He went into the house, turning on the carbide light in the kitchen, and for a few minutes Flora heard the tinkling of spoons and glass. George returned with a tall glass smelling of cucumber. A Pimm’s Cup was a drink she liked at a sporting event—the one time she was taken to Ascot she remembered that was the drink everyone savoured as they waited for the races to begin. The concoction never failed to impress, the dance of the fizzy lemon making it taste of the nursery. Her mother had scolded her for trying to fish out the slices of fruit, though it seemed wasteful to leave them.
After his second whisky, George became quite exercised by his day at the flume. “By God, Flora, it was a false economy to use second-rate lumber to build that thing. I don’t know what they were thinking of. It will take some work to get it functioning reliably. And there must be some way to pump water up from the river. It’s right below us, for Heaven’s sake! Why on earth we must bring it from such a distance when a river runs through our community . . . Well, I am going to consult a man in Vancouver about pumps at the next opportunity.”
One of the other labourers, now working at the rail siding, actually knew something about irrigation since he’d been employed over at the Coldstream Ranch, but he had not been consulted during the planning of the settlement’s system. George was determined to seek this man out as well and ask him to help.
Flora could smell soap as George waved his arm in the dim lamplight. She heard rustling in the field just beyond their house and hoped it wasn’t a snake—sometimes you could hear their bodies in the dry grass, and the insistent harsh rattle when they were startled—or a coyote lurking for their hens or the one splendid Muscovy duck their neighbour kept and that waddled between the properties, aching for water.
“What will it mean for this year’s crop, this trouble with the flume?” Flora asked. George said none was really expected, the Jonathans and Wagoners might produce something, but that the real harvests would be in two or three years’ time when the Rome Beauties and Wealthys came to maturity. Some orchardists had interplanted potatoes between their trees, some onions, and when Flora first arrived the previous fall, she’d been shown enormous earth-covered potatoes and had seen the onions drying on the ground, their papery skins fragrant and golden, their green tops withered. They had very good flavour, she was told, and would travel down to Vancouver by train in bushel baskets. A drying shed was being built for tobacco too, which proved congenial to the soil and weather.
Flora had been eager to leave Watermeadows, the family home near Winsley, in Wiltshire. Not that she had been unhappy there, for how could unhappiness find a toehold in a life so utterly calm and pleasant? The estate was more than two hundred acres; an eighteenth-century house of mellow golden Bath stone stood on a slope above the river with gardens and pastures leading down to the water; a ha-ha separated the two so that it seemed that placid Jersey cows grazed in rhododendron groves, a student of Capability Brown having arranged this effect. Right down by the river were meadows that flooded each spring, giving the property its name, rich with water avens and ragged robin, flag irises providing cover for snipe and water rails. The land upon which the estate was built had been inhabited for many thousands of years; flints and arrowheads showed up frequently when a gardener turned the soil. A small spring in a secluded limestone escarpment was a place used over the centuries by those wanting to bathe in its warm restorative waters, not as hot as the spring at Turleigh but very pleasant all the same. Flora’s father had spoken of creating a large warm pool around the spring, then introducing the Victoria regia water lily and perhaps some other tropical water lilies as well. But nothing had come of that plan and the area remained wild with ransomes and bluebells and red campion, a perfect place to come for picnics.
Some days, Flora stood in the middle of the house at Walhachin, in the hall as the rooms radiated around her, clean and polished, and remembered the house as she’d first seen it, new, smelling of freshly sawn wood. George had arrived first but had done little to make a home. That had been left for Flora: she opened the tea chests of china and linen and curtains and hung chintz from the dowelling over each window, filled needle- worked covers with goose-feather cushions, arranged pretty jugs on windowsills and the mantelpiece, some of them with dried grasses and the vivid yellow plant she was told was rabbitbrush. She hoped her arrangements would pass muster, that the linens would smell as sweet as those from the cupboards at Watermeadows, that her table settings would be proof that she had learned her lessons well and that the fish service could be reliably found next to the cutlery for meat and salad, that the small bone-handled fruit knives were gleaming and ready for the apples that she served with cheese at the end of their meal. Coffee from the tall silver pot with the monogram and the eagle on the lid, segments of ivory alternating with sections of ebony on the graceful handle, a little creamer to match. And silver tongs to grip each lump of sugar, a pretty long-tined fork to skewer the thin slices of lemon when indeed lemons could be found.
Some days she regretted that the house had been filled with what she had imagined they were leaving behind. She remembered the rooms as she’d first known them, airy and bright, the plaster freshly painted, and the floors bare of any covering, just the bees’ wax protecting the wood. There were possibilities in the long shapes of sunlight on the floorboards, in the smell of fir and window-screening. She’d had a momentary sense of herself as newly born, anticipating a future unlike any she might have expected, in a house without any history at all.
Happiness and purpose: Flora puzzled over the accommodation of these in her daily life. As much as she loved her mother, she did not want to pass most of her days at rest in a dark room. She did not want to sit in a chair by a window consulting with a servant about the day’s meals. She did not look forward to having her hair dressed for a cotillion or being fitted for a dress she would wear once or twice and then forget. Coming to Canada with George had seemed such an adventure, and it certainly was, though not necessarily in the ways Flora had expected. She supposed that George was under pressure to succeed and that made him seem stern and proper, no longer the boy who jumped into the river below Watermeadows without a stitch of clothing. He had never taken notice of his sister’s more casual habits until the two of them were living alone at Walhachin. She valued his company and wanted to keep the household harmonious. But sometimes, walking alone up Brassey Creek, she would let her hair down and tuck up her skirts to feel the sun on her legs. And on those walks, she certainly did not wear gloves.
• • •
Flora sat in a wicker chair on the veranda and looked out towards the river. She could see far into the distance, the brilliant sunlight rippling up from the road like water. Grasshoppers rubbed their legs together, a steady monotonous clicking. Someone was coming. Little clouds of dust rose from the road as Mary, it was Mary, rode towards the house on her quiet mare. The horse was carrying something else too; as Mary approached, Flora could see it was a child, a baby of about a year, fastened into a carrying frame of wood. Mary put her horse into the small paddock adjacent to the house where a cottonwood provided shade.
“My baby isn’t too well, and I thought I’d better bring her with me. She’ll sleep mostly.” Mary placed the sleeping child, still in its carrier, on the floor of the veranda, under the cooling blades of the fan.
Flora poured her a glass of lemonade, chips of ice clinking as they fell into the tumbler. George wouldn’t like it, Flora thought—a servant bringing a child to her place of employment. But she was interested to see this woman with her child. Mary was already tying on an apron, her hands filled with rags to begin to clean. Flora could not have imagined a child sleeping on the floor of Watermeadows while one of the housemaids swept the carpets or dusted the furniture.
“Shall we move the baby to one of the bedrooms, Mary?”
Mary shook her head and answered that the baby would be fine where she was and would sleep for the next hour or two at least.
There was so little for
Flora to do in the house. Mary kept it clean. Apart from a soft-boiled egg in the morning with some toast and marmalade, there was not much food to prepare other than tea and biscuits. George Oakden usually liked to eat his evening meal in the hotel where Eleanor Flowerdew presided over a proper dining room and members of the colony gathered, those staying in the hotel while waiting for their own homes to be finished and those who chose to partake of the full service at a reasonable price. The occasional sandwiches would be cut and wrapped in greaseproof paper and a flask filled with tea for treks across the river to the flume for repairs.
Sometimes Flora found the days endless. A basket filled with needlework was always handy, but you could only stitch for so long. She was working on some pillows as a gift for her father, a pattern of the Egyptian blue lotus, Nymphaea caerulea, which was cultivated in a special glass house at home in Wiltshire, along with its white cousin. Some days, she loved choosing the right silk from her workbasket, finding a stitch to express the petals, the cupped sepals, the dramatic anthers covered in pollen, an element she worked in the tiniest French knots. Other days, it was a chore to pick up the linen and try to dream her way into the blossoms, the dense texture of a leaf. On those days she would put on stout shoes and walk into the sun-parched hills in search of cacti or the sight of coyotes at play in the draws.
Mary’s child was waking. Flora went to the veranda to take her out of her carrier, a clever device made of basketry; the baby was fastened in with thongs of soft buckskin. A smell of urine rose with the child as Flora lifted her out. She was not wearing a diaper but had been padded with what looked like the fluff from cattails gone to seed. Little bits of the fluff clung to her buttocks. Flora held her over the side of the veranda with one arm and brushed the baby’s skin with her free hand. Mary came to the door and quietly took the child from her.
“No need for you to do that, Missus.” She deftly finished the job and then felt the baby’s forehead. “Not well, this one.”
Flora urged her to do what she needed to with the child, that there was no need to polish the woodwork or iron yet another set of pillowslips. She suggested a bath in the large zinc basin they used for gathering potatoes and offered to draw water for it, bring towels. Mary nodded and Flora brought the pan from the scullery, placed it on a folded towel on the veranda after Mary had indicated that this was where she would bathe her baby, then filled a jug with tepid water.
The baby grew quite animated in the water, chirping like a sparrow and smacking her plump hands down on the surface. Flora brought a tablet of her own lavender soap and a large towel still smelling like the outdoors; it must have been one that Mary had laundered recently.
“May I hold her, Mary?” she asked as the mother lifted the baby from the pan, wrapping her in the towel. Mary handed her the sweet-smelling bundle. The baby’s face was very solemn as she looked into Flora’s eyes. She had several small teeth, not a mouthful yet, and wisps of very black hair damp from the bath. Full cheeks. And her shoulders were the warmest brown, so soft that Flora could not resist pressing her mouth to each one in turn.
“She is so lovely, Mary. What is her name?”
Grace, she was told; the baby’s name was Grace. Mary’s other children had come through a time of fevers, and Grace was the last one to become ill. The children had been cared for by a relative while Mary came to do her work at Walhachin—she cleaned for another two families as well as for George and Flora—but that relative had come down with the illness too. So now Mary’s husband, Agrippa, was minding the younger children but couldn’t manage Grace as well.
“Did you have the doctor come, Mary?” asked Flora.
Mary smiled and shook her head no. The nearest doctor to her home at Skeetchestn on the Deadman River was at Savona but wouldn’t travel to an Indian Reserve to treat a family that would not be able to pay him. She explained that her mother and her grandmother had prepared teas of mint and the bark of the willow tree, that yarrow and juniper had been burned to cleanse the air of the small cabin the family shared, that tonics of nettle and rosehips were given to the children. And now just Grace had the lingering heat but was otherwise recovering.
Flora realized, listening to Mary, how little she knew of the woman who came several days a week to wash her clothing, clean the house, darn George’s socks, and lug buckets of water to the area where the kitchen garden flourished. Flora had come to Walhachin with only the most rudimentary notion of Indians. Any literature she had read presented them as savages, half-clothed, with pigment smeared on their faces in a particularly horrible way. But here they were fieldworkers, servants, some of them working on the railway. There were stories, of course, of their lack of hygiene, their irregular marriages, their heathen beliefs. But Flora could not say she had observed any of this. Mary was scrupulously clean and wore both a wedding band and small crucifix. Occasionally she had seen Mary touching something in the parlour, a piece of china or an embroidered cloth, with a stillness that unsettled her; she had felt so completely the woman’s otherness. But for the most part Mary was simply a woman who did for them. Now, seeing her with Grace, Flora sensed something like power—a deep maternal core, perhaps, or the clear confidence of a woman who knows who she is and what she is doing. That two jobs would need to be done simultaneously, caring for a sick child and cleaning the house of her employer, was nothing to Mary. Or so Flora imagined as she held Grace, breathing in the sweet baby smell of her, feeling the dense reality of weight in her arms.
“Let me keep her for a time, Mary. I’d like to get to know her. And may I make her a nappy with an old towel?”
Grace was more than happy to be pinned into a soft cloth and carried on a walk around the garden, one of Flora’s straw hats on her head to shade her face. The child made soft noises as the woman told her about the roses—“Slips of plants from my father’s garden in Wiltshire, that’s a long train and boat ride away, Grace”—and shifted her from hip to hip for comfort’s sake. It felt so wonderful to hold a child, a warmth that spread out from her arms to every part of her body, including her heart. Flora hadn’t had much contact with children and had been raised mostly by a nanny, then governess; maternity had never been discussed; her one encounter with a child had been on a visit to her cousin in Devon at the age of fourteen when she had helped her cousin bathe her infant daughter. Flora had seen how she neatly pinned a nappy around the baby’s posterior after towelling her off. Yet she felt a kind of familiarity with Grace, as though she had known her in some way for the length of her small life. She wanted to learn things about the child—what she liked to eat, whether she had a favourite plaything; she wanted to know what Grace might become. She whispered to her of Dobbin, the day he had come home over the field on her brother’s back, and shared her own sense of the mystery of Dobbin’s absence, her wish that he had become real for a time and had galloped away to join the wild ponies of the moors. Grace made small agreeable sounds and drooled.
After a while, Mary came out with a tray of tea things and put it on an iron table in the shade of a young cottonwood tree. At Flora’s insistence (because Mary would not normally sit with the lady of the house), the two women drank a cup of tea while Grace gnawed on a biscuit. Then the child turned to her mother and began to nuzzle her chest. Flora was startled to see Mary undo a few buttons to release a brown breast for Grace to suck. And yet the mother and child were so at ease with the process that she could not feel startled for long. It was peaceful to sit with Mary and her baby while bees droned in the garden and far away men shouted to teams of horses ploughing the bench above the river. Grace finished drinking from her mother’s body and fell into a deep sleep. Mary took the child to place her in her carrier on the veranda and return to her tasks. Flora remained in her chair, musing about the miracle of a child being nourished by a mother’s breast, and gazed about her at the garden. How else would a child feed, she asked herself, wondering why she had never thought about it before now, having seen young foals nuzzle for their mother’s m
ilk, and the lambs suckling in the fields. Even the tiny offspring of the barn cats lined up against their mother’s belly and sucked themselves into a drowsy slumber.
Supposedly I am the gentlewoman, she thought, and Mary is the Indian servant. But which of us is the more accomplished? The one with a full position in the world? Mary is a mother who can nurse her child while caring for my house and doing my laundry. I can boil an egg and do fancy needlework. Mary has even been to school whereas I had such sporadic education. The world needs Mary and her kind, I fear, far more than it needs me.
She dozed off under the shade of her sunhat, hearing Mary in the kitchen as though from a great distance. A fly buzzed near her ear, a lullaby of sorts.
George was determined to grow flowers, and his small collection of roses was doing quite well. Keeping the plants watered was the thing. In his luggage, he had carried a vasculum with rooted slips of favourites from the family garden—a Gloire de Dijon and an old-fashioned pink rambler that he was training along the fence—and their father had sent seed from his delphiniums; the crowns of leaves were well along and would soon send up spires of deep blue and, Flora hoped, one the colour of summer skies. She remembered drifts of them at home in the Long Border, with pink phlox and baby’s breath. George was also digging a deep hole for a small pool to attempt to grow their father’s water lilies, or one at least. Some of them were so large that they covered the entire surfaces of ponds at Watermeadows. Flora remembered being taken to see a glass house that covered tanks in which grew the fragrant white water lilies from the tropics, the Victoria regia her father had thought might be coaxed into growing at the spring with leaves the size of dining-room tables, and blue lotuses from Egypt. It was very warm in the glass house. When Flora looked closely, she saw small brown beetles sleeping within the blooms themselves. Flora and her father had been urged to sit on wicker chairs covered with a print of water lilies, yellow ones, and tea was brought by a man in full livery. The outing to the glass house had inspired her father to build his own, an elegant construction of domed glass and iron, and order his first root of N. caerulea.
The Age of Water Lilies Page 2