Love's a Stage (31 page)

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.”