“Well, sir, it’s good to hear Ramsay’s still employed upon faces,” Sanborn said.
“Indeed. With, as I understand it, Hudson’s Vanaken now much in assistance on the remainder of the canvas.”
“I recall,” Sanborn said, “when Mr. Ramsay suddenly became the new thing, about ’thirty-nine or ’forty. After Dr. Mead took up his cause. He had a way of laying in faces to make the flesh clear, transparent. I’ve never been able to replicate it. Said he learned it in Italy from Luti and Titian. His practice was to begin with a red mask and then build up the flesh with a toner of lake and vermilion—in a half-dozen layers, apparently.”
“He is still known for his flesh,” Wentworth said.
All three of them laughed.
“I would be pleased to carry any letters you wish to the city,” Wentworth offered. “And a list of colors and supplies to Emerton’s for shipment to you.”
“It would not be an inconvenience to you, sir?”
“Not at all. Carrying lists for merchants is for me a commonplace.”
Perhaps he had misjudged the man, Sanborn thought. Perhaps Rebecca, too, had found him more than bearable. There was a certain charm about him, a worldliness and serenity about the justice of his place in the world that leavened the natural haughtiness of his clan. And, of course, he had won his prize, the beautiful Rebecca—the most exotic blossom in all Portsmouth.
The remainder of the day Sanborn spent in cleaning and packing his equipage and clothing. He walked out and took the early evening air. The Wentworths had doubtless connubial matters to catch up on, and he was relieved to find himself alone and at his leisure about the manse and its grounds. After a late tea, he withdrew to his chamber with a book from the library, an amusing collection of Addison’s essays.
He read for a while but his mind began to wander from the page. Was she truly in danger from herself? The thought began to plague him. And could she really give up, essentially, her painting and drawing, and the visions that inspired them?
He would not allow himself to believe she had presented him merely with a mask. He had to believe everything he witnessed that indicated she was engaged in this life here, reconciled to reap the bounty of its beneficence.
But for how long? Are bounty and luxury and elegance enough? For perhaps one in ten thousand they are not. Or for one in a hundred thousand, not enough. Surely, however, for the whole general run of mankind they were enough: the only ideal worth achieving or, if necessary, cozening. But for Rebecca?
He recalled what Smibert had said. “Things are not ripe, not yet, not here, for the likes of Rebecca Wentworth!” Would there ever be a place here, as in the Old World, for a Mrs. Beale, a Clara Peeters, a Rosalba Carriera, for the others? Even the Old World had nourished few enough such women, and their lives, he seemed to recall, were the result of strange and fortuitous convergences—in addition to their prodigies and talents: as if the rarest strands of Fate had been woven to produce lives of passion and beauty and accomplishment. Yet who among the women Smibert had named would anyone call, as Miss Norris once had called Rebecca, “a dear little visionary”? A dear little prodigy perhaps, at most, had these others been called. Rebecca in her distraction had drawn and painted work that was beyond even these fortunate women.
And what had she become now? The doubts kept returning: Was she truly content, or was she merely resigned? Was she secretly afflicted still? Was she, in sum, a danger to herself? He had to believe—he must believe—in her reconciliation. Just as he had of necessity come to believe in his own narrowing reconciliation to his loss of her.
BY THE FOLLOWING morning, the sun rising into cerulean heavens, he convinced himself that she was no longer in danger. At breakfast, Paine Wentworth was again absent on urgent business. Sanborn had last evening properly taken his leave of the squire.
He dawdled some moments in the dining room before Rebecca arrived. For the first time he looked closely at a watercolor on the wall. Bright flowers, an unusual canvas but perfectly executed, the kind of incidental and innocuous painting Rebecca referred to earlier as what she might do on occasion. He looked more closely. The painting was a decorative confection, as if executed by some elegant mechanism. He could hardly credit the work to Rebecca.
She arrived at the table in a pastel yellow silk gown. They found it difficult to speak now in the hour before his departure.
There had been no mention of subsequent commissions, as he had hoped for, once satisfaction was secured. But he was not discouraged. There was time enough for commissions.
“That rather sweet watercolor behind me,” he finally said. “Where did that come from?”
“Oh,” she said, and laughed. “A product of some odd moment of leisure.” She waved her hand as if to dismiss it.
“Yours?” He stood up and turned around to look at the painting again.
“Yes.”
“It’s well done, and surprisingly bright. And as to the flowers . . . accurate enough—”
“But it doesn’t look like mine,” she said. Her voice was composed.
“That’s what I’d say.” He returned to the table.
“Mr. Wentworth is pleased with one such as this, now and again.”
“He would appreciate the elegance.” Well, he thought, isn’t dull elegance better than a madhouse?
She changed the subject to the coming season, their preparations, her worries over extremes of weather. They bantered through the rest of the breakfast hour. And then it was time for him to leave.
She accompanied him to the end of the front walk after the attendant announced that his chaise and portmanteau awaited him. She offered her hand. He bowed nicely and took it. When he could no longer hold her gaze he looked down and put her hand to his lips. Then he climbed into the seat and took up the reins.
“It does my heart good, Madam Wentworth, to see you settled and happy amidst your domestic duties and amusements.”
“I’m settled, Daniel, yes,” she said and smiled, as if to eschew the formality he had taken up again.
“It is a shame to flee the world.”
“Perhaps you are right, after all, Daniel.”
“That was a hard thing for a girl I used to know to admit.”
She laughed. “It was a hard enough thing.” She placed her hand on his arm. “Thank you, Daniel. I shall never forget your help, and your courage.” He reached toward her and took both her hands. She smiled; her face lit up and understanding filled her eyes. There was so much still unsaid that he would speak. But he felt himself choke up. He feared tears would give him away. He turned from her and said merely, “Good-bye then, Rebecca.” He snapped the reins and the horse jerked the chair into motion. As he hurried down the long carriage drive that wound from the house to the road, he glanced back once. She stood in her doorway now with more than a trace of sorrow on her face.
He loved her still, that was plain enough. But there had never been any hope for them, and he expected by now she considered that a blessing. If she would not stray too close to the river, there was nothing to fear for her any longer, and that for him was a blessing. Still, he felt sorrow and loss. But why should he? By now he was a confirmed bachelor anyway. His commissions were only from the very best people. He had his friends and amusements, his clubs and gatherings. And he had Gingher. There was nothing more to wish for, save continued health and commissions. He told himself several times, as he made his way to the ferry, “I will not despair. I will not despair over her. As she has the courage not to despair over herself.”
He forced his mind away from Rebecca. He calculated that subtracting his fares for ferry and horse and chaise, he would clear—well, minus materials, of course—approximately twelve guineas from this handsome commission alone.
Still, this tack could not occupy his mind for long. He examined the nature of her world at Hawkshead Hall again and again as he rode on. Had she been destroyed as an artist to be saved as a woman? Had Smibert, the kindly old fox, tried to tell him that here, that now, i
t must be so? And if the incandescent artist had been tamed, what role had he, Sanborn himself, played in the long, tortuous way of her defeat? These were the gall and wormwood of thoughts he simply could not endure. These were doubts about her, about himself, he had no choice now but to suppress and deny.
Ultimately, he assured himself, he must conceive of her only as one who had come through, as one who had succeeded in life. Only a cynic would disagree, and he was not cynical.
He could see the ferry moored at its dock, the cattle aboard already lowing for the sense of merely wood and water beneath their hooves while the carts and chairs rattled aboard. He snapped his reins.
Across the river from the ferry he saw Portsmouth now, its streets and spires rising in the midday sunlight, the masts of ships swaying and flickering in the silver light rising off the water. He had never tried to paint the flashing masts of Portsmouth, as he had once long ago thought he might. If Rebecca had, he had never seen the painting. And now, of course, he had come to believe that she never would.
Marrying well had saved her, he thought. It was as simple as that. And it was time to let her go now and return to the prosperous life he had forged out of nothing, really, beyond his own talent and labor over the past seven years.
“It’s time to let Rebecca go—and Giles, into the bargain,” he repeated aloud as his chaise rumbled over the dock to approach the ferry waiting on the bright wide river. “It’s time to let them go.”
Reading Group Guide
Questions for Discussion
1. How is your experience of the story shaped by the fact that it is told from Daniel Sanborn’s point of view? How would your experience of the story be different if it were told from Rebecca’s point of view?
2. When first confronted with examples of Rebecca’s paintings, Sanborn concludes that she is “alarmingly gifted in some incomprehensible way.” How do you respond to this description? What expectations does it establish?
3. When Rebecca critiques Sanborn’s painting of her, she describes it as “a necessary imitation of the best models,” while he counters that it is “rather a kind of quotation.” What expectations does this early exchange establish about their relationship and their respective attitudes toward art?
4. What do you make of Rebecca’s more visionary paintings? How do they seem to be in keeping or at odds with her character? What do you make of the repeated assertion that Rebecca “paints what she sees”? What do you make of her question “How can there be light without darkness?”
5. How do Sanborn and Rebecca differ in their understanding of the economic value of the activity of painting? Rebecca is not averse to making money from her paintings—she attempts several times to do so. Why does she fail? Why does Sanborn succeed?
6. In what ways are Rebecca and Sanborn defined by class or social standing? What implications does this have for their behavior?
7. What do you make of Sanborn’s obsession with Rebecca? How does the character of his obsession change over time? How does Sanborn’s response to her paintings differ from those of others? How does John Smibert’s response to her talents differ from Sanborn’s?
8. What do you make of Sanborn’s relationship with Gingher? Why does he take such an interest in her? Of his relationship with Miss Norris? How do the changes in Sanborn’s own status affect his relations with these women?
9. How do the episodes in Blackstone affect your understanding of the period and the circumstances of the characters? How do you feel about Sanborn’s return to Portsmouth with Rebecca? Was it a rescue or an abduction? Or both?
10. Do you believe that Rebecca has successfully accommodated herself to her circumstances at the end of the novel? Does Sanborn believe that she has?
11. Is there considerable irony, perhaps, in the conventional happy-ending elements of the resolution? If so, how does that irony fit the novel’s themes of art, business, and individual freedom and self-definition?
An Interview with Robert J. Begiebing
Rebecca Wentworth’s Distraction completes a trilogy that also includes The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin and The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton. Did you plan these books as a trilogy?
No. Only while working on novel number three in the early stages did I realize I could tie the two previously published novels together with this one, the “middle narrative” of an historical trilogy set from roughly the 1630s to 1850. From that point on, I was working within a degree of restriction, in the same sense almost that one is limited while working within a particular genre or poetic form. But often the restrictions, the demands of the form, or the series, or in this case a trilogy, challenge you in a new way. These demands might even result in a better, tighter book. I hope that’s the case here. The reader will have to judge. I’ve wondered myself how many rather daunting series were started with the whole series in mind: Anthony Powell’s twelve-part A Dance to the Music of Time? Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels? Trollope’s Barsetshire series? And so on. And, of course, Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales were not planned as a series or published in order. Finally, in 1850, Cooper published a new edition of the five novels, in chronological order this time.
Did you gain any new perspectives on the earlier two books by writing this one?
Well, this new one confirmed that I had to keep returning to the past to serve my muse, and that I had to keep returning to certain themes to serve myself. I guess I proved myself to be as monomaniacal as many of the authors I admire. I did gain a new sense of how the themes that interest me sweep broadly across early American history, and for the most part resonate for us still today. I think I also learned something about the flexibility of “historical fiction.” I was able to employ (and enjoyed employing) a number of different genres along the way within the larger genre of historical fiction—mystery and crime novel, artist novel, epistolary novel, coming-of-age novel, business novel, the picaresque novel, the quest tale, and so on.
Though each of these novels is set in New England, they are set in different centuries, and you have described the process of writing about each era as “living in it.” What insights did you gain about New England by “living” in these three different periods? What continuities or discontinuities did you discover?
I can only write about the past by immersing myself in the period I am writing about—largely through continual reading and thinking and fantasizing about the place and time and characters. This is a process that takes years (usually three to five) for each narrative. The insights I gained are, I hope, explicit in the texts, and to list them here would probably seem reductive or a little too pat. What one discovers most, I think, is the deep and lasting foundations (the continuity) of human nature over time—our foibles and our accomplishments; our folly and our intelligence; our greed, lust, and spiritual hunger. Maybe everything changes around us, but I believe more than ever that we don’t change much in our deepest selves. Nor in our secret selves.
I did come to appreciate (not so much an insight) the sheer difficulty of survival with all the natural forces arrayed against one before industrialized humanity developed the technologies (and the culture of convenience) most of us take for granted today. That seems an obvious point, but only by living vicariously as I did in these former times could I really begin to appreciate it, or should I say “feel it.” What I came to feel is something like the hovering presence of death that we all sort of know about but that these earlier generations lived with very differently and immediately. “In life we are in the midst of death” had absolute, real meaning once upon a time; it was not just one saying among many in a perfunctory religious service.
You say in the autobiographical profile that at one time the eighteenth century left your imagination “a little cold.” Was there something specific about that period that left you feeling this way? What changed your perspective? What surprised you about the era when you did begin to read and write about it?
I think my problem was that I came to the eighteenth century
through my literary training, mostly. I was young when I studied the eighteenth century in Britain and seemed to find the literature a bit chilly and dry, with a few exceptions like Stern, Swift, or Fielding. I came to know it as a time of conventionalized forms and rules and “neoclassicism. ”Those endless couplets, for example, as if some demonic machine were cranking them out. Of course neo-anything is going to be a lame spin-off of the original. And then there’s that Age of Reason brag—the perhaps arrogant foundations of modern science, technology, capitalism, and so on. I had a prejudice, in short. But slowly I became aware of countercurrents in the century itself—the radical foundations of Western democratic revolutions, the visionary artists like Blake and Smart, the challenges to the old, essentially feudalistic, order from young Wordsworth and Thelwall, to name a couple. But America, for all our desperate aping of the British gentry among our rising classes, was another world indeed. Pre-Revolutionary America had its own Age of Reason, to be sure, but it was also here, across the pond, a time and place of romantic richness, irrational behavior and violence, wild-man capitalism and adventurism, religious enthusiasms, and almost continual warfare on the seas and in the wilderness, a time (like all times) filled with drunkards, politicians, prostitutes, and other obstreperous folk.
You have conducted extensive research for each of your novels. What characterized your research for Rebecca Wentworth’s Distraction? What sources did you find particularly useful? In what ways was the experience of researching this novel different from the earlier books?
Researching this novel was faster than researching the previous two in the series. I think I’m getting better at it, more efficient, and I’m learning as I go along. I’ve developed my immersion process and refined it. I’m better now at picking out essential sources and telling details than I was when I started the trilogy. To name even the most useful books and articles would be a tedious exercise for me and for the reader, but there were some highlights I might point out. The archives of the Portsmouth Athenaeum, the Strawbery Banke Museum, the American Antiquarian Society, and the University of New Hampshire’s Special Collections Department were indispensable. Mostly, these resources provided original sources of the period (published and unpublished) and a few data-based studies by modern experts. Diaries and journals are very helpful, such as those of James Birket, Andrew Burnaby, Alexander Hamilton, and Timothy Walker, who all saw eighteenth-century New England and Portsmouth and gave us glimpses of them. If I had to pick a single most-helpful source it would probably be the New Hampshire Provincial Papers for the 1740s—a published version of the court/legislative activity, day by day. This is a remarkable window into the doings and concerns, large and small, of the people and leaders of coastal New Hampshire and the immediate interior communities. But I also had to research the costume, the art, the military and militia, the taverns and byways, the business practices, and the religious beliefs and frenzies of our forebears. The research is, literally, endless, but one finally stops when the narrative is itself apparently “done.” Or at least that’s the way I work. I write the story while I’m researching the story, and the research doesn’t stop until the story (much revised) feels “finished” to me.
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