Louisa and the Country Bachelor : A Louisa May Alcott Mystery (9781101547564) (13 page)

Anna came up with a tray of lemonade and offered him a glass.

“I am so pleased you have ventured out,” I told him. “I have longed to increase our acquaintance.”

He smiled, and there was sadness in the smile. “Most days I can do nothing but sleep,” he said. “Or try to sleep. Sometimes the pain disallows even that. I fear I was less than hospitable during your first kind visit to an old man, and wished to make it up.”

“Oh, I'm sure you are not so very old,” said Lizzie, who had kind words for everyone. “If you have a piano I would be pleased to play some cheerful music for you. Perhaps it would lift your spirits.”

“A grand idea, a grand idea,” said Mr. Wattles. “But not today. Today you must play your game of croquet and I will explain the rules as I recall them. Ida is shopping, and she would be pleased to know I was in the fresh air.”

I warmed to him, and wondered how uncle and nephew got along; was Clarence appreciative of having his mother's brother live with them?

“I think that was a point, Lizzie. Well done,” said Anna, dividing her attention between Mr. Wattles and the ongoing game.

“It was. Excellent, young woman.” Mr. Wattles beamed. “Remember to keep your thumbs tucked. And you, Miss Louisa, you are employed?” he asked.

“In many ways. I take in sewing, and in Boston I have a school for children. I also sold a book last year, and hope to sell more.” I frowned. I was facing the sun, and May's ball was between mine and the next wicket. Should I try for a complicated “roque croquet” by sending her ball flying while mine raced for the metal arch? I tried; I missed.

“Next time, my dear, you'll make it,” Eliza cheered.

“I have read your book,
Flower Fables,
” Mr. Wattles said.

“I am very flattered. It was but a work for children,” I said. I tried to be modest, but I still felt such a thrill whenever anyone said, “I have read your book,” that I'm sure it showed in my expression.

“The child is father to the man,” said Mr. Wattles. A fly buzzed about; he waved it off with his handkerchief. “It is important that children have edifying literature.”

“I hope it amuses as well,” I said. “It is difficult to edify children who are so bored they will not read the book.” And then that name, Jo March, popped into my thoughts again. She often did, since she had first entered my imagination the year before. Jo March would be a character who would not bore children, I decided.

“But didn't you have another activity last year?” asked Mr. Wattles. The fly continued to buzz at his head; he waved at it and his cuff link caught on the wavy mass of his white beard. He gingerly untangled it.

“Another activity?” I paused.

“I read in the papers. You must not be modest, my dear. You helped discover a murderer.”

I hesitated before answering, having a strong dislike of employing the topic of my friend's death and the incidents that followed it as small talk on a bright summer afternoon. “Constable Cobban had the case,” I finally said. “My involvement was slight.”

“Tut, tut,” said Mr. Wattles, clucking his tongue. “Such desire to stay out of the limelight is very attractive in a young woman. Her choice of friends can be equally attractive. Or questionable.”

“Your meaning, sir?”

“You have struck up an acquaintance with Lilli Nooteboom, have you not? Ah, my dear, don't look surprised. Even invalids follow the events in a small town. I advise against this friendship; she is sly and untrustworthy.”

“That is a hard charge against her,” I said. “I have not found her so.”

“I don't like to speak ill of the working class,” said Mr. Wattles. “But I will just say she is no longer allowed into our home. When she delivers Ida's orders, she stays on the front porch, and is paid there.”

 

 

“AND THEN,” EXCLAIMED May over soup that evening in our pale blue dining room, “then Clarence Hampton burst through the bushes at us! I quite screamed with fright! He looked like a madman!”

“Pass the bread to your father, dear,” said Abba. “And we must have a talk about your reading habits. You seem to have acquired a touch of melodrama. Surely he was not at all like a madman.”

“He had been drinking,” Anna affirmed quietly. “And he was furious with Mr. Wattles for being out of the house on such a hot day. He wheeled his chair so quickly back through the hedge I thought there might be damage.”

“To the hedge?” asked Father. “It is vegetal and therefore regenerative.”

“No,” said Anna even more quietly. “Damage to frail Mr. Wattles.”

“Do you think Mr. Hampton is always drunk, or just most of the time?” May asked.

“I have met him thrice,” Sylvia said, giving in to the gossip. “Once in Mr. Alcott's vegetable patch when we quarreled over undergroundology, once in town when I posted a letter, and at tea. Thrice I smelled gin. Judging from the looks Clarence Hampton gets in town, I would say many families have noticed his weakness. He seems distinctly unpopular.”

“If looks could kill, I suspect Mr. Hampton would be dead many times over,” May said. “Is the cream really gone, Louy? Could I have more? I hate fish soup without cream.”

“You came across him in Father's vegetable patch?” I asked Sylvia.

“He was poking around,” she said. “I mean literally, poking a stick here and there.”

“Now that is uncalled-for, pestering my chard,” said Father, riled by this blatant cruelty to vegetables.

“Perhaps I should have a word with Mrs. Tupper,” said Abba. “I do not like to stick my nose in where it does not belong, but that young man needs a firmer hand. I would be quite, quite upset if he should spoil your father's vegetable garden. By the way, Louy, a letter has come for you.”

CHAPTER NINE

THE LETTER WAS from Fanny Kemble.

The great actress was an old friend of the family, since she was as intelligent as she was beautiful and enjoyed the company of what she called “thinkers.” She had a Madonna-like face, and her voice was absolutely thrilling. How to describe it? Somewhere between birdsong and thunder, low, yet womanly. The year before, she had been in Rome, visiting with the Brownings. Upon her return to America her father had died and thrown Fanny into deep mourning. Some said that Mr. Kemble's death had been a kindness, for old age was bearing harshly on him and he was so deaf he could not hear his daughter's beautiful voice. “How sad,” Anna had remarked, “to no longer hear birdsong and children's laughter.”

“Is she in Boston? It is unfortunate we will miss her. What play?” Anna asked. She lifted the emptied soup tureen from the table and looked over my shoulder at the letter I was still reading.

“Queen Gertrude, from
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,
” I said. “Do you remember, Anna, last year when she visited and performed that soliloquy in our parlor?” I stood and imitated the pose Fanny Kemble had used, leaning forward as if about to lose my balance above the grave of poor drowned Ophelia.

“ ‘Farewell! I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife; I thought thy bride-bed to have deck'd, sweet maid, and not have strew'd thy grave.'” I moaned, trying to match Fanny's thrilling tones.

Anna shivered. “Such a cruel play,” she said. “So much bloodshed in it.”

“She asks if she might visit us,” I reported with great enthusiasm. “She has never seen Walpole, New Hampshire, and is desirous of country air.” I wished that I had pursued my original plan of seeking an affiliation with the amateur troupe of Walpole so that I might discuss a play or two with Fanny and seek her advice, but I had been so busy. Time, in the country, somehow seems to pass even more quickly than in a busy city.

“Tell her yes, to come to us,” Anna said, “but first help me with the washing up. Abba, you are to sit in your chair and rest.”

“I admit to an ache in my feet,” Abba said, and Lizzie and May rushed to find extra pillows for her chair and footstool. Father went to check on his chard and see that it had come to no harm, and his shadow fell long on the dark ground, spotlighted by one of those long, lovely summer dusks when the sun seems to linger like a child unwilling to go to bed.

While washing the soup spoons and shaking out the napkins I found myself thinking about Ernst Nooteboom, and wondering what had become of the long-absent Mr. Jonah Tupper, and why Mrs. Tupper's son, Clarence, had such a fondness for obliterating himself with gin. Perhaps, like Hamlet, he had a disturbed conscience. Hamlet, who had lost a father and hated his stepfather.

 

 

THE NEXT DAY Abba prepared peach pies for Eliza's household, and we all went over with her to visit. Ida Tupper and her son, though uninvited, joined us for tea. Clarence seemed ill at ease; perhaps he wished to apologize for his rudeness during our croquet party but did not know how. He paced in the parlor till Uncle muttered that he should come or go but not wear out his rug in indecision.

“I'll leave, sir,” said Clarence, wounded. But before he could reach the door, Mrs. Fisher appeared and announced a caller for the “old gent.” This took us all by surprise, for in the weeks in which I had been with Uncle Benjamin, not a single townperson had called on him.

“He has a valise with him,” the gaunt housekeeper said unhappily. “I think he means to stay.”

“The name of this wanderer?” asked Father, puzzled. “I believe the family to be complete. Abba, dear, are we missing a child?”

“Indeed we are not,” said Mother, equally puzzled.

“Not a child, but a friend,” said a low voice from a dusty, bedraggled figure now standing in the archway between parlor and hall.

I ran to him just as he ran to greet me, so when we literally ran into each other our embrace was a little more impactive than either of us intended. Llew squeezed me in a big bear hug, sweeping me off my feet and around in circles. Because of my height, only Llew, even taller than I, ever successfully completed this maneuver once I reached adulthood.

Reader, lest you think either I or my family encourage such familiarity among casual friends, let me tell you at the outset that Frederick Llewellyn Hovey Willis was not just any young man, or a mere Sunday visitor. He came closest to being a brother to me, being an orphan and having spent so much time in the bosom of my family that Father all but considered him a son. We had missed him greatly, since the year before he had left Boston and removed to Michigan to study medicine.

“How's the whistling coming?” Llew asked, putting me down again. “Or are you too much of a grown lady now?”

I pursed my mouth and whistled a full verse of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

“Better than ever,” he said. “Sir.” He turned to Father and extended his hand. To Abba, the woman who years before had discovered the child Llew alone and injured on the Boston–Still River stagecoach, and had brought him home for a hot meal, he gave a hug even more forceful than the one he had given me.

“Is this my caller?” asked Uncle Benjamin somewhat petulantly. “I never saw him before.”

“Mrs. Fisher confused the greeting,” I told him. “This is a friend of Father's.”

“Your neighbor's maid said I might find you here,” Llew said.

This was Llew: curly black hair, brown skin, big black eyes, handsome nose, fine teeth, small hands and feet, tall, very polite for a boy, and altogether jolly. Suddenly I felt a great desire to include Llew in one of my stories as a kind of modern hero. I remembered that other character who had been wandering in my thoughts for over a year, Jo March, with the long legs and boyish habits and impoverished family. Jo and Llew would make an interesting match in a story—as friends, of course. I would call him Laurie. Laurie Lawrence, and he would live next door to the March family and be their benefactor, just as mine had been his.

To compensate for his being orphaned—for the poverty his mother and father suffered before dying, poverty rendered more bitter since his grandparents had been wealthy but would not help because they had disapproved of the marriage—to compensate for all that, I would render Laurie fabulously wealthy in my story.

I had three characters—Jo and Laurie and Abba, who, of course, would be the heart of the novel. Marmie. Wasn't that what she had called her own mother? Now I needed a plot, other characters, a title. They would come in time.

“How long can you stay?” I asked Llew.

“A fortnight or longer,” he answered. “I am on holiday from my studies, and since you are in the mountains, I thought I would spend time with my new avocation.”

Ida Tupper leaned closer to Llew, looking at him over her pink feathered fan—I had realized some time ago that she was nearsighted—and gave him an appraising glance. Clarence Hampton, I observed, watched his mother with narrowed, speculative eyes. He wore a brightly checkered waistcoat that day, new, it seemed, and expensively made, like all his wardrobe. Did selling fossils really pay that well? Or was Jonah Tupper supporting a grown stepson as well as his wife? If so, that would only increase the problems in a household that seemed already quite problematic. There was another possibility. Ernst Nooteboom's missing gold watch could easily have been sold to a less-than-reputable jeweler outside of Walpole. A good gold watch would fetch enough for a year's wardrobe.

“Llew, I'm so pleased to see you!” Sylvia exclaimed. “When you leave Walpole, let us travel together. I'll return on the train with you so I don't have to travel in the women's car. All those wailing infants, you know. No wonder men pack escortless females into those cattle cars. The racket!”