Louisa and the Missing Heiress (20 page)

“Mendosa. An actress. A performer. One who treads the boards. Surely you have heard of actresses? If not, I will explain the profession.” One had to get down to business quickly at the Athenaeum.

“No need to explain,” he said, turning bright red. “Have you any information other than a name?” His tone of voice was peevish, yet he picked up a pen and prepared to take a few notes.

“Let’s see. She is still alive. Is that helpful? I would say she is about thirty years of age, though her costumes and makeup give her a more youthful appearance. She has an accent. Spanish, I believe, though it tends to fluctuate a bit between that language and several others. She is currently appearing on the Boston stage, and before that she toured in the West.”

“Newspapers and journals,” he said. “I suspect there will be little written of her of a more permanent nature. If you will wait here . . .”

He returned fifteen minutes later carrying piles and piles of yellowing periodicals.

“These are publications from cities of the South and the West,” he said, using a tone of voice that preachers often adopt with children. “If you find dates of her performances in various cities, you may also find reviews and biographies and other material.” He gloated as he released the pile in front of him with such alacrity that a small cloud of dust puffed out as it landed on the polished mahogany desk. For the first time during our exchange he seemed pleased. He’d had his revenge, he supposed, for my female act of trespass.

What he did not know was that the prospect of that tall pile of popular press gave me a thrill. I had a morning before me filled with news and stories from all over the country. What more could I wish?

And so I passed a very pleasant half day reading several years’ worth of news of Natchez, Saint Louis, Nashville, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Wheeling, and several smaller towns along the Western theater-touring route. There were stories from New Mexico, which had been acquired for the Union, and reports from M. C. Perry in the Japans, tales of gunfights and land claims and blizzards and more drama than any writer could seek. There were pages of poems by Tennyson that set me dreaming, and countless reviews of my dear friend Henry Thoreau’s book
Walden
.

There was considerable space and verbiage used to describe the progress of Jenny Lind, who had toured the year before, but notices advertising the appearances of Katya Mendosa were scarce and, even when located, small. It was sobering to think that much of what Miss Mendosa’s promoters claimed for her was hyperbole and even invention. I half believed her to be famous and wealthy, or at least as wealthy as a woman of the working classes could become. She was not, as her lack of publicity and reviews indicated little interest on the part of audiences.

I did, however, find a few dates and listings of performances, and scribbled those down on a blotter.

When I left the Athenaeum, there was a closed carriage standing at the curb. The window had been rolled up and curtained, but not completely. Inside, strangely, sat Katya Mendosa herself. She glared as I passed. There was a man inside as well, but I could not see his face.

It felt a strange coincidence, but it was possible that another Athenaeum member might be spending time with the actress and escorting her about in a carriage.

Still, it did feel strange.

“Hmm,” I said later, biting my lip and looking at the list, once again alone with Sylvia. “I would have expected more.” We were in the small garden that came with our Pinckney Street house, and I was pulling away the pile of last year’s leaves that buried Abba’s daffodil bed.

“Why, Louisa, is something missing? To think you spent an entire morning in that dusty vault. Is this a weed or a flower, Louy?” She pointed to a small yellow tip just breaking the ground.

“Flower. Don’t pull at it, Sylvia. The Athenaeum is well maintained and not at all dusty,” I replied. “Certainly it’s not a vault. I could happily spend a month in there with all those books, those leather chairs and gas lamps at every desk, no wailing children . . .” I grew dreamy for a moment, and then resumed a brisk manner. “But I prefer not to spend my time there researching such actresses as Madame Mendosa. She was a fairly boring research subject.” I took off my thick gloves and pulled from my pocket the blotter on which I had written my notes of the diva’s appearances.

“Did you notice anything about this list, Sylvia?” I asked when she had finished reading.

“A certain paucity of engagements,” Sylvia said, “with much time between them.”

“A worthy observation. We can assume Miss Mendosa has, and needs, other sources of income. Anything else, Sylvia ?” I was smiling encouragingly, giving her the kind of look I gave my schoolchildren when I was trying to make them feel clever.

“She had a run in Newport, in that little theater we used to attend as children, because they had ballet dancers and puppet shows in the afternoon.”

“Yes. And . . .” I cradled my chin in my hands and watched as the maid from the house next door carried a bucket of ash out to the pile. Sylvia frowned with impatience.

The maid, not knowing she was watched, scratched her red hands and sighed with exhaustion, though the day was not yet over. If her duties were typical, she still had a table to lay, a long wash-up to clean the kitchen after dinner, children to bathe, hearths to prepare for the morning fires. If there was mending, and there always was, she would have to do it by gaslight. She would be working long after the family was sleeping in their beds. If the poor woman had children they would have spent the day alone, probably in the attic, in soggy nappies and with their thumbs in their mouths to quell the hunger, and with that distant look in their eyes that lonely children soon develop.

I sighed, and Sylvia knew I was thinking of Queenie.

“Unfair!” Sylvia cried. “You hint at hidden meanings and then fall silent!”

“Katya’s career seems to have begun sometime in 1850, four years ago, for I found no mention of her before that.”

“And so? All careers must begin at some time.”

“Exactly,” I said.

BOSTON HAD A SIMPLE system of restraining its criminal population. Offenders of modest ambition—Saturday-night drunks, meat-shop butchers with heavy thumbs and light scales, pickpockets, and others of that ilk—were housed in a small, uncomfortable jail till their fine was paid or their time served. Dangerous villains, however, were quartered in the courthouse itself, a building that I had already visited many times even before Preston fell headlong into his troubles, since my father’s Vigilance Committee had rallied there in the past, especially three years before, when the fugitive slave Sims had been held and tried.

Said building, located in Court Square, was a four-square granite structure of formidable size and austere presence that contained the marshal’s office, much of the city administrative offices, and the courtroom itself. It was guarded by an assortment of soldiery and police, and much of legalistic Boston gathered in that place. The dashing young lawyer Richard Henry Dana kept his offices across the way, and Judge Edward Greely Loring spent more time there than teaching in his Harvard law class. Wendell Phillips could be seen pacing the halls with papers in hand to file or present; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and my father, of course . . . the names of the people who could be seen scuffling down those halls at the time of this story read like a history lesson, the law students boasted.

And so three days following the birth of Queenie’s daughter, after my own schoolchildren had left and the parlor had been swept clean of marbles and crumbs, I returned to that courthouse to pay a second visit to Preston Wortham. I had some very specific questions for him.

It was about three o’clock in the afternoon when I arrived, and Constable Cobban was just finishing an early workday at the courthouse; we passed each other in the hall.

“Afternoon,” he said, grinning and making a little bow vaguely in my direction. He blushed. He seemed to always blush when he saw me, I reflected, and reminded myself I must give him no encouragement.

“Good afternoon to you, Constable,” I replied somewhat coolly. He seemed to wish to converse, but I continued on my way.

“I approve,” he called after me.

“Approve?”

“Your manners, Miss Alcott. You are right. You should not stop to talk to a man in public. I wonder, though, that you came here by yourself. Perhaps something of Mrs. Wortham rubbed off on you.”

I wondered what he meant by that, but decided the conversation would have to wait. There were other matters to look into before I quizzed him on his somewhat harsh attitude toward my friend. It seemed far too soon to trust him with all my reflections on the business of Dorothy, and if I stopped to exchange small talk, he might interpret that as encouragement.

No, there would be time enough for chatting later, and I was in a bit of a rush, fitting, as I was, this chore between my school day and the domestic tasks waiting for me at home. So I did not stop and give that young man a chance to converse. What would he have said if I had? I felt his eyes on my back, and kept walking.

And, of course, because I was both preoccupied and rushed and in no mood for small talk or other unnecessary conversation, just as I rounded the corner, Mayor Van Crowninshield Smith appeared before me, his top hat reaching to the low ceiling of the third floor, the carved ivory handle of his walking cane shining through the shadowed interior darkness.

“Ah!” Boston’s mayor exclaimed brightly. “Miss Alcott. Yes, it is Miss Alcott? Miss Alcott, how are you and your excellent father?”

It is not politic to snub a mayor, much as one is tempted, so I sighed and squared my shoulders and prepared to listen to his chatter for a few moments. I did not particularly like Mayor Van Crowninshield Smith. He was the kind of person who seeks to be admired by all and so ends up admired by none. He had the morals of a kite, Father said, turning in every breeze that came along and sometimes spiraling in nonsensical circles. When he met with the pro-slavery Irish of Boston, he advocated the slavery system. When he met with the free-soilers, he preached against slavery.

Mayor Van Crowninshield Smith also had literary aspirations, and had been an editor of the
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
. He fancied himself to be a man of letters and was always desirous of conversation with other men of letters, so much so that those more stately men of the town, Mr. Thoreau, Mr. Richard Dana, and even Mr. Emerson when he was in from Concord, took to ducking down hallways and behind shrubs when they saw the mayor approaching. One of the great delights of my girlhood had been to spy the top hat and bushy eyebrows of the very serious Ralph Emerson sticking up from behind a rhododendron as the mayor strolled by.

I had no such recourse at that moment. Shrubs are difficult to find in interior hallways of courthouses.

“Father is well, Mayor. I will tell him you asked about him.” I made the tiniest of curtsies, as women are expected to do before high personages, and made to continue on my way.

He took my elbow and turned to walk with me. Such men usually do. It is one of their irritating habits to believe that no woman could possibly wish to be alone with her thoughts when he was available to them.

“I had a letter to the editor published on Wednesday last. Did you see it, Miss Alcott? Did your father comment upon it?” the mayor asked eagerly.

“Wednesday last. Let me remember.” I pretended to search my memory, frowning a little with the feigned effort. “Yes, Wednesday. That was the day the neighbor’s spaniel reached the paper before Father could. How sad! We missed your letter! What was it about, Mayor?”

This was a fabrication. We had read the letter and laughed heartily before using the paper to light the evening fire in the hearth, for the mayor had proposed that the history and geography of Turkey be made a compulsory subject at Harvard. Not that we had anything against that esteemed Oriental country; rather it was transparent that Mayor Van Crowninshield Smith merely wished to sell more copies of his travel book,
Turkey and the Turks
, by requiring the Harvard students to buy it. The book’s unimaginative title was indicative of its unimaginative contents. I had read the tome and torn my hair over it. “Has he no eyes? Has he no ears?” I had moaned. “To visit such a place, and record only street names!”

“Ah. A spaniel. I see. Well. I shall send your father a copy.” The mayor stroked his beard thoughtfully. “I believe I have saved a few,” he added, as if his entire front parlor were not crammed with copies of the paper. “Then perhaps we might discuss it.”

“Certainly,” I agreed cheerfully. “Though Father is just a little busy these days. He still gives conversations, as you know.”

Now the friendly mayor grew quite serious. “And it is just that I wish to speak with him about,” he said. “Perhaps he could put my name forward. Not that I would wish to be remunerated . . . no such thing. But I believe I could provide some philosophical and literary content to a room of intellectuals and philosophers such as those who gather to hear your father speak. Don’t you think?”

He paused and smiled at his own disingenuousness. I was thankful he did not allow time for me to answer, certain as he was that my only possible response could be an affirmation. Then his expression changed, as if it had suddenly occurred to him that he was having this delightful conversation not on the avenue or in the park, but in a dark hallway lined with rooms in which criminals were detained, probably plotting even more dreadful deeds as we spoke.

“Miss Alcott, may I ask your business at the courthouse? You are not in any difficulty? Your father’s activities have not caught up with him?” He referred, of course, to Father’s work with the Boston Vigilance Committee and the abolitionists. Should we ever be discovered harboring a fugitive slave in our home, we would be fined five hundred dollars (a fortune!) and Father would go to jail. Mostly, the mayor simply looked the other way. Even abolitionist votes were important to him.