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

by Maclean, Anna

  Feeling horribly self-conscious, having thus been made the center of attention, I untied the string and brown paper that held the first pages of Thornton and Emmeline: A Colonial Tragedy. I cleared my throat.

  “Thornton is the son of a cobbler, poor and ill-respected by the town because of his poverty and because his father is often seen publicly inebriated,” I began.

  “Ah!” exclaimed Helen, frowning to indicate deep thought. The others nodded.

  “But Thornton,” I continued, “has several qualities that will eventually redeem his reputation. First, he is brave, braver than most. Second, he is loyal.”

  “Loyal to Emmeline,” Helen said.

  “Exactly. He loves her, and she returns his love, but fears her own father’s wrath for her misplaced affection. They must never speak in public but only steal a few moments of joy when Thorton measures her feet for new boots.”

  “How romantic!” sighed Sylvia.

  “How racy!” said Helen. “There must be bare feet onstage! And then what happens?”

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “I have only the first act.”

  “Then we will read that, and spur you on,” Helen said. “I myself will play Emmeline, unless there are objections.” No one dared object, of course. “Anna, you can play my mother, and, Thomas, you can play my father. Walter will play Thornton.” She looked at him from under her long lashes, and that poor young man, already branded and trussed and ready for the altar, though he did not yet know it, ran his finger around his shirt collar.

  The readings were dreadful. The young men were wooden and muttered their lines; the young women giggled and poked each other in the ribs. The amateur group had earned its name, indeed. Painfully we struggled forward, turning page after page of my “blood and thunder” story.

  When it was again Helen’s turn and she exclaimed, “‘Oh, Thornton, I shall never love another but you, and die a maiden rather than betray you! ’” I knew the play would not do. Helen had declaimed her lines by putting one hand over her heart and shrieking with what she thought was a fit of passion. As Sylvia later described, she sounded more like a cat with its tail being pulled.

  “I think a comedy will suit us better,” I said, rolling up the pages. “Let us put this play aside for a later time.” Ten or fifteen years later, I said to myself.

  BEFORE SLEEPING THAT night, I spent an hour alone on our front porch, gazing at the full moon, round and white as a mercury glass globe. The rehearsal made me laugh at how dreadful we had been, but also saddened me because of how dreadful we had been.

  I hugged my knees and tried to think of nothing, for there were too many thoughts in my head at once.

  Footsteps shuffled down the sidewalk and I saw, in the moonlight, a man, awkward and slow, coming toward our house. No, the house next door. Clarence Hampton. He saw me just as I recognized him.

  “Ah! The lovely Miss Louisa,” he said. His speech was very slurred, the S’s sibilant and hissing. “May I join you? Yes, thank you, I will.”

  I hadn’t agreed, yet he sat next to me on the step. “Lovely night,” he said. “Lovely.”

  “You have been celebrating,” I said.

  “I have,” he admitted, giving me a broad wink. He hiccuped.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” he said, leaning so closely to me that I could smell the gin on his breath. “I have made a decision. An important one. I am going to run away from home. Enough of family.”

  “You already seem to spend quite a deal of time away from your family.”

  His drunken smile turned to a snarl. “Not enough,” he said. “They confuse me. Make me doubt my own senses. That’s how it’s always been.”

  “That is harsh,” I said. “May I ask you a question about other matters?”

  He looked at me with slightly crossed eyes. “You may,” he said.

  “How is it that your stepfather paid a deposit for a new bell order out of his own family bank account? Doesn’t the church usually pay?”

  “Ah,” he said. “You have been snooping. Thought you might. But Mother will tell you that it is not uncommon for commercial travelers to make such transactions. It is a kind of loan, you see. From him to the church, to encourage the bell order if they are at all undecided. And now, Miss Louisa, I’m going to turn in. If I’m lucky I’ll make it upstairs without waking her. She doesn’t approve of the company I keep, you see.”

  He rose unsteadily, with laborious and slow gesture unbuttoned his boots, and tiptoed home in his stocking feet.

  I watched him go, fearing for the safety of his mother, for I remembered those murderous glances he often gave her.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Lady Macbeth Comes for Dinner

  “THIS WILL DO nicely for a summer comedy,” I said to Sylvia, who found me sitting cross-legged on Uncle’s Turkish carpet the following day, surrounded by volumes of plays and stories as well as a book of engravings of European locales. I had spent a lovely afternoon scouring Uncle’s library for a suitable candidate, and found—rather refound—Sheridan’s The Rivals and decided we could stage a production of that very humorous eighteenth-century play.

  Sylvia sat next to me and opened the book of engravings. “Paris.” She sighed. “Wouldn’t it be lovely to walk along that bridge over the Seine? Mother, as you know firsthand, has not a large stock of principles, but those she has, she abides by sternly. She insists I cannot tour Europe until I am wed.”

  “She is afraid you will run off with a handsome scoundrel and end up running a vineyard in Sicily or an Alpine inn,” I said.

  “Doesn’t it all sound exquisite?” Sylvia sighed again, and then looked dazedly at the volume I placed in her hands. “What is this?”

  “It will become our comedy,” I told her. “Just enough roles for the group, the lines are not overly long to learn, and it will make Walpole laugh.”

  “I almost forgot,” said Sylvia, peering at the volume. “A letter has come for you.” She reached into her pocket and retrieved the correspondence. “Abba sent me over with it. She knew once you were in a library you would be gone for many hours.”

  I studied the envelope. The paper was of good quality, though thin enough to indicate a certain thriftiness when it came to supplying stationery needs. The handwriting was thin and spidery, very old-fashioned, as a town recorder’s should be. “It is from the coroner in Worcester,” I said. “About Mr. Sykes, Ida’s second husband.” I hesitated, then tore the envelope and read quickly.

  “Well?” asked Sylvia when I had finished and returned the letter to its envelope. “Well?”

  “It is polite and official,” I said. “It gives dates of Ida’s marriage to Mr. Sykes and his death. He died just six months after the wedding. And the coroner writes one other thing: It was almost a double tragedy, for Mr. Sykes’s stepson was swimming with him the day he drowned, and the stepson almost drowned as well.”

  “Mr. Hampton never mentioned that he once nearly drowned,” said Sylvia.

  “Just the opposite. I heard him say he wasn’t swimming at all that day.”

  WE FOUND ABBA in the kitchen as usual, stirring a pot of fish soup for supper.

  “Lake trout,” she said happily. “Caught this morning. Benjamin sent them over.”

  The scrubbed wooden table was covered with fish heads and tails, and the cat and her kittens were wild with appetite, meowing and dancing figure eights at our ankles. Abba gave them a plate of milk and one of the fish heads and put the rest of the unusable fish pieces into a covered pail. She poured lemonade for Sylvia and me and sat down to rearrange daisies and ferns in a long-necked vase. Abba loved flowers, and when Father had a garden he always planted a row for her. This summer the flowers, like the vegetables, were growing at an astounding rate.

  “You look like little girls again”—she laughed—“come to tell me about a broken cup or scraped knee. What are these glum faces?”

  “I need your advice about Claren
ce Hampton.”

  Abba stopped smiling. “That strange young man. Advice about what course of action?”

  “That will depend on how you answer my question,” I said. “What do you think of him?”

  “Are there any biscuits?” asked Sylvia, who was always hungry. Abba took the tin from the shelf and put it upon the table.

  “Mr. Hampton is a mystery,” she said. “And people so young as he is ought not to be such a mystery. He is hiding something. I hope you are not . . . ?” She could not even bring herself to say aloud what all mothers fear, that her daughter has formed an attachment to a man so promising of heartache.

  “I have no feelings for him, Abba, only an awareness that affairs are not as they should be between Clarence Hampton and his mother and his stepfather, indeed, that entire family. Ernst Nooteboom has died violently, and Jonah Tupper seems to have disappeared. I would like to know how you assess Clarence Hampton’s character.”

  Abba poured herself a glass of tea and gave me a long, steady gaze, all the while stirring her fish soup with her other hand.

  “When I was young,” she said, stirring, “and still living in my brother’s house in Connecticut, a boy came calling on me. This was before I had met your father, you understand. After I met Bronson . . . well. That was that. But this boy was different.”

  “In what manner?” asked Sylvia, leaning forward. She loved stories of Abba’s youth.

  Abba’s usually soft gaze grew hard. “He carried an air of something about him, something unpleasant. He visited us often, since my brother was tutoring him in Greek, so that he might enter divinity school. My brother, Sam, was interested in new educational theories. That’s how I met Bronson, you know. He and Sam corresponded, and then Bronson arrived one day on the stagecoach. He was wearing that funny old beat-up hat he kept for so long.” Her eyes grew dreamy as she looked into that long-ago romance still so fondly remembered.

  “The other young man,” I prompted Abba.

  “Yes,” she said. “Mr. Crawford. Dick Crawford. He had a fine mind, but always seemed unhappy, as if he carried a tremendous burden. And he didn’t know the difference between mine and thine. Several times he brought me flowers he had taken from the neighbor’s garden when no one was looking. He took one of Sam’s stocks, a good lace one, and never returned it. As if everything were his by right. And there was gin. Much like your Clarence Hampton. My brother soon had to forbid him the house, and ask him to pursue his studies elsewhere. He caught him in the kitchen with Sally, the cook’s daughter. Oh, how she cried, so afraid we’d dismiss her without a character, but we could tell the fault was Mr. Crawford’s. I wonder what happened to poor Sally?” Abba grew soft-eyed again with nostalgia.

  “Did you ever learn the origins of that cloud under which Dick Crawford walked?” I asked.

  “Not really. But I guessed at it, sometimes. He had a mother who had had several husbands, and she had sent him away to be raised mostly by distant cousins. I suspect they practiced the ‘spare the rod, spoil the child,’ philosophy. Step-families can be so cruel.” I knew what Abba was thinking; in the darkest moments of the Alcott family she had had to consider sending her own children to live with others, or choose hunger and want for them. She had decided to keep us together at any cost. She had been right.

  “What happened to him, Abba, do you know?” I asked.

  She gazed sadly at her fish stew. “He was hanged, after he had stabbed a girl who, at a party, had refused to dance with him.”

  “Anyone home?” a fluting woman’s voice called from outside our kitchen door.

  Abba shook her head and put down her wooden stirring spoon.

  “Coming, Mrs. Tupper,” she said. “Will you take a glass of lemonade?”

  “Why, that sounds lovely, Abba,” said Ida, breezing in before Abba could open the door, and sitting down with us. Ida had that way about her; doors were for strangers, not her, and she did not wait to be asked.

  “You all look frightful,” said Ida Tupper. “Whatever have you been talking about?”

  “An old beau, that’s all,” said Abba, turning back to the stove. “I was speaking of an old beau.”

  Ida gave Mother’s back a funny look, and suddenly I knew exactly what she was thinking: There was Abba in her stained apron, her gray hair pulled back into a stern knot low on her neck, her hands red from housework. What had she to do with beaux?

  “Abba was famed for her hair when she was a girl,” I said. “She never had to fill it out with horsehair pads.”

  Ida blushed. “I’m sure Abba was the belle of whatever balls she attended, and had many beaux.”

  “I had not,” said Abba, half-offended, stirring her soup somewhat more vigorously than required. Sylvia and I twirled the lemon pulp in the bottom of our glasses and said nothing.

  Mrs. Tupper cleared her throat. “How are the rehearsals coming?” she asked. “I think it is so charming that you are bringing some culture to little Walpole, Louisa.”

  “Walpole seems quite cultured already,” I said. “But I am pleased that the theatrical group has welcomed us into their midst.”

  “I had hoped Clarence might join you. I suspect he has inherited some of my own talent for playacting. Did I tell you about my King Lear? Yes, I see I did. I also played Cleopatra. Such a lovely costume! Too bad only the schoolgirls saw me.” She giggled.

  “Is Clarence interested in the stage?” I asked.

  “He is interested only in fossils, I believe,” said his mother. “I tried to raise him to appreciate the good things of life, but he digs in the mud.”

  “Has he considered serious study of science at Harvard?” I asked.

  “I’m sure he has no aptitude,” Ida said. “He is a dilettante in everything, and it would be a waste of money to send him to school. Think of the trouble he’d get up to without me to look after him. Why, he’d be chasing after servant girls, although Mr. Wattles seems to have convinced him of the wrongness of that error. I shouldn’t speak so of my son, but he does try me.”

  Ida sipped her lemonade. “Of course, my own playacting days are past,” she added. “Now I am old, married. Why, I have a grown son! I could never again appear before an audience in costume. That is a pleasure for the young.” She sighed heavily.

  Her hint was too lacking in subtlety to be politely ignored. “Perhaps, Mrs. Tupper, you would accept a part in the forthcoming production of the Walpole Amateur Dramatic Company?” I suggested.

  “Oh, I couldn’t.” She looked at us from under her long lashes. “But, of course, I wouldn’t want to appear standoffish. By the by, Louisa, I’ve received another card from my Jonah. In the morning’s post.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “A penny card with just a few words of greeting.”

  “Since you know so much, there is no need to tell you what my dear husband said.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Tupper. Please have another glass of Abba’s lemonade and tell us about the card from Mr. Tupper.”

  “Well, if you insist. He says he misses me, of course.” She looked at Abba and gave her a schoolgirl sort of smile. “Such a sweet man, my husband. Business has not been good for him. There have been no more orders for church bells since that last one came in from Grand Rapids, but he assumes that once all this potherill about Whig and Republican dies down, the commercial world will improve.”

  “He is still in Detroit, then?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Strange that he would spend so much time in a city where his business is not successful,” I commented.

  Ida Tupper frowned. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said, twirling a string from her shawl. “Well, Jonah can be strange and stubborn. I had to plead with him for ever so long before he would purchase our little honeymoon cottage. Men worry so much about money. Why, if you can’t buy yourself a little home, what is the point of working your fingers to the bone?”

  Abba smiled wanly. Mrs. Tupper’s “honeymoon cottage” was a Walpolian ma
nsion, larger than any house Abba had lived in since her marriage to Bronson Alcott, philosopher, and certainly larger than any she ever expected to inhabit again. But there was no bitterness in her smile, only patient amusement.

  Ida blushed prettily. “Well, I must be on my way.”

  OUR LITTLE THEATRICAL group rehearsed The Rivals that evening, and I grew optimistic, for our group was well equipped for comedy, with Helen in the role of Lydia, the pretty ingenue and ward of the dragon dowager, Mrs. Malaprop, and Charles as her disguised beau, Captain Absolute. In these romance comedies beaux are always in disguise, and Charles was hard-put to play both the dashing captain and the penniless Beverly, but he managed, for love of Helen.

  I was Mrs. Malaprop, a widow trying to advantageously marry off her ward. No one else had wanted the role, for the widow is past youth and was never beautiful. But, dear reader, how could you not want to play a woman who utters such lines as, “I would by no means wish a daughter of mine to be a progeny of learning; I don’t think so much learning becomes a young woman; for instance, I would never let her meddle with Greek, or Hebrew, or algebra, or simony or fluxions, or paradoxes, of such inflammatory branches of learning—neither would it be necessary for her to handle any of your mathematical, astronomical, or diabolical instruments.”

  I added geology and undergroundology to Mrs. Malaprop’s list of things not to be meddled with. Llew laughed; Clarence Hampton, who attended a single rehearsal at the urging of his mother, did not. He had not left home, as he had insisted he would when in his cups, and I was both relieved and disappointed. Relieved, for I felt he somehow was involved in the tragedy of Ernst Nooteboom and should be made to answer for it, and disappointed because I had come to realize that his mother had a very negative influence on him.

  I had other worries that night, and a different sort of problem. Anna had missed the same cue several times, and I had to face what could no longer be ignored, something that explained the cloudy distance I often felt between my beloved older sister and the rest of the world: She had lost some of her hearing.