by Rich Horton
Elizabeth was startled into immobility by Laura Anne’s unaccustomed embrace. Really, it was the wrong way to treat the child, giving in to her whims. But men were stupid about childrearing.
Anson said, “I have a wonderful idea, Lizzie dear. Why don’t we get you a push chair? That way you won’t have to do a thing and I will push your carriage up and down the promenade and you can be a princess.”
Elizabeth wavered.
Mrs. Finch looked worried. “She’s really over stimulated, Anson.”
“Nonsense,” Anson said. “Nothing will be better for her than good sea air. Put color in her cheeks.” He was looking a little irritable.
So they all trooped down. Anson procured a big wheeled whicker chair and deposited Elizabeth in it and started down the promenade. The sea crashed and there were seagulls everywhere, just like in pictures. But pictures did not give a sense of how the ocean just went on and on until it disappeared. In pictures there was something cozy about the ocean. Laura Anne felt uneasy. Resolutely she set her eyes on all the promenaders, dressed in summer linens. She felt a little shabby in her mourning Bombazine, but as she was still in second mourning, all she had been able to do was add linen cuffs and collar to her two dresses.
She had really liked the theatricality of mourning, but seeing all the women in jaunty dresses this day she was sick of it. She wanted a nice hat. She wanted to be noticed. No one noticed girls in mourning.
The Promenade was crowded. There was a Minstrel band including a Negro with a banjo and checkered pants. Men and women thronged the beach, many of the women carrying black umbrellas against the sun. Boys stood on the rocky beach or waded in the water, their shoes and socks discarded, their pants rolled up exposing their white legs. There was a man with a monkey that capered and turned somersaults. Elizabeth clapped.
There was a man in a bowler and coat standing next to a cart with a sign that said Beach Photographs While You Wait, 6d.
“Mr. Risewell,” Laura Anne said, “you must get your photograph.”
Every one turned to her, startled.
“It would mean so much to the children,” she said. “They so adore you and to have a little memento of this occasion.”
For a moment she thought she had been too bold, even for Anson. But a man’s vanity could always be counted on and even as the Finches frowned, he laughed. “Lizzie? Would you like my photograph?”
Elizabeth nodded solemnly.
Mrs. Finch said, “Oh Anson, don’t be foolish.”
“It’s a lovely sentiment,” said the photographer, a short, common looking fellow with sideburns that stood away from his face.
Once Anson had decided there was nothing to be done. The photographer prepared the plate, asking them how long they had been at Brighton. William was intensely curious, whispering to Laura Anne, “What is he doing?”
“Making a tintype of Mr. Risewell,” Laura Anne said.
After a moment, William whispered, “What is he doing now?” The man was sliding the plate into the camera. “It’s all part of making the tintype,” Laura Anne said.
There were tintypes on display and William gazed at them. “Can I have a tintype?”
“You will have one of your uncle, to keep. But you must share it with your sister.”
“No,” William whined. “I mean one of me.”
“They’re six pence.” She frowned at him. “Now be quiet.”
Anson posed and the photographer whisked the cap off the lens. Everything hung still, expectant, and then the photographer covered the lens. “There you go,” he said, and if you’ll just wait a minute’s time, we’ll have this ready for you.”
But it was more than just a minute as the man busied himself at the cart, the tintype hidden as he swished it around in some liquid.
“What’s he doing now?” William whispered.
Mrs. Finch glared.
Laura Anne told herself it didn’t matter.
The tintype was finally produced. It was fine, if a bit dark. Even Mrs. Finch had to admire it. Anson held it out. “I don’t know, Miss Huntley. Maybe I should keep the thing.”
“I want to see it, please!” William said.
Anson laughed. “So you shall.” He handed it to William.
“May I see it?” Elizabeth asked.
“Certainly, Princess,” Anson said. “Just let your brother have his turn.”
The tintype had caught his expression very well, Laura Anne thought. It would do nicely.
The week in Brighton was a mixed success. Elizabeth was terribly sick for the first three days, but then the sea air seemed to work its improvements upon her, for which Laura Anne was grateful since she had spent those three days in the hotel room with the little girl while the rest enjoyed the pleasures of the promenade and the piers.
Near the end of the trip, the unthinkable happened.
Their little party was gathered in the lobby, deciding on tea when Anson spied newcomers and happily hailed them. They were an older couple, genial and well dressed. The woman wore a dark red dress with a bustle, much in contrast to Mrs. Finch’s old fashioned crinoline skirt. But it was the daughter accompanying them that drew all eyes. She wore a dress of emerald green and white shot silk, artfully trimmed in black velvet ribbon. Mrs. Finch murmured, “Surely that is from Worth.”
Anson strode across the lobby to meet them and brought them back. Once close, the girl was a mild-faced thing, not quite so pretty as her elaborate couture, Laura Anne thought. “Mr. and Mrs. Gower, Annabelle, may I present my sister, Louise Finch, and her husband George Finch.” He beamed, “I believe I am able to announce that I have offered Annabelle a proposal of marriage, which she has been so kind as to accept.”
Laura Anne felt the shock to her nerves, vibrating through her. For a moment everything in the lobby drew far away and she saw dancing specks of white. It was so impossibly warm, and she heard nothing of what was around her. But then her vision cleared. Anson was beaming at the girl and everyone else was looking on, except William who had started off across the lobby towards on of the potted palms. He was unhealthily fascinated with them.
Laura Anne caught up with him, scolded him in a whisper, and brought him back. “So we shall meet you for dinner then,” Mrs. Gower said. “At eight.”
“I do so look forward to it,” Mrs. Finch said.
“Until then,” Anson said to Annabelle.
The Finches strolled out to the promenade. “Are they connected to the Leveson-Gowers?” Mrs. Finch asked.
“Yes, I believe Mr. Gower is a distant cousin of the Duke of Southerland,” Anson said lightly, as though this were a bit of trivia.
“What does father say?” Mrs. Finch breathed.
Anson laughed. “He said they’ll do, even if they are Scots.”
Everyone laughed, even William, who had no idea what he was laughing at. Only Elizabeth and Laura Anne did not laugh.
They came home on Saturday because Mrs. Finch preferred service at her own church, and thought perhaps it was not quite right to travel on Sunday. Mrs. Finch was very punctilious in her relationship with Our Lord. Mr. Finch, to Laura Anne’s surprise, did not go to church. She did not quite understand Mr. Finch, who seemed to be such a milquetoast but who on closer examination was prone to unexpected actions and statements. But of course, this was the first time she had ever spent even the smallest amount of time in his presence.
She was so delighted to be home she could have cried. She was exhausted from dealing with Elizabeth and William, and still quite disturbed by all that had happened in Brighton. Jane came running down the hall when she got in. “You’re home!” Jane said. “What was it like?”
“It was very nice and very healthy and I brought you a post card,” Laura Anne said. She dug out the post card—tucked next it was the tintype of Anson, which she left in her bag. The postcard was a scene of the Promenade and the beach, with the West Pier off in the distance. Jane tucked her skirts behind and sat down on the stairs to admire the ca
rd.
From the drawing room, Laura Anne’s mother called her.
Mother looked sallow and tired. She was seated at her desk with her writing slope. Her hair was not carefully done and her dress was stained. She so did not take care of herself these days. She had been so tiresome since Papa had died. It was all very well to mourn, but there were standards, and even Mrs. Finch, who had none of Mother’s old style, looked better.
Propped on the writing slope was Laura Anne’s own, her special memory book.
She was speechless.
“The maid found it,” her mother said. “I am only grateful that Jane did not.”
“You should not meddle with that,” Laura Anne finally managed.
Her mother opened the book, paged through it, the images of family flickering past, Papa with the needle through his head, Elizabeth as a butterfly fairy with blackened eyes. She paged back to the image of Papa.
“Why him?” she asked. When Laura Ann didn’t answer. “Why not me? He always doted on you. He didn’t see—” She sighed. “It would have been so much better if it had been me. As it was, you might as well have stuck that needle through my heart.”
She closed the book and handed it to Laura Anne. She looked down at the desk, lost in thought. It was as if she had forgotten Laura Anne was there.
Why had she stuck the needle in Papa instead of her mother? She didn’t like to think about these things, it made her thoughts skitterish and disturbed. But she and her Mother had not always gotten along. Papa had understood that Laura Anne needed special things, had snuck her toast with marmalade when most people thought it was wicked to give it to children. Papa had teased and cajoled and called her pet names.
Peter had recited his poem from school and Papa had said, “My favorite boy! There is nothing closer to a father’s heart than his son.”
Laura Anne had said without thinking, “But I’m your favorite!”
“Laura Anne,” her father replied, “don’t be foolish.”
He meant it.
“Because you never betrayed me,” Laura Anne whispered.
Her mother’s head jerked up and they met each other, eye to eye. Her mother’s eyes were wild, red-rimmed. “You were such a angel when you were a baby,” she said. Her voice ground with despair.
Everything felt hollow for a moment and Laura Anne thought she would cry. She wanted to throw herself on her mother and cry and cry. But her mother would not comfort her. Fury surged through Laura Anne, red and then white, burning out the tears. She could feel the colors chasing her face. Her mother was watching her.
“If something happened to me,” her mother said evenly, “I should not care for myself, but I would feel saddest I think for you, for it would be on you that would fall the burden of this house, and of raising Peter and Jane. There is not so much money, and if you did not work, we would have to let the maid go. It is,” she said deliberately, “perhaps the one thing that keeps me going on, that your dear Papa loved his children so and I must take care of them as best I can.”
Laura Anne fled upstairs and flung herself across her bed, her memory book clutched to her.
She had to escape this house. She could not stay here. And she did not want to be a governess all her life. With a character from Mrs. Finch she could get a good position in a more prosperous house but she would always be invisible. No one had introduced her to the Gowers. She had been taken to Brighton as a servant, and Mrs. Finch was already tiring of her, she could tell.
She had a plan, it was a good thing. The poor little Miss Gower would never know what had happened.
At the door to the bedroom, Jane said, “Laura Anne—”
“Get out,” Laura Anne hissed.
Jane looked her and fled.
Laura Anne took out the tintype of Anson Risewell. She dug out scraps of cloth, black wool, and made a little coat for him to wear and a top hat. She made buttons out of little knots of thread, quite cunning. Then she dug out a square of red cotton and folded it and cut out a heart. She opened the heart and carefully wrote “Laura Anne” on the heart. She was buzzing, buzzing the way she had the night she drew the tracing of her father, and the tintype was even better, she knew. She felt powerful. She glued the heart to Anson’s chest and then covered it in the coat, so that the tintype was “dressed.” She added the top hat.
She pasted it in the memory book. It was very stiff and she would have to be careful. She would have to hide the memory book again, this time where no one would find it. She would. She would think about that in a moment.
But first, she surveyed the result.
Anson Risewell at the beach, wearing a coat and hat glued on, and underneath it, the barely visible lump of the heart. Underneath the tintype she wrote, “Mine.”
Anson was rather drunk, although it was just after three in the afternoon. He turned when Laura Anne came into the drawing room and his face registered delight, a flicker of something, perhaps dismay, and then again the flood of delight. “Sweetheart,” he said.
It was almost two years from the day she had pasted the tintype in her memory book. The day she had decided she had to get out of her house. Breaking off an engagement takes a little time, and then there is the new engagement period and the picking out of a house—a bigger house than the Finch’s. (How was Laura Anne to have known that Louisa, her dear sister-in-law, had married down. For love.) There were the furnishings to pick out.
The house had turned out very well, Laura Anne thought. This room in particular, with it’s red trimmed in black. And she had her own Morning Room.
Anson had not turned out as she expected. “We are going out tonight,” she reminded him.
He looked chagrinned. “A little spirits, it’s nothing.”
She let him see her displeasure.
Again, his face was a curious mixture, dismay, and then a crack of something smothered breaking out, disgust and maybe even a bit of fear? But it all disappeared again under his embarrassment.
Still, she could barely look at him now. Such a disappointment he had turned out to be. She had thought he would be fun, he had been so bluff and hardy in the first days of their engagement. Now he looked as if he was going to fat.
“Oh,” she said, “photos have come.” They were carte de visite photographs, pages of eight the size of visiting cards. There was a page of Anson in the coat and hat he had worn on their wedding day, and a page of her in her wedding dress and veil. Eight little Ansons, eight little Laura Annes. Except the Laura Anne page was missing one. She had already cut it out.
Anson glanced at them. “Very nice, sweet.”
“I like photographs,” she said. “Remember when I asked you to have the tintype taken for Elizabeth and William?”
He frowned.
“At Brighton,” she prompted.
“Oh yes,” he said, although she was fairly certain that he did not. “What became of that?”
“The children lost it, I do not doubt,” she said. “Louise lets her children run like heathens.”
Anson did not like it when she criticized his sister, but he did not like to disagree with her, either. He busied himself topping off his glass of claret.
She was growing very tired of Anson. She had not expected to be so lonely when she was married. But there had been a lot of fuss and discomfort when Anson had broken off the engagement with Miss Gower. And very many people had preferred to blame her. Mostly, Anson was not good company. But he drank quite a bit these days and things happened to people who drank. They fell down stairs, or stepped in front of carriages.
She had taken care of her loneliness.
Just now, she had pasted a wedding picture of herself in the memory book. She had covered her wedding dress with an actual piece of watered silk cut from the hem of the actual dress. Underneath it, on the belly, was pasted a picture of a tiny baby.
An angelic tiny baby. Not like Louise Finch’s children at all. Hers. Her very own.
The Dead Sea-Bottom Scrolls
; Howard Waldrop
(A Re-creation of Oud’s Journey by Slimshang from Tharsis to Solis Lacus,
by George Weeton, Fourth Mars Settlement Wave, 1981)
So I am standing here on a cold morning, beside the best approximation of a slimshang of which Terran science is capable—polycarbonates and (Earth) man-made fabrics instead of the original hardened plant fibers and outer coverings of animals long extinct. It looks fast, probably faster than any native-made slimshang, but it will have to do.
One thing it’s missing is the series of gears, cogs, plates, and knobs with which a sort of music was made as it rolled. Martians spoke of “coming at full melody”—since the reproduction was mechanical, like a music box, the faster the slimshang went, the louder and more rackety the tune.
Instead, I have a tape deck with me, on which I have chosen to put an endless loop of the early-1960s tune “The Martian Hop.”
It’s appropriate and fitting.
What I am doing is to set out in the recreated slimshang to follow the route (if not the incidents and feelings) of Oud’s famous journey from Tharsis to Solis Lacus.
It’s the most famous Martian travelogue we have (for many, and varying, reasons).
Oud was the first thinking commentator on the changes Mars was undergoing in his (long) lifetime. Others had noted the transformation, but not the underlying processes. And Oud’s personal experiences added much to the classic stature of his tale.
So on this cold morning at Settlement #6 (vying, like many, for the AAS to officially rechristen it Lowell City), I shook hands with the three people who had come outside the temporary bubble dome to see me off.
We stood exchanging small talk for a few minutes, then Oud’s words came to me: “A Being has to do what a Being has to do.”
