Lily was sure what Bridie would think. Since no mirror ever graced her aunt’s house –“greatest time-waster and corrupter of good intentions ever devised”– Lily had little experience in physical self-assessment. On occasion she had peered at her rippled face in the goose-pond and watched fascinated as that other visage – fay, unmoored, incomplete – yearned back at her from the depths. But she had appreciation of her whole body or the sudden shape it had taken.
“The dress is beautiful,” Lily said. “But how can I work in these petticoats?”
“The dress is not beautiful, pet, youare. It’s high time you realized that. Walk around for me. See? You have no idea how graceful you really are. Bridie tried to take it out of you, no doubt, putting calluses on your hands and letting the sun burn and freckle that glorious Irish skin of yours.”
Lily was abashed. She felt she ought to defend Bridie but couldn’t find ready words to do so. Mrs. Templeton was not looking for commentary.
“I’ve got Iris to do the housework, pet,” she explained, “and Bonnie comes in to serve and scull at parties. But I do my own cooking and you’ll be a big help to me. Other times, like now, I want you to be my ‘companion’, to sit with me at teas, to talk to me when you feel like it, and to let me make a lady out of you.”
Lily looked dubious.
“I’ll send your wages to Bridie every month,” she said, picking up one of Pamela’s cloth-and-china dolls and caressing it fondly.
Lily relaxed a little; Aunt Bridie was counting on her for that. “Will you teach me to read?”
“Of course, pet,” said Mrs. Templeton, suddenly as serious as Lily. “Why do you think I arranged your rescue?”
They began with recipes, just the two of them working in the kitchen. Mrs. Templeton was amazingly patient. She sounded out the recipe words slowly and repeatedly with Lily at her shoulder. They would say them together, Lily’s alto voice melding with the older woman’s soprano.
After the second week Lily was reading the familiar recipes haltingly to Mrs. Templeton who matched her actions to Lily’s words. “Remember now, pet, read the words clearly, ’cause I’m doing exactly what you say. If the pie wins a prize, then we’ll know you can read!” she giggled.
Towards the end of October, Mrs. Templeton would sit with Lily before a blazing fire in the parlour and read from The Arabian Nights, a book that Bridie would have found scandalous not because of its racy tales but rather for its utter “silliness”. Lily began to ‘read’ parts of these stories aloud, easy sections carefully picked out by Mrs. Templeton and abetted by repetition and memory. One evening she was allowed to take the book to her room where she struggled once again through the early paragraphs of Aladdin and his magic lamp. There was some imperative in this story that drove her to try to decipher the exotic words, to grasp at the central thread of events whose import she sensed but could not pin down. Suddenly the aura of meaning faded and went out like the genie himself. In frustration she threw the book across the room and sat shaking for five minutes before she hurried over in panic to see if she had damaged it. Only her pride was bruised.
Even Mr Templeton – now His Worship the Mayor – got into the game. He would call Lily into his den, detonate a cigar, wave her to a plump chair, and begin to read aloud from one of his legal tomes. “Know what thatword means, Lily?” he’d say with mock-sternness, rolling off his tongue some arcane polysyllable. Lily would shake her head. “Neither does Judge Maitland!” he’d rumble. “And I doubt if the dolt who thought it up does either!” Then he’d go dead-serious again. “But that’s the law, Lily dear. Men have been hanged on it!” Lily soon realized that this was a game he had played with both his daughters before they left for school in London and marriage in Toronto. And some of the words she would remember.
Lily found herself doing little domestic work. The calluses on her hands shrank and faded. Bonnet and parasol soon whitened her skin, though the freckles remained as permanent record of a different past. Lily even attended church – the Anglican church – with the Templetons, though no word was ever said about baptism nor question raised about her not taking communion. The Church of England seemed to be quite accommodating after all. Lily watched, listened, and learned.
After Church she would be given the pony-and-surrey and allowed to drive out to visit her Bridie and Chester. Chester was always overjoyed to see her, though he would sometimes embarrass the women – for different reasons – by bursting into tears without apparent reason. Bridie’s assessment of Lily’s gradual transformation to citified lady was not discernible in her talk or her manner. She continued to refer to Lily’s “work” and as the girl prepared to leave each Sunday, she would grasp her hand and say, “Thank you, lass. You’re a good girl.”
Lily’s duties consisted mainly of being at Mrs. Templeton’s side during her frequent ‘At Homes’, given in deference to her role as the wife of the mayor. “Sweet but dreadfully quiet,” Lily overheard one of the dowagers remark to another. “Might be pretty, in time, though Lord knows where she comes from.” Her days as a tactful delivery girl and easy conversationalist served her well with the women when at tea. The surprise and challenge came from the gentlemen and grandees who frequented the bi-weekly political ‘socials’ (salons was a word not infrequently heard) held by the mayor. As hostesses, Lily and Mrs. Templeton engineered the distribution of food and drink and were expected to provide casual divertissement for those gentlemen who found the strain of political discussion too hard on a thinning intellect.
The political chatter in late 1858 concerned the coming of the Great Western and the machinations of its rival, the Grand Trunk. Much bitterness, not fully assuaged by the good brandy and home-made chocolates, was expressed over the shabby treatment of the town’s noblest citizen, Malcolm “Coon” Cameron, whose moderate reformers had been outflanked by the chicanery of the Clear Grits. Lily was exposed to the intemperate talk of radicals as well as the lamentations of old-compact Tories and the hollow bellicosities of the local Orangemen, Although His Worship would soon depart Port Sarnia and later join the coalition as a repentant reformer, his hospitality was so generous that the warring factions in town not only answered all invitations to attend, but often broke protocol by appearing unannounced. The result was a series of spirited and spirit-fuelled soirees which furthered Lily’s education in unexpected ways.
Regardless of party affiliation or ideological bent, Lily learned there were four elements common to a politician’s life: food, liquor, gossip and sex. Indeed, she soon became adept at identifying parliamentary loyalties not by the swagger and fire of the rhetoric but by the method through which the fourth element was realized. The very first evening she attended one of these salons – radiant in Pamela’s ‘best’, her eyes alight with intelligence – Lily was standing suitably aloof from a heated exchange about the abomination of separate school rights, intent on following the swing of the argument, when she felt a hand slink its way across the stretched silk at her lower back.
“Don’t let those Orangemen put ideas into your pretty head,” whispered the owner of the errant appendage into her ear. Lily turned to see Dr. Michaelmas, the ardent Reformer, smiling behind his trimmed moustaches.
“It’s not my head concerns me at the moment,” Lily said, slipping to one side and casting him an ambivalent smile.
Without a doubt, she concluded, you could tell a Reformer because they were all sly touch, accidental nudge, a fleshy press in tight corners. The Old Tories, on the other hand, because of their advanced infirmities or belief in divine right, were the boldest. Judge Maitland, for example, stalked her in the den on the pretext of discussing recipes and tried to pinch her bum through two layers of crinoline. “My God, you’re a little beauty,” he drooled, aiming a paw at her décolletage, his lust positively aquiline. Lily knew she could cry for help, but instead she curled up her fingers and delivered a muted rebuff to the old scarecrow’s lower abdomen – not hard enough to cripple his intent outright yet insistent enough to make him wheeze, double, and hobble towards the parlour. She watched him trying to straighten his stride as he