Love's a Stage (30 page)

He glanced around with shaded eyes. “Can we talk here?”

“Of course.” She lifted her feet to the top of the wall and hugged her knees, looking up at him with a slight tilt to her lashes. “The only ears here are on the sweet corn.”

“But the potatoes have eyes,” he answered with a reluctant smile. “Is that what you’ve been doing, sketching vegetables?”

“Trying,” she said. “There are riches in shape and shading under the leaves, but I’ve a poor hand this afternoon.” She held up her sketch pad for him to see.

“Hmm. Amazing. Like life. I can’t see what you find amiss with it.”

Merry only smiled and closed the sketchbook. “Will you come in the house, Carl? It’s almost teatime, and we’ve got cider cooling on ice chips.”

“Later.” He waved his hand impatiently, as though dismissing an inane courtesy. “I need you again, my girl.”

Her heart quickened. “To draw, do you mean?”

It was the pride of her life that twice before she had been able to help him and the American cause. He had taken her once to a coaching inn and once to market day at Richmond, where he had quietly pointed out men suspected of collaborating with the British. She would make her best effort to watch them without seeming to and later had rendered the faces in detailed sketches. Carl saw to it that the drawings were reproduced and circulated, which neutralized the British agents as effectively as if they’d been captured or hanged.

It had been a small thing to do for her country, especially compared to the ultimate sacrifice American soldiers were prepared to make on the field of battle; the smallness of it had stirred within her embers of dissatisfaction with the useless gentility of her life. These yearnings would surely have wounded her staunchly pro-British Aunt April, so Merry kept them to herself and tried to find solace in painting watercolor portraits of heroines like the courageous Mrs. Penelope Barker, who, thirty years ago in the First War of Independence, had stopped the British from commandeering her carriage horses by pulling her absent husband’s sword from the wall and slicing to ribbons the reins in the British officer’s hands. Inevitably Merry had tried to daydream herself into Mrs. Barker’s shoes, but even if she’d possessed a sword, Aunt April would never have allowed such a gruesome object to hang on the wall, and the only horse they had was poor old swaybacked, buck-kneed Jacob, whom no one would want to steal. Furthermore, if enemy troops came within a hundred miles, Aunt April would undoubtedly whisk Merry away to a place of safety.

Carl shoved his hat back over his sweat-lacquered curls. “If you’ll do it. Want to work with me again?”

“I
dearly
want to draw for you again, Carl.” She stretched out a hand to stroke the horse’s soft, damp muzzle, smiling at her older brother. Motherless, they had been reared separately; he by their austere, unloving father, she by Aunt April, their mother’s sister. If she had seen Carl twice a year as a child, that was often. His boyhood had seemed to her an entrancing miracle of kite string and fishhooks, Latin tutors and wooden boats that really sailed. Unaware that she herself had become anything more than the awkward, overprotected girl-child who knitted mittens in the winter and stitched samplers in the summer, she watched as Carl grew taller, more clever, more self-confident. He was not an affectionate man. He hadn’t once remembered her on her birthday. He rarely offered himself as a confidant or a protector, and yet, through his patriotic activities he had brought into her life a rare and precious dimension. Teasingly she told him, “You’re my only chance to grab a little glory, you know. I suppose I’m not to tell Aunt April, again?”

“Not unless you want her to forbid you to go. Anyway, that’s been taken care of. Father wrote a letter to cover us, saying that he’ll be in Alexandria this Thursday on government business and wants you to meet him there for a visit.” He jumped from the horse’s sweating back. “Come with me while I walk the horse.”

She slid from the stone wall and put her hand self-consciously to her hair. “I ought to fetch my bonnet, I suppose. I imagine I look all scraggly.”

He looked surprised and irritated. “We’re just going down the lane a bit. Does it matter so much?”

Instantly she shook her head and joined him in the bright, battering sunlight, embarrassed that she had been so petty. “Then Father knows about it,” she said.

He glanced down at her as she caught up to him and tried to match his stride, her eyes blinking out the sun’s stinging rays. “He knows you’re going to draw for me again, Merry, but—” A bee, attracted by the sweating horse, buzzed around their heads, and he swatted at it. “But he doesn’t know where. Truth is, I lied.”

Shocked and honored at once by his confession, she said, “You lied to Father?” Her father had been forty-five when she was born, and now his wreath of white hair, long hooked nose, and still eagle vision made lying to him seem futile. He appeared to be looking for the lie in the face of every man he met. “Why?”

“Because it’s not a place I should take you. I wouldn’t either, if it wasn’t such a rare opportunity. There’s a man who is going to be there at nine o’clock Thursday who—no, I’ll tell you about it later. But it’s important. I would never take you to such a rough place if it wasn’t important.”

“A rough place? Do you mean a prizefight?”

He gave a rueful grin. “Is that the roughest place you can think of, Merry?”

The lane angled away from the kitchen garden, into a green meadow dappled with pink clover and birdsong. Merry had been holding her skirt carefully above the path’s red dust, but at Carl’s words she let it drop and snatched up the silver-seeded head of a thistle. She held it before her, flourished a hand over it, and said in an important voice, “This, my dear brother, is a crystal ball.”

He had no particular taste for whimsy, but because she was young and female and his sister, he said indulgently, “Is it? Divine for me then, ma’am.”

“Let me see!” A soft breath of air from her pink lips sent a powdery cloud of feathered seeds spinning off across the high June grass. Staring with comical intensity into the thistle globe, she said, “Yes, it’s becoming clearer now! I see—a room. A rough place! There are men there, some of them unshaven, and they are—horrors, they’re setting great flagons of ale upon a maple-wood table and leaving dreadful water rings! The high corners are dripping with spider webs, and the side tables beg to be dusted.” She glanced at her brother. “How am I doing?”

“Shockingly well. A body would think you’d taken to tavern-haunting.”

“The doors to Mr. Hardy’s taproom were open as we walked home from prayer meeting last Thursday, and I took a good look inside.” Taking in a deep breath, Merry turned the thistle in her hand and was about to blow into the remaining plump hemisphere when the breath choked short in her throat and she said in a startled voice, “Carl! Does that mean you really
do
intend to take me to a tavern?”

Frowning heavily, he said, “There. I’ve shocked you, have I? There’s worse yet. The tavern’s on the coast, and isolated, and we’ll have to be there after dark. Furthermore, the place is frequented by some of the lowest rogues that . . . Look, here’s the straight truth—the tavern’s a smugglers’ den.”

When Glory smiled, she smiled with a vengeance. The thistle’s dark-green stem slid from Merry’s suddenly numb fingers and was crushed under the hind hoof of the ambling horse. Her first instinct was to ask Carl if he really meant it, but she stopped herself. Never had he looked more serious. With experimental bravado she said, “Then I’ll be able to find a good price on some English cotton for Aunt April.”

He was too much a soldier not to be pleased. “Well said! And things aren’t quite as bad as they seem on the surface. We’ll be in and out quickly—and things are likely to be more unpleasant than dangerous. Sal and Jason will be with us.”

“Our Boston cousins?” They were Carl’s friends much more than hers. “I haven’t seen them in over four years! But I had thought from Father’s latest letter to Aunt April that Jason would be at Sackets Harbor with General Wilkinson?”

“Making Jason an aide to Wilkinson was the worst idea somebody ever had. Jason’s never bothered to be discreet about his belief that Wilkinson was wrongly acquitted at the Fredericktown court-martial, and within a bare twenty-four hours of his arrival in Sackets Harbor, Wilkinson arranged Jason’s transfer down to Knoxville to fight Creeks with the Tennessee militia. He has to report to Jackson within the month, but he and Sal are eager as dying saints to run a paid agent of Britain to earth with us before Jason leaves.”

The lane dipped to a narrow stony brook that bordered a field of Indian corn, and Carl loosed his gelding’s reins and watched as the horse dropped his head into the gurgling water.

“And the war news?” she asked quietly.

“Is nothing you wouldn’t have read in the newspaper. If we can get the Northern Army into Montreal before winter, we could have Britain out of North America by spring! We’ll win this bloody war yet, Merry. Justice is with us.” He scooped a round, glistening stone from the brook and lofted it hard into the corn, scaring out a large crow, which flapped tiredly away toward a far stand of trees.

“Farewell hope, then, Britannia,” cried Merry, pulling a handkerchief from her sleeve and holding it up to wave in the hot breeze.

As he watched her his face changed, as though a new and uncomfortable thought was first entering his mind. He said suddenly, “We can’t take you to the tavern looking like that.”

“Why, of course not, Carl. I
told
you I should have returned to the house for a bonnet . . .”

“No, not a bonnet. An old hat, felt, I think; cheap felt. And I’ll need a shabby dress.”

She couldn’t resist it. “Oh, are you going in disguise as well?”

He gave her a wisp of a smile. “Of course, I’ll be in disguise, but not in skirts, Merry.”

“What then?”

“You’ll find out Thursday night.”

*     *     *

The modest home that Merry shared with her aunt had been pretty once, with its brick patterns of Flemish bond and richly detailed interior woodwork, the latter mostly covered now with muting layers of olive house paint. The kitchen alone was large, but the other rooms were high with many windows broken into small square panes that charted the faded carpets in white sunlight.

Since Aunt April had had the care of it the house had grown homely, though it was meticulously kept. Here were neither the bleak look of poverty nor the irritating frothings of a trite taste, but rather a place made dreary by the bewilderment of a lady unable to decorate within the boundaries of a limited income. There was no money and very little access, therefore, to gilt porcelain, to chairs with graceful legs turned in the workshops of Sheraton, to fine tables with gold inlay, to paintings by men with great names, to fabrics so supple that they inhaled light and breathed it out again, made new and glowing. Gone forever were the exquisite, expensive things that Aunt April had touched and smiled at and draped on her body in the childhood spent across the Atlantic’s bitter waters.

Only in Merry’s room had April made an effort, with chintz hangings and animals cut from nursery prints set with care into colored heavy-paper frames. The rest of the house had been left alone and clean, its fixings growing old-fashioned and paler with each scrubbing.

That evening Merry sat as she always had with Aunt April in the “green drawing room,” never quite realizing how laughably grandiose was the title for this tiny parlor with its faded chartreuse-and-vanilla-dotted wall covering and shabby mustard-colored wing chairs. The room was always too hot, in the winter from the oversized white stone fireplace and in the summer because Aunt April was too worried about flyspecks to leave the window open. The heat filtered into the horsehair stuffing in the chairs and drew from the fibers the scent of that long-ago sacrificed animal. But tonight the warm weather had rendered the perfume of the stables so strong that even Aunt April had reluctantly agreed that the window must be opened.

In the glowing twilight Merry could see families walking together on the village green, fathers pitching their little sons up to ride on broad shoulders and stooping to toss balls to their daughters. Sweethearts walked in pairs, sometimes laughing, sometimes earnest, and the parson was taking his nightly two turns for health, tipping his hat to the ladies as he went. To Merry it might have been another world, because Aunt April had shunned the other villagers so completely that all save the most thick-skinned had long since ceased to visit. Twenty-five years ago Aunt April’s father had packed up what was left of his once illustrious fortune in a few cloth bags, bought his family passage to the New World on a leaking, rat-infested hull of a refitted slaver, and left England and an angry flock of creditors shaking their fists from the wharf. The shock of being reduced in the course of a day from irreproachable respectability to a position close to that of the wretched poor had been the death of April’s mother, father, and older sister, and the same fate might have befallen April and her younger sister, Annette, had not Annette had the good fortune to have been knocked down by a horse being ridden by a young civil servant, who, full of remorse, had decided he was in love with Annette and married her, rescuing them from a state of dire poverty.

Carl and Merry were the result of that union. Not five years after Merry’s birth Annette had died politely in her sleep from a weakness of the heart. Aunt April went on to run her sister’s motherless household with such sterling competence that before he was out of mourning gloves for his wife, Mr. James Wilding had decided to remove himself from the house on the slim pretext that he didn’t want to trouble April with his maintenance. Taking his son, he set up a small, comfortable home for himself along one of the rutted lanes in the nation’s brand-new capital and proceeded to make his way up the ranks of the Treasury to his current exalted position. Each month without fail he had sent to April a sum of money to maintain herself and his daughter, Merry.

The arrangement suited him, for he had never been at ease in the company of any woman, not excepting his highborn wife, and had more than once told April that he didn’t know what to say to little girls anyway. If Merry had been a boy, well, then, that would have been different.