Louisa and the Country Bachelor : A Louisa May Alcott Mystery (9781101547564) (19 page)

“Louy, I forgot to tell you,” said Sylvia. “When I posted your letters, Clarence Hampton was in the office. He saw them in my hand and I think he read the addresses. He had such a funny look on his face.”

 

 

THE NEXT MORNING Mr. Dill, the unemployed railroad worker who had inherited our firewood, came by to give his thanks and to bring us a half dozen eggs from his hen coop. He stood on the back step rather than broach the kitchen, because his boots gave pungent evidence of his recent venture into a farmyard. I hoped it was his own, and the eggs were properly his to dispose of.

“Is the mister here?” asked Mr. Dill, cap in hand.

“He is,” said Abba. “Bronson, you have a caller!” She raised her voice somewhat, despite her disapproval of such rudeness, but she was at that crucial moment of porridge stirring when the pot cannot be left.

“If you are what is meant by a philosopher, then I approve, I approve,” said Mr. Dill when Father appeared. He shook his benefactor's hand with such lengthy enthusiasm we thought that appendage might drop off. Father, still in his nightshirt but with a volume of Cicero in his left hand, beamed.

“If it was philosophy made you send over the wood, then philosophy is a fine thing,” asserted the man.

“It was nothing,” said Father. “ ‘Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore of nicely calculated less or more.' ”

“Say,” said Mr. Dill, scratching his chin. “Now, is that a piece of philosophy? I'll have to remember that.”

“It is Wordsworth,” said Father.

“Well, well,” said the man. “Fancy that. I'll be off, then. I've got work for the morning, sweeping out the town hall, since there's to be a hearing today.”

“A hearing?” I looked up from the loaf of bread I'd been slicing.

“Town fathers have decided to officially question Mr. Tupper about Ernst Nooteboom's death,” said Mr. Dill. “Seems his sister found a piece of what they are calling evidence.”

Abba looked at me and sighed. A detective word had been used.

“Evidence?” I asked, handing Mr. Dill a slice of buttered bread. He stretched for it from his place on the step.

“She was cleaning out her brother's things and getting ready to sell his Sunday suit when she found a note in the pocket from Tupper, asking Ernst to meet him by the ravine for a conversation.”

“Who is this Mr. Tupper?” asked Father, who had been in his shop a half dozen times but had not yet noticed the sign overhead.

“Ida's father-in-law,” Abba said. “It is an uncommon family, though. Mrs. Tupper and her father-in-law do not care for each other.”

“Ah.” He shook his head in disapproval. Father had adored Abba's family. “It's those horsehair pads in her hair, I suspect,” he said. “Makes for a strange daughter-in-law.” He wandered off with a plate of bread and jam.

I did not dismay Father with the news that Mr. Tupper senior also seemed to hold a grudge against Uncle Benjamin and had made domestic trouble for Lilli, as well. Mr. Tupper in all ways seemed at odds with his own community.

“Could I attend this hearing?” I asked Mr. Dill.

Mr. Dill stared unhappily at his boots. “Well, with you being a girl and all, and an outsider . . .”

“Louy, perhaps you should visit with Lilli instead, after the meeting,” Abba suggested. She was right, of course. A stranger at such a meeting would cause considerable discomfort and perhaps even delay whatever truth might be available. Lilli would have to provide the information.

 

 

AFTER THE NOON meal of fish chowder (served warm, thanks to Uncle Benjamin's woodpile), Sylvia and I went off together to meet with Lilli Nooteboom.

She was in Mrs. Roder's back parlor with a cold compress on her forehead.

“Oh, dear,” said Sylvia. “You look all-in. May I help?”

Her eyes were red. “I don't see how,” she said.

“It is a temple massage I have learned,” said Sylvia. “My mother suffers the most frightful migraines. Sit up here, with this pillow behind your back, and let down your hair.” Lilli did as instructed, and an arm's length of white-blond hair fell over the harsh black of her mourning dress. I would use that image, I knew, in one of my “blood and thunder” stories about heroines in danger. Sylvia stood behind her and began moving her fingers in gentle circles over Lilli's forehead and the top of her head.

“That is better,” admitted Lilli some minutes later. “I feel almost well, and the pain has gone. You want to hear about the meeting. It was as I knew it would be. They believed Mr. Tupper, not me. He denied the note was in his handwriting, or that he had sent for Ernst that day. They think I wrote the note to lay blame.”

“May I see the note?” I asked.

Lilli took it from the little drawstring bag of black leather she wore tied to her waistband. It was a small piece of inexpensive brown paper, the kind merchants use to wrap purchases, and it contained very few words:

 

 

“It is in script,” Lilli said, “and Mr. Tupper wrote to Ernst in block letters, because we were foreigners and he made fun of our English, said it was children's English. But maybe this time he forgets.”

Or maybe it was son, not father, who wrote the note, I thought. Or maybe someone who only claimed to be Tupper. Whoever it was, they had written on the same paper I had found at Clarence Hampton's camp.

“So we are back at the beginning, with Miss Nooteboom's word against Mr. Tupper's,” said Sylvia as we made our way back home.

“Not quite at the beginning,” I said. “Think, Sylvia, who else would profit from the acquisition of land wanted by Mr. Tupper?”

Sylvia frowned and puffed a little, trying to keep up with me. I was walking quickly by then, using the long-strided pace that often accompanies my worried moods.

“That would be his partner, which he doesn't have,” she guessed. “Or his heir, who is not here.”

“Jonah Tupper,” I agreed. “Where is Jonah Tupper? But remember, Sylvia, there is more than one potential heir. There is a daughter-in-law, and she has a son.”

“Clarence Hampton,” said Sylvia.

“The first is missing, or at least his whereabouts are not known, and the second is . . .”

“Very strange,” supplied Sylvia.

 

 

BY THE EVENING of the second Thursday after the picnic, I had the beginnings of my play ready for the Walpole Amateur Dramatic Company. Since I must wait for the mail to bring responses to my inquiries about Clarence's family, I had gone back to my writing shed with renewed energy.

The play scenes were not as humorous, when humor was desired, nor as tragic, when tragedy was the mood, as I had hoped to produce, but there was time yet to further work them. It is my experience that initial attempts often fall short. It is in the second and third and fourth renditions that value might be mined in prose, another lesson learned both from Father and Mr. Emerson, who used much ink crossing out misshapen phrases and straightening them into a lovelier form. Meanwhile, we had an initial set of lines to rehearse.

However, the faults of the plot and characters became even more apparent once we had gathered in Helen Kittredge's attic for rehearsal.

Our rehearsal room was a beamed area brightened with oil lamps and as large as a barn loft. One end had been cleared of the usual leather and wooden trunks, woven baskets and boxes of chipped china, and ancient shoes that accumulate in attics, and a large rose-colored curtain put up to mimic a stage area. The effect was rather romantic: an island of possibility set into the debris of the past, rather like one of those gloomy and mystical paintings of the German landscape school.

The new Walpole Amateur Dramatic Company was there, a half dozen expectant faces.

Helen beamed. “Well, then, shall we start?”

There was a shy shuffling of feet among the young men and a giggling among the young women.

“Perhaps Louisa should tell us about the play we have commissioned,” Helen suggested after a moment of deep thought. “Sit here, Louisa.” She pulled forward a chair into the middle of the gathering and held an oil lamp over my shoulder.

Feeling horribly self-conscious, having thus been made the center of attention, I untied the string and brown paper that held the first pages of
Thornton and Emmeline: A Colonial Tragedy
. I cleared my throat.

“Thornton is the son of a cobbler, poor and ill-respected by the town because of his poverty and because his father is often seen publicly inebriated,” I began.

“Ah!” exclaimed Helen, frowning to indicate deep thought. The others nodded.

“But Thornton,” I continued, “has several qualities that will eventually redeem his reputation. First, he is brave, braver than most. Second, he is loyal.”

“Loyal to Emmeline,” Helen said.

“Exactly. He loves her, and she returns his love, but fears her own father's wrath for her misplaced affection. They must never speak in public but only steal a few moments of joy when Thorton measures her feet for new boots.”

“How romantic!” sighed Sylvia.

“How racy!” said Helen. “There must be bare feet onstage! And then what happens?”

“I don't know,” I said truthfully. “I have only the first act.”

“Then we will read that, and spur you on,” Helen said. “I myself will play Emmeline, unless there are objections.” No one dared object, of course. “Anna, you can play my mother, and, Thomas, you can play my father. Walter will play Thornton.” She looked at him from under her long lashes, and that poor young man, already branded and trussed and ready for the altar, though he did not yet know it, ran his finger around his shirt collar.

The readings were dreadful. The young men were wooden and muttered their lines; the young women giggled and poked each other in the ribs. The amateur group had earned its name, indeed. Painfully we struggled forward, turning page after page of my “blood and thunder” story.

When it was again Helen's turn and she exclaimed, “‘Oh, Thornton, I shall never love another but you, and die a maiden rather than betray you! '” I knew the play would not do. Helen had declaimed her lines by putting one hand over her heart and shrieking with what she thought was a fit of passion. As Sylvia later described, she sounded more like a cat with its tail being pulled.

“I think a comedy will suit us better,” I said, rolling up the pages. “Let us put this play aside for a later time.”
Ten or fifteen years later
, I said to myself.

 

 

BEFORE SLEEPING THAT night, I spent an hour alone on our front porch, gazing at the full moon, round and white as a mercury glass globe. The rehearsal made me laugh at how dreadful we had been, but also saddened me because of how dreadful we had been.

I hugged my knees and tried to think of nothing, for there were too many thoughts in my head at once.

Footsteps shuffled down the sidewalk and I saw, in the moonlight, a man, awkward and slow, coming toward our house. No, the house next door. Clarence Hampton. He saw me just as I recognized him.

“Ah! The lovely Miss Louisa,” he said. His speech was very slurred, the S's sibilant and hissing. “May I join you? Yes, thank you, I will.”

I hadn't agreed, yet he sat next to me on the step. “Lovely night,” he said. “Lovely.”

“You have been celebrating,” I said.

“I have,” he admitted, giving me a broad wink. He hiccuped.

“Why?” I asked.

“I'll tell you a secret,” he said, leaning so closely to me that I could smell the gin on his breath. “I have made a decision. An important one. I am going to run away from home. Enough of family.”

“You already seem to spend quite a deal of time away from your family.”

His drunken smile turned to a snarl. “Not enough,” he said. “They confuse me. Make me doubt my own senses. That's how it's always been.”

“That is harsh,” I said. “May I ask you a question about other matters?”

He looked at me with slightly crossed eyes. “You may,” he said.

“How is it that your stepfather paid a deposit for a new bell order out of his own family bank account? Doesn't the church usually pay?”

“Ah,” he said. “You have been snooping. Thought you might. But Mother will tell you that it is not uncommon for commercial travelers to make such transactions. It is a kind of loan, you see. From him to the church, to encourage the bell order if they are at all undecided. And now, Miss Louisa, I'm going to turn in. If I'm lucky I'll make it upstairs without waking her. She doesn't approve of the company I keep, you see.”

He rose unsteadily, with laborious and slow gesture unbuttoned his boots, and tiptoed home in his stocking feet.

I watched him go, fearing for the safety of his mother, for I remembered those murderous glances he often gave her.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“THIS WILL DO nicely for a summer comedy,” I said to Sylvia, who found me sitting cross-legged on Uncle's Turkish carpet the following day, surrounded by volumes of plays and stories as well as a book of engravings of European locales. I had spent a lovely afternoon scouring Uncle's library for a suitable candidate, and found—rather refound—Sheridan's
The Rivals
and decided we could stage a production of that very humorous eighteenth-century play.

Sylvia sat next to me and opened the book of engravings. “Paris.” She sighed. “Wouldn't it be lovely to walk along that bridge over the Seine? Mother, as you know firsthand, has not a large stock of principles, but those she has, she abides by sternly. She insists I cannot tour Europe until I am wed.”