The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (8 page)

Tirzah, the younger and shorter of the two, was the prettier, her face more full, her eyes brighter. Harriet, they said, had during her apprenticeship undergone a terrible illness, and there was some shadow of that long struggle lingering in her thin face.

“And did your poor mother relent?” I asked.

“For the most part, yes,” Harriet said. “And why should she not, once having thought over our propositions? When we visit now she seems proud of us, and the only concern she expresses is that we might suffer periods of loneliness without husband and children to occupy us. I confess I once had similar thoughts myself.”

“But we suffer no such episodes,” Tirzah assured me, smiling. “All our days are full, and many delicious. As Miss Taylor at the Academy used to say to us girls, ‘A rich and curious mind is the path to freedom of body and soul.'”

“After we lay our day's work aside,” Harriet added, “we often find time for lectures, papers, meetings, and causes of every kind.”

“It's a strange and lovely world,” Tirzah said. “And so much there is to be learned.”

They both wore their hair as plain as their dresses. But I believe I succeeded in portraying Tirzah's simple beauty. I also endeavored to capture the more ready, if less serene, smile in Harriet's thin face, with its almost too-firm chin. And Harriet's somehow more mischievous eyes, I did my best to express.

As I painted these two sisters, I found myself speculating that had Tom not suffered so much in his recent failure to win over Miss Parrie, he might have shone his light upon Tirzah. But had he done so, he would most likely have had as little effect in that quarter. Even as spouses are so rarely fit together upon a single canvas, it seemed to me the more suitable, though no one said so, that these two should be portrayed like verso and recto sides of their accounts book, the very book which each sister in this double portrait holds by one hand. The sisters paid me promptly and fully, quite satisfied by their likenesses.

B
Y LATE OCTOBER
that year our business with the mill hands and shopkeepers began to hang off, so Tom and I started to think of employments for the coming winter. Before we were able to decide to our best advantage, however, we were forced to decamp.

Perhaps it was the penetrating glance from some pedestrian in the street, or perhaps some stranger's shadow in a doorway, or perhaps an eye cast in my direction from a passing carriage or cart, or perhaps all of these, but for some time I had a sort of oppressive intuition that I was being watched. Only Mr. Joseph Dudley's arrival at my studio one afternoon, even while I was engaged with a patron, revealed the true basis of my apprehensions.

I told him that I was busily employed with a portrait. Mr. Dudley responded that he would be pleased to wait upon me and would return in one hour. When he returned, he laid out for me, while the darkening November afternoon began to enshroud my studio, the results of what must have been assiduous machinations. He had somehow discovered the origins of my and Tom's arrival in Worcester County. His mission now, it appeared, was to threaten me into submission.

“Your Uncle Simeon,” he told me in a calm voice, “was much displeased with your … absconding, which he maintains he had every right to consider a betrayal of his long and devoted provision for you as a family member over the years.”

I was so taken aback that I could not speak.

Mr. Dudley began to pace about the room, handling his watch fob officiously, while he continued and I sat on the chair so recently occupied by my patron.

“Your uncle further charges that you stole a wagon and a mare from his farm and shamelessly enchanted his nephew (whom he much needed in the growing and harvesting seasons) by the promise of ‘God only knows what Babylonian wantonness and adventure.'”

I found my tongue and stood up. “Mr Dudley! How dare you come here and voice such lies to me!”

“Gladly will I leave, Madam, but hear one thing more, in consideration of your own security, for I may yet prove your friend, even as in this instance I am but your enlightening messenger. I report only the words of others.” He reached for his hat and overcoat. “The constabulary are already involved; your uncle alerted the sheriff, and his men pursued your path to the very border. Further, your uncle has hired two stalwarts from Massachusetts to search you out wherever you may be, in order to return you and your brother to justice.

“No, hear me out but a moment longer.” He held up a thin, white-gloved hand before his face, his hat and coat adjusted in his other arm. “These two have come to my attention in their searchings for you, but I have told them only that father and mother sat for portraits last July; that completing your commissions, you and your brother Tom left together. And this last: I come to offer you not only my continued discretion as to your whereabouts … and any subsequent movements, but to offer protection, and even solicitude.”

“I need no protection or solicitude from you, Mr. Dudley… .”

He cut me off: “Don't answer, please, at this moment, Madam; such sudden news, I realize, needs to be contemplated. I extend my hand to help you,” he continued immediately, “and have no intentions of interfering with your brother in any way. He must decide his fate for himself. But it is for you I fear the worst.”

He held up his hand once more to silence me. “Therefore, I will return for your answer on the 'morrow at four o'clock, so as not to interrupt your work while the light lasts. Either you wish to accept my offer of friendship and protection, or you do not. Yet at the least you see that I have warned you of dangers you did not suspect or know … when I might have remained silent.” He made a little bow. “Good day to you, Mrs. Fullerton.”

Before I could utter another word, he turned on his heel and walked swiftly out. My uncle's long-festering vengeance soon unsettled my thoughts even more than Mr. Dudley's insolence. Over time, it was now all too clear, Uncle Simeon had enlarged our offenses against him. Our success in eluding him only fanned his passion. And although I was not the worldly creature Mr. Dudley insinuated in his little speech, I was not so innocent as to remain blind to the bargain he wished to strike with me.

T
OM APPEARED CRESTFALLEN
when I broke the news. Yet as always he soon rallied, for we had concluded already that spending the winter here would lead to impoverishment. He asked me what plans I was considering. I said that only one removal had taken tangible shape in my mind—surreptitious flight to Boston, to the anonymity of the city and the salutary milieu of artists, galleries, and patrons in the middling station.

He thought a moment and agreed: “But we shall need a day or so to pack and close down our affairs properly here.”

We then concocted the following ruse: I was to meet Mr. Dudley at his appointed hour and hold him at bay by pretending to have come to an understanding of my vulnerability and so thought better of his offer. I would require only two days further to help Tom get away and arrange my affairs.

I must have played my role competently, for my proposal pleased him. He had already begun to plan for my removal “to a private establishment in the town of Sutton,” a little to the south, where I would be well hidden until he could throw my pursuers off for good.

I suspected that my uncle's ruffians might well be under Joseph Dudley's control by now, but I feigned relief and asked, as I say, only for a little more time.

Sadly, Tom and I sold poor old Rachel and our cart; then we arranged for a baggage wagon to ship the more cumbersome of my paraphernalia to a storage concern in Boston. I bundled my most essential clothing and materials into a single traveling bag. Tom threw a few of his own essentials into a sack. He had engaged a young dairyman, whom he had come to know and trust, to take us just after midnight in his family's milk-delivery cart to Shrewsbury, where we were to take the stage for Boston.

SEVEN

Boston and my associations with artists
This strange captivity begins

O
ur flight to Boston was bone-rattling. The November roads, though muddy and difficult of passage, were thronged with stagecoaches and an endless procession of great creaking wagons whose teamsters were bent on dispersing goods that had entered Boston from all the ports of the wide world. As we drew closer, the traffic increased. Never had I seen such a lot of hawkers and peddlers plying their wares: cartloads of tinware, clocks, books, hats, clothing, et cetera. It appeared that a great marketplace, full of the bluster and noise of virulent competition, had spilled out of the city and onto the autumnal highways of Massachusetts.

Our backs ached from cart and coach, but the day was rare for November, blue and clear. I had of course been to Boston on occasion, but perhaps due to my new circumstances and dangers all my perceptions of the city seemed sharpened. The bricks of the buildings seemed intensely red, the stone strikingly white, the knobs and plates on the doors unexpectedly shiny, and the signboards fresh and gaudy, like a bright stage set for a pantomime.

We had passed through the immediate suburbs of Boston, as if from prim churches and white wooden houses with green blinds—all varnished like children's toys—into a gaiety of sunlit city streets with front lawns that refreshed the eye.

Upon our arrival at the depot, Tom and I gathered our kits and hacked up to Tremont Street, where innumerable artists live. We lodged that first night at the Tremont House (a wonderful maze of galleries, colonnades, and piazzas) in one of the least expensive upper rooms. That evening, after supper in the hotel's handsome hall—occupied chiefly by gentlemen who appeared to board here, and the table spread with cold fowl, joints of ham, bread, butter, water and porter and iced champagne—we briefly stopped in at the bar, attracted by the din and press of other boarders as well as more casual comers, goers, smokers, and loungers. Everything about this city seemed magical now, and I stood wide-eyed on the stone floor listening to people laughing and ordering Gin-slings, Sangarees, Sherry-cobblers, and Tinker Doodles.

But of course we had to find permanent lodging more within our means, and devoted the whole of our second day to finding it. At length we found two rooms by pretending to be husband and wife (a dire necessity for economy's sake) and soon began settling in. If the cost was still too dear, we nevertheless had learned the necessity of taking an apartment—also serving as our painting and exhibition room—that would place us before the public in a more genteel than shabby fashion.

Nor were we quite able to cast off all our apprehensions, for we were still, we assumed, the quarry of those whom Mr. Dudley had mentioned, even if we were indeed now buried, so to speak, in the beehive of the city. Yet here I embarked, in the winter of 1838, upon my plans for study, even while I continued, with the help of Tom's promotions, to paint likenesses.

I had already begun to feel the fatigue of rapidly producing inexpensive likenesses, and I was, moreover, all too aware of my many shortcomings as a painter. In Boston I found not only other artists who in good seasons traveled out from their city rooms and studios and into the towns and villages scattered across New England, but also men of true accomplishment and reputation who had sought instruction from European masters living and dead.

In addition to such Boston masters as Greenwood and Harding, there was every opportunity for viewing and attending public lectures at the Gallery of Fine Arts, the New England Museum, the Artists' Association Hall, and the Athenaeum. I now lived in a vague but acute state of expectancy.

T
HAT WINTER WE SPENT
cultivating our acquaintances and patrons while I took advantage of the many opportunities of picture-viewing at Chester Harding's gallery, the Boston Athenaeum, and elsewhere. By spring, while I was in fact much engaged with several modest commissions Tom had garnered, one of my dearest new friends thought I might especially benefit from acquaintance with a painter of portraits and landscapes whose powers had moved him into the front rank of artists in Boston. I write of Mr. George Spooner. My friend Julian Forrester, a young artist from Gloucester with a painting garret not far from my and Tom's rooms, had been very encouraging to me since our first meeting. Julian himself had studied with Mr. Spooner briefly, soon after the master had settled in Roxbury, just as Stuart had settled there before him. Indeed, Julian led me to understand that Stuart (though nearly forty years his senior) had done much to advance George Spooner's interests.

Working in Spooner's Roxbury studio, however, Julian discovered that his master demanded so much of his time and such devotion to his painting that he, Julian, found it necessary to go on holiday, so to speak, in order to earn his living again. I was, therefore, not without apprehension when I walked beside Julian one brilliant afternoon in late spring from Boston over the neck to Roxbury, carrying by turns a recent portrait. The painting was well covered, and I had protected it with a second glaze of varnish, which brought it out very well. I believe this portrait of Mrs. Jonathan Hay was the best I had done to that time; fortunately, moreover, I had not yet boxed and shipped it to her summer residence on Cape Ann, as she had directed me to do come June.

The eastern village was well settled and handsome, offering a pleasing variety of views owing to the mildly uneven surface of the land. There was a pleasant elevated green in the center of town and numerous well-planted, genteel residences and cottages painted white. Upon our arrival, Mrs. Spooner answered the door.

“Why, Mr. Forrester,” she said in a friendly, enthusiastic manner. “We have not seen you in a great while!”

I took heart immediately, and Julian introduced me. Emeline Spooner was a trim, gracious, unpretentious woman, but she informed us that Mr. Spooner was “utterly occupied at the moment” with a patron. She invited us in, made tea and conversation to divert us, and an hour must have passed in her pleasant company before we were finally ushered into the great man's presence by Mrs. Spooner's son Gibbon—an apprentice to his own distinguished sire.

The painting room was awash with brushes, canvases, props, and paints, but the busy man, fresh from some labors of his own and half reclining on a couch, rose energetically to greet us. He was imposingly tall, about six and a half feet I should say, and he came toward us like a demi-god, his thick, dark, tousled hair lightly salted with gray, his loose linen shirt well bespattered and open at the throat, his neck and face ruddy, his entire form sturdy and powerful: in a phrase, superfluously manly. He must have been about forty-five years old at that time, and I'm afraid I literally shrunk back from this giant as he approached us.

I saw in an instant how fond he was of Julian. “Mrs. Spooner has often asked after you, my dear neglectful Julian, I can tell you that!” he said and smiled. “Ah, and whom have we here?” He turned to me, still smiling, and Julian introduced me, to my chagrin, as the “finest new limner in the city.”

“Aha! Is that so? Well now,” he said, looking at the covered object in my hand, “and you seem to have brought some evidence of it along, eh, Mrs. Fullerton?” He then gestured modestly toward my canvas.

Stunned into silence, I handed the covered portrait over to him. He graciously accepted it, removed the cover, and carried my
Mrs. Hay and Son
to an empty easel just canted toward the light of a large, partially draped window.

Mrs. Hay is indeed a vital woman to begin with. I had bent all my efforts upon capturing the bright spirit in her lovely face and brown eyes, a face softly framed by naturally curling brown hair. For the sitting she wore a small muslin cap embroidered with pale blue flowers. And in this instance I painted her just as she came to me: not only in her cap but in her velvet black dress and ruffled muslin collar, over which she wore a stunning black velvet cloak trimmed in sable. In the portrait, the cloak just begins to slide back from her shoulders, revealing her beautiful trim figure. I painted a glimpse of her fine teeth behind lightly parted lips—a stroke of inspiration through which I captured her smiling vivacity.

In this portrait her little son stands by her, brown ringlets cascading toward his face, his eyes brown and alive as his mother's, his cheeks like the florescent blush on a ripened yellow pear. The facial beauty in these two figures I found difficult to match, yet my companion Julian assured me that I had captured it.

Mr. Spooner now stood in a thoughtful attitude, arms folded, right hand reaching to place a finger against his lips, stepping this way and that to change his angle of vision, and finally said only, “Yes.” And then again, “Yes, yes, yes.”

He finally came toward me, without his smile now, and looked me in the eye.

“With whom have you studied, Mrs. Fullerton?”

“With no one, sir, beyond my art instructor at the academy, the Wilmington Seminary for Young Women.”

“Mmm … I thought that some such might be the case,” he replied. But his head shook slowly, thoughtfully, in approval, and he then added, “You have a delightful way about it nonetheless. Of course you lack many things that might be acquired by practice and study. But
that
which can not merely be acquired, you already possess.”

Julian laughed pleasantly and said, “Just as I told you, sir. So now you see. A gifted young lady.”

“Oh yes,” Mr. Spooner said. He smiled charmingly. “Ah, friend Julian,” he added and slapped him on the shoulder, “knows better than to waste an old man's time! And perhaps you have already learned old Stuart's trick of engaging your sitter on some topic of her interests or passions, that you might see her features lighted up and then transferred to your canvas?”

“I have from the first engaged my sitters in conversation,” I said, “according to my own principles.”

“Well then, here's another one to consider well from Stuart: Get half the price of a portrait at the first sitting.”

“The demand for my work is slighter, sir. So most of my paintings I complete at a single sitting.”

He laughed in a friendly knowing manner.

It was, as I say, the end of his work day. Rubbing his hands like a happy giant, he invited us back into the parlor for “a bottle of Madeira, or two.”

I do not recall much of our conversation, for I was almost delirious from his response to my work. But Mr. Spooner appeared fond of relaxing with a story after his labors. He asked Julian whether he had thought further of going to London for study, but he barely waited for a reply before rendering an account of Charles King in London. Mr. Spooner had spoken years ago to a poor old widow who took in lodgers and told him that for twenty years she had “never been without an artist under m' roof.”

“She liked painters,” he said, “because
‘they are so innocent'
! King lived with her for four years—nine months of which he slept on the floor.”

“On the floor?” Julian asked, a smile twitching about his mouth.

“My response exactly, Julian. ‘I'll tell you why,' the old lady said. ‘He had a good bed made up for him every day; but every night, instead of going into it like a Christian, he used to strip off the bedclothes, wrap himself up in them, and throw himself down with his whole length upon the floor. So that he might later be able to say that he slept on a board and lived on potatoes while pursuing his studies!'”

We all laughed at this, no one enjoying such a tale on “old King” and the vain posturings of artists more than Spooner himself.

“I told the good widow,” Mr. Spooner continued, “that her account of him sounded very like my friend King (who had been in London studying with West) and that he, King, was by then established in Washington, the capital of our country, and making quite a name for himself. She appeared most gratified to hear it, and said to me with a satisfied smile: ‘Well, we persuaded the poor man at last, with the cold weather coming on, to sleep in a bed like other folks.'”

We all laughed again, sipped our wine, and then somehow Mr. Spooner turned the conversation to the question of my own plans for proper study. I was unable to name any intended masters. At that point, just before we took our leave, he suggested that I might come to his studio on Thursdays, if that would be convenient. Without waiting for my response, he added that Julian would be happy to accompany me, and that it was “well past the time when my dear Mr. Forrester should renew his own studies.

“Moreover,” he added, “I am just now in need of fresh apprentices to help with a large painting, a landscape, and potentially a series of landscapes, commissioned by … well, I dare not even say by whom just yet. Such knowledge might prove too … daunting, so to speak.”

I then answered that I was honored and delighted by his invitation, but that I would not be able to accept his generous offer until I had accumulated a living in Boston.