by Kate Gray
Mary had tried to compose herself, this neighbor had made an appearance. He had come out of his dilapidated home, followed closely by another man who wore what appeared to be butler’s dress.
This sight alone had pricked Mary’s interest. This man, Purce, was supposed to have drunk or gambled away all of his family’s fortune. She heard the two men begin to speak to one another and listened as closely as she could without making herself visible.
“No, no, Andrews, get you back indoors! What if someone were to see you?” The voice of the deceptively heavy Purce wafted through cape rose and honeysuckle to reach Mary’s ears behind the crabapple. A long-suffering voice countered that of his employer.
“Sir, I would beg to ask you to observe our surroundings carefully. A body would need to be well-concealed and quite determined to remain unnoticed here.”
“Fiddle faddle, man! This whole scheme perpetuates itself on everyone in town believing me to be a degenerate, to which the sight of a valet does not engender itself.”
Already Mary had begun to grasp the magnitude of not only the townspeople’s assumptions, but also the depth of Mr. Purce’s words. He was not at all what he’d ever appeared, nor what the townsfolk believed him to be. Not that her discovery explained very much else, but it was enough to compel Mary to watch him splash himself with the contents of a tin mug while Andrews stood by, shaking his head.
“Do contain yourself, Andrews, or I shall require you to appear dressed as a scarecrow if you insist on coming out of doors again.”
The other man had then swept himself back inside the house with whatever dignity remained to him. Purce had chuckled and refilled his mug from a silver coffeepot, and then begun to walk down the lane. He’d moved normally at first, but as Mary had watched, he seemed to try out several different gaits, each one an evolution of the last.
He’d first limped around, until shaking his head, pausing, and restarting with a bit of a hopping motion, which formed itself into a stumbling act. None of these were suitable, it seemed, and he finally settled on a shuffling pace, which was well-suited to the odor he emanated.
It had struck Mary full-force as he passed by. Assuredly, she had not known exactly what type of alcohol it was, but knew only that it could not be gin. It had been her father’s preferred drink, and therefore knew that scent only too well.
For the first time in her life, Mary felt a tickle of rebellion in her soul as it itched to take hold. Mother would never know whether she’d gone and banged on her tambourine for an hour, or not at all. Mary suddenly wished to follow this Purce man and see what he was up to, for curiosity as much as anything else. Temperance be damned, she thought, surprising herself.
And so Mary Whitegate had determined to follow Augustus Purce, her increasingly mysterious neighbor, as he shambled his way into town. He whistled a jaunty tune, something modern from the sounds of it. Something which her mother would never allow played under her roof. The closer he got to the main street, however, the more affected his behavior had become, and the less he seemed like the man she had witnessed speaking to his valet.
He’d turned down toward the green, around which the inn, the grocer, and the tavern were scattered. He’d sauntered along in his disarray, tipping his hat to every horse he saw. In contrast, he bowed deeply to children along the way, blew kisses to the ladies, and raspberries at the men.
He occasionally quaffed from his mug, presumably to add to the performance with sodden-sounding belches. Nearly everyone reacted as expected, as Mary would certainly have done without the benefit of having seen what she had.
The only exception was a younger lady, who had been tending her garden with a small child. Mary thought that this was the widow she’d heard about, along with the usual mélange of gossip and speculation.
By this time, however, as the woman waved in a friendly manner to Purce, Mary was beginning to formulate an idea that most of the “news” she heard from neighbors in town was nothing more than jealousy or mean-spiritedness.
She too waved to the woman and her little girl as she walked by, and began to give thought to her earlier reaction to her cousins’ poking and prodding. What if Ian was correct, she wondered, in that the reason she had never found a suitor was because she had ‘too much pride and was poorly self-examined’?
These and other thoughts lingered as Mary had followed Purce down the roadway. She caught sight of him slipping the saddle buckle on a horse whose rider had been very nearly beating the poor animal to death.
Purce made his escape from the scene with alacrity before the man fell to the ground, while the rider’s companions had laughed for some time without offering him aid. Mary shook her head and soldiered on to keep up with her quarry, who was swift, though not in an obvious way.
He had finally begun his approach to the green, where presumably his final destination resided; the tavern. Mary saw the other Temperance Movement Mothers circling, a bit like vultures looking for rotted flesh.
One of them, Elizabeth Swansea, who always wore excessively verbose sashes, accosted Purce as he trundled his way ever nearer the tavern doorway. Elizabeth waved her Old Testament near his ear, nearly knocking his hat off, but Purce only smiled.
As Mary had watched, a bit dumbstruck, he’d leaned in toward Elizabeth, and spoke at her, being sure to breathe quite heavily in her face. And then, while Elizabeth was fully discombobulated, he’d swept himself into the tavern and disappeared.
The other women had surrounded their compatriot, and brought her over to a wooden bench, where they fussed and fumed. Mary stood still, thinking over everything that had transpired in the last half-hour. As she did, an unfamiliar sensation bubbled up inside her chest, and she had raised a trembling hand to her throat.
“You laughed at them? Out loud? Did anyone witness this?” Charlotte hardly knew what to say beyond this. It was a development she could never have predicted.
“I did, out loud, and perhaps someone heard, but by then, I had dropped my tambourine and started back home.” She looked up and added unnecessarily, “to here.” She smiled at the ceiling. “You might wonder why I was so upset by Ian’s words to me this afternoon.”
“I confess I hadn’t given it particular thought.” Charlotte had begun to relax a tiny bit during the story, but now her hackles were up again.
“He was out of temper with me, because…well, he had asked me something the other night, and I had refused him an answer. It was silly on my part, but I’ve been so long under the illusion that the sleeping dragon upstairs will forever breathe fire on me, that I’ve not thought of myself at all. Only her, only what she wants…wanted. I believe that I am finally ready to shed these invisible shackles and choose to live how I like.”
She smiled more broadly, and hugged her skirts about her knees where she sat. Charlotte stared at her cousin, unable to clear her thoughts, except for one question.
“I do beg your pardon, Mary, but I do not understand what it was that my brother asked you, ah, the ‘other night’?” She held her breath, and bit her lip, only to jump nearly out of her skin a moment later as Ian’s voice broke in.
“If you must know, sister dear, I was asking her whether she might very much mind being my wife. And though I suspect you disapprove of my being there, that was how I found myself acquainted with Mary’s toilette in the evening hours.”
Ian must have slipped in quietly behind them as they’d been talking. She could only wonder how long he had been there, and whether he had heard the whole tale of Augustus Purce. Mary and Ian sat side by side and watched Charlotte quietly.
“For once, Charlotte, you have no witty reply. I wonder, cousin, whether you are quite well?” The tone was tinged with mockery, and Charlotte gaped at the two of them.
How, how could this have happened? She thought desperately through her options, furrowed her pretty brow, and spoke in a tightly controlled voice.
“Ian, my only sibling, it is too bad of you not to have mentioned this to me. I could have offered yo
u advice from a woman, as how to secure a fiancée.” She tried to smile, feeling her nerves fraying badly as she did so.
“Not to worry, Charlotte, Mary was only under the influence of, as she says, a sleeping dragon. I knew it then. It was why I was so angry with her today, especially after I had gone to the lengths of telling her our whole sorry family history.” Charlotte’s head jerked up at that.
“What d’you mean, our whole history? Everything? All of your failures?”
“Well, that, yes. Couldn’t start things off on a footing of dishonesty, you know.” He wore a sardonic and accusatory expression. “But more importantly, the story of Jonathon Whitegate. Thought she should hear how the old homestead came into being, don’t you know.”
The two of them continued their infernally implacable staring at her. Fury flooded into Charlotte; she could feel it burning her up from the inside out, and she wondered briefly whether this was how insanity felt.
“And what of me, Ian? You intimate that I am unkind to you; where would you currently be, do you suppose, had I left you in Lahore? I used up everything to free you from that life.” She was picking up pace now, anger driving her words and thoughts. “This house was built by our ancestor, it is our legacy, robbed from us. I only want what should be ours.”
Mary did her best to stand firm against the storm
