Louisa and the Country Bachelor : A Louisa May Alcott Mystery (9781101547564) (18 page)

“Why, Mrs. Tupper! What a surprise!” I said.

“Louisa! I am going to have my future read. What do you think of that?” she gushed like a schoolgirl. Her hair was more flamboyantly padded than ever, her gown was a determinedly youthful pink, and she smelled strongly of Hungary water. How does vanity affect a mother? I tried to imagine my childhood with Abba occupied most of the morning arranging her hair and spending the household pin money on fortune-tellers. Such a challenging scene defeated my ability to imagine it.

“Mrs. Tupper, I want to thank you for the picnic you arranged.” I sat on the stool next to her.

“Why, Louisa, it was my pleasure. It is good for Clarence to be with other young people. He has become quite unsociable this year. Such a moody young person. What do you think the fortune-teller will see for me?”

“Lemonade,” said Clarence Hampton, arriving with a glass in one hand and his umbrella in the other. As usual, he was dressed in polished boots (in a cow pasture!) with lace frothing at his throat and wrists, though most young men those days wore simple collars and cuffs.
Does vanity ever lead to violence?
I wondered. Narcissism. Ralph Emerson had been particularly fond of the classical tale of Narcissus and had told it over and over, about the boy who could only stare at his own reflection. That fable had ended badly, I recalled.

“Are you here to have your fortune told?” Clarence asked. His right eyebrow lifted, and there was a suggestion of a smile on his mouth, as if he thought the idea humorous.

“Are you?” I asked.

“A man's destiny is what he makes of it,” he said.

“Really, Clarence!” said Ida Tupper. “You seem to think that there is no mystery, no romance to life.”

Clarence's gaze grew hard. “Mystery? Romance? I thought you more practical than that, Mother.” He turned away and stalked off through the crowd.

“Children,” said Mrs. Tupper, sniffing. “I wonder sometimes if they are worth the pain of bringing them into the world. Oh, excuse me, Louisa. I shouldn't speak of such things to you, you being unwed and such.”

“It is quite all right, Mrs. Tupper. I know a little about childbirth.” Last winter I had assisted in a home for unwed mothers. But this seemed a promising venue for our conversation, so I pursued it. “You must have been quite young when Clarence was born.”

“A mere slip of a girl,” Ida agreed. “My husband, Mr. Hampton, was an older gentleman. We were very happy together. He adored me, the sweet man. He passed over when Clarence was fourteen.” She wiped away a tear. “His death was such a shock. So unexpected.” Ida blew gently into a handkerchief. “I warned Billy to let the handyman take care of the roof, but he would attempt it himself. He fell, and left me with a boy to raise on my own.” She blew her nose heartily into her flimsy lace handkerchief.

“My deepest regrets,” I said. “I hope you had your family there to comfort you.”

“No, Mr. Hampton and I had a house—oh, ever such a nice house it was, in Weymouth. Before that I lived in Manchester with my family, the Wattles. I come from good people. But they have all passed away, and so I was quite alone when I mourned my dear Billy. Alone, and in a town that was so unfriendly. You know how these small towns can be, Louisa. So Clarence and I moved to Worcester.

“Oh, how happy I was there!” She sighed, her tears for Mr. Hampton forgotten. “I met Mr. Sykes there—he was a lawyer, widowed—and he said, ‘Ida, if you don't marry me I'll just jump off the bridge!' So I did, of course. So strange,” she mused, growing thoughtful.

“Why was it strange?” I asked.

“Because he did drown, after all. He would go swimming too soon after lunch. He was a sporter, you see, and swam every day. He always said a brisk swim would keep him healthy forever. He took Clarence swimming with him.”

“I was not there that day!” Clarence had returned from his perambulation about the pasture. Apparently whomever he sought was not at the fair, and he had crept up behind us with a second glass of lemonade in his hand. This he handed to me.

“Of course you were there, dear. Don't you remember?” insisted his mother. “I had gone into town with Brother, to see a specialist, and left you and Mr. Sykes together for the day.”

“I was fossil hunting that day,” muttered Clarence, whose lace cravat was suddenly too tight, for now he tugged at it in discomfort.

“Then we moved to Walpole and I met Jonah Tupper. Oh, how he courted me!” Ida fanned herself briskly. “Mr. Tupper did not care much for Clarence, I have to admit. Those two never hit it off.”

“It does seem unfair,” I commented. “To have been left a widow so young and so often, and now you are alone again.”

“A man must earn his living,” Ida said. “Oh, it is sad to think of the past. We must cheer up. Too bad it is so difficult to make a name for oneself in the theater. I understand you are to write a play, Louisa? Ah, you young people, so much promise, so much fun. I once acted, you know.” Ida grew gay once again, her sorrows forgotten. She had a mind like a mayfly. “My day school when I was a girl had a teacher who was fond of theatricals, especially Shakespeare. ‘So good for the memory, girls, so good for the memory,' she would tell us. My last year in school we played
King Lear
. Can you believe it, Louisa, dear? I was Lear! I had such a fine long white beard and really the best lines in the play. I still remember some of them.”

Ida rose from her chair and struck a posture with one lace-mittened hand pointing up and the other at her nipped-in waist. She frowned, and even so I could not imagine a less Lear-like figure than the one before me.

“ ‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath!' ” she growled, knitting her brows and stabbing her hand higher into the air. “ ‘I lov'd her most, and thought to set my rest on her kind nursery. Hence, and avoid my sight! So be my grave my peace, as here I give her father's heart from her!' ”

“Brava!” I exclaimed with feigned admiration.

Ida curtsied and blew kisses to me, arching them over the imaginary limelights of a stage.

At that moment the tent flap opened and a dreamy-eyed girl dressed in white came out. The fortune-teller must have given her good news, for she seemed to barely touch the ground as she walked away.

“Next,” said the Gypsy with a tone of impatience in her voice. Her silver bracelets gleamed and clanked as she gestured at her opened tent flap.

“That's me,” said Ida, clasping her hands under her chin.

“No. You,” said the Gypsy, pointing at me. She squinted. “You, I think, are next. Those eyes. You live in two different worlds.”

“You are mistaken,” I said. “Mrs. Tupper was next.” I pushed Ida toward the tent. As interesting as it would have been to spend time with a Gypsy fortune-teller, I could not spare a dime on such amusement. Besides, I had already acquired a considerable quantity of information.

CHAPTER TWELVE

IN THE MORNING before my run in the ravine, I sat down at the little desk in the room I shared with Anna and Sylvia and wrote a letter to the coroner's office in Worcester.

“What is that for, Louy?” asked Sylvia, still yawning but woken by the scratching of my pen. Anna slept on.

“To discover, if I can, whether or not Clarence was with his stepfather on the day he drowned. There is some confusion over it, and the detail seems rather important to me,” I told her. “Will you take it to the post for me later?”

“Ummm.” She turned over and went back to sleep, pulling the quilt over her head to keep out the bright dawn.

For good measure, I wrote a second letter to the Unitarian church in Manchester, Vermont, asking for details of the Tupper family and Ida's first marrriage. Such curiosity borders on low gossip, so I did penance for that sin by spending an hour with Father, weeding in the vegetable patch, after my run in the ravine. It was an unpleasant, muddy task, and the soil had a rotten smell that grew almost unbearable when it began to rain again and Father retreated to his study, still wearing his yard boots.

Absolved from further manual labor because of the rain, I decided to work on the play I had agreed to write for the theatrical group. First, though, I thought to quell the rattling in my stomach, for I hadn't eaten since the day before. A mystery often undoes my appetite, which renews once I have found an action that will forward my speculations. The letters gave me a sense of momentum, and that sent me to our little kitchen in search of a bowl of soup and mug of coffee.

The kitchen was damp and cold. The soup was chilly. “Abba?” I asked. She sat in a corner by a window, knitting a stocking. Rain pelted against the pane, making a crackling sound as if to compensate for a missing fire in the stove.

“It is a potato soup,” Abba said. “Very good cold. I hear they eat it chilled in Paris. Try it, Louy.” There was a dogged cheerfulness in her voice.

“What has Father done this time?”

Abba put down her knitting and smiled a little crookedly. “He gave away our firewood, dear. To a man who was in much greater need than we.”

“I heard your voice, Louy. Are you done working for the day?” Sylvia came into the kitchen, wrapped tightly in a shawl.

“Have you had the
Potage de Pommes de Terre
?” I asked, laughing. “It is a French dish, served often on warm summer days.”

“This is hardly a warm summer day,” Sylvia complained. “What is it?” She stared into the bowl I had ladled for her. “Cold potato soup?”

Mother and I were laughing. Life with a philosopher had its ups and downs. Father had given away all the wood, but at least we still had our rain capes. One previous spring those had disappeared as well, and I had had the uncomfortable feeling, during a stroll on the Boston Common, of seeing a young woman walk by in what I recognized as my own cape. Attached to the hands and knees of that young woman was a swarm of hungry-looking children. Father had been right: She needed a little warmth in a cold world.

“I will send to Uncle Benjamin for more wood,” I said, kissing Abba's cheek. “There is more than enough in the shed to get us through this rainy spell.”

“You might ask him for a pail of potatoes as well,” Abba said. “It will be some time before the new potatoes can be dug.”

“Now that is a strange thing, how well Father's vegetable patch is growing,” I remarked. Sylvia sat next to me and dutifully swallowed cold soup. “Remember Fruitlands?”

“How could I forget it?” said Abba. Our months at the commune called Fruitlands had been a very hard time, and she, on her frail back, had carried all the practical exigencies of a community of philosophers and children. We had almost starved, since Father had refused to fertilize the fields and the harvest was a failure.

“I remember all too well,” Abba continued in a tone as close to a complaint as that patient woman ever came. “It will not happen again. Seeing the ribs on my children stick out like that. Not again. Think no more on it.”

“Think no more on what?” Llew came into the kitchen from the back stairway.

“Hard times,” I said.

“Strange! I was just reading that volume when I fell asleep!” said Llew.

“You fell asleep over a Dickens novel?” I asked, stunned. “That is one of his best! It is excellent.”

“Louy, you know I have little time for novels,” said Llew, “so do not berate my lack of knowledge of current romance. Say, it's freezing in here! The fire gone out? They say there will be a death by misadventure when the kitchen fire goes out.”

I shivered. “No misadventure,” I corrected. “Only that Father gave away our firewood.”

Llew laughed and rubbed his hands together. “I thought voices disturbed my study. Perhaps it was just the cold and damp.”

“You heard voices?” I asked. “It must have been us, speaking here in the kitchen.”

“No, they were men's voices, outside the window of your father's study. I admit to using
Hard Times
as a pillow when I rested my eyes. A very hard pillow, though of substantial thickness.” Llew grinned sheepishly. “Then I heard a man's voice say something about Miss Nooteboom, and then, ‘Louisa Alcott will know.'”

“You were asleep,” Sylvia said.

“I was not,” Llew insisted. “As a medical student I know the difference between asleep and awake. Moreover, I know the difference between the typical male and female voice and have learned to deduce intent. This was a man's voice, very angry. A young man's, I would say. And there was a second voice, another man's, deep as Mr. Alcott's. He said, ‘It does not matter.' They seemed to be quarreling rather vigorously.”

“Could you discern the subject of the quarrel?” I asked.

“Mr. Tupper's name was mentioned, but I could not tell if they referred to father or son.” Llew rose from the table and paced, rubbing his hands together to warm them.

“Were you in the chair by the window, and was that window open?” I asked.

“Yes and yes,” said Llew, sitting at the table and tasting the cold soup. He frowned. “I will fetch over more wood before supper,” he told Abba, and he gave me a wink. He put down his spoon after the first mouthful and patted his stomach to indicate he desired no more.

“Could one of the voices have been Clarence Hampton's?” I asked. Llew nodded thoughtfully. Walpolians do not take “shortcuts” through other people's gardens. But if Clarence and the second man had been standing by the hedge that separated our house from Ida's, their conversation could have been heard in Father's study. Who was the second man? And what did they mean by “Louisa Alcott will know”? Somehow even more ominous was the other statement, that it did not matter.