Episode 2: In Which We Drop In on a Club in Marseilles, Then Return to Brookside for the Untimely Arrival of the First Guests

Chapter 2 

In the dingy dressing room hung with exaggerated costumes, Rupa finished painting her eyes before a tall mirror cracked from top to bottom. Beyond the door a gay piano piece led six dancers across the wooden floor in perfect, pounding unison. Rupa drew a steady black line just below her lower lashes. She wrapped herself in the last layers of her sheer orange costume and stretched her legs, her arms, her neck one more time. She looked around the chaotic room, stale with the smell of sweat and grease, and thought how far away India was, how far away her father’s house. No one must find her here; surely no one would look in a place like this. She hugged herself, counting up what she had lost and what she had gained by the hard decisions made in her sixteen years.

            Here, on a narrow street in Marseilles, just a stone’s throw from the docks, sat the tavern that had become her home. Like everything in this port city, it catered to crews tumbling off ships, rough men eager for food, drink, and the smell of perfume. On this particular evening, Monsieur Vaudin, proprietor of La Coquette, had just finished hanging the new sign he had ordered, featuring the establishment’s name skillfully painted onto a wooden replica of a woman’s calf. And tonight he would be introducing Rupa to his clientele. 

            It had been a long time since his troupe had included an Indian, not since the last one ran off with a captain from Istanbul. But this girl was better in every respect: younger, prettier, a gifted dancer, and more docile. When she came to him two months ago she was almost skeletal, but even her jutting bones could not disguise her beauty. He had fed her and fattened her to an attractive size, although she would always be small. He had watched her practice with the other girls and could not help noticing a natural grace and fluidity to her movements. He dubbed her La Petite Violette. Tonight she would debut with a solo performance of a veiled dance for which he had gone to some expense with a silk merchant two streets over.

            By eight o’clock the tavern had filled up, as usual, with a handful of locals as well as captains and crew from ports all around the Mediterranean. Many were regulars, but others had been drawn in by flyers that promised a new talent performing a never-before-seen dance that would set even the sternest seaman’s heart thumping. Come see for yourself La Petite Violette.

            Rupa heard the piano player hammer out the final notes, heard the audience whistle and stamp their feet. In a great rush six girls tumbled into the dressing room, jostling each other in their bulky skirts. They fell exhausted onto benches and wiped the perspiration from their faces and arms. Unfastening the hooks of their bodices, they glanced expectantly at Rupa. They could hear Monsieur Vaudin intoning her introduction. Rupa tiptoed through the open door to the dark curtain beside the stage and waited for her cue. Monsieur Vaudin’s voice stopped and the plaintive notes of an Asian flute took its place. Rupa looked back at the oldest girl, who stood in the doorway watching.

            “Vas-y, vas-y,” the girl encouraged her, making a shooing motion with both hands. “Go on. You’ll do fine.”

            Rupa held her breath and stepped into the harsh light of the stage, carefully keeping her eyes away from the men spread out before her. She felt their eyes on her and smelled the sting of tobacco, catching her breath as the smoke entered her lungs. She felt exposed, like a fleeing fawn forced into an open field. But no one could know her here. She somehow remembered what the girls had told her—forget the audience and listen to the music. Closing her eyes, she drove her attention back to the mournful flute and arched her back. She took the first step, the second, and let the music pull her along. Little Violette danced, her sheer veils floating around her with each liquid swivel and leap. Before she realized it, the dance was over, and she looked out on the men as they roared their approval. She felt frightened, almost in peril, until she caught sight of Monsieur Vaudin in the back, applauding slowly and nodding his approval.

            The second show went more easily than the first, and Rupa found herself smiling as she bowed gracefully at the finish with the last notes of the flute trailing off. Her head pounding from the smoke and excitement, she made her way up the tight staircase to the little room she shared with two other girls. A small window faced the sea that glittered darkly beyond the tiled rooftops. She went to it and stood with her elbows on the sill looking out to the water and wondering which way she would sail to find a certain man who had saved her from one fate without dreaming she would run to this.

            And she thought about the tiny baby left in a basket by the convent’s kitchen. The nuns had been so good to her, and she flushed when she thought of how she had run out on them. But she could not stay at the convent where Phillip had brought her—although thousands of miles from India, it was still too easy to find. Her father might pick up the scent any day and fall upon her. She pictured his eyes, round with rage, and his terrible strength. The last time she saw him angry, their servant had barely survived the beating, and she remembered the sound of the blows as her father brought down the baton on his back and head.

            Rupa pressed her hands to her eyes to push back the tears. Was all this pain worth the mad flight? Had she made a terrible mistake? In answer, an image of herself as the disgraced daughter—or worse still, as Manindra’s bride—flashed into her mind, and she knew that she was willing to run her whole life long.

 

Chapter 3 

Maria looked out a foyer window between the pane’s deep etchings.

            “Guests, Madam. I see trunks on top. What shall we do?”

            “Oh, my.” Agnes instinctively tucked loose strands of hair up and under. “The Bairnaughts must have found a quicker connection. I do wish people would not improvise in the middle of traveling, it throws things off so.”

            “Ma’m, I believe it’s your Aunt and her companion. I think I recognize her baggage.”

            “Oh, well that’s easier at least. You absolutely never know with Aunt Vera, anyway. She could arrive two days early or a week late.

            The carriage, which was now directly in front of the entrance, turned off to the right. “Oh, they must be headed for the porte cochère,” observed Marie.

            “That’s very much Aunt Vera—keep them guessing, even about which door you’ll come in.”

Fettles reappeared, slightly out of breath, to report that the footmen had the snake cornered in the pantry and should have no trouble bagging him.

“Very good, Fettles,” sighed Agnes in relief. “It seems my Aunt and Mr. Schmidt have arrived well ahead of schedule. Would you please welcome them and offer them some tea, of course, while I dress. Do you know whether Mrs. Williams remembered to put Mr. Schmidt at the other end of the hall from Aunt Vera?”

            “Oh, yes, they are in the distant corners. Your aunt has the ivory room, as you requested, and Mr. Schmidt looks out toward the stables.”

            “Excellent. Oh, and Fettles--” Already proceeding to intercept the early arrivals, Fettles stopped himself.

            “Close some of these windows, please.”

            “Of course.”

            Agnes took a step. “And one more thing,” Fettles caught himself in the passage doorway and turned again. “Ask Dahlia to get a light lunch together for us to eat in about an hour. But no chicken—Aunt Vera refuses to eat it since she saw one killed behind the kitchen last year. And send ­­Marie up if you see her—I don’t know where she has disappeared to.”

            Fettles waited. “That’s all. Thank you, Fettles.” The butler bolted away in his usual manner, like one sprung from a trap, to check on the efforts of the footmen.

As Agnes hurried up the stairs, she heard the distant exclamations of her aunt. If Agnes’s life had been one prescribed by duty and tradition, her aunt’s was the opposite. No experience was too risky, no taste too foreign, for Vera to try it on. Twenty years earlier, she had cut her hair and dressed in homespun to sign up with the Union Army at Albany. Being of rather boyish proportions, she was accepted and uniformed without question under the name Julian Howard. 

Vera’s hobby of marksmanship stood her in good stead at three battles, from which she emerged with no more than scratches. But the endless marches and lack of sanitation became more than she could stand. When the captain asked for volunteers to staff a field hospital in Virginia, she raised her hand. The captain had noticed a certain daintiness about the recruit and doubted he would last on the trail much longer, so with a warm handshake and best wishes, he gave up the odd marksman to service as a nurse. Before arriving at the hospital, Vera peeled off and buried her filthy Union uniform, bathed in a creek, and donned a dress she had stolen for the occasion from a soldier’s wife at their last encampment. (She did, however, leave two dollars clipped to the clothesline where the dress had hung.)

            She arrived at the hospital late that day, after rubbing the letter “n” off her paperwork, presenting herself as Julia Howard, nurse volunteer, ready for duty. The hospital was a once glorious plantation home wrested from its owners and pressed into service for the North’s dying and wounded. Vera would say that she met the only man she ever loved there, where he lay in a corner of the dining room, bandaged about the head and missing a left arm and foot. She tended him for six weeks, falling in love with his stories and his soft eyes, those eyes that followed her as she stepped gently over the soldiers, handing out water and changing dressings. 

            What she did not know was that the hand he lost had worn a gold band that was now tucked into his jacket pocket, a memento he never revealed. When a letter from his wife finally reached the hospital, it fell to Vera to read it to him, owing to his sight being badly damaged from the explosion that took his limbs. That torture had a lasting impression on her—reading a wife’s declarations of love and news of their children to a man who had in every way possible encouraged her affections. She never again trusted herself in the matter of men and pursued a life of independent adventures.

            By contrast, Agnes felt her own life was narrow and hardly deserving of comment. She had few stories to tell. And time was passing faster and faster, still with no husband to share the work or joy of life.

            Lately, Agnes looked more closely into the mirror on her dresser. Sometimes she picked it up and moved nearer to the window to check the lines forming at the corners of her eyes, the definition coming into her brows, the hardening of her mouth. She had always told herself that she would not be a woman to fuss over age and run from wrinkles. Gray hair had a beauty of its own, and she would be perfectly happy when it came time for her deep brown waves to lose their color.

            “A woman must walk into winter gracefully,” her mother had often said, “or she’ll look the fool, wearing her summer hat to an ice-skating party.” And mother had managed that feat of grace like no one else. Mrs. Somerset’s long hair had turned gray early, and Agnes remembered no other color on her. Her mother wore it piled on her head with jeweled combs setting off its own dull shine, combs Agnes’s father brought home from his distant travels. 

            But it was different for Mother, Agnes brooded in her moments of self-pity. She had Father. They married young when she was beautiful and he was dashing, and she was not, at thirty-two, trying to win a man. Mother knew who she was and what she had to do, every day. Life did not scare her; life was at her service.

            Agnes had not inherited her mother’s beauty or her tall, delicate body. She mirrored instead her grandmother’s short, sweet frame with soft, rounded shoulders and full hips. She even had Grandma’s gentle brown eyes, her dainty mouth, and beautiful hands. No, Elizabeth was the one who took after Mother in nearly every way. Agnes adored her older sister and still felt a dull shock to her chest whenever she remembered how swiftly the infection had carried her off, leaving one daughter on the verge of marriage, their darling Stella.

            As she stood before the wardrobe unbuttoning her work clothes, Agnes imagined the lunch she was about to share with Aunt Vera and Mr. Schmidt. They would sit on the terrace and listen to Vera’s latest tales, laughing and exclaiming, and this was wonderful and as it should be. We can’t all be adventurers, she reminded herself; some must stay home and keep things running. Day after day and year after year. But Agnes knew in her heart that this life suited her well and only occasionally did she wish for more. That is, besides having a man to call her own, and that particular emptiness pulled at her heart more and more.

            Agnes took from its hook the rose-colored chambray with pale blue bows running down the sleeves, one of her favorites. Marie, who was a genius with a needle, had converted several of Agnes’s best dresses, including this one, to the new slimmer look by removing the bustles. Agnes was thus spared the expense and aggravation of ordering an entire new wardrobe while enjoying immensely the liberty to now sit properly against the backs of chairs.

            A soft knock came at the door, and Marie entered. “Oh, your pink, ma’m, it’s still missing a bow on one sleeve.”

            Agnes dropped the dress over one arm and put her hands over her face. She drew a slow, deliberate breath. Marie  waited.

            “Maybe this was a mistake,” Agnes confessed from behind her hands. She peered at her maid over her fingertips. “Don’t you think so, Marie? Once again I am probably trying to do too much. Who decreed that we needed all this ado over our hundredth anniversary? Well, I did, of course! I set myself and everyone else chasing through several circles of hell to make something grand happen, but why, really? And then we’re all exhausted by the time it begins.”

            “Ma’m you are hardest on yourself,” Marie asserted. “All of us are doing fine. It’s exciting to have a party now and then, and if there’s a little extra work, no one minds.”

            “You don’t mind. I don’t think you speak for Mrs. Williams or even Fettles. They both look like they are pondering getting up a mutiny.”

            Marie laughed. “How you talk, Miss Agnes! That’s not anywhere near true.”

            Agnes held out the pink dress.  “I doubt anyone will notice the missing bow—it is surely the least of our flaws.  I’m in the mood for it, Marie, so I’m wearing it! Have you seen my little silver cross? It was missing yesterday.”

            “Yes, ma’m, I just put it back in your drawer last night. I polished all your silver things.”

            “Marie, you are a gift.” Marie helped Agnes into her dress and fastened the delicate silver chain behind her neck. Agnes sat down in front of the mirror and straightened her sleeves. “I think this dress is getting too young for me. I might send it to Stella. I wish she would have come, it’s been so long since I’ve seen her.”

            “We are a long way from Chicago, ma’m, and her being in a family way makes it hard, you know.”

            “Oh, but she’s only a few months along and feeling perfectly healthy. She said so in her last letter. I suspect her husband is being overprotective and worrying her with all sorts of disasters that could befall her if she travels. You know that once the baby is born it will be a long time before she’ll want to take a trip out here. Traveling with children is so difficult.”

            “Yes, ma’m,” Marie braided Agnes’s dark hair and wound it artfully into loops that hung across the back of her neck.

            Marie knew about traveling with children. Some twenty years earlier, at the age of eight, she had traveled with her mother and baby brother, along with the remnants of the family that had owned them, to New York City. Half starved, they had turned their backs on their Mississippi home, the burned crops, the graves of their men, and headed north to find work—any work. Marie had loved Mistress Dickinson and learned reading and arithmetic at her knee. Her owners’ daughters were almost sisters to Marie except for the chores that never fell to them. She did not know until later how fortunate she had been compared to most of her black brethren. Together, in that crisis, the ragtag group operated more like an extended family than slaves and masters, and lived together in the huge, pounding city for several weeks until different fates pulled them in separate directions.

            “You do have beautiful hair, Miss Agnes. It sure does remind me of your mother’s, may she rest in peace.”

            “Yes, and it’s turning her color at a frightening rate.”

            “No, ma’m! I don’t see but a strand or two of silver, and it’s always the same—never more.”

            Agnes turned her head from side to side in the mirror. “I choose to believe you, Marie. All right, let’s go down and hear what new revolution my aunt has lent her hand to.”

To be continued

Welcome to Brookside Estate, early 1880s

In Duchess County, New York, on a bluff overlooking a quilt of fertile farmland, sits the venerable Brookside Estate, home for generations to the Somerset family. This is a novel about Agnes Somerset, a capable woman of 30-something, who is left to manage the family estate after the death of her parents. Romance crops up with an unusual man, but scandal undercuts it, and this is but one of a series of misfortunes that beset our heroine. Sprinkled with the philosophical and societal foment of the day and peopled by a wide cast of characters, it's a story of duty and love, villainy and loyalty, and time running out. The tale takes us into mid-Victorian America and into the hearts and minds of the people whose era it was.

Like many an author in the days of Dickens, I have decided to issue Agnes Somerset in serial format, beginning with this initial post that includes the Prologue and Chapter 1. Each week you may return to this blog to read another installment (usually published on Wednesday). I hope you might become good friends with your favorite characters--and firm enemies of others--and enjoy your time at Brookside. Happy reading.

All the best,
Ann Maureen Doyle

 Agnes Somerset (a novel)
 copyright 2014 by Ann Maureen Doyle. All rights reserved.

Prologue       

Brookside Estate, Duchess County, New York

Early 1880s

Agnes stood motionless at the foot of the stairs. She had just put the baby down for a nap, and his dribble cloth still lay across her shoulder. She looked at Phillip and knew why he had come.

            He stood in the middle of the foyer, turning his hat in his hands. “I have good news,” he began abruptly.

            The words he was about to speak she could not hear. She knew she should sit down but feared that if her feet moved they would carry her away at a run. Better to stand steeled for the next blow. She was vaguely aware of Fettles working behind her, quietly lighting the lamps against the darkness of the autumn afternoon. She looked at Phillip’s dark eyes and beautiful brow, the careless hair, the magnificent angle of his shoulders, and for the first time wanted to put her fists into him.

            He had come to begin prying the baby from her. Agnes felt herself standing there, between the two of them, as though blocking the man from mounting the stairs to where the mysterious little bastard slept, ignorant of the swirling violence his existence had ignited in the grown-up world below him.

            How strange, Agnes thought, that the passage of less than half a year could pull a woman through bliss she had never imagined and dash her into dark chasms with hardly a foothold. She turned her gaze toward the tall eastern window, trying to steady her mind.  The lawn stretched out damp and brown, and the sky was  threatening rain again. Only a few months ago, how green the view had been, when a glad sun coaxed every blade of grass into growing, every bud into opening, and warmed the gray stones of the terrace. For a moment only, the whole scene lay before her clothed in the glory of summer, but tiny, like a cameo, as though seen from a great distance and growing smaller with every swing of the pendulum in the implacable old clock behind her. No, they were here now, thousands of miles from last summer, with no way back—even the truth about the baby upstairs would probably make no difference, could they ever even know it . . . .

Part I. As the Wild Bird Flies

         

Chapter 1

It was one of those days in early June that, despite their rarity, stand in our memory as the quintessential summer day. Agnes directed the staff to throw open all the doors, which set the draperies to gently flapping, the edges of tablecloths fluttering, and newspapers and writing supplies taking flight until paperweights were rounded up to secure them. The sky was a luxurious blue interrupted by high, white clouds sailing briskly to the east. It was tremendous luck that brought such fine weather on this, the first day guests would be arriving for Brookside’s hundredth anniversary.

            By mid-morning the house was nearly ready. Flowers had been cut and arranged, guest beds made up with scented linens, the dinner menu finalized, and the croquet course freshly mowed. Agnes swooped from room to room, her dark blue work skirt swirling about her legs, as she checked every detail, issued instructions, and lent a hand where needed.

            In the foyer she paused across from the grand front doors that she had ordered propped open to let in the air. She slowly surveyed the space as the breeze stirred her hair and brought in the smell of climbing roses blooming just outside the door. Something was not right, but what? Then she saw it. “Marie,” she called to the young woman spreading a heavy red cloth over the mahogany dining table, “Where is the umbrella stand?”

            Marie approached, her thin dark hands smoothing her white apron. Agnes could not help noticing how handsome Marie looked, with her black hair pulled tightly back from her smooth brown face with its magnificent cheekbones and lavish mouth. “Ma’m, Mrs. Williams thought it needed polishing and took it to the kitchen. And, the weather being so fair, we probably won’t be needing it for a while.”

            Agnes turned a cautionary gaze on her maid. “So we are now able to forecast a week’s weather, are we?” Marie was silent. “Well, you may both be completely right, and I hope you are, but do me the favor of asking Mrs. Williams to finish polishing the stand and replace it by lunch time, please.” Marie nodded and hurried to the kitchen.

            Agnes loved opening the grand house to guests each summer, but the details nearly drove her to shrewishness in the days leading up to their arrival. And this year the expectations were all the greater since they were celebrating the century mark of her family home. On top of the usual preparations, this year called for a celebration dinner, a reading of “The History of Brookside” (researched and written by herself), a hunt, and extra invitees.

            Urgent footsteps approached from the main hallway, echoing against the gray and white marble tiles. “Madam, a moment, please.”

            It was Fettles, looking more frightened than usual, his coat flying open, his wiry gray hair blown back from his narrow face.     The butler paused to catch his breath as he stood before her on his impossibly thin, black-stockinged legs, his hands shaking just the slightest bit with the tremor that had set in during the past year.

“Fettles, you’re just the person I was looking for. Have we safeguarded our more valuable pieces? You remember that the Duke is coming . . .”

            “Oh, yes, madam,” Fettles said firmly. “Reassembling one seventeenth-century Polish pitcher was quite enough for me.” (The Duke of Gloucester, who lived just up the road, had on a previous visit knocked the pitcher to the floor while making a sweeping gesture to describe his enthusiasm for American politics.)

            “And what were you going to say?” asked Agnes.

“Madam, the strong air through the house is, I’m afraid, posing difficulties for the floral arrangements. Mrs. Williams requests that we might close the doors and windows.”

            “Does this mean that Mrs. Williams is not able to engineer a bouquet that can withstand a summer breeze?” Agnes affected an incredulous look.

            “Well, Madam, it’s just that she has designed a particularly complex arrangement for today’s decoration, making it more delicate than her usual.”

            “Fettles, I applaud her zeal, but I cannot let concern for our bouquets shut up the house on this glorious day. Please tell Mrs. Williams that we will be very happy indeed with her habitual brilliance—a few collections of durable flowers will suffice.”

            Fettles rubbed his fingers together and waited as though more precise instruction might be coming. Hearing none, he blinked and turned to retrace his steps with a murmured “Yes, Madam.”

            Agnes heard phrases float back to her as he retreated—“won’t be easy . . . why I’m always elected . . . hurricane . . .”—and smiled. Fettles had a heart of purest gold, but the butler was even more prone to upset than his mistress during their bigger events. He had served the Somerset family since coming at age seventeen to work as a groom in her father’s stables. He proved totally unsuited to working with animals, but his earnestness could not be overlooked, and, much to the horses’ relief, Agnes’s father offered him a position in the house.  Fettles executed every task he was given quickly and with merciless attention to detail. Her father felt his conscientious bent owed much to a strict Catholic upbringing.

            Agnes consulted the solemn clock that stood counting off the seconds in a corner of the foyer. Ten forty-six. In just over three hours the guests should start arriving, beginning with the Bairnaughts and followed shortly by Aunt Vera, accompanied by Vera’s friend and traveling companion, Mr. Schmidt.  In two days, by Wednesday, the house would be nearly full.

            Agnes started for the stairs to check on the guest rooms but stopped on the first step. She turned her head and listened. It was getting louder, the certain sound of carriage wheels on gravel. Impossible—no one was due before two. Fettles, returned from his mission and ever alert, had also heard it. He edged cautiously sideways to look out the open door.

“Oh,” he winced. “Mrs. Thorne’s carriage.”

“What?” snapped Agnes. “At this hour? The woman has no consideration whatever!” She looked down at her simple work clothes, started to smooth her hair, and stopped. “Well, if she wants to pay visits in the middle of the morning, I am not going to worry about it. She gets me as I am.”

“She does it on purpose, you know, Ma’m,” put in Maria from the dining room doorway.

            Agnes let out a low, exasperated sound. “It was too much to hope that she would not appear this week.”

            “Shall I tell her that you are indisposed?” asked Fettles.

            Agnes put her fingers to her temples. “No, I had best get this over with. She’ll be outraged, of course, that she is not part of our festivities, even though she has not invited me to a single thing. Oh, why can’t this woman just disappear?”

            Fettles looked at her sympathetically and smiled. “She is indeed the Thorne in our side.”

            Agnes smiled despite herself. “Of course, if she sees me like this, she will take in every disheveled detail and recount them to her circle of magpies. Show the woman in. I will appear by and by,” she said, hurrying upstairs.

Moments later, after a deft refinement of her coiffure and the addition of a smart poplin jacket, Agnes came down to find Mrs. Sherman Thorne sitting stiffly in the first parlor. Both of her delicate hands rested on a well-ruffled parasol as she stared at a sweeping painting of sturdy Italians harvesting olives. As usual, Claudia’s dress was designed to stun the viewer into speechless admiration. Today she was a pillar of ivory in varying tones. European lace embraced her throat, shoulders, and arms. Below her impossibly narrow waist, cascades of ruffled satin fell to the floor. A simple, wide-brimmed hat protected her pale face from the day’s sun and concealed her masses of silken hair. Claudia’s hair was famous and often described as the color of wheat just before harvest.

            The siren turned her head mechanically at Agnes’s approach and rose. Agnes extended her hand, grateful for Claudia’s gloves that prevented contact with the skin of this poisonous woman. She looked neutrally into the cold face, into the gray eyes set wide beneath the perfect brows. Claudia tilted her fine chin forward and broke open her most dazzling smile.

            “Agnes, do forgive me for calling so early. I was just on my way into town and thought to stop for only a moment. It looks as though you are making preparations for something rather grand. I had no idea.”

            “Not at all. It’s a small fête with mostly family and friends of my parents,” Agnes explained, allowing no space for a mere enemy such as Claudia. “We are marking Brookside’s hundredth anniversary.”

            “That is a special occasion,” Claudia enthused. The two women seated themselves across from each other. “I will not keep you. I simply came by because Sherman’s mother finally left for Europe”—she drawled the word finally to ensure an understanding of how burdensome her mother-in-law could be—“and at last I have time to attend to calls I have long neglected.”

            “How lovely that you and Mrs. Thorne keep up such close relations,” smiled Agnes, “even with Sherman gone.”

            “Well, he was all she had. So now it’s me, I suppose.” Claudia smiled wanly and pulled gently on a dangling curl. Claudia had declared herself a widow a year earlier, after her husband had been missing for eight months. Sherman had left with his trunks, telling her that the French had recruited him to assist in building the canal in Panama. She was used to—and even relished—his far-flung travels, as his career kept him away the greater part of every year, engineering bridges, tunnels, and seaports. Devotion to his work was one explanation, but many felt that he accepted long assignments to remote places as a refuge from his wife. For her part, Claudia took advantage of Sherman’s absences to indulge in amusements he would neither enjoy nor approve of. On the rare occasions when he was at home, Claudia threw parties to put him on display and demonstrate that he was more than a myth. He spent those evenings sipping hard liquor and saying as little as possible.

            But this trip was different. After several weeks she had received neither letter nor money. When her own letters were returned unopened by the canal administrator, Claudia demanded answers. After several more weeks, the French Director General of the operation sent her a telegram from Panama City stating in no uncertain terms that they had no knowledge of her husband, had never hired him, and had no reason to, being fully confident of their own engineers’ ability to build the daunting waterway. Claudia declared him either a liar or an incompetent who did not even know the engineers they had engaged. Still, she chose not to request a formal investigation and concluded that Sherman, in his selfless effort to bring progress to that barbaric part of the world, must have met his end either by fever or headhunters. She resigned herself to her new status of singleness, wearing black for only a month with the explanation that she found that ritual “far too depressing.”

            Most people felt that Sherman was not dead and secretly cheered for him in his new life. Overall, his disappearance served Claudia well. She had found that, after working to secure Sherman as a husband, his mathematical mind only bored her more each day. She had not realized that the qualities required of a good engineer do not include creativity or anything like reckless abandon. He did not care what pictures she hung on the walls or what local scandals were bubbling, and he proved incapable of surprising her with anything but the depth of his dullness.

            Agnes speculated that Sherman had married Claudia for her beauty and possibly her dowry, which was her parent’s estate upon their death. Claudia’s mother had died of tuberculosis shortly after the wedding, and her father welcomed the couple to live at Beaujour with him. He had shamelessly spoiled his only child since her birth and constantly referred to her as “the prettiest thing breathing.” He sent her in her teen years to the same academy as Agnes, where Claudia enjoyed a campaign of subtle persecution upon the intelligent, quiet girl. Afterwards, Agnes’s theft of the desirable M., (a man she could not even manage to keep, Claudia had often pointed out at the time) only increased Claudia’s antagonism. Claudia took her marriage to Sherman as a personal victory over Agnes and gloated over her neighbor’s continued spinsterhood.

            “Well,” smiled Agnes, “you are very kind to drop by.”

            “Of course, I can’t stay. A widow’s affairs just have no end, it seems. Lawyers, bankers, architects, there is always someone demanding a meeting. But, as a single woman, I am sure you know how that is.”

            “I do indeed.”

            Claudia smiled. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “There is one thing I have been meaning to ask you. I’ve heard that you are thinking of . . . “ Claudia leaned closer and dropped her voice as though sharing a secret, “selling Brookside?”

            Agnes felt the words run over her like ice water. “Selling Brookside?” she repeated slowly. “What—what would possess me—“

            “Oh, I have no idea, it’s just something I heard,” Claudia laughed lightly, drawing back.

            “From whom?”

            “I really don’t remember now. But I thought I would ask. It is a lovely old place, but I would understand if you were growing a bit tired of keeping up with it all.” Claudia waved her folded parasol around vaguely. “It is, of course, old-fashioned and would need a lot to bring it up to date, but it still is a very fine property. You know, I have about finished the improvements at Beaujour. You must come by and see it! I spared no expense,” she confided, winking at Agnes as she adjusted her gloves and rose.

            “Well, I am off. Do come by, won’t you?” she repeated as she headed for the open door, then stopped. Turning, she tossed out “I hear that the Duke’s son is back from India. Have you met him?”

   “Not yet, but the Duke has promised to bring him to the festivities.”

   “You are the lucky girl!” exclaimed Claudia. “I’m told he is quite the fascinating young fellow and rather dashing. He should make a colorful addition to your grand event. I am gone!” she concluded, waving a lacey hand in the air, and glided out the door to her waiting carriage.

   As it clattered away, leaving a gray swirl of dust, Marie approached and touched her mistress’s arm.

   “Beware of this woman, ma’m. I feel danger from her.”

   Agnes looked into her maid’s dark, serious eyes. “You need not warn me, my dear. I have long understood that Mrs. Thorne is capable of nearly anything.”

   A sudden shriek pulled their attention sharply away from their departing neighbor.  A house maid, just crossing the foyer, stood against a wall with a hand to her mouth.

   “What is it?” Agnes asked.

   “A snake, ma’m!”

   “Where?”

   “He went down the hall.”

   Fettles dashed to the front doors and pulled them closed. “It is a morning for unwanted visitors,” he declared. “I will do my best to find it, ma’m, and enlist the footmen.”

   “Oh, you must, Fettles!” cried Agnes. We can’t have a serpent in the house! Oh, my Lord, it will be surprising our guests as they climb into bed or slithering between them at dinner.”

   “Yes, madam.” Fettles called, already flying down the hall after the legless intruder, his heels clicking crazily down the passageway to the kitchen.

            Agnes shook her arms and let out an exasperated noise. She should not have forgotten, but it had been so long since a creature had sneaked into the house that she had let herself relax too much in leaving the doors open. The raccoon had been hard enough to trap, but a snake . . . . You cannot relax, she stormed against herself, and you should have known better.

            But there was no time to dwell on her mistake. She heard again the sound of carriage wheels rolling toward the house. “Oh, who can it be this time?” she cried. “The first guest has not set foot in the house and already I need a bromide!”

            From the corner of her eye, Agnes thought she saw a black, satiny form slither under the parlor doors and disappear. The footmen, she realized with a sinking heart, had been bested. 

To be continued . . .