Pugg's Portmanteau

by DM Bryan

  “Quick,” said Glossolalia to the young woman, “we must rejoin the crowd at the grove. My plan was embroidered according to an improvised design. Those villains may return when they have had a moment to consider the looseness of my stitching.” Glossolalia did not know if the girl would take in her words, but the latter rose sluggishly. Standing, the young woman was tall, her person more neo-classical than rococo. One smallpox scar disordered an eyebrow, while another twisted her lip. The plump flesh of her cheeks was pitted with them. She might have carried off her boy-disguise if her nose had been less pert and her round eyes a better match for a queued wig. Her hat was gone, and as Glossolalia could not see one lying on the scuffed gravel, she gave it up for lost. “We go this way,” she said, seizing the girl by the arm and pulling her down a path opposite to that taken by the rogues.

  The girl said nothing but followed with at least a show of willingness, and by the time they found the first of the illuminating lamps, she no longer tripped and stumbled. Following the light, the women moved along the pathway and in time found themselves returned to the grove at the heart of the garden. They emerged into golden light, rich with sapphire gowns and scarlet coats, and here, where the stone pineapples grew, the girl stopped and begged a moment to catch her breath. Glossolalia took the young person’s hand in her own and led her to a bench not far from an oil lamp. There, the girl, dropped down and cried with the silent heaves of a body unused to tears. Glossolalia let her alone. Indeed, that lady found she herself was shaking, despite the warmth of the evening. The elm branch she still clenched tightly in her hand, and now she flung it away, sending it back into the bush with a crash and a quivering of leaves. Then all was still.

  By now, the girl was more measured in her distress. She had dried her eyes and begun to put her disordered costume to rights, and by the light of the little oil lamp, Glossolalia could see that the breeches and coat were well cut, although not of a recent style. The wig, still askew on her head, contained a share of elm twigs and lime leaves, but Glossolalia did not do as she wished and put up her hand to set the floured strands to rights. Instead, she sat silently and waited for the other to recover. Her patience received its reward when at last the girl began to speak, thanking Glossolalia warmly and apologizing at some length.

  Glossolalia held up a hand. “Please,” she said. “Consider I was myself alone upon the path. And I have not youth as an excuse.”

  “Still,” said the young woman, “I remain sensible of your bravery.”

  “Ah,” said Glossolalia. “Bravery.” And then she considered what else she might add, but found herself without any sentiments whatsoever on that topic. At last she said, “A boy’s disguise is one of the pleasantest I know. The costume affords us women a taste of freedom we might not experience by other means.”

  The young woman rubbed her eyes. “Is that then how I look? A girl at a masquerade?”

  Glossolalia said nothing.

  “I had hoped to conceal, not flaunt my sex.”

  Glossolalia said, “That is not so easily done. You make a very pretty Rosalind, although tonight we have both seen how Vaux-Hall is no forest of Arden, my dear, for all its charm.”

  Considering Glossolalia’s words, the girl said, “I should have disguised myself as a clergyman, for a clergyman’s cassock is like to a petticoat and licenses him to betray a little femininity without censure. If I had dressed as a clergyman those brutes on the Dark Walk must have been obliged to treat me with as much decorum as if I had been a woman. Although, now I think on matters, I am a woman, and they treated me with very little decorum at all.” The girl paused, thinking on the problem, concluding only with a shake of her head. Then she said, “Either way, I could not lay hands upon a cassock. We have no clergyman in my family—although my sister thinks our brother William might make one in time.”

  “The breeches are his then?”

  “The breeches belong to Charles, but he is gone to sea, and so I borrowed them. The coat is also one of his.”

  “And the wig? Did he not take his wig to sea?”

  The girl chewed at her lip. “The wig is my father’s.” She now removed this object, revealing a smooth coil of brown hair tightly wound into a knot on her head. She held the wig on her lap and picked leaves from its white bristles. “My father has a very large head,” the girl said at last. “The wig is not a good fit. I hoped, perhaps, my hair might hold it in place, but it slipped repeatedly. I have been ridiculous.” She seemed like she might cry again.

  “Oh, my dear,” said Glossolalia, feeling for her handkerchief. “We are all ridiculous. We all have tales we might tell against ourselves.”

  “Tales,” said the young woman. “Well, I have a pretty one now.”

  “You are safe,” said Glossolalia, “and now that you are somewhat recovered, we must add the finis to the tale. Doubtless, your brothers and father circulate about the gardens, worried about your well-being. Shall we find them and return you home?”

  At this the girl wiped her nose with her ruffled sleeve, although she still held Glossolalia’s handkerchief in her free hand. “Perhaps,” she said, “I might join your party?”

  “My party,” said Glossolalia, and she began to laugh.

  In the end, they agreed to walk together to the boats at the Vaux-Hall dock, hoping to pass as mother and son, or aunt and nephew. Then Glossolalia did take the wig, and placing it on the other woman’s head, arranged matters so that the smooth, brown hair was covered better than before.

  Glossolalia said, “If we are to be travelling companions, what shall I call you?”

  “Sarah Robinson,” said the girl, and then appeared to regret her honesty.

  “Perhaps I should give you a boy’s name, since you are still in disguise. William?” said Glossolalia, “Charles?”

  “Morris is my favourite brother.”

  “Morris, then,” said Glossolalia.

  They rose, and Morris took Glossolalia’s elbow. As they took the wide boulevard that led out of the garden, Glossolalia turned to her companion and said, “I know the end of this tale, but I wonder if an account of its beginning would divert us both on our return journey, which otherwise must be long and filled with awkward silence?”

  “Certainly,” said Morris, “I owe you that much. I shall start with my birth.”

  “That far back?”

  “We have a considerable distance to travel.”

  Glossolalia assented, and so Morris began: “I was born the younger of two sisters in a family of brothers. My father and mother, desiring to send none of us away to school, had all of us instructed at home and by the same competent tutors. My sister and I thrived on this regime, and we proved as quick as my brothers. More than any other branch of knowledge, our family excelled in rhetoric and argumentation, and across the dining table, it was our pleasure to debate the issues of the day: the necessity of the Witchcraft Act, the efficacy of the Gin Act, and, of course, the wisdom of the Licensing Act. My father used to jest that he had spawned nothing but parliamentarians, and he encouraged his daughters to hold forth as vigorously as any of his sons. We called my mother “The Speaker,” and she moderated our discourses lest we grow too hot and lose our tempers. In such a household, I grew up happy and content with everything and everybody.

  Alas that time did not stop and freeze me in place, but seasons and people shift and change. My sister, whom I loved better than I loved myself, grew weary of our pea-pod closeness. She shook off husk and tendril, and let a friend carry her into glittering society. Without her, I grew fervid. Before long, I erupted all over with marks, red and painful, and my lips burned with lesions. They gave me water to drink, said prayers, covered the mirrors in all the rooms, and when my sister returned to me, they would not let her into the house. She was young and still lovely to look at, while I had scabs on my face, my trunk, my limbs, and always beneath my fingernails when I scratched.
My sister wrote to me of the lilies of the field, and how I might yet be glad to toil or spin. She would flower while I became as useful as an apple with pitted cheeks. I crumpled her letter. I expected never again to be happy.

  Alone, I took walks over frozen stubble-fields, but my sister’s letters did not stop. She met and married a man who made gold out of friable black rock. He put diamonds around her neck, which pleased her. He gave her houses with stairs and beds and curtains and cooks and chairs and bedpans. He gave her a park in the country and a coach in town. She leased half her heart to him but preserved the rest for her own purposes, and he was content with the exchange.

  My brothers one by one went to Cambridge or to sea; my father read the broadsheets from London; my mother prepared to die. I watched the sun rise over the oak at the edge of the lawn and set behind the outbuildings where we kept the chickens. In summer, the arc resembled a slice of peach, but in winter, it shrank to a shivering bite.

  At home, my mother rallied, then complained of the stone, then rallied again. She obtained a squirrel she liked to call her “pretty fellow” and her “little love.” When the French offered to invade, she refused to decamp and so secured the crown for King George. Again, she took to her bed, and this time she died. No sooner was she buried than my father packed up his papers and moved to London. He said living in the country was like sleeping with open eyes.

  I did not know what I should do. The house was my mother’s and my eldest brother Matthew her heir. He loved politicking and pamphleteering—his work both brilliant and strange. His beard he kept at a Biblical length, and he bathed only in the sea—our house was a three-hour walk from that body of water. He did not tell me I must leave, but I wrote my sister almost at once. Come, she wrote back. Bring all your things.

  In Berkshire, where my sister settled, I had a bed and a place to leave my gowns, but I did not have a home. My sister sparkled in her setting, but without letters between us, I did not know how to say to her what I needed to say. Without my pen, I was dumb and dull—what a disappointment I was to the both of us. Before long, my father wrote me and said, Come—leave your things with your sister. And even though I knew I should not, I went to him in Tunbridge.

  As soon as I arrived, he left me for the races at Canterbury, and I found I must serve as my own chaperone. He did not understand the proprieties that whispered in my ear. I hid indoors, drawing the bells of blue Penstemons with a little camera obscura. At length, my father returned and embarrassed me again with his free speech to a merry widow—this one named Nun, which seemed a satirical jest on nature’s part. I wrote my sister of my father’s wit, of which I’d had my fill. But when he returned to London, it was he who refused my company and not the reverse. I asked him where I should go, but he only stared back at me.

  “Chin up,” said my father and pulled tight the strap on my portmanteau.

  This time, when the proprieties breathed coolly in my ear I would not listen. I wrote a letter to my sister, telling her I was to go to Chilston to stay with cousin Callie. Then, I took myself to London. Young and unaccompanied, my sex made me conspicuous in the coach, and upon arrival I was cheated by two hard men for a harder seat in a sedan chair. My sister had a new townhouse on Hill Street, empty save for the painters and plasterers, but the house was ready enough for me. Past the decorator at the door, I breezed, asking how the wainscoting did—the man knew me. Up two flights of stairs I went, and into one of the bedrooms at the back. It contained a new sofa protected by a length of linen cloth. There, I sat and wondered what I should do next.

  I looked about me. Stacked in the corner was a bed frame, and between the windows sat a pier table with a workman’s clay pipe sitting cold upon it. Near the door, a crate held clothes belonging to my younger brother, Charles, who had gone to sea, and to William and Jack whom my sister sent to school. Under a pair of folded breeches, lay the wig I now wear upon my head, although I do not know how it came to join the rest, for as I have said before, it is my father’s. For a long time, I sat on the sofa with this wig in my lap and wondered at families: how they are composed and to what purpose. In time, the clattering of workmen died away, and when the uncovered windows went dark, I knew they were gone home to the scent of gammon and onions. I realized how easily I had strayed beyond anyone’s particular care—but why should that condition have surprised me.”

  Glossolalia stopped Morris there, putting her hand out to signal silence. Already, they had followed the dusty road that returned the nymphs and shepherds of Vaux-Hall back to the river-crossing. “Am I to understand that you intend to return to an empty, half-furnished house,” said Glossolalia, “and that you have no one waiting to receive you in warmth and safety?”

  “I cannot return even to my sister’s house, for when the workmen left, they set keyed locks, proof against both entrances and exits.”

  “Then how did you escape?”

  The two began to walk down to the Vaux-Hall stairs where the watermen plied their trade. Morris said, “When I finally heard what the wig had to tell me, I went, like a fool, out a window casement. I wore Charles’ breeches and stockings, William’s coat, and Jack’s shirt. As for my stays and hoops, I stuffed those under the linen sofa cover.”

  “Do you then intend to return through the window?”

  Morris shook the wig. “It is too far over my head.”

  Glossolalia had no response to this. She was haggling with a waterman in his skiff. They soon came to terms, and Glossolalia stood expectantly until Morris remembered to hand her into the little craft.

  On the way back to London, the river’s current was with them and made the man’s work easy, so he lit a pipe and smoked as he plied his oars. Morris and Glossolalia sat in the stern and looked out over the waters. Morris looked behind at the faint flickers of Vaux-Hall, while Glossolalia looked ahead at London, heaped like a smoldering mound of bone.

  Once they were well away on the water, and some distance from any other boat, Morris turned away from a scrutiny of the vanishing gardens and said, “I jumped from the window because I heard voices in the street and feared discovery. I imagined if I were taken as a burglar, I might be clapped in Newgate and hung as a thief. I thought the judge would suppose I had broken a lock to gain entry, and I knew what that meant in law. When first I put on boy’s clothes, I feared I might not be convincing, but as I straddled that window casement and contemplated discovery—well, then I feared the opposite. That thought made me jump and kept me company in my mad rush down St. James, toward the Whitehall Stairs. My actions were not an intention—they were the very opposite.”

  And now Morris removed the wig and sat bare-headed in the river breeze, which picked up the loose strands of long brown hair and showed them to the stars. Glossolalia glanced at the boatman, but the same breeze made contented flags of the smoke from his pipe as he puffed. He pulled on his oars, keeping the stem of his pipe between his teeth and his gaze fixed on the horizon.

  “I am not so stupid,” said Morris, “as to confuse romance with life. I know I am not a boy and that any careful inspection of my costume would confirm my imposture. But I have seven brothers, and I hoped I might successfully play one, as if on stage. I have been to the theatre and have seen it done.”

  “Rosalind again,” said Glossolalia.

  “My assailants did not appear to know the play,” said Morris. “They did not court but followed me until I grew afraid. Then I could no longer control my manner of walking, and my squeaking way of speaking would have shamed a castrati. Poor Rosalind was never so served.”

  Glossolalia pulled up her cloak to cover her head, for they had neared the middle of the river, and here the breeze sharpened into a wind. The Thames waves also wore white shawls over their glossy faces. “Are you not cold?” Glossolalia asked Morris.

  Morris shook her head. “I am angry,” she said. “But I must put off anger like I must put off breeches. Neither suits m
e.”

  Glossolalia looked out over the water, watching the churn of the currents. At last she said, “I once heard tell of a woman who commanded an attack in Trepassi Harbour—a Bristol Galley boarded and taken. The lady acted coolly, taking not a single life, so that no one could say of her what they said of the pyrate Roberts: that he grew to love mischief for its own sake.”

  “And what is the moral?”

  “No moral. She did it for silver teapots and some fine creamware tureens, shaped like melons.”

  “When I was attacked in the garden,” said Morris, “I should have swung my feet and hit with my fists, but propriety told me I was still in petticoats. Propriety asked me what I was doing there so far from my father and brothers—why had I gone where I had no right to go?”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” said Glossolalia.

  “Wasn’t it?” said Morris, pulling at her shirt collar. “I hate these clothes.” She threw the wig into the river Thames, where it floated like a slick of paint. In a moment or two, a wave tossed it on its side, and the wig slipped beneath the surface.

  “A fine catch in the morning,” said Glossolalia, and Morris began to laugh.

  “I want,” said the girl, “but one firm friend, who will stand at my side in all things.”

  “You have a sister.”

  “And yet I want another.”

  “I want,” said Glossolalia, “to recover what I have lost.”

  “And what is that?”

  Glossolalia frowned. “The subject of another tale,” she said. “But I believe I can serve as your friend, at least for a little while longer. As soon as we land, I will take you in a coach to your sister’s house to recover your own costume. There must be some caretaker who will open the door to us.”