Regency Christmas Gifts (12 page)

Hardly anyone in Dumfries received letters, and
these were letters from Canada first and the United States now. For
a few years she asked herself why Margaret didn’t at least read
them.

After a decade of writing to John McPherson,
pretending to be someone else, Sally had grown in introspection as
well as maturity. The Margaret Patterson who had petitioned the
more reserved and malleable Sally Wilson to write those letters had
become a vain creature, a spoiled one, and a social
climber.

Perhaps Margaret had always suffered from those
defects, but Sally preferred to give her sometime-friend the
benefit of the doubt. She was a generous soul and it
was
Christmas, when one was supposed to overlook pettiness and
concentrate on giving, instead of making note of general
nastiness.

When she had done everything except put on her
cloak and bonnet, Sally sat down, slit the envelope and pulled out
a letter that had been sent three months earlier, according to the
barely visible postmark. After it had been read several times and
answered, this letter would join the others in a pasteboard box
labeled Doctor Meacham’s Restorative Tonic, and shoved under her
bed. She had never thrown out any of John’s letters, preferring to
read them over and over, and contemplate the writer who had changed
mightily in ten years.

In fact, the earliest letters, desperate
affairs telling of cold and hunger and ill use as he ventured into
Canada’s interior to trap beaver, were written on such cheap paper
that they needed to be copied onto better paper. The few days’
break at Christmas would be a good opportunity to do that. She had
worn them out with reading.

She stared at the folded letter, remembering
two awful years during those ten when she had heard nothing and
finally given him up for dead. Even now, she couldn’t help the
tears that welled in her eyes, remembering her prayers then her
anger that such a nice man should die alone in a strange country.
Finally she had resigned herself to the will of God, since the
matter was in omnipotent hands anyway—at least that’s what Papa
said. And besides that, she was writing for Margaret Patterson and
not Sally Wilson, who could only anguish in private and pray for
John McPherson’s safety.

She slid the letter back into the envelope,
deciding to read it at home after supper. Since there were usually
only three letters a year, she had schooled herself to savor them,
because the next one would be a long time coming. Lately she had
been writing once a month, telling him Dumfries news, which meant
stretching out even the most trivial detail, since Dumfries was a
quiet town. She could only assume that when he did get mail, it
accumulated in a pile for him to read.

She locked the school door behind her and
walked slowly home, pausing as usual at the bridge over River Nith
that separated the east side of Dumfries from the west. Accompanied
by its usual cloud of seagulls, the fishing fleet was tying up and
preparing to sling the day’s catch to the wharf, where the poor
women who scaled, gutted, and filleted the fish were even now
readying their knives.

Several of her students’ mothers saw her on the
bridge and waved. Sally waved back, happy to teach their children
and perhaps, if they were lucky and sharp, school them for
something better than gutting fish.

She walked slowly through Dumfries, nodding to
her friends, stopping to chat with other parents, and smiling at
the students. Released from school only an hour ago, they were
working behind counters and helping their families.

Her days were predictable and unerring. She
thought of John McPherson, breaking free from the deadly cycle of
other McPhersons, who fished a little, ran a few cattle—hopefully
their own—smuggled French brandy, and scratched a meager meal or
two from exhausted soil, as their fathers before them had done. In
spite of family skepticism and a certain amount of disdain from
others, John had set out to seek his fortune at eighteen years old,
far away from his useless kinfolk.

At least he was a man and at liberty to break
away.
Here I remain
, Sally thought, and not for the first
time.
Too bad that ladies cannot seek their fortune, too
.
She saw no change in her future, not at twenty-four, with only a
modest dowry. The story might have been different, were she
beautiful enough to allow a man to overlook the deficiency of a
skimpy marriage portion.

She was hardworking and ordinary, with no
glaring defects, but no soaring beauty beyond kind eyes. On the
bright side, she would never lack for employment, and the house
would be hers when her father died.
Is that all?
she asked
herself there on the bridge.
Tell me that isn’t
all.

She put off the letter, deciding to save it for
herself alone. She could tell her father over breakfast what John
had said. She knew from long experience Papa would advise her to
end this deception and send the man a letter explaining just who
has written the letters he thought came from Margaret. Ministers
were like that.

Better to let her father talk through supper,
even though he was retired from the ministry and seldom ventured
much before their doorstep now. She knew he had little to tell her,
beyond what he had read in Bartell’s
Confessions of a Penitent
Sinner
, or some other tract or treatise. She would listen
through supper, drink a small cup of negus with him in the sitting
room later, then make her way to bed, another day done, one much
like the day before, except for John’s occasional
letters.

So it was that she made herself comfortable in
bed, cap on her head, warming pan at her feet, and opened the
letter.

She couldn’t help observing that the stationery
was even more expensive this time, too heavy to see through as she
held it to the lantern light, and possessing a watermark. On a
whim, she reached under her bed, pulled out the Restorative Tonic
box and reached for the earliest, most fragile letter, written on
scraps, but still signed
Faithfully Yours
.

“
You have come so far, my dear,” she
whispered, even though Papa snored in the bedchamber across the
hall and couldn’t have heard a black bear trundle through—black
bears that John had described in some detail during those first few
years in Canada.

She carefully replaced the old letter and
hunkered down in bed to read the new one, pretending, as usual,
that John McPherson was her fiancé. She knew it was a harmless
diversion, but one that she would never divulge to another
soul.

She read slowly and with growing delight,
relishing the words. John described his promotion to assistant
purveyor of furs to John Jacob Astor—a German immigrant, Sally had
learned in a previous letter, who had come to American shores with
ten dollars and a suitcase of clarinets to sell. This had strangely
led to trade in furs, and then real estate, hence the Fifth Avenue
address. Apparently there was no end to what even a musician could
achieve.

Margaret, I have a place of my own here in New
York City, Sally read. It’s been ten long years. I can finally say
that the wisest thing I ever did was to leave Dumfries and seek my
fortune.

She settled lower in her bed, reading of his
only occasional trips now into America’s interior on flatboat and
by canoe. Generally, he signed off on great packs of beaver and
buffalo robes floated down the Missouri to St. Louis, where they
were sorted, then taken overland to New York City. The final
destination was the Paris and Frankfort markets, now that the long
war had ended and commerce could return safely.
We are even
negotiating to sell buffalo robes to Czar Alexander, to make
overcoats for his troops
, John wrote.

As always, Sally read between the lines,
savoring the confidence that nearly leaped out of the page at
her—well, at Margaret. She put down the letter, thinking of her
last sight of John McPherson, ragged duffel slung over his
shoulder, as he left Dumfries sitting on the back of a hay wain
heading toward Carlisle. She had waved to him, and he had smiled
back. No one else had seen him off. Even then, through his dirty
clothes and hair in need of cutting, she had seen confidence
burning in his eyes.

“
Good for you, John,” she told the
words before her.

She picked up the last page of his lengthy
letter, gulped, and read it again. “Oh, no,” she said. “Oh,
no.”

Luckily the next day was Saturday and no
school. Sally doubted that Margaret ever woke up early, but she
didn’t care. Letter tight in hand, she marched up the tree-lined
lane, bare of leaves now in winter, and right to the front
door.

As she waited for the footman to answer her
knock, Sally tried to recall the last time she had visited the
Patterson home and found she could not.
We were never
friends
, she thought in dismay.
I let you use
me
.

The footman opened the door, fixing her with a
frosty stare. One would think he didn’t often see young persons at
his doorstep so early, especially someone with hair twisted into a
careless knot and left there to languish.

“
The servants’ entrance is around
back,” he said, and tried to shut the door.

Fearing just this brush-off, Sally had worn her
sturdy shoes, one of which she stuck in the door as it started to
close. “I am Sally Wilson, a good friend of Miss Patterson,” she
said, which meant the door widened a little. “My father was the
min—”

“
Miss Wilson, I recommend that you
come around at a more appropriate ti—”

Another hand flung the door open wide, grabbed
Sally, and yanked her inside. “That will do, Reston,” Margaret
Patterson snapped. “Go away!”

Sally was at least relieved to see that
Margaret looked no better than she did. In fact, she looked worse,
with dark smudges under her eyes, and a pinched look to her mouth.
She couldn’t help thinking that the dignified Mr. Mallory, who was
going to marry Margaret in a few days, was in for a real surprise
the morning after the wedding.

With unexpected strength, Margaret towed Sally
up the stairs and dragged her into her bedchamber. Giving Sally no
time to catch her breath, she thrust a single sheet of paper under
Sally’s nose. “I am ruined!” she declared.

Sally held the sheet away from her face so she
could read it. “ ‘My dear Margaret,’ ” she read out loud.
“ ‘I’m in Bristol right now and have only to arrange a post
chaise to Dumfries. I am eager to see you and talk to your father.
Yours faithfully ….’ ”

Margaret snatched the sheet back and tore it
into tiny bits of confetti. “Don’t read it out loud! What are we to
do?”

Sally thought about putting John’s much-larger
letter under Margaret’s nose, but changed her mind. Beyond the
obvious truth that all this was Margaret’s doing, she had a
question of her own.

“
Margaret, you haven’t read a single
letter ever,” she said. “Why this little note now?”

Margaret was busy in tossing the note out the
window, all hundred pieces of it now, maybe thinking that the wind
would blow it away and end the dilemma. Sally could have told her
that troubles don’t vanish like that, but she reckoned it was a
little late to inject life lessons into Margaret’s woefully slender
frame of reference.

“
Seriously, Margaret, why
now?”

Margaret plumped herself down on her unmade
bed. She glared at Sally, then pulled back the coverlets and
crawled underneath. The blanket went over her head.

Felling ruthless, Sally yanked off the blanket
and posed her question again.

“
You’ll think I am an idiot,” came a
small voice somewhere between the sheet and a wool
blanket.

I already do
, Sally thought. “I’m just
curious. I tried to get you to read John’s letters and you refused.
Why now?”

Silence, then, “Those other letters you pushed
at me were so
big
. So many pages! So many words! I was busy,
Sally. This was just a little sheet.” She pulled the coverlet over
her head again. “It came by express last night.”

Then, “I was so hoping that cannibals would eat
him and no one would know that I had talked the gawky nobody into
writing me. What was I thinking?”

Back went the coverlet again. Sally sat down on
the bed beside her friend. “Margaret, he was in Canada, and then
later in New York City. Cannibals eat people in the South
Pacific!”

“
How am I to know that?” came a
sulky voice.

Paying attention in school wouldn’t have
hurt
, Sally thought. And now John McPherson was coming to see a
young lady who hadn’t ever written to him. If she hadn’t been so
disgusted with Margaret and herself, she would have found it
funny.

“
You have to make a clean breast of
it and tell him what you did,” Sally said.

“
I can’t!”

“
You had better,” Sally told her,
pulling back the coverlet again. “Suppose your fiancé gets wind of
this?”
Just send John to me
, Sally thought suddenly, and the
heart went out of her.

“
My fiancé! I had forgotten all
about him!” The sheet came away and Sally stared into Margaret’s
stricken eyes. Her friend grabbed her hand. “Sally, I will tell
John McPherson that you had wanted to write to him all along and
were too shy. I was being kind to a friend.”