The Age of Water Lilies (3 page)

“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 milk, 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
.

And now Mary was standing by her chair, asking if she might leave early, the work had been done, biscuits were baked and under the pink tea towel. There was one other house to clean still and then it was a long ride with Grace to consider.

“Of course, Mary, and there's no reason to come in two days if the baby is still poorly.”

But she understood from the look Mary gave her that there was all the reason in the world: the small sum the woman earned. Otherwise she would not be in the townsite at all but in her own cabin on the Deadman River with her children and Agrippa.

And then she had an idea. “Mary, would you like to leave Grace with me while you go to the Wallaces? It would be a shame to wake her now that she's so comfortable” —Flora and Mary both looked at the carrier where the baby slept— “and I would be so pleased to have a visitor.”

Mary agreed. Without any more fuss, she left for the second house she was expected to clean.

Grace slept for another hour and woke up as the sun was moving around to the veranda. The heat was sudden and intense so Flora gathered her up and took her inside. The old towel she had used for a nappy was wet, so she found another one, washing Grace first with a soft flannel. She sprinkled a little of her lavender talc on the baby's buttocks before pinning her into the towel. The child's skin was like velvet, rich brown, the colour of hazelnuts. She knew little about babies but remembered that they liked to be rocked. She settled into the rocking chair and cuddled Grace, singing “Greensleeves” in her best choir voice. Grace laughed and snuggled in. It felt so completely right, holding this child, the way a lap contained the weight of a baby and gave a purpose for the bench the thighs formed. “For I have loved you all my life, delighting in your company,” sang Flora, while the baby touched her face and snorted. She was still very warm, with little beads of perspiration on her shoulders and chest. “Greensleeves was all my joy, / Greensleeves was my delight, / Greensleeves was my heart of gold, / and who but my lady Greensleeves?” Grace chuckled and stretched her toes. That reminded Flora of “This little piggie” and a host of other rhymes. The baby watched her face and waited for the next one and then another.

When Mary returned, she found them both in the rocker, asleep, a damp patch growing across Flora's lap where the nappy had soaked through. Flora helped her collect her things, held the horse while Grace was secured in the carrying arrangement, then watched them disappear over the bridge, the dust of the road collecting them inside it. She rinsed out the towels, the scent of urine growing fainter and fainter until there was none at all. She hung the cloth on the line and wondered how to spend the rest of the day.

THREE

1913

The community had been founded in 1908 when the Pennie Ranch and other surrounding properties had been purchased by the British Columbia Development Association with the intention of developing both a townsite and orchards; the
bcda
hoped that well-heeled English families would buy acreages and farm them in a leisurely way. By 1910, the flume had been built, a hotel erected, thirteen bungalows designed by Bert Footner with their overhangs and stone fireplaces stood in their bare tidy lots with more under construction. Potatoes and tomatoes flourished in the ploughed fields.