summer blooms bright and strong out there in the garden. Edward’s garden. I hear the sounds of the birds and part of me wants to join the joyful song. But I cannot. I feel trapped here in this dark room, but the dark is like a warm shroud that comforts me. I cannot abide the windows being opened. I do not want to let the light in. There is precious little light in my life now. I cannot believe we will ever hold a baby that breathes and lives long enough to laugh.
At least this time I was able to hold my baby boy for a short time, even if he didn’t have the strength to suckle.
They say he died in sin. There was no time to baptize him. Father will not even allow him to be buried in the churchyard. My poor innocent little boy. How could he have sinned? How could God have let him die?
No, there is no light in my life, and none in my heart. Nor do I think there can ever be again.
Edward Handford came home to a very different wife. The household was cold and bare. There was no joy any more. The Lily he remembered only two short years ago, laughing with him by the willow tree, the Lily who had had so many hopes and plans for the future – that Lily had gone. In her place was a silent, pale ghost who barely moved from her bed. She stared blankly into space, her skin translucent against the pillow, her lips pale and bluish. Sometimes he feared she was dying; her hands were so cold; she lay so still.
Many an evening, he sat at his writing desk, recording his thoughts in his diary. Lily is not like other women, he wrote in November of 1894, she is more fragile than they are, less able to deal with the loss of her baby. Where other women accept it as God’s will, Lily rages against Him, in ways her parents both find blasphemous. Perhaps I should, but I cannot. Lily feels things more than others do. I cannot condemn her for it.
There were times when Edward had to stand up for Lily to his whole family – as the months wore on and still she seemed more and more enshrouded in her gloom, and less able to engage in the outside world, he even found himself quarrelling with his mother.
‘I will not hear of it,’ he said, when his mother suggested that he should have Lily committed because her behaviour was too extreme, too feverish, too hysterical. ‘Lily will stay here with me, and she will get better.’ Edward recalled with horror an aged aunt who had been locked in a sanatorium, and he had no desire for his beloved wife to be sent to one, however scattered her wits.
Later he wrote, Perhaps it is wrong of me to have had Mother live with us. She, who is so strong and steady, cannot understand the pressures the world brings to one such as Lily who flourishes in its light, but is bowed under by the dark. I know Lily will get better. She needs tender nurturing to take her through the winter of her pain. One day it will be spring, and she will smile again.
So Edward persevered that whole long dark winter, refusing her family’s demands to have Lily sent away, gently encouraging her day by day to re-enter the world once more. Until a day came, in the spring, when he was able to persuade her to join him in the garden to show her the agapanthus he’d planted in memory of Edward James, the son who had lived a mere six hours.
Lily cried in his arms then, and he rocked and cherished her and promised there would be other babies, and that he would never leave her again.
Chapter Nine
After Lauren left, Joel and Kezzie dragged the trunk, paperwork and pictures down the stairs.
‘You should really give Eileen a ring about some of this,’ said Kezzie, ‘I’m sure she’d love to have a look through it.’
‘Good idea,’ said Joel. ‘Lauren’s been nagging me about getting involved in the summer fete. I have to confess, it’s not my kind of thing really, but I’m beginning to change my mind. The more I find out about Edward Handford, the more I think the world needs to know about him.’
‘I think there’s enough here to mount an exhibition,’ said Kezzie. ‘Wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing to do in his anniversary year?’
‘Just look at all this stuff,’ said Joel. Now they had it in the light, they could see just exactly what was there.
There were boxes and boxes of letters, files, paperwork and photos piled higgledy-piggledy into the trunk. They were loosely organized into piles of letters with neat handwriting, saying Lily to Edward/Edward to Lily, Connie to Edward, and so on.
‘I wonder who organized all this,’ said Kezzie. ‘Someone must have pulled all this stuff together.’
‘Hmm, I wonder …’ Joel picked up some of the packets of letters and compared the handwriting. ‘I think it may have been Connie – see this letter here from her to Edward, the writing looks the same.’
‘Remind me who Connie was again,’ said Kezzie.
‘Edward’s daughter, I think, which makes her my great great aunt,’ said Joel. ‘I think she died just before I was born and Uncle Jack inherited the house from her. I can’t believe how much stuff there is here, it’s going to take forever to sort out.’
‘Where’s your sense of adventure?’ said Kezzie. ‘I don’t mind having a look through it, I bet Eileen will be interested in it as well. I’ll call in on her on my way home.’
Before she left, Kezzie turned to him and said, ‘By the way, you are going to apologize to Lauren, aren’t you? I know it’s not my business, but I think she deserves better.’
‘I know,’ said Joel with a sigh. ‘Claire always said I was a bit thick about other people’s feelings. I’ll apologize next time I see her.’
As he waved Kezzie off, Joel decided he’d have to try and make it up to Lauren sometime. Kezzie was right, he could be casual with Lauren, and it wasn’t fair. He appreciated what she did for him and Sam, and he barely ever said so.
‘You stupid sod, haven’t you learnt anything?’ he said out loud.
He thought back to that last catastrophic night with Claire, and how they’d argued because she felt he’d let her down and now here he was doing the same thing to Lauren. In the morning he’d go round with some flowers and apologize. It was too late to make it up to Claire, but it wasn’t too late to put things right with Lauren.
Lauren flew home in absolute fury with Joel. She snapped at the children, who trotted by her side like such frightened little mice till she got them home and hugged them, she felt terrible. It wasn’t their fault Joel could be such an insensitive sod. Lauren felt immensely guilty that she’d taken her bad mood out on the twins, and made it up to them by giving them a cookie each. Lauren wasn’t sure what had annoyed her most, the casual way Joel had let her make everyone lunch, the fact that he’d assumed she’d be able to drop everything to stay and help him out, or the way that Joel and Kezzie made her feel so left out.
‘Serves you right for being such a soft touch,’ she murmured. This was the problem of course. She did have a soft spot for Joel. Partly because of Claire – Lauren felt she should help him for her friend’s sake – partly because of the situation he was in, and partly because it was impossible to stay cross with Joel for long. So by the time Lauren had walked the girls to her mum’s, had a moan about Joel and got home again, she was feeling better. She decided that what she needed was to chill out before work and banish all thoughts of Joel and Sam from her mind. She walked back home fantasizing about a nice hot soak in the bathtub.
But as she got home, all her previous irritations paled into insignificance. She approached
