Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  “It sounds a handsome place,” Montagu said. “I suppose it has a lot of trees that could be cut down and sawn into planks and timbers and shipped back to England—if one had a ship.”

  Henry’s body, dressed in a black silk suit and a white shirt, lay on its back on the hall table. The shutters were drawn. Candles burned at all four corners of the table, throwing Henry’s face into shadow but clearly revealing the portrait of Fanchon that hung on the wall above his head.

  While he spoke to Oliver, Montagu’s eyes were fixed on Fanny, who sat by her father’s head on the other side of the table. Montagu took some snuff, shifting his gaze to the portrait while he sniffed and then sneezed.

  “Is that the mother?” he asked.

  Oliver looked at him dumbly. Montagu behaved as though he had received a long and detailed answer to his question.

  “I thought so when I first saw the picture,” he said. “The resemblance is striking, except, of course, that the daughter has a much fresher beauty. It must be the eyes. Because they are such a remarkable blue they set off the skin, making it appear even more golden than it is by nature. You see how even a little light illuminates her face? Even in black she is astonishing.”

  “Get out,” Oliver said.

  “Ah,” Montagu said. “You are disturbed. Of course. It was wrong of me to speak of our affairs in the presence of your dead friend. But I only meant to reassure. The rubies you offered will not satisfy your debts, or those of this orphan.…”

  “Orphan?” Oliver said. “What orphan?”

  “Young Missis Harding there. She is now alone in the world, and as her father’s heiress, inherits his debts.” “She is not alone. I am her godfather.”

  “Then she is doubly unfortunate. She acquires your debts as well. I was only going to suggest an arrangement with you that might make her situation less painful.”

  “And what would that be?”

  Oliver had been advancing on Montagu as he spoke and had herded him to the head of the bier. Dressed in pink silk, with the usual cascading lace and a wig tinted pink (it was this that made Fanny remember the pink in Captain Pennock’s hair over a distance of years), Montagu stood directly behind Henry’s head. He looked down into the dead man’s face and then gave Fanny another long look.

  “I had discussed this matter with poor Harding,” he said. “Fanny cannot be unaware of it.”

  “What matter?”

  Montagu waited a long moment with his eyes averted, as if expecting to sneeze, but no sneeze came.

  “I am planning to pull down this whole street of houses,” he said just as the sneeze did come. He smiled. “A dividend from the snuff,” he said. “They say that sneezing is the second greatest of the pleasures. Do you agree with that, Barebones?”

  Oliver took hold of him. Montagu reached for his sword, but Oliver seized his wrist.

  “Let me go or I shall call in my men,” Montagu said. “Surely we don’t want that to happen in a room where a dead man is lying.”

  Fanny was standing now. She had been concealing her rosary in her hand, but now Montagu saw the beads. He smiled very broadly and inclined his body toward her as gallantly as he could while Oliver still held him.

  “What a lot of secrets your family has, Fanny,” he said. “Mysterious ships, lands in the colonies, and now those pretty papist beads.”

  Oliver’s body was trembling. Fanny thought he might kill the man.

  “Let go of him,” she said.

  Oliver did so. Montagu shrugged and wriggled his body back into place inside his elegant costume. His hat, decorated with a plume, had fallen to the floor.

  “My hat, if you please,” he said.

  Fanny said, “What do you mean, you’re going to pull down this whole street?”

  “I mean I am going to remove the houses that now stand along Catherine Street—just the ones at this end by the Strand, actually; I exaggerated when I said the whole street.”

  He was smiling again and examining Fanny’s face and figure. His eyes kept straying to the rosary. It had been Fanchon’s and it was very fine, with a silver crucifix and ivory beads; Henry had had it made in Italy.

  “Remove the houses?” she said. “How can you? What for?”

  “I can remove them because they are my property, and I shall do so. And then, to answer your second question, I shall put up a stand of far better houses and sell them to a somewhat better class of people. Everyone profits.”

  “But you don’t own this house or Oliver’s.”

  “For your sake, my dear, I wish that that were true. But it is not. I own your father’s debts. He cannot pay them. Therefore I own whatever he owned and can do as I like with it.”

  “Even pull down his house while his dead body is lying inside it? The law will not permit it.”

  “There are quicker things than the law.”

  Montagu had moved closer to Fanny while she spoke. Now, with a fingertip, he touched the back of her hand, the one that held the rosary. She moved away.

  “And there are alternatives,” he said. “If this house comes down, and Barebones’ house too, you’ll have no roof above your head. I should be very sad about that.”

  He had placed the bier between himself and Oliver, and now he spoke to him across it.

  “I would accept the ten thousand acres in America as a dowry,” he said. “Of course, your goddaughter would have to renounce the popish religion. But that’s a small enough thing, considering what faces her in other circumstances.”

  Oliver’s mouth was agape. Fanny had read about this gesture but she had never seen it in real life.

  Montagu watched Oliver’s face in open enjoyment.

  “You are astonished,” he said. “I realize that the match seems wrong—your goddaughter has no fortune, no family, no rank. But I am entranced by her beauty, sir, and have been from the moment I saw her.”

  Oliver bent down and picked up Montagu’s hat. When Montagu reached for it, Oliver seized him, lifted him into the air, and shook him. Resistance was impossible. Montagu seized his wig with both hands to keep it from flying off his head and tried to shout for help: the toughs who went everywhere with him were waiting outside the door. But his voice came out of his mouth in a shrill gargle. His sword shot out of his scabbard and spun across the floor.

  Still shaking, and growling all the while like a big dog killing a smaller one, Oliver carried Montagu out of the hall and threw him out the door into the mud. His toughs rushed across the street to rescue him.

  “Kill the bastard,” Montagu squeaked. But seeing what was in Oliver’s eyes, they did not advance.

  Montagu shook his jeweled fist, “Tomorrow,” he said. “Tomorrow!”

  Inside the house, Fanny had thrown her body across Henry’s to protect it from violence, and touching it for the first time since the warmth went out of it, she knew that whatever had made her father what he was had gone away.

  Feeling the cold face of the corpse, she understood that everything had changed. She was alone, as Henry had been alone, and she knew that that was one thing that remained the same forever.

  13

  As she woke from a dream about the Pamela, Fanny imagined that she heard all around her the creaking of a ship under sail in a storm. Then, wide-awake and sitting up in bed, she recognized the sound for what it was—the shriek of nails being pulled from timbers. Rose was asleep beside her. She remembered that her father was lying dead downstairs.

  The glass in the window shattered with a loud report. Rose woke up with a scream. A hole opened in the side of the house, letting in a shaft of light filled with swirling dust. Fanny got out of bed and looked through the gap. On the ground below, a man whipped a span of eight red oxen so hard that his hat fell off. The animals bellowed and shat, terrified by the crash of the huge lump of masonry and slate and splintered beams—Fanny’s bedroom wall and part of the roof—that cartwheeled behind them, spewing bricks, at the end of a whipping chain.

  Outside in the smok
y London morning, a crowd of Alfred Montagu’s friends had gathered to watch while he pulled Henry Harding’s house down around his daughter’s head. Montagu and his friends had come from a party; the men were dressed in silk and the women wore ball gowns and jewels. They were all seated in sedan chairs to keep them out of the mud, drinking wine and eating cakes and making the giddy gestures that people make when they have been up all night. Montagu had brought extra thugs; at least twenty men surrounded him as he sat with his left ankle crossed over his right knee, chatting with a pretty woman who was dressed nearly as magnificently as he was. The oxen had already been hitched to a second roof beam, and Montagu raised a finger to warn the woman that something was going to happen. The oxen threw themselves into their yokes and tore another gobbet from the body of the house. The spectators applauded and cheered. Montagu gave a slight bow and held out his glass to be refilled.

  Some of the Hardings’ possessions had been carried outside—a spinet, a few of Henry’s books, a heap of silver plate, casks of wine, the painting of Fanchon. Antoinette stood guard over them. Among the crowd, chatting with one another and calling out witticisms to Montagu, were people who had dined in this house. One of them, a tall man with a whore on his arm, struck a note or two on the spinet. A silver box full of dried rose petals rested on top of the instrument. The man picked up the box and sniffed the rose petals. He offered the tart a smell. She took the box from his hand, snapped it shut, and dropped it into a pocket among the fringes on her skirt. When Antoinette protested, the woman laughed and dropped the box into the mud.

  The house, torn lumber howling, shifted under Fanny’s bare feet as it swayed on its foundation. Fanchon’s mirror toppled and broke. The bed slid across the tilting floor and came to rest against what was left of the wall. Fanny seized a jagged piece of wood and pulled herself back into the room. Rose began to scream. She was pressed against the wall in her nightclothes, hands fluttering over the plaster as she searched for something to hold on to. She lost her balance and lurched toward the gap in the wall.

  Fanny caught her in her arms and they staggered together across the steep floor. Like a drowning person, Rose clawed at Fanny’s face and pummeled her chest. Fanny seized Rose by the hair. She pulled it violently, first one way and then the other, until Rose stopped screaming and instead howled from the pain.

  Fanny had never hurt anyone before, but she felt nothing for Rose, who sank to her knees shrieking from the pain. “Where’s Oliver?” Fanny asked.

  Rose was sobbing. Her nose ran. Fanny pulled her hair again, gently.

  “Rose, tell me.”

  Rose found her voice. “What is happening to me?” “Never mind that. Tell me where Oliver is.”

  “Drunk. Gone. I don’t know.”

  “Then you’ll have to help me,” Fanny said.

  The house shuddered as the oxen pulled off another chunk of the roof. Rose screamed. Fanny tried the door. It was jammed into its frame, but she managed to pull it open a few inches. She forced her body through the crack.

  “Squeeze through, Rose!”

  Rose crossed her hands over her breasts.

  “I can’t, Fanny. No one could.”

  They could hear the crowd outside, cheering and laughing. Someone played a scale on the spinet, badly. Fanny looked through the door at Rose. She beckoned.

  “I’ll help you,” she said.

  She showed Rose how to stand sideways to the door and, prying her hand from her breast, helped her to fit the soft flesh through the narrow gap.

  “Now the other one,” Fanny said. “Gently. Turn your body.”

  But just then, with Rose halfway through the crack, the house shuddered again.

  “Oh, God, Fanny, I can’t move,” Rose said. “It’s going to cut me in half.”

  Fanny seized her by the hair and pulled as hard as she could. Screaming in pain, Rose spun free.

  Leading Rose by the hand, Fanny ran down the stairs. The door to the street was ajar. Montagu had moved closer in his sedan chair, and they could see him just outside in his silks and laces. Rose ran toward the door.

  “No,” Fanny said. “Into the hall.”

  Rose realized what Fanny wanted. “I can’t,” she said. “Fanny, I can’t. There are men outside. They’ll help you.”

  She screamed and tried to get away, but Fanny held on to her hair and pulled her after her.

  Henry’s body lay on the table. The air, filled with dust and the light, was dappled and dim, like the light in a wood. “Take his feet,” Fanny said.

  Rose fell to the floor and rolled herself into a ball. The house shook around them. The dust grew thicker. Rose’s face was black with it. They were both coughing violently.

  “You’ll help or you’ll be buried with him, Rose,” Fanny said. “I won’t leave my father here to be crushed by his own house and dug out by strangers.”

  Rose took hold of Henry’s feet while Fanny seized his shoulders. They slid him off the table. Henry’s small corpse was far heavier than either of them expected it to be and it thumped on the floor. Gas moved inside the body and made a sound like a voice. Rose shrieked again.

  “Up,” Fanny said. “Lift him up.”

  They staggered toward the door. The body was stiff, but Henry’s head moved about loosely on its broken neck like a hanged man’s.

  Outside, Fanny laid her father down gently in the mud of the street and straightened his head. Montagu stood over her. He wore a bright green cape trimmed in fur and a hat with an ostrich plume pinned to it.

  “My dear child,” he said. “I had no idea. The fools have pulled down the wrong house.”

  Montagu covered Henry’s corpse with his cape and helped Fanny into a sedan chair. He swept off his hat, and with a charming smile lifted Fanny’s bare foot to his lips and kissed it.

  14

  Very early in the morning on the third Wednesday after Easter, Fanny buried her father in Saint Andrew’s churchyard. A fine windblown rain darkened the stones that marked the graves of Fanchon and the rest of the Hardings and soaked the mourners in their black clothes. There were only five of them. Antoinette and Oliver stood on either side of Fanny. Both were weeping. Nobody else was there except Rose and Praise God Adkins. Fanny had told none of Henry’s friends about the funeral; she did not want to be comforted by people who would make jokes about it afterward in the Rose Tavern.

  The old bald curate looked at Oliver. “Is the shroud made of wool as the law requires?” he asked.

  Oliver stared back with uncomprehending eyes. “Yes,” Fanny replied.

  The clergyman nodded, his duty to the wool trade done, and read the burial service very rapidly in a shivering voice, coughing into the prayer book as he went. He wore a petulant look—it was barely six o’clock and he was awake before the city for the first time in many years. Fanny gazed down into the grave at the raw lumber box in which her father lay. Oliver began to sob deep in his chest. He was trembling all through his great frame. The clergyman read on in a louder voice. Fanny took Oliver’s hand and warmed it against her body, but he could not stop sobbing. This was a place where corpses had been buried on top of one another for a long time, and there were old bones in the walls of the grave. Rose, bundled up in a cloak trimmed with fur, held a cloth over her nose and looked at the minister out of her unblinking eyes as if trying to remember who he was.

  Rain drummed on the coffin. River water had already seeped into the grave. Smelling it, Fanny realized that it would rise into the coffin after the hole was filled. On visiting his father’s grave, Henry had always patted the stone and said, “Sorry about the damp, Papa.” The old man, in his delirium before he died of the plague, had kept crying out that he did not want to be buried in a watery grave, and Henry would have dug him up and reinterred him elsewhere if the law permitted.

  Fanny knew that Henry would not have been troubled by the wet: the dead were dead, there was nothing afterward, there was no return and no reunion.

  Fanny could hear the firs
t muted morning noises of the river—men joking and the thump of wood against wood as oars were dropped into their pins. She closed her eyes again. The curate, as he sped through the last hopeful phrases of the Order for the Burial of the Dead, spoke in a very loud voice, as if a congregation of hundreds was trying to hear him over the hubbub of London instead of the little knot of mourners who were actually present in the still of the morning. When the time came for the Lord’s Prayer, Fanny did not attempt to repeat the words.

  She heard a cough and opened her eyes. The curate was offering her a trowel full of mud. She threw it down into the grave. It thudded on the coffin.

  “Your father is in heaven with God and His angels,” the curate said to Fanny, shuddering from the cold. He gave Antoinette a look of deep sympathy. “Your mother, here, will look after you now.”

  Antoinette made the sign of the cross on her bosom and slapped Fanny’s hand to remind her to do the same. Fanny ignored her. The curate’s eyes widened at this popish behavior and he hurried away into the church, tripping over the muddied hem of his surplice.

  Fanny put some of Henry’s flowers on Fanchon’s grave and closed her eyes, trying to imagine her parents’ faces. She saw the Fanchon of the portrait clearly enough in her mind’s eye, but she could not picture Henry: when she attempted to see his face she saw the oxen, the crowd in Catherine Street, the dust exploding from the shattered walls.

  She felt a kiss on her cheek. It was Oliver.

  “I must go straight back and guard the house in case Montagu comes again,” he said. “Praise God will look after you until tomorrow. Then we’ll decide what’s to be done with you, Fanny.”

  “What?” Fanny said. Her voice was so harsh that Oliver started and looked to the right and left of her as if he thought that it came from somebody else. Rainwater ran off his hat brim in a thin sheet. His eyes wandered. Fanny realized that Oliver and Praise God and Antoinette—everyone but Rose, who was whimpering and sucking in her breath in the cold rain—were all looking around the churchyard for the patch of gaudy color that would be Montagu.