Lily Fairchild. Don Gutteridge

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СКАЧАТЬ You take my very point,” the solicitor said, wheeling to face the invisible jury. “We have come to take Lily to a place where all of these conditions obtain, where both her well-being and that of the child will be assured. Moreover, we are not insensible of the social difficulties associated with a child born out of wedlock; the Prince himself was particularly concerned about this point. Hence, the immediate and secret removal of the girl to a house we have arranged in London will be of benefit to all concerned.”

      “And after the babe is born?” Bridie said coldly into the ensuing silence.

      “Mother and child can be returned here, of course. Not right away naturally. Perhaps a husband can be found for her, or a reasonable story concocted to account for the exceptional circumstances. Whatever arrangements are decided post partum,” he said relishing the Latin, “Her Majesty has commanded Her viceroy here in the dominion to disburse appropriate funds for the maintenance of the child till it comes of age. Furthermore –”

      “We don’t want any of your money,” Bridie cut him off.

      “Now, sweetie –”Chester said, but was silenced by a stare.

      “Would you kindly get the girl’s things together as soon as possible? There’s a train leaving here in an hour; we’ve arranged a special car to be attached.”

      Aunt Bridie stood up. “The girl, as you call her, only goes if she wants to. Please tell Her Majesty that we are quite capable of taking care of our own, royal blood or not. An’ we don’t take charity.”

      “May I see Lily alone, then?”

      Lily nodded to her Aunt.

      “If you must.”

      The privy-councillor and ex-Grenadier was disconcerted by the way the girl gazed directly at him while he lectured her, with just the slightest hint of disapproval. Moreover, the thumping of the baby on the drum of her abdomen was disturbingly audible.

      “We understand your reluctance to leave home, but we ask that you reflect on all the advantages that will accrue to a positive decision to go to London. The lady who has agreed to care for you is a woman of the highest quality and discretion. We also recognize that you are part of a working family and that your loss over the next three months or so will impose serious hardships on your Aunt and Uncle. Thus, though your Aunt sees it as charity, His Excellency will, with or without her consent, deposit a hundred dollars in her account at the Bank of Upper Canada for each month you are away, for as long as it takes to resolve matters in a satisfactory manner.”

      When Aunt Bridie and Uncle Chester were waved back in, they found Lily standing by the stove, her eyes brimming with tears.

      11

      Mrs. Edgeworth’s walled garden in May was as beautiful as the East Gate to Eden, as that lady iterated often when the ladies of London gathered there, as they did each Thursday afternoon during the warm season. , Lily was obliged to observe the ritual teas from her room on the second floor of the red-brick mansion. She was not to be seen in public and particularly en silhouette. Those were the principal terms of her confinement. But when it was not Thursday afternoon, Lily was free to roam the gardens at will, protected from prurient view by its fieldstone walls, rampant privet and gothic elms. Hedges of honeysuckle and wild lilac marked out avenues for the eye, arrested by arbours of budded rose, beds of thrusting tulips, and the prodigality of peony and rose-of-sharon. Here Lily whiled away the weeks and hours of her twenty-first spring.

      Of London itself she had seen little since that night in mid-April when she had been lifted from a private railway car and placed gently in a closed carriage to be driven through the dark to the Edgeworth home. The full moon allowed her to catch glimpses in outline of the largest, most imposing buildings she had ever seen. The gas-lamps along Richmond Street glittered like amethyst and cast across their path the shadows of railings, newel-posts, pitched gables, and spires. There appeared to be no trees except for occasional decorative saplings of maple or elm on the steep lawns of the palaces along North Street. As they wheeled onto the latter to head east, Lily drew in her breath at the sight of two cathedrals whose grand martellos carved the night-sky into Protestant and Catholic halves.

      So this is civilization, Lily thought. This is what the Millars and the Partridges dreamed of as they hacked their trees to death, slashed, burned, pulverized and ground the very ash of them back into the resisting earth. This is what the burghers of Sarnia, with their muddy streets and clanging foundries and clapboard shells, yearned towards?

      “You can’t read? My gracious Godfrey, what havethey done to you in that dreadful bush-town?” Mrs. Anthony Edgeworth’s questions were usually pointed comments on the deteriorating human condition. “Well, we’ll soon rectify that! We shan`t have a son of the aristocracy grow up in a family of illiterates now, shall we?” She blushed then, as she did easily and often.

      “Oh, I am sorry, dear-heart. I am expressly forbidden to mention things like that. Walls have ears, you know.”“I had no upbringin’,” Lily said helpfully.

      “Well now, that isn’t yourfault. We’ll just see what we can do in the few weeks at our disposal,” she said with determined cheeriness. Then she released a bosomy sigh. “If only the Colonel were alive, he’d take you in hand.”

      So it was that just as the first lilacs sprang into bloom, drenching the air with the sweet phrases of their perfume, Mrs. Edgeworth donned her best brocade and ushered the freshly attired Lily into the grotto where Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare could be suitably worshipped.

      “She’s very quick,” Mrs. Edgeworth said consolingly to the vicar, after another of his less-than-successful exchanges of catechism with the unlettered and unrepentant girl. “She took an instant fancy to Portia and Rosalind. Isn’t that intriguing?” The vicar thought not. “She can tell you right back, quick as a wink, the whole story of The Tempest, or The Winter’s Tale.” His reverence thought perhaps Pilgrim’s Progress would be more suitable fodder.

      To Dr. Hackney, taking his leave after his bi-weekly check of the patient, she said, “And yesterday I decided to read her some of the Bard himself. Of course, as you remember, I don’t read nearly as well as the Colonel, but do you know that wisp of a girl understood those speeches!” How she wished she could confide in the vicar and the doctor, but only she knew that the father of the child was some important figure-of-state from Toronto and that secrecy was imperative. The doctor, the vicar and Lucille, her servant, were told only that the girl was the daughter of a friend from the country, and that discretion was requested. Lucille was, alas, “dumb as a post but ever so sweet” and fully devoted to her mistress.

      Lily soon discovered that Lucille was not at all dumb, only French, and that a great deal of the French she had learned from Maman LaRouche came back to her easily. The two girls, barely a year apart, chatted amiably in both tongues during the drowsy afternoons of early spring with the earth greening around them and the air as clear as claret.

      When not reading to her, Mrs. Edgeworth took full advantage of her captive pupil to give her a singular history of England from the narrow but no-less-illuminating perspective of her own family and, where verisimilitude demanded, that of the late Colonel’s. “Oh how my Aunt Fanny laughs when I tell her in letters that I live in London on the Thames in Middlesex County. She’s of the opinion that we all live in log cabins and spend most of our days swatting flies.” Then she would sweep the garden and environs with her Canterbury gaze: “Ridiculous, isn’t it? But the Colonel, bless his memory, helped to make it what it is today. My only worry is that my dear nephew, Tippy, the Colonel’s sister’s boy, whom I’ve raised since he was a tot of ten, will СКАЧАТЬ