The Last Refuge (2 page)

I nodded. ‘I remember watching
Manor House
about ten years ago, and I thought
Texas Ranch House
was a hoot, especially when the “Indians,”' I drew quote marks in the air, ‘turned into cattle rustlers.'

Jud laughed. ‘110 degrees! 200 cows! 47,000 acres and fifteen people! Who could forget it?'

‘I don't watch a lot of TV,' I confessed, ‘but haven't living history shows gone a teeny bit out of fashion?'

‘Tell that to LynxE. These days, the suits are calling them experiential history shows.' Jud grinned. ‘With TV, what goes around comes around, like bell-bottomed pants.' He paused to take another long, slow swallow of tea.

‘So, what's the problem?'

‘Can I tell you a little bit about the show first?' When I nodded, he continued on in a rush, as if reading a teaser from a listing in
TV Guide
. As the show's producer, though, I figured he'd pitched it a thousand times. ‘The Donovans are a real, upper-middle-class family. John and Katherine, and their two kids, are playing the well-to-do owners of the Paca House. For three months, they'll be sharing the house with a cast that includes an African-American cook and her son, a tutor and a lady's maid, assisted by a housemaid, valet, gardener, groom and a visiting dancing master. There's a camera team on site ten hours each day taping the participants as they dress, eat, work, play and worship just as the home's original occupants did more than two hundred years ago, with all the modern conveniences of, well, 1774. There's no electricity, no running water, no telephone and the “necessaries” are way out back.'

‘Privies? What fun,' I deadpanned.

‘We had everyone in place; they're down in Williamsburg, Virginia for orientation right now, in fact. But three days ago, Katherine Donovan, who's playing the mistress of the house, had to quit the cast.' He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Just what I need! We start filming in two weeks.'

‘She quit? Why?'

‘That's one of the reasons I thought of you. She's been diagnosed with breast cancer. Kat's about to have the surgery, but she'll have to undergo chemotherapy, like you had to. There's no chance of her getting back on her feet in time to participate in the show.'

I was a survivor, too. I knew what it was like to have your life turned upside down by a diagnosis of cancer. I felt sympathy for this woman – been there, done that – but had no idea what her unfortunate situation might have to do with me . . . unless. ‘Do you want me to talk to her, Jud? Reassure her? If so, I'd be happy to.'

‘That would be gracious of you, Hannah, but that's not exactly what I'm after. I need to find a replacement for Kat, and I don't have much time.'

‘But don't you spend months and months auditioning people for those shows? Surely there's someone waiting in the wings, an understudy, champing at the bit.'

‘Ordinarily, yes. You wouldn't believe how desperate some people were to participate. We had applicants from all fifty states and at least twelve foreign countries, including Thailand. One woman sent in samples of her needlepoint. Others sent videos of themselves shoeing horses or milking cows.' Jud raised a hand, palm out, as if taking an oath. ‘One guy, I swear to God, wrote his application on parchment in ye olde letters with a quill pen.'

I had to laugh. ‘So, pick one. It can't be that hard.'

‘I already have.'

‘So, why the Tylenol?'

‘I haven't asked her yet.'

I gave him a look. ‘Well?'

The tips of Jud's ears turned pink. ‘Hannah, I'm hoping you'll agree to take Katherine Donovan's place.'

When I could breathe again, I sputtered, ‘No way!'

Jud nodded, his face as solemn as a priest at a funeral. ‘We'd like you to play Jack Donovan's sister-in-law, recently arrived in Annapolis to be mistress of his house and mother to his kids. We'll pretend his wife died of smallpox or something. Things like that happened back then.'

‘And my name would be?'

‘Hannah Ives. Everyone's keeping their real names.'

I raised a hand. ‘Wait a minute. Don't you have to vet your people? Do background checks and so on? Make sure they aren't publicity seekers? Psychotics? Axe murderers? Whatever?'

‘That's another reason your name leaped to the top of my list.'

‘Now I
am
confused.'

‘When you poked your nose into Lynx News headquarters last year asking all those questions about John Chandler? I ordered a background check on you.'

I felt my face grow hot. ‘I passed, I take it?'

‘Squeaky clean.'

‘But . . .' I closed my eyes and tried to work out the time-line. ‘Three months is a long time!'

‘We'll pay you fifteen thousand dollars.'

‘That beats selling candy bars outside the Safeway, but still . . .' I thought ahead to my calendar which held the usual stuff – lunches with friends, charity work, running the occasional carpool for my grandchildren, babysitting. The semester had already started so my husband, Paul, would be teaching math full time to undergraduates at the United States Naval Academy, a few short blocks from our house. He could certainly manage without me using a combination of daily lunches at the Officers and Faculty Club and dinners from the hot food bar at Whole Foods, Galway Bay or by mooching off our daughter, Emily. Emily had to cook for five anyway – including her husband, Dante Shemansky, and my three darling grandchildren – so setting another place at the table was rarely a problem. Still, three months under virtual house arrest with a bunch of people I didn't even know seemed like a tall order, even with a check for fifteen thousand dollars at the end of it.

My mind raced ahead. No electricity, no modern plumbing, and grande cappuccinos from Starbucks wouldn't have been invented yet.

Jud looked so young, so enthusiastic, so hopeful, I hated to disappoint him. ‘I'm not sure I'm the woman for the job, Jud. Everything I know about living during Revolutionary War times comes from watching the
John Adams
series on HBO.' I paused, ticking the items off on my fingers. ‘Let me get this straight. No running water, no heat, privies way out back . . .'

‘Right. And no Internet or cell phones, either.'

‘You make it sound so attractive!'

Jud flashed me a mischievous, schoolboy grin and I felt myself weakening. He stood up, looked around for a coaster – a properly brought-up lad – and set his empty glass down on it. ‘Before you make up your mind, there's something I'd like to show you.'

Despite the many negatives, my interest was piqued. ‘Lead on,' I said, and before I knew it, I was picking up my iPhone, following him out the front door, and walking into history.

‘You want to see my stays? They're worn over this shift which doubles as a nightgown, and they've got boning from the bust to below the waist, sort of like the corset that Scarlett O'Hara wore in
Gone With the Wind,
you know, but not nearly so tight. There's really not room for my bust in this thing, but shit! Check out my cleavage!'

Amy Cornell, lady's maid

W
illiam Paca's five-part, Palladian-style Georgian mansion towers over its neighbors from its perch on an embankment several feet above street level. The three-story, five-bay central house is flanked by symmetrical two-story pavilions – one a former office, the other a kitchen – each connected to the main house by short, one-and-a-half-story hyphens, or passages. Perfectly balanced. Out back, a two-acre formal garden steps gently down to a wall that borders King George Street, a garden that was (and still is) the most elegant in Annapolis. In 1965, exactly 200 years after it was built, the house – which had been converted into a hotel – was scheduled for demolition, but after an eight-year struggle by a group of tenacious Annapolitans, the building and its terraced gardens had been saved and lovingly restored.

‘Paca House fits our needs perfectly,' Jud said as we paused on the sidewalk to admire the impressive façade, which was built of brick laid in the Flemish bond style – narrow end of the brick out – so Paca could show off his wealth.

Jud pronounced the name ‘Pack-ah,' and I had to correct him. ‘It's Pay-kah. According to a rhyming couplet Paca wrote himself in 1771, it rhymes with “take a.”'

‘Is it Paca Street in Baltimore, too?' he asked, correcting his pronunciation.

‘Nope. Pack-ah. Go figure.' I stepped aside to allow a workman carrying a large wooden crate to pass. ‘When I saw all the to-ing and fro-ing, I thought they'd closed the house for repairs.'

‘That's what we asked Historic Annapolis to say,' Jud informed me. ‘Actually, we're replacing all the antique furnishing with high-quality reproductions specifically made for us in Wilson, North Carolina.'

‘I can't imagine the expense.'

Jud grinned. ‘Our sponsor has deep pockets.'

‘Sponsor?'

‘The show is being underwritten by Maddingly and Flynt.' I must have looked puzzled because he continued: ‘Paints. They specialize in recreating historical colors. Some of them are pretty vibrant, like Ripe Pear and Presidential Blue.'

‘I remember a bit of hoo-hah when historians bored through all the paint layers at Mount Vernon and discovered that George and Martha Washington favored gaudy, Easter-egg colors. Their dining room is green, as in emerald green.'

Jud grinned. ‘At Paca House, I understand researchers used an electron microscope and discovered more than twenty layers of paint, all the way down to the brilliant peacock blue you see on the walls of the main floor rooms today.'

‘I'm familiar with it,' I said. I'd toured the house often, in fact, whenever we had out-of-town visitors, and we'd attended the occasional garden wedding there, too.

Jud and I detoured around the moving van where two burly guys, sweating profusely in the noonday sun, were struggling with an eighteenth-century sideboy, and continued down Prince George Street past the house.

‘Historic Annapolis – affectionately nicknamed Hysterical Annapolis by some of us locals – isn't generally noted for their flexibility. How on earth did you get them to agree to closing the place to tourists for three whole months?' I asked.

Jud paused to look at me, and tapped his temple with his index finger. ‘Ah, that's where we had to get creative. Technically, the house
is
getting some renovations done, but at Lynx network expense. The roof needed to be replaced, for example, and the cypress shingles set us back nearly a quarter of a million. And as a gesture that we weren't going to eat and run, so to speak, we've set up an endowment that should pay for the services of a professional gardener, pretty much in perpetuity, thanks to another sponsor, Hughes Horticultural. We've repointed the brick on the façade – a minor expense compared to the roof – and there were things we had to remove, of course, so we could return the house to some of its eighteenth-century functionality. We uncapped all the chimneys and had the flues checked to make sure the fireplaces could be used without burning the house down. Took out the storm windows, too; otherwise nobody would be able to open the windows.

‘I'm hoping the weather stays temperate so we don't have to use the fireplaces that often,' he continued, ‘but the fireplace in the kitchen will be going pretty much twenty-four seven.'

We were making our way down a narrow alleyway sandwiched between the Paca House and a private residence that eventually led to a parking lot tucked behind Brice House, another Georgian masterpiece that now served as the headquarters of the International Masonry Institute. Normally, there would have been half-a-dozen cars in the lot, but through some Lynx magic, the cars had been made to disappear – probably to assigned spaces in the Hillman parking garage off nearby Main Street – and the lot was now occupied by two aluminum-sided trailers, their doors standing open in the late August sun. Cables snaked from the Paca garden, through the hedge, along the ground and into the trailer marked ‘Production,' outside of which several well-tamed coils of wire were connected to a giraffe-like stalk antenna. The second trailer was marked ‘Wardrobe.'

Jud bounced up the fold-down steps that led into ‘Wardrobe,' poked his head out the door and motioned me inside. ‘In here.'

It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the low light inside the trailer, but once inside, I noticed a woman sitting behind a table, head bent over her work which was spotlighted by an anglepoise lamp. When we entered, she looked up, dress pins studding her lips, paused in the act of sewing lace onto something that looked like a collar. She considered me over the top of a pair of half-glasses perched precariously at the tip of her nose.

Jud introduced us. ‘Alisha, this is Hannah Ives. I'm twisting her arm, hoping she'll agree to fill in for Katherine Donovan. Can you show her Katherine's costumes?'

Alisha laid her work down on the narrow table in front of her, spit the pins out into a glass dish and stood. ‘Sure.' She led me down a long aisle toward the back of the trailer.

Rich costumes hung along both sides of the aisle like the seventy-per-cent-off sales at Macy's, if Macy's had been unloading merchandise that had been hanging around since 1780-something, that is. Groups of costumes were bundled loosely together, labeled with signs hand-lettered in felt-tip marker: Karen Gibbs, Dexter Gibbs, John Donovan, Melody Donovan and a dozen or so others. Katherine Donovan's wardrobe hung on padded hangers in a section just past her daughter's.

‘Here you go.' Alisha shoved the hangers along the pole to make maneuvering room then, to the accompaniment of a soft rustle of silk, pulled out one of the most beautiful gowns I had ever seen. Holding the hanger in one hand, she draped the exquisite garment over her extended forearm. It was a pale peach confection, with gold, dark rose and deep blue flowers embroidered all over. ‘This is a ball gown,' Alisha said. ‘Hey, Jud, hold this for me a minute, will ya?'