by Laura London
It was noon, and Merry’s gaze caught the gleam from a church tower as its great bell began to dance. The voices of other bells joined in. From the Presbyterian Church, the Trinity, the Dutch Reformed, French Episcopal, and Baptist came brilliant thunder that laced the cool air between the hard claps of cannon salute.
In front of Merry the parade was retreating down the straight stretch of Broadway. A unit of dragoons had been the last of the military that would pass them. The workers came next, under bright printed banners that snapped in the shifting breeze. The hat makers, the pewterers—and the blacksmith trade with a wonderful float that carried a working anvil and red fire, where three men stood forging an anchor, even as six horses pulled them along.
What a day it was, what a parade! Merry glanced to her side, at Sir Michael Granville, wondering how the tall British man could remain unruffled in the face of a patriotic display that commemorated a humiliating defeat for his own nation. His expression was much as it might have been if he were watching the hunting dance of tribesmen in loin cloths and feathers—as if it were to him a colorful, primitive spectacle full of naïve and pretty drama and simple symbolism. He was too well-bred to have said anything to confirm her suspicions, but condescension has its own particular odor, detectable like a yard where goats have been, even if one walks through it with closed eyes and covered ears. She hoped that soon she would be able to look at him without feeling at all intrigued.
It was Sir Michael who had brought Aunt April to New York. Aunt April had never shown Merry the letter, but it happened that Sir Michael was a distant cousin to the Dowager Duchess of St. Cyr, one of the few of Aunt April’s correspondents who wrote back more often than once a decade. On hearing that Sir Michael had obtained permission to visit the New World in the entourage of the British prisoner-of-war exchange agent, the duchess had encouraged him to convey her respects to Aunt April. It was a compliment to the duchess’s influence that he had actually done so after his arrival in the United States. Merry could imagine the missive he had addressed to her aunt, full of polite clichés and a vaguely expressed desire that they should meet. It must have been an unlovely surprise for Sir Michael to find a letter from Aunt April in his return mail, promising to be in New York within the fortnight.
In the face of that it was hard to understand why he had received them with kindness. Instinct, based on no solid evidence, warned her that Sir Michael was not a man who routinely bothered himself with unrewarded kindnesses.
Passing them was a wide float that nested a press, the printers aboard working with quick economical movements to make broadsides. Two youthful apprentices leaned off the back, tossing the fresh inked pages into greedy outstretched hands in the crowd. Sir Michael caught one and handed it to Merry with a smile.
“A souvenir for you, Mistress Merry,” he said.
Mistress Merry, quite contrary, how does your garden grow.… It had been a favorite tease of the village children. Merry could barely hear it without wincing. She might have told him not to keep calling her that if she hadn’t been worried that the pain would be exposed in her voice.
Glancing at the paper, she saw that it was an ode about the Battle of Fort George last May, between her nation and his. No matter that his purpose here was peaceful. He was still her enemy. It was incredible that they hadn’t discussed it, not once, although she’d been in New York a week. Aunt April had always been there, fawning and frightened, until this morning, when she had stayed in her rooms, avoiding happily the noisy, shoving crowds. Mostly Aunt April had talked to him about England: gossip, much of it, and the rest politics, the arts, fashion, and the latest books. They had talked of New York too, which ironically he knew much better than Merry, because he had been here often before the war. He had many friends here, and she met them at dinner at the mansion of the Austrian trade commissioner, where Sir Michael was staying and where he had somehow gotten an invitation for Merry and her aunt to stay as well.
Folding the paper in half, Merry considered Sir Michael’s face, where deep half-circle lids lay open over green irises with spokes of silver. His nose was a nice shape, even if the bridge was rather high, and the spare line of his mouth bent stiffly at the corners when he smiled, producing a pair of shallow and not unattractive dimples. Scissored brown hair barely slit with gray curled forward stylishly over his ears. Carl, of course, was going to be furious with Aunt April when he heard about all this.
“What is war,” said Carl’s sister abruptly, scraping tight the paper’s crease between her gloved thumb and forefinger, “if we can stand together like this and watch a parade?”
The green-silver eyes glanced thoughtfully at the crowd around them. “They don’t seem to mind if we stand here together,” he said.
Obviously not. It was the kind of thing she had discovered he was likely to say: a slightly preposterous half gambit that shook her unsteady poise with aggravating efficiency.
Around them on the pavement the many gay, anonymous celebrants moved, swarming and shouting and turning in a crisp sigh of early spring garments, freshly brushed for the day, just-turned white collars on the little boys and flat new ribbons for the girls. Even if the restless crowd could have identified Sir Michael as British, the men and women of New York, intelligent patriots that they were, had a far greater hatred for their own Madisonian government, which had declared this costly, tiresome war that was destroying the economy of their city. Damn the British Navy, which had blockaded their port; but damn, damn those idiots in Washington who had struck Britannia on her stuffy cheek and brought this clumsy war down upon the hapless American merchants.
“My point stands,” said Merry and was grateful it came out sounding less feeble than she knew it was.
Granville lifted his hand, where wide dark knuckles rode from the black, tight-fitting sleeve of his coat. He was, by far, the most elegantly dressed man Merry had ever met, certainly not excepting those in her family.
“Do you see that pedestal?” he asked her, pointing into the bowling green before them, to where a wide slab of marble lay beside a marshal, whose job it was to chastise anyone who stepped on the grass here, or harassed the spindly, long-suffering trees. “There was a statue of King George III on it, torn down in 1776 and melted into shot. It might have been one of those pieces that killed my uncle, fighting here a year later. He left four children below the age of seven, one of them blind.” There was a short silence while she looked away from him. Then he said, “Merry, it goes back and forth. Will it really help if we blame each other?”
Will it really help if we blame each other? As Merry stood wondering if there was something wrong with his logic or her own, Sir Michael looked down at her, his eyes still in complex, mature calm, and said, “Anyway, we’ll have enough time to work it out, won’t we, on the way to England?”
It was a ridiculous error. Merry stared up at him with a start. “I’m not going to England.”
Correcting her with the censureless care one might use with a child who has spoken a faulty lesson, Granville said, “You are. The day after tomorrow on the Guinevere, with your aunt. It’s all right. You can trust me. Your aunt and I have talked about it, and I understand why she doesn’t want it to become known.”
And then he smiled at her as though he had not with a single sentence blown the sane structure of her life into slithering fragments.
A few moments had passed, blank and ugly, before Merry could organize her blood-stripped muscles into activity and begin to walk backward from the well-mannered face with its features slowly realigning themselves into compassion and concern.
“Merry? Dear God. What have I said? Can it be—could it really be that you didn’t know?”
As he began to come toward her she turned and fled from him, her velvet slippers striking hard on the coarse gravel path, her heart banging in her chest as she wove between grouping families and the dull-green stacks of shrubbery that squatted like trolls under the elms.
For once, her size helped. Quic
kly he was lost in the tall crowds, and when she came to a break in the line of spectators, she gripped the iron railing that lined the Battery and kicked her legs over, one at a time.
The political societies were passing in review, and Merry dove through a herd of Republicans, with their buck’s tails dangling forward from their hats. Some laughed drunkenly and tried to reach for her as she passed frantically among them.
When her feet found the neat ocher bricks of the sidewalk, for the first time in her life she lifted her narrow white skirt and ran full out over the busy pavement toward the house five blocks up Pearl Street, where Aunt April would be waiting with, she prayed, a denial of Sir Michael’s words.
The house of the Austrian trade commissioner was ruddy brick, tastefully decorated in bluestone with eyelet window curtains in the upper stories that lent the home a friendly and feminine look. It was not the place, surely, where one would hear grim news. Merry nearly collided with a cake vendor as she swung through the white picket gate into the small cobbled front yard, and the sweet odor of hot spiced gingerbread swirled around her as she stopped to lean dizzily against the cistern that caught soft water from the rain roof. Then she climbed the stoop, knocked, and was admitted almost immediately by a pretty Austrian maidservant, who looked curiously at Merry’s pale cheeks and glittering eyes.
The rooms within were narrow rectangles with low ceilings, eerily quiet at this time of day while their elderly host and his wife napped, nicely insulated from the street noise. Everywhere beautiful imported furniture in the French taste gleamed sleepily in the hazed sunlight, and walking soft-footed through the corridors, it was hard to believe that not many days’ journey away American settlers lived in rough cottages and feared Indian attacks.
Willing temperance to her breathing, Merry laid her hand on the door and entered quietly into the cream-and-copper suite that her aunt had enjoyed these last seven days.
Merry’s aunt, protector, and guardian was on her knees laying tissue-wrapped nightgowns in a cedar chest. Her gaze flew like a startled pigeon to her niece. She couldn’t have looked more guilty if she’d been hiding a corpse.
“Aunt April, it’s not true. Is it?” asked Merry tightly.
Aunt April stood, her face raw with worry. Beseechingly she offered her hand. “Merry—forgive me, Merry.”
They were like mother and daughter. Between them there was no need for accusation, for evasion, or for lies. Merry saw confirmation of Granville’s words in her aunt’s fearful eyes, in the set of her chin; no spoken words could have announced the truth more unmistakably. Anger, love, and pity met between them and remained unspoken also, clashing and mingling like great waves, which broke in lonely desolation into helpless undercurrents. Compassion fought the keen smart of betrayal within Merry; moving clumsily, like a machine that needed oil, she took her aunt’s hand. And when she could force herself to speak, the words came out like a sigh.
“Aunt April, we can’t do it. We simply can’t do it.”
“There are papers of transit—Sir Michael has arranged them.”
“My father will never allow me to leave this country,” Merry said faintly, still hardly able to believe that this was really happening.
Aunt April looked as though she were experiencing physical pain. “But it doesn’t make any difference. Not formally. Because, you know, your father put you legally into my care.” April paused, and then her words came out in a flood. “Merry, an old friend of mine has offered to cover our fares. In fact, she has commissioned Sir Michael—well, perhaps not commissioned, but asked him—Merry, he is to escort us back to England.”
“No.” Unimaginable that Merry should say that word to her aunt. “I won’t go, Aunt April. I can’t go. I’m an American.”
“You’re not; you’re British. Half-British. And from one of the first families of the country.”
As gently as she could, Merry said, “A name disgraced. The name of a family that had to flee the country in debt.”
April’s gray eyes snapped. “A name is a name. Our connections were of the highest!”
Connections who never answer your letters, Aunt, thought Merry. Why in the name of heaven had one of them decided to invite April back now?
“Aunt April, I don’t want to go.”
“Oh, Merry.” April put her hands on Merry’s shoulders and drew her close, her embrace intensely loving. “What have you here? We live like nuns in a cloister, in a farming village full of bigots. You should be mingling with people your own age, your own class—you should have beaux and dances and nosegays and rides in the park. How are you going to be married here? Do you think your father’s ever going to trouble himself with the matter? Every time I’ve written to him about it, he’s replied that it will sort itself out. But it won’t, Merry. We’ll both of us only get older, lonelier, and more eccentric. People aren’t like us here, Merry. They’re too interested in superficial change, and not interested enough in the things that last, and that have lasted.” She drew Merry away from her and gazed into her eyes, her hands pressing into Merry’s shoulders. “Don’t expect Carl to find you a husband! There’ll always be something that interests him above you. Now there’s the war. Then there’ll be the business of reconstructing the country after the war, and then he’ll take a wife and he’ll have a family of his own to think about. Do you want to live on the fringe all your life, Merry? I’ve never said this to you before… but you’re a beautiful girl, far too special for this rough backwater of a country.”
Merry took her aunt’s hands from her shoulders and held them in her own and repeated, “I’m not going to go, Aunt April. I don’t want to go.”
April slid her hands from Merry’s, and she crossed her arms in front of her and walked slowly to sit on the edge of the bed, her thin shoulders slumping. As the cloudy tears slid down the pale cheek Merry suddenly saw the crumpled figure in a new way. Why, she’s not old, Merry thought. She’s only forty. I always thought she was old.
“I shan’t go either, then,” said April softly. “I can’t leave you here with the country at war.…” One of the pins slipped from her tired bun, and the freckled bird-boned hands replaced it. April walked to the window, looking out with the same look that Merry had often seen when she observed her gazing out of the drawing-room window at home—but, she realized, the hope that had been in the gaze was replaced by desolation. “I’m sorry, Merry. I wanted just one time to see my home again.”
Merry went to stand behind her. “Go without me—please, Aunt April.”
April shook her head in a definite way, and Merry knew she would never talk her into that.
For one human being to cause a tragedy in the life of another is a responsibility that not many would choose to shoulder. Adult resolution, patriotism, fear, and even common sense were seared to ash by love. Two days ago, if someone had asked her, she might have said that there was very little she would not do for her aunt, but now she realized there was nothing she would not do for her.
Chapter 6
Putting up a very good front to cover her hysteria, Merry stepped into the carriageway, securing the neck button of her tan wool redingote, her gloved fingers slipping nervously against the dark-brown embroidery on her silk collar. “Such a nice slim neck you have, Miss Wilding,” the village dressmaker had said and added emphasis to her point by cutting Merry’s dresses a size tighter at the neck than Merry would have liked. This evening the sensation that she was being slowly choked was more intense than ever.
Across the yard Henry Cork was making fast the trunks in the hired mule cart. The trunks had grown dusty (not that Aunt April would notice such a triviality on this day of all days) from sitting in the yard all afternoon waiting for Henry to rent a cart and load them. You had to give Henry Cork plenty of time to do a thing.
Merry wandered to the hired carriage that waited, shabby as a workhouse hearse, to convey her to the dock where she would board the British ship that would sail on the dawn tide for England. One of the carr
iage horses eyed her curiously. She raised her hand to gently stroke its friendly nose as Henry caught sight of her and hurried over with the wind lifting his untucked red flannel shirt like a flag to expose the spiky black hairs on his round, chalky belly. Drooped over his bowed legs were baggy pants of gray sailcloth cinched with a frayed rope, because he doggedly persisted in losing the leather belts Aunt April had generously bought him, one after the other. No doubt he sold them. Merry had heard him telling one of the kitchen maids what a sad time he had of it, being indentured to a tight old witch who wouldna’ even give him a belt to make himself decent.…
Joining Merry, he said crossly, “The auld vixen, she’s as good as kidnapping you, ain’t she?” A string of tobacco juice escaped one corner of his mouth and ran down his long, grizzled chin.
“Oh, no, Henry,” Merry answered, looking over her shoulder to make sure her aunt hadn’t been following her closely down the stairs. “That’s not true. We’ll be back next spring—Aunt April promised. This is something my aunt has wanted for years, Henry. If she likes, she can stay, and I will come back happy, knowing that I let her have the chance to live in the land of her choice once again. And besides, it might be a lot different than she remembers it.”
“Paradise would be a disappointment to her, the way she talks about England,” he said.
“Well, if that happens, she’ll be more content to come back,” Merry ventured.
“Aye, the old besom. Yer old man is likely to load up a dozen men-o’-war and come sailing after you as soon as he gets wind of this.”
“With Achilles, a dozen Argonauts, and a wooden horse?” said Merry. “I’m not Helen of Troy. Father will understand if you give him my letter. You won’t forget, will you?”
“Don’t fret yerself about that now, Miss Merry. I’ll see that he gets it. You’ll have enough to do, keepin’ on yer feet on the wide, wide sea.” There was the sound of a door opening behind them, and Henry winked at her strangely. “Ah, there she is now. She’ll get a going away surprise from me.”