The pastor’s voice returned Sanborn to the moment. “She shows little recognition of her good fortune, Daniel,” he was saying. “I spoke to her of the necessity of humility before God, of the struggle against crippling ambition all men and women must wage, and do you know what she said to me?”
“I dare not ask, Parson. Really, I can’t imagine. She always surprises.” He prepared to contain himself again.
“‘So much religiosity about us, sir. Yet so little Christian charity.’ I’m not exaggerating, Daniel, I assure you. Her very words. Followed by the most complacent smile. It chilled me. It chilled my heart.”
Sanborn could see that what remained with the good reverend were her quips and challenges. He had no doubt that Rebecca was, otherwise, the model of courtesy, as he had seen she could be. Might she have been referring to the Episcopalians as much as to the dissenters and Enthusiasts? Her words reminded him again of her forbidden drawings and paintings. Her thoughts and her pictures, he realized now, were of a piece. She could at times act like some ancient sophistic gadfly. Was that her ambition? Were her darker paintings above all criticisms? None of this could he consider with the good parson, so he kept his thoughts to himself.
“Perhaps she was thinking only of this infection of Enthusiasts, Arthur, which you’ve spoken against so often yourself,” Sanborn said, trying to mollify him. “I’ve never taken her for an Enthusiast, nor any of her disorders of intellect and fancy for sectarian distempers. I take them to be more mundane distempers of the brain. I trust you’ve spoken to Colonel Browne since her visit.”
“Yes, immediately,” the pastor said, “as it was he who sent her to me. They have been thinking of service, but I advised them to consider matrimony, provided they had someone in mind to protect and tame her.”
“I see,” Sanborn said. “He would first have to appreciate her delicacy of mind and sensibility. My own feeling has been all along, if I may speak frankly and confidentially again, that she would be more malleable if they were to find some appropriate channel for her talents and energies. But they’ve insisted on restraining her from a more acceptable exercise of her powers.”
“That is their prerogative. I trust they have good reason.”
“I wouldn’t presume to inflict my views on them. Perhaps you are right.”
“Matrimony would not be an unusual palliative in a case of such extremity,” the parson said. “I’m put in mind of another instance, some few years ago, over Durham way. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? An Enthusiast by the name of Mary Reed—one of Mr. Gilman’s, the most fanatical of New Lighters? One among those true Aeolists, as my good Doctor Swift used to call them.”
“Not of Miss Reed particularly,” Sanborn said. “Mr. Gilman is rather infamous among Church of England people, however, as he must be among his own clan. I’m given to understand he’d preach some eight hours running, only to be taken outside by a church elder to be walked up and down until the screaming from his congregation drew him back into meeting.”
“Precisely. However, I’m not suggesting Miss Rebecca’s an Enthusiast, but there is a certain visionary similarity leading to what Madam Browne has described as bizarre flights of fancy and intervals of unmanageability.”
“I take your point, sir.”
“Oh, Nicholas Gilman had a veritable apoplectic entourage—Hannah Huckins, Mary Reed, others. But my point is that these fits of vision, these hysteric disorders, this fantasticalness and coquetry, indicate some want of a more legitimate manly presence, some connubial balance, in the young woman’s life. In Miss Reed’s case, her behavior provoked a scandal and anticipated the minister’s final undoing.”
“Scandal, sir? From what cause?”
“When Mr. Gilman had just moved to his Durham parsonage, his wife and family still at Exeter preparing to join him, Miss Reed presented herself at the minister’s door in a state of ‘exceeding joy’ that she proclaimed had possessed her all day. She was invited in, innocently enough one supposes, but soon fell into a trance and ended up spending four days in a parsonage bed—envisioning, by Mr. Gilman’s own defensive account, her soul in heaven the whole time.”
Sanborn suppressed a laugh; he looked down and shook his head.
“A great upheaval ensued,” the prelate went on, “but such was the state of the enthusiasm at that time the people were finally induced to exonerate their new minister and the prostrate seer herself.”
“A scandal indeed,” Sanborn said, allowing himself a small laugh finally. “But I take your point, sir. And I find myself of your mind as well. Perhaps marriage is the best physic in such instances—and in this instance of the fair Rebecca.”
Chapter 26
SANBORN DID NOT TRY to communicate with Rebecca. He would see her at Queen’s Chapel of a Sunday, but they did not speak. Abigail delivered him no further missives, so there was scant opportunity to send or respond to private messages. He believed that calling upon Rebecca again, or even speaking of her to her guardians, would have had too much the appearance of intrusiveness. And he had no wish to confirm further his unreasonable preoccupation with Rebecca and her affairs. He went about his business for some months, right through the terrible news of the destruction of Saratoga and other settlements deep in the western frontier, thinking about her but without speaking his thoughts to anyone.
This strategy of aloofness and self-interest began to unravel, however, when Rebecca finally renewed their correspondence after the Christmas season.
Saturday, January 4, 1746
Dear Mr. Sanborn,
I hope you will forgive me the impertinence of this epistle after so long a silence between us, but I have no one else to whom I can unburden my thoughts and fears. Aside from court paid by two suitors chosen by my guardians, my life in the Browne manse has been severely restricted. I am limited for the most part to my chamber, as if association with the staff and visitors would somehow taint or endanger them. (I am allowed out only for the medicinal powers of Reverend Mr. Browne’s sermons and for the amusement of my suitors.) The colonel and Mrs. Browne are convinced my picture making is at the core of my “nervous distempers.” So I dare not continue to follow my heart.
My suitors are one Mr. Buckminster, a merchant of perhaps forty-two or forty-three who might stand for a model to Mr. Hogarth, and the impetuous Mr. Paine Wentworth, one of the scores of young cousins, who seems to believe the Lord’s creation was laid before us for his personal self-indulgence and the aggrandizement of our multitudinous clan. He attended Harvard College but is a gentleman of superficial learning and flashy parts. Mr. Wentworth is inordinately handsome, and though my guardians do not favor him so much as they do Mr. Buckminster, they believe me deranged for not displaying a proper enthusiasm over the blandishments of so charming a rival.
But lately there has been one thing more. Parson Browne, with whom I am given to believe you are well acquainted, had advised my superiors to search out any such illustrations as those I had shown him and any such as I had executed aforetimes in my “more melancholic moods,” which he somehow came to suspect I had turned to once again. Without my knowledge, several of the house servants were charged with this quest, the result being that I am paying now for my own impetuosity, when I should have left my pictures under your beneficent care.
In short, the choice my benefactors seem to be contemplating for me is either to marry me to one of the aforementioned gentlemen or remove me to a private madhouse in Boston. Much as I would prefer the dreariness of the former to the horrors of the latter, I live as if in a state of perpetual darkness while others consider my fate. I wonder if you might, as a last resort, so to speak, intervene on my behalf. Might there be some means for a gentleman as yourself, whom they respect and whose pictorial judgment they honor, to shepherd them toward a more sensible accommodation?
Respectfully yours,
Rebecca Wentworth
Had he said something that sent the good parson on such researches into Rebecca’s private quarters? Sa
nborn tried to recall their conversation precisely. Or perhaps it was something he did not say? How could he be certain? He was certain, only, that the Brownes would hear nothing more of his proposed lessons or his pleas to indulge her a little in her passion to draw and paint. He might be somehow implicated in the strictures of her present condition, but there was little he could do about it now. Moreover, he had come to the opinion with so many others that perhaps marriage was her best recourse. If only the alternatives in that line were not so “dreary,” as she had put it. He did not really wish to see her married to another, especially to one who would make her unhappy. Nor did he allow himself to contemplate the pangs of jealousy he could not entirely deny. But the fact remained that, married, she would be protected from the intrusions, even the vagaries, of guardians and ministers. Whether she would be allowed to continue her drawing was another matter. If she were, a husband surely would countenance only the sweeter delineations. That was quite understandable, he thought. One couldn’t expect a husband to revel in her more antic figurations. But at least she would be exercising, rather than suppressing, her talents, however narrowly to her mind.
He began to wonder if there were not some way to make the young Wentworth more pleasing to her. He knew who the proud young man was, however, so that line of thought ran out quickly. Or perhaps another suitor, one more tolerable to her, yet equally acceptable to the Brownes. But how would he initiate such a scheme of matchmaking? Moreover, would the Brownes ever countenance his own suit? Not for a moment, he assured himself. He was no longer poor, but he was irrevocably beyond their marriageable, clannish circles.
He couldn’t trust any of his female acquaintances of standing; they would be too loyal to the Brownes to join in his scheming. And his closest associates who were women, Gingher and Miss Norris, were outside the sphere of proper husband-hunting. Nevertheless, he called on Miss Norris for advice.
“She will be ruined,” Miss Norris said after he detailed Rebecca’s own description of her narrowing circumstances. “Not only are such men unworthy of her, they will never understand her and therefore soon tire of her. She will live abandoned in her marriage.”
“I suppose ultimately she will be marooned,” he finally admitted.
“To put it bluntly,” she said.
“Yet the alternative is even more frightful.”
“A certainty, Mr. Sanborn.”
“Is there nothing to be done?”
“It would take some drastic measure on our part, or your part, Mr. Sanborn. Something daring and audacious.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not at all certain myself, yet. I think she will refuse these chosen suitors, as you intimated.” She got up from her chair and began to pace about. “And when she does, the Brownes, I now believe, will complete their threat. They’ll not be crossed or blocked.”
“It’s vexing to think it may be so. They believe she is, in some degree, mad. They seem to believe that as separation and domestic labors were the curative for the child, so now marriage would be for the woman.” He got up and began to pace about, too. “Perhaps you should talk to her of your conviction, as you have to me, and at the least enjoin her to marry, for her own security.”
“You may be right,” she said. “I don’t know that she’ll listen to me, but marriage, even such marriage, is preferable to destruction.”
That evening they discovered no other way to proceed, so Miss Norris prepared to call on Rebecca.
UPON CALLING, however, Miss Norris understood that it was too late. Rebecca had refused both suitors and she believed the Brownes in the process of making good their threat. Whether they saw this as a punishment to bring her “to her senses,” or as a more permanent means of disposing of their recalcitrant ward, Miss Norris could not yet fathom. But Rebecca was in a terrible state of mind herself, Miss Norris reported. One might be convinced she was mad.
“She somehow keeps stealing paper and pen and making her secretive and ever more bizarre illustrations,” she said, reporting to Sanborn on her visit. “They’ve had to lock her in her room for long periods to keep her from it. But the very drawings now incriminate her. As they did at Blackstone, I now understand.”
“You heard of that mess?”
“Miss Rebecca told me. And Mrs. Prescott, still in mourning but come to her own senses, has told the Brownes of the incident. You’d have done better to tell me of that yourself, sir.”
“I intended to, and soon would have, but had remained silent out of my fear for her.”
Miss Norris was now beside herself, and she and Sanborn fell into a chaos of helplessness, and, in Sanborn’s case, self-recrimination. He, after all, had returned her to her guardians-turned-persecutors, he told himself.
“I don’t understand how they can contemplate such a course of action,” he said. “This trade in lunacy. They baffle and anger me.”
“They will brook no rebellion,” she said. “And they believe her lucid intervals grow more infrequent by the month.”
“But this?”
“As I mentioned before, there is a history of madness of some sort—religious melancholia, hypochondria, suicide, and the like—in Squire Browne’s lineage. His people have always feared it greatly, all the more so for occasional manifestations through the generations.”
“But Rebecca comes by way of the other side of the family—the Wentworths.”
“That doesn’t matter, or lessen the fear of it, the repugnance, the shame of it, in the squire’s eyes. Her grandmother Mehitabel, on the Browne-Cutts side, married a Wentworth. And Mehitabel’s grandmother in turn, Elizabeth Browne, drowned herself in the river on her birthday. That woman is none other than the Squire’s own grandmother, on his father’s side! There were, I believe, others. Of this only you can be certain, Mr. Sanborn—he’ll have no mad woman, by his lights, under his roof.”
Sanborn looked at her without speaking.
“We must get her away from there,” Miss Norris finally said. “We simply can’t let such a thing happen.”
“But how?” he asked. “Shall we ruin ourselves into the bargain?”
“Could you not return to Boston, or some farther center, Mr. Sanborn, to ply your lucrative trade, and take her with you? For a time only, of course. Provide for her safety and work, without anyone knowing who she is or how she helps you, painting drapery—or whatever you wish. She might well be a younger sister after all. . . .” She ran out of speech as if she had run out of silly ideas and explanations. She stood before him desperate and empty.
He could not make an answer. He knew that he most certainly could do no such thing. And he knew that she was equally certain of the impossibility of it. Every instinct told him it would be his ruin as well as Rebecca’s. A thought returned to his mind: He might marry her himself and indeed take her away. But it was a useless thought. The Brownes would never hear of it—a painter of portraits, a man of social servility when all was said and done, marrying into the Browne and Wentworth families.
Chapter 27
YET WHEN HE NEXT SAW Rebecca he knew he had to do something. She appeared not well, as if surely she were becoming what they had already determined her to be: recalcitrant and mad. She no longer paid attention to her appearance; she cared little for manners and conventions, even outwardly now. Her frowsy back chamber overlooked the gardens, and he noticed a chair by her window, as if she spent much of her time gazing at the dead, snow-covered planting beds below. Perhaps the sun brought needed heat through the window, too. He felt a chill and stepped over to the fire to stir the smoldering wood.
“How did they allow you in to see me?” she asked immediately after speaking his name in surprise.
“I asked if I might reason with you, and they saw no harm I could do.”
“The Master of Reason has a forked tail, has he not?” She smiled. It was not her old smile.
“If so, his underlings, such as I, are granted no such distinguishing demarcation.”
She laughe
d. “It’s pleasing to see you, Mr. Sanborn. It’s pleasing to see anyone who speaks plainly to me.”
“Miss Norris?”
“Yes.”
“Parson Browne?”
“Less so.”
“Your guardians?”
“They speak only out of fear of reproach, of dishonor, to the family.”
“Miss Norris thought so too.”
“She is a kind, knowing woman.”
“Indeed.” He knew that Miss Norris had sneaked a few books in to Rebecca. He couldn’t stop noticing the disarray of her hair, the soiled clothing. “She wishes to help you. We both do.”
“You are kind. But it’s futile now. What could you do?” She didn’t expect an answer. She looked around the room. “I’m hardly ever let out of this chamber now.”
“No suitors,” he said flatly.
“No more.” She looked around the room again. “They don’t allow suitors to see me like this.”
“That is a relief to you.”
“A blessing.”
“You have been drawing and painting on the sly.”
“Yes, I had been.”
“The colonel showed me a few.”
“Did he?” Her face revealed nothing. “He constructs his proposition, his plea against me.” There was a taint of amusement in her voice.
“Perhaps. You’ve been a willing accomplice, I daresay.”
“I interfered with no one. I was a model of propriety, otherwise.”
“You disobeyed their explicit instructions. Your actions have caused more than a little disorder. They were bound not to take kindly to that. And then you rejected the suitors they took pains to send your way. What, they kept wondering, are they to do with you?”
Rebecca Wentworth's Distraction Page 17
