SHE PROMISED HERSELF she would wait a week before she started to worry. Her monthly visitor was due late in July, a week after David sailed for New York. Three weeks since she had said goodbye to him. Three long, lonely weeks. Most days had been grey, chilly, rain-soaked. Lily tried to read or write, but paced the floor of her room more often than not. There was no Abby to call and visit with, no hope of notes passed through the fence from David, nothing outside the house to distract her since she had been banned from everything but church.
She had come home at half-past seven in the evening the night she rejected Reverend Collins’s proposal. When she walked into the house that night only her mother was there: her father and Reverend Collins were still out looking for her. The fact that she could, or would, give no account of herself for three missing hours made Papa’s rage even greater.
“I was confused. I needed to think. I went for a walk by myself.”
“For three hours? In the middle of the city?”
“I walked downtown, by the harbour.”
Lectures, shouts, threats. It went on ’til nearly midnight. Reverend Collins politely excused himself. The fact that she had told him she wouldn’t marry him somehow got rolled into the whole business of her disappearance, more evidence that her behaviour was entirely inappropriate for a Christian young woman.
“And the worst part of it,” her father said, about ten o’clock in the evening as he warmed to his theme, “is that this fine young man of God, who made you an excellent offer of marriage, has now seen what kind of girl you are, and when you’ve had time to think better of it and realize what a good offer it is, he will be unlikely to make it again.”
Lily felt as if her entire body were filled with shattered glass. She could make no sense of the fact that Obadiah Collins had offered to marry her, that David Reid was going away and had asked her to come away with him, that she had once again succumbed to temptation and lain with him, and worst of all, that it would be the last time ever.
The Reverend dropped by the following day to see if she was well after her “misadventure.” Lily refused to see him. He went back, presumably, to Greenspond, and Lily went back to pacing the floor. She did not leave the house again until it was time for church on Sunday.
Over the next week she read Bleak House, the only Dickens novel she hadn’t yet read, and went no further than the back garden. Only once did she see Johnny with a note from David, which turned out to say “Leaving on Friday the 14th. Will you reconsider?”
She burned the note.
Friday the 14th dawned with a hard rain. Lily had not sent a return note to David. He was leaving. Unless he had changed his mind, decided to stay. He could stay in St. John’s, keep on working away at the Evening Herald, start going to church. He could come to the front door, meet her father, ask for her hand in marriage. Papa would say no, but Lily would defy him, head held high, and marry David anyway. And in a little while, three months or six months or a year, her parents would see what a fine young man David was. There would be a grandchild someday, and Lily would be forgiven for being a headstrong girl who got married without her parents’ permission. It would all be so easy: why wouldn’t David do it?
By the beginning of August it looked like there might well be a grandchild, after all, without the benefit of even a secret wedding. Lily wished she could read that medical book again, the one she had seen in Abby’s parents’ library, but she had no way of getting to that or any other book, and there were no useful volumes on her parents’ shelves. Perhaps she had misunderstood it. Perhaps if you missed your monthly visitor only once, it didn’t mean anything. Surely it had said a woman couldn’t be certain until she had missed twice? She would have to wait all of August to be sure.
The calm thoughts, the thoughts assuring her that she must be mistaken—those thoughts came during the day. She rehearsed them, repeated them soothingly to herself during the times when Bleak House slipped from her hands and she couldn’t focus on the words. In the daytime, she could convince herself of anything. That she wasn’t going to have a baby. That David would go to New York, realize he couldn’t live there without her, and come home to marry her. That God could forgive her sins.
But at night all those careful defenses fell away. She drifted into a troubled sleep and woke in the dark, knowing she was going to have a baby whose father was far away, that she was going to be shamed and cast out. She would have to go to a home for unwed girls, or no, worse, they would send her to Harbour Grace, to her grandparents, and she would have the baby in seclusion and then it would be taken from her, given up for adoption. She would never even see David again and he would never know about his child, and she would be farmed out to some relative around the bay and become the spinster cousin, never to marry or return to the city of her shame.
When those thoughts crowded into her head she felt snakes of terror twist in her gut. And then she would convince herself that those were cramping pains and that her period was coming after all, and she would lie there believing she had been given a reprieve.
August grew hot and muggy, despite the general rule that summer was over after Regatta Day. In mid-August a letter arrived from New York.
Dearest Lily,
I got my landlady, who has rather pretty girlish handwriting, to address the envelope in hopes that if your parents question the sender, you can claim this is from Abby. When I think that such tricks are necessary to write to you it makes me angry, but I see no other way. The thought of never hearing from you again shatters me. It’s a great city here, my love. So different from old St. John’s—and not just because it’s bigger. There’s a kind of life pulsing through the streets here. Even knowing I’ve left you behind and that you may never follow me—missing you every hour—still I’m glad to be here. I probably shouldn’t confess that but I can’t lie to you. I only wish there was a place we could both feel this way together.
Lily locked herself in her room, read the letter, cried for an hour, reread the letter and burned it. It would have been better if he hadn’t written. Better for him to have just sailed silently out of her life. She could pretend the whole affair had never happened. Only she couldn’t. Not if she were pregnant.
August ended. By mid-September there could be no further denying it. Two months had passed without her monthly visitor. She looked at herself in the mirror and wondered how soon women started to grow large. She looked no different, but her breasts felt sore and she was often sick to her stomach, which she knew were signs she was carrying a child.
The night she finally admitted the truth to herself, she prayed for the first time since July. She confessed her sins fully and with an open heart. She knew now that no love, no pleasure, no moments of delight in each other’s arms could ever be worth the agony, the torment she was now suffering. A man could walk away from a love affair, could go on to a new life in a new city and write about how happy he was there. He could cherish her like a sad and lovely memory that would grow smaller and sweeter with the years. But Lily had no such luxury.
She prayed for the baby too, knowing the only half-way respectable solution was to go away and bear the child in private and then give him away. Him, or her. A son or a daughter. David’s and hers. Lily tried to place it all in God’s hands but she could not imagine leaving the child with someone else. For the rest of her life that child would stamp her with the stigma of her sin, but also with the only tangible memory of love. How could she give up such a child?
She wrote two letters, finally. She was still virtually a prisoner in the house and garden. During the times when her father was at work and her mother was lying down in her room, Sally was nearby, doing her work with watchful eyes. Only in her bedroom or in the garden did Lily have any privacy. She gave the two letters to Johnny Murphy with some money for postage and prayed that the boy was trustworthy enough to take them to the post office rather than spending the money on candy or tobacco and tossing the letters in the gutter.
People at church began to ask how she was, why she didn’t come to the Sunday School outing or that wonderful concert last week. Mrs. Ohman dropped by three times to try to visit, but was turned away, once by Mother and twice by the efficient Sally. The third time Lily was actually on the stairs to hear her say, “No, sorry Ma’am, Miss Lily isn’t seeing nobody.”
“Are those her orders or Mr. Hunt’s orders?” Mrs. Ohman’s rich voice rang out.
Lily thought of running down the stairs, racing into Mrs. Ohman’s arms, begging for rescue.
“Don’t make no difference, Ma’am, she won’t see you either way.”
“Can I leave a note?”
“Probably best not to, Ma’am. Miss Lily haven’t been very well and I’ve been told over and over she’s not to be disturbed.”
Lily turned and went upstairs. Mrs. Ohman was still bickering with Sally, their voices mingling into a single high-pitched chitter as Lily continued up to the third floor.
For a fortnight it seemed there would be no reply to either of her letters and she fell further into despair. She really was all alone, then, in the world. Nobody would help her, no one would rescue her. Then Abby’s reply, a postcard enclosed in an envelope for privacy, arrived.
It’s a pickle and no mistake. She could hear Abby saying the words, her pretty mouth curving downward with shock even as she couldn’t resist thinking what a delightful melodrama she’d been caught up in. But her offer of help was immediate, even though Abby was still a guest in her aunt’s house and was not really at liberty to offer house-room to Lily. She had said they could “puzzle out what to do” but there was no solution to this puzzle. Even God could not change what had happened. Unless…
Lily knew that not every woman who conceived a baby went on to give birth. She had heard of miscarriages though she was vague about what was actually involved. Would it be a sin to pray for a miscarriage? Was there something one could do to make one happen? That in itself would surely be a sin—although any stain of guilt might be worth it if she could go back and erase the past, erase the child she now knew was growing in her womb.
She did not burn Abby’s letter but stuck it in a drawer with some old issues of the Water Lily and WCTU handbills. How strange, that all that had once seemed so important to her, that she had slaved over little essays and poems in hopes they would be published. That she had handed out leaflets to invite women to meetings. She thought of that Lily, the Lily of just a few months ago, as an alien creature, strutting the streets like a peacock spreading its tail, drawing attention, opening herself out to the larger world. Now she was a snail curling into its shell, drawing more and more of herself inside.
While she thought about Abby’s letter and whether she could really go to New York, the first week of October came and went. Another week in which she should have had her monthly visitor but didn’t. Three months. She studied herself in the mirror again and thought she could detect a slight thickening of the waist, though everywhere else—arms, face, legs—she looked thinner, because the combination of nausea and distress was making it hard to eat much.
Then the second letter came, in the same pained careful handwriting as before, the handwriting of David’s New York landlady. “Another letter from Abigail?” Papa said, scanning the New York postmark as he handed over the letter. “I hear she’s engaged to be married.”
“I hadn’t heard that. Perhaps that’s what she’s writing me about,” Lily said, taking the envelope.
She opened it upstairs. Inside, David’s familiar scrawl, a few lines inviting her to come to him. Soon it will be too late—for you, that is.
She could do it, she thought. Go to New York. Stay with Abby. At worst it would offer a more comfortable spot than Harbour Grace to live out her months of shame and then come back. Perhaps even her parents would not be any the wiser. At best, well, she would see David. They could talk, decide what to do. He had, after all, said he would marry her, though neither of them could imagine a life together that would make them both happy.
But now Lily couldn’t imagine a life anywhere, with anyone, that she could be happy in.
She went to her father three days after getting David’s letter. “The letters I had from Abigail? She wants me to come visit her in New York.”
“She does? I’d have thought she’d be busy preparing for married life. I spoke to her father just the other day. The wedding’s to be in the spring, in New York.”
“Yes, yes I know.” There had been nothing in Abby’s brief note about a wedding, but it was easy to improvise. “She wants me there for the winter, to help her plan and prepare, and then to stay for the wedding.” Six months. She counted ahead. April. The baby would come in April, about the time Abby would be getting married to some rich American. “I could stay ’til she’s married and come home in the summer. She might—she may want to ask me to be a bridesmaid, Papa.” Though not likely, if Lily was a big as the broad side of a barn. “To tell the truth I feel the need of a change. You know I haven’t been feeling well.”
Papa nodded slowly. “Yes, I’ve noticed, and your mother has told me you’ve lost your energy and your appetite. Lily, you know I did what I had to do. If nothing else, your reputation would suffer, if I allowed you to walk the streets unchaperoned, to go out to radical meetings, to keep unsuitable company. I know you’re a good girl—I know you always have been—but a girl needs her father’s protection until it’s time to pass into her husband’s care. When you have a daughter of your own someday, you’ll understand why I had to act as I did.”
When I have a daughter of my own, which may be sooner than you think, Lily thought. When my daughter has grown up, perhaps we will live in a different world. Where a girl can love whom she chooses, and go where she wants, and make her own choices. It seemed like a fairy tale she was telling herself, an enchanted land where the princess could become heir to the kingdom.
“I think a winter in New York would do me a world of good, Papa.”
“No. No, I can’t allow it.”
“Won’t you please think about it, at least?”
“Absolutely not. Lily, you know I’ve never thought Abigail Hayward was a good influence. I’ve only allowed you to be friends with her because I respect her parents. But I don’t agree with their choice to send her off to New York. Apparently it fits with the life they want for their daughter, but it has nothing to do with the kind of life we’re preparing you for. Your problem has been too much freedom, and that certainly won’t be remedied by sending you off to stay in a foreign city with a flighty and reckless girl, under the chaperonage of an aunt we don’t know. If I fear for your safety and good judgement here on the streets of St. John’s, why on earth would I ever let you go to New York?”
Tears welled up, but Lily fought them back. It was, after all, only to be expected. She had made the best case she could but she had always known he must say no. She dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief.
Papa’s voice was gentle and low. “Lily, I agree that the existence you’ve been leading these past months is not good for you—moping about the house, being always alone. I miss your spark, your spirit. You are the only thing that keeps this house from turning into a mausoleum. But running away to New York, trying to copy Abby Hayward’s life, which can never be yours, is not the answer. The answer is to turn your thoughts to your own future, to the kind of life we have always prepared you for. Marriage to a good, godly man. It’s time to think of being a wife and mother, Lily.” He waited but Lily said nothing to fill the silence for him. The mantel clock ticked, ticked away the moments. How little time she had left before the whole mess was out in the open!
“Reverend Collins is coming to town again in November, while the steamers are still running,” Papa said.
“He seems to make a great many trips to town,” Lily sniffled, reaching for the handkerchief again. “Are you sure he’s not neglecting his parish?”
Papa smiled but said, “He is a very conscientious young clergyman. He is coming to town because he hopes you will have a different answer to his question. I understand that you didn’t feel ready, the last time he asked. You weren’t prepared. But you have had time to think. Think and pray about it, Lily. It is time to move ahead.”
She thought. She prayed. She wondered if there was a plan that would somehow get her to New York with no money for a steamer ticket. She prayed by the hour, looking for signs, reading the Bible, waiting for anything that might tell her where to turn.
She took out David’s postcard, tucked away in the same drawer with Abby’s. He loved her. He wanted to help. He wanted to be with her. But he hadn’t said the one thing she most needed to hear. He hadn’t said, “I’m coming home at once.”
That was what it came down to. What she needed from him was so simple. Not an invitation to come to a faraway city when she had no means or money to get there. What she needed was for the father of her child to come home and take care of her.
She would not write to beg him to return. What kind of basis for a marriage would it be, if she asked him to make a great sacrifice, unwilling? The marriage would begin with Lily always under a great burden of debt.
One could begin a marriage that way, but it would not be, never could be, a love match. Sometimes it might be the only choice.
As promised—or threatened—Reverend Collins came to town in November. The air was raw with northeast winds by then, the sky a perpetual ceiling of grey. Lily had begun to choose looser, high-waisted dresses: no-one could yet have guessed, glancing at her, but she could see it herself, feel it in the tightening of her waistbands. More than four months along, now.
Reverend Collins took her to a choir concert at St. Thomas’s Church. It was the first time she had been out of the house, except for church, since that day in July. But Papa didn’t seem to mind trusting her reputation, her girlish purity, to the Reverend Collins.
They went for a drive after the concert, though it was chilly and Lily huddled inside her fur coat. “Thank you for that,” she said, with at least a little sincerity. “I haven’t been out much at all these past months. It’s been quite dull.”
“It’s lovely to see you enjoy yourself again, my dear,” the Reverend said. “How I’d like to see roses bloom in those pale cheeks! I know a life in Greenspond would not offer you much in the way of diversion, but it would be a life of useful work and companionship. Have you given anymore thought to my offer?”
“I have,” said Lily. She shivered, possibly from the cold, but she did not want to have this conversation in her parents’ parlour.
She told him everything. Everything, except David’s name. She did not try to colour the truth, or not very much. She told him that she had fallen in love with someone else, a young man who was kind to her but whom her parents would have considered an unsuitable husband. She had been tempted, and fallen into sin. “And now I am going to have a child,” she said. “A child with no father. I am a sinful woman, Reverend Collins. I want a new start, and a father for my child, but I cannot ask you to take on such a burden, especially since it will seem to others that the child is yours.” She had rehearsed the words over and over, like a part in a play.
She watched his face change as she told her story. His eyes widened. A frown creased his brow. The corners of his mouth, upturned in what he must have thought an appealing smile when he started to speak, turned down, and his eyes faltered away from hers when she finished speaking.
“I ought to take you home,” he said after a moment. “I should speak with your father.”
“Mr. Collins, I beg you—my father and mother know nothing of this. I have kept it a closely guarded secret, and I have trusted only you with it.”
“No one else? Not even this—this man? The father of your child?” The word “father” seemed distasteful on his tongue.
“Of course I did tell him. But he isn’t—I can’t marry him. He has gone away, and he won’t return home to care for me and for his child.” She felt disloyal as she said it, painting David as a man who would shirk his responsibility. But at bottom it was nothing more or less than the truth.
It was likely that Reverend Collins would withdraw his offer of marriage and tell her father at once. She was surprised when he said, “It would be like Joseph.”
Lily knew what he was thinking immediately, but prompted him. “Like Joseph?”
“Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, had to take on not only the responsibility of Mary and her baby, but the shame of having people think he was the father—that he was the one who had sinned in having relations with her before they were married. But he bore it all with grace.”
“But I am not the Virgin Mary,” Lily said. “Only a girl who has sinned.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, his eyes still on the road and not on her. “So in a way it would be more like Hosea and Gomer.” He turned to her. “Lily, I won’t speak to your father tonight. I won’t deny to you that I’m deeply disappointed, that you’re not the girl I thought you were. It’s a heavy blow, to be sure. But I must go home and think and pray on this—be sure of what God is calling me to do.”
Lily had always disliked the book of Hosea—or ’Osea, as Mr. Collins pronounced it—and thinking of it now she felt sorry for Gomer. Hosea’s sinful wife had run away from her husband and become a harlot, and he took her back. But for the rest of her life Gomer would have had to live with that burden of gratitude, of knowing that he had stooped into the gutter to lift her up.
He came the next day. Lily had not slept all night. In the morning she stood at the window and thought, David could come home. He might return on a steamer, without sending a letter or a cable because he knew it might not be safe, and at any moment he might walk up to her front door and rescue her. He might say, “You must marry me” and she would have to say yes. It would be so wonderful, not only to see him again but to have someone else take away the awful burden of deciding what to do.
Instead it was Reverend Obadiah Collins who came to the door at eleven o’clock in the morning. Lily had touched nothing except tea on the breakfast tray that Sally brought up. He walked up the street with his head down and his hands clasped behind his back, like a man going to do something serious and important.
Lily took out the contents of her dressing-table drawer and looked through them: not just David’s postcard and Abby’s but the copies of the Water Lily, the leaflets, the scraps and pieces of a life she had almost lived but then abandoned. Then a knock came. Sally said, “Your Papa would like to see you in his study,” and he was down there with the Reverend, the two of them on either side of the desk, and neither of them looked happy. But the Reverend was there. Happy or not, he was there.
“Sit down, Lily,” her father said, indicating a chair. “Reverend Collins and I have been having a long talk, heart to heart.” Lily sat in the chair next to Reverend Collins, which made it feel like they were two naughty children called into the headmaster’s office in school. “He has confessed something that surprised me greatly, that seems entirely out of character with what I know of him, and of you too. You have been headstrong, Lily, but I never thought you wicked. However, I understand that you are an innocent young girl, easily led astray, and the greater blame rests on Reverend Collins’ shoulders.”
Lily looked from her father to the Reverend, waiting. The Reverend reached over and took her hand. “Lily, my dear, I’ve confessed to your father that when I came to town in July, that you and I—that we were indiscreet, and did what we should not have done, when our engagement was not yet even settled, much less our marriage. That we want to be married very quietly and quickly, before the baby comes, and that I will endeavour to do all I can before God to atone for this error by taking care of you, and of our child.”
It was the most natural thing in the world that Lily should burst into tears at that moment. There could be any number of reasons for it.
“I need not say again how disappointed and surprised I am,” Papa said, “especially as you are a clergyman, Mr. Collins. But I think it is a failing that people are apt to forgive and forget if the marriage is made promptly afterwards.”
When she was alone with the Reverend, Lily said, “I suppose I ought to thank you.”
The Reverend looked a bit taken aback. “I…I had thought you would be grateful.”
I am, Lily thought. I have to be. And I will have to be, every day of my life.
The word was out in church the next day. “Oh, you should have a Christmas wedding!” cried Daisy Gill, when Lily said only that they would be married “Quite soon.”
But it was not a Christmas wedding. It was a twenty-fourth of November wedding in the parlour of the bride’s parents’ home. A week had passed since the marriage proposal; Reverend Collins wanted to be married and back in Greenspond while it was still possible for a boat to travel there, before the weather closed in. He had cabled home to tell them he would be away an extra week, but would bring his bride when he returned. Lily’s father and mother were present. There were no other guests, no wedding supper, no celebration.
Before the wedding she had written a long letter to Abby, explaining what she was doing.
…Thank you for offering, but there was no way I could come to you: Papa wouldn’t allow it. D said the same—that I could come to him in New York—but what good it does me to have him, or you, or anyone who cares for me in New York when I am here, I don’t know. I have been forced to turn to the only person I thought might help me, and he did help, though God alone knows how he will make me pay for it.
Anyway it will all be over very soon. And I will be married before you after all. What fun.
Her note to David was much shorter. She sent a telegram.
MARRYING REVEREND COLLINS NOVEMBER 24 STOP IT’S FOR THE BEST STOP NO NEED TO WRITE AGAIN STOP
She could, of course, have written to him after it was all done. But she cherished that thread of hope that there was in David Reid some spark of Young Lochinvar, that he would batter at the door and tear her from the arms of Obadiah Collins even as the vows were being said. He could claim Lily and his child and carry her off to—where? It hardly mattered anymore.