Louisa and the Missing Heiress (2 page)

“And then what, Louisa? Does she give her hand to the faithless painter, Claude?” breathlessly asked Miss Sylvia Shattuck.

I stopped reading and began marking on the pages, crossing out some words and adding others. On some days the phrases came easily; on others each was a struggle. This day was a struggle, since I was already preoccupied with the events to come . . . though I could not yet know how truly and frighteningly eventful the afternoon would become.

Sylvia and I were in the attic writing room in my family’s house on Pinckney Street. She stood beside my piles of manuscript wrapped in paper and string, leaning on the huge ancient desk at which I wrote. Behind her on a ledge stood my favorite, much-thumbed books: my father’s gift,
Pilgrim’s Progress,
and my secret thrill, an edition of Poe’s
Murders in the Rue Morgue.
I have always adored Poe for his prose and the suspense and thrill of his writing. But, truth be told, not so much for the mystery of this story, which I solved long before Poe intended me to, an achievement I credit to my education in my father’s philosophical methods and the influence of my mother’s gift for insight. My parents’ careful education in the ways of the world has made me particularly apt at arriving at answers to questions of human nature.

The one window in my garret was curtained with muslin, not lace—I prefer a gentle light when I work, and of course my family could not waste money on lace. The floor was bare but scrupulously clean. It was 1854, I was twenty-two, Mother had just lost her job with the charity agency, and Father . . . well, he had never had a talent for earning income. Those years of poverty bleed together in my memory, always overpowered by memories of more important problems. That was the year following the election of President Franklin Pierce, and Father, months later, still grumbled to himself about it. We would see him pottering from library to parlor, from parlor to dinner table, jabbing the air with his forefinger as he lectured President Pierce in absentia. Pierce was a will-o’the-wisp, a moral deficient, willing to do anything for a vote, including support slavery.

That was also the year my beloved older sister, Anna, had gone to Syracuse to work as a governess. I missed her every day, every evening, and perhaps my friendship with Sylvia grew even deeper because of that longing for the wise, gentle, absent Anna.

That afternoon, as I finished my work, the slanted light coming through that window indicated it was close to three o’clock, the household dinner hour.

“Well,” Sylvia said impatiently, reading over my shoulder. “Does she leave the stage and pledge herself to the faithless one?”

I considered Sylvia’s question, replacing my pen in its tray. “She must, else there is no story, I fear. But it will not end happily.”

“Claude will love another,” Sylvia guessed, leaning forward eagerly.

“He will be absolutely unreliable,” I admitted. “But Beatrice will have her revenge.”

“How exciting, Louisa!”

“Do you think so, Sylvie? Is it, perhaps, too exciting?”

“Could there be such a thing as too exciting?”

I scratched my nose, leaving a smudge of ink behind, one of my bad habits, I’m afraid. I contemplated the quality of my writing. It was all blood and thunder. My natural ambition was, I suppose, for the lurid style. I could not help but indulge in gorgeous fancies. Perhaps there was no other way for me to write, I thought as I straightened the manuscript pages into a neat pile. Yet there was this impulse, deep inside, to tell a true story, not a fancy.

Even then, before I had published my first work, I sensed what would ultimately be the real value of my work. But that day there were three manuscripts on my desk:
The Flower Fables,
little stories I invented for the Emerson children and was now working into a children’s book; my true short story, “How I Went out to Service”; and my tale of Beatrice and Therese, which I had just named as “The Rival Prima Donnas.” None had yet been published. Next to “How I Went out to Service” was a rejection letter. I hadn’t anticipated how much pain a simple envelope could carry. The rejection had suggested—no, stated—that I should pay more attention to domestic duties, as I had no talent as a writer. The story was one of my first “real” stories about real people, rather than inventions such as Beatrice and her fickle lover, Claude. In fact, it was about me, and the rejection had a double sting to it, for it was my life, my experience that was rejected, as well as the story.

That name Josephine, though. That was not a blood-and-thunder name, nor was it a fairy name for the Fables. The name conjured up a fleeting image. A young woman, a character who sprawled on rugs rather than sitting primly in chairs, a woman who cherished books over new bonnets and rich husbands. Was this too ordinary a character for a novel? What would she say if she spoke? The seed that bloomed into Josephine took root that day . . . but I get ahead of myself.

Whilst some authors complain that they cannot work without perfect solitude, at this stage in my life I found being with Sylvia Shattuck more natural and more helpful than being alone. We had been friends since childhood, and we had arrived at that wonderful, intimate stage in which words are often unnecessary, so well does one know the other. Of a far less humble background than I, Sylvia was able to enjoy the frivolity that comes with wealth. Unlike so many members of “society,” however, she possessed a deep conscience and dedication to help those less fortunate, and, for this and her sweetness, my parents had accepted her into the bosom of our family. “She can’t help that she was born wealthy,” Father often said, in the same tone in which another person might say,
He can’t help that he was born lame,
or mute, or some other inescapable and unearned defect of nature.

And so Sylvia was allowed into my attic workroom. When Sylvia and I were alone, and not working for the poor, for women abandoned by their husbands, or for children desperate to learn, she helped me be less serious and indulge my fancies, my whims, my creativity. Looking back, I am certain that Sylvia was something of an inspiration for me. But I often wondered how we could be frivolous—even silly—when there was so much injustice in the world. Was it that Sylvia and I valued each other not for the fancies and fantasies we indulged, but for what was most subtle in the other’s character, for that mysterious promise of what could be?

“What could be,” I repeated aloud.

“Another gorgeous fancy?” Sylvia asked. Seeing the look on my face, she said, “Are you thinking again of that letter? You must not let it discourage you. Your writing is marvelous and success will come.”

“Sylvia, you are a friend. Meanwhile I write my blood-and-thunders filled with moonlight in Rome, adulteresses with flashing black eyes, madwomen locked in attics, when real life needs to be written. If Father ever read this . . .” I riffled the pages on the desk.

“Now, Louy, you know your father never reads anything more entertaining than
Pilgrim’s Progress
. And you may publish those
Flower Fables,
that sweet collection.”

“Yes. A children’s book. Closer to life, I hope.”

“Louisa! Sylvia! It is almost time!” my mother’s voice called up the narrow stairway.

I carefully placed the manuscript in a drawer, leaving Beatrice to her fate, and locked the drawer. I extinguished the lamp, for the attic was dark even in the afternoon, and stood.

“We must go, Sylvia. Time to face the terrible siblings and the Medusa.”

“Poor Dottie,” Sylvia said, also rising.

Dear reader, I must now explain this profusion of friends. Mr. Hawthorne, in one of his calmer moments a few years before, had patiently explained to me the importance of pacing, of allowing the characters time to speak, to be known by the reader, before introducing the next. “Think of it as a play,” he had instructed, knowing I was stagestruck in my teens. “Characters appear one at a time, or in couples. Never all at once.”

Suffice it to say that before Sylvia became my sole close companion (for as much as I loved my younger sisters, Lizzie and May, they were too young for the adult conversations I had shared with Anna when she was at home), Dottie had also been a close companion. She had, the year before, married Sylvia’s cousin, Preston Wortham, and embarked on a honeymoon visit to the capitals of Europe. For months Sylvia and I had speculated on Dottie’s daily activities (her visit to Italy had inspired me to place my heroines in peril throughout the Apennines and along the Bay of Naples), and the tea party was our first chance to see her since her return to Boston. Unfortunately, as a price of seeing our friend, Sylvia and I would be forced to endure a visit with Dottie’s sisters, and her aunt, a formidable creature we had nicknamed “the Medusa.”

Mother waited for us at the bottom of the attic stairs, a basket of just-baked rolls in her hands.

“Bring these for Dottie,” she said. “She always liked my raisin cakes. Just imagine, Dottie is a married woman now. Seems like just yesterday she was still in short skirts and afraid of the dark.”

“Oh, Abba, with all you have to do,” Sylvia said, accepting the basket and giving my mother a kiss on the cheek. Like all of us, Sylvia called Mrs. Bronson Alcott by the familiar name, Abba, short for Abigail. Mother usually had high spirits, but today she looked tired and worn. We worried that she bore too much responsibility on those frail shoulders. Yet she remained my rock, my deepest support in times of difficulty.

“A year seems a long time for a young woman to be away from home and friends.” Abba sighed. “These new customs. Why, after your father and I married at King’s Chapel we went back to his room at the boardinghouse, and after supper he wrote his lecture for the next day of school. We didn’t make such a fuss of things.”

“You and Father are the exception to all customs,” I said, smiling.

“But to invite you for tea instead of supper,” said Abba. “Well, it is time. Send Dottie my love.”

In my mind’s eye, I can still see us rushing out of the house, two pairs of neat, high-buttoned shoes clacking over the wooden floor and down the stairs, and our black cloaks making the whooshing sound of heavy flannel as we dressed for outdoors. I dashed out, chiming the doorbell as I left, both of us laughing with nervousness, dreading the ordeal to come.

Mother, with her housecap askew on her graying hair, waved from an upstairs window and shouted, “Louy, remember to bring back a cake of laundry soap. Now hurry along, or you’ll be late! Don’t keep Dottie waiting!”

“Oh, true and tender guide, we will not forget the soap!” I waved back a farewell. “And we won’t keep Dottie—Mrs. Preston Wortham—waiting!”

Later, I would recall with great sadness the irony of those words.

“I SUPPOSE IT IS some strange new custom,” complained Miss Alfreda Thorney. “Inviting guests and then not being there to greet them. I never.”

Miss Thorney was the personage we referred to in private as the Medusa, for the thick, curling salt-and-pepper hair that snaked around her forehead and cheeks in a style of hairdressing that had been popular some thirty years before; and because her glance could turn men to stone. Or so I had imagined as a little girl, when the mere sight of her would compel me to run away in terror. Unfortunately, as an adult I found her only slightly less terrifying. There were, after all, those rumors of her instability, of a two-year period when she had been locked into a room with only the family doctor for a visitor.

“Mrs. Wortham is only back from a long voyage,” I protested gently, braving the Medusa’s stern glance. “I am confident that some pressing matter arose at the last minute, and that she will be home soon. Have another slice of seedcake, won’t you?” I picked up the silver cake tray to pass it, but before I could, Mr. Wortham’s man, Digby, stepped forward and took it. This sort of formality was not what I was accustomed to.

“I’ll do that, miss,” he said, and with great stateliness, as if he held the crown jewels, he silently moved around the little circle with it, his highly polished black boots giving off occasional glints of light. Alfreda Thorney visibly cringed as he approached her and studiously avoided any eye contact with the servant. Digby, I thought, must be the only man in Boston who intimidates even the Medusa.

Other than Sylvia and myself, our companions in the room were Edith and Sarah, Dottie’s sisters, the Medusa, of course, and Edgar, Dottie’s brother. Preston Wortham, Dottie’s new husband, our host, had briefly greeted us and then disappeared before explaining why our hostess, the new Mrs. Preston Wortham, was not present. Good manners forbade a direct question, but I felt distinctly uneasy.

With both Preston and Dottie absent from the room, Sylvia and I were trapped with Dottie’s relatives, and we shifted around in an awkward silence. I tried to observe, contenting myself with the idea that I might encounter some snippet of conversation, some nuance that might reappear in my stories.

We sat in the best parlor of 10 Commonwealth Avenue, one of the new mansions that had begun to appear along that tree-lined boulevard. It was a late-winter afternoon, a season of gray skies and constant damp drizzle. Any disheartened light the sky offered could not make its way through the heavy velvet curtains, so all the lamps had been lit and a fire set roaring in the fireplace, as well.

I held an alarmingly thin teacup and saucer in one hand and a plate of fish-paste sandwiches—so different from our less fancy but more delicious fare at home, cunningly (and wastefully, when one considered all the crust and cutaway bread) shaped as shells—in the other. I kept my back straight and my gaze serene, but I must admit I gave in to the temptation to tap my foot, marking time with my impatience, safely out of sight under my hooped skirts, a habit of my girlhood.

“The seedcake is dry,” Miss Thorney complained.

“Do try the lady cake,” I said, allowing a touch of impatience to creep into my voice. Miss Thorney glared and purposely let her eyes come to rest on my high-buttoned shoe, where the leather had worn noticeably thin at the toes.