Among the Lilies

by Daniel Mills

  III.

  Misses Phyllis and Edith Evans lived in a whitewashed cottage behind a high lilac hedge. The house was well hidden: I must have passed it three times before asking my way of a bespectacled gossip, who leaned in close to inquire if it was the young lady I had come to see?

  It was, of course, but her brother opened the door to me. “Henry,” he said, without much enthusiasm, and showed me into the parlor where two elderly women in black gowns sat sipping tea. “Cousin Edith,” Justice said. “And Cousin Phyllis.”

  “Charmed,” I said.

  “You’ll join us for dinner, I trust,” Edith said. “Though I fear we dine rather early.”

  “I do hope,” Phyllis said, “you will not hold our country ways against us.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  Clemency entered the room and flushed to see me. “Henry,” she said, that was all, and I wondered how I had ever found her plain.

  “I have spoken to my uncle,” I said.

  “I am relieved to hear it. I feared he had taken a vow of silence.”

  I swallowed. “I—which is to say, he—”

  “Unless it was you, Henry, who swore the vow?”

  “Clemency,” Phyllis said, gently. “Don’t tease.”

  I cleared my throat, continued. “He would be honored to welcome you and your brother as guests at Bittersweet Lodge.”

  Justice asked, “When are we expected?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “Unless that’s too soon?”

  “Not at all,” Clemency said.

  Justice fidgeted, consulted his pocket watch.

  “Please, Justice,” she said. “You will say yes.”

  He replaced his watch in his waistcoat. He nodded, said nothing.

  “And you are certain,” Clemency asked me, “the prospect is not a dreary one?”

  “My uncle’s property is… considerable. I am looking forward to our exploration.”

  Justice snorted. “Exploration? This is hardly darkest Africa.”

  “Excuse my brother,” Clemency said. “He is inclined to play the cynic.”

  “Whereas you, Clem, must play the victim.”

  “Oh, yes?” she said. “And to whom have I fallen victim?”

  “Yourself. You have always been the victim of your own romance.”

  He stalked out of the room and we heard his footfalls on the stair. He was angry, I thought, but Clemency only shook her head, as if bemused.

  “A victim of romance,” she said.

  “A fair turn of phrase,” I offered.

  “Poe would have liked it.”

  “He would have liked Bittersweet Lodge, too, I think.”

  Clemency leaned forward. “Tell me everything.”

  I described a house of shuttered rooms and unlit hallways, and told her of the crickets’ singing, how it echoed, until it seemed the very house were moaning, or screaming.

  Clemency clapped, delighted. “Emily Bronte could not better it.”

  A bell sounded and Phyllis called us into the dining room. Justice pleaded illness, did not join us, and I was seated next to Miss Edith, who plied me mercilessly for details of life in Boston. I obliged her as well as I could though I believe she found my abstemious lifestyle to be, on the whole, rather disappointing. Phyllis and Edith cleared away the dinner-plates and Clemency and I were left to ourselves, if only for a quarter of an hour.

  We talked. That is all. We confided our griefs to each other and spoke of the comfort we had found in literature, recognizing ourselves in the romances of our childhood and later in poetry that gave voice to a loneliness we could not ourselves express.

  “From childhood’s hour,” I recited. “I have not been as others were.”

  She recognized the verse. “I have not seen as other saw,” she quoted. “I could not bring my passions from a common spring.”

  “Yes.”

  “I was much the same as a child,” Clemency said. “Though I was never alone.”

  “Because of your brother, you mean.”

  She didn’t respond, didn’t need to explain. I understood, or thought I did, and I told her of my sister, who had died the year before. “She was ten years older than me and as a much of a mother as I could have wished. All the same, I was—lonely.”

  “And now, Henry?”

  “Now?”

  “Are you still that lonesome child?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Once, perhaps. Not anymore.”

  She reached across the table, closed her hand on mine.

  “Not anymore,” she repeated, and we were quiet.

  The others returned: Phyllis, first, then Edith, and even Justice, who seemed in better spirits. He escorted us to the parlor where Phyllis played at the spinet and we sang Loch Lomond and Madam Will You Walk? until the carriage clock struck eight.

  Clemency walked me to the door, accompanied by Justice, his expression unreadable. We stood face-to-face but separated with less than two feet between us but unable to touch for her brother’s gaze upon us.

  “Goodnight,” she said, and turned away, and Justice followed me outside. The weather was changing, clouds across the southern sky and a wind in the hedgerow, the smell of the sea.

  Justice spoke. “You are not worthy of her.”

  “No,” I admitted. “I am not.”

  “But you came here anyway.”

  “I could not stay away.”

  “A poor excuse.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “But there is no other.”

  “No,” he said. “I suppose not.”

  He kicked at the ground and sent a flat stone skittering into the street. The gesture unnerved me, the violence of it, and he pressed his hands to his face, breathing hard.

  “Please,” I said. “I do not wish to quarrel. I have presumed too much, I know. I do not deserve your sister’s affections—not now—but in time, I hope I might become worthy of her. Certainly, I will try. That much, at least, I can promise.”

  “You will try,” he repeated, dully. “Of what use are such promises?”

  “I can offer nothing more.”

  “You could scarcely offer less.”

  “What, then, would you ask of me?”

  His hands fell away, making fists at his sides, and he stepped toward me with nostrils flaring and pupils like the heads of nails. “End it now,” he said, “this… flirtation. Before any more harm is done. Send a letter, tell her we cannot come tomorrow. Invent some excuse.”

  “I cannot do that.”

  “Because you aren’t a gentleman.”

  “No—because I am. I will send the letter, if you wish, but I will not deceive her.”

  “What would you write?”

  “I do not know, but it would be the truth.”

  “You would tell her of this? What we have talked about.”

  “I would hide nothing.”

  Silence, then, the twilight humming. A mosquito settled on Justice’s forehead and commenced to feed, stinging through his skin. Slowly, he reached up and crushed the insect between his fingers, then flicked it away, and laughed heartily, and clapped me on the back.

  “Well, then,” he said. “Until tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Bittersweet Lodge, Henry,” he said. “We’ll call at two.”

  He slammed the door. The sound echoed down the lane and I made my way back to my uncle’s house. The Lodge was dark when I arrived: no lamps lit, no lights at all but a puddle of candlelight near my uncle’s study. Edward stood at the window with his back to the door and a folio volume to hand. It was his habit to read in this manner, holding his book to the gap in the shutters so a sliver of moonlight swept down the page.

  I wished him good evening. He glanced up from his book and squinted to make me out where I stood in the doorway. Probably he had spent the whole of the day inside the study.

  “Ah, Henry. I didn’t hear you. I thought you had gone up.”

  “I was in the village, actual
ly.”

  “In Westerly?”

  “Visiting with the Misses Evans.”

  He looked embarrassed. “Forgive me. I had forgotten.”

  “I saw their cousins as well,” I said. “Justice and Clemency St. James. You’ll recall they had hoped to call at the Lodge tomorrow.”

  “Yes, of course. Asaph will see to it.”

  The candle flared and spit, sent shadows up the walls. A woman’s portrait hung over my uncle’s writing desk. Its subject was about twenty years of age, aquiline and imperious, a figure from another time. Her gray eyes dazzled.

  “She wore such a loveliness about her,” my uncle said. “Such grace.”

  “You knew her, then?”

  “A little,” he replied, faintly, and turned toward the shutters, their lines of moonlight. “Too little,” he said. “Even after we were married.”

  Jane Feathering. Edward’s wife had died young, the victim of a wasting disease the doctors could not name or cure. The end approached and my uncle sent for my father, his brother, who kept vigil with Edward at the sickbed while Jane writhed and shook and fell silent.

  There was nothing left of her, my father had told me. Only those long fingers splayed on the bedding and that face like a skull in a cloud of black hair.

  Sunken eyes, skeletal hands. That was how I had always imagined her. I could not have guessed at her beauty or obvious intelligence or at a certain playfulness the portraitist had contrived to capture despite the apparent severity of his subject’s expression.

  Edward returned his attention to his book. He muttered to himself as he turned the pages, oblivious of my presence where I stood in the doorway, unmoving, unable to look away from the image of his late wife. The candle guttered, burning down, and Jane’s face blurred into its shadow, as though she might yet turn toward me, smiling, or throw back her hair with a laugh. But my uncle coughed—the candle went out—and the dark crept over her like the stain.

  IV.

  They came early. At half-past-one the library door swung open and Asaph showed them inside: Clemency in white and her brother following in brown tweed. I fumbled at my collar and tie but Clemency took no notice of me. She looked about the library as in a dream.

  Justice nodded to me. “Henry,” he said.

  “Justice.”

  Asaph coughed meaningfully. “Mister Edward’s in his study,” he said. “He said he wanted to meet his guests.”

  We found my uncle at his writing desk with his back to the shuttered windows and spectacles perched on the end of his nose. The desk was a mess of open books and piled-up papers covered with my uncle’s cramped scrawl.

  “Come in, come in,” he said, rising.

  Introductions were made. Edward questioned Justice concerning his archival work in Concord (I gather it involved the collation of court documents) affording me an opportunity to watch Clemency as she circled the study and to follow her gaze over the walls until it came to settle on the portrait of Jane Feathering, where it lingered.

  My uncle addressed Clemency. “I understand you are this charming lad’s sister?”

  A flickering about her features. The color washed into her cheeks and she returned to herself as though from a great distance.

  “His sister,” she said. “Yes.”

  My uncle bowed from the waist. “Enchanted.”

  Clemency clutched her skirts and dropped to a curtsey, surprising us all, I think. “Likewise,” she said. “Your nephew speaks highly of you.”

  Justice was at my uncle’s desk. “Velleius Paterculus,” he said, plucking a volume from among the chaos and examining the binding. “Burman the Elder. 1719. A treasure,” he said, then turned to Edward. “You are to be congratulated.”

  “Nonsense,” he replied. “It is far from being the jewel of my collection.”

  “You have others like it?”

  “Many, yes. I should be glad of the opportunity to show them to you. Apart from texts in Latin and Greek I have in my possession the diaries of a local physician you are certain to find of professional interest. He performed numerous autopsies and served the village for decades as its Justice of the Peace. Shall we have a look?”

  Justice hesitated, perhaps uncertain, but Edward took this silence for consent. He squired the younger man toward the door, pausing only to address Clemency. “And you, my dear?” he asked her. “Do you share your brother’s interest in old, unhappy, far-off things?”

  She shook her head. “Rather the opposite, I’m afraid.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I would rather the past remain in the past. The present-day offers ample cause for unhappiness, doesn’t it?”

  “Quite.”

  I spoke up. “I had hoped to show Miss St. James about the property. I thought we might walk together while you were occupied in the library.”

  My uncle blinked and removed his spectacles. His gaze struck through me, searching, but he only nodded and waved us away, taking Justice by the arm and leading him toward the library.

  Justice was furious. He glared at Clemency, then at me, but we were soon free of him. We slipped outside and descended the sloping lawn. The morning’s damp clung, dripping, to the cedars, and a weak sun streaked the grass.

  We talked of my uncle and the house, of Jane Feathering’s portrait and the hold it exerted on us both. “Edward’s wife,” I explained. “She died young. My uncle never married again, never recovered from the loss. He was a different man, I gather, before she died.”

  “He must have been,” she said, “to have wooed and won a woman like that.”

  “A rare and radiant maiden,” I quoted.

  “Radiant, yes, but hardly a maiden A wife.”

  We had reached the end of the lawn, where the rolled grass yielded to brush and evergreens, a line of firs broaching no light.

  “Anyway,” she said, “it’s all nonsense. This maiden she lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me. Such women exist only in Poe’s imagination.”

  “Perhaps,” I conceded. “But love is real enough.”

  “A love that the winged seraphs of Heaven coveted? I hardly think so.”

  “Now you sound like your brother.”

  “My brother?”

  “Playing the cynic.”

  She shook her head. “You know nothing about it,” she said with a voice like steel, cold and cutting, face half in shadow and the light behind her, gray eyes flashing to blue. She was beautiful and terrible, an army with banners, but I did not shrink away.

  “It isn’t nonsense,” I said.

  “You truly believe in it, Henry? A love that is more than love?”

  “I do.”

  “And in that kingdom by the sea?”

  “Of course.”

  She smiled. “And in covetous angels, too, I suppose.”

  “Naturally,” I replied.

  We reached the tree-line then turned to walk along it. The earth slumped to a long escarpment and we stumbled down it like children, running to keep our footing and laughing when we fell. We reached the bottom and ambled across an old field, wild with juniper, to reach the stone wall marking the boundary of my uncle’s property.

  Afternoon dwindled into dusk. We turned back toward the house, finding an old footpath that led us into a stand of young birch trees. Their green leaves crowding about us, layered shadows shifting underfoot. We emerged in a clearing formed by black locust trees, seven in all, wracked in twisting shapes like bodies in agony and older by far than the birches that surrounded them. Likely they had been planted here when all about was open field.

  It was quiet but for the whisper of wind and leaves, no birds singing, and a gravestone marked the clearing’s center like a sundial’s gnomon, cut from dark slate and carved with a death’s head and the words memento mori.

  Clemency approached the stone and knelt to read the inscription. “Lily Elspeth Stark. Twenty years, four months, two days. Et in Arcadia Ego.”

  “So young.”
r />   “My age,” Clemency said.

  “I’m reminded of Wuthering Heights,” I said. “The sleepers in that quiet earth.”

  “That’s the worst of it, I think,” she said. “The silence.”

  “I’m not certain I follow.”

  “My mother died when I was sixteen. She had been sick for years and I held her hand as she expired. The room was cold, and her last breath hung in the air like a cloud unraveling, dissolving into the silence. I loved my mother dearly. I even believed I knew her until the moment of death when she passed beyond all knowing to a place of endless quiet and I realized we were, in fact, strangers.”

  She turned toward me. Her eyes had dimmed and lost their color. “It’s true of us as well,” she said. “When I am in the ground, Henry, you will know no more of me than you do of Lily Stark. Et in Arcadia ego.”

  “No,” I said. “I will not believe that.”

  “Then you are deceiving yourself.”

  “You suggest we cannot know one another, not even in death, but you’re wrong. I know you, Clemency, as I am known to you, and not in a glass darkly but face to face. The two of us together in this moment, this place, Arcadia.”

  The wind gusted. The locusts pitched and moaned. A leaf shook loose and drifted down to settle in her hair, where it remained, unnoticed, her eyes meeting mine and her face as empty as a chiseled angel’s. She reached for my hand, squeezing it hard and pulling it to her breast and holding it there as my knees trembled and the pulse thundered in my temples.

  “Clemency,” I said.

  I will not write of what followed. Some intimacies must remain sacred. Suffice it to say she consented to be my wife and that we passed together out of the locust trees.

  Late August. Summer’s lease had passed its date, but its warmth lingered on our shoulders as we walked together, hand-in-hand, our footprints like black glyphs in the earth or the first lines of a text known only to us, a story that began in Arcadia and led to Bittersweet Lodge, and then beyond, and had no ending.