Bible. It was a big book, but still, it couldn’t have every true thing in it, could it?
She turned and walked up the slope towards the cottage. The working day was no shorter in winter than in summer, and by the time she got home it was almost dark. She still had to see to the animals.
Lily had come to live in the cottage four years ago. She had introduced herself as Mrs White, a widow, and was thought at first to be slippery because she gave evasive answers to any question that touched on her past life and nervously rebuffed all friendly interest. But she appeared at church every Sunday without fail and counted out the scant coins from her purse for every modest purchase without once asking for credit, and over time suspicion faded. It wasn’t long before she started work at the parsonage, first doing the laundry and then, because she was unstinting in her efforts and quick, gradually doing more and more. Since the retirement two years ago of the parson’s housekeeper, Lily had taken on entire responsibility for the domestic comfort of the parsonage. There were two pleasant rooms reserved there for the use of the housekeeper, but Lily continued to live in Basketman’s Cottage – because of the animals, she said. People were used to her now, but it was still held locally that there was something not quite right about Lily White. Was she really a widow? Why was she so nervy when anyone spoke to her unexpectedly? And what sensible woman would choose to live in damp isolation at Basketman’s Cottage when she could enjoy the wallpapered comfort of the parsonage, all for the sake of a goat and a couple of pigs? Yet familiarity and her connection with the parson worked together to reduce suspicion, and she was now regarded with something closer to pity. Excellent housekeeper she might be, but still, it was whispered that Lily White was a bit soft in the head.
There was some truth in what people imagined about Lily White. In law and in the eyes of God, she was no missus at all. There had been for some years a Mr White, and she had performed for him all those duties a wife customarily performs for a husband: she had cooked his meals, scrubbed his floors, laundered his shirts, emptied his chamber pot and warmed his bed. He in return had performed the normal duties of a husband: he kept her short of money, drank her share of the ale, stayed out all night when he felt like it, and beat her. It was like a marriage in every detail in Lily’s eyes and so, when he had disappeared five years ago in circumstances that she tried not to think about, she had not hesitated. With all his thieving and drinking and other bad ways, White had been a better name than he’d deserved. It was a better name than she deserved too, she knew that, yet out of all the names she could have had, this was the one she most wanted. So she took it. She had left that place, followed the river and come, by chance, to Buscot. ‘Lily White,’ she had muttered under her breath all the way. ‘I am Lily White.’ She tried to live up to it.
Lily gave the yellow goat some rotten potatoes, then went to feed the pigs. The pigs lived in the old woodshed. It was a stone building, halfway between the cottage and the river, with a tall, narrow opening on the cottage side for a person to go in and out, and a low opening on the other, so that the pigs might come and go between their enclosure and their mud patch. Within, a low wall separated the two ends. At Lily’s end, chopped wood was stacked against the wall, next to a sack of grain and an old tin bath half full of swill. There were a couple of buckets, and on a shelf apples were slowly mouldering.
Lily lifted the buckets and carried them out and round to the pigs’ outdoor mud patch. She tipped a bucketful of half-rotten cabbages and other vegetable matter too brown to identify over the fence and into the trough, then filled the old sink with water. The boar came out of the straw-lined woodshed and, without a glance at Lily, lowered his head to eat. Behind him came the sow.