Lilli de Jong

by Janet Benton

  Soon Margaret returned, thrilled by her outing with Rosa, who’d brought a picnic and read to her from a book of aphorisms. I was cleaned up by then and had readied a fresh supper. As we ate, I asked Margaret to care for Henry tomorrow, to which she consented. Then I asked to borrow money, which she had to deny. She’d sent most of last month’s pay to her family already, and the rest had gone to stamps, pencils, and stationery. In fact, she intended to write to her sister about her rekindled friendship with Rosa, my arrival in the household, and other developments in her young life. And could I help her to do so, she asked, on this very night?

  I couldn’t very well deny her, despite my panicked state. We took down our hair and got in our clean, starched bedclothes, then sat on the hooked rug in Margaret’s room. It was all cruelly pleasant compared to Charlotte’s situation. The windows were opened to the darkness and let in a beguiling breeze as we began Margaret’s first written message to the world.

  “Dear Meghan,” she began, with me dictating the spellings. “I am writing this myself.” She paused, pencil in the air, breathing rapidly. Then she stood. “I have bubbles inside! Is this joy? I can’t keep still!” She lifted her legs high, tossing her curls shoulder to shoulder as she danced, then leaned to kiss my cheek. For precious seconds, my troubles were replaced by her exhilaration.

  Upon finishing the letter, she retired, and I crept downstairs and took a piece of stationery from Clementina’s desk. I wrote a note with her fine pen and ink, attesting to my husband’s recent demise and my reliable employment and lodgings in her household. “I welcome the chance to house Mrs. de Jong’s baby,” I wrote, “because this will allow Mrs. de Jong to stay longer in our service.” With many flourishes and not a little satisfaction, I signed “Mrs. Clementina Burnham.”

  I tucked that letter and the birth certificate into the pocket of a plain dress from home, which I’ll wear tomorrow when I leave to do what I’ve realized I must do to get the needed money.

  If Clementina were in, I’d ask for an advance on pay; if Miss Baker were here, she might have loaned me something. But as things stand, the only method in my control is to take a page from the book of Patience. I’ll gather some valuables from my room at Father’s and pawn them. I’ll gain entry to the house by telling them I’ve completed my governess assignment, then take what I can and depart.

  I will lie to my own family.

  I’ve fallen into bed, with failing courage, and trembling.

  Sixth Month 6

  Miss Baker was angry at our mistress for banishing me but could do nothing. Margaret whispered that she was so sorry, and I replied that it wasn’t her fault, she had to tell the truth. She said please come to the kitchen door and wait behind the bushes, so I did. I crouched there, sweating in the dusk and sending mental messages to Charlotte—Stay alive another night! I’m coming! Breathe, my darling! It seemed a long time till Margaret brought a candle, a blanket, a cup of water, bread and cheese, and an orange, and set me up where I am now, in a closet in the Burnhams’ stable that is thick with spiderwebs and the stench of mouse droppings and leather harness pieces left to molder. Margaret warned me not to use the candle until late, for otherwise the Burnhams might see.

  It’s been several hours since. I’ve lit the candle. With the water being gone, and my bosom painfully full, I pressed my milk out to the cup and drank it along with the remaining bread. It seemed nearly cannibalistic to drink from my own body, but I couldn’t pump water from the well, and what else could I have done with the milk, which had to be let out and would attract vermin if it dripped to the floor? The liquid brought a touch of sweetness to my misery.

  Oh, diary, how grateful I am for thy page, which will hold my terrible story.

  Before dawn this morning—how was it only this morning!—I woke in the dark in my attic room and waited for the grandfather clock to chime the hour. The Burnhams were away, with no indication yet of their return. At four I arose and woke Henry to change and nurse him, knowing I’d be gone many hours. As the sky lightened to gray, I laid his sleeping body back in his crib, hoping this would be the last day I’d leave him. I would get the money I needed, and at Blockley I’d either find out that Charlotte was dead or pay to release her.

  I dressed as plainly as I could; to do otherwise would have startled those at home. I ate bread and milk at the kitchen table as the clock struck five. Then, leaving a sleepy-eyed Margaret charged with Henry, I entered the gloom, with a shawl covering my head, money in a purse at my neck, and various papers tucked into my skirt. I aimed to get the full eight dollars and to be at Blockley by one o’clock, when Mr. Lambert would return.

  Despite the urgency of my mission, I relished the cool and vitalizing air. It seemed every bird and other creature was poised in stillness, waiting for the day to enliven it. I moved rapidly down Walnut Street, wondering whether Patience had already taken the valuables from the trunk at the foot of my bed. I stepped along the cobblestones of Main Street, then turned and turned again, until I reached our brick-laid street, not much wider than a pathway.

  In the corner barn, a cow mooed. Hooves scraped the wooden floor. I slipped in to stand before the rope that kept our horse, Sarah, in her stall; she huffed her excited greeting. I accepted the push of her head into me and ran my hands along the sides of her neck, relishing its velvety feel and her recognition of me. This was the horse who had pulled our loaded wagon across a spread of rocks, knocking Mother off and piling furnishings on top of her. But of course the horse was innocent. Father had decided to keep her.

  Father. Was he all right? Might I find out otherwise?

  A rooster crowed; another answered. I kissed Sarah’s tender, twitching nose and left the barn. With my hand on the cold latch of the low iron gate, I paused to behold our two-story domicile, with its peaked roof and its mortar crumbling between the stones. My stomach fluttered, and my mouth grew dry. I picked up a pebble and sucked it, as I had done in childhood, to taste its minerals and bring up moisture. Peonies that Mother and I had planted along the iron fence were bobbing their flower-heads toward the flare of early sun. Along one side of the house, rosebushes stretched budding limbs in all directions.

  To the left of the front door, the windows to Father’s workshop were dark. But the windows to the right showed lamplight, and smoke came from the chimney. Someone was awake and had rekindled the hearth.

  I dropped the pebble from my mouth and unlatched the gate. The sound of splashing liquid made me look up, and there stood Patience, emptying kitchen waste from a bucket into a gully between our house and the next. Her abdomen extruded; she was with child, and far along. I opened the creaking gate and stepped toward her.

  “What might be your business?” she demanded, not recognizing me.

  I undraped the shawl from my head. “It’s Lilli.”

  She put down the bucket and placed her hands on her belly. Her fair hair was pulled tight in a bun, and her face looked bare and swollen.

  “I want to come in,” I told her. “I need to collect a few things from my room.”

  I’d started out all wrong. The sight of her unnerved me.

  She paused, her eyebrows low over suspicious eyes. “Aren’t you coming back for good?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  She shook her head in refusal. “I won’t let you past unless you tell me what you’d rather not say.”

  She lifted the empty bucket and began to walk fast toward the open door of our house. A horse’s hooves sounded in the street behind us. She stood in the door frame like a log blocking the way of a stream.

  I pulled the shawl back over my head to keep the approaching person from recognizing me, then took a few steps closer. “I need to get some of my possessions.” I spoke softly, so as not to be overheard. “I only want what belongs to me.”

  Her tone was harsh. “That won’t happen till you tell me.”

  “What’s going on, Mrs. de Jong? Someone botherin’ ya?” I recognized the deep voice of a local busybo
dy whose visits had been dreaded by Mother. Patience looked up to address the man on horseback.

  “Fine morning, isn’t it?” She inclined her head to indicate me and added, “We’re talking over private business.”

  “Good day, then.” His horse’s hooves rang on the bricks as it moved away.

  I decided to tell Patience a sort of truth. “My baby is gravely ill. I need money for her treatment.”

  Her blue eyes narrowed. “You didn’t keep the child.”

  “I did give her up, but—” I stopped. I’d have to reveal my situation to get into the house.

  What is a reputation, really? A pile of platitudes, so often inaccurate.

  Patience cut in to my thoughts. “You surrendered the baby, and now you want her back?”

  “I kept her,” I said. “I kept her, but now she’s in the almshouse.” My voice grew tight and strained. “I must get her out or she’ll die.”

  Patience spoke in a whisper, but her face beamed with ugliness. “With a bastard in arms, you’ll have no place with us. And while I’m in this house, not a single thing will leave in your hands.”

  “I have a right to my belongings, and what my mother left me in her will,” I replied—“at least the items thee didn’t steal!”

  She seethed with dislike. “You’d best be off, or your father will wake and your secret will be out.”

  At the mention of Father, I lost strength. “Does he ask after me?” How I longed for his care, which had been seldom in coming. And how I hated myself for revealing this weakness.

  “No.”

  “Thee has kept my secret, then?”

  “You’re a governess so far as he knows, and he’s pleased with that.” She adjusted the bucket at her front. “He has plenty to worry about, with his workers having abandoned him and our baby on the way.”

  My throat clenched with the force of tears unshed. “Thee won’t tell him what I’ve done, will thee?”

  So all my posturing came down to this.

  She smiled, relishing my abject state. “No, I won’t tell him, on one condition.” The smile disappeared. “That you go away and never come back.”

  How dare she speak so cruelly to me? “This is my home, and thee can’t keep me out.” I took steps forward. “I’m going in to tell Father what thee pawned of mine.”

  “He’s already at the mill, buying lumber,” she said, altering her earlier claim.

  “Then I’ll go in and take my things.” I tried to dodge her body and step into the main room of our house, first to one side of her, then to the other. She and her bucket blocked whichever way I went. Her body had the fixed strength of a mountain. Over her shoulder I caught a glimpse of the long oak table we’d used for meals and studying, and our pie cabinet with its cut tin front. Beside the kitchen hearth, I knew, hung many of the items Mother had meant for me to inherit—the copper and iron pots, the wrought-iron utensils passed from daughter to daughter, the carved spoon rack. Those I would never get. I raised my arms, determined to move this imposter aside and run up to my bedroom to claim what was mine. But she was quicker. She raised the bucket and used it to shove me backward.

  I reeled away, struggling to keep from falling on the peonies and the fence, and then that woman picked up a sharp stone and threw it at me.

  It hit its mark. My fingers flew to my neck and came away with blood. I clasped my locket to see if it had been struck—it hadn’t. But look what a tyrant Father had chosen in Mother’s stead!

  “Thee is evil,” I yelled.

  “My children will be respectable,” she hissed. She stepped into the house and began to shut the thick wood door, speaking her last words through a narrow space: “Your name will not be spoken! My family will know nothing of you and your bastard!” At that, she pushed the door into its tight-fitting frame.

  I stared at the old door a moment, then scurried away—like a stray dog.

  I’d always been glad that our stone house had passed from generation to generation in my father’s family. But at that moment I wished its insides would burn to the ground and its stones would be knocked into piles for farmers to cart away. They would become walls for pastures, and sheep and cows would rub their itching hides on the gray roughness and leave tufts of fur behind, and the memories of centuries would float into the ether.

  I headed toward the Burnhams’ mansion, not knowing what I’d do once I arrived. The trip took longer than it ought to have, for I was forced to stop and collect myself several times, sitting with my back to the road on whatever tree or large rock would support me.

  I had in some hideaway of my spirit harbored the belief that my family, even Patience, would offer aid if I were otherwise without hope. But in those moments, hidden from the road, I scraped that belief out of me with a crude and rusty knife.

  Finally I turned onto the driveway to the Burnhams’ house. Perhaps I’d find a stash of bills inside and become an outright thief for Charlotte. A large carriage led by two sweating horses was just departing from the front door, its driver directing it toward the stable.

  In terror, I rushed around to the kitchen door and entered, with milk dripping down my front and blood at my neck. A startled Miss Baker told me that the Burnhams had returned a moment earlier—with Clementina’s parents.

  I took the back stairs to the door of the nursery and found Clementina and her mother already in the room. Mrs. Appleton was tall and imperious in her French heels and elaborate gown; Clementina held her mother’s arm for support as the two of them beheld the nursery in a shared state of alarm and disgust. They’d just discovered Henry weeping and wet, since Margaret had been unable to attend to his every need; even worse, the brown medicine bottle sat on the floor beside his crib, open, with the dropper beside it. For in my near madness the day before, I’d left them there. Thus the women understood that Henry had been drugged. Adding further to their revulsion were the soiled bedsheet and clothing from yesterday, which I’d heaped in a corner and neglected.

  Mrs. Appleton stood by in frigid silence, but Clementina’s fury was hot—and well deserved by me. She grabbed my shoulders with hard hands to arrest my progress when I tried to enter the room.

  “Margaret!” she yelled over my shoulder. Margaret rushed up the servants’ stairs and down the hall, wearing her best black dress and starched apron and cap. At Clementina’s probing, Margaret confessed unhappily that I had indeed been gone for several hours on this day and for all of the previous one (managing to leave out confessing that I’d also been gone the day before)—“to try and find her daughter, a cause of great concern to her.”

  Despite my tender care of Henry to date, my heartfelt pleas, my vow to make this up to her and Henry, Clementina dismissed me on the spot, giving me a half hour to pack and be gone. Her mother looked on, face as stiff as china. Not one hair of her bun stirred as she nodded her approval. Only Henry wanted me to remain; he aimed his head my way and screamed for me.

  “Can’t I please nurse him once more,” I begged, “rather than leaving him hungry?” I couldn’t bear his distress, and my bodily discomfort was growing in response.

  Clementina put her powdered face close to mine. “Your milk is unsuitable. My son would do better to live on artificial food.”

  My words tripped over one another as I tried to explain again why I’d had to leave him.

  “I’ve had enough of you and your endless problems,” my mistress intoned, leaning so close I saw the tiny red vessels in her eyes. “Be gone from this house, and good riddance!”

  I asked meekly for my money from the first of the month till today. Clementina reached into the beaded bag at her waist and threw a quarter at me, which I picked up from the floor. It was far less than she would have owed if I’d done my work, but I was lucky to get it.

  I stumbled to my attic room. My body flooded with urgency as I thrust clothes and other effects into my valise. The attic was musty from dampness, and its odor suddenly revolted me. My head spun and my mouth watered with nausea. I
lay back on the mattress, hoping not to be sick.

  The sensations subsided as I listened to the household’s noises. I heard Clementina tell Margaret to feed Henry with a bottle. Then she called that she was going to the doctor’s to request another wet nurse. The front door slammed shut; a bit later, the pattering of hooves and rolling of wheels indicated her departure by carriage. Someone climbed the stairs to the attic story, and Albert entered my room, hot and dusty in his traveling clothes.

  “If you have no place to go,” he said, holding out a card to where I lay, his face awkward.

  I accepted it. “Burnham Imports, Incorporated, 8xx Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Penna.,” it read.

  “Best to call before ten or after four.” He gave a tight-lipped smile. “I’ll have more time to attend to you.”

  I thanked him and sat up, putting the card into my skirt pocket; he gave a slight bow and returned down the stairs. At least I have a last resort, I thought. Perhaps even a friend.

  I finished packing and left that spacious attic room, descending with my valise to the nursery, where Henry lay drowsy in his crib. He began to make sucking motions when I entered, but I dared not nurse him. Leaning close, I whispered that I was sorry to have drugged him and kissed his plump cheeks repeatedly. He opened his brown eyes wide, startled at my passion. I picked up the bottle of laudanum from the floor and tucked it into my valise—since I’d paid dearly for it. Then I descended to the kitchen, expecting a final parting with Margaret and Miss Baker.

  Instead, they gave me one more sheltered night.

  Which brings me to this moment. The sky is dark. I’ll use the outhouse, and pump some water at the well to drink and wash in. I’ll dry off with the blanket Margaret gave me, assemble my hair, put on clean clothes, and sleep on my valise rather than getting mussed by filth from the floor—so that, in my efforts to reclaim my Lotte tomorrow, my appearance won’t be so unkempt as to bar me from succor.