The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (6 page)

FIVE

Recherché dramas

O
nce in my room, I took up my only book again, turned it over several times, and leafed aimlessly through its pages. I had read through perhaps half the volume before putting it aside as unworthy, not intending to take it up again. But it had occurred to me once more that if there were differences between the circumstances of Mr. Cleland's heroine and my own, there remained nevertheless a few disturbing similarities. And might not these disturbing residuals, I began to wonder, be precisely what I had been intended to discover? Was I, in brief, the object of another's cruel sport?

Had not Fanny first observed the drama of Venus—between “the Mother Abbess herself” and a brawny young Horse-grenadier—upon looking from that venerable Dulcinea's closet into her bed-chamber through a slightly parted damask curtain? Had she not witnessed through a long crevice in the partition between closets the dalliance of the young Genoese and the beautiful Polly? The Polly who was “a subject for the painters to court her sitting to them for a pattern of female beauty, in all true pride and pomp of nakedness.”

Was it not possible, indeed, for the rooms in the very house where I had been ensconced to have as many apertures through which the inmates might view one another as the whim took them?

I then commenced a careful survey of the walls and ceiling of my quarters. As I had nothing in particular to do, I spent a good deal of the afternoon in my search. Yet I found no evidence of any aperture, or of anything that appeared to be moveable enough to create one surreptitiously.

I sat by my window in a moment of respite, watching with envy as feathered citizens flew by my window, just as they pleased. What joy to be one of the winged people, I thought, what utter freedom of sunlight and air. Then my eyes focused across the way at a neighboring window where I saw a now familiar pasty-skinned woman, perhaps a recent immigrant, whose bondage sometimes seemed barely less painful than my own. As ever, she bent over her washtub. Behind her now a familiar little girl, perhaps her daughter, dragged a heavy basket of steaming clothes to the drying lines strung across the room. Somewhere behind them a child wailed.

I turned from the window to resume searching my room. When evening approached I flung myself upon my bed in frustration. Finally, I opened the book and propped it on my stomach. If there was one aperture such as I had discovered, I was certain there were others.

There came a knock on my door. I leapt up, opened the curtain, tossed the book under the bedclothes, and adjusted my dress. It was Reggie, my chamberlain, with my simple evening meal. He placed the tray on my bed without so much as a word or look, as was his habitual manner with me, and left the room, gently closing the door behind him. On this occasion, however, after overhearing the Ethiopian in unguarded conversation, I now saw him as a more active enemy than I had previously.

But Mr. Dudley had made it clear that, ultimately, I was utterly within his own power.

“I could have bound you,” he said on one of his visits, pointing casually to my bed. “But I have not. I might have put you under again, very easily I assure you, but I have not.” He looked at me, his eyebrows arched with significance.

I said nothing, but I did not glance away.

“Do you suppose that in either case there would have been a single inch of your person that might not have been mine? That I could not have savored in any manner and at any leisure?” He spoke gravely, his face frowning now. “I could have made things very simple, direct. You see? But I have not.”

“Then why do you not release me?”

“Because I do not wish to, no more than to violate you by force. I wish you to see that I am not a monster. That I am a man, who has tried to understand you, and who would be understood—as a man and a woman should understand one another, and arrive at a more reasonable accommodation.”

“Come, let us reason together?”

“Yet you insist in vilifying me, even though I have stayed my hand. Despite my quiet approaches, you rebuff me. What good is a woman's body to a man, even if he loves, if she does not surrender her will, as she would have him surrender his unto her?”

“You see no force? Are you a mechanism blinded by self-interest?”

“I should have thought by now you would have seen that I am quite something other than that.”

“You hold me, against my will. What else can you expect me to see?”

“That I am patient, that my feelings toward you are tender, that I am a man, and you are a woman, of natural desires and passions. That we could discover in one another some more tender core as a basis for relations. That I am prepared to wait until you come to me, willingly, and in the fullness of your own desire.”

He turned before I could speak again and left the room, as if to allow me to contemplate the weight of his words and a truer vision of my precise circumstances. Would I, indeed, have to capitulate to my captor some day? Was that to be the only hope of freedom, or some sham-freedom?

F
OR SOME DAYS
I continued reading, examining the walls and ceiling of my cell, and reconsidering the true nature of my confinement. My window was sealed; my door locked from without; my every move scrutinized during those brief excursions to the bath. No means of escape from oppression suggested itself to me. Would it be possible to feign compliance with Mr. Dudley's wishes?

As I thought again and again about our weekly conversations in this room, certain things gradually became clearer to me. First, that Mr. Dudley supposed he could eventually wear down my resistance to his will through the rigors of lengthy confinement. (The more so now that, as he told me one evening—as if to entice me—he had come into his full patrimony since the recent death of his father from a hemorrhage; he could, I now understood, endure any expense to feed this bizarre, deceitful monomania regarding me.) Second, that he wished to cultivate a mutual sympathy between us through this game of reasoned conversation and the absence of any direct violence against me. (If, no doubt, he had had his way with any number of women by the power of his purse and position, it was now clear to me that he did not in the least understand women.) Third, that he found it acceptable for the intimacy he desired between us to grow by degrees (perhaps he derived pleasure from the contest in my case, where he would not have with another). Fourth, that, indeed, since my captivity had now consumed another two months, the search my dear friends must have initially mounted had by now dwindled into hopelessness.

As a result of these considerations, which as I say he gave hints of in conversation, Mr. Dudley seemed prepared, were I to evince a certain degree of compliance, to take me with him on brief evening excursions of entertainment beyond the walls of this house. I did not doubt that such excursions would be cautiously circumscribed. But I began to see that my only hope for an opening into freedom resided in my acting as if I were coming around to his fanciful notions of our relations.

Therefore, to outwit my persecutor at his own game I embarked on a new tactic of guarded compliance. Slowly, by mere hints and a most circumspect progress, I began during our weekly colloquia to insinuate myself into Mr. Dudley's scheme.

One evening, therefore, I allowed him to kiss me. His lips and tongue were shockingly sweet (as if from wine), his hands curiously gentle, and his entire being without the harsh insistence of that night in his mother's moonlit garden. Was it because of my long isolation from others that I found it difficult to curtail a flush of unexpected feelings, as if a dangerous spring suddenly had begun to flow again, portending the approaching flood? By Mrs. Moore's contrivance, I wore only my chemise and dressing gown during his visits, and the tips of his ungloved fingers drank warmly at every impudent touch.

He breathed in the scent of my hair and neck. “Please, not yet. Please,” I said, backing away, suddenly fearing that I might be destined to undo myself by my own calculations.

He withdrew. “Such things take time with a woman like you,” he said, smiling pleasantly.

But that evening for the first time he escorted me up a narrow flight of stairs onto the roof of the house. The waning daylight seemed to rush at me as every point of my skin and every organ of sense drank hungrily of the fresh, living world all about me. He waved his arm, like a regent surveying his domain, at the commanding view of the city and lovely villages that skirt the back bay from Roxbury around to Charlestown. “All this can be yours once again,” he said. But like a woman who had been dying of thirst and now drank frantically, I could not speak; I could barely breathe.

A
ND SO IT WAS
, through the most delicate of stratagems, that I found myself in the early autumn of 1839 once again on the streets of Boston, breathing the air—nay, the very sunshine and moon-light!—of liberation. To be sure, we walked or rode mostly in neighborhoods unfamiliar to me. Our first outing was a cautious ride at evening into certain of the wharf districts where we stopped to view from our carriage a whaling ship lying at anchor, on the eve of her sailing no doubt. I imagine the owner or captain had encouraged his whalemen to board and remain until sailing by dispensing plenty of Old Jemecka among them, as they now danced about like demons—or perhaps more like puppets at some demon's hand—heads and feet appearing above the gunwales in mad, irregular succession. A drunken Indian seated upon the heel of the bowsprint blew a pipe maniacally while thundering his heel upon the deck and grunting in time to his wild minstrelsy. All this time, as they kicked their fore-an'-afts, there hung above them from a yard-arm an effigy of someone whom they apparently honored as holding the luck to return them safely to their “Mollies.”

As an added precaution during these excursions, Mr. Dudley never allowed me to appear in anything but a costume he had prepared from, as I understood him, the trunk of an actress friend. This costume consisted of a bold yellow wig, a rather severe facial application of theatrical paints and powders, and one gown or another of the sort I would never have chosen for myself.

If these expeditions often led to rather coarse performances and Cyrenaic diversions, if they exposed Mr. Dudley for the roué and libertine that he was beneath his exterior, I nevertheless found these adventures different from my previous routine of dreary days, lonely meals, and shameful baths.

Reader, do not doubt that during every moment of these pilgrimages, whether at some minstrel performance or concert-room, I looked about me for even the most narrow means of escape. On several occasions I thought I had found my opportunity, but those moments proved fruitless. I will relate here, as representative of those hours spent in Mr. Dudley's company, but a few such recreations.

One of our early outings was by private conveyance to the theater to enjoy Mr. Finn, the stout Englishman who had settled in Boston and whose comic renditions of Tam O'Shanter, Monsieur Jacques, and Rory O'More, among others, were by now the very thing. We were immediately ushered, by a separate entrance, into the infamous third tier of boxes, just below the row reserved for colored persons, where by expressions of greeting and familiarity I saw that my guide was something of an habitué. Here women of the most questionable character circulated brazenly, either on the arm of their “beaux” for the evening—comprised of men from all classes of society—or independently.

There was a bar where unattached women drank and sidled round in a lascivious manner for solicitation. I noticed there, also, a handsome boy, to appearances genteel and wearing a spencer and cap, in the company of a very young girl, who had an air of being his familiar mistress, go out together—for what purpose one can imagine.

At the interim between performances I also saw well-dressed men leave their families in the box below, come up to the third row, make a sign to some woman, and rush out with her in all likelihood to take a hack—as Mr. Dudley intimated when I questioned him about this behavior—for some minutes of diversion. What had such a respectable profligate told his wife and daughters? That he had been out for refreshment or to relieve the restraint of posture? One can only guess. Some others, whose unsuspecting wives, sisters, and friends were sitting below, slipped up through the snug passage provided for them to our third row for whatever recreations such a visit might afford.

And I noticed one further amenity on our way out that evening—an apparently private apartment with a sign over the door reading “No Gentlemen Admitted Here Without A Lady.”

I saw that the theater owners would provide any facilities that might increase their receipts and by accommodating all sorts of people.

We visited, likewise, a variety of subterranean establishments together. I must have seen the worst of this city, excepting perhaps the rat pits because from these alone, or so Mr. Dudley assured me, women were excluded. In one of those lower rooms, I asked him where the trapdoor at the far end led.

“Down a flight of stairs, to the rat pit,” he explained. “A foul nest! Merely a board crib surrounded by plank seats rising one above the other for the spectators who place their bets.”

“Bets?”

“On the dog or the rats. Usually the rats, kept in an empty flour barrel, lose. So the bets are on the time it takes. The proprietor lifts the wire netting over the barrel and with a sort of curling tong fishes out twenty or so for the pit. Then his assistant brings forth a ratter, usually famous for such frays, which the assistant must hold tightly for the dog struggles and yelps to have at its enemies. The hero is dropped into the ring and the growling and champing and squealing begin, and the crowd goes into its own frenzy, until the rats lie all about lifeless, time is called, and any good bets paid out. This drama is repeated several times with as many dogs, the men coming up for liquor between acts. So long as the barrel of rats holds out.”