an even more eccentric character than I had imagined and spoke in much the same tiresome manner as his letters.

  Of my uncle’s passing, he remarked, “This Court had hoped the late Edward Feathering might present himself in person. As his absence has become unavoidable, his correspondence with the Court must serve as evidence of the late Mr. Feathering’s integrity and character as well as that of his nephew, Henry Feathering of Boston. The opinions of Justice St. James will be disregarded.”

  But Justice’s low opinion of me remained unaltered. He avoided us that evening, and again at breakfast, and though he attended the wedding, he would take no part in the service but sat with his father in the box-pew glowering.

  His anger did not ruin the day. We did not allow it.

  Clemency and I exchanged rings and promises, and afterward, we returned to the St. James house to find a veranda hung with Chinese lanterns and a s
tring quartet playing waltzes by Mozart and Strauss. We danced into the dark of evening with everyone watching though we looked only at one another or our own reflections in each other’s eyes like fixed points in a world that spins and will not cease from spinning.

  VII.

  We spent a fortnight in Concord and wired ahead to Westerly. Asaph met us outside the Lodge and helped us to unload our luggage from the hired buggy. It was late April, almost May, the air scented with new leaves and early apple blossom.

  The buggy drove off. Asaph presented me with his keys on a heavy brass ring but lingered, awkwardly, waiting to be dismissed. He stood with his cap in both hands before him and head bowed, showing the pitted scalp.

  “I’ll go, then,” he said, at last.

  “Surely you aren’t leaving us?” Clemency asked.

  “I reckoned you’d have no need of me. Now Mr. Edward’s gone.”

  “Then you reckoned wrongly,” Clemency said, taking Asaph’s cap from him and placing it back on his head. “Our need has never been greater. My husband may be younger by some years than his late uncle, but I assure you, he is no less hopeless.”

  Asaph nodded but didn’t speak. I believe I made some feeble protest but they both ignored me, and Asaph tipped his cap to Clemency.

  “I’ll keep my room, then.”

  “Please,” she said.

  He snatched the keys out of my hands and went back inside. I shook my head and complained of his rudeness, but Clemency didn’t hear me. She had turned from the house to the untended lawn and to the birch-woods beyond, the locust grove and Lily’s grave.

  She smiled, if a little sadly, and offered me her elbow.

  “Shall we go in?”

  We spent the rest of the day wandering the house, passing down galleries into shuttered rooms where we drew back the curtains and let in the light.