The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton

by Robert J. Begiebing

  “Mrs. Fullerton,” he said, “there is a summer house, completely private I assure you, just over here.”

  “Mr. Dudley, you behave like a precocious child, with no concern for the effects of your behavior upon others. I must insist that you allow me to return to my room. Please do not follow. I will complete the promised portraits of your father and mother, and then be on my way.”

  He pulled me toward him, as if to interrupt my little lecture on his behavior, whereupon I gave a small cry of surprise. At that very moment, dear Tom, who had come out to see what kept us, stepped in between Mr. Dudley and me and calmly threatened to spoil that young man’s face to such an extent that no woman would look at him twice ever again.

  “And you may count your blessings, sir,” Tom added, “if I do not expose your brutal actions toward this innocent woman to your father.”

  Young Mr. Dudley evinced the slightest sneer of contempt, turned on his heel, and walked briskly away.

  I lay troubled all that night. And how was I to remain calm the following day as my generous patrons sat before me while I completed their portraits?

  But the next morning I arose early, set Tom to priming three canvases with a base coat of light gray, and went directly into the sitting room where I was to finish Mr. Dudley’s portrait. I adjusted the damask draperies as I knew he desired, set up my easel, palette, and maul stick, and steeled myself to complete these commissions expeditiously. Indeed, I completed his before noon, and worked on Mrs. Dudley’s from about two o’clock.

  She chose to sit in her favorite room (the music room on the second floor, with prodigious mahogany gilt mirrors and a rosewood pianoforte) where she had arranged a satin daybed before a large window, swag-curtained in double silks, that looked out over her gardens. Here she sat in her modest, pleasing manner, wearing a bright blue, tight-waisted gown set off by a stunning necklace of coral beads, as if to charm away any intrusion of bad luck or evil in her life. At first she engaged me in pleasant if trivial conversation about her children, her garden, and fashion—commenting particularly upon my own habit of simple dress.

  “Few,” she offered approvingly, “have the grace and trim to be so free of artificial compressions about the waist, of binding ligatures that prevent the natural movement of one’s limbs. You are a most fortunate and unusual young woman, Mrs. Fullerton.” She smiled.

  “I sometimes feel a little unusual, Mrs. Dudley, but hardly ever fortunate.” I returned her smile.

  “I hope my stepson has behaved well, Mrs. Fullerton. I suspect he might be a little distracted by you.”

  I stopped my brush and looked directly into her eyes. Without a blink she went on.

  “I noticed perhaps a rather sudden strain between Tom and Joseph.” She smiled again. “You see, my husband has worked very hard for everything we have. And he is incapable of dishonesty or discourtesy. We lay his every success in bad times and good to the sweat of his brow, to his probity, and to a certain—what shall I call it?—civic virtue. Yes, and why not? He has been a pillar of strength in church and village.”

  “I don’t doubt his merit, Mrs. Dudley. He seems very industrious, and has been in every way straightforward with my brother and me.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That is what I mean. But our young Joseph has come into all this,” she glanced around the room as if taking in the entire house and grounds, “through the long labors and risks endured by his father, not by himself. We have perhaps somewhat overindulged him, perhaps he is rather impulsive and assumptive as a result. I notice that he does not always observe every courtesy with the ladies. That he can be impatient. That he too often expects his wishes to be accommodated …”

  “I’m sure more experience of life will teach him otherwise, Mrs. Dudley.”

  “I should think so.” She smiled. “Please don’t misunderstand me, Mrs. Fullerton. My husband requires that he work hard for his place in the mills and for his rewards. Mr. Dudley would never have it otherwise. But we have wanted the best for all the children and, well, to be forthright myself, Joseph has gotten himself into misunderstandings and scrapes before, because of his expectations, I believe. There are times when he seems to believe that the world has been arranged for his particular gratification. He is a great one for the ladies, for sleighing and summering parties, all manner of amusements.”

  “He is young still,” I offered, keeping my brush busy. I wanted to spend my final days here free of further complications; I wanted to finish my work and be away.

  “Yes, I agree.” She smiled again. “My hope is that he take greater responsibility for his actions—beyond the mills, I mean—and become a man worthy of his father, and of all his father has struggled to build. You have heard him speak of Miss Simmons?”

  “Yes. Surely matrimony will restrain him, give him opportunity for these other … responsibilities?”

  “So we had hoped, Mrs. Fullerton. But I confess I am no longer as certain as I once was. I see now that she has grown up even more indulged than he. They are perhaps too much alike in their need to have every impulse gratified, finally, to be good for one another. For her part, she seems to believe that life arranges itself about her like a sentimental romance—and she the heroine at the center of it. I believe Joseph indulges her fancies, toys with her for his own ends, as it were, and she finds pleasure in pretending that she doesn’t realize he’s doing so. It does not seem a healthy basis for relations, and I think he begins to tire of her himself. But all this is a long way to say that I hope he has not offended you in any way. I am fond of Joseph and know him to be capable of goodness. But I know he is also at times capable of causing much trouble for himself and others.”

  “No,” I said. “I have taken no offense, Mrs. Dudley. I found him merely forward, perhaps. But I think we understand one another. Please don’t concern yourself. My object is to work well while I am here, to give you and your husband good satisfaction by my portraits. And then Tom and I shall be on our way to pursue our own fortunes.”

  She seemed to accept my assurances. She must have known her stepson well enough to fear the worst. Whether she spoke to him I did not know, but Joseph Dudley never showed himself during the remainder of my tenure, allowing me to accomplish my task more readily than I had reason to hope.

  And while I was completing Mrs. Dudley’s portrait, Tom busied himself in promoting our trade among the mill operatives in the Blackstone Valley from Worcester to the southern limits of the Commonwealth, just above Woonsocket, Rhode Island. Late the following day I departed the Dudley manse for our rooms in Worcester with all the dispatch I had promised Mr. Joseph.

  As my wagon pulled away, I caught sight of him in one of the upper windows, grim-faced, stepping aside just as I looked up, and a dark bat of foreboding flitted across my vision.

  AND NOW, sitting in a room sealed by his hand, I asked myself how might I thwart his tyranny? I had entertained various fancies. But the sheer gravity of practical considerations and the press of utter vulnerability weighed so heavily upon my mind and soul that I could not settle on a strategy. Only once did I consider terminating my life as the sole means of escape. But I felt the repugnance of self-destruction upon awakening one night from a dream, just before the hour of dawn.

  I had been standing on the bank of a wide, shallow, swift-moving river that opened into sunlight from the dark wood beyond either shore. The bright water reflected the blue of the sky exactly. A young girl emerged from the wood and stood on the far side looking at me. I soon noticed that she held in front of her (turned back side toward me) a framed canvas. Then I recognized Effie, a child I had painted in death, at her mother’s request. She was wearing the same white sleeping gown I had painted her in. I was unable to turn from her and run back into the deep forest behind me.

  She smiled in a friendly manner, waved as if in greeting, and motioned for me to join her on the opposite bank. Unable to move, I was equally unable to turn away from her. I knew that soon she would turn the front side of t
he canvas toward me, and I also knew that I did not want to see the painting. When she did turn it toward me, I recognized a portrait of myself—perhaps she had painted it!—and I began to cry out. My own cries awakened me, and I slept no more.

  Recalling that dream now, I stood up and began to pace about my enclosure, as if movement would help ward off panic. Perhaps my only hope of liberation would be through some subterfuge directed at Mr. Dudley, some masquerade of compliance that might raise opportunities for escape. But I sickened at the thought of the cost of any degree of compliance.

  No, until I knew the circumstances of my captivity in every dimension, I now thought, I had better not act rashly. Survival and quiet resistance, held in some difficult balance under Mr. Dudley’s discipline, was all I dared. His reasonableness and gentility, his apparent concern for my well-being, like his impeccable opera-suit, seemed all too shamlike for me. How could I ever willingly capitulate to his momentarily restrained passions? I would, for the immediate future, have to live under the oppressions I have described, lying in wait, in hope and cunning, for the first occasion of my deliverance.

  TWO

  How I became an itinerant painter

  How I came to live in such a state of vulnerability is not a simple tale. But I cannot imagine, reader, that you have not asked such a question yourself. All during my captivity memories washed over me—memories which may now enlighten my reader as much as they sustained me in my fear and loneliness.

  To begin, I should say that during my twentieth year my husband passed away, in June of 1836, in the agonies of bilious fever. I soon found that I must shake off my sorrows and turn my mind to getting my own living. Of course, I did not contemplate marriage after such a loss. My parents had both passed away of the consumption during my childhood and we children (there were four of us, two sisters and a brother) had scattered about New England to come into the care of family relations. My brother and I were taken under the wing of my mother’s sister Sally Wentworth and her husband, a dairy farmer in Willoston, New Hampshire, near the border with Massachusetts.

  Wrought with new sorrows and confusions upon my husband’s death, I returned in mourning to Willoston. I found repugnant, however, the ceaseless drudgeries of farm life, and I gradually began to feel the necessity of turning my hand to some other labor that might allow me to earn my keep in my uncle’s household.

  I had, it seemed to me, but one pleasurable skill the world might willingly remunerate, and that was limning—painting true likenesses.

  Previously, I had on occasion taken likenesses in waters and oils of the farmers and merchants of Lexington, Massachusetts, where I had lived with my husband after our marriage. These were accounted well done, and true. And although I had begun merely to amuse myself in idle moments, before long several people of the town came to me and offered to pay modestly for similar portraits of their children or themselves. Whenever I could discover time for it, I delighted in this avocation, always considering it more a diversion than a competence.

  Sometime after returning to Willoston, as I say, I took up my brushes, paints, palette, and boards in earnest, and before long was spending not mere idle moments but my most industrious hours plying my craft to earn my way in the world. Indeed, any roving artisan who brought his trade to Willoston soon discovered little public desire for his services. “Oh, but we have Widow Fullerton, you see,” or some such thing people would say, “and her likenesses are serving quite well.” In point of fact, however, Willoston being a limited and generally impecunious community, I found myself out of regular commissions within several months.

  The subsequent year of 1837 was, moreover, a time of great financial panic across the land, a time of inevitable winter which men had forgotten in the summer of their prosperity, an arctic blast which awakened them from their gorgeous dreams into the desolation of forsaken fidelity and confidence. I will not expostulate here upon the frequency with which this pattern of dreaming and waking repeats itself. The fall into desolation of that year was for me, however, fortuitous, causing my brother Thomas to return from Massachusetts where he had gone to make his way in textile manufacturing. Being a nephew, and ambitious, he had not seen an adequate future for himself on our uncle’s hardscrabble farm; he dreamt of making his fortune through his own mechanical skills and through acquiring a sound knowledge of manufacturing processes. I regretted his temporary failure, yet relished his presence once again. He was a little over a year older than I, about six feet in height, and endowed with the powerful frame and flesh of a young man who had, until recently, tilled the land all his life.

  As when we were children together, we once again spent a portion of our infrequent leisure discussing our aspirations, which of dire necessity had changed considerably on both our parts. Our relations, which had been those of brother and sister orphans, regained something of their old strength, and I entrusted Tom with thoughts I had not opened to others. Mainly, I revealed my fancies of traveling among my scattered relatives to secure more regular employment as a portraitist. I told Tom one evening that I saw no reason why I might not, just as others had, support myself in fair seasons by my skill.

  “How much,” Tom immediately asked, “will people pay for a portrait, Allegra?”

  “Well, that depends,” I said. “One would scale one’s craft to a patron’s purse.”

  “Can you give me some idea then?”

  “To speak in general, five to ten dollars for a person’s portrait to hang on a wall is not uncommon, slightly less to paint fine—miniature—and perhaps approaching twenty-five for large canvases or group portraits. More if one’s reputation rises.”

  “Is that so? Why, Allegra, that’s on a par with a cleric’s salary for a week! Nearly a month’s wages for John, is it not?” John was our uncle’s hired man.

  I could see Tom calculating a week’s work of one or two portraits a day, a level of performance I hoped to maintain by moving about to where the work was.

  “Your reputation could soon be enhanced as well,” he said as if musing.

  The next week, Tom grew more and more interested in my proposed travels, not only, I began to see, for their pecuniary potential but for the opportunity of adventure. He too had long ago developed a distaste for farm labors, and he was a born dreamer.

  Suffice to say he ultimately proposed that we act together upon my aspirations. He assured me that a young widow traveling about on her own in search of commissions, even among her limited family relations, would never do, but that he might accompany me as a kind of “assistant-promoter-protector, et cetera,” as he put it.

  “You can show me how to mount and stretch and prepare canvases and boards,” Tom said earnestly, “and purchase supplies, grind pigments, and assist you in every way. And wouldn’t moving about the countryside be an agreeable way of earning one’s living—nay, perhaps fortune!—in these uncertain times. And mightn’t we make the acquaintance, dear sister, of the best society villages and centers of commerce can offer?”

  I agreed with his proposal that I should cast off my second mourning. For if I had already laid aside my veil and my black crape sleeves and collars for tarleton and cambric, our success might depend on a quiet, if untimely, laying aside of even my sable silks and trims for violets and, in summer, whites and colors. As a sobering memento, however, I resolved to wear the glass-and-gold brooch containing a lock of my dear husband’s hair.

  “We shall have handbills printed, and I can see to the promotion of your works (you have always given good satisfaction), drive our wagon, care for our horse, look after your accounts, keep a sharp eye on would-be cheaters and frauds, and, in short, perform every useful task that would free you to your highest level of production.” He smiled grandly. “Fullerton and Wentworth Enterprises!” he added, with an expansive wave of his arm toward the hills. Tom saw us traveling the highways in full equipage—bank notes, no doubt, bristling among my palette knives, brushes, maul stick, easels, and frames.

  “Horse a
nd wagon?” I asked. Tom looked wistfully toward our uncle’s barn.

  My uncle Simeon Wentworth had always played the petty tyrant about his farmlands and household. My Aunt Sally, a kind, generous woman given to the compensations of religious frenzy, could little alter her circumstances. And our cousins, Seth and Simeon junior, seemed unwilling to release themselves and strike out on their own. Yet Tom had pursued his education and tasted freedom; he had no more inclination than I to remain in thrall to our uncle’s farm a day longer than necessary.

  To be brief, Tom and I therefore pooled our meagre resources and purchased new palette boards, brushes, oils and varnishes, turpentine, drawing papers, dry colors, canvas, crayons, pencils, and sketching boards in sufficient quantity to get us underway. We then rehabilitated a broken wagon lying among weeds behind the dairy barn. When we felt ready, I wrote a letter to Aunt Sally explaining my desire to make my own way in the world, against convention, with Tom’s assistance, and thanking her for every care and kindness.

  Then one clear midnight in the summer of 1837, the nearly full moon shining above our truant heads, Tom and I stole out of my uncle’s farmhouse, the old patriarch’s snores rattling assurances that he was still wrapped in head handkerchief and slumber.

  Thus we began our journey together. We had hope of little more than improving our fortunes during the seasonable months of that year, and our only fear was that Uncle Simeon, imagining some breach of familial decorum or trust, would send for the constable to retrieve us. We knew Uncle Simeon well enough to expect that he would not take kindly to our pressing into service good old Rachel, now the farm’s matriarchal mare, who had served as Tom’s faithful companion since childhood during many a ramble and labor.

  But we made good time through the night and all the next day. Uncle Simeon’s outrage at our absconding we discovered much later when we were at a distance well beyond, or so we had thought, his despotic reprisals.