by Linda Wolfe
Watkinson, a shrewd businessman, wasn’t so sure. He told Lucretia that he couldn’t undertake any tailoring without the certainty of payment. She tried to persuade him that the money would absolutely be forthcoming. But there was no reasoning with the man, and in the end she said, “Make the clothes and charge them to me.” After that she called in Lino, and Watkinson measured him, stretching his tape around Lino’s small waistline and down his slender arms and legs.
His new customer was diminutive, Watkinson saw. Only a few inches over five feet. He looked like a little bantam cock. Especially standing alongside the gangly Mrs. Chapman. And the outfit he had on! That nasty little jacket. Those ghastly pants. They were so loose, the tailor would later say, the little fellow “could hardly hold them up.”
It was nearly one o’clock when Lucretia, her children, and the still atrociously attired Lino pulled up at the Union Street office of the Mexican consul, Colonel Estanislao de Cuesta. Leaving the children in the carriage, Lucretia and Lino went inside and were shown into the colonel’s presence. “I am an unhappy Mexican,” Lino said at once, without pausing for formalities. “My name is Carolino Amalia Espos y Mina. I beg you to hear my misfortunes.” Then promptly he told Colonel Cuesta that he was the son of General Mina, the governor of California.
Cuesta’s curiosity was piqued. He knew of General Mina, one of Mexico’s most famous military heroes. The general had once even been to Philadelphia—back in 1817 he’d been the one who’d led a delegation of Spanish and Mexican revolutionaries to Joseph Bonaparte’s home and offered to make him king of Mexico. Intrigued, Cuesta offered Lino and Lucretia seats, and Lino, addressing the consul in Spanish, proceeded to relate his tale of woe, the same tale he had told the Chapmans.
Lucretia didn’t know Spanish, but she sat through the recital anyway. Had she known the language, she might have heard things that would have awakened her from the dream to which she was more and more succumbing—the dream that the handsome Lino was precisely what he claimed to be and was going to make her and her family extremely wealthy. But her Spanish was minimal, and as Lino chattered on, his account interrupted at times by questions from Cuesta, she began thinking about the LeBruns and how she’d promised the children that they’d visit them today. Could she leave, she wondered, leave and go pay her call? Lino, who’d gotten through the lengthy narrative of his disastrous visit to Paris, was explaining how he’d happened upon the Chapmans, and how they’d offered to take him in and to write letters to his parents. Distracted, she sat on.
Cuesta, however, was listening attentively. A diplomat of no mean accomplishment, he wore a sympathetic look on his amiable face. But his expression belied his inner thoughts. Strange fellow, Cuesta was thinking. Looks more like a beggar than the son of a Mexican nobleman. He was so skeptical that when Lino finished his story and asked him to forward the Chapmans’ letters to the American consul in Vera Cruz, he decided to lay his cards on the table. “Your manners,” he said, “your way of speaking. These do not show you to be such a man as you would have me believe.”
If Lino was taken aback, he didn’t reveal it. “It’s true,” he acquiesced, and while the uncomprehending Lucretia continued to consider excusing herself, quickly amended his story. “I am an ignorant man without any kind of education,” he said. “But the reason is that my grandfather, by whom I was raised, was without education and neglected me in that particular and therefore sent me to travel, to improve my manners.”
“I did not know there was any governor by the name of Mina in Mexico,” Cuesta persisted.
Perhaps his father wasn’t the governor, Lino hedged. Perhaps he was wrong about his title. “I only heard it from my grandfather.” Still he was sure his father was an important figure in Mexico’s province of California. “He is in some high employment, and I thought it was governor.”
Cuesta wasn’t sure whether to believe the young man or not. “Where in Mexico did you reside?” he asked.
This time Lino fumbled for an answer, and Cuesta frowned. “You’re lying to me,” he said. “You’ve never been in Mexico.”
“I have,” Lino protested. “All I’ve stated is true. But I have been suffering so much from the loss of my friend and my money that I am almost out of my senses.”
“Give me some proof that you’re Mexican,” Cuesta commanded. Lucretia, oblivious to the direction the interview had taken, was planning the rest of her day.
“What proof?”
“Your passport.”
“I have none,” Lino mumbled.
“Your certificate of baptism, then.”
“Lost.” But the loss of the documents was not his fault, Lino insisted. The papers had been in the trunk of the friend with whom he’d traveled to Europe, and the friend had died, and the police had confiscated his trunk.
The man has an answer for everything, Cuesta thought. But perhaps, who knows, maybe he’s telling the truth. After all, the woman with him looks quite respectable. She’s got her own carriage. Brought him here in it.
Observing her dignified demeanor, he decided to do as the fellow requested and forward the letters. But as soon as he said he would, the stranger asked for still another favor. He asked if he could write another note, one to his mother, and have it included in the packet.
Cuesta said yes, and handed him a pen and some paper. At this Lucretia finally stood up. “If you’ll excuse me,” she said, “I have some business in town. I’ll come back for him in an hour.”
The consul bowed. Lucretia left. And Lino eyed Cuesta and asked for even a third favor. Would the consul write the letter to his mother for him? “I’m ashamed to write in front of you,” he explained. “Because my handwriting is very bad.”
It was too much for Cuesta. “I’m busy,” he snapped. “Write to your mother yourself—particularly as it’s rather her fault that you write badly, isn’t it?”
With that, he leaned forward at his desk and began doing his own work. He was still at it—and his visitor was still penning his letter—when his servant arrived and called him to dinner.
Cuesta did the polite thing. He invited Lino to join him. Not that he expected him to accept. “It is a custom in my country,” he would later say, “that when a person is called to dinner, he invites the stranger with him; but it is customary also that the stranger never accepts such an invitation, because it is understood merely as an act of politeness.”
This stranger’s manners were so bad that he accepted.
Lucretia was late getting back to Colonel Cuesta’s after her visit to the LeBruns. The family was at table, a servant informed her. But he showed her into a parlor and sent up word of her arrival, and a few minutes later the consul appeared. “We are just beginning to eat,” he greeted her. “Won’t you join us? I’d feel much honored if you would.”
She said no, she’d dined with her friends, and besides, her children were outside, looking after the horse.
No need for that, the gracious diplomat replied, and, dispatching a servant to take care of the horse, went outside himself and brought the children into the house. “Would they like a sweet?” he asked Lucretia. “And you? Would you care for a drink?”
She said that she’d take a glass of water. But he brushed aside her modest request. “Cold lemonade,” he suggested, and before she could reply, or so it seemed, a servant was handing her a glass of icy lemonade and passing around a tray of sweetmeats.
These little attentions to her and her children delighted Lucretia. Even more pleasing was Cuesta’s suggestion that he send one of his sisters downstairs to talk to her until he and Lino were finished with their meal. “Romania speaks a little English,” he said. “She can keep you company while you wait for Señor Mina.”
Romania proved as delightful as her brother. She chatted with Lucretia on a variety of subjects, and then began talking about Lino, whose tragic story she had learned while in the dining room. She spoke sympathetically of Lino’s plight and said his family was a prosperous one in Mexi
co. Indeed, “In his own country,” she confided, “he’s very rich.”
So it’s true, Lucretia thought. So it’s all true.
By the time Lino and the consul came downstairs, she and Romania had become fast friends. “You must come and see me at my house,” she said to the Mexican woman as she prepared to leave. “And you must come and see me here again,” Romania said. They hugged each other and the consul escorted his visitors outside and personally handed Lucretia into the Dearborn.
If a suspicion of Lino’s true character had ever flashed across Lucretia’s mind, that suspicion was now, or so she would one day say, altogether dispelled. From this moment on, she would say, she was certain that Lino was every bit the Mexican nobleman he had represented himself as being. Otherwise Romania wouldn’t have talked about his being wealthy back home. Otherwise Colonel Cuesta would never have invited him to dinner.
Five
Bucks County, Pennsylvania
June 1831
SOON AFTER THE VISIT to the Cuestas, Lucretia’s maternal affection for Lino blossomed into a different kind of love. She stepped across some forbidding Gobi desert deep inside her and like a traveler arriving at an oasis, found herself ready to gorge on whatever was offered. First it was conversation, never a strong suit of William’s. Lino chattered, spouted stories, made the dinner hour come alive. Then it was music, long Lucretia’s favorite pastime. Lino asked her to entertain him, and when she did, playing the piano and caroling the hymns that were her specialty, he responded with his repetoire—love songs. Next it was touching. When they went out on errands in the carriage, Lino would sometimes say he had a headache and, laying his mop of black curls down in her lap, ask her to stroke his throbbing forehead. When they were surrounded by others in the house, he would sometimes say he could feel a fit coming on and beg her to keep him from flailing about when the shakes gripped him. To spare him embarrassment, she would send the others out of the room and hold and soothe him until he felt better. Finally it was sexual relations—she began going up to his attic room regularly.
Ellen noticed. One evening she saw her mistress, dressed in nothing but a flimsy nightgown, perching on the edge of Lino’s attic bed. One morning, at dawn, she saw her tiptoeing down from his room.
If Lucretia was aware of Ellen’s spying, she didn’t seem to care, for by the end of May she was fully in love with the handsome stranger. And he with her—if he could be believed. At times it crossed her mind that he couldn’t, shouldn’t be believed, that given the disparity in their ages—she was forty-three, he a mere twenty-two—it would have been more credible and more appropriate for him to have fallen in love with her daughter Mary, now a strapping girl of twelve. But when Lino insisted that despite Lucretia’s being old enough to be his mother, he loved her, and that he loved her because she was like a mother, because she’d nurtured him and given him refuge when he was down and out, she accepted his explanations, took what was offered.
Lino’s protestations, and the passion he had kindled in her, made her more and more irritable with William. She flew off the handle at the least provocation. One morning she asked William to help Mary turn over a mattress, and when he ignored her, she told him that in that case she wouldn’t serve him any breakfast. Another day she asked him to call everyone to the table for morning prayers, and when he procrastinated, she told him that in that case there wouldn’t be any prayers, and got so mad that she locked up the prayer book. Yet a third day, she was so irked by the sight of William’s homely face and rotund aging body that she shouted at him that she wished to God he was gone, for she was tired of him, and even gave him a little kick with her foot.
On a clear cool morning in early June, Lucretia’s friend Esther Bache came to the house to make Lucretia a new dress. Soon after she had cut and pinned the fabric they’d selected and was ready to begin the sewing, Lucretia asked to be excused, explaining that Lino, her new boarder, was subject to fits, and she needed to attend to him. Esther nodded and took up her needle. She stitched away dutifully, but occasionally she was distracted by the sound of conversation coming from the room above. She could make out the voices, Lucretia’s high-pitched tones and the deeper tones of the boarder. The two were chatting animatedly, and sometimes they burst into laughter, the boarder’s guffaws and Lucretia’s silvery trills drifting merrily down the stairs.
The sound made Esther think that the boarder couldn’t be very sick, not so sick that Lucretia couldn’t come down and let her do some fitting.
She kept on sewing, but after a while she told Mary Chapman she needed her mother and asked the girl to go fetch her. To her astonishment, Mary refused to do so.
Esther was puzzled. Later that morning she was even more puzzled, for when Lucretia finally did turn up, she said darkly that the boarder was no better. In fact, “We fear for his life,” she sighed.
Still, when the household was called to the midday meal, the boarder appeared and took a seat at the table. Right beside Lucretia, Esther observed. She observed, too, that he seemed perfectly well. He ate his food heartily and after emptying his plate was in such fine fettle that he suggested taking Lucretia and ten-year-old little Lucretia out for a carriage ride.
At that they disappeared, leaving Esther to work on the dress, and they didn’t return till evening. When they did, Lucretia invited Esther to come sit in the parlor with her, and William and Lino joined them. Lino was in high spirits and started telling a story. Esther understood the tale well enough—it was about his voyage from Mexico. But William, she observed, didn’t quite get the drift. A perplexed look clouded his face, and he interrupted with a question.
Lino didn’t answer, just gave the elderly man a dirty look.
Esther glanced at Lucretia, who acknowledged that the boarder had been rude and quickly apologized for him. But she seemed to feel her husband was responsible for the boarder’s display of bad manners. “Mr. Chapman hardly understands anything,” she complained.
The next morning the dressmaker left, Lino hitched up the horse, and Lucretia and the housekeeper climbed into the Dearborn. Ellen had asked Lucretia for the day off so she could visit relatives, Lino had offered to drive her, and Lucretia had said she’d like to go along.
It was a hot morning. Ellen was glad she was sitting beside Lucretia in the back of the carriage, where her head would be protected from the sun. But Lino, who was sitting on the exposed driver’s seat, began to fuss that he was getting a headache, and after they’d gone just a few miles he asked Ellen to change places with him.
She came up front. She took the reins, clucked the horse forward, and trained her aging eyes on the road. But from time to time she glanced resentfully back at Lino.
He’d made himself mighty comfortable, she saw. He’d put his head down in the mistress’s lap!
A few moments later she heard him start to sing. It was, she thought, a love song. The words sounded odd, what with his broken English and all, but from the sound of it, she was sure it was a love song. Holding her back stiffly, she tried not to listen, but next thing she knew, Mrs. Chapman was singing, too. What she was singing didn’t sound much like a hymn. No, what she was singing sounded like a love song, too.
Ellen turned her head and shot a disapproving look at her mistress and the flirty, flighty Lino. He saw her stern expression, but instead of sitting up straight and stopping his nonsense, he offered teasingly to put his head in her lap. Ellen glowered at him. Then, “Who wants to be troubled,” she snapped, “with a butterfly like you.”
At last they arrived at her relatives’ place. But it wasn’t the kind of visit she’d hoped to have—the family was getting ready to whitewash the house and had piled up all the furniture. Mrs. Chapman suggested that since there wasn’t a decent place to sit down, they leave her relatives to their efforts and go for a walk in the woods. But Ellen said no, she’d rather stay by the house, so the mistress and Lino strolled off into the forest by themselves. Ellen didn’t mind at first. She was sitting under a shade tr
ee, and it was cool enough. But then she ended up sitting there for two or three hours—that’s how long it took Mrs. Chapman and that butterfly of hers to come back.
I’m going to quit working for Mrs. Chapman, Ellen decided. She isn’t the same woman she was when I came to her a year ago. She isn’t the same woman she was just a month ago, before that Lino turned up.
But she didn’t give notice that night. She had arrangements to make, family members to consult, and by the following Monday she still hadn’t told the mistress she was leaving. So she was still with the Chapmans when out of the blue Mrs. Chapman announced that she was going into Philadelphia for the day and that she’d asked Ben, the student who was so good at managing the horse, to drive her. They’d be taking Lino and William Jr. along, Mrs. Chapman said, and they’d be back in the evening.
Ellen nodded and went about her work. But in the evening when the first fireflies began twinkling in the yard, the mistress wasn’t yet home. Nor was she home when full dark descended. Ellen felt sorry for poor Mr. Chapman. He was running around the house like a crazy man, worrying aloud where his wife was and what on earth was keeping her.
“Maybe they’ve run off to Mexico,” Ellen said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” the old man steamed. “The way they’ve been going on.” But afterward his eyes filled with tears and he said with a sigh that cut right through her, “I wish the ship that brought Mina from Mexico had sunk.”
It isn’t easy to face up to the defection of a spouse. William, like many a husband whose wife is being unfaithful, was at once both aware and yet not aware of what was happening with Lucretia. He knew and didn’t know. He knew and didn’t want to know. Part of him liked to think that she was just flirting with Lino, trying to flatter the young fellow so he’d be sure to make them all rich when the money from his father arrived. But part of him didn’t trust Lino, didn’t think he was what he said he was. And that part, a part of himself he hated, told him that maybe Lino was having sexual congress with his wife, that maybe he was getting her to sneak up to his room at night. Would she do a thing like that? He’d never caught her at it. But after all, he was an old man, given to nodding off well before she did. Who knew what went on when he was asleep?