One Glorious Ambition (11 page)

“At the last judgment,” he concluded, “I believe Christ will say
‘as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’ What have you done?”

“Thea?” Anne asked. “Do you care to reply?”

“He’s quite right. Those who cannot afford my school do deserve an education. But I don’t know what to do about it.”

“I have begun a ministry, Miss Dix, whereby I visit the homes of the poor and destitute, the suffering. I find it untrue that most are people who deserve their fate or are people who have failed to lift themselves into proper society. They are instead mostly virtuous men and women who stepped out as best they could to rise above crushing poverty and found the path strewn with boulders too heavy for them to move alone. It is our duty to assist them, our Christian duty to respond regardless of the circumstances.”

“Reverend Channing has taken it upon himself to raise funds to provide food, clothing, coal, whatever is needed for such people,” Mary Heath noted.

The group had gathered under the gazebo in the Heaths’ backyard, and the ice in the tea glasses clinked against the sides. From her tongue, Dorothea removed a tiny piece of sawdust left behind from the icehouse.

Mary’s eyes glistened with admiration. “He is more than a sermonizer. He is a doer.”

“As are you, Miss Mary,” the cleric added. Polite applause followed as the pastor bowed enough to acknowledge their support.

When he raised his eyes, he held Dorothea’s for a moment. She wanted to take action. Whether to achieve a small measure of
his acclaim or to be able to respond to Christ’s call, she was not yet certain.

Dorothea remained thoughtful as the carriage ride back to Orange Court took her past the ice warehouses and cotton stores, past the buildings she knew were full of pineapples from the Sandwich Islands and blue porcelain imported from Britain. She had ridden the route a hundred times, but this time she noticed the children. Small, dirty, barely covered with threadbare clothing, they scrounged the wharves for droppings of food or bits of cotton baling they might stuff inside their clothes for warmth. Stray cats roamed the same wharves, and many looked healthier than the skinny children who ran among them.

She asked the driver to stop. “Please wait here.”

Dusk hovered at the edges of the warehouses. The smell of the sea wafted to her, though not enough to cover the stench of the small child who stood before her, her hand out.

“Are you well, miss?” She thought the child before her was a girl.

“Aye. Just hungry. Do you have a coin for me?”

“I do.” She removed the coin from her reticule. She hesitated. Perhaps the child would see she had more and reach for it, grab what she could. But the child accepted it and said, “This’ll buy a soup bone for me mother. She’s not well.”

“And your father?”

“Mum says he ain’t coming back. She works the mills to feed us.”

“Your mother works when she’s not ill?”

“She does, ma’am. Wants us to go to school, she says. Me brother and me, but we can’t.” The girl bit the coin.

“Yes, schooling is good.”

“But not for now. She’s sick, and me and my brother, we collect for her.”

Dorothea gave the child another coin. “May your mother soon be well.”

“I would like to use the barn,” Dorothea told Madam Dix the next day. They sat in the kitchen of the cottage. Cookie served mashed yams with butter as the evening meal, but she had cleared the dishes and shooed Charles and Joseph out, leaving Dorothea and her grandmamma alone. Benji the spaniel lay at the old woman’s feet.

“The barn? Whatever for?”

“To make it a school for children who cannot afford to pay.”

“Wasteful of your time.” She tugged at the strings of her black cap.

“I have nothing but time, Grandmamma. And I believe this is what God has called me to do: to teach. Did our Lord not say words that meant that as we do for the least of these we do for Him? I do this class for Him, for those He spent His time with, the sinners and tax collectors.” Dorothea warmed to her subject and her reasoning. Even she could hear the increased confidence in her voice.

Madam Dix grunted, and the dog perked up his head.
“However will you engage them? They’re hungry and won’t be able to think. Worse, they’ll scamper around the estate doing who knows what. I do not think this a worthy cause.”

“But you will not forbid me?”

“And if I do, would you defy me?”

“I will remind you that you have leased the ‘estate’ except for the cottage to the Hudsons, and if Mrs. Hudson agrees to let me use the barn, I will proceed.” She swallowed. “It is a courtesy that I ask you before speaking to Mrs. Hudson.” The woman squinted at Dorothea, who now heard her voice quiver. “The barn is not being used now, and the children might even be able to improve its value as they help prepare it for their own school.”

Madam Dix sat silently for a moment and then said, “Use the carriage house at least. I don’t want them jabbering that Orange Court offered nothing but a barn. And while we are on the subject of schooling, I may as well tell you that I have enrolled Charles in the Boston Latin School. It’s time he had proper instruction.”

The sudden jolt to Dorothea’s stomach felt like a mule kick. “He won’t be in my classes?”

“He can visit you when he comes home on weekends.”

“And Joseph?”

“He’ll continue with my teaching.”

“Was Charles not progressing as you’d hoped?”

“It’s better he has a male instructor. It will prepare him for Harvard. Living with other boys will be good for him too.” She added, “I think I’ll forgo your readings this evening, Dorothea,” and hobbled out of the room.

Benji started after the woman, then returned, lifting his paws onto Dorothea’s lap. She looked into his watery eyes and scratched his chin. He panted happily in response. “At least you offer a little comfort to me,” she said.

“Benji! Come!” the old woman called, and the dog scooted away.

Dorothea dove into the new school project, pressing against the tightness in her chest when she thought of Charles’s being gone and Joseph as distant as if he were too. Charles was ready for the Latin school, but she missed him and his sea stories. The latter made her nervous as she imagined him on a ship during a raging Atlantic storm. Still, she knew that her influence over him waned and would more so now.

Dorothea wrote daily to Anne, telling her of her project and her visits to the wharves and the business sections of the city. Wherever she encountered a small girl, she handed her a coin and asked if she might like to come to school so that one day she could earn more coins to support herself and her family. She never found the child she had spoken with on her first visit, but a dozen others were there to take her place.

“The school will only be in the late afternoons and early evenings,” she assured the parents when prospective students took her to their homes.

“Why would you do this?”

Because it is my duty
. “I have the ability and the gift given me
to teach, and it is my desire to share that gift. It is your duty to receive it.”

“Ain’t had many gifts given me, so don’t have much practice in recepting them,” one father said. He pressed his hand on his daughter’s head. Were those lice moving through her hair?

She would have to bathe them all. Dorothea cleared her throat. It would be something to manage in the charity school, head lice and even ticks perhaps.

“Give me to know that but one human being has been made better by my precepts, more virtuous by my example, and I shall possess a treasure that the world can never take from me,” she wrote to Anne after the first week of her carriage house class.

Anne replied, “You are doing the Lord’s work with these children. They will remember not only their education but the woman who made it possible, a woman who could have spent her evenings bowling on the lawn or reading the
Sunday Scholar’s Magazine
instead of your charity. I am so proud of you, my sister. So very proud. Reverend Channing will be too.”

Anne’s words filled Dorothea, made her realize how important friendships were and how much she had missed having someone she could share her deepest thoughts with but who also showed her how to encourage others.

“I have a request,” Dorothea told Anne one Saturday. They had come to the stables where the Heaths kept several riding horses.
They had left the clan at home and now rode side by side, sunlight flickering through the trees. “Don’t save my letters.”

“Why ever not?”

“What if someone saw how deeply I express my emotions. My worries over Charles, my struggle with purpose, my wish that I had a child of my own. I’ve even shared with you Madam Dix’s interruption in my guidance of my brothers, how deeply she hurt me. Those ought not to be read by others.”

“I’ve written personal thoughts to you. Do you destroy my letters?” Anne asked.

“I do. But only after I’ve read them a dozen times.”

Anne grinned. “When I broke the porcelain you gave me, I thought I had chipped a part of my heart away. I’m sure I wrote that.”

“You did. And I treasure the words but keep them in here.” She patted her chest.

“I do not have your fabulous memory,” Anne said. “I think you remember everything you read, word for word.”

“Nearly.”

“I wrap your letters in packets tied with ribbon and keep them in a wooden box in the attic trunk. No one will see them.” Anne resettled her riding crop.

“Do you?”

“You’re like one of my sisters. Letters are a part of who you are. It would be like ripping away a portion of my skin, my bones, to toss them away.”

Dorothea leaned across her horse and reached for the bridle of Anne’s horse to stop them both. She pecked her friend on the cheek and felt her face grow hot. “Thank you for that. You are my only … friend.”

Anne touched her cheek. “Only because you do not share yourself with others as you do with me. My sisters adore you. Mary especially.”

“Do they?”

“More would find your intellect fascinating and your heart as the fire in the hearth. You simply do not allow others to know you, Thea.”

“If they did, they would soon find fault. I worry over that with you too.”

“Nonsense. I find no fault in you except you do not laugh enough and you take yourself too seriously. You’re a young woman, successful and full of generosity. But you should also have time for rest or you will become sick. I have seen this happen in men and women who work too hard in the care of others. With both schools operating, I fear you’ll fall ill.”

“I’ll work harder at laughing,” Dorothea said.

Anne laughed. “Somehow I knew you’d make a task of it.” She leaned forward and put her horse into a canter. Dorothea followed closely behind.

Dorothea’s days were filled with her school at Orange Court, her evenings at the carriage house school, and Sundays with the Heaths, and in between she wrote. She wrote to Anne, to her former Worcester students, and to Charles and Joseph, giving them instruction for living. She wondered how long she could maintain this grueling pace. And it was grueling. She arose at 4:00 a.m., donned enough petticoats to ward off winter drafts, dressed in a simple black linen dress with a white lace collar, fixed tea, and wrote. She wrote down ideas, stories, and even hymns she intended to use in her school. A kind of frenzy drove her days, and she heard herself be short with her students when they seemed unable to grasp a concept a mere day after she had taught them. At least cold weather halted the head lice in the carriage house schoolchildren, and in November she temporarily closed that school as the children all had coughs.