Louisa and the Country Bachelor : A Louisa May Alcott Mystery (9781101547564) (12 page)

“Does he wish, at his advanced age, to build another house?” I asked.

“Not Dr. Burroughs. He's an antiprogressive. He wants the land so no one else can build on it. Such a purchase would delay the completion of the railroad for a long, long time, I think,” Uncle Benjamin said. “I wish I had known them,” he continued, stepping cautiously over a mud puddle.

“Known what?”

“The good old days that Burroughs keeps talking about.” Uncle laughed.

“I wonder to what extent Dr. Burroughs would go to stall that progress he so hates,” I mused.

“Don't worry your head about it,” said Benjamin, obviously of that school that equates the feminine nature with an inability to do sums.

The path was muddy, and I hitched my skirts up to my knees, revealing patches and a few new holes in my stockings. Such open revelation of the condition of one's stockings was reprehensible, certainly, but preferable to spending the rest of the day scouring mud off the hem of my dress.

It was a lovely day, filled with sun and birdsong and, now, Uncle Benjamin's companionship. We linked arms and walked in silence for some moments when a wider path allowed this affectionate display.

We turned a corner in the muddy path and the river widened, revealing a semicircle cut into the bank where sun glittered on shallow water. This little arena was filled with minnows darting this way and that; I crouched down for a better look, oblivious now to the damage to my dress. There is something about the way the sun shines on darting fish that entrances me, as if the water has taken prisoner a gliding moonbeam; as a child in Concord I spent many hours with a muddied, crouching Henry Thoreau, mesmerized by the sight.

“There is something else we should discuss, however briefly is up to you,” I began cautiously, remembering there was a purpose to this walk.

Because his knees had stiffened with age he could not sit beside me at the river's edge, and so there was no chance of eye contact, which was just as well. “Mrs. Tupper seems to spend much of her time in your company.”

“And Eliza's,” he said. He tried to crouch, and his knees made the most alarming noises. “She is lonely.”

“Yes, but it seems to me that Mrs. Tupper plays the coquette with you, you know.”

“Indeed!” Benjamin snorted. He looked pleased. I could see how a man of his years could be flattered. “Indeed.” He grinned and sat, with some effort, on a log. His knees again creaked as loudly as a rusty gate. “Well, I am old enough to be her father.”

That was even more alarming than his noisy knees. When men protest of a paternal age in that manner they are often obscuring contradictory desires.

“She is alone too much,” he continued. “Her husband has gone off, and that son of hers . . . well, I wouldn't count on him for anything. Are we to leave her on her own? You've met her, Louy. You see that she is uncomplicated, almost innocent, like a young girl. If I don't keep an eye on her, she may come to grief.” He poked his cane in the water and stirred up a swirl of mud.

“Then you have set about to preserve Mrs. Tupper's virtue,” I said. “You are a romantic.”
A hopeless romantic,
I could have added.

 

 

AFTER OUR WALK, Uncle Benjamin turned down the path to his house with a decidedly jaunty step. I went in the other direction, to the county clerk's office. So much talk about land values and speculation prompted me to look at the local deeds and maps. The clerk made it plain by his loud slamming of the wooden bureau drawers that I, an outsider, should have little interest in local land ownership, but I spent an interesting hour checking boundary lines. Mr. Tupper had recently purchased many acres on the north town line. Lilli Nooteboom's acreage along the river was completely fenced in by his own. I knew that in the country adjoining acreage was a reason to marry; was it also a reason to murder? Below the Nooteboom and Tupper acres—completely overwhelmed by them, in fact—was a little plot marked
Burroughs
. The doctor owned land that had, until this decade, faced onto miles of virgin wilderness. Now his land, to say nothing of his view, faced the development instincts of a new generation.

Uncle Benjamin owned two lots, one containing the house now inhabited by the Alcotts, and the house in which he lived with his daughter, Eliza, and son-in-law and grandchildren. Both lots were well within the old town limits.

 

 

AT BREAKFAST THE next morning, Anna buttered her bread with great concentration as I described my ramble with Uncle Benjamin.

“Uncle is lonely, even living in the midst of Eliza's pack,” she said. The Alcott family, as usual, was up at dawn, and Abba's “Golden Brood,” the Alcott girls, gathered around the table, eating, Abba said with joy, like farmhands. Father was already in his study, and Abba was at the open window, inhaling deeply and admiring the mountains.

Soon she will marry,
I thought, watching Anna. She had no beau that we knew of, and Anna wasn't the kind to keep secrets. But the previous winter spent working as a governess in Syracuse had changed her; being away from her family had imbued her with both independence and sadness, for solitude had not suited her. I thought soon she would want her own family, so she might never be alone again.

And what would become of me? Marriage was far from my thoughts. I was more concerned with writing, and always in the back of my mind was that character, Jo, the tomboy whose story I had yet to discover.

Anna looked up from her toast, smiled, and commented, “I have news as well. They seem to take two things very seriously in Walpole: politics and gardening.”

I looked at her expectantly over my morning paper, an edition posted from Manchester. I had just opened the page to the theater section. Gentle reader, I was still at the stage of my life in which I considered a career on the stage and spent hours thinking how I might perform four times a week, rehearse twice a day, tour most of the month, and still write my stories. I had not yet found that plan. It seemed to require an extra afternoon for every day, and an extra day for every week.

“Dearest Anna, the basis for your observation?” I asked.

“Well, yesterday when you were walking with Uncle Benjamin I decided to walk to the square and buy some stationery. I purchased it at Hubert's, the Democratic store, rather than at Tupper's, the Whig store. I have heard the prices are lower there.”

“A fatal error,” I teased, referring to her choice, not the prices.

“It was!” Anna blushed. “When I came out of the store, one of Eliza's friends saw me and said, ‘You're as bad as Lilli Nooteboom. She and her brother shopped here. See what happened to them.' And then she walked past and stuck her nose in the air.” Anna was amazed.

“I should have warned you,” I said. “When I first arrived, Eliza was very pointed in her instructions that I was to shop only at Tupper's. ‘It's like this,' Eliza told me. ‘The Whigs want the railroad to finish coming through as soon as possible, even if it means some people have to sell their land or even houses cheap to make way. The Democrats rant about losing family rights and being sold out to the merchants and industrialists. But industry is the future, isn't it?' And so Walpole takes this matter of where one shops very seriously.”

“Surely not seriously enough to push one over a cliff, for that's what this woman seemed to hint at,” said Anna, shaking her head.

“No,” I said with great uncertainty. “It could not have come to that.” Could it? Execution for shopping on the wrong side of the street? Yet Mr. Nooteboom had thereby slighted hot-tempered Mr. Tupper, who was a Whig, and it was Mr. Tupper whom Lilli had accused.

“Oh, Louy, you are supposed to be having a rest,” said Anna, who guessed the direction of my thoughts.

“And what of the gardening?” I asked, to distract her. “You've learned they also take that quite seriously.”

“Well, the townspeople have started to come by Father's garden in the afternoon to offer advice and make comments,” she said.

“All of which Father ignores,” I said.

“Of course,” said Anna. “Besides, it hardly seems he needs advice. His seedlings are growing quite nicely.”

“See for yourself.” Abba rose and went to the window. She pointed to the raggedy rows of determined little sprouts already reaching to the sun.

“Good soil,” said Abba with a smile.

“It must be miraculous soil,” I said. “I wonder what was planted there last year?”

“Probably nothing, since the cottage was vacant,” said Abba.

“But when I first began setting up our household, that side patch had been dug up,” I said.

“Louy, don't turn everything into a mystery,” said Abba, humming a little tune.

I stayed at the window for a long while, looking at that patch of ground between our house and Ida Tupper's. My imagination, the one that creates bodies in moonlit gardens and widows in Cuba and love-weary damsels who leap from bridges, my “blood and thunder” imagination added a strange new scent of sickly-sweet rot wafting in from the window overlooking the vegetable patch.

It called to mind something that Dr. Peterson Burroughs had said on our train journey north to Walpole; that it was first the smell that led him to the place wherein the murderer, Webster, had hidden the left thigh of George Parkman.

I took my coffee cup to the sink and folded up the paper. A notice on page four, which I hadn't finished reading, caught my eye. A Peter Dodge had been buried recently in Manchester,
mourned by few,
and
survived or not, as their whereabouts are unknown, by two brothers,
as the paper bluntly stated. I would have to remember to tell Eliza's housekeeper, Mrs. Fisher, that one of the villains of her childhood had been laid to rest.

 

 

ANNA SET UP a croquet set, borrowed from Ida Tupper, in our back lawn, explaining that the new game was a great favorite among her friends in Syracuse and we should learn it as well. Reader, as you know by now the Alcotts were not part of the new moneyed leisure class and had little time for games. But it was summer, and both the Alcott and May names (from Abba's side) were well respected in the East; Anna was determined we should “keep up.”

Eliza left the children at home with Frank, who was reframing a doorway, and joined us, and it was good to see that weary woman grow merry with sport and the light conversation that accompanies a carefree summer afternoon.

“Now, knock your ball through the wicket and push mine out of the way,” Anna instructed Lizzie.

“But that seems so rude!” Lizzie protested.

“Indeed, it does,” agreed Eliza, swinging her mallet to relax her wrists more, as previously instructed by Anna.

“I'll do it,” said May with gusto, racing forward to accomplish the required move.

“But it was my turn!” wailed Lizzie.

Anna pushed her straw hat lower over her forehead to keep the sun out of her eyes. She laughed and laid her mallet on the green grass. “You must play by the rules, darlings, or the game makes no sense at all.”

“Even then, it hardly makes sense,” said I.

Sylvia, watching from the sidelines, declared in a superior voice, “I have seen greater activity and athletic accomplishment at the meeting of a stamp-collecting club.”

“Then you come play,” Eliza said. “You can have my mallet.”

“No. Confucius did not approve of competitive play.”

“You made that up,” I accused somewhat testily, for I had planned to spend the afternoon visiting again with Lilli Nooteboom (and, hopefully, learning more about the situation between Ernst and Mr. Tupper) but had been gently coerced into this game instead.

Sylvia took from her pocket the little volume she carried at all times and leisurely thumbed through it. “Ah!” she exclaimed. ‘A wise man is proud but not vain; he is sociable, but belongs to no party.' Nor does he play at games with sticks and balls.”

“That says nothing at all about playing croquet,” pointed out Lizzie.

“Get out of the way, Lizzie; I'm going to knock your ball out-of-bounds.” May grinned wickedly.

“Here, here, not like that,” said a male voice from behind the hedge. There was a squeaking and straining sound, and the invalid, Mr. Wattles, appeared in his wheeled chair.

“Let me help you,” said Anna, rushing forward to greet him. She pushed his chair closer to our group.

“You, young lady, struck a dead ball.” Mr. Wattles's fine white beard shook in protest.

“I what?” Lizzie asked.

“Your sister's ball had made the point and is therefore dead to all direct shots. You did not have the right to roque her ball.”

Lizzie put down her mallet and tugged at her bonnet strings in confusion.

“You seem to know the game, Mr. Wattles,” I said. “Perhaps your guidance would serve us better than Anna's memory of the rules.”

“Do join us,” said Anna, “and I will bring you a cool drink.”

He must have been spying on us from behind the hedge. How long had he been watching us? Loneliness, I assumed, had driven him from his invalid's couch into the afternoon air. Despite the warmth of the day, he had a lap rug over his legs and was gloved. The pain and stiffness of rheumatism often drove people to such desperate measures.

“You must hold the mallet like this,” he said, taking my mallet and demonstrating the proper grip. “Tuck the thumbs under. They musn't stick up or you will have no strength to the shot.”

Out of his sickroom, in the fresh air, Mr. Wattles seemed a much cheerier companion. Even his complexion seemed much improved, with patches of pink in his face and on the tip of his nose, and his brown eyes shining. His face was barely lined, only one stern wrinkle between his brows and a solitary one marching across the white forehead.