Laurier in Love. Roy MacSkimming
out of her coat, unbuttons her high boots. She sits on the bed and sighs: fatigued not merely from her walk in the cold, but her never-absent longing to be elsewhere.
This is how it was for Wilfrid years ago, on first arriving in Ottawa. The poor dear wrote letter after letter home to tell her how desolate and out-of-place he felt: “The session has not even begun, and already I want to see it end. As far as I’m concerned, the best thing about being an MP is the salary.” She knew back then his isolation was all the sadder for the memories it evoked: the boy of St-Lin being sent away to school after his mother had died, because his father wanted him to learn English from the Scots of New Glasgow.
Of course that doesn’t explain her own misgivings. By now, after several months as Prime Minister’s wife, she should be feeling confident in her role. But that’s the trouble: it is a role, mere playacting. There’s no school where she could learn the part, and even if she was bold enough to ask for her advice, the formidable Lady Macdonald, now a baroness, is living somewhere in the south of England, unreachable. Zoë simply has to do as Wilfrid did, learn from scratch. Yet there’s a crucial difference: it wasn’t her choice to live here.
She notices the enamelled pin lying on the dresser, white heather entwined with ivy, a gift to Wilfrid from Lady Aberdeen. The Governor General’s lady is another conquest. Not that he has to work at winning these admirers. On the day he was sworn in, Lady Aberdeen presented him with a sprig of real heather, enclosing it in a note explaining the old Highland custom: if a girl meets a man and gives him a piece of white heather when he embarks on a quest, it brings him luck. For good measure she also enclosed the pin, to serve as a reminder after the heather had wilted.
At dinner at Rideau Hall the other night, Wilfrid wore the pin in place of his usual horseshoe stick pin. Lady Aberdeen looked transported when he took her in to dinner on his arm. Zoë was on Lord Aberdeen’s arm, or rather one of them—on impulse the Governor General offered the other to Émilie, explaining rather too loudly that Madame Lavergne looked lonely with her husband out of town on business. A very peculiar sort of gallantry, in Zoë’s opinion.
All the same, Zoë trusts the Aberdeens, considers them friends and allies. Her Excellency has made up her mind that Madame Laurier is sad because she has no children: she herself has four. The concern is an extension of Lady Aberdeen’s maternal approach to Canada. She’s announced her intention of establishing a national order of nurses to provide home care for Canadians, in celebration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee next year. She believes it will complement the National Council of Women, her vehicle for improving Canadian society by giving women more influence.
In fact, the Aberdeens have done more than anyone to make Zoë feel at home here: ironic, considering they’re from Scotland. When Lady Aberdeen threw a mammoth fancy-dress ball in the Senate chamber, a revue of Canada’s history since the time of Jacques Cartier, she assigned Zoë a starring role as wife of the Sieur de Maisonneuve, awarding only a small subordinate part to Émilie. When Lord Aberdeen read the Speech from the Throne in August, he gave it first in French, posting plainclothes officers around the Senate to insist on quiet, since English MPs always chat rudely during the French. And when the Toronto Mail and Empire greeted Wilfrid’s election with a virulent diatribe against “French domination,” claiming Quebec would now “demand its pound of flesh,” the Aberdeens assured the Lauriers of their outrage.
It’s a blessing such people occupy Rideau Hall. She must offer up a prayer of thanks tomorrow for the Aberdeens. And when she thinks what a great doer Lady Aberdeen is, despite the migraine headaches that periodically confine her to bed, she glimpses her own salvation. Zoë too will have to take action. Here in Ottawa she’s going to stay, whether she likes it or not. She’s fated to belong to everyone and no one, when all she wants is to be once more the simple wife of the small-town lawyer of Arthabaska. That was the best time of their lives. But Wilfrid has no intention of going back, so neither can she.
God has a purpose to everything, and she’s beginning to discern His purpose for her. She’s in a position now to do things: to exercise influence over people and events. There’s no shortage of those who need her help. She can promote at the highest levels the clearly deserving, the unjustly ignored, the cruelly mistreated. She can advance the careers of gifted young musicians and artists, as she once did in the smaller sphere of Arthabaska. She can bring to Ottawa her mahogany grand piano, her menagerie of songbirds, her cats and dogs, even her dear nieces and nephews if she wants, as long as she can find a house big enough to hold them all. If only she’ll act, she can do all this and more. She can even recreate, after a fashion, their old home life, carving out a warm and welcoming island in this frozen English place.
Imagining herself doing these things makes it all seem possible. Zoë’s spirits begin to rise. In any case, it’s entirely up to her: Wilfrid has no time. He’s fully preoccupied with the exigencies and opportunities of the nation’s young life, all the promise and peril. Gold has been discovered in the Yukon wilderness. Canadian and American prospectors have rushed north, and Wilfrid has sent the North-West Mounted Police after them to keep order. The world needs Canada’s wheat, the prairies need more farmers. Immigrants will supply the necessary manpower, sturdy eastern Europeans, since English and French Canada can’t produce settlers fast enough. Every railway promoter in the land is lobbying Wilfrid for the right to build lines across the prairies to transport the immigrants west, the wheat and gold east.
Wilfrid has brought Clifford Sifton into cabinet, a strange, abrupt, impatient man who is rapidly going deaf, to oversee the westward expansion. To Sifton the future is already here, it must be dealt with immediately. The border with Alaska remains in dispute, making both Wilfrid and Sifton anxious to reach a settlement with Washington before it decides the Yukon is simply too tempting, too empty, to leave in Canadian hands. Voices south of the border are already clamouring to swallow Canada whole. An organization called the Continental Union League favours annexation, and it isn’t just a lunatic fringe: its headquarters are in New York, its members include Andrew Carnegie, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt. The problems are vast and bewildering, yet Wilfrid is exhilarated. One of these days he’ll worry himself sick over them, but for now he’s transfixed by Canada’s splendid and limitless future, and his own role in creating it.
For a woman of Quebec, it’s enough to contend with the bitterness in her own province over Wilfrid’s settlement of the Manitoba schools conflict. The bishops are outraged he didn’t restore full French Catholic rights after the provincial government dissolved them, but he insists he’s done all he can constitutionally, making the best of a bad job inherited from the Conservatives. With his gift for diplomacy—what the newspapers call his “sunny ways”— he’s forged a compromise and prevented a religious civil war. But that isn’t good enough for the bishops. They’ve denounced him to the Vatican as worse than liberal: as a free-thinker, anti-clerical, anti-Catholic. They’ve forbidden the faithful to vote Liberal on pain of being refused absolution. They’ve sent parish priests door to door to warn Liberals won’t be buried in holy ground, and they’ve banned the writings of Laurent-Olivier David and L’Électeur.
These attacks make Wilfrid furious, yet he refuses to strike back. Holding himself in check is costing him enormous anguish. Only Zoë knows how painfully he bears the fury of the Church, their Church—only Zoë and one other person.
The muffled knocking of a gloved hand makes her realize she’s forgotten all about her promise to go house hunting. Émilie lets herself into the room in a cascade of bright laughter scented with French cologne. She’s wearing a long dark-green coat trimmed with mink and a matching mink hat, and is already talking about the houses she’s picked out for them to visit.
Zoë falters. After her long morning walk, she’s not sure her legs are up to inspecting houses: she definitely knows her spirits aren’t. It’s never easy to deny Émilie, but in the firmest tone she can muster she proposes they first take tea in the Russell House café. And Émilie, who isn’t, after all, completely insensitive and inconsiderate, sees Zoë is tired and agrees.
They descend the grand staircase arm in arm into the lobby.
Sessional People, as parliamentarians and their staff are known, consider the Russell’s