IT BEGAN TO snow almost the minute they landed in Greenspond, or so it seemed to Lily. The parsonage was small but it felt cold, bare, and empty. She knew that her job was to make a home of it, to grace it with a woman’s touch, but a weight of lassitude had fallen on her as soon as she stepped off the steamer. When she accompanied the Reverend to church on Sunday, people crowded round to shake her hand and welcome her. Nobody seemed to feel there was anything hasty about the wedding: they knew their young minister had been going into town to court a girl there. Lily caught no covert glances at her waistline, even from the older women. There was nothing to see anyway. Unclothed, she could see a slight roundness to her belly, but under a corset, petticoat and dress there was no hint at all.
She got a keener glance from the Reverend’s mother when they went over to Wesleyville to visit his parents. They presented their son and his wife with a handsome set of china that must have been ordered long before the wedding was confirmed. Mrs. Collins was nothing like Lily’s own mother. She reminded Lily more of Abby’s mother or of Mrs. Ohman, women filled with an alarming energy. But where Mrs. Hayward’s energy was dedicated to moving in the right society, and Mrs. Ohman’s to bettering the world, Mrs. Collins’s energy appeared to be directed towards setting other people straight and pointing out the errors of their ways. In a three-hour visit Lily heard from her all about what was wrong with the Ladies’ Aid, why the Sunday School was being run improperly, and who was wearing inappropriate hats to church. What would this woman do when she discovered a real sinner, right under her nose, in her son’s house?
December. Snow, rain, sleet, snow again. Visits from parishioners with small wedding gifts. At night Lily slept in the master bedroom alone; the Reverend slept, as he had done before marriage, in a little closet of a bedroom off his study. “Of course, when your child is born,” he had said, looking down at his feet, “we shall, ah, be together as man and wife. I hope we will have more children. I want children of my own, you understand.”
Christmas Eve. One month since her marriage. Lily woke while it was still dark. She had had trouble sleeping for months now, but usually managed to fall into an exhausted sleep sometime in the early hours of the morning. Now she was awake at five, cramps twisting in her stomach. The pain was sharp and red-hot. She cried out, then muffled her face in the pillow.
August, September, October, November, December. Five months, nearly six. Was the baby coming already? She almost laughed—even in April there would have been no hope of convincing people it was so very premature. But now? It was a joke, another of God’s little jokes.
By the time the sky lightened, Lily knew she had to call the Reverend. She gritted her teeth to keep from screaming. She didn’t want the housemaid to know. Then she remembered they had given the girl Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off to spend with her family. Maybe the baby was coming, or maybe something else terrible was happening. She had never seen a doctor or a midwife. It struck her for the first time that she had entered upon this whole marriage on the grounds that she was expecting a baby and no one had ever told her for certain that was the case. Maybe there was no baby. Maybe she was dying.
She dragged herself to the door, doubling over as another wave of pain rolled over her. “Reverend Collins!” she called. She had never yet called him Obadiah.
He came and told her to get back in bed, then went himself to fetch the midwife. Lily lost track of time under waves of pain. Then the midwife was there, an old woman who muttered and shook her head. “This don’t look good,” she said. “How far along do you say you are, Missus?”
“July 8,” Lily said through gritted teeth. That one thing she knew for certain. On the eighth of July she had lain down in a bed with her lover and conceived this child. She tried to lock her jaws against the screams but the midwife said, “Have a good holler, my love, it’ll do you good. Not much else will, now.”
She had thought the wedding day was the worst of her life but that was only because she was a little fool, an ignoramus. An innocent girl, as her father had said. Could she be a fallen woman and an innocent girl at the same time? Now she was innocent no longer, but still falling, falling through pain and darkness and horror, screaming and pushing like a barnyard animal to give birth to something the midwife had told her would not, could not live. No one had even guessed she was having a baby. She had sold her life away for nothing. If this had happened a month earlier, on the morning of the twenty-fourth of November instead of December, everything would have been different—no wedding, no husband, no chilly parsonage in Greenspond.
It wasn’t over ’til midnight, as Christmas Eve turned to Christmas Day. Her whole day, her child’s whole life, had been bordered by this one room, this bloody bed, this square of streaky window glass that grew light and then rain-covered and then dark again.
“’Tis all over now, Missus,” said the midwife. She had taken the thing away to dispose of—Lily didn’t ask where or how—got Lily out of bed when she was able and scrubbed up, changed the sheets, changed Lily’s bedclothes. The room looked tidy again; a fire burned in the grate, and the midwife sat next to Lily with a bowl of beef broth, spooning it into her mouth.
“You’ll need to rest now, a good few days. Don’t be up and about too soon. I’ll drop back Saturday or Sunday. And don’t worry—the Reverend give me extra money, but he didn’t need to, I been at this business long enough to know when to hold my tongue. Nobody will know nothing but what the minister’s wife was laid up with some female trouble. The Reverend thinks we can make it like nothing ever happened.” Another spoonful of broth. The midwife wasn’t really as old as Lily had thought. Middle-aged at best. Her dark eyes were shrewd. “There’s no better skill than learning when to keep your mouth shut and I knows it better than most. All the same, you can’t really make it like a thing never happened, especially if the thing is a baby. Whatever you does after this, however many more you has, it always happened.”
“Yes,” Lily said. She had hoped for so long that some miracle would come along and make it un-happen. But the miracle had come too late.
Her husband came in when the midwife had gone. He stood by the window, hands in his pockets, bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet.
“How are you feeling?”
“Tired. Sore. Exhausted.” Did it feel the same, Lily wondered, to birth a living child? But then you would feel full instead of empty, surely.
“It’s a great pity. But it may prove to be for the best in the end. God moves in mysterious ways.”
The cup that had held the beef broth was still on the side table. Lily had her hand around it before she stopped to think. She hurled it straight at his head, but he dodged aside and it shattered on the wall, shards of white crockery splintering around the room.
“You’re very upset,” he said. His tone had not changed at all. After a moment he said, “I told Mrs. Cuff—no one needs to know about this. After you’ve recovered, it will be like a fresh start for us both. We’ll begin again.”
“Go away.” She buried her face in the pillow. When she looked up again he was squatting on the floor, picking up pieces of the broken cup. The sight moved her for a moment, ’til she thought, He won’t want the maid to see this tomorrow, to know I’m going mad.