A Sudden Sun Page 16

  David said nothing, only stood his ground, his hands still fists. The drunkard backed up further, further, and finally turned around. “Devil take ya, I never meant nudding by it!” he shouted. “You can go to hell, you and yer little whore too!”

  He was out of the alley before he flung the insult, and David lurched forward as if to follow him, though until he heard that filthy word he’d seemed content to stand his ground and watch the man walk away. Lily grabbed for his arm, felt the hard cords of muscle tensed there. “Leave it, David. He’s gone now.”

  He turned. “But he said—”

  “I know what he said but it’s only words, isn’t it? A man like that doesn’t know anything else to say about a girl.”

  A girl standing in a dark lane with a man’s arms around her, Lily added silently. Maybe Jim the drunkard was no fool after all. Maybe he called it as he saw it, and what he saw was a woman falling.

  As they turned their steps east on Duckworth Street towards Abby’s house they heard the clamour of church bells—a thinner sound than it used to be, in this city after the fire, with so many church steeples still crumbled and empty. The surviving bells struck eleven. “I’m late,” Lily said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll be there by quarter past.”

  “Not just for being late. For—all that.”

  “It’s not your fault what a few drunks say or do.”

  “It is if I bring you to places like that.”

  I don’t mind, Lily wanted to say, but he would have known it wasn’t true.

  “Next time we’ll walk along Rennie’s River,” David said. Her heart leaped with relief. Another man might have said there would be no next time, that it wasn’t worth the risks they took to be together.

  They walked home quietly, making no effort to pick up the threads of their interrupted conversation. But the questions David had asked played over like a gramophone record in Lily’s head. She’d struggled to find the courage to defy her father and see David. But she had known always that her father was right and she was the one in the wrong. It had never occurred to her to question, as David did, a father’s fundamental right to make such rules for his daughter. And yet if she truly believed all the fine words she’d heard about women being the equals of men, why should it be? If she had the right to vote, and to go out to work and earn her living, just like a young man might do, would her father still have a say in who she courted, who she married?

  There was a reason to it, she knew. Preachers might say it had to do with Genesis and God making man head of the woman. But Lily thought it might have more to do with what had just happened in Williams Lane. For what would have happened to her if she had been in that place alone tonight? How could any woman walk through the world without a man to protect her?

  She wanted to try to explain this to David, but she was very tired, and they were nearing Cochrane Street and Abby’s house. A conversation for another time, perhaps.

  Lily

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ABBY’S MOTHER SWEPT in to her parlour. Mrs. Hayward moved like a schooner running with a strong headwind. She had a list of things she wanted Abby to do, and as she was on her way back out of the room, almost as an afterthought, she turned back and said, “Oh, Lily, did your father’s man find you, the other day?”

  “What day was that, Ma’am?”

  “Oh, two or three days ago—Tuesday, was it? Evans came to the kitchen with a message for you. He seemed to think you were here, but Abby was out visiting the Ayre girls that afternoon. I told Cook to tell him he must have been mistaken.”

  “Oh—of course,” Lily said. On Tuesday she had met David in the park for half an hour as he was leaving the office. She had told her mother she was going to Abby’s. Walking back from the Park alone she had run into Evans, who gave her a note from her mother asking if she could pick up soap and some Minard’s Liniment at the druggist’s. It wasn’t on her way at all, but she did the message and congratulated herself that once again she had gotten away with meeting David in secret.

  Abby didn’t hesitate long enough to take a breath. “Oh, Mama, I decided at the last minute to take Lily along with me to the Ayres’s.”

  “That was a dangerous story to tell,” Lily chided Abby after Mrs. Hayward had gone. “What if your mother talks to Mrs. Ayre and finds out I was never at her house?”

  “Mrs. Ayre wasn’t even there, it was just the two girls and me and the old grandmother who’s deaf as a post. Besides, to tell the sad truth, Mama’s not interested enough in your comings and goings to play Sherlock Holmes. Why, she’s not even interested enough in my comings and goings, as long as she’s assured I’m someplace respectable. She’ll have forgotten this whole conversation before she’s up the stairs—more important things on her mind, you know.”

  “So all in all, it’s a pity you’re not the one sneaking around to see a secret lover.”

  “Isn’t it! Believe you me, I think that every day.”

  “Would you, though?”

  “What, me? In a heartbeat.”

  “No, but really. If it were real, a real-life young man your parents wouldn’t approve of, would you see him secret?”

  Lily’s tone was serious enough to sober even Abby. “I’d love to do something so naughty,” she said after a moment. “But I’d have to ask—why would my parents not approve of him?”

  “Because he’s not a churchgoer. Because he drinks—a bit, anyway. Because he’s half-Irish and his mother was a Catholic and his family are—nobody really. Any of those reasons.”

  “In this scene you’re painting, is he rich?”

  “No.”

  Abby took a deep breath. “The problem with the whole scenario, when you lay it out like that, is—why am I doing it? Do I hope to run away with him, to marry him, in the end? Because it seems to me—well, I know I’m very silly and I talk a lot of rot about being wicked and all that, but the truth is, anyone Papa wouldn’t want me to marry is probably not anyone I’d want to marry, either. I mean, you do want someone…compatible, someone who can socialize with your friends, someone who can provide for you. Papa’s very concerned that I marry a good provider, and I’m even more ambitious. I want a rich man!” Abby laughed, her serious mood dispelled already. “And if he’s rich, and respectable, and all the rest, then there’s no need to sneak around. He’d just come calling.”

  “Yes. I suppose so.”

  Abby leaned forward, took Lily’s hand. “Oh, sweetheart, I don’t want to make you feel sad. You are in a bind, aren’t you? But do you really think Mr. Reid would ask you to elope with him? And if he did, would you risk it? The shame, and all that? And you’d be so poor!”

  “Well, he hasn’t asked. But what if it—I mean, what if it were you, and he weren’t planning to marry you? If it were just—” Lily’s voice trailed off. She couldn’t think of a word for what she was imagining.

  But Abby could think of several. She squeezed Lily’s hands. “You mean to be his lover—his mistress? Oh Lily, you haven’t—have you?”

  “No! Of course not! I’d never be so wicked—or foolish.”

  “Foolish is the important part, not wicked. It’s dreadfully wicked for a married woman to take a lover, but it’s safe enough if you’re discreet. No, I’m not saying I’d ever do it, but people do and they’re not struck by lightning from heaven. But an unmarried girl—darling, we can’t be too careful. Once a man has his way, he’ll toss you aside, and no one else will marry you. I know it’s harsh but it’s only the truth.”

  “I know—of course I know all that. Let’s talk about something else. Or, no, let’s do something else. I’m tired of sitting inside and I’m tired of turning this whole thing over and over in my head. Let’s go walking.”

  “A drive instead of a walk, please,” Abby said, leaping up. “I want broader horizons than I can see on shoe-leather. Let me ask Mama if Wilson is free to drive us. Or no, wait, I’ll ask if she’ll let us take the gig. I
do love to drive, but she hates to let me.”

  Predictably, Abby’s mother said no to the gig, particularly as both the horses would be engaged in taking her on an afternoon call. She suggested the girls join her.

  “I’d rather be hung, drawn, and quartered,” Abby said, returning to the parlour with this news. “Two hours sitting with Mrs. Monroe in her parlour discussing china patterns and middle-aged gossip? And now Mother’s got it into her head that we should go with her and I’ll never be able to cry off for anything as frivolous as a walk. Unless I can come up with something improving and good-works-ish to do instead, I’m afraid I’m doomed—and you along with me.”

  “Martha did ask if we could come help deliver baby blankets to the Rescue Home this afternoon,” Lily said. “I put her off, but they were meeting at her house at two, so we’ve still time to get there.”

  “Perfect!” Abby jumped up to tell her mother the revised plan, then lifted her hands in despair. “See what my life has come to? So desperate for entertainment that I jump at the chance to bring blankets to—ugh, a poorhouse?”

  “You still have a concert with Frank Ayre to look forward to tonight, haven’t you?”

  “No, tonight is Norman Winsor. Now I’ll be able to be all aglow with virtue when I go. Very well, I’ll ask Mother if we can ride along with her as far as the Withycombes’ house. It’s not a perfect plan, but for lack of time to invent a better, it will have to serve.”

  To make some of their lies plausible it had become necessary for Abby to accompany Lily to a number of WCTU events. Abby turned out to dislike the efforts of the “earnest bluestockings,” as she called them, far less than she pretended to. Lily herself was becoming a bit disillusioned with the WCTU. In the wake of their latest defeat in the House of Assembly, the women who opposed pushing for the vote had won the upper hand in the temperance organization. Frances Withycombe had been elected secretary, replacing Jessie Ohman, who now seemed sidelined. Not silenced—she was impossible to silence—but the latest issue of her Water Lily had had to be postponed twice due to lack of funds and nobody seemed to know when it would be printed. Lily had written a little piece for this issue and was beginning to despair that she would ever see it in print.

  So Lily had not committed herself when Martha asked about the blankets, worthy though the work was. Martha insisted, as her mother did, that this was their real work, to alleviate the suffering caused by drink and other social evils. Getting the vote would have been only a means to that end, and if it stood in the way of achieving their real goal it was best to abandon it.

  “But I can’t help feeling,” Lily said, trying these ideas out aloud on Abby as they walked up the long path to the Withycombe house, “that we’re being pushed off into a corner, told to go and do woman’s work. Not that the work isn’t good, but it’s not enough.”

  “Well, if Martha’s parroting her mother, you’re parroting Mrs. Ohman,” Abigail said. “I’ve heard her say almost the very same words.”

  “I don’t—oh, perhaps I am. What do you think?”

  “I think the afternoon would be more pleasantly passed if you and I were both dining at Cochrane House—if it were still standing, of course—then going on from there to assignations with our secret lovers. But one can’t get what one wants all the time, so it’s good to learn how to make do with next best.”

  Lily said no more, for they were at the Withycombes’ door and this was not a house in which one spoke lightly of secret lovers. But she supposed Abby’s words might be applicable to her own question after all. If women couldn’t have the vote, perhaps they would have to make do with bringing blankets to the poorhouse.

  Inside, Mrs. Withycombe, Martha, and three other women were folding the blankets they had sewn, knitted, and crocheted over the past weeks. Most were white, some pale pastels. Lily herself had knitted a pale blue one and trimmed it with white crochet lace, and was particularly proud of her work.

  “Oh, Miss Hunt, Miss Hayward, how good to see you both. Martha said she’d asked you but we thought you must have decided not to join us. I’ve hired a carriage—why don’t we ladies go in that? Martha, you girls can follow us in our buggy. I’ll get the boy to hitch it up.”

  Lily had not yet visited the new Rescue Home, for all she had heard about it. She imagined an orderly house, clean-scrubbed but shabby, with poor girls who all looked a bit like her maid Sally. Babies would nestle in their mothers’ arms whimpering softly because of the lack of blankets, and both mothers and babies would smile with appreciation when the blankets arrived.

  A middle-aged woman in a Salvation Army uniform met the WCTU ladies in the front hallway. Lily didn’t know a great deal about the Salvationists except that they had only come to town in the last few years, they had noisy musical meetings, and they weren’t considered entirely respectable despite being such devout Christians. She also knew they dressed up in uniforms as if they were in the military, and when Mrs. Withycombe addressed the matron as “Captain Jost,” Lily realized it must be possible, in this army, for women to hold positions of rank as well as men.

  Lily saw no fallen women, though she could hear a baby crying somewhere. The lady captain took the blankets from Mrs. Withycombe. “Thank you, I can take these and distribute them.”

  “No, no, we’d much rather do it ourselves, meet the mothers and babies,” Mrs. Withycombe said.

  Lily saw a flicker of irritation cross the other woman’s face. No doubt it would be easier to drop off the blankets and have the staff distribute them—it wasn’t that the girls and their babies needed to see the WCTU ladies, but rather that the ladies wanted to look at them. But then, if WCTU funds were going to support this place, perhaps it made sense to drop in for occasional visits.

  “No need to make ready, we shall greet them just as they are,” Mrs. Withycombe said, moving towards the staircase.

  “First let me show you our workroom.” The captain steered the ladies away from the steps and opened the door of what must have been a large parlour and a dining room when this was a private home. The wall between had been opened up to make a single, large, sunny room where four young women sat at sewing machines with large baskets of work beside them. “Here we train our girls for useful work.” The ladies all stood there for a minute looking; the girls kept their eyes on their machines. It was a clean, bright room and the clickety-hum of the treadles and needles made a pleasant sound.

  Upstairs, when the captain led them up, was the room where the four babies slept in cots. Two had been born there in the home to girls who were with child when they came there, Captain Jost explained; two had come in with their mothers. Just now two of them were in their cots, one scooting about in the cot and making small grizzling noises, the other asleep. A young girl sat on a stool nursing a baby while another girl was down on the floor on all fours, face to face with a child who was old enough to crawl.

  “Nancy, get up off that floor!” said the woman, who really did sound like a captain now.

  The girl scooped up her child and cradled it on her hip as she turned a sulky, pouting face to Captain Jost. “I ain’t doin’ nothin’ wrong, Ma’am,” she said.

  “Getting down on the floor with her encourages bad habits—in both of you,” the captain said. “Baby should play quietly in her cot until you come up for a feeding; she must learn to be on her own and not expect to be picked up every time she cries. These ladies have come to bring us some blankets.”

  Nancy’s baby reached out a hand for the pink blanket that Lily carried over her arm, but Captain Jost pushed the little hand away. “Perhaps a blue one for her, Nancy. That lovely rose colour would be nice for Aggie’s little boy.” She turned to the girl who was nursing the squirming baby.

  Lily handed the blanket to the girl. She pulled the baby away from her breast; the front of her dress still hung loose.

  “How old is your baby?” Lily asked as the girl wrapped him in the blanket.

  The girl called Aggie dropped her eyes: there
was no boldness in her stare as there had been in Nancy’s, and Lily found that this girl made her less nervous. “Thank you, Miss,” she said. “He’s two months. Just startin’ to sleep through the night. ’Tis some hard to hear them crying when we’re not allowed in to feed them.”

  “Hard, but necessary,” said Captain Jost. She reached out to pry the baby from his mother’s arms. “Too much fussing spoils a child, Agnes. Go on now that he’s fed, there’s dishes to be done in the kitchen.” Aggie scurried away as Captain Jost whisked the baby, now wrapped in Lily’s pink blanket, to a nearby cot. The girl glanced back once before she went to the door, not at Lily or at the captain but at the cot. Her eyes looked like the eyes of a starving dog.

  She’s younger than I am, Lily thought, Fifteen? Sixteen? What happened to her? Did she fall in love with a man who abandoned her? Or did some man take her by force?

  A year ago she would not even have thought of the latter possibility. Abby had been the one to tell her, when they were sixteen, that babies resulted from a man and a woman “having relations,” though she did not explain what those mysterious relations might be. She said it was a bit like dogs or horses mating, only not as nasty. Lily had always assumed the act to be inevitably a part of marriage, or at least of romance. Mrs. Ohman had had to explain to her that girls of the poorer class were often forced into “relations” against their will. More like dogs and horses after all, Lily had thought.

  “I have some hopes for Agnes,” Captain Jost was saying to Mrs. Peters. “She’s a good, biddable girl, and we should be able to place her in service if the baby dies. If he lives, we may be able to find a good home for him. It’s a sin the orphanage won’t take illegitimate children. They’re the ones who need care the most.” She led the ladies back out of the room and downstairs. “That one Nancy, now, she and her baby were living on the street—actually on the street—and she was selling herself for gin. They’ve been here six weeks but Nancy’s still hard as nails, and she won’t be parted from the child. I don’t see much of a future for either one.”