by Carla Kelly
“Seriously, Margaret, why now?”
Margaret plumped herself down on her unmade bed. She glared at Sally, then pulled back the coverlets and crawled underneath. The blanket went over her head.
Felling ruthless, Sally yanked off the blanket and posed her question again.
“You’ll think I am an idiot,” came a small voice somewhere between the sheet and a wool blanket.
I already do, Sally thought. “I’m just curious. I tried to get you to read John’s letters and you refused. Why now?”
Silence, then, “Those other letters you pushed at me were so big. So many pages! So many words! I was busy, Sally. This was just a little sheet.” She pulled the coverlet over her head again. “It came by express last night.”
Then, “I was so hoping that cannibals would eat him and no one would know that I had talked the gawky nobody into writing me. What was I thinking?”
Back went the coverlet again. Sally sat down on the bed beside her friend. “Margaret, he was in Canada, and then later in New York City. Cannibals eat people in the South Pacific!”
“How am I to know that?” came a sulky voice.
Paying attention in school wouldn’t have hurt, Sally thought. And now John McPherson was coming to see a young lady who hadn’t ever written to him. If she hadn’t been so disgusted with Margaret and herself, she would have found it funny.
“You have to make a clean breast of it and tell him what you did,” Sally said.
“I can’t!”
“You had better,” Sally told her, pulling back the coverlet again. “Suppose your fiancé gets wind of this?” Just send John to me, Sally thought suddenly, and the heart went out of her.
“My fiancé! I had forgotten all about him!” The sheet came away and Sally stared into Margaret’s stricken eyes. Her friend grabbed her hand. “Sally, I will tell John McPherson that you had wanted to write to him all along and were too shy. I was being kind to a friend.”
Trust Margaret to concoct a scenario favorable to her. “That won’t do,” Sally said.
“It will if I say so.”
Sally sank down beside her friend, wishing she had never agreed to write Margaret’s letters, and at the same time, grateful she had been part of John’s North American adventure. Without even knowing it, he had opened a window on a wider world she knew existed, but which she never thought to see, except through someone else’s eyes. I can be philosophical, she told herself, even as she wanted to push Margaret aside and pull the coverlets up, too. She took Margaret’s hands in hers.
“He’s going to come here, and you are going to tell him the truth,” she said, using her teacher voice as though she were advising an eight-year-old, which somehow seemed appropriate. “He’ll be humiliated and leave Dumfries as soon as he can. Your fiancé will never know, and we will regret having played such a deception on a good man.”
It sounded reasonable. It sounded rational, but oh, the pain in her heart. She knew it had to be impossible to fall in love with someone through a handful of widely spaced letters. Once John heard the worst from Margaret, he wouldn’t linger in Dumfries longer than to see his ramshackle relatives—if any still lived—and be grateful he got out with a whole skin.
“It’s only John McPherson,” Margaret said with a sniff, her expression militant now. “No McPherson has ever amounted to anything.”
Tired of Margaret Patterson, Sally rose to go. “You started this and you can settle it.”
“You are no friend,” Margaret snapped. “Kindly do not bother to show up at my wedding.”
“As you wish,” Sally murmured. “Do the right thing, Margaret. For once, do the right thing.”
T
John McPherson stayed in Bristol for three days, walking the waterfront, eating in good restaurants, and remembering the lean days when he arrived in Bristol, poor but determined not to remain that way.
This visit to the principal port on the west coast of England was night and day, compared to his unheralded arrival in a rainstorm, cold and trying to stay out of everyone’s way. He had been hungry—he was always hungry—and swiped two apples and a pear from a vendor near the waterfront.
He remembered that thievery and walked the waterfront until he located the market with the tables of fruit empty now. He went inside and removed his beaver hat, looking around for the owner.
“Sir? May I help you?” said a man wearing a dingy apron over his work clothes.
He spoke with a deference that startled John, even though he knew he looked the part of a gentleman, from that beaver hat, to a suit of unmistakable American cut, to his well-shined shoes. For a small moment, he had been remembering himself thin and starving, and dressed in shabby clothes that hadn’t been washed in months.
“Help me? Yes, you may,” he said, recalled to the moment. He reached into his coat pocket for his wallet and drew out a pound note. “Eight years ago, I stole two apples and a pear from you because I hadn’t eaten since Carlisle. Please take this and give me no change. I owe you considerable interest on that loan.”
The merchant stared at the pound note, but took it. He was a shop owner, after all. Christmas loomed and he had three hopeful children. “This will constitute the first time a beggar boy has done such a thing, so I thank’ee,” he told John.
“I’ve thought about it through the years,” John replied. “I didn’t mean to be a thief.” He replaced his hat and left the market.
His next visit was to a purveyor of Bristol’s famous blue beads. He bought a single strand and had it wrapped in pretty paper while he waited.
“For your missus?” the jeweler asked. He motioned for his young shop assistant to press down her finger to make the bow tight.
My missus? John thought. We shall see. “Perhaps,” he told the man.
A visit to a bookstore consumed more time. He scanned the shelves, still amazed that he could purchase any volume he wanted. He settled on Jedediah Cleishbotham’s The Heart of Midlothian in four volumes, wondering why Walter Scott still used a pseudonym.
The bookseller recommended a book containing both Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, “by a respectable lady, sir,” the man assured him. Reasoning that all play and no work would make Jack an even duller boy, he bought a new tome, A History of British India, probably destined to put him to sleep. It might prove useful if any of the inns he slept in going north had noisy public rooms, making sleep difficult.
Dusk was fading quickly to evening, even though the hour hadn’t advanced much beyond four of the clock. He ate a good dinner, popped into the posting house to make certain all was ready for an early departure, and returned to his hotel.
He spent a few minutes in a deep leather chair in the lobby, reading the Bristol Chronicle. He had acquired the newspaper habit in New York City. As he read, he heard the inn keep talking to another traveler. He heard whispered “American,” and “going north to Scotland,” and knew he was the object in question.
So I look like an American, he thought, with quiet pride. I wonder who Margaret will see, the man of business or the raggedy lad who left?
He thought of little Sally Wilson, who had seen him off to seek his fortune, sitting on the back of a hay wain, and wondered if she would even recognize him. Of the two young ladies, he thought that Sally would be the least surprised to know of his success, even though he sent his letters to Margaret Patterson. He had a theory about that; time to test it.
T
Travel by post chaise was far superior to the hay wain. It was certainly a stride in seven league boots from travel in the backwoods of the new United States, which meant days on teeth-rattling corduroy roads made of logs, or horseback for weeks on roads that were barely trails. He preferred the canals of New York State, and even the flatboats on the Ohio River to stagecoach. At least there wasn’t much worry from Indians, pushed farther and farther toward the unexplored West near Missouri.
John read and dozed, and then gazed at the alternating rain, drizzle, and snow as they tr
aveled on roads that the Romans had probably laid down years ago, if he remembered aright the lessons from Mr. Wilson, minister of St. George’s Church. He thought of Mrs. Agatha Wilson, who had left this vale of tears two years ago, according to one of Margaret’s letters. Yes, he would certainly have to pay a visit to Reverend Wilson and Sally.
Evenings in the inns were lonely for such a gregarious man as John McPherson. This trip served to remind him of the great gulf in England separating those served and those serving. Left to his newly acquired American ways, he would have dined with his post riders and played cards with them in the public room.
He had timidly suggested such an evening to one of the riders, who shook his head sorrowfully. “Maybe in America, but not here, sir,” the man had said. His following question sounded wistful to John. “Would such a thing happen in the United States?”
“All the time,” John replied, missing his new country with surprising longing. The post rider walked away, shaking his head.
They arrived in Dumfries late in the afternoon. The innkeeper at the Garland Hotel—a place he would never have dared enter eight years ago—moved smartly to assure him of a room with dry sheets with a warming pan between them.
“You’ll be staying for a few days, sir?” the man asked, again with that deference that John was beginning to find uncomfortable.
“A few days.”
“You’re here for the wedding, sir?”
“No. Just to visit a few old friends,” John replied. “A wedding?”
“Aye, Mr…. Mr….” The keep turned around the ledger. “Mr. McPherson. Miss Margaret Patterson is marrying a foreigner from England on Christmas Eve.”
Margaret, Margaret, John thought, more amused than surprised, somehow. Funny that she never mentioned such a life-changing event in her letters. Perhaps it was sudden. It occurred to him that even with his little note sent from Bristol, she had not been expecting him, which nearly made him laugh out loud.
Once he had applied a chapter of History of British India to his brain, he slept the sleep of the pure in heart. The book had proved surprisingly useful on his trip. Before he drifted off, he wondered what Margaret would say when he knocked on her door in the morning.
He enjoyed a leisurely breakfast at the Garland, then strolled to the Patterson mansion on the edge of Dumfries. A cold mist fell, reminding him there were some things he would never miss about Scotland.
He had never even approached the Patterson manse before, basing all his knowledge of it on a lengthy, tree-lined private road and a mere glimpse of a stone house beyond. Skeletal limbs and a few tired leaves tossed here and there would be his memory now.
He gave a firm knock to a door he never thought to enter, and was let inside, after a brief explanation, by a footman who would have shooed him away ten years ago. He found it gratifying, if a little sad, that no one so far in Dumfries had recognized him. His life here as one of the ramshackle McPhersons had amounted to nothing. Put a man in a good suit, low-crowned beaver hat, and a cloak, and the world opens wide.
I am the same man I was, he thought, as he was shown into a sitting room, after leaving said cloak and hat with the footman. I am older and wiser, but I am the same man.
He looked around the lovely room and went to the fireplace, because his hands were cold. No, not just his hands. The room gave off no warmth. A more comforting memory came to mind of the parsonage at St. George’s, book-filled and untidy with paper clutter. He had been there a time or two, right after the death of his mother, whom no one lamented except the McPhersons, because no one took the trouble to know her kindness amid squalor. He turned away from the fireplace. Such thoughts were unprofitable. He was here to test a theory.
Someone cleared her throat and he looked up. Margaret Patterson stood in the doorway, as lovely as he remembered her at age fifteen when she approached him and said she wanted to write to him in Canada. Suspicious, he assumed it was a prank, but the hunger to belong had made him agree to her nonsense.
The letters had come to him through the years, kept in the North West Company office in Montreal until a fur trader was heading in his direction, and then in New York City. They had been his lifeline; he had kept every one.
“Margaret Patterson, you have not changed even a little,” he said, and gave her a proper bow.
To his amusement, she gawked at him, looking less lovely and self-possessed. Her curtsy was proper, but perfunctory. She looked both put upon and irritated, which he charitably put down to her surprise at actually seeing that man she had corresponded with for a decade. She gestured to the hall.
“Mr. McPherson, my father wants to have a word with you. I’ll be here in the sitting room.”
Surprised, he followed her gesture and then a footman down the hall to what turned out to be a bookroom. He was now in the presence of the great Mr. Milo Patterson, who could squeeze a penny until it yelped in pain and slunk to a dark corner to nurse its wounds. Patterson had owned that pathetic scrap of land the McPhersons farmed and showed no sympathy when Mam died. What do you want with me, he asked himself as he bowed and was left standing in front of the desk like a sorry petitioner.
“What are you doing here?” the big man growled, with no preamble.
No, not a big man. Mr. Patterson’s shirt looked too large for him. John smiled at a rather ordinary-looking fellow who appeared to be ill. He was small and the possessor of a pinched, sour expression. John wondered why he had ever feared him. And, come to think of it, his expression mirrored Margaret’s.
“I thought merely to visit Miss Patterson,” John replied. “I am now situated in New York City and work for Mr. John Astor as a purveyor of furs for the European market. My life has changed significantly since Dumfries.”
And then he was asked, in kinder tones, to sit down and say more, which he did, stifling his amusement as Mr. Patterson decided he was worth talking to. He told the man of his own personal fortune, and his growing career with America’s largest global corporation.
“I came here to say hello again to Miss Patterson,” John concluded. “She was always so kind to me in school, and I never forgot.” A little lie in the interest of self-preservation couldn’t hurt.
“Do go see her, John … Mr. McPherson,” the little man said, rising to shake his hand, even bowing a bit. “Please stay for luncheon.”
John swallowed down his unholy glee over such an offer and put on his best business face. In dealing firsthand with Iroquois and touchy Hurons in their lodges, he had learned to cover his emotions as he bargained for furs. That same poker face had served him well as he moved up the fur trade ladder and became a middle man. It hadn’t hurt that he’d discovered a facility with languages that served him well with Frenchmen, Spaniards, and other tribes on America’s frontier.
He politely declined the invitation to luncheon, because he had other plans, and hedged about returning for dinner. He knew he could play Mr. Patterson like a one of Mr. Astor’s clarinets, if need be.
As he returned to the sitting room, escorted by the great man himself, John noticed a certain shabbiness to the manor. It was a place going to seed. And why on earth was Margaret only now getting married, and to an Englishman? She had to be nearly twenty-four—no antique, but not the dewy fresh maiden that a man might want to wed.
He returned to the sitting room and waited there, his shoulders shaking with silent laughter, as Mr. Patterson pulled his daughter into the hall for a few whispered words. When she returned, she gave him a brilliant smile, sat him down on the sofa and crowded close to him.
Up close, he found her less beautiful. Her complexion had an unhealthy tinge to it, and her eyes had a hard look.
She placed her hand on his arm. “Do tell me all about your travels, John,” she said.
“I did in my letters,” he replied. “In considerable detail, I might add.”
Oh, he shouldn’t do this, but he could not resist. “Surely you have not forgotten my letter about captivity with the Hurons and a
near scalping, followed by my escape through a trackless forest?”
“I have not forgotten that incident,” she replied, increasing the pressure on his arm. “Poor, poor you!”
His only dealings with the Hurons had been marathon bargaining sessions that left him red-eyed from sitting for hours in a smoky lodge. They had been more than kind, once he spoke to them in their own tongue. The North West Company had declared him king of the Huron trade, which had brought him to the attention of Astor in the brand new United States, and a better career path.
He let her chatter on a few more minutes, because what man doesn’t like praise, even the false kind, heaped upon him? As he listened, John began to count himself a fortunate man, indeed, that another of his skills was reading people.
Detaching himself from Margaret Patterson proved to be a challenge, but he was equal to it. He promised a later return, probably no more sincere than all the blather she was heaping upon him. Since Margaret Patterson, that self-absorbed girl, had grown into Miss Patterson, still self-absorbed, he excused his own prevarication.
Once outside, he breathed in the cold air and congratulated himself on his escape. He did turn around for another wave and a bow, because she stood in the doorway, but that was it. He had survived with his whole skin, and a complete confirmation of his decade-long suspicions.
Back in town, he knocked on a more humble door, and was invited in by the Reverend Wilson, retired minister of St. George’s and his former village teacher. He spent an edifying hour in the good man’s presence. An inquiry about Miss Wilson’s address meant another hour to cool his heels and compose himself.
He went back to the inn and wrote a letter, just a short one, to Sally Wilson. He signed it “Faithfully Yours, Hay Wain Lad,” and asked the ostler’s son to deliver it to the village school. He composed himself for a short nap, and found that all he could do was lie there, shoes off, comfortable, with a huge smile on his face.
He had begun his journey to Scotland wondering if what he thought was true would lead to more disappointment. Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, he had reminded himself that his intuition was sound in more than just fur and business. Even better, he believed in himself.
