such. You know how it is.”
“Oh yes. I always have.” She feels the old, old anger begin to churn her stomach. And she thought she’d put it behind her long ago, locked away in its vault, along with the humiliation.
“Please, my dear, I thought you’d learned to appreciate Émilie’s friendship. You’ve said so yourself. It could get lonely for you here. Émilie will be good company in the long hours when I’m in Parliament.”
“So she’s coming for my benefit?”
Wilfrid kisses her cheek and squeezes her hand, kneads it slowly with his fingertips. “I have no illusions it’s going to be easy, being in power. This is an impossible country to govern. I’ll need a lot of help. I’ll have to be careful and patient and forbearing. I’ll need a strong cabinet, men I can trust. But I’ll have something Macdonald never had in all his long, long years in power, something I need more than anything: you.”
She lifts her gaze to those deep-set brown eyes flecked with yellow and green. They hold her fast.
Émilie Lavergne moves swiftly about her room at the Russell House. It’s a small confined space, and she covers it in a few strides. One more time she rearranges the showy white peonies, slightly past their prime, in the blue china vase. She approaches the open window as if expecting something new to materialize on the dust-streaked glass, something besides the dreadful heat, the endless overhead wires, the grinding streetcars of Sparks Street. She turns back to the double bed. The dowdy rose counterpane, shiny from the bottoms of prior occupants, distresses her: her sensibility demands finer things.
This dingy room is where Joseph has stayed since first being elected to Parliament. It’s less than half the size of Wilfrid’s sunny suite on the next floor down, and it simply won’t do. Joseph’s boiled white shirts and black suits hang in the narrow armoire like empty husks. There’s scarcely any space left for dresses or hat boxes or shoes. It depresses Émilie to think how long they’ll have to survive in this cell before they can afford a home of their own in Ottawa.
Never mind. She resolves to set the future aside, to dwell on the happy present. Wilfrid will be here at any moment. He wouldn’t be specific about the time, saying only it would be after the luncheon following his first meeting with his new cabinet. Meanwhile Joseph is spending the day across the river in Hull, putting his time to good use, sounding out legal acquaintances about his prospects for the bench.
Waiting for Wilfrid: the phrase sums up Émilie’s existence. How agonizing it’s always been to bring him to a new place, whether to bed or a belief in God. . . . Although it’s two years old, she’s chosen to wear the summer gown he likes so much, white peau de soie with short flounced sleeves and bare arms, several long strings of pearls draped loosely over the bodice. The neck square and deep, but not too—just enough to show off her shoulders. No earrings, since it’s still early afternoon. An antique silver bracelet on her left wrist.
She swings past the armoire’s oval mirror and doesn’t entirely like what she sees. She can accept the deepening furrows under her eyes but not the slight droop under her chin, nor the matronly thickness beginning to envelop her middle. The dress clings gracefully until it reaches her waist, where it loses its way. It was absurd of the Parisian designer to add that extraneous thin strip of fabric encircling her hips. She’ll have to have the gown remodelled as soon as she can find a stylish dressmaker in Ottawa. If such a thing exists.
“This dull, detested place,” Wilfrid once called the city, in letters composed just down the stairs and along the corridor: “this commonplace, vulgar hotel.” But, he also wrote, “you have the happy faculty of bringing sunshine wherever you go, of inspiring the flow of mind and soul, so the atmosphere of this awful place will be much improved by your arrival.”
And now she’s here.
In fact, Émilie finds the Russell rather charming in its old-fashioned way. She admires English style, if not the English themselves. It was so like Wilfrid to despise and denigrate his surroundings when he was feeling lonely or disappointed or depressed. It was the same for her, at home in Arthabaska. For years they exchanged two, three letters a week across the abyss, he here, she there—Joseph too off in the capital, the children away at school in Quebec City—and only Zoë, of all people, to keep her company. Wilfrid’s letters, always so tender and thoughtful and solicitous, written in his fluent though stilted English so that Arthabaska’s nosy postmistress couldn’t read them, were all that kept her sane: even if he did make her jealous with his stories of women he’d met. Those days of mutual exile seemed to last forever.
Now all that has changed. With Wilfrid in power at last, and Joseph a member of his government, Émilie is determined to make Ottawa her home. Noticing an unfamiliar metallic taste in her mouth, she decides approvingly it must be the taste of Ottawa, caused perhaps by the drinking water, or the sulphurous air drifting up from the lumber mills that line both banks of the river beyond Parliament Hill. This city is their field of action. She’ll advance upon it, embrace it, occupy it, populate it with her being and ideas and energy. Ottawa, with all its deficiencies, is where she and Wilfrid are fated to pursue their destiny—whatever form it may take.
For longer than she cares to remember, the obstacles to their being together have been insuperable. It’s dizzying to see them swept away overnight. In his letters Wilfrid repeatedly referred to the “chains” of his political work, coiling ever more tightly about him as his career came into the ascendant. He portrayed himself as a Samson who could regain his strength only if he broke away from his duties long enough to spend a few precious hours in her presence. Soon they’ll be in each other’s presence almost daily. The irony is breathtaking: the chains that kept them apart so long have finally brought them together.
What other bonds might they snap? Not that she dares expect the ultimate union, but without question she can imagine it: can visualize it in vivid detail, taste its promise, its rightness. Men and women have done more outrageous things in history.
Can such things happen in Ottawa? She needs to understand this city better, has to learn how society here thinks, how it will receive the closeness of her friendship with the Prime Minister. The English, after all. But she and Wilfrid have never been secretive about that closeness, and they can’t start now. Years ago they agreed not to dissemble or deceive, but to be as open as possible: open before family, neighbours, friends, above all before Zoë and Joseph. They’ve always behaved like people with nothing to hide. And they’ve been accepted as such, at least in friendly quarters, in spite of gossiping enemies. Of course, that was in Quebec City and sleepy, out-of-the-way Arthabaska, both tolerant places where Wilfrid is the favourite son and can do no wrong. . . .
Immersed in these thoughts, she almost misses the discreet but persistent knocking at her door.
She flings it open to Wilfrid standing in the corridor, courtly and perfect. He’s wearing a pearl-grey summer suit and top hat, in one hand an extravagant bouquet of red roses, in the other a large parcel wrapped in plain brown paper.
“May I present these inadequate tokens?” He slips the parcel under one arm, removes his hat, offers the roses with a bow.
Émilie smiles broadly, completely forgetting her anxiety about exposing her irregular teeth. Seeing Wilfrid bow to her, however satirically, thrills her to the core.
At these moments of reunion,
