A Sudden Sun Read online

  But outside the door was David Reid waiting to walk Lily home, though she had been promised a ride in Mrs. Ohman’s carriage. “Tell her you’re walking home,” David urged.

  “I can’t –she’ll see you there—you know she won’t think it’s proper that I’m walking with you.”

  “Better than walking alone, isn’t it? It’s coming on duckish. No time for a young lady to be on the streets alone.”

  “And no time for a young lady to be on the streets with a man who is not known to her family,” said Mrs. Ohman, appearing beside Lily’s elbow. “Come along, Lily.” Her tone was sharp and clipped; she was still irritated with Mrs. Withycombe.

  Despite the way she kept reliving David’s kiss over and over in her memory, Lily could not imagine defying Mrs. Ohman yet again to go off with him. There was no convenient sister or niece or nephews around, nor could she pretend any longer that his intentions were entirely honourable.

  “I’m sorry, I must go,” she told David, and climbed into the carriage beside Mrs. Ohman. The older lady fumed the whole way home about the scolding she’d gotten from the Sons of Temperance, who had told her that the WCTU was tarnishing the good name of the temperance cause by agitating for women’s votes. When the carriage pulled up in front of Lily’s house, Mrs. Ohman told her driver to wait while she went in and called on Lily’s parents. “Tell them I’d like to see them both, if your mother feels well enough. Just us older folks,” Mrs. Ohman added with a nod that was hard to mistake.

  Lily waited an agonizing hour in her room, wondering if she should concoct further lies or confess everything. Finally Sally tapped on the door. “The Mister would like to see you down in the study, Miss,” she said.

  Papa sat in his big wingback chair, papers and books all over his desk. Printing was a practical trade with him but also a passion. He loved books and reading, and collected first editions of books when his budget allowed. It made Lily sad to see the bare shelves in his rebuilt study; so many of his prized volumes had been destroyed in the fire, and he was just beginning to rebuild the collection. Papa’s old study with its book-lined walls had been a favourite place when she was allowed in there as a child, but today Lily felt as nervous as she had when she was ten years old, the day she had accidentally torn a page in Papa’s big Shakespeare book. She took a seat in a straight-backed wooden chair across from her father.

  “Mrs. Ohman has told me that you have—not a suitor in the proper sense, but an impertinent young man who has made your acquaintance. Do you know who I mean?”

  “I suppose she is talking about Mr. Reid, Father.”

  “Yes, that’s the fellow. I’ve met him of course, in the way of business. He knows quite well I would never consider him worthy to call upon my daughter. He’s a nobody, no family, a young upstart with radical ideas. He’s neither a regular churchgoer nor a temperance man.” He paused, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Of course, you may not have known all these things about him.”

  “Mrs. Ohman told me he was…not someone you could approve of.” Lily kept her hands knotted in her lap. She looked down at them, studying the little knobs of her own knuckles and the tiny hollows between, glancing up at her father’s eyes only once for each sentence she spoke. Against the dark green fabric of her skirt her hands looked very tiny and white. She remembered pressing them against Papa’s big hand, not so very long ago—she might have been, what, eleven or twelve?—to see how big and strong he was compared to her. Then she remembered David’s hand tangling in her hair, pulling her close to him.

  “Lily?” Father said, and she knew she had missed the last question he asked her.

  “I beg your pardon, Father? I didn’t hear you.”

  “I asked if you have any feelings for this young man, or if he has just been bothering you with his presence. Either way, I will warn him to stay away from you, but if you have any fancies about him, it makes my task more painful.”

  “He hasn’t bothered me. I only ever spoke to him because he was interested in the WCTU work; he wrote a piece for the paper about it, and I talked to him a little. I’ve been polite to him, but nothing more than that.”

  “Yes, but has he been polite to you? Are you sure he hasn’t said or done anything improper?”

  “No, not at all,” she said, and then she did look him in the eye. She had never told Papa a direct lie before, though ever since becoming involved with the suffrage cause, not to mention since meeting David Reid, she had certainly misled him. It seemed important to look him right in the eye as she lied.

  “You’ve always been a good girl, Lily. You know I’ve worried about your friendship with Mrs. Ohman. She’s a good woman, but I don’t approve of all her ideas and I was sorry to hear she had brought that petition before the House. Women have no place in politics. But Mrs. Ohman, regardless of her errors, is a good Christian woman and she was entirely right in coming to speak to me about this.”

  Lily was back to looking at her hands, at the little half-moons on the base of each nail. When she was little, she had used to bite her nails but Mama had painted them with iodine and broken her of the habit. “Mrs. Ohman has been very kind to me,” she said.

  “You know young Reverend Collins admires you. I hope you will come to like him too, as you get to know him better.”

  “He seems…very…nice.” That was not as barefaced a lie as the other one but it was, at best, stretching the truth. And it seemed to content Papa, at least for now; he dismissed Lily and told her to go to bed.

  Two days later, Abby Hayward came to call. “You have an admirer,” she told Lily, her mouth drawn down as if trying to mask amusement with disapproval.

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Well if there’s a young man who’s brazen enough to walk up to a girl he doesn’t know on the street and slip her a note with no more introduction than, ‘I hear you’re friends with Lily Hunt,’ then I’d call him an admirer.”

  “What sort of young man?”

  “Threadbare. Barely respectable. I don’t know him at all, and you know if I don’t know him, then he’s nobody. Red hair. Looks Irish. Might be a papist, for all I know. He’s certainly not a Methodist, nor from any family worth talking about. Saucy manner. Why am I telling you this? It’s perfectly clear you know who I mean!”

  “You saw him once before, in the park, the day after the fire.”

  Abby shrugged and picked up her needlepoint. She had been working at this same sampler of roses and a pious motto ever since before she went to New York last winter: she was not much of a needlewoman. “I can’t remember anything about the fire—that’s all such a blur. Can you believe we camped all night in Bannerman Park? Anyway, it’s clear you’re not concerned about this fellow, so it’s just as well I threw away his note.”

  “You what?”

  “Ha, caught you out there!” Abby’s smile broadened into a grin that made her look like a freckled schoolgirl again.

  “I won’t tell you a thing ’til you hand over that note.”

  “No, I won’t hand over the note until you tell me a thing or two. And you know I’ll win at this game, because you want the note more than I want the information.” Abby pulled a small white envelope from a pocket of her blouse and held it up before her face. She pulled away, giggling, when Lily made a grab for it.

  “There’s nothing to tell. He’s only someone I met.”

  “Indeed. A man without a name?”

  Under pressure, and the desire to obtain the note, Lily finally admitted to David Reid’s name and to their handful of previous meetings. She did not tell Abby about the kiss, nor about the conversation with her father.

  To Abby’s disappointment, Lily waited ’til she was alone to open the note. She took it up to her room and closed the door firmly. Papa was not even home but she somehow imagined that downtown, in the printshop, he could sense the presence of David’s letter, tucked in its envelope, as if it radiated heat and light.

  Her fi
ngers trembled as she sliced open the note with her silver letter opener. The letter opener slipped and scratched the palm of her hand, and she dropped it on the bed beside her as she took the slip of paper from the envelope.

  Lily of the Valley—I have been rude. I have taken

  liberties. Would like to take more if possible. Could

  you meet me in Bannerman Park at about four o’clock

  on Saturday? Some things in this world matter more

  than good manners.

  – D (as in Daring).

  She read it again, twice, and noticed that her hand shook more rather than less with each reading. Was she really thinking of going, meeting with him secretly?

  No, this was entirely wrong. He was handsome—moderately—and clever, and charming. And something else, something she could not put into words but that made her think of him all the time. But Papa had made it clear David Reid would never be allowed to call on her.

  She tucked the letter inside her pillowcase, thinking she must find a safer place for it before Sally changed the beds again. Downstairs, a bell rang for dinner.

  When the meal was over Papa pulled Lily aside. “You’ve thought about what we spoke of on Tuesday night?” he said. “After Mrs. Ohman’s visit?”

  “Of course, Papa. You know best.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Do I have your promise that you will not see or speak to this young man again?”

  He had not asked her to promise that before. That he asked now, in plain words, while the letter burned a hole through her pillowcase, must be a sign from God.

  “I promise, Papa.”

  “My good girl,” he said.

  Up in her room, Lily lit a candle. She took David’s note out and read it once more, then laid it in her washbasin. She touched the candle to the corner of the paper, saw the flames eagerly lick at the lines of his handwriting, swallowing up David Reid and any possibility of meeting him in Bannerman Park at four o’clock on Saturday.

  When it was all gone she tipped the ashes into the grate and wiped out the wash basin. No one would suspect a thing.

  Lily

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FOR THREE MONTHS she was obedient. For three months she remained the girl her mother had raised, the girl her father hoped would marry the Reverend Obadiah Collins. She went to church, went to meetings of the WCTU, the Women’s Missionary Society, and the Ladies’ Aid. She visited girlfriends for tea, she read books, she went for walks, and she did not see David Reid at all. Or rather, she did not speak to him. She saw him on Water Street one day as she and Abigail passed Clouston’s storefront, a temporary booth the tinsmiths had set up to sell pots and pans while their shop was being rebuilt. As Lily paused to admire a china teapot, Abby poked her ribs with her parasol. “It’s that man! Isn’t that he?”

  Lily shot a look at Abby that she hoped would freeze the blood to ice in her veins. She wasn’t really good at giving that kind of look but she hoped that with practice she would get better, having seen Mrs. Ohman do it at meetings. She looked at the red-headed man walking towards them only long enough to know that it was David Reid, but she did not meet his eyes. She lifted her skirts and veered around a stack of barrels on the sidewalk to avoid him, though that meant she had to step down into the street and barely missed a pile of horse dung.

  “He tried to speak to you!” Abby protested, looking back over her shoulder. “You were very cold to him!”

  “Why shouldn’t I be cold? Father made me promise never to see him again.”

  Back in May, after she had failed to show up in Bannerman Park at the appointed time, Mr. Reid had sent two further notes. She burned them both. Sometimes she woke between midnight and dawn from a dream in which she was in an alley with David Reid again, his lips against hers, his fingers pulling the pins from her hair. She woke from those dreams breathing fast and found it hard to get back to sleep.

  She said nothing of this, of course, to Abigail, who would have giggled and gasped with delight at such fantasies. That door was closed, Lily reminded herself. She prayed every night that God would cleanse her of evil desires.

  In all that time, she had not seen him. But that was not strange. They did not move in the same circles. The only place she was likely to see him was walking along Water Street. Now it had happened and it had not been so painful after all. There had been just a moment when their eyes met and the urge to turn her head and look back had been like the force that must have pulled the gaze of Lot’s wife toward Sodom. But Lily was made of tougher stuff: no pillar of salt for her.

  The next note came the following day, slipped brazenly into her mailbox rather than hand-delivered by a messenger as the others had been. It was put in the box after the morning mail had been delivered but before Papa came home for his dinner, so its secrecy depended upon Lily checking the mail before Papa returned. Fortunately she did, and carried the small envelope up to her room, unseen by anyone. Her fingers trembled as she tore it open.

  Tiger Lily—

  Your heart is stone, and mine is like a poor stray tomcat who has lost a dozen fights and is missing an ear and part of a tail but still goes out prowling. Which is to say, I thought I had given up hope ’til I saw you yesterday. And now I find I cannot put you out of my mind again. A note left at my place of work will always find me, if you choose to take pity, stone maiden.

  – D (Discouraged, but not Defeated)

  She read it over and over, and could not help smiling at the picture of the battered alley cat, still roving the streets, spoiling for another fight. In an endless battle he could not win, for the maiden with the heart of stone—Mr. Reid certainly did not mind mixing his metaphors—would never relent.

  Still. She did not burn this note. She put it under her pillow and slept with it there that night. Woke in the morning from a dreamless sleep cursing herself for a sentimental fool. She was as bad as a girl in a novel, and not a sensible girl like Alida either. A silly girl like Alida’s sister, Lottie, doomed to destruction for her selfishness. Sleeping with a note under her pillow! Lily threw it on the morning fire.

  “A friend of yours is coming to town soon,” Papa said that night at dinner. “He wrote and asked if he might call on you.”

  “You mean Reverend Collins.”

  “I hoped the news might please you.”

  “It does. It does—please me, Papa.” Lily tried hard to put warmth and energy into her voice. “I know you think very highly of Reverend Collins.”

  “I hope that, in time, you’ll come to think well of him too.”

  She tried to think, over the next few days, good thoughts about Reverend Collins. She had met him only that once, at Reverend Pratt’s house. Her father had said that he was a very progressive young clergyman—though not so progressive, apparently, as to approve of votes for women. She struggled to recall his face. His thinning hair was—black? Dark brown? Some nondescript colour. Not red, certainly. And whatever colour his eyes were, they were not green.

  Reverend Collins came a week later: came to sit in the parlour and make polite conversation with her father while Lily sat silent beside her mother. He was in town for the Methodist Conference and was full of talk about the wonderful sessions he had attended and the great speakers he had heard. He showed his excitement by a slight rise in the pitch of his voice, and by laying his teacup down in the saucer with a little clang. Every time he did it Mother started, either because the noise troubled her nerves or because she was worried about damage to the china.

  Mr. Collins had invited Lily to attend a lecture in the evening, by a returned missionary who was also attending the conference, telling about his experiences in the Congo. It was held at the Tabernacle on Parade Street, the temporary home of George Street Church, and it was well-attended. Their seats were not as good as Lily would have liked. She was stuck behind a woman with a very large hat that blocked Lily’s view of the speaker and his magic-lantern slides. The speaker’s voice was dry and scratchy. He seemed to have had amazing
experiences in the Congo but lacked the ability to describe them in a way that would keep his hearers awake.

  What an unfortunate thing, Lily thought. It would be so much more convenient if the world was arranged so that interesting things only happened to people who were good public speakers or writers. Good experience was, after all, wasted on anyone who could not convey the sense of it. She thought of sharing the thought with Mr. Collins, but decided he would not appreciate the humour.

  In the carriage afterwards he said, “You are very fortunate, living here in St. John’s, to be able to hear good speakers and good music, to be in contact with the wider world. During the winter months in Greenspond, I think with longing of lectures such as the one we just heard, or some of the sermons that were given during the conference.”

  “Well, conference week is unusual. There isn’t normally such a collection of great Methodist preachers in St. John’s. But of course you are right, we have more diversions here than in the outports.”

  “There, a man must depend on reading to broaden his mind,” sighed Mr. Collins. “You attended some of the ladies’ sessions yourself at the conference, no doubt, Miss Hunt?”

  “I did.”

  “And the Temperance Rally on Sunday night?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Now that was inspiring! No doubt you were moved by it, as well.”

  Lily had gone with her father to the big Temperance Rally. The speeches had all been stirring, but not one of the speakers—all men, of course—had made any mention of the work of the WCTU. It was discouraging, after the heady excitement of the rally she had attended earlier in the spring when not only women’s work but women’s votes had been spoken of with such approval.

  She tried to explain her disappointment to Mr. Collins. “Having been so involved with the women’s temperance work, I felt it as a rebuke, to be quite honest.” She had not intended to raise any topic that might be controversial, or even interesting, but he was the one who had brought up the rally and she was a little curious as to how he would respond if she shared even a sliver of her true opinions.