by L. B. Joramo
“I’m sorry, but, no, you may not have my handkerchief.”
My sister joyfully scolded a young man who was begging on his knees in front of her, Monsieur Beaumont, and me.
“Why, Mr. Foster,” she teased, “you are quite aware of my feelings regarding a certain lieutenant. I have no affections for you. Now, be gone, you beast.”
“Hannah!” I reprimanded my sister with pursed lips and a quick shake of my head, then turned toward the strapping young man with as much sympathy as I could muster. “Mr. Foster, I’m so sorry for my sister’s—”
“I like it when she calls me a beast.” He got back to his feet on a jump and a large grin. “I’ll win you over yet, Hannah Buccleuch.” He shouted as he ran toward the crowd of Concordians now serving brandy and wine.
Monsieur Beaumont’s chuckle was not apparent except that he was standing very close to me, and I felt the bubble-like repercussions from his laugh tickle my arm and shoulder, like it was champagne for my skin. No, no, I didn’t just think that.
My sister turned to Monsieur Beaumont and me and rolled her eyes. “Well, he is a beast. My virtuous sister would never say such things, but I will. Mr. Foster is a pest, Monsieur Beaumont, mark my words.”
Monsieur Beaumont’s smile widened and he nodded. “I am sure you would know best.”
Hannah smiled at him, then looked at me, her voice hushed. “How are you doing, my dear sister?”
She knew I was uncomfortable in crowds, but I nodded, which gained me a quick smile.
Then her grin morphed into a giant sunbeam at Monsieur Beaumont. “My sister isn’t a gossip either. So if you want to know all the juicy fat about my community, you’ll have to ask me.”
“Noted.” He bobbed his head again and was still quietly chuckling.
“How is it that you make me sound like such a bore, my beautiful sister?” I asked.
“Oh, Violet!” Hannah snatched my hands in hers and grimaced. “No, you aren’t a bore. You’re the sweetest, most polite, most thoughtful—”
“Boring. Good grief, I sound like I could cure people from their sleeplessness.”
Monsieur Beaumont laughed louder. I stopped myself from shuddering, but just barely.
Hannah rolled her eyes again. I was more than six years her senior and lately the eye rolling had gotten bothersome.
She shook her head. “My sister is anything but boring. When I was a wee bairn, she would tell me stories of fairies who would dance in moonbeams or mermaids singing in this very river.” Hannah motioned with a graceful wave toward the Concord waterway. “Oh, the stories she would invent—well, I’ve never read anything better. And, what she probably won’t admit to you—”
“Hannah, please.” I foresaw where my sister’s conversation was heading and internally cringed as I knew there was no stopping her from embarrassing me now.
“Is that she was my father’s son,” Hannah continued without noticing my glare. “Not literally, of course. I guarantee she’s all woman. I mean that my father taught her to read and write just like the boys. Oh, my father was a Harvard lecturer, by the by, in his younger days. He was said to have a keen knowledge of almost the full curriculum of the university’s library, but he met my mother, fell in love, and decided to be done with Harvard and Boston and to come here to farm.” She wrinkled her nose. “Can you believe he left Boston for this? My father must have been mad with his love for our mother. Oh, but I digress, which I do quite often. My conversations are filled with tangents that drive my lovely sister insane. I’m not sure what I love more, my digressions or my sister’s reaction. Oh, but I must add that my father also taught our Violet how to hunt like a man and think like a man. Now, that’s hardly boring, is it, Monsieur Beaumont?”
I avoided looking at Monsieur Beaumont for his response. My right eye might have been twitching with the need to deepen my glowering frown at my sister. She looked down at me with the sweetest, most glorified of smiles, as if she had just saved my life with her words. My anger subsided as I worried about Monsieur Beaumont’s judgment toward me—half-man woman that I was.
I wasn’t humiliated that I had, indeed, been raised like I was a boy—even playing field hockey. (Before the age of ten I preferred to take my shirt off, just like the lads.) I was embarrassed because I never understood my station, never knew where I belonged. I did like the feel of smooth silk stockings against my bare skin and wearing flowery perfume and swishing about in a skirt. But I also liked wearing breeches and being in the mud and not wholly dependent on a man for my opinions. I liked having my own mind, my own ideas, but I never knew if that was acceptable or not.
Monsieur Beaumont linked my hand through his arm, forcing me to gaze up at his warm smile as I felt his twitching rounded bicep.
“My mother could outshoot any man in Marseille. She was the one that taught me how to use a musket and sword.”
“No! Isn’t that a coincidence?” my sister hollered. “Violet also reads like my father did. She could probably teach better than any man at that stupid Harvard. She knows all the sciences and math and philosophy and,” she clapped and made tiny jumps up and down while she said, “she speaks at least four different languages, including French!”
That was why I could never stay angry at my sister. She might embarrass me or sometimes get annoying with her vanity and the incessant eye rolling, but she loved and adored me and always wanted to brag to others about me. I loved her from the start, as well. At six years of age, I told everyone that she was really my baby. I would, of course, brag about her accomplishments too—like the dress I wore was one of her designs, and she really was one of the best playactors. Too bad respectable ladies weren’t welcomed to playact.
Mr. Foster then snuck up behind my sister and grabbed her handkerchief that she had loose in her hand. She turned toward the running back of Mr. Foster and yelled, “Come back here, you beast of a man!” Then took off with her sky blue skirts billowing about her as she gave chase.
I softly laughed and turned toward Monsieur Beaumont, releasing myself from his hold, if only physically. He tilted his face and narrowed his dark blue eyes at me.
“V. V. Buccleuch. It is such an unusual name. Mathew told me it is Scottish. I just assumed it was a relative of yours or maybe your father, but it is you.”
I wasn’t sure what he was talking about and wondered if the hot sun had gotten the better of him in his dark uniform, but then he said, “Every book I have checked out from the Harvard library has been checked out by you. Every one by a V. Buccleuch.”
I smiled and my heart raced. “You must read a lot.” I flinched and retracted. “I mean—oh, I sound like a braggart.”
His laugh was no longer silent at all. Suddenly he stopped chuckling. “You have Locke’s Letter on Toleration.”
“Yes, I do. I just got that a week ago.”
“I know. The librarian told me that a scholar had it.”
“He did? Mr. Winthrop was a friend of my father’s who lets me check out the books.” I was inwardly warmed that Mr. Winthrop would call me a scholar. “I love the philosophical mind of John Locke. Any philosopher really. My father and I used to spend whole days discussing philosophy.”
Monsieur Beaumont’s smile dimmed. “May I ask, who you talk to now about philosophy?”
I looked over at the smiling face of my mother as she was drinking wine with Mrs. Barrett, and the angry face of my sister as she was pointing a finger at Mr. Foster’s chest, and finally my eyes swept over the large frame of Mathew. My mother and sister hadn’t ever engaged in philosophy, and Mathew was such a good, kind, and intelligent man, but not a philosopher.
I shrugged. “No one. I—”
“Then, it is settled for us. We must meet . . . every day, I think, to make up for lost time.”
“Meet?”
“Oui, don’t you think so? After all it was Locke himself that stated that it was a duty for all mankind to come together to discuss philosophy.”
I chuckled. “Th
e Essay Concerning Human Nature, yes? That is what you are using as the agent to propel us to discuss philosophy . . . every day?”
He nodded. “All right, I admit, he wrote to explore such subjects within the limits of one’s social opportunities, but I have not had anyone to talk to, nor have you, for some time. So we should meet every day. We have so much to discuss. Should we start with the Greeks?”
I’d always wondered what impelled a person’s decisions, especially when the choices he or she made could change their lives forever more. Greed? Sex? The Greeks believed these were the main drives of humanity. But what about matters of the heart? What pushes a person to knowingly make a bad judgment?
I cannot tell, as my own heart was beating so voraciously I couldn’t hear any advice it was giving.
“I—I want to discuss science and math too. Newton and Leibniz.”
Monsieur Beaumont’s smile somehow managed to widen. His eyes took in the light of the afternoon sun and radiated it back to me in the deepest color of blue.
“As you wish, but I must warn you, I’m not good at calculus.”
I smiled and nodded. “I am. I’ll tutor you.”
“I will, of course, be a horrid pupil.” He lifted one black brow playfully.
I chuckled. “That’s all right. I’ll just beat you.”
“I’m looking forward to it then.”
“As am I.”
I bit down on my smile as I turned from him, instantly spying my mother and sister—my whole life. If there was even the slightest whisper of me conducting interviews with men, single men, both my mother and sister’s lives would be changed, perhaps in ruins, if I was caught being improper.
“No.” I couldn’t look at him while I gave my answer. I could only stare at my family. “I can’t meet you. I’m sorry, I—”
“But I’ve seen you shoot,” he paused.
His long silence provoked me to turn back to him, wondering what his point was. I met his dark, searching eyes.
His nose flared while he said, “With a shot like that you can do anything you want.”
Chapter Three: For Debate