The Last Refuge

by Marcia Talley

  I laced my fingers with his. ‘Unfortunately, we don’t own a billiard table.’

  ‘Improvise, improvise, improvise,’ my husband said.

  A few minutes later, in my own twenty-first century dining room, I got rogered, good and proper.

  FIVE

  ‘I’ve been wearing the same dress for a week and, look at it! It’s a road map of kitchen disasters. This grease spot was yesterday’s roast and this crusty one over here is where I slopped egg yolks all over it. There’s burn marks from practically falling into the fireplace, and I can’t tell you how many times I wiped my face with the hem. I stink to high heaven! I would kill for a hot shower.’

  Karen Gibbs, cook

  It actually took until Wednesday before all the paperwork was in order and I found myself and my overnight bag of toiletries being whisked away from Annapolis in the back seat of a black Lincoln Town Car, heading south to Williamsburg, Virginia where I’d meet the rest of my television family.

  After a four-hour slog down Interstate 95 – a nightmare commute, no matter what the hour, but at least I wasn’t driving – the chauffeur dropped me off at Providence Hall Guest Houses on South England Street, one of Williamsburg’s finer hotels in the heart of the historic district, directly adjacent to the posh Colonial Williamsburg Inn.

  As part of the orientation packet Jud had promised, I’d been given a handout from Colonial Williamsburg entitled ‘Daily Schedule for an Urban Gentry Housewife’ which I’d read in the limo on the way down. I was relieved to have it confirmed in writing what Jud had told me earlier: that the Donovans were well-to-do. I’d have domestics – both indentured servants and slaves – to perform the grunt work around the house, although I’d be expected to supervise their efforts. In the days to come, Jud’s memo said, I’d be taken in hand by re-enactors and given crash courses in cooking, cleaning, gardening and dairying, eighteenth-century style.

  Also in the packet were several sheets of 8-1/2 x 11 with color photographs of the cast, their names and ages underneath their headshots; a kind of Who’s Who of Patriot House. The cover sheet was stamped ‘Confidential: Not for Dissemination’ and I could understand why. It’d been thrown together in a hurry. I’d seen more flattering photographs on Most Wanted posters.

  Arranged in four rows of three like a high school yearbook – but without the autographs and scrawled endearments – were my TV family. John ‘Jack’ Donovan, Patriot, his red hair as abundant and perfectly coifed as the Nightly News anchor on WFXM. Jack’s children, sixteen-year-old Melody – looking like she’d rather be anywhere else – and nine-year-old Gabriel, eyes full of mischief and cute as a button. Katherine Donovan was included, too, with an ‘X’ over her photo, one black line marring the perfection of her pale Irish skin. Harsh. I hoped her children hadn’t seen this; it seemed a touch insensitive, to say the least. The list continued: Amy, Gwendolyn and Karen, Michael, Alex and Dex. Jeffrey Wiley, too, eyes huge behind his glasses, with a toothbrush-style moustache – think Adolf Hitler as geek. Over the next three months, I’d get to know them all, and their roles, very well indeed.

  I’d checked into the hotel, found my room and was pressing a hot washcloth to my face when Jud knocked on the door armed with my schedule for the next four days. A few minutes later, with cursory introductions all around, he inserted me into a late-afternoon training session on colonial games and pastimes, already in progress, before rushing off on some important errand.

  Sprawled in an armchair in one corner of the hotel lounge, a girl who looked about fifteen or sixteen was scowling over a piece of embroidery. Embroidery cottons, each color wrapped around an hourglass-shaped bit of cardboard, were lined up on the arm of her chair like soldiers. A strand of her stick-straight black hair – a stark contrast to the girl’s pale skin – hung over her left cheek as she worked. She swiped it away impatiently, revealing a multi-studded and beringed earlobe. This had to be Melody Donovan, my ‘niece.’ Eventually somebody would have to tell Melody that the earrings – and the stud that presently decorated her nose – would have to go. I’d dealt with sullen teenagers before – my daughter, Emily, had been a worrisome handful at that age – but I hoped it wouldn’t end up being me.

  At a table to my right, a bespectacled youth was playing checkers with a boy who, judging from his black hair, had to be Gabriel, Melody’s little brother. As I stood stupidly in the doorway of the room where Jud had abandoned me, Gabriel – playing black – jumped three of his older partner’s pieces and snatched them triumphantly off the board. ‘Woot, woot!’

  At a square table in the center of the room, four people sat playing cards. ‘Here. Sit,’ one of them said, leaping to his feet. ‘We’re about to start another hand. You can partner with Amy.’

  I started to object, but he flapped a hand. ‘No, no. It’s fine. I have to work with Melody on her dance steps anyway,’ he said, glancing toward the girl in the armchair. ‘She can probably use a break from, well, whatever it is she’s doing over there.’

  The dancing master, then. What the heck was his name? Alex something. That meant that the guy playing checkers had to be Michael Rainey, the children’s tutor.

  The trio remaining at the table looked up from their cards, expressionless, almost as if they resented the interruption. I squared my shoulders and pasted on my friendliest smile. ‘Hi,’ I said, directly addressing the only male at the table, a stout, forty-something fellow whose pale red hair, already long, had been pulled back into a neat ponytail at the nape of his neck. ‘I guess I’m your sister-in-law. What are you playing, then?’

  John ‘Jack’ Donovan, Patriot, smiled at me, revealing a row of teeth as white and even as George Washington’s famous ivory choppers. ‘Whist,’ he said as he shuffled the cards for the next hand.

  I sat down in the chair Alex had just vacated. ‘I’ve never played whist,’ I said. ‘Is it difficult to learn?’

  ‘Easy peasey.’ Amy Cornell, lady’s maid, smiled at me then, and her face was transformed from a mask of indifference into a face of such natural, youthful beauty that it belonged on the cover of Cosmopolitan. Her honey-blond hair was cut in a stylish, fuss-free shag with a fringe of bangs that almost hid her gray eyes. ‘It’s like bridge,’ she informed me. ‘Except there’s no dummy. You play bridge?’

  ‘My husband and I used to, but we had so many arguments over it that we decided to quit. He’s a mathematician,’ I explained as Jack began to deal. ‘He can remember every card that’s been played, and who played it.’ I picked up my hand and fanned the cards, sorting them into suits as I went. ‘For me, bridge was just a game. So what if I trumped his ace? To Paul, though, it was a blood sport.’

  ‘I hear you,’ the woman on my right said as she picked up her hand. ‘Like I always say: there are three kinds of people in this world. Those who are good at math, and those who aren’t. I’m Gwendolyn Fry, by the way, but people call me “French.”’

  It took a moment for all that to sink in, but when it did, I laughed out loud. ‘French Fry? You’re kidding.’

  French shrugged. ‘Anything’s better than Gwendolyn.’

  Jack dealt the last card, face up, in front of him. The seven of diamonds. ‘Diamonds are trump,’ he announced. Amy, on his left, immediately played a four of diamonds and I smiled, knowing I held the king. French played a two, and when Jack laid his seven next to my king, Amy and I took the trick.

  All the while we were playing, I kept one eye on Melody and Alex and the dancing lessons going on over in the corner. ‘One, two, three, curtsey … four, five, six … hand up, now turn, turn, turn …’ I recognized the minuet, and realized that the dancing lessons I’d taken prior to Ruth and Hutch’s wedding – where we learned the waltz, tango and foxtrot – were probably not going to be relevant to my new life in the past. It was a good thing that dancing lessons had been blocked in on my schedule, for two o’clock the following day.

  A sudden movement caught my eye. A dark shape seemed to materialize from the shadows on th
e wall next to a highboy. I gasped, then relaxed as I realized it was only a cameraman, clad in black from head to toe, like a ninja, wearing a Steadicam strapped to his chest. As the cameraman passed behind me, I pounded my chest to jump start my heart and said, ‘Gosh, you scared me!’

  ‘That’s Derek,’ Amy said calmly, slapping a ten of clubs down on Jack’s nine. ‘Chad’s around somewhere, too. They don’t talk. You’ll get used to them eventually.’

  ‘I didn’t think they’d be filming us quite so soon,’ I commented before taking the trick with my queen to end the game. ‘Considering the contracts we signed, that was probably a naïve assumption.’

  ‘We call them Thing One and Thing Two,’ French said. ‘From Cat in the Hat,’ she added, just in case I didn’t get the reference.

  ‘What role are you playing at Patriot House?’ I asked French as Amy began to deal the next hand.

  ‘I’m the housemaid,’ she said. ‘One of the indentured servants, supposedly from Scotland. I finished up early over at the Wythe House today. Sweeping, mopping, turning the mattresses – all good preparation. When I got back, Jud cornered me, saying they needed a fourth for whist. Not that I’ll be playing cards with any of you upstairs types, mind.’

  Four hands later, Amy and I were ahead by two points and the beginner in me was feeling rather smug.

  Jack was shuffling the deck, preparing to deal again, when a woman rushed in. She paused for a moment in the doorway, one hand clutching the door frame, the other pressed to the small of her back. She was dressed as a household slave in brown homespun, and her gray apron was dusted with flour. Her head was wrapped, turban-like, in a white scarf from which a few dark curls had managed to escape, bobbing like tiny springs over her forehead. Her mahogany skin glistened with sweat.

  ‘You better finish up in here if you’re gonna want time to freshen up before dinner,’ she drawled. ‘They said to let you know that they start serving in twenty minutes. Me? I’m for the shower.’ And she disappeared as quickly as she had come.

  ‘That’s Karen Gibbs,’ Amy told me before I even had time to ask. ‘She’s our cook. They’ve had her working over in the Raleigh Tavern Bakery for a couple of days. Her boy’s with her, too. Cute kid named Dexter. Dex. Nine or ten, I should think.’

  ‘What’s Dex going to do?’ I wondered aloud. ‘Chop wood? Pump water? Build fires?’

  ‘Whatever a little slave boy would do in 1774,’ Jack muttered without taking his eyes off his cards. ‘Empty the chamber pots, too, I imagine. Wouldn’t want my boy saddled with that. Don’t know what the woman can be thinking.’

  Amy’s eyes blazed. ‘Karen’s got a PhD, Jack. She graduated from Oberlin College and has been teaching sociology there for ten years. That’s more than most of the rest of us can say.’

  I had graduated from Oberlin College, too, but quite a few years before Karen, I suspected. When Oberlin opened its doors in 1833, it never occurred to the founders not to admit blacks or women. The college had a long association with progressive causes. It had been one of the breeding grounds of abolitionism and a key stop along the Underground Railroad. When I visited the campus in 1965, in fact, Martin Luther King had been the commencement speaker.

  ‘Oh, I’m not questioning the woman’s intelligence,’ Jack hastened to add. ‘I’m sure she has her reasons.’

  ‘As a black woman and a sociologist, this experiment must have seemed a unique opportunity for Karen to understand her own history by actually living it,’ I commented. ‘I’m not sure I would have involved my son, either, Jack. Dex seems a little young to really understand what slavery was all about.’

  ‘I don’t think she had a choice,’ French said as she slapped an ace of hearts on the table and took the trick. ‘She didn’t have anyone at home to leave him with.’

  ‘She’s not married?’

  French shook her head. ‘Never has been.’

  I knew about Jack’s marital situation, of course, but was curious about the others. ‘I’ve got a husband waiting for me at home, probably wondering where his next meal is coming from about now. How about you two?’

  ‘I’m engaged to an investment banker in Boston,’ French said. She glanced quickly at Amy who was studying her cards intently, silently. ‘Amy’s a widow.’

  Amy, who I guessed to be in her mid to late twenties, looked too young to be a widow. A look of such sadness passed over her face that I could have kicked myself for bringing the subject up. ‘I’m so sorry, Amy.’

  She glanced up, eyes glistening with unshed tears. ‘It’s OK, really. Drew was a Navy SEAL. We both knew the risks when I married him.’

  I stared at her pale face and shuddered. During our long association with the Naval Academy, Paul and I knew a number of midshipmen who’d gone into Special Ops after graduation, but we’d not lost any of them … yet. ‘Was he an Academy grad?’ I asked.

  ‘No. UVA.’

  I was about to comment on the high quality of naval officers coming out of the NROTC program at the University of Virginia when Jack took control of the conversation and made a U-turn. ‘I went by the bakery this afternoon. The apple pies looked fantastic. Seems like our Karen can actually cook.’

  ‘Speaking of Karen,’ I said, laying down my cards and rising to my feet, ‘I’m going to take her suggestion and go freshen up. See you at dinner?’

  As I left the parlor, Derek disengaged himself from the dance lesson. He and his Steadicam shadowed me out of the room, down the hall and onto the elevator, a red light near the camera lens indicating that he was filming me the whole way. As I slotted the key card into my door, I turned and waggled my fingers at the camera before slipping inside and closing the door in his face.

  ‘Cameras already dogging my tail,’ I texted to Paul on my iPhone from the bathroom a few minutes later. ‘Apparently I’m today’s fresh meat.’

  Dinner that night was a buffet affair – mixed green ‘salat,’ sliced roast of beef, and an oven-roasted potato and vegetable combo, all set out in very twenty-first-century chafing dishes on a dark oak sideboard in one of the hotel’s private dining rooms. Cast members, some already in costume, continued to arrive in dribs and drabs as they finished their training at various locations throughout the ‘plantation.’

  My costume consisted of the same jeans and T-shirt I’d ridden down in, although I had washed my face, put on a bit of eyeliner and a smear of lipstick.

  I loaded up my plate, snagged a brandy-spiked bread pudding from a side table and sat down opposite Jack Donovan, who was already tucking into his beef. His daughter, Melody, sat to his right, her plate heaped with vegetables, but she was having the bread pudding as an appetizer. At sixteen her baby fat was not likely to go away without a bit of push-back-from-the-table discipline, I thought. Fortunately, the mistress of Patriot House (me!) was not planning to serve quarter-pounders with cheese in 1774, so perhaps she’d make some headway when we got back to Annapolis.

  Melody’s little brother, Gabriel or ‘Gabe,’ as he was more commonly known, and to whom I’d been introduced in the game room, had finished his meal and from the sound effects leaking out of his iPod Touch, I gathered he was playing Angry Birds. Since discovering my role in the cast, he was pointedly ignoring me, as if holding me responsible for his mother’s absence.

  ‘How’s your wife doing?’ I asked Jack Donovan, genuinely concerned.

  Jack swallowed the morsel of steak he’d been chewing, looking surprised that I asked. ‘The prognosis is good. She still needs the chemo, but we are all optimistic.’

  ‘It must be hard for her back in … sorry, I forget where you’re from,’ I babbled.

  ‘Texas,’ he said simply.

  I paused, a fork loaded with potatoes halfway to my mouth. ‘Texas is a big state.’

  He sawed off another chunk of steak. ‘A little town north of Dallas. McKinney. You’ve probably never heard of it.’

  Surprisingly, I had. ‘Didn’t Money Magazine rate McKinney as one of the top five places to liv
e in America?’

  ‘It did. After that,’ he grumbled, ‘and all the publicity from this show, I worry that the population is simply going to explode, although I have to admit it’d be good for business.’

  ‘Does Katherine have anyone staying with her during treatment?’ I wondered.

  His gray eyes caught mine and held. ‘Of course. What kind of a person do you think I am? Kat’s being treated at MD Anderson in Dallas, so no worries there, and her mother lives close by.’

  ‘I text her, like, every minute,’ Melody said, her manicured thumbs flicking rapidly over the keys of her Droid, ‘Except the cell phone signal here really sucks.’

  ‘Better get used to it, young lady,’ her father warned. ‘There’ll be no cell phone service at Patriot House at all.’

  Melody’s head jerked up, her green eyes wide and disbelieving. ‘No way. Cell phone signals are everywhere!’

  ‘Not when they’re jamming it,’ Jack informed her.

  Jamming. Great. There went any prayer of clandestine Facetime tête-a-têtes with Paul, assuming I’d even be able to smuggle my iPhone in.

  ‘Is that true, Mrs Ives?’ Melody wasn’t buying it, seeking a second opinion.

  ‘It’s technically possible to jam cell phone signals,’ I told her. ‘You have to have permission from the FCC, of course, but movie theaters, restaurants, concert halls and churches are issued permits for jamming equipment every day.’

  ‘That sucks,’ she said, and I had to agree.

  ‘You’ll write to your mother every week,’ Jack said. ‘The old-fashioned way, with paper and pen.’ His eyes darted in Gabe’s direction. ‘You, too, Gabriel.’

  All the while we’d been talking, I could feel Gabe’s ice-blue eyes boring into the side of my head. I leaned across the table and lowered my voice. ‘Are the children really on board with the experiment, Jack?’