Love’s a Stage Read online

  As he watched her his face changed, as though a new and uncomfortable thought was first entering his mind. He said suddenly, “We can’t take you to the tavern looking like that.”

  “Why, of course not, Carl. I told you I should have returned to the house for a bonnet . . .”

  “No, not a bonnet. An old hat, felt, I think; cheap felt. And I’ll need a shabby dress.”

  She couldn’t resist it. “Oh, are you going in disguise as well?”

  He gave her a wisp of a smile. “Of course, I’ll be in disguise, but not in skirts, Merry.”

  “What then?”

  “You’ll find out Thursday night.”

  * * *

  The modest home that Merry shared with her aunt had been pretty once, with its brick patterns of Flemish bond and richly detailed interior woodwork, the latter mostly covered now with muting layers of olive house paint. The kitchen alone was large, but the other rooms were high with many windows broken into small square panes that charted the faded carpets in white sunlight.

  Since Aunt April had had the care of it the house had grown homely, though it was meticulously kept. Here were neither the bleak look of poverty nor the irritating frothings of a trite taste, but rather a place made dreary by the bewilderment of a lady unable to decorate within the boundaries of a limited income. There was no money and very little access, therefore, to gilt porcelain, to chairs with graceful legs turned in the workshops of Sheraton, to fine tables with gold inlay, to paintings by men with great names, to fabrics so supple that they inhaled light and breathed it out again, made new and glowing. Gone forever were the exquisite, expensive things that Aunt April had touched and smiled at and draped on her body in the childhood spent across the Atlantic’s bitter waters.

  Only in Merry’s room had April made an effort, with chintz hangings and animals cut from nursery prints set with care into colored heavy-paper frames. The rest of the house had been left alone and clean, its fixings growing old-fashioned and paler with each scrubbing.

  That evening Merry sat as she always had with Aunt April in the “green drawing room,” never quite realizing how laughably grandiose was the title for this tiny parlor with its faded chartreuse-and-vanilla-dotted wall covering and shabby mustard-colored wing chairs. The room was always too hot, in the winter from the oversized white stone fireplace and in the summer because Aunt April was too worried about flyspecks to leave the window open. The heat filtered into the horsehair stuffing in the chairs and drew from the fibers the scent of that long-ago sacrificed animal. But tonight the warm weather had rendered the perfume of the stables so strong that even Aunt April had reluctantly agreed that the window must be opened.

  In the glowing twilight Merry could see families walking together on the village green, fathers pitching their little sons up to ride on broad shoulders and stooping to toss balls to their daughters. Sweethearts walked in pairs, sometimes laughing, sometimes earnest, and the parson was taking his nightly two turns for health, tipping his hat to the ladies as he went. To Merry it might have been another world, because Aunt April had shunned the other villagers so completely that all save the most thick-skinned had long since ceased to visit. Twenty-five years ago Aunt April’s father had packed up what was left of his once illustrious fortune in a few cloth bags, bought his family passage to the New World on a leaking, rat-infested hull of a refitted slaver, and left England and an angry flock of creditors shaking their fists from the wharf. The shock of being reduced in the course of a day from irreproachable respectability to a position close to that of the wretched poor had been the death of April’s mother, father, and older sister, and the same fate might have befallen April and her younger sister, Annette, had not Annette had the good fortune to have been knocked down by a horse being ridden by a young civil servant, who, full of remorse, had decided he was in love with Annette and married her, rescuing them from a state of dire poverty.

  Carl and Merry were the result of that union. Not five years after Merry’s birth Annette had died politely in her sleep from a weakness of the heart. Aunt April went on to run her sister’s motherless household with such sterling competence that before he was out of mourning gloves for his wife, Mr. James Wilding had decided to remove himself from the house on the slim pretext that he didn’t want to trouble April with his maintenance. Taking his son, he set up a small, comfortable home for himself along one of the rutted lanes in the nation’s brand-new capital and proceeded to make his way up the ranks of the Treasury to his current exalted position. Each month without fail he had sent to April a sum of money to maintain herself and his daughter, Merry.

  The arrangement suited him, for he had never been at ease in the company of any woman, not excepting his highborn wife, and had more than once told April that he didn’t know what to say to little girls anyway. If Merry had been a boy, well, then, that would have been different.

  And so April had stayed, raising her dead sister’s child, hating the rawboned land that was to her a prison, flaunting her royalism to her offended neighbors, and searching with desperate, secret restraint for some way to return to England and her vanished life.

  In her turn Merry had developed like a tree split by lightning, both halves continuing to grow; one side an intense loyalty to her prim, well-meaning aunt, and the other side an exciting patriotism, pride in this rough, wild, unmapped country. It seemed always that she must protect her aunt from how different the two sides really were. When Merry was little, the village children had shouted at her: “Tory, Tory, shoot the redcoat,” so she had stopped playing outside their own garden and never told Aunt April why. The other children had to content themselves with sticking their tongues out at her in church when they could get away with it, until they grew old enough to tire of the game. Merry had grown up lonely and shy, and the village, not understanding, said what a shame it was that her beauty had gone to her head and made her a snob like her aunt.

  Opening the polished marquetry cap of the sewing box, Merry pulled out the pillowcase hem she had been monogramming for Aunt April. It was tedious work after the quick, fluid pen strokes of drawing, and Merry glanced over to where April was sitting ramrod straight on the settee, the sensible lap desk balanced on her knees. She was a narrow woman, narrow everywhere—in the hips, the shoulders, the face, the hands; Carl would have added, in the mind. Her hair was light, fine, and had a tendency to wander, and her voice was marred by a tremor left from childhood measles. For as long as she could remember, Merry had felt only one emotion whenever she had looked at her aunt, and that was love.

  With painstaking deliberation Aunt April was transcribing a letter to England, to a friend who had years ago ceased to care. Faithfully every month Merry’s aunt wrote to more than a dozen ladies and received back, at the most, two letters a year. It seared Merry’s heart to watch April’s elation when letters came, but it hurt much worse to watch her aunt hide her disappointment on those days without number which came and went with a barren post. There was nothing Merry could do except ache with impotent pity and hate the callous British aristocrats who ignored her aunt and those letters filled with forlorn pleasantries.

  Merry was about to thread her needle when April, with a sudden irritated gesture, jerked the quill from the paper and slid it into its holder, and stretched her neck like a turtle, sniffing the air.

  “Segar!”

  “Aunt?”

  “I smell tobacco!” Her aunt set the lap desk with a clatter on the side table and went to the window, bending from the waist to peer out into the velvet-black evening, gesturing toward the dark lacy mound of the honeysuckle bush. “Henry Cork!” she called. “Are you smoking in those bushes?”

  Henry was Aunt April’s only male servant. He’d come under an indenture from Ireland, where, he was wont to tell the admiring maidservants, he’d not done a day’s work in all his forty years. There was only one area in which he’d ever chosen to invest his energy, and that was in doing everything he possibly could to send Aunt April into
a tizzy.

  After a minute April called again, “You . . . Cork! Are you out there?”

  She was answered by silence, and a palpable waft of tobacco smoke, which even reached to the corner where Merry sat.

  “Shall I go out and talk with him, Aunt April?” she asked.

  “No, no, it’s not the least use. If he sees you coming, he’s bound to run off, and who knows what mischief he’ll get into. I suppose I should be grateful that I can smell where he is.” She came away from the window to trim the wick of a sputtering candle. “Plague take that man! How many times must I read to him from the Virginia Charitable Fire Society pamphlet: ‘May not the greater frequency of fires in the United States than in former years be ascribed in part to the more general use of segars by careless servants and children?’” April turned to her lap desk and pulled out the evening paper. “Why even tonight, in the National Intelligencer . . .” She gave Merry a look heavy with significance and carried the paper to the window, holding it so that the candlelight enabled her to read from it in an unnaturally loud voice. “‘There is good reason to believe a house was lately set on fire by a half-consumed segar, which a woman suddenly threw away to prevent being detected in the unhealthy and offensive practice of smoking.’” Her aunt paused and peered into the darkness again.

  The honeysuckle bush began to shake with Henry Cork’s half-suppressed laughter, a sly, roguish chuckle that filtered into the room and hung there as pungent and smoky as the spent tobacco. Aunt April blinked her eyes in exasperation and slid down the window with a certain force. The incident seemed to have put her out of the letter-writing mood. She went to the sewing box and drew from it the gaily colored alphabet sampler that she said she was designing for Merry’s firstborn child. The project had astonished and amused her niece, who didn’t know a single unrelated gentleman of marriageable age and could scarcely imagine herself talking to one, much less (very much less) creating a child with one.

  Tightening her embroidery hoop, Aunt April said in a gloomy voice, “I can’t think why your father would want to have you visit Thursday. Thursday! He’s never been one for visits on Thursday that I can remember.” She threaded pink silk on her needle in a single swift stab. “And I can’t understand why your brother wouldn’t stay for supper. Such a sudden boy.” A swirl of her forefinger knotted the thread. “I know what it is. I offered him tea. He despises me for serving tea. Sometimes I think he despises all civilized things.”

  Merry was caught in a churning muddle of embarrassment and conflicting loyalties. “Oh, no, Aunt April, I’m quite sure that . . . that is, I know tea is your very favorite drink, and . . . if we are to be free in the United States, that means people are free to drink what they want, surely.”

  “That’s not the point of view of Mrs. Patterson.”

  Merry set down her pillowcase. “From the Society of Patriotic Ladies?”

  “Oh, yes indeed. She was here this afternoon, dispensing recipes for drinks that might be substituted for imported teas. Liberty tea, for instance, can be made by boiling loosestrife. Have we any in the cow field? And one can make do with strawberry leaves, raspberry leaves, or leaves from the currant plant.”

  Merry went to her aunt, taking her aunt’s hand in her own. “I’m sorry, Aunt April. Did she . . . was she condescending?”

  Her aunt smiled wryly at Merry. “Dreadfully.” She stared at the black square of the window, and her smile faded. “A goose farmer’s daughter, at that. She has nowhere from which to condescend. In England that woman wouldn’t have been received into our home!” April’s faded blue eyes were melancholy. “That was another life. England . . . cool mists; the grass as fragrant and sweet as wintergreen candies. Our home, with deep rooms scented of beeswax and fresh flowers, and filled with friends in bright silks. Oh, you’d laugh if you saw how we used to dress, with hairpieces piled in stacks on our heads, sometimes more than three feet high, stuffed with cotton bunting and doused with white powder until we looked like a crowd of grandmamas. Monstrous, the satirists called it, but that was the fashion. My, we thought we looked like something—‘prodigious elegant’ was what we used to say. I don’t believe I had a single care in the world.” April returned Merry’s handclasp. “Oh, how I wish I could have those things for you, not this savage land of heat and mosquitoes, and fathers who visit only once a year. And brothers so overcome with the heat that all they want to do is make a war.” Aunt April shook her head, her lips tight, the skin on her cheeks drawn. “What could be important enough to make a man shoot at another? For the United States to be warring with England—the idea is absurd. We are English. We speak English, we eat English food, the very gowns on our bodies are woven on English looms.”

  Yes, indeed. That was certainly true. And it was a mark of shame for Merry to walk through the streets wearing British cotton while loyal Americans had switched proudly to coarse homespun. It was useless to try to explain that kind of thing to her aunt. Instead Merry said gently, “Americans aren’t only English, Aunt April. We’re Dutch, French, German, Spanish—”

  “Criminals,” said April, “malcontents, and religious fanatics.” She thrust her needle into the pink crossbar of her sampler’s italic letter A. “There are times, Merry Patricia, when I feel I could give my two arms if only I could take you with me and travel back to England.”

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