A Sudden Sun
Authors: Trudy Morgan-Cole
A NOVEL
RUDY
J. M
ORGAN
-C
OLE
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L
IBRARY AND
A
RCHIVES
C
ANADA
C
ATALOGUING IN
P
UBLICATION
Morgan-Cole, Trudy J., 1965-, author
A sudden sun / Trudy J. Morgan-Cole.
ISBN
978-1-55081-559-7 (bound)
I. Title.
PS8626.O747S83 2014 C813'.6 C2014-901924-6
Copyright © 2014 Trudy J. Morgan-Cole
All Rights Reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means–graphic, electronic or mechanical–without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or storing in an information retrieval system of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to Access Copyright, One Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1E5.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing activities.
PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA.
FOR MY MOTHER
J
OAN
G. (S
UE
) E
LLIS
M
ORGAN
In loving memory
LILY, 1892
L
ILY HUNT SAT on the front bridge of her family’s home, drinking ginger beer and fanning herself, reading Mrs. Gaskell’s
North and South
in the hazy grey-gold light of an early July evening, when she heard the first screams.
It had been hot all day, for days and days in a row—not at all the usual St. John’s summer when cool breezes, fog, and rain could be expected to punctuate the warmer weather. When St. John’s did have warm weather, the skies tended to be clear blue, free of fog, but all this week there had been heat with smoky haze from the brush fires and forest fires burning outside the city, fires that licked up grass and trees with no rain to slow their progress. She had heard the fire bell an hour ago: no doubt another house or barn up in flames. A tang of smoke flavoured the air and it was so hazy Lily could stare directly at the sun. It looked like the face of a woman wearing a veil.
The heat tired her out, though it didn’t strike Lily as hard as it did poor Mother. The benefit came in the evenings when temperatures dropped a little but it was still warm enough to go walking or sit out of doors. Mother was lying down upstairs with a cool cloth on
her brow—she had gotten up for supper and gone immediately back to bed—so Lily was alone on the bridge when she heard a man shouting at the top of his lungs.
She stepped off the verandah and looked up the road, hoping to see the cause of the commotion. A knot of people gathered at the end of the street, down by the corner of Garrison Hill, but she couldn’t tell what kind of group it might be. Perhaps she ought to go inside and bar the door just in case some young hooligans were looking for trouble. She wouldn’t wake Mother, of course, but it might be prudent to take refuge inside and perhaps she could tell Sally to send a boy to the print shop with a message for Papa.
She was just turning to go inside when she saw someone coming—not a threatening crowd but a single man running, stopping to shout at windows or pound on the doors of houses as he passed. Lily stepped down into the front garden, out towards the gate. Though the man was still three houses away, running past the Temples’ front door, she could hear that he was shouting, “Fire! Fire!”
“Where’s the fire?” she called. The stranger was in the front garden of the house next door now, talking to Mrs. English’s cook, and Lily hiked up her skirt with one hand and hurried to join them. “Where is the fire?”
The man turned to her and lifted his cap. “Started at O’Brien’s Farm, Miss, but it’s sweeping downtown in all directions. We’re warning people to get out of their houses in case it comes this way.”
“But…all the way up there? Freshwater Road? It wouldn’t spread this far,” Lily said. Fires were nothing unusual in this town of crowded wooden houses; just a few days ago a blaze had left twenty poor souls homeless. But the fire station lay between here and O’Brien’s Farm—Lily remembered the clang of the great bell earlier. Surely even a big fire couldn’t travel all the way down to Queen’s Road.
“Miss Hunt, the Mister sent me up to tell you and the Missus,
Miss, told me I should get you both out of the house, it’s not safe.” It was John Evans, who worked for Papa at the shop and was their man-of-all-work about the house. When Lily turned to Evans, the stranger took off at a run, down the road to bring the word to other families. She had only a quick impression of him—sandy hair under a flat cap, a smudge of ash on a cheekbone. Had he been that close to the fire? Looking west towards the site of the fire she saw the sky was darker there, smokier than the general haze of the sky. She turned back to Evans. “Papa really believes we need to leave the house?”
“Yes, Miss. Is the Missus lying down?”
“I’ll go wake her.” Evans was accustomed to all their habits, including her mother’s mid-afternoon rests and frequent headaches. It embarrassed Lily that her mother’s weakness was so apparent even the servants took it into account. She hurried into the house and up the stairs as John Evans continued talking below. “Me and Sal, we’ll just get the little handcart, and you and the Missus can tell us what things you wants put in it. The Mister said not to take nothing bigger than a handcart, and I should get you all up to Bannerman Park.”
Lily crossed the upstairs hall to her mother’s door. Below, she could hear the reassuring rumble of Evans’s voice and the higher shrill of Sally, the housemaid, taking in news of the fire.
Eleanor Hunt was in deep sleep, her drapes drawn, her room gloomy as an underwater cave. The air itself felt thicker in here, an element to swim through rather than breathe. One of Lily’s earliest childhood memories was of standing in this doorway, teetering on the threshold, wanting her mother but not wanting to breach the solitude of that room, of the afternoon rest.
Lily shook her mother awake. By the time she had managed to wake her enough to convince her there really was a fire sweeping through the town and Father wanted them to leave the shelter of the
house for the open spaces of the new park, Evans was in the doorway, cap pressed to the front of his shirt. “Miss, Ma’am, sorry to trouble you but did you have any thought about what you might want to put on the cart?”
“Cart?” Eleanor echoed, still not fully awake. “I’m not riding up to the park on a cart.”
“No, Ma’am, a handcart. The Mister said we should take a little cart, me and Sally only needs to know what to put in, like. Things you might want to save if—well, if the house were to go, God forbid.”
Eleanor’s eyes widened. “It won’t come to that, surely? Why, we’d have to take—”
Lily stepped forward to forestall the image of her mother loading everything in the house, from her wardrobe full of dresses to the grandfather clock downstairs, onto a handcart. At nineteen she was more the woman of the house than her mother was, and a crisis like this required firm decision, a quality Eleanor had always lacked. “We should take a few of the nice blankets, I suppose, in case we’re out long and it gets cool this evening.” She couldn’t imagine being gone longer than that: surely they would be back in the house by nightfall, the danger past. “The…the silver, in the box downstairs,” she said. “Sally will know about that.” She took her mother’s family Bible from the nightstand, the one with years of careful annotations, with the Hunt and Stone family trees lovingly inscribed in the front, and handed it to Evans. “Take this, and—and Father’s strongbox, I’ll bring that. Mother, take your pearls.”
“The clock!” her mother said, and for a mad moment Lily did think she meant the grandfather clock, until she pointed at the fine old mantel clock above the bedroom fireplace. “That painting—the one downstairs—it was a gift from my mother! Oh, and my furs…”
As Lily had feared, her mother trailed off, unable to stop listing things she could not live without, and as she wandered vaguely about the room picking up a scarf, a fan, a silver letter-opener, Lily
met Evans’s eyes and nodded. “Just those things, the things I told you,” she said.
Half an hour later they made a little procession down Queen’s Road to Prescott Street, where they joined a larger group crossing Military Road towards Bannerman Park. The streets had been transformed in that half hour, from quiet residential streets on a summer afternoon to a crowded scene of people straggling north and east, toward the park or the lake. Women, children, and servants mostly, the men still being at business down on Water Street or, Lily thought, probably helping to fight the fire. The acrid smell of smoke was stronger.
“It’s gone downtown, towards the harbour now,” someone said, and “I heard tell all of Long’s Hill is on fire,” another added. All around were voices, people sharing news or rumour, advising each other of the best place to take shelter. Ahead of them, Evans pulled the handcart while Sally walked beside, making sure the little pile of worldly goods didn’t topple. Lily took her mother’s arm and made soft soothing noises while trying to catch snatches of conversation from the people passing by.
“The Missus said she wouldn’t leave the house without the barrel of flour because she just bought a whole new barrel and she wouldn’t have it go to waste,” said a man nearby to a companion, “and I couldn’t get her out of the house without it, so I dumped it all into a clean pair of long johns and took it with me.” Lily took a second glance at the man and saw that over his shoulder, like the bottom half of a ghost, he did indeed carry a stuffed pair of men’s long underwear, tied off at the ankles and waist. He moved in a cloud of flour dust.
“We brought all our furniture, all our good pieces, to Gower Street church, you know,” a woman said as they moved into the park itself. “I mean, the churches are stone and brick, they’ll never burn. I saw the Church of England bishop himself—well, his men, you
know, but he was there—moving trunks of clothing and books into the cathedral.”
Eleanor tugged at Lily’s sleeve. “Send Evans back—he could take our good furniture to the Congregational church.” The Hunts attended Cochrane Street Methodist, but surely in a crisis the Congregationalists wouldn’t bar Methodist neighbours from storing things in their Stone Chapel, Lily thought.
“Wait ’til Papa comes,” she said. “He’ll know what to do about our things. All he wants is for us to get to safety ourselves.”
In the park, Eleanor stared at the throngs of people—every sort of person, from well-dressed ladies like themselves to beggars and street urchins. It was as if the sight of so much humanity overwhelmed her, robbed her even of the power of speech.
“Over there,” Lily said, pointing at a patch of grass. “Bring the cart over there, Evans. Sally, spread out the blanket, the blue one, on the grass. It’ll be like a picnic, Mother. Only without anything to eat.”
“Oh no, Miss, I packed you a lunch,” Sally said, as Eleanor protested faintly, “Not my good blanket—on the bare grass!”
How clever of Sally, Lily thought, to think of packing a lunch. That was the mark of a good servant—to realize what one needed before one thought to give the order. Cold chicken, hard cheese, and some of the light fruit cake. There was even a jar of pickles and another of tea wrapped in a towel both to protect the glass and hold in a little heat.
The evening was still warm, not yet near sunset. People laid down blankets or sat on the bare grass nearby, everyone crowding closer as more people poured into the park. A girl of about ten in a ragged dress sat very close by and stared with wide, longing eyes at their supper. Lily cut a slice of fruit cake and handed it to her.
The sky grew slate-grey. Every breath tasted of smoke. The babble of voices all around swelled with every group of new arrivals. Now people were fleeing the fire itself rather than just leaving their
homes as a precaution. Around their little island of blanket Lily caught snatches of talk.
“It’s down to the harbour…Job’s premises are burning.”
“We was barely clear of it before the roof fell in.”
“There’s people stealin’ stuff right out of shop windows, brazen as brass.”
“I saw the windows of the Cathedral—them big stained-glass windows? Blew out like someone heaved a rock through ’em.”
So much for the Bishop’s furniture
, thought Lily. Around her she could hear every kind of voice to be heard in St. John’s: the cultured accents of the educated, the rough accents of the poor, the heavy brogue of fishermen.
Lily imagined rain. Thought of cold, wet St. John’s afternoons, of rainy mornings and chilly nights. This summer had been so hot and dry, but every other summer of her life she could remember picnics ruined by rain, walks along Rennie’s River that had ended with sopping skirts and umbrellas turned inside out by the wind. Rain was the one thing St. John’s was never short of. And today barns, houses, whole streets burned, and not a drop of water fell to help the men fighting the blaze.
There were few adult men in the park: only the very old. Every able-bodied man was out at the fire. “You should go,” Lily said to Evans, who had just gone around the park to hear the latest news and report back to them.
“No, Miss. Your father told me to look out for you and your mother.”
“He told you to get us safely out of the house and to the park.” Across the street, on the other side of Military Road, houses were in flames. The street was filled with men, hoses, barrels, and buckets, but nothing seemed to slake the hungry fire. People pressed together at the edges of the park to watch the houses burn. Every few minutes there was a crash and a shout as another roof caved in. Lily craned
her neck to see past the crowds as if she could look past the bend in the road and see whether the flames had reached her own house.
A soot-stained man ran up to Evans, grabbed him by the arm. “Come on, b’y,” he shouted, “They want men down on Cochrane Street. The fire’s going up towards Rendell’s big house on the corner, but if we tear down the one next door, it might stop there.”
“Oh my God, if Rendell’s burns then the flankers might go across the street—” On the other side of Military Road was not only the wooden Anglican church but a school and orphanage, all ready to go up in flames.
“Go, John,” she urged Evans, and he fled with the other man, pushing through the crowds of watching women and children.
It grew dark. The light that illuminated the faces around her turned sickly and strange. The sky changed colour again: gunmetal grey overlaid with an eerie orange glow. Lily paced the grass: her mother had finally fallen into a fitful, uneasy sleep curled on the blanket, with Sally watching over her.
“The wind is carrying flankers from one street to another,” their neighbour, Mrs. English, said when Lily found her amid the crowd gathered to watch the houses on Military Road burn. “Mr. English is gone down with a crew of men trying to save Gower Street church. I heard the roof was on fire already.”