The Evidence Against Her Read Online Free PDF Page A

Robert’s friends, and as she declared with slight variations when she and Robert returned to Ohio, “I love a game of golf, you know. Or tennis or croquet. Any sort of cards. Oh, I’ll play just about anything. It doesn’t matter to me if I’m any good at it. I like almost any sort of competition. But I don’t think I possess a single
bit
of adventurousness,” she said of herself ruefully.
    “If it had been up to me I’d still be standing on my one wretched square foot of earth somewhere in England, struggling to subsist on whatever pitiful things I could coax from the kitchen garden. I’ve always liked the sound of that—a kitchen garden—and I’m going to be sure to have one of my own. Well! I probably already do. If there’s a garden to be planted, I’m sure my father will have done it!” This bit was left out in her retelling back home in Washburn, but she had made great characters of her delightful parents in the little stories she spun out for her school friends and any of Robert’s acquaintances who gathered around the couple during their stay in Boston.
    When Lily and Robert and Warren returned to Washburn the first week of September, the three of them were filled with amusing anecdotes, sitting out in Leo’s garden, where Lily and her mother had strung Japanese lanterns. Once back home, Lily merely turned the tables and with quick, clever verbal twists managed to portray even the least interesting of their East Coast friends as wonderful characters, full of endearing idiosyncrasies. Lily told a good tale, and Robert always sat looking on with a little smile of contentment.
    She claimed to her family and friends in Ohio that she couldn’t have endured alone so much
nature
as they encountered in Maine. She knew Robert would want company, she said, on his hikes and outings, but she wanted to enjoy the scenery—at least when Marjorie Hockett visited—from the comfort of a chair set out under the trees. The Hocketts lived nearby, in a handsome old house overlooking the village and harbor of Port Clyde, where Lily had visited them several times during her years at Mount Holyoke.
    “Oh, no! I would never have made an explorer,” she insisted when her Washburn friends protested that they didn’t know anyone more likely than she to relish a hike through the wilderness, a chance to discover a mysterious cove, some out-of-the-way place. “I might have been quite shocking, say, insisting on playing polo—having a pony of my own.” And the company in the garden laughed at the idea of tiny little Lily on some great horse, swinging a huge mallet about determinedly, with that peculiar air of insistence with which she went at any game.
    “Or taking a turn at cricket,” she added, to further laughter. “I can’t ever resist trying something if there’s any chance in the
world
that I might win. But I’d never have had the courage to venture into foreign territory. You know, I think it would be really frightening not to know the country. The customs and . . . well, it would be tedious, too. But anyway, I simply know I wouldn’t have the patience or the forbearance or the courage. If I’d been born whenever the first Marshals emigrated I would have had to be orphaned. Staying behind and begging crusts of bread in the street. I wouldn’t ever have set foot on any one of those little ships.”
    Lily was cheerfully self-deprecating. Everyone who knew her became fondly possessive of the shortcomings she found in herself, translated as they were into her own particular and amusing eccentricities, which she confided unabashedly and with charming chagrin. Everyone but her uncle John, who had never been fond of his brother’s daughter. Who always said to his wife or to Warren that she reminded him of nothing so much as a scrawny hen that won’t lay. “Pecking about and squawking, but not worth the feed it takes to keep her.”
    It was one of the few provocations that elicited a sharp rebuke from Lillian