The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton

by Robert J. Begiebing

  Had I been at liberty to run out into the street, I would not, I now understood, have felt safe asking for help. Many of the people I saw seemed exuberant, some nearly to the point of delirium, yet there was a garish cast to their persons and proceedings that suggested to me the desperation of Nether Regions, of antic figures from Hogarth or Brueghel.

  Yet I had witnessed a mere pocket of my new neighborhood, in, as I soon discovered, its quieter hours. For later, as I watched evening coming and finally darkness spreading over the city and settling comfortably into the corners and alleyways, the scene below seemed to quicken, to throb and blazon forth under a strange flaring light that, for me, only heightened the tawdry chaos of this neighborhood. How many afternoons and how many evenings was I condemned to witness the shameless little dramas of the street?

  I recall feeling in the early days and weeks as if I were an aloof and ruthful spirit looking down upon the vanities and follies of the human race, as if, indeed, the windowpanes through which I observed these people were in fact that adamantine barrier which separates the visible from the invisible worlds.

  I was soon to discover, however, that the barrier between me and the street below was something more than those thin panes of glass through which I observed the garish parade. For on the third night of my immurement I met my chief tormentor.

  It happened after the Ethiopian had returned to my room with a supper tray balanced on one enormous hand. He placed the tray on my bed, again without a single word, and without expression on his face. I turned from my window to watch him in a silence of my own as he came and went. Then I ate the light meal and drank off the small pot of tea. I began to understand that every meal (there were two a day) was to be light. But just as I had finished, someone knocked softly on the door. I asked who was there, but for reply heard only another knock. I stood up and returned to my sealed window, thereby placing the bed, with its curtains drawn aside, between me and whoever should enter.

  A key turned in the lock and the knock was repeated.

  “Come in,” I said softly. The door opened and suddenly there before me stood Joseph Dudley.

  My knees began to tremble as if I were about to engage in life and death struggle. A thousand unspoken questions coursed through my mind. No doubt prepared for my confusion, he merely indicated with a small gesture that I should sit in the chair by the window and compose myself. I sat down, without taking my eyes off his face. In his white waistcoat and kid gloves, he was handsome as ever, as if he were on his way to the theater or opera, his full dark hair combed perfectly into place, shining like polished leather above the rather pale but perfect skin of his smooth-shaven face.

  He was smiling, almost as if to encourage me. When he began to speak, I remained in the chair.

  “I’m truly sorry, Mrs. Fullerton,” he said, “that we should meet again in these circumstances.” His good eye glanced quickly around the small room, his face tending toward disapproval. “Rest assured you are under my protection here. No injury shall befall you so long as you are my concern.” He smiled again.

  “I’m sure you’re aware of betraying my confidence previously. I’m not a man to nurse grudges.” He spoke serenely, pausing to let his words make their mark upon me. “Yet like every man I do not relish being taken for a fool. Mattie, Mrs. Moore, assures me that you’ve been seen to, and she has treated you well, I believe, just as I’ve instructed.”

  I found my voice. “Mrs. Moore? To what end have you brought me here, Mr. Dudley? And to what sort of establishment?”

  “You are safe here,” he suggested, again in a calm voice, “so long as you betray me no further, as I’m sure you would not wish to.”

  “My questions remain, sir!”

  “Yes, my hand is in your restraint,” he said. “And why should it not be, given your promises and deceits? Yet, as I’ve said, I bear no grudge. I do not desire that you should suffer, nor to restrain you any longer than necessary.”

  “Necessary!”

  “Please, Mrs. Fullerton. If I may …” He walked over to the bed, sat upon it, and turned enough to face me. “If I may,” he began again. “I want you to understand two things. First, that I and I alone have stayed your uncle’s hand, and the hands of his … emissaries.” He put a long, gloved finger to his lips. “Please allow me to continue. I have your interests at heart, you see. I do not wish that your uncle should have you forcibly returned or treated as a common criminal. Nor do I wish to see you, in transit, at the mercy of hireling mollbuzzers or reprobates.

  “Secondly,” he began after a brief pause, “I wish that we, you and I, should reach an understanding, more than a mere accommodation. That you can trust me, that I do not wish to restrict you, that I welcome your ambitions, your lack of conventionalisms—that, finally, I wish us to become friends and intimates. Since discovering after long search your whereabouts, I have delighted in hearing of your progress. I have the acquaintance of two or three gallery owners. In brief, I too may be of some use to you, if you’ll but relinquish your scruples toward me—I am the first to admit that we started on the wrong foot—and accept my offer of friendship.”

  He paused. I could hardly find where to begin. “And what does your betrothed know of your wishes,” I blurted, “to say nothing of this—what shall I call it?—captivity you have placed me in?”

  “Please, Mrs. Fullerton,” he said, raising his hand again. “You have the habit of seeing everyone in the worst possible light, if I may say so. To be brief, in answer to your rather personal query, my engagement to Amelia, to Miss Simmons, is terminated. I am quite free to cultivate other friendships and relations with the fair sex. So you see, there is no hindrance from that quarter, no need to scruple.”

  “Mr. Dudley, unless I’m free to leave this … house immediately, I will not hear of friendships and relations. I will not listen to you further.”

  “I understand your concern, Mrs. Fullerton,” he said before I could go on. “Indeed, I share it. I had hoped you’d listen.” He smiled. “To my reasonable appeals. I will press you no further this evening, as I am in any event otherwise engaged.” He pulled out his watch. “But I wish you to consider a little longer my offer of protection and friendship. And help in your work. Were I to relinquish my interest in you, and in your safety, your uncle’s men would swoop down on you like owls upon a helpless chick.”

  He rose off the bed, smiled, and without a single word more quietly let himself out of my room. I heard the key turn in the lock, and again I was alone.

  I remained seated by the window, confused and feeling even more helpless than I had before his appearance. Gradually, there came over me a terrible oppressiveness of spirit. It was not merely the sealed window, the locked door, the utter dependency upon total strangers for my most basic needs. It was all that, of course. But more than these strictures, it now came to me with frightening clarity, was a deeper violation.

  Held in this tiny room through each round of the sun and moon, I might be in any state of dress, dishabille, sleep, wakefulness, or personal function when, without warning, one of the strangers whom I had now seen, and God knows what others, might unlock my door and enter abruptly. It was, finally, this exposure to the sudden violation of my dignity and privacy that now truly oppressed me. It was as if my every movement, thought, and dream were no longer my own, were no longer inviolate to the merest whim or incidental intrusion of others.

  AND NOW I knew that it was none other than young Joseph Dudley who had undone me, destroyed my dreams, smothered my ambitions, and turned the course of my life, as if a free highland rivulet had been straightened to a ceaseless drudgery at the manufacturer’s wheel. Yet how could I have foreseen my undoing upon meeting him or upon meeting, first, his most respectable father?

  I recalled the day my brother Tom, my companion in travel, and I had entered Worcester—an industrious town of woollen and cotton mills—feeling hopeful, as if our luck were turning for the better once again after a bad day in Fitchburg. Even t
he broad, tree-lined streets with handsome buildings and shops, a perfectly delightful, well-shaded Common, and surrounding undulant hills with well-regulated homes and farms seemed to welcome us.

  “Spaulding and Harrington,” from Worcester Business Directory for 1842–43.

  Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

  We no sooner saw our own advertisement for taking likenesses in the newspaper late the next afternoon than a most prosperous-looking gentleman called. It was immediately clear to us that he had his suspicions about traveling painters. While we sat on the settee in the sitting room of our lodging house, Mr. Augustus Dudley asked if we knew of “this fellow Grimmage, Mr. Jason Grimmage, a limner like yourselves.”

  We were pleased to say we knew nothing about him; Mr. Dudley’s manner suggested that his association with Grimmage was not a happy one.

  “A most ridiculous and disrespectful fellow, this Grimmage,” he said. “My wife nearly boxed the man’s ears; she sent him packing in no uncertain terms! I can tell you that.”

  “How dreadful for you and Mrs. Dudley, sir,” I offered. “Was his work so poor as that?”

  “We never discovered the measure of his work, for he was most intemperate.”

  “Ah, I see, sir,” I said, “and that was his offense, then. Mrs. Dudley did well to send him away directly.”

  “His commission was to paint a family portrait and one each of me and Mrs. Dudley. But at each sitting he seemed more intoxicated than at the last. So on the third attempt we threw him out.”

  We conversed for some time, and eventually Mr. Dudley seemed satisfied with our deportment and offered to accompany us to see his manufactory, which he wished to be evidenced in his own portrait. The mill was located below the town in one of the many villages on the south-flowing Blackstone River. And his splendid home, where he wished us to take the sittings, was on a rise nearby, among the farms neatly enclosed by fence and fold. His portrait alone was my most handsome commission yet, and I expected to spend nearly three days on it. Since we would need to stay on a considerable time to execute all the work he had in mind, Mr. Dudley offered us lodging, with only the cost of our meals to be deducted from the commissions.

  It was late in the second day of his sitting that I began, from sketch-studies, the depiction of his mills through a handsomely draped window. The mills were white clapboarded buildings, with the main building topped by a cupola and a full clerestory monitor roof. Here was a man who had weathered the financial storms that had undone so many others, including Tom’s former employer, and who clearly intended his portrait to celebrate his emergence as a commercial patrician with whom the world must now reckon.

  It was at the end of the second sitting that I met his eldest son, Joseph, who entered to see how the portrait was progressing as his father was leaving to attend to more important affairs. I had just turned my attention to the representation of his mills. Mr. Dudley introduced us, but I felt as though I already knew the young man. For his father had spoken to me proudly of his family, and especially of this eldest son among eight children who were the products of his three marriages. His first wife had died of the consumption, his second in childbirth. It was Joseph who worked alongside his father in their textile business.

  He was a handsome young man, and he knew it, but given to an inordinance of pomatum and Old West India bay water, to a stiffness of waistcoat, a tightness of trouser, and an exorbitance of silk cravats. And he was quick-witted. I knew, however, of his betrothal to the daughter of a prominent judge. Moreover, I found rather discomposing his one immobile glass eye—which his father had informed me was the result of a factory accident. It detracted nothing from his agreeable appearance but added a slight, inexplicably sinister element to his aspect. As soon as his father left the room we discussed the portrait briefly, and then Mr. Joseph asked after “my husband”—meaning Tom. I explained my situation as a widow and my true relation to Tom, who was out posting handbills in the city. Thereafter, Mr. Joseph grew attentive toward me. I had no idea just how things stood between him and his betrothed, but his behavior seemed improvidently forward.

  As he fumbled with his watch chain and seals in departing, he had the face to ask if I would walk out with him after tea to enjoy the cooler evening air, a summer habit, he assured me, of his own. I made no promises but let him talk on. He confirmed, also, that I would be staying on somewhat longer to take a likeness of his mother, and he suggested that Tom and I might do well to advertise among the mill girls, whether in the village or elsewhere, for portraits.

  That evening Mr. Augustus Dudley seemed pleased to have us at his table, spread over a Saxony carpet and laid with every silver goblet, spoon, knife, and fork imaginable, with every bright French china vase, silver tureen, olive boat, plate, and compotier. He and Tom conversed much of business, the recent financial debacle, and current machinery of textile manufacturing. At one point while we were with the Dudleys, Mr. Dudley did indeed offer Tom work in his mills, but my faithful brother declined, saying that he had promised his devotion to my own success and that a gentleman could hardly leave such a “comely and talented young widow to fend for herself on the open road.” Nevertheless, Tom suggested, he would be pleased to consider the offer if extended again once my independence had been assured.

  During these mealtime colloquia, I found myself engaged mostly by young Joseph and Mrs. Dudley. On the evening before our final day, Joseph renewed his invitation to walk out with him in the evening, and because I had seen that he did regularly take the cool air after his evening meal, and because I had come to make his acquaintance a little better, I saw no harm in it.

  The evening was lovely, the moon casting a white iridescence over everything it touched. In the distance whippoorwills called and everywhere crickets sang their love songs in that great thrumming of the night, as if moonlight and cricket song were the obverse of sunlight and the throbbing of bees among summer blossoms. Had any of our artists, I wondered for a moment, ever quite captured on canvas this effect of unearthly moonlight laid gently upon our terrestrial surface, that enwhitened American landscape punctuated only by the shadows of houses, barns, and trees? Even the divine Allston generalizes.

  “You are warm enough, Mrs. Fullerton?” Joseph asked as I admired his mother’s blue-and-white planting bed at the center of her garden, which was all the more striking for the moonlight.

  “Quite. It’s a lovely summer’s eve.”

  “All the more so for your company,” he said.

  I remained silent. I supposed he might mean no harm; a certain forwardness seemed to be his natural manner, or perhaps what he had been bred to by so enterprising a father.

  “Your father tells me,” I began as we walked on, “that you are to be married soon.” He hesitated. “You must feel elevated at the prospect.”

  “Not particularly,” he said. “You see, I’ve known the young lady all my life; we were at times playmates as young children. She’s an eminently worthy person, and makes for me an excellent marriage, but we are, so to speak, fulfilling the enduring expectations of others more than our own inclinations.”

  “I’m sure that knowing one another so well, you’ll learn to love lastingly, as do so many others in time. Familiarity merely allays infatuation.”

  “Ah, you are no doubt right, Mrs. Fullerton. Why don’t we rest a moment here,” he said, indicating the fanciful wrought-iron garden bench separating two large flower gardens. “I don’t wish to tire you at this hour.”

  “I’m not at all tired, Mr. Dudley. But we may sit if you like.”

  He turned the conversation to his plans for the family properties and business, which one day he would pass on to an heir of his own as an estate enlarged beyond even his father’s ambitions.

  He seemed a little too insistent in pressing upon me his future prospects, and he hinted of my own appeal to him, all in spite of his betrothal. At length, he began to insinuate that he had experienced certain interludes, of a questionable nature I h
ad no doubt, with several available young women. I tried to change the tack of his conversation, but with little effect. For he suddenly turned to me and took my hand, with a remarkable delicacy I seemed unable to shun, and looked into my eyes.

  “Does not a beautiful widow such as yourself, Mrs. Fullerton, suffer the absence of a husband’s tendernesses?”

  “What I suffer, sir, is my own affair, and hardly any concern of yours.”

  It was then that he stole a kiss. He was most insistent, as if he were used to women’s pliancy. He quickly stood up as I pulled back from him, but he retained my hand and kept his good eye on mine. I admit that he was shockingly handsome in the moonlight, especially in his moment of passion, but I could hardly let this man have the advantage of me, even though he had most likely had the advantage of nearly everything and everyone he desired. I was not about to become another of his playthings.

  Yet he was relentless, the grasp of his hand had grown alarmingly forceful, and I began to fear my situation, as we were completely alone in the garden and some distance from the manse. Moreover, as he stood before me like a passionate hero in some giddy tale, it was clear that he was most certainly aroused and capable of almost anything.

  I confess I felt an unsettling mixture of terror and excitement for a moment. Here stood the first man to confront me with his feelings since I cast off my weeds in favor of the open road and the unrestrained practice of my humble arts. Here stood the first man, indeed, to seize my hand—nay, my arm—in passion since the loss of my husband whose many tendernesses I sorely missed, as young Mr. Dudley’s words had so starkly reminded me.

  I now saw clearly my own weaknesses, and I saw further that Mr. Dudley was a man adept at perceiving the weaknesses and wounds in another. That he was not above utilizing for his own gratification what he perceived in others was now equally clear to me. I suddenly stood up and backed away a step, yet his hand still clutched mine.