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