The Last Refuge

by Marcia Talley

  I had to smile. At least we would be attending St Anne’s that morning, a real church, rather than experiencing the torture of sitting through one of Jack Donovan’s bowdlerized versions of Morning Prayer. As I slathered butter and a glop of Karen’s strawberry jam over my bread, I remembered a previous Sunday when gusts of wind had hurled sheets of rain furiously against the windowpanes. Jack had pronounced the day too unspeakably foul to consider going out in it, and ordered Amy to pass the word that our presence was required in the parlor, where we found Jack, balancing the Book of Common Prayer on his open hands. When all had assembled, even little Dex, Jack – heeding the admonition to ‘read with a loud voice’ – had stumbled over the hasts and doeths all the way to the end of the Apostle’s Creed where, good Baptist that he was, he skipped over the troublesome bit about the ‘holy Catholick Church.’ I had been amused rather than annoyed when Jack refused to pray for ‘the King’s majesty’ or to ‘bless the royal family,’ but fully half his captive congregation seethed in silent anger and for all I knew were seething still when – for some reason known only to Jack – the New Testament scripture lesson was taken from Luke 17, verses 7–10, the Parable of the Dutiful Servants. Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’

  ‘A beautiful day,’ I commented to the table at large. ‘Nice and sunny. I shall enjoy the walk to church.’

  Melody shot me an as if glance. Judging from the cockeyed arrangement of curls on her head I gathered that Amy had been too preoccupied with worries over Drew to help Melody with her toilette. Thank goodness for mob caps and bonnets, I thought, fingering my own hack-handed do. They covered a multitude of sins.

  At a quarter to nine, wrapped in our cloaks against the cooler weather, Jack Donovan and his little family, including several of his Dutiful Servants, began the Royal Progress toward St Anne’s where our (very) late benefactor, William Paca, had served as a vestryman from 1771 to 1773.

  I attended St Katherine’s Episcopal Church in West Annapolis where my friend Eva Haberman served as rector, so I didn’t know whether the black-robed rector who greeted us when we passed through the door was a regular at St Anne’s or some ‘talent’ that LynxE had brought in for the day. Would we get to sit through an hour-long sermon delivered by a firebrand like Peter Muhlenberg from Woodstock, Virginia who, in 1776, threw off his clerical robes and stood before his startled parishioners wearing the full uniform of a Virginia militia officer declaring, ‘It is a time for war!’ Or would the service be more or less business as usual for the nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost?

  Little had changed with the actual language of the Anglican service since the 1662 Book of Common Prayer was first published. Even Thomas Cranmer (who began working on the first version more than a century earlier) would have been right at home that day in Annapolis, Maryland. Priestly vestments hadn’t changed much since then, either, but gratefully, the Reverend Thomas Dyer kept them on as he delivered a long, rambling monologue based on the parable of the Good Samaritan.

  Next to me, his arm often brushing mine, sat Jack, listening intently, nodding in agreement whenever Reverend Dyer made a point with which he agreed. Amy sat in the pew directly behind me, between the two Donovan children who had to be separated. They’d been squabbling over an origami frog that Gabe had folded out of a scrap of his father’s fine vellum writing paper.

  ‘Some among you may not appreciate the do-gooder interpretation of this parable,’ Dyer was saying when Amy tapped me lightly on the shoulder with her gloved hand, as we had arranged.

  ‘I don’t feel well, Mrs Ives,’ she whispered feebly. ‘I need to visit the necessary.’

  ‘Perhaps, then, it could better be characterized as the parable of a man who is saved by an enemy.’ Dyer droned on.

  I patted Amy’s hand and whispered back, ‘Go ahead.’ I turned slightly, observing with an obvious show of motherly concern as Amy gathered her skirts close about her and eased past Gabe, out of the pew and into the aisle. She dipped her head in reverence to the cross, then spun around and drifted toward the rear of the church.

  A sudden movement in front of an elaborately carved screen in the north transept drew my attention. Chad, Steadicam attached to his chest like a phantom twin, was making a move to follow.

  I caught his eye, glared ferociously and mouthed ‘bathroom,’ which seemed to settle him down.

  The service wore on, and Amy had yet to return. The final hymn – ‘O For a Closer Walk with God’ – was appropriate to our century, having been written by William Cowper in the 1700s and set to Caithness, a seventeenth-century tune. I noted this arcane fact as I paged nervously through the hymnal, trying to distract myself and not worry about Amy.

  She had still not returned when, from the chancel steps, the Reverend Thomas Dyer raised a hand in blessing. ‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore. Amen.’

  ‘Amen,’ I repeated softly, desperate to leave, but the singing of the final hymn intervened.

  As the last note of the organ died away, I tensed, ready to bolt for the door, but Jack looped my arm through his and escorted me down the aisle, greeting the congregation, nodding and smiling, paternally patting my hand where it lay in the crook of his arm, acting oh so lord of the manor.

  In the narthex, I reclaimed my hand. ‘I need to check on Amy,’ I told him.

  He looked puzzled. ‘Amy?’

  ‘In the necessary,’ I said, bobbing my head in the direction of the restroom. Jack hadn’t even noticed that my lady’s maid had gone.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We’ll wait outside.’

  But Amy wasn’t in the restroom, and there was no sign that she had ever been there. I checked all the stalls. No discarded clothing, no telltale twists of toilet paper, no messages scrawled on the mirror with a bar of soap.

  Amy Cornell, my lady’s maid, had disappeared.

  FOURTEEN

  ‘I have no idea where Gabriel has gotten to this morning. It’s hard to keep track of him in a house this large. I worry that he’s spending too much time hanging out with Dex, the cook’s boy, and wonder if it’s appropriate for him to fraternize so much with the servants, and then I remember, this isn’t for real, Jack. When it’s over, we go back to Texas.’

  Jack Donovan, Patriot

  Founding Father was not going to be happy.

  Neither was Jack Donovan.

  I needed to think. I scrunched up my petticoats and backed into one of the stalls, sitting myself down on the toilet-seat lid and leaning back against the tank.

  One of two things had happened. Either Amy had decided to leave the show voluntarily, or she hadn’t. In which case, Drew – or someone he’d hired – had kidnapped his wife. Unless Amy had done a one-eighty turn since our talk the previous morning, I figured her departure had not been by choice. But before I blew the whistle, I needed to be sure.

  When I rejoined my family on the lawn in front of the church, they’d already attracted a crowd. Jack had gone all pater familias, gathering his sullen offspring around him, grinning broadly for the cameras. When he spotted me standing on the church steps, he waved me over. ‘Mrs Ives! Join us. I have good news.’

  I dredged up a smile from somewhere and pasted it on for the benefit of our audience, then sashayed in their direction with my skirts sweeping the brick sidewalk. ‘Indeed, Mr Donovan. Pray tell, what news is that?’

  Jack withdrew a familiar buff envelope from his waistcoat pocket. A message from Founding Father, dammit. He waved it in the air. ‘We’re to have tea at Reynolds Tavern,’ he announced. ‘Come along, or we’ll be late.’

  If I hadn’t been preoccupied with worries about Amy, I might have guessed as much. Derek had already positioned himself on the corner where Church Circle meets Franklin, preparing to film our grand entrance into the histor
ic tavern, another authentic colonial treasure, built in 1749 by Annapolis hatmaker, William Reynolds, who dubbed it the Beaver and Lac’d Hat. Except for stints as Farmers National Bank and later, the Annapolis Library, it’d been a tavern and B&B ever since.

  Jack answered my next question before I could ask it. ‘I’ve sent Jeffrey home to tell Cook that we’ll have dinner somewhat later,’ he said in a rare display of sensitivity to the rhythms of the household. ‘But, where’s Amy?’

  ‘She’s ill,’ I lied gracefully as he guided me across the street. ‘I’ve sent her home, too.’

  ‘I hope it’s nothing serious,’ Jack said. ‘It’ll be hard to manage without her.’

  ‘It’s that green ham, I’ll bet,’ Melody chimed in. ‘Gross.’

  ‘Nonsense, Melody,’ said her father. ‘That ham is cured, and it’s perfectly safe.’

  ‘“Do you like green eggs and ham; I do not like them, Sam-i-am. Would you like them here or there? I would not like them anywhere.”’ Gabe channeled Dr Seuss as he trailed into the tavern behind us.

  ‘Behave, Gabriel,’ cautioned his father. ‘You’re being watched,’ he added unnecessarily, as if none of us had noticed Derek’s camera.

  Tavern staff attired in colonial garb seated us in the elegant front dining room, next to the fireplace. Over the mantel hung a portrait of our recent dinner guest, Colonel George Washington as painted by Rembrandt Peale. Although servers laid a grand ‘Savory Tea’ out on tiered trays in front of us – scones, tarts, and an assortment of finger sandwiches – I could barely taste my food. As I sipped tea out of a flowered Wedgewood cup, I kept staring out the window at St Anne’s Church, praying that Amy would reappear on the steps at any minute.

  But she didn’t.

  When we returned home from the tavern, I made straight for Amy’s room. I opened the door to her wardrobe and looked quickly through it. Nothing appeared to be missing. If Amy had run off, it was in the clothes she was standing up in.

  On my instructions, French had already made up the bed and tidied the room, removing the gown I had cast off so hastily the previous evening and returning it, freshly pressed, to my room. I stared at Amy’s bed for a few moments, reliving the terror of waking up to an intruder in my bed.

  I shuddered, shook off the recurring panic, and approached the bed. Kneeling alongside, I lifted the quilt, untucked the sheet, stuck my hand inside the slit in the mattress and began rooting around. Amy’s iPhone was still there. That settled it, at least in my mind. If Amy had planned to leave with Drew, there’s no way she would have left her iPhone behind.

  I turned the phone on, and was rewarded with a thin line of red on the battery indicator – the iPhone still had some juice – but the message, NO SIGNAL still taunted me. I turned the phone off to conserve what little power remained, then tucked it into my pocket.

  I needed to tell Jack about Amy’s disappearance – I couldn’t cover up her absence for very much longer – but decided that could wait until dinner. In the meantime, I opted for a stroll, leaving the house by the back door.

  At one time, William Paca’s garden would have overlooked the Severn River, but now it overlooked the Naval Academy. Damn. Would everything remind me of Drew, and of Amy?

  I wandered down to the middle terrace where I hoped that the geometric preciseness of the heirloom rose garden would help order my mind.

  It didn’t. It only reminded me of Amy Lowell’s heart-wrenching anti-war poem, ‘Patterns,’ a poem I’d memorized in high school, snatches of which began to float about my head, bringing tears to my eyes. I walk down the garden paths, in my stiff brocaded gown. With my powdered hair and jeweled fan. I shall go up and down, in my gown. Gorgeously arrayed, boned and stayed. For the man who should loose me is dead. In a pattern called war.

  Eventually, I found myself drifting down to the lower terrace, skirting the fish pond, and meandering along serpentine paths, each turn bringing into view a fresh bed of native plants. At one point, the path paralleled the wall that separated the garden from a three-story apartment building so far from the Paca House that I wondered if it might be out of range of the LynxE cell phone jamming equipment. All the time I’d been walking, Amy’s iPhone had weighed heavily in my pocket. I brought it out then, and switched it on: NO SIGNAL.

  I was about to switch it off, when I noticed that the fan-shaped wireless signal strength indicator was displaying a single bar. I walked a little distance along the wall and the indicator jumped to two bars. I tapped the Settings icon and discovered that Amy’s phone was picking up an unprotected wireless signal – hellcat3 – that was apparently leaking from an adjacent apartment. My heart fluttered. I couldn’t telephone Paul, but maybe I could email him.

  Holding the iPhone in front of me, blessing hellcat3, whoever he (or she) was, and praying that the iPhone’s battery wouldn’t die, I began wandering along the garden wall like a prospector with a metal detector, searching for a stronger signal. Just outside the privy, I got three bars, so I ducked inside and hooked the door shut behind me.

  It was dark inside the one-holer, muggy and slightly fetid. I opened up the email app and with my thumbs literally flying over the virtual keyboard, composed a message to Paul – subject URGENT from Hannah – hoping that the unfamiliar address won’t get caught up in his nitpicky spam filter. ‘Need to talk. Critical. Look for message in bottle on back wall.’

  I pressed SEND, held my breath until I heard the comforting swoosh of the email going merrily on its way, then leaned against the wall of the privy, weak with relief.

  I was about to send a second message as an insurance policy, when the screen faded to black.

  I pressed the ON button. Dead as a doornail.

  As oppressive as it was inside the privy, I remained there for a few minutes more, holding the dead phone, contemplating the bucket of dried corn husks that served as our toilet paper, and wishing I were back in the land of quilted Charmin. Even the privy seemed preferable to facing Jack Donovan – and Founding Father – with the truth about Amy.

  I sensed Karen before I saw her, standing behind me, hands on hips, watching in mild amusement as I rummaged among the items on the pantry shelves in search of a bottle the appropriate size and shape to hold a rolled up message. I was holding an empty gin bottle – square, and with a pig snout top – but it was too big and the mouth too small for my purposes.

  ‘Can I help you find something, ma’am?’

  ‘Guilt’ might as well have been written in letters two inches high across my forehead. ‘An empty bottle,’ I said, ‘for some experiment that Gabe is working on.’

  ‘He’s not going to be blowing things up, is he?’

  I laughed. ‘I don’t think so. It’s something to do with, uh, sympathetic inks.’

  ‘Lord, what’s that?’

  ‘You write with something like lemon juice or vinegar and it’s invisible until you hold it up to the heat. Most of these bottles are too big.’

  Karen chuckled at the foolish amusements of the idle rich, ambled over, lifted the gin bottle out of my hands and set it down. She reached behind a crock and came out holding a brown bottle about the size of an old-fashioned Coca-Cola bottle, only square. The mouth was a little small, but if I rolled the message up tightly, like the size of a pencil, it might just fit.

  ‘This isn’t an original, is it?’ I asked, worried that if Paul had to break the bottle to get the message out he’d be destroying a priceless antique.

  ‘Heavens, no. Look on the bottom where it says ‘Made in China.’’

  ‘Ah, well, that’s a relief.’ When I sniffed the bottle, it smelled like my grandmother’s Christmas cookies. ‘What was in it originally?’

  ‘Vanilla. We use a lot of that around here.’

  I tucked the bottle into my pocket and followed Karen back into the kitchen where a roast duck rested on a platter, wreathed with perfectly round potatoes the size of golf balls. ‘I’m sorry if Founding Father’s tea party upset your schedule, Karen.’


  ‘I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t an inconvenience, but that’s what slaves are there for, right? To be inconvenienced.’

  ‘Is dinner ruined?’

  ‘Oh, Lawsy, no!’ She beamed. ‘Youse dealin’ wif a pro, Miz Hannah.’

  I laughed out loud. ‘How on earth do you manage to keep a sense of humor with all the thankless, back-breaking work we ask you to do?’

  Karen shrugged her broad shoulders. ‘It is what it is.’

  ‘When this gig is over, Karen, have your girl call my girl. We’ll do lunch.’

  I trotted up to the library and sat down at the desk, grateful that everyone else seemed to be occupied, so I had the room to myself, except for the watchful eye of the SelectoZoomMini, of course. I made an elaborate show of extracting a fresh sheet of paper from a drawer and smoothing it out on the blotter. A small glass vase held three goose quill pens. I took my time selecting one of them, then uncapped the ink bottle. I dipped the pen in, and began to write, carefully at first, keeping my pressure light so the ink wouldn’t squirt out all over the page on the first ‘D’ of Dear Paul. One line, then two, using round letters, drawing rather than writing them.

  After thirty minutes, I was done.

  I waited for the ink to fully dry, then folded the letter once and tucked it into my pocket. Aiming a self-satisfied smile at the camera, I left the room.

  Outside, in the privacy of the privy, I started at the narrow end, rolling the paper up carefully. I inserted it into the bottle where it uncurled, filling the bottle. A tear-jerker by Nicholas Sparks; a song by The Police; instructions to my husband. They were all messages in a bottle.

  A few minutes later I stood in the wilderness area of the garden, past the bee hives, behind the spring house, nestling the bottle in one of the vertical slits in William Paca’s brick wall. If Paul found the note as planned – rather than some curious tourist – he’d know exactly what I planned to do.