Louisa and the Country Bachelor : A Louisa May Alcott Mystery (9781101547564) (16 page)

I interrupted quickly. “Tell us why it never rang, Mr. O'Rourke.”

“It cracked during the fire of 1737. Bells are funny that way. They need heat to be created, but once born, they dread fire much as people do. So no trees near my little workshop, little misses. One lightning strike and the work of a year or two is up in flames.”

“Have you been here long, Mr. O'Rourke?” I asked, thinking it time to bring our conversation closer to my original purpose for the visit.

“Fifteen years. Came over from Belfast. My church there had a bell cast in the ninth century, and still rung true as daylight. Lovely sound, lovely.” His rugged, square face softened, and his eyes closed at the memory, as if he were hearing that bell.

“Then you know the town well,” I said.

“Well?” His eyes flew open and he laughed. “I'm a newcomer by New England standards, miss. As is that uncle of yours.”

“You know Uncle Benjamin?” I asked, startled.

“Well as any man in Walpole,” he said. “A great man with some fine tales to tell, and not stingy with the pouring of port after dinner. But he keeps strange company these days.” O'Rourke blushed a bright red.

“You mean Mrs. Tupper,” I guessed.

“Certain I do. And she a married lady and all.”

“It is a friendship, no more,” I defended my uncle.

“Well,” said O'Rourke, scratching at his whiskers with a thoughtful squint, “there be them that t'ink themselves above the moral imperative.”

“Uncle Benjamin thinks no such thing,” I insisted.

“ 'Twasn't your uncle I meant,” O'Rourke said. “ 'Twas herself. Your uncle is not Mrs. Tupper's only gentleman companion.”

He rose from his wooden stool, went to the leaky rain barrel, and brought up from it a tin cup of water, of which he drank half and poured the rest over his florid face and flamelike hair.

“Her brother lives with her, as well as her son, Mr. Hampton,” I said.

O'Rourke shook his head, and heavy drops of water splashed around him. “I've met the brother at Sunday meeting. He attends once a month or so. He is stooped and bearded and strapped into that wheeled chair, and the son is thinner than . . .” He paused.

“Thinner than whom?” I asked, perplexed.

“I have seen another man come out of that house,” O'Rourke said, running his sooty hands through his red hair. “This is kitchen gossip, though. I'm no better than a woman.”

“Please,” I said, ignoring his harsh criticism of women's penchant for discussing others, “this might be important. What did you see?”

“Well, 'twas the other week. The day Ernst Nooteboom fell, in fact. I was coming in early to the foundry and I passed by Mrs. Tupper's house. A man was coming out the side door. He weren't the milkman.”

“Did you see his face?”

“It were barely dawn and he wore a brimmed hat.” O'Rourke ran his hands over his wet face, streaking the soot that had accumulated on his cheeks. “His face I weren't able to see. But he was heavy-built. Dressed like a city fellow. I'm not the only one to have seen him. Mr. Fortbra saw a stranger fishing one day, about dawn, dressed in those city clothes. Mrs. Amherst saw a man crossing through her backyard at dawn, heading toward the ravine.”

“My goodness,” said Sylvia. “This town does acquire detail. Am I spoken of in such a manner?” Sylvia, as one of Boston's Belles and an heiress of considerable fortune, had a reasonable distaste for being the subject of gossip.

“You really want to know?” asked O'Rourke, squinting even more deeply so that his eyes almost disappeared.

“I do,” said Sylvia staunchly.

“There's bets on whether the wedding will be a June or December one.”

“Wedding?” she asked faintly.

“You and young Mr. Hampton. His family likes to marry upward.”

Sylvia fanned herself briskly. “Well, Mr. O'Rourke, if you wish to profit from such bad taste, I recommend putting money on the fact that there will be no such wedding. I never.”

“It is your fatal beauty,” I teased.

“It is my shares in the Cheshire Railroad, and you know it. Tell me more about bells, Mr. O'Rourke,” Sylvia said. “But not wedding bells.”

His blue eyes, which had before sparkled with gossip, now grew luminous. “They have souls,” he whispered. “Each one different. I've known evil bells and bells that could heal, and bells that refused to sing, though no engineer could figure out why. There's a bell in County Cork that rings by itself every year on October thirty-first, and it can't be stopped even when cloth is wrapped on the clapper.”

“Really?” asked Sylvia, wide-eyed.

“And I've heard that you have a new order,” I said, leading the conversation to my purpose.

“I do. And how did you know that, lass?”

“From the commercial traveler's wife herself, Mrs. Tupper.”

O'Rourke scratched his whiskers again and ran his fingers through his hair so that it stood up, looking even more flamelike. “Strange thing, that order. Do not usually happen in such a manner. See, a bell is a very specific thing; the weight, shape, tone, decoration—all that is usually decided after much correspondence. I've known some ministers put more thought into their church bell than the choice of wife. When you think about it, a bell does last much longer than a wife.”

“What was strange about this order?” I asked. His conversation, I had marked, had a meandering style that needed stern guidance.

“No previous correspondence, no putting out of feelers or asking of questions. Just the order for a bell, sent by telegram, no less, half ton, brass, middle tone, and no decoration other than an inscription. No decoration! Think of that. You'd think the order had been placed by someone who knew nothing at all of bells and cared even less than they know.”

“Strange,” I agreed. “And the order was sent in by Mr. Tupper?”

“It seems so. It referred to Mr. Tupper's commission, which was to be held by me till further notice. But the deposit was to be paid by a draft drawn from a Walpole bank, not a Michigan bank.” O'Rourke squinted and leaned closer to me. “The bank account was Mr. Clarence Hampton's. Why is he buying a bell for a church his family don't attend?”

To make it appear that Jonah Tupper was in Michigan, I thought.

Sylvia and I rose to leave. Mr. O'Rourke stood and pulled his overall suspenders back up to his shoulders. Soon a new bell would be poured; another of his “souls” would enter the world.

I had one last question. “You said Mr. Tupper's order included an inscription for the bell,” I said. “Would you tell me that inscription, Mr. O'Rourke?”

“I would. It was the strangest part of this affair, for it was not a Latin tag but a French one. Most unusual. Had to ask the schoolteacher to tell me its meaning. It was
“ ‘Abondance déclarée.' ”

“I have heard Mother shout that,” said Sylvia, “while playing at whist.”

O'Rourke turned white, then red with anger. “That beat all,” he muttered. “I'm a gaming man myself, but a frivolity like that on one of my bells? I've a mind to refuse the order.”

“It is more than a gaming term for cardplayers,” I said. “In some common parlance it describes a state of ambition that has become greed. A desire to win all.”

“That beat all,” O'Rourke said again.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE DAY OF the picnic dawned fair, with not a cloud in the sky. I awoke to the country smell of pine and wildflowers mixed with the pungency of flapjacks and coffee from the downstairs kitchen, and so stretched and sighed in my bed with great pleasure. And then I remembered the picnic, and my contentment disappeared. I would much rather arrange my own activities (including a good four-hour shift in my writing shed) than surrender my day to the machinations of Ida Tupper's son.

Poor Sylvia was even less inclined to go. “He'll be bringing me plates of pâté and buttered rolls all afternoon. He'll ask me to go for walks with him,” she complained from under the bed quilt, refusing to rise.

“I might let it slip that you are secretly affianced and therefore he can never hope for a return of his affection,” I said. My qualms and concerns about the nature of Clarence Hampton made me willing to prevaricate rather than risk an entanglement of any sort between that mysterious man and my best friend.

“Sylvia is engaged?” asked Anna, coming into the bedroom just then, her arms full of fresh towels and chemises carried up from the laundry room behind the kitchen. “Who is the fellow? Do I know him? Why weren't we invited to the betrothal supper?” She tapped her foot impatiently.

“Truly, she is not.” I laughed. “It is a ploy.”

“An extreme one,” said Anna thoughtfully. “What if that lie gets back to Boston and Sylvia's mother?”

Sylvia stared back at me for a long moment. “It would serve Mother right.”

“But, Sylvia, didn't Confucius require his followers to respect their elderly parents?” I said, looking up at the ceiling to avoid her gaze.

“Louy, don't do that,” Sylvia protested. “You play me along like a trout. Yes, I have been fishing once or twice. You play me along and humor me, then turn it all around so I don't know if I'm coming or going.”

“Well, today you are going, so get dressed,” I told her. “If the rumor spreads too far, we will find a way to make it up to your mother.”

 

 

WHEN CLARENCE ARRIVED at ten with his buggy and two-horse team, we four Alcott girls, along with Sylvia and Llew, climbed up.

Clarence looked almost cheerful that morning. He tried to smile, producing a kind of grimace that reminded me of falsely brave men entering a surgeon's office to have a bad tooth pulled. He wore an expensive plaid suit and well-polished boots, but seemed to have made an attempt at playing the country squire by donning a straw hat.

Llew was dressed in farmer's overalls and well-worn boots, for he intended to use this time well, by digging for fossils after lunch. He was like Father in his insistence that life was best lived for work, not pleasure. He sat next to Clarence on the driver's board, and we five girls filled the two benches in back. There was little legroom because the hamper from Ida Tupper was large enough to contain a body or two. Why, I asked myself, was I thinking of bodies?

Abba, her face rosy from kitchen duties, was at the front steps to see us off. Father waved from his vegetable patch. The potato plants were already a hand tall.

“To the mountain?” Clarence asked us over his shoulder. “Or to the river?”

Sylvia and I exchanged glances and studied our boots. “The mountain, please,” I said, hiding my smile. A lake, for the Alcott girls and Sylvia, meant swimming, but since my family had believed in progressive education even for daughters, swimming meant donning a chemise and little else. And that would not do in the company of Llew and Clarence. “Remember Walden Pond?” Sylvia grinned. I nodded.

Clarence snapped his whip over the horses' heads, and we jolted off.

“Perhaps we can visit your campsite,” I called from the back of the buggy, holding on to my sun hat.

Clarence did not answer, but his shoulders flinched as if I had struck him.

The drive lasted well over two hours, since we stopped often to pick wildflowers, which we stuck in the horses' halters and our own hats, and we delayed for half an hour in wild berry brambles, hunting and picking the first ripe ones till we could eat no more. At one moment I found myself picking next to Mr. Hampton.

“Mr. Hampton,” I whispered loudly, a true stage whisper, seeking his attention.

He looked up from the spiderweb he had been examining, for in the middle of the web sat a spider black and round as a ripe berry. “Yes, Miss Louisa?”

“I offer you information of a private nature, and ask your pledge not to repeat it. Not even to your mother,” I whispered urgently.

He leaned closer.

I couldn't restrain my slight recoil. Though we never mentioned it, I still remembered the feel of his angry hands on my shoulders, shaking me.

“Miss Sylvia is secretly affianced,” I said. “She cannot announce it yet, but would have you know of her attachment to another.”

Unfortunately at the moment Sylvia, only some yards away from us, lost her footing and fell laughing into the arms of Llew.

“She does not seem affianced,” said Clarence, knitting his brows. “I could predict a stage career for her successful playing of an unattached young woman,” he said. “As it happens, you need not fear I will impose myself. After twenty-three years with Mother, I prefer women of a more sincere nature. I have put up with more than my share of brief enthusiasms and crocodile tears.”

I started to speak in Sylvia's defense, to argue that she was, at heart, a serious and intelligent young person, but since I had achieved the desired effect of discouraging Clarence, though not in quite the way I had planned, I let him have the last word in that conversation.

We returned to the buggy, our lips and fingers stained purple, and Llew and Clarence began a heated and protracted conversation over geologic theory. If they had been small boys they would have already been pushing and shoving at each other. But they were men and fought with words instead of little fists.

The sun shone; butterflies flitted past. Part of our trail led along the river and a section of ravine, and I composed in my head for my story of Kate and Mr. Windsor, noting the “rocky way, following the babbling brook that dashed foaming down the deep ravine, whose sides were ringed with pines and carpeted with delicate ferns and moss.”