Louisa and the Country Bachelor : A Louisa May Alcott Mystery (9781101547564)

by Maclean, Anna

  “Have you many trunks?” I asked. “Uncle Benjamin said he would send his cart for them.”

  “I don’t see it,” said Abba, looking around in a worried manner. “There is no cart. And there are more trunks than we can possibly carry.”

  “He might have forgotten,” I said. “He is increasingly forgetful.” Now worried myself, I looked at the pile of Alcott trunks, worn and battered things but also heavy with our worldly possessions, and knew there was no way we could transport them to the cottage ourselves. Father alone had four heavy trunks of books and papers.

  “Say, you can’t leave those boxes here, in the way,” said a man’s voice. I turned and saw a very tall and gangly man, a veritable Ichabod Crane, with the arrogant eyes and bobbing Adam’s apple of Washington Irving’s schoolteacher, glaring at us. Sheriff Bowman, Walpole’s single officer of the law.

  Father extended his hand. “I am Bronson Alcott,” he said hopefully.

  “Still can’t leave them things in the way,” said Sheriff Bowman.

  “Leave them here,” said a different man’s voice from behind me. Mr. Tupper came out of Tupper’s General Store and gave me a half smile. He had red hair and hazel eyes and a ginger-colored walrus mustache above his lip. His white apron was stained pale green with pickle juice. “Didn’t mean to startle you, Miss Alcott,” he said. “Passengers can leave packages here for pickup later. Charge is a nickel a day for storage.”

  I had met Mr. Tupper already on several occasions; he ran the Whig store, and my cousin Eliza Wells had given me stern orders to shop there, not at the Democrat store, or I would make trouble for her family. Walpole was very firm on those lines and more divided in politics than any other issue.

  Though he, like other Whigs, was an antislaver, I had no fondness for Mr. Tupper; he overpriced his goods and was often rude. Political morality is well and good, but one must uphold principles in mundane matters as well. Charity begins at home.

  However, we had no choice but to accept his offer for trunk storage, though the charge was excessive. I gave him a nickel from my bag, and Mr. Tupper and his boy began carrying our trunks off the sidewalk and into his store.

  “Do put it down gently,” I called to him as he disappeared through the door of Tupper’s General Store with a trunk May had packed for me as well. I had traveled to Walpole without my skirt hoop. Comfortable reader, if you wonder why I did such a thing you have obviously never sat for long periods of travel in a hoop skirt, which is somewhat like a clothy balloon but not tied at the ankles, thankfully. May, however, had been so mortified by my lack of stylishness she had packed the hoop into its case and brought it.

  “The case is old and fragile . . .” I called to the store’s interior.

  Too late. There was a loud thud.

  Obviously Mr. Tupper had never had to deal with crinolines and hoop skirts which, once wrongly bent, are never the same again.

  HALF AN HOUR later we had returned to the cottage that Sylvia and I had prepared. I held my breath and pushed open the door. Abba entered first, then Anna, Lizzie, May, and Father.

  They looked around in curious amazement at their new home.

  Suddenly I saw the cottage, and my own work in it, through Abba’s eyes. The windows were still streaky; the curtains in the dining room were lopsided. I had chosen the wrong rug to lay between the blue silk settees.

  But Abba turned to me with glistening eyes and enfolded me in her embrace once again.

  “You have made us a castle,” she said. “It is perfect and beautiful.”

  I remembered the reading I had given Sylvia earlier in the day, about the ideal true woman. I realized then that I had been describing Abba.

  “What is that house next door, Louy?” asked May, curious. “Have they girls my age? Do they have afternoon parties?”

  “I have not met the people,” I told her. “They seem to be away.”

  “It is a big house,” said May, impressed. “And look, there is lace at every window. They must be very wealthy. I do hope we’ll be friends.”

  Not too friendly, I thought. I had so much writing I wished to accomplish, and overly friendly neighbors can be such a distraction.

  “We are going to have a lovely summer,” I told my family. “All calmness and quiet.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mother—or Femme Fatale

  IN THE MORNING, I rose before everyone else and dressed quietly in a castoff pair of Father’s old trousers, a sweater such as the kind worn by fishermen, and a boy’s cap with my hair tucked up in it.

  I slipped out the kitchen door and made my way through our back garden, which grew only weeds and stones because the house had been uninhabited for the past year. I opened the creaking gate and followed a path I remembered from my childhood visits.

  The milk cart made its slow, horse-clopping way down High Street, at my back, but little else moved except the fluttering, chirping birds. Walpole was only half-awake, and the air was fresh and clean, my step buoyant.

  The ravine was just minutes away from our cottage. Mist rose up from the ground as if the earth itself were breathing, and a pretty babbling brook dashed down the ravine, whose sides were fringed with pines and carpeted with delicate ferns and moss. I loved this place, and decided instantly that my story of ideal womanhood, about strong Kate and handsome Mr. Windsor, would have a ravine in it.

  I took a deep breath, executed some knee bends, and stretched my arms overhead in preparation.

  This was what my Boston circle did not know about me: I was as fast on foot as any long-legged boy, and I had the stamina of an athlete. In Concord, as a child, I won all the footraces and never needed to take a leading start, as the other girls were given. “What a shame she’s a girl,” Emerson had commented once to Father, after seeing me run. Father, characteristically preoccupied with thoughts of a lecture he was to give, had answered, “She is? Ah, yes. Though I protest, dear Waldo, that it is never a shame to have daughters, though I admit they are somewhat expensive to clothe. Lace and embroidery, you know.” And then, with the occasional flash of preternatural brilliance that often startled his hearers, he had said, “At least she will never wear a uniform and march behind a military band.” That was years before we realized that the North and South problem would lead to war.

  In the Walpole ravine I ran till my legs ached, till my lungs burned, till the sun was higher in the sky by an hour or more.

  And then, panting, I sat on the ground and stared up at the beautiful blue sky. Abba had been right: Time in the country was just what I needed. Peace and quiet.

  When I returned to our cottage, Cousin Eliza, the generous woman who had helped outfit the house loaned us by her father, Benjamin, was in the kitchen, unpacking a basket.

  She screamed when she saw me, and reached for the broom.

  “Eliza,” I said hurriedly, taking off my cap and shaking out my hair, “it’s me, Louisa.”

  “Oh.” She gasped, hand over her heart. “I thought you were one of those Irish scoundrels come to rob the silver. Why are you dressed like that?”

  It seemed pointless to address her first remark and point out that an Alcott household never contained silver. “My exercise clothing,” I explained. “I’ll change and be right down to help.”

  Ten minutes later, now dressed in my workday brown linen dress with ink-stained cuffs, I was helping her set the table for breakfast.

  Eliza was a woman who had all the virtues except beauty, or so I had heard townsfolk gossip, though I found her large eyes and warm smile to more than overcome for a weak chin and a figure much challenged by the strains of procreation; she was also much pitied by those townsfolk because she had a difficult household of four rambunctious children and a hard-luck husband, Frank, whose ventures for profit almost always failed, and so they were dependent on her father, in whose home they all lived.

  “How is Cousin Frank?” I asked, wiping a spoon on my apron. Sylvie had washed them last, and she had not quite mastered that simple
chore.

  Eliza clucked her tongue. “Frank was fixing the back porch and banged his thumb with the hammer this morning. I suspect he’s at home with his hand in an ice bucket. You did give me a fright,” she said, laughing. “They brought them Irish in to work on the railroad, and there’s been trouble in town ever since, what with the railroad work stopped.” She set out the coffee cups. “The Dutch begun the railroad here in Walpole, but the board voted to replace them because the Irish would work cheaper. There’s been Saturday-night fist-fights ever since.”

  Finished with setting the table, Eliza reached up to pull the linen window shade down. She had to stand on tiptoe to do it, so I helped. Our dining room window was directly opposite a neighbor’s window, and I saw two people sitting there, a man and a woman.

  “Our neighbors have returned,” I said. “Do you know them, Eliza?”

  “That’s Mrs. Tupper and her invalid brother,” she said in a cold voice. “She’s a newcomer. Last year she married Mr. Tupper’s son—you know, the family that has the general store in the square. I heard they were in Boston, to the health clinic. You’ll meet Ida. Everyone does. Last month I saw her sitting in the garden with Frank. Her head was on his shoulder. Ah, men are silly.” Eliza clucked her tongue and drew the curtains shut with such vigor I thought they might come down. “There’s a son as well,” she said.

  Abba came downstairs first, still yawning and stretching, and almost bumped into a wall because she had thought she was still in her Beacon Hill house, where the rooms were arranged differently. Anna came down with circles under her eyes, for she hadn’t slept well. “How loud the frogs are!” she said. “They make my ears buzz.”

  Lizzie soon followed, humming a tune, and May came down with curling papers in her hair. Minutes later Sylvia and Father made their way to the breakfast table, where Eliza had spread out rolls and butter and boiled eggs.

  We chattered all at once and arrived at an agreement to have tea together at the Willis house that afternoon. Eliza rose—somewhat reluctantly, we all observed—after her second cup of coffee and returned home to her brood and to polish her silver teapot.

  “I suspect she has troubles at home,” Abba commented, watching her niece disappear around the corner.

  IT WAS A hectic day of unpacking the trunks that had been delivered by Mr. Tupper for an added charge of a dime, and when teatime came we were all glad for a break. I led the way to Eliza’s house, marching in front and occasionally pointing out local landmarks such as the tin shop, the inn, and the tavern. Mostly, though, as I walked I composed my story in my head, hearing a conversation between Kate and Mr. Windsor that was heavy with secret longing.

  By the time we arrived at the house on the north side of Main Street I suppose my face might have looked a little startling to Eliza when she opened the door to me. She held a pot in her hands, a stew she had been simmering for supper later.

  “Oh, Louisa, whatever is wrong?” she exclaimed, reminding me that when I composed in my head I often made strange faces, or so I have been told. “Has there been an accident in the village?”

  “I’m sorry, Eliza. I seem to be always taking you by surprise. I was simply thinking of a story,” I explained.

  “I see. Just a moment, dear friends,” Eliza said, fleeing down the hall. I heard her in the parlor, slamming drawers, drawing curtains, throwing balls and dolls into a box to stuff into the cupboard—doing those very things that Abba and I do when company arrives and the parlor is not quite ready.

  We were left standing in the hall.

  “Look,” said Anna, smiling. “Oh, it is just as I remember it from our childhood visits. There is the mangy moose head for Uncle Benjamin’s hats, and that grisly umbrella stand.” She pointed at the object, made from an elephant foot, in which Uncle kept the collection of walking sticks I had been so fond of as a child, carved ebonies each topped with a gilt pagan deity configured as a handle, a set of four brought from Egypt.

  Anna and I had dueled with them as children, and I had always chosen the one with the little goddess on the handle. Hathor, Uncle Benjamin had said her name was, and Anna had chosen Ra, the round sun deity. No child had been allowed to play with the Anubis-handled cane, for he, with his long, pointed jackal snout, had been deemed too dangerous. “You’ll put someone’s eye out with that thing,” Uncle had always warned. Anubis was still there, the gilding of his figure less tarnished and worn than the others, for even Uncle did not like to use that cane.

  I touched Hathor for luck and followed Anna’s exploration. The blue-and-white portrait plates of George and Martha Washington, painted in China so that those familiar faces seemed somewhat Oriental; the teak plantation chair now used to hold fire logs; a cabinet of tiny wooden wine cups from the Japans; and other assorted items acquired over a lifetime of foreign exchange and travel. It was eclectic and marvelous, and I felt a thrill of excitement, for Uncle Benjamin always told the most wonderful stories of shipwrecks and pirates and opium dens. Largely, I suspect, they were invented, for his career in shipping had been marked by prodigious good luck, and he himself was a somewhat timid soul who preferred his library to seafaring.

  “Come in,” Eliza said a moment later, balancing a baby on her hip. The stew had been forgotten somewhere; I discovered the pot later on the parlor carpet.

  Uncle Benjamin, a tall, gray-haired man adorned with an ancient embroidered silk shawl, red Turkish fez, and battered tapestry slippers that were his at-home wear, appeared behind Eliza. Under his silk shawl he still wore the full pleated trousers and puffed-sleeved coat popular in his youth. He cut a strange and charming figure.

  “Abba!” he exclaimed. “Dear Abba! And Bronson!”

  There followed a good five minutes of hugs and how-are-yous, and then Eliza tried to steer us all down the hall.

  “Father,” she shouted. “We were just about to have tea. Will you join us?”

  “Tea? Yes, yes,” Uncle Benjamin shouted back. And so we went into the parlor.

  It was somewhat dusty and shabby, not for lack of caring or even money, but for lack of time and energy. Reader, even if they are not mentioned in these pages, when Eliza appears imagine her always with a child attached to her leg or clinging to her hand. A sweet bun had been ground into the carpet; potted violets on the windowsill wilted for lack of water.

  “Frank is in the back, fixing the chicken coop,” Eliza said. “A fox got in last night.” She sighed.

  “Is his thumb better?” I asked.

  “Yes. But he seems to have a dampness in the lungs today. Grippe, I’m afraid. All the children have had it. One comes down, and the others just have to have it as well.” Eliza sighed again.

  “She complains too much,” said her father. “Sit down, sit down. I’ll have Mrs. Fisher bring us our tea. Louisa, are you better contented now that your family is here?”

  “Much better,” I said. We all sat, somewhat gingerly, for Father had found a rag doll under his chair cushion and we wondered if we might find something sharper under our own. Conversation lagged, because a child had thrown a ball through the open parlor window and it had landed on another child’s head, who now set to wailing and had to be put down for a nap.

  “Back in a minute,” said Eliza, carrying one child and tugging at another.

  Uncle Benjamin and I smiled at each other. He was a rascal, no doubt. He thought I was one, too, for as a child I had climbed all the trees in his garden and lost one of his fishing poles in the Connecticut River.

  Sitting there in the parlor, with the deer heads and hunting trophies and Chinese porcelains and Turkish carpets, I remembered the fun that Anna and I had had years before, when we were young enough to play at dress-up, and Uncle Benjamin let us rummage through the trunks in the attic.

  Eliza returned with her housekeeper, Mrs. Fisher, and the two of them set out the tea things with a great clattering of plates and cups.

  As Eliza poured the tea, I examined the objects on a small table under the window, a magni
fying lens and, beneath it, a small flake of stone with an impression in it of a small, rounded snail, so old it had petrified.

  “Are these yours, Uncle Benjamin?” I asked. “Have you taken up a new hobby?”

  “No, they belong to Clarence, Ida’s son. He is careless, and leaves objects all about,” Uncle Benjamin said. “He brought them over to show Eliza and never fetched them back home.”

  The front door chimed, and Eliza stiffened. Footsteps came down the hall.

  I looked up and saw a woman—a female, I would call her in one of my “blood and thunder” stories—unknown to myself; she was not unknown to Uncle Benjamin or Eliza.

  “Come in, come in,” he said. “My Boston relations are here and we are having tea.” His face had brightened suspiciously upon her arrival.

  “What meticulous timing,” Eliza said. She turned and gave me an unhappy look. “Louisa, I told you you would soon be meeting Ida Tupper.”

  Mrs. Tupper, with a great swaying of her pink sprigged hooped skirt and bobbing of her feathered bonnet, entered the parlor.

  “Ah!” she exclaimed gaily. “You are the family now inhabiting the house next to me! Benjamin told me you were coming. Isn’t he an old sweetie, letting you have that house free of cost!”

  Father cringed. His noble nose flared. Philosophers are almost always above such things, but he disliked being reminded that the Alcotts were often at the mercy of others’ charity.

  “I am Louisa Alcott,” I said, quickly offering my hand to end that particular conversational lead. “This is my mother, Mrs. Alcott, and Father, my sisters Anna, Lizzie, and May. And our good friend Miss Sylvia Shattuck.” Each person nodded, obviously fascinated by this vision of femalehood.

  Ida Tupper was buxom and of smallish height, but her elaborately coiffured blond hair and richly feathered hat made her a foot taller. Her womanly figure was exaggerated by her wide crinoline skirt and an expensive fox stole around her sloped shoulders. Father, the vegetarian, stared in heartbreaking dismay at the poor creature’s still-attached head, with the black-bead eyes.