Rebecca Wentworth's Distraction

by Robert J. Begiebing

  “Has anyone seen these? I don’t think there could be any offense taken.” He held up the drawings, re-examining them one by one. “You are being faithful to Dr. Watts.”

  “My sister, Sarah. It was she who brought the pen and ink to me.” Rebecca smiled, as if remembering the act fondly. “And Mrs. Prescott has seen only one or two. She found them and saw no harm, finally, such goodly subjects. But she admonished me not to dwell on them or waste precious time.”

  “Then she agrees with me,” he said, still examining each drawing closely, “that there can be no offense in these.”

  “Oh, do you think so, sir? It gives me pleasure to hear it. I saw no offense, but you see I had been forbidden to make pictures of any sort.”

  “Forbidden?”

  “By Colonel Browne and Mr. Prescott.”

  “Surely they had nothing such as your Dr. Watts in mind.” He laughed to encourage her. “I find these ... I wonder if we might not encourage such milder productions. Surely Mr. and Mrs. Prescott might be convinced.”

  “I do not think so, sir.”

  “Well, perhaps not. But perhaps all the same.”

  “It would mean a great deal to me if they would allow it.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. It may be that they would allow some . . .”—he searched for a word—“instruction.” She looked at him blankly. “Some supervision on my part. It can’t hurt to ask.”

  “If you say so, sir, but take care, please, in how you put the idea to them.”

  “I shall, I promise you.”

  She gathered up the illustrations and packed them neatly back into the book. “I must get on with my tasks,” she said and left quickly.

  Chapter 16

  THAT VERY AFTERNOON, once the Prescotts had viewed the still-wet painting of the children with apparent satisfaction, he accepted an offered tumbler of metheglin. While they were enjoying their drinks, he off-handedly broached the question of giving Rebecca occasional drawing lessons.

  “She has attempted a few, in pen and ink, which I asked to see,” he quickly added, “on divine matters, Dr. Watts to be precise, which she gave me to understand you presented her upon her arrival.” He gave Mrs. Prescott a friendly look. “I think such an exercise of her talents would be wholly salubrious. And keep her mind off darker matters.”

  “Her labors and responsibilities here provide salubrious effects, Mr. Sanborn,” Mr. Prescott said. “My wife and I have discussed giving her license to draw, now and then. We are aware of her impulse to improve the rather clumsy little illustrations in Dr. Watts, and in some measure we take your point, sir. However, even if we were to allow her to practice upon such enlightened subjects alone, we would be countering Colonel Browne’s will. So, to be brief, we wish to discourage rather than encourage her.”

  “I see your dilemma.” He looked pleasantly at Mr. and Mrs. Prescott in turn. “But if she were closely supervised, if her strong desire to make pictures of any sort were, well, channeled by a guiding hand, a hand such as my very own, it would not only bring the child much delight, but also nourish those very gifts the good Lord Himself provided her.”

  The Prescotts did not reply immediately, so he continued his case. “These lessons on such pious subjects would, in short, inspire her to her happiest moods, rather than her more melancholic hours. And we would be confirming her Christian duty. Surely Squire and Madam Browne desire only that she be released from her somber moments that her mind and heart may take a brighter turn.”

  “They had hoped that honest labor in planting field and household would do as much,” Mr. Prescott suggested. “And, as I say, we believe it has.”

  “I agree,” Sanborn said. “Yet I, we, would only be continuing her progress, nay, even deepening, quickening it. Perhaps we should ask Squire Browne about my proposal. Put in the right light, the proposal, I have hope, will meet with success.”

  “There’s something in what you say, Mr. Sanborn,” Mrs. Prescott put in. “And the Brownes know you and your refined portraits. Perhaps it’s not too far-fetched.” She looked tentatively at her husband, who returned a more skeptical look.

  Sanborn wondered why he had taken Rebecca’s cause so vigorously. While he was in this town, her new home, he wished to slake his curiosity about her productions, as much as about her welfare. That much he understood. But he felt a renewed vehemence. An unreasonable desire to see all her drawings—he did not doubt there were more—and probe her state of mind as much as her unsettling gift. Such impulses, he realized now in a bizarre moment of self-reflection, had begun to consume him. He could not explain them yet, even to himself. And he worried that they might distract him from his own more important work.

  “We cannot have it until I speak with the Brownes,” Mr. Prescott was saying. “I may find I can put the matter to them, but I will not have the opportunity to travel to Portsmouth. Some of our absent, more speculative proprietors have been selling parcels to high bidders from Massachusetts, and they are causing us innumerable difficulties just now.”

  “I appreciate how business consumes your energies and hours, Mr. Prescott. You are much needed in Blackstone. However, I wonder if you might write of our proposal in a letter to the colonel?”

  “It’s not a matter easily presented in a letter. It would require some conversation and due consideration, directly, man-to-man.”

  “You’re perhaps right, after all, Mr. Prescott.”

  THERE WAS, as a result of all these considerations, a delay in his further contact with Rebecca. Well into his fourth month there, with demand for his services waning, he decided to return to Portsmouth. He had no idea when Mr. Prescott might be able to speak as he had said to Colonel Browne, and soon the season would prevent convenient travel. And the nagging thought returned: Was he spending his own precious time wisely?

  Chapter 17

  HE FOUND LADD through acquaintances in the town who made inquires abroad for him. It was close to Ladd’s intended time of travel, as it turned out, so within three days Sanborn found himself on the path to Portsmouth.

  They were nearly halfway in their travels when Ladd stopped and turned in his saddle. “Smell that?”

  Sanborn sniffed the air. “Fire?”

  “Yes. Listen.”

  The two men sat their horses in complete silence. Sanborn heard something—a distant angry wind. “Is that the conflagration we hear, then?” he asked Ladd.

  “Fire hunt,” he said.

  “I’ve never seen one. I thought it was restricted to winter.” He had heard of this practice from the painter Robert Feke, after Smibert introduced the two younger portraitists when Feke was visiting Boston. Feke took pleasure in regaling Sanborn, a green Englishman, with tales of the New World.

  “Or approaching winter, or in spring,” Ladd said, “if the season’s wet enough, as our last month has been. Want to join in?”

  Sanborn recalled Feke suggesting one of the great dangers of this method—where large companies go up into the woods and set a fire circle of several miles circumference. The danger was that rather than merely contracting inward to trap the animals, the fires sometimes broke outward and burned uncontrollably for several weeks. But it made for very rewarding hunting otherwise, and the original settlers had learned it from the Indians a century ago.

  “If you’d like,” Sanborn said.

  The two men set off in the direction of the sound. Shortly, they came to the burned-over ground, still smoldering in places. The mature trees were all left standing, if severely burned and doubtful of regeneration by the look of them. The huntsmen had already gone well into the ever-contracting burn area and Sanborn and Ladd followed them, yet unseen, inward.

  It was not long before they encountered members of the hunting party, one member whom Ladd knew by name. After some talk while they waited for the newly burned ground to cool down enough to proceed, Ladd and Sanborn were invited to join in the sport.

  The whole affair cost them a day’s delay in their travels, but Ladd se
emed especially in his element when the flames finally drew to a small compass and the animals of all kinds began to respond in panic to the full realization of their entrapment. A few of the most desperate, deer in particular, began to break through the smoke and flames to escape the ever-enclosing circle and no sooner staggered in dismay into the smoky daylight than the hunters began to shoot them.

  Sanborn took a few musket shots himself, at first, as all the animals began to break out, but it came to seem a very bloody business, this slaying of scorched, dazed, panicking animals of every species, so he refrained from taking further advantage of their plight. He recalled Feke’s comment on the practice: “It causes incurable injury and devastation in the woods.” Little more than two years later, when the provincial legislature would pass “An Act for the Better Preservation & Increase of Deer,” Sanborn immediately would understand the necessity. Now, he assured himself once again that he was never meant for a bloody woodsman, but was bred entirely to a city man of polite taste and urban pleasures.

  The butchery in the aftermath was equally repugnant to him. Scores of animals were strung up in a great ring among the trees. What seemed to be tons of offal, steaming and oddly green smelling, fell in piles upon the ground, to be left for scavengers. And then the skinning, the hacking at joints, the cracking of bones. Before dark, Ladd himself had neatly packaged one hundred pounds of prime venison for sale in Portsmouth and a wolf head with both ears for a four-pound bounty. Even the nearby stream could not wash the blood and soot entirely from their hands and faces. Ladd and Sanborn had no choice but to camp with the hunters that night, gorging on wild meats, and resume their journey at first light.

  UPON ARRIVING at Portsmouth the following afternoon, Sanborn stood Ladd dinner and a pot of toddy and paid him for his return services. The very next thing he did, after the two men took their leave, and Sanborn returned his hired horses to the livery stable, was to search for Gingher among her haunts.

  “Look who’s returned from the king’s wood,” she said, an amused sneer on her face as she left a tippler and came over to Sanborn.

  He handed her a pound note and told her to “bathe and purchase a respectable hat and gown,” before visiting him in his rooms that evening.

  She looked at him, snatched the money, tossed her hair, and turned to go.

  “Seven thirty,” he said.

  She immediately turned back to look at him. “’Ee’s been a long time, ‘ee’ as.” She smiled wickedly.

  “And would you mind dropping that ridiculous cockney-talk with me, please. I’m not one of your coarse boys.”

  He had patronized her enough by now to know that her usual manner of speaking was an affectation, a sort of stage effect, as if she would speak so as to fulfill a sportsman’s expectations. She could speak plainly if she wished and, he had confirmed, she could read as well. He suspected that she had had another life, but had somehow fallen into dishonor. And tales of the hanging of two women in Portsmouth for the birth and destruction of their bastard infants kept him from asking about the sources of her disrepute.

  “Yet coarse enough for all that!” she jibed him. As she walked away, she laughed, but he knew from past experience, though he had never invited her to his painting rooms, that she would honor his proposal.

  His next order of business was to wash any remaining soot and blood from his flesh and send his card around to the Brownes to alert them to his return from, so far as they knew, painting portraits among the settlements. He intended to call on them briefly to report that he had inadvertently come upon Rebecca in his travels, give them innocent but hearty news of her, and suggest to them that her guardian, Mr. Prescott, would be in town for a visit, most likely the following spring. Calling on the Brownes would also help to alert the gentry to his return.

  He had many affairs to put in order, and such matters occupied his mind for several hours. Not the least of which was to prepare an offer to speculate in lands as one of the participating proprietors himself through, as Prescott had informed him, a grant of the colonel’s. As in England, so in America: A man without property was little more than a vagabond or a servant. Next to his commissions, the slow and careful accumulation of property would become a central concern.

  His occupations made the hours fly toward 7:30, when he was surprised in all his plans by a knock on his door. He looked up from his writing table confused at first. Another strong knock, and then he remembered Gingher. He put down everything and hurried to his door. She stood there, well powdered, in a glaring new gown, with an open skirt displaying a silk petticoat, a plunging bodice, and a nearly presentable hat, looking less a common harlot and more a fashionable young widow of flagrant availability. A white mask on a stick dangled from her hand. Her shawl slid from her shoulders and there was no scarf or fichu to subdue her bosom. She smiled but said nothing. He gathered himself and asked her in.

  She gave him a rather sly look as she passed him to begin examining his quarters. She bent over his work table, on which he had arranged in “lucky order” his brass crayon holder, his chamois stump, quill drawing pens, pen knife, a compass, brushes, his shell for thinning bister, his water pot, and his ruler. She studied the implements as if they were sacred objects from ancient lands. Finally, she stood straight and glanced at him without a word. She stepped over to his model’s rotating stool and sat on it, grinning at him. Suddenly she swiveled to face his artist’s layman—a life-size female figure made of wire armature, fabric stuffing, and papier-mâché—and placed her hands on her hips. She looked the figure up and down as if it might be a rival. “God’s blood, sir! What the devil do you do with this lot?” She turned to look at him, a taunt in her face.

  “It’s my artist’s model, for heaven’s sake, Gingher. It allows a painter to labor longer over the garments and drapery than a sitter can sit. With some patrons it’s quite necessary, I assure you.”

  “I can imagine,” she said and turned back to the mannequin. She gave out a little mocking laugh. “Quite convenient.”

  “Please have a seat, just here. Would you care for a glass of Vidonia?”

  She sat down as he indicated, smiled, and held out her hand to accept the glass.

  “The governor’s health,” he said, touching her glass.

  “Bugger the gov’ner!”

  “Now, Gingher, I thought we were going to avoid the stage antics. Let’s talk plainly, if you please.”

  “You’ll see no stage in this town,” she said and sipped at her glass. “Too many Congregationalists and hypocrites.”

  “Be that as it may, I’d prefer to talk plainly, as we have on occasion before.”

  She drank off her glass and held it out for a refill. “Agreed, sir!” she said with a just audible smack of her lips.

  He asked her about her own adventures and the doings about her part of town while he was away, and she inquired a bit about his own travels in turn. With every glass of wine she grew more appeased and friendly, as if suddenly recalling after his long absence what a promising patron he had become for her.

  Finally, he stated his secondary purpose. “What would you say if I offered to match your weekly take in the trade?”

  She looked at him skeptically and spoke with irony in her voice. “To what purpose, sir, if I may make so bold?”

  “To free you from your coarse labors, and the dangers attendant to them. To arrive at an agreement that I shall become, in utter discretion, your sole patron and will provide for you in divers ways.” He smiled. “That new gown becomes you, as I imagine you know.”

  “I liked it from putting it on,” she said. “There were very few adjustments required.” There was warmth in her voice but she offered no smile. She quietly considered his bold offer, sipping her wine.

  He watched her. She was very striking in her clean dress and toilette; he had not yet truly appreciated her . . .—he searched for a word—potentiality. She had gone to some trouble herself.

  “How do you know I don’t prefer my tr
affic as it is?”

  “I can’t believe that. It’s serviceable, to be sure, but I can’t believe you enjoy such . . . attachments.”

  “And what makes you think I’d enjoy a sole attachment to you the more? It comes to the same thing, don’t it?”

  She had a point, the darling devil. He held in his laugh. “In a sense, yes, I suppose it does,” he said. “But there is a distinction nonetheless.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “A distinction.” She looked at him as if to see whether he was serious. “To begin, I’d have to leave my quarters. I can’t stay there if I’m to be bound to one man in a pretense of respectability. Then there’s the matter of your own reputation, should you be seen with me.” She held the mask up to her face and began to laugh. “You’re proposing ’gainst your own interests, seems to me.”

  “On the second matter, so long as we are scrupulously discreet, let me worry about that. Would I be the first man to take a mistress? I’m not speaking of traipsing up and down the thoroughfares arm in arm.”

  “I imagine not, sir.” She gave another coarse little laugh.

  “As to new rooms, we can arrange something, I’m sure.” He held her stare. “I can’t believe you’d prefer living in public stews. One might as well live in a bog house.”

  “Don’t you, as everyone, have to pay your visits to the bog house?” She laughed lightly.

  “It is one thing to dispense with a necessary office, quite another to take up residence there.”

  She laughed again, then looked at him without a smile. “That would make for you, all told, substantial expense. Why would you want to do so?” She placed the mask on her lap and smiled. “This proposal of yours seems ill considered to me. How’s it in your own interest, truly?”

  “It’s in my interest because you are in my interest. I propose it so that we may have a more simple, unadulterated connection. An understanding. And, to be honest, I don’t like sharing you with others so randomly, so perilously.”