Lily Fairchild. Don Gutteridge

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СКАЧАТЬ shock. “An’ why not?” she ventured.

      “We work on Sundays,” Lily said, looking up proudly.

      Mrs. McHarg was speechless. Lily was already giving Benjamin a nudge when she heard faintly from the back doorway: “That woman oughta be hanged!” Then: “Lily, you tell that so-called aunt of yours not to bother comin’ round here again!”

      Lily did no such thing.

      Lily loved the boarding houses, especially the rambling clapboard establishment on Lochiel Street run by Char Hazelberry. If she wished, which was often, Lily stepped right inside the cozy kitchens where aproned servants cooked and scrubbed and gossiped; where some of the resident working men – dilatory, hungover or recuperative – lingered about to tease them. When Lily questioned the landlady’s name, Badger McCovey whispered breezily in her ear: “Short for Charity, but she ain’t got none, get it?” Walleye Watson, his good peeper next to hers, declared, “It’s the way she cooks the food!” He tried to wink, with absurd results, and she laughed with the rest of the room.

      “Hi, toots, gonna take me to the shindig, Saird’y?”

      “I get first dance, promise?”

      “Not me, I’ll take the last one, eh Lily gal?”

      “Don’t you pay them geezers no mind,” Char would tell Lily. “Most of them’s well past it anyways! They couldn’t raise dust in a hen-house.”

      Lily usually left Char’s place feeling faintly wicked but welcomed and cheered, – and humming all the way to Exmouth.

      Lily carried the last order of the day to the back of the Templeton’s blue cottage, under the rose arbour in primary bloom and into the meadow of the Templeton’s dooryard. She was delighted to see the cedar table covered with a linen cloth and set for tea. The missus must be planning a garden party, she thought. And by the looks of the fancy cakes and scones and the silver tea-set, the company expected must be the hoity-toity. Mrs. Templeton popped from her shed, brushing back her uncovered hair, and swept across the lawn to Lily.

      “Well, young lady, don’t just stand there lookin’, sit down.”

      Mrs. Templeton showed Lily the proper way to pour tea and how to hold a scone with three digits and some dignity. She smiled sideways and whispered, “Wouldn’t want to upset the good ladies of the town, now would we?” She took Lily’s arm and escorted her about the garden, explaining carefully how one nursed and groomed such unruly beauty, prompting Lily to recall and speak about the wild blossoms of the townships.

      “Well, Lily my sweet,” she said with a sigh, “I mustn’t keep you. Bridie will soon be frettin’.” She tied Lily’s bonnet snugly below her chin. “I just hope your auntie knows what a prize she’s got.”

      Lily blushed. Bridie, she knew, would not approve of such “spoilin’” that could “turn a girl’s head” in a direction that would eventually – one had to assume – prove regrettable.

      As Lily was leaving, Mrs. Templeton turned suddenly and called after her. She had a piece of paper in her hand. “I almost forgot: Maurice and I are holding meeting here in a week, we’ll need a few extras, delivered early in the morning if that’s all right.”

      “Yes, ma’am.” Lily’s eyes were fastened on the fluttering note.

      “There’s so many things, I wrote them all down for you. Here, take this along.”

      Lily took the paper, turned and was almost under the rose arbour when Mrs. Templeton said, a bit too quickly, “Oh Lily, would you mind checking, do I have cucumbers on that list?”

      Lily froze. She felt the confiding coziness of the morning ebb away.

      “Just take a quick glance at the list, love.” Mrs. Templeton prompted, but kindly

      Lily looked sideways then directly to Mrs. Templeton. “I can’t,” she said tonelessly.

      “Well then, it’s high time we did something about that!”

      Lily desperately wanted to be present when Bridie and Mrs. Templeton had their tête à tête. A letter in an engraved envelope had been delivered right to their door by a suborned errand-boy. Bridie read it, her brow furrowing, her lips mouthing the words. “Some nerve!” But next morning she and Lily scoured the house and, to Lily’s amazement, a pewter tea-service materialized from the steamer-trunk to be set upon a crocheted tablecloth of ancient but unblemished vintage. Then she and Uncle Chester – only one of them protesting – were banished to the barn.

      Bridie was a good reader, Chester said so many times. But there were no books in evidence in their home. Lily did see her aunt reading, though, for each week she picked up The Canadian Observer and brought it home, taking special pains to read it on the Sabbath. Chester would peek at it occasionally but would say to Lily, “It’s full of radical ranting, girl, an’ bad politics that’ll come to no good end.” He sigh with the feigned resignation he used whenever Bridie’s behavior frustrated him. “It’s beyond me why she takes in that stuff. ’Course, you gotta remember where she come from.”

      Lily couldn’t remember what she didn’t know. Bridie wouldn’t talk about the old country. Chester would, after a slug or two from his cache in Benjamin’s stall, about the Ramsbottom tribe in Lancashire, the innumerable cousins he’d never met, his own history as the only child of a shipwright attached to the military command during the Simcoe regime, the premature deaths of his parents from cholera. The Ramsbottoms, however legendary, were not blood.

      “Don’t ask,” Auntie would say, seeing the tilt of Lily’s chin. “The Old Country’s old, it’s only good for forgettin’. This is the here and now and that’s what’s important.”

      Seeing Lily’s disappointment, Chester slipped into his bedroom, opened the trunk with a squeal that arched Bridie’s’s eyebrows, and returned with a large leather-bound book. “I’ll just read her the story parts,” he said in Bridie’s direction. “It’s her right, you know,” he added vehemently though his voice didn’t sound fully confident until Samson had pushed both columns aside and brought the wicked temple down upon himself.

      The next winter Chester grew bolder and brought out a calf-covered novel called The Last of the Mohicans, from which he read aloud to Lily, curled up on his lap in the armchair, all through that dark, cold season. Last winter, when The Deerslayer made its debut, Lily perched on the ample arm of the chair and followed the words on the page. Soon she was able to point to some of the words and repeat them back. “See, Bridie love, the young lady can read. Smart as a whip, she is.”

      Bridie, who appeared not to be listening, snapped, “Don’t be turnin’ her head, you old fool. She can’t read. Soon as I get some time, soon as everybody around here pulls their weight, I’m gonna teach the child to read properly.”

      “Don’t blame the girl,” he said petulantly. “After all, she’s had no educatin’ to speak of.”

      “An’ never willwith the likes of you around her.” The reading was over for that evening.

      When Lily ventured in to see if Bridie and Mrs Templeton were still talking, she found Mrs. Templeton adjusting her Sunday hat and looking quite pleased with herself. “Thanks for the tea, Bridie. You really must let me return the hospitality soon.”

      In her working СКАЧАТЬ