THE HALLWAY WAS as narrow as the passage between the kitchen and pantry in Lily’s house. It struck Lily that this was the poorest house she had ever set foot inside, and David’s sister and her children were humble but by no means destitute. I tell myself I want to help the poor, she thought, remembering that day at the Rescue Home, but I know nothing about them. And she was here today, not as a bringer of charity but as an intruder, coming when Catherine would surely not approve of her being here.
She thought of leaving. No one had seen her arrive: David’s note had told her to come at three, let herself in and wait ’til he arrived at three-thirty. She went into the small parlour, crowded with furniture, and eased herself onto the pink velveteen settee as if afraid to make any impression on any part of the room. Spidery ferns in brass pots draped the bookshelves: watering the plants was part of David’s duties while Catherine and the children were away.
What if they came back early? They were due back on Sunday, but what if something had gone wrong in Upper Gullies and they came home sooner than expected? She imagined Catherine Malone, carrying bags and bundles and surrounded by her three young children, opening her front door, saying, “Miss Hunt! What are you doing here?”
When the door did open, she jumped. “It’s only me! Are you here, Lily?”
She stood up as he came into the parlour. He stopped two feet away, took his hat off but made no move to hang it up or to step closer to her. It was the first time they had ever been alone with each other in a building, with a roof over their heads and a door shut between them and the world. Goosebumps rose on Lily’s arms, but perhaps it was just that the room was cold.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t be here.” His voice sounded gritty, as if he had a sore throat.
“I almost didn’t come.” Lacking the excuse of WCTU activities or church women’s meetings, she had found it difficult to get out of the house alone for a few hours. When she proposed a visit to Abby, Eleanor had offered to go with her and visit Abby’s mother. A swift exchange of notes with Abby changed it to a walk in Bannerman Park—a subterfuge they soon would not be able to resort to, as the days were growing chillier. Eleanor decided her head was not strong enough for a walk and had contented herself with warning Lily to go to the park, meet Abby, and be back by suppertime.
Abby, of course, had to know the real plan. “You’re actually going to his sister’s house alone with him? Aren’t you frightened?”
Yes, of course. Lily was frightened of almost everything now—frightened her father would catch her out in lies and discover the truth was so much worse than passing out women’s suffrage tracts. Frightened that David would interpret her frantic note, her scribbled desire to meet him, as permission to take liberties. But frightened, most of all, that her life was closing in, narrow as the hallway of Catherine’s house. Reverend Collins’s letters arrived every fortnight and Lily knew that when winter passed and ships came to town again, he would come with a proposal of marriage. Then she would be a minister’s wife out in Greenspond, and everything she loved would be barred to her forever.
So here she was in Catherine Malone’s parlour on Cuddihy’s Lane, alone with David Reid.
David bent down to light the parlour fire. When he had it going he put his arms around Lily, as if lighting the fire had dispelled more than just the chill of the room. She hadn’t imagined the luxury of a kiss in an empty house, with no one nearby to see and judge. He pulled her closer ’til her body was pressed tight against his and she could feel every line, every muscle. One flesh, she thought. Is this what it means?
Then his lips left her lips and began to trace a path down her jaw, onto her neck. Shivers that had nothing to do with cold or fear of discovery travelled over her body. His mouth was at the collar of her blouse now, then his fingers were there too, unbuttoning, kissing the hollow of her throat, caressing bare skin that had never been touched since, she supposed, she was a baby in her mother’s arms.
She wanted to touch, to feel his skin too, wondered what his bare chest and arms would look like with his shirt off. His shirt was untucked already. She slipped her hands beneath it, found his skin warm and a little sweaty to the touch.
“Lily. Ah, Lily.” He pulled away from kissing her throat, closed his eyes and then straightened up and opened them again. “Lily. Wait.”
She left her hands where they were, touching his bare skin, but he pulled them away and held them in his tightly.
“I’m sorry, I don’t want to—to take advantage. I know you’ve got your—well, what you believe about right and wrong and all that. I didn’t bring you here to—” His usually quick tongue groped for the words, words she didn’t know herself. She knew there were coarse words for the things a man and a woman did but she had only heard them muttered in the street. What would she call it, if she talked about it? “The joys and troubles of the marriage bed,” she had heard a lady of her acquaintance say once, but this was no marriage and there was no bed.
“It’s all right.” She didn’t know if that was the truth or the boldest lie of her life. She couldn’t think of the right words either. Show me the pleasures of the marriage bed would hardly do it. All she wanted was to keep touching him, for him to keep touching her. Surely they could do that and she could still keep at least some of her virtue intact.
“Are you sure?”
She shook her head. She wasn’t sure at all. In fact she had come here thinking that she would have to be very strong, very firm with him if he tried to push her. Thinking of her virtue as that castle she had always been told it was, surrounded by a moat, the drawbridge securely pulled up and the walls guarded. But she thought instead of words like yield, surrender.
He unbuttoned her blouse and touched the curving line of the tops of her breasts, covered in the light fabric of her shift. Then his hands moved down to her waist, enclosed in the stiff bones of her corset. “Pardon my language, but this thing looks bloody uncomfortable,” he said.
She giggled, feeling as she were gasping for air. “It is. You could…I wouldn’t mind taking it off, but I’d need some help. Sally usually laces it up for me in the morning and unlaces it at night.”
“You’ll have to show me what to do.”
She turned her back to him so he could untie the laces of the corset. It took some time; David kept interrupting the process to kiss the back of her neck. But every loosening of the laces was a release.
“Is that it? It just comes off then?”
“No, there’s a hook down there…I thought you’d be a man of experience.” Now her voice was the one that sounded hoarse, her mouth dry.
He laughed a little. “Only a man of very little experience, and not with the sort of ladies that wear corsets. Ah, there it is, then.”
And then she was free, free of the corset, and it was easy to slip off her shift so he could touch her bare skin. Her petticoat was on the floor at her feet. “Are you quite sure?” he said again, coming up from kissing her like a man breaking the surface of water, gulping for air. She was not at all sure and at the same time completely sure. Sure only that whatever right and wrong meant, whatever virtue was, whatever God might say, she could not stop touching David and feeling his touch, could not stop this lovely sensation that flooded through her whole body when he touched her bared breasts.
“Oh, God. My God, my God,” he said. A man’s hands on her breasts, and instead of shame she too, was thinking My God, my God. A hymn of praise. The only hymn that mattered, because commandments and rules were a thousand miles away, and all Lily wanted was David, here and now, skin against skin.
“It will hurt,” he warned her later. They hadn’t talked in what seemed a long time, absorbed by kisses and touch and the intricacies of her undergarments. Her clothes were a bed below her now, covering Catherine’s parlour rug. “It’s not like in some romance.”
She knew nothing of the kind of romances that enumerated these details. Jane Eyre said only, “Reader, I married him,” and left the rest to imagination. Cathy and Heathcliff, for all their talk of dark passions, had never even gotten in a bed together. Lily had no idea what to expect. But she was, now, absolutely certain, all doubt washed away under the touch of lips and hands. The drawbridge was down. There was nothing in the castle worth guarding. Everything good had been waiting outside all along.