The band from Goderich had just struck up a quadrille.
“Here comes your first admirer,” said Mrs. Templeton. Gratefully Lily let herself be swept into the square by His Worship. Once the dancing actually began, Lily found herself completely absorbed by it. She couldn’t think of anything else when there was music in her, she could only feel, and mime that feeling with her feet and arms and the bow of her body. She galloped and polka-ed and waltzed and quadrilled. Her black-suited partners – so cordial, so deferential in their requests – became faceless instruments of her need to surrender to the discipline of the rhythm.
Between dances, however, when couples chatted, sipped, and nibbled sandwiches for solace, Lily felt anxious and drained. With only two dances left, the object of her desires had not appeared in the same set nor had he been among her partners. Delicately, she asked Mrs. Templeton if she knew the names of any of the military gentlemen from London. “Well, Mr. Carleton and Mr. James are both lieutenants in the fusiliers, she said, nodding a head in the direction of faces Lily did not recognize. “The others I don’t know.” That’s that, then, Lily thought, turning to her card to see “Mr. Marshall” next in the list.
She looked up in expectation of a “regrettable necessary,” when there he was, not a foot from her. “I believe I have the honour of this dance. My name is Tom Marshall. I’m from London.”
The penultimate dance was the fast-paced lancerswith eight couples challenging the military complexity of its steps. There was little opportunity to converse in the midst of such manoeuvres. Nonetheless, she felt Tom’s arms momentarily about her waist, her hand clasped in his, and confirmed her premonition of his vulnerability, his erratic energy, his need for safe harbour. She placed her face naked before his gaze, released a locked part of herself to him for scrutiny and care. He smiled at her when they were apart and possessed her with his grasp when they sashayed or twirled in linked curves. He wafted words to her and she nodded as if they were comprehensible.
When the lancers ended, he ferried her towards the table where the punch was wilting in the heat. Now they would talk and it would begin. He placed a crystal goblet in her hands. She drank thirstily.
“Lily, you’re the best dancer of the lot. Surely you can’t be from Port Sarnia,” he said with a twinkle.
She was about to reply when his eye was caught by a beckoning gesture to their left. “Damn,” he muttered to himself. “Would you please excuse me, Miss Ramsbottom; I’m wanted by my party. It’s been a pleasure meeting you. I hope we’ll meet again.”
She could only murmur thanks and watch him walk over to the Dowling group. Lady Marigold and her husband had joined them. When the music started for the last dance, a Strauss waltz, she saw His Nibs take the withered fingertips of the judge’s wife. Dowling put his arm about the waist of the dark lady and they strolled with utmost ease to the centre of the floor. So engrossed was Lily in this minor melodrama that she almost missed seeing Corporal Marshall offer his arm to Miss Platinum and, when the music began, clasp her pliant body to his own.
Lily was in a deep, daylight sleep following a night of restless dreams and near-dreams, when she was awakened by Mrs. Templeton gently shaking her shoulder. She blinked at the invading light. “What’s wrong?” she said.
“It’s your Auntie,” Mrs. Templeton said.
Lily saw Bridie hovering behind Mrs. Templeton, her face sombre.
“Are you all right, Auntie?”
“Yes, love. It’s your Uncle Chester.” Her voice was close to breaking. “His heart give out.”
8
The year 1860 was born in hope. For the county’s farmers, victims of the ‘black frost’ of 1859, there was not much else left. Those who tilled the soil were left with shrivelled roots and wizened leafage to mock them through the hot summer of ’59 with little chance that they could afford even to buy seed for next year’s planting and some chance in the back townships that they might starve or chew their way through a winter of turnip, chicory and hazelnut.
Typhus, cholera and diphtheria trimmed the infant population with regular and reliable horror, and struck down among the adults those who were weak or unwary. Moreover, the high cost of progress – of living up to the county’s adopted motto, Ongoing– appeared to be routinely accepted by the populace. Certainly the 440 shipping disasters listed for 1859, at a cost of $668,565.00 and 105 lives, offered no deterrent to the expansion of water commerce. Nor did they discourage excursionists and pleasure-seekers from boarding hundreds of cruiser-craft and heading out ‘into the blue’. In September 1860, the excursion boat Lady Elgin went down with a loss of 287 lives. The disasters on the new, often jerry-built, railroads, though not as calamitous, were as frequent and as cavalier. Notwithstanding, the Great Western moved more than 800,000 passengers per annum in Upper Canada in these years. And the Grand Trunk had designs of its own on the landscape. Elsewhere, bridges were being flung across the St. Lawrence at Quebec and at Lewiston, swing ferries wobbled over the St. Clair rapids, and canals were deepened and widened – each leap forward taking its routine toll in killed and maimed.
But the spring of 1860 seemed blessed by that same Providence whose hand was ever on the tiller and the throttle. Sun and rain collaborated so that the wheat grew and the fruit trees blossomed on cue. Even Bridie began once again to entertain the notion of a future. She had become resigned to the fact that all of their efforts had now to be put into maintaining a few cash crops to be sold, at outrageously low prices, at the farm gate. Nonetheless, she persevered through two long winters with her quilting despite the onset of arthritis, which she mocked as “a little twinge or two to remind me I’m gettin’ old an’ to keep me honest.” Only their cash reserves had allowed them to survive the ravages of the black frost, but as Bridie often said, “We’re holdin’ our own with our heads up, lass, don’t ever forget that.” Still, Lily sensed a hollowness to Bridie’s aphorisms and more than a little world-weariness.
With Chester a virtual invalid, there was no talk of Lily’s going back into service even though the income would have helped them a great deal. Someone had to nurse the man night and day, summer and winter. His heart attack had been real, and he was fortunate enough to have the doctor arrive from town too late to be of immediate harm, and thus managed to survive. For months he lay on Lily’s bed (she now slept on a cot in the kitchen) barely able to express his thanks as she fed him with a spoon, emptied his festering bedpan, or bathed his bleached flesh. By the spring of 1859 his voice was a guttural rasp, like a wraith calling from some shallow part of purgatory.
“I don’t pray much, Lily,” Bridie said. “But if I did, I’d ask my maker to take Chester back. Nobody oughta suffer like that.”
However, early in the summer of ’59, even as the black frost’s legacy lingered, Chester stirred himself, sat up, smiled, and became impossible. Bridie stared at him as if he had, for a second and more unforgivable time, betrayed her. But she did her duty. They bought a wicker chair with feather pillows and wheels so that he could sit by the stove or out on the flagstones in the sun or be ferried about on short excursions through the garden and woodlot. Alas, his appreciation was in short supply. He whined and wheedled, threw tantrums and dinner plates, cried like a baby and grumbled like an ogre, and generally wallowed in self-pity.
“I should’ve gone,” he’d say, “the world’d be a better place without old Chester in it.” Bridie would glare, then relent and say without conviction, “But you’ll be up an’ walkin’ soon. Is there anythin’ special Lily can fix you for supper?”
“Well, rhubarb tart’d be nice, but I expect it’s too late for that.” It invariably was, and he then had to be mollified with whatever second-best alternative could be offered.
If it hadn’t been for Bill, the