And in that case—
“Mrs. Adams?” Pattie, who was standing at the front door even as Abigail stepped out of the study into the hall again, turned, and beyond her Abigail saw a cloaked form on the threshold in the dusk. “A lady here to see you.”
Miss Fluckner? Thank goodness there was a fire in the parlor fireplace this afternoon . . .
“My dear Mrs. Adams!” As Pattie stepped aside, Mrs. Margaret Sandhayes limped into the hallway, paused to prop one of her gold-headed canes against her pannier, and this time—second encounter being obviously ground for a promotion—extended her entire hand instead of the cool two fingers as before. “I am desolated to interrupt you at this hour, but dear Lucy warned me—at the same time that she begged me to bring you this—that you Puritans spend the entire day in Church on Sundays. Is that true? Doing nothing but listening to the minister prose on about God and holiness? How very extraordinary—but very morally uplifting and good for the character, I’m sure.”
She smiled and held out a thick-folded packet of paper, crusted everywhere with blots of sealing wax into which a seal of a flying bird had been hastily squished. An equally impatient hand had scrawled Mrs. Adams across the front.
“Won’t you come in?” Abigail nodded to Pattie and stepped back to open the parlor door.
“Well, just for a moment, thank you so much.” In a vast rustle of petticoats Mrs. Sandhayes shed her cloak into Pattie’s hands and preceded Abigail into the parlor, her panniered skirts—a style worn by only the wives of the wealthiest merchants in the colonies—swaying uneasily with her lurching stride. “Of course I should attend more regularly—Dear Hannah Fluckner tells me that the minister at King’s Chapel is dazzling, and so handsome, too, for a man of his years, and with a beautiful voice. I always think a Man of the Cloth must have a beautiful voice, don’t you? So much more important than all that dusty Bible-quoting! Yet vestries over here never seem to think of that when choosing them, or even offer training in elocution or rhetoric at seminaries, which makes it such a bore for the poor parishioners.”
She settled in the chair beside the fire and propped her canes beside her, her movements suddenly gracefuclass="underline" as she removed her gloves, Abigail noticed the length and pale beauty of her well-cared-for hands. “And God forbid if there’s some perfectly simple word that he habitually mispronounces, like concupiscence, which dear Dr. Ellenbrough at St. Onesimus’s always pronounced con-cuppy-since, and I’m afraid we girls would start giggling and could not stop ourselves—Why, thank you,” she added, as Pattie came into the parlor with a tray: softly steaming teapot, small plates of bread, marmalade, fig-paste, and soft cheese. “How very kind of you, m’am! Such a freezing night as it promises—” Mrs. Sandhayes broke off, started back for a moment as Abigail poured out the un-Sabbatical tea: “Chamomile?”
“Would you prefer mint?” Abigail inquired serenely. “I know some people think mint is rather everyday.”
“Oh, dear me, I completely forgot.” She laughed, the silvery sweetness accompanied by a dismissive wave. “The notorious tea fracas! Don’t tell me you subscribe to the boycott, Mrs. Adams? La, such a to-do dear Lucy makes of it, and all just to annoy her Papa, as girls will—especially girls whose Papas insist they marry dreadful little snirps like Sir Jonathan, nihil nisi bonum and all that, of course . . . Please do read Miss Lucy’s letter.”
The outer note enclosed a thicker inner packet, sealed but unaddressed. A blotted scribble implored:
Mrs. Adams,
Got your note! What luck that you’ll see Harry! I beg you, put this into his hand! Philomela and I will go walking on the Common Tuesday 10 o’clock . . . I beg of you, meet us there, away from prying ears! I am consumed with envy—will you go disguised as a boy?
Lucy
William Shakespeare, Abigail reflected, had a great deal to answer for.
“The poor child.” Mrs. Sandhayes heaved a deep sigh. “I positively weep for her, but of course one understands one can’t have one’s daughter marrying a bookseller. But I’ll swear the boy is no fortune hunter.”
“Of course he isn’t!”
“No of course about it, my dear Mrs. Adams.” Mrs. Sandhayes took a sip of the chamomile tea, politely suppressed a grimace, and set the cup aside. “Mr. Fluckner’s ships, cargoes, and property in Boston are worth a hundred and twenty thousand pounds if they’re worth thruppence, not to speak of proprietary rights to over a million acres in Maine, wherever Maine is”—she laughed again, dismissively—“once the title is confirmed. It has a very French sound, don’t you think? And say what you will about the French, they may be our enemies and Catholics and all that, but they cut a dress in a way that no Englishwoman ever could, not if she lived to be a hundred. I had a mantua-maker in London—”
“And I’ll swear”—Abigail returned to the subject under consideration—“that Lucy hasn’t formed an attachment to Mr. Knox simply to disoblige her father.”
“What? Oh, dear, no.” Mrs. Sandhayes folded her lovely hands. “I think that’s why dear Lucy was so taken with Mr. Knox: because they’d met half a dozen times, and talked of books and battles and horses and dogs, before Harry ever knew who she was or that the man who won her should be rich for life. That he was taken with her, she said, and not with her dowry, which is a great deal more than could be said about Sir Jonathan Cottrell. It was really very sweet.”
“’Twill be a good deal less sweet if Harry is taken for a military trial in Halifax and hanged for it,” replied Abigail grimly. “Was Sir Jonathan wealthy?”
“My dear Mrs. Adams, the King does not have penniless friends.” Disconcertingly after her babble of mantua-makers and fashionable preachers, a flash of worldly wisdom glinted from the Englishwoman’s green eyes. Even with the last of the evening light fading from the windows, and the gentler glow of candles and the parlor hearth concealing the details of the day, Abigail could see that however fashionable the cut of Mrs. Sandhayes’s clothing, the fabric itself was faded, and the lace and ribbons that decked her bony bosom either clumsily refurbished or repaired. At the meeting-house that morning Lucy had spoken of her chaperone as her social equal, her mother’s “friend who is staying with us,” but now it occurred to Abigail to wonder if this were not simply a polite fiction. Had Mrs. Sandhayes delayed borrowing her hostess’s carriage to deliver Lucy’s message until a time when she knew that the light would be kinder to a gown that had seen better days? The pearl earrings and the Medusa-head cameo at her throat were old and probably valuable—this was a woman who wouldn’t wear trash. But they were also the jewelry she’d had on earlier in the day.
“It’s surprising,” the woman went on, “the number of people who subscribe to the belief that just because a man has a respectable fortune, he isn’t going to pursue a woman with a larger one. I use the word pursue advisedly,” she added drily. “Sir Jonathan adhered to the Kiss-Me-Kate School of wooing and seemed to think that a girl of Lucy’s boisterous temperament would find violence of conduct as well as sentiment appealing.”