The Last Refuge (6 page)

‘There's one thing that concerns me,' I said, reaching out for his hand, kicking myself for being so self-centered that I hadn't considered this before. ‘I'm afraid Lynx'll take this agreement as an invitation to invade
your
privacy, whenever they want to.'

I had nightmare visions of cameramen and reporters ambushing the poor man the minute he walked out our front door, dogging his tail all the way to his office at the Naval Academy. They'd barge in, interview his students, disrupt his classes. When I voiced my concerns to Paul, however, he waved them away. ‘You don't need to worry about that, Hannah. They've signed an agreement with
me
, not the United States government. They'd never get past the Marines guarding the Academy gates. And the Marines have guns.'

Since 9/11, security at all government installations, including the Naval Academy, had been beefed up. Bancroft Hall, the largest single dormitory in the world, is home to four thousand midshipmen who call it affectionately ‘Mother B.' With 1,700 rooms, 4.8 miles of corridors and thirty-three acres of floor space it was a target-rich environment, well worth protecting.

I had to smile, though, when Paul pouted pitifully and said, ‘But, you'll miss our anniversary.'

That missing our anniversary mattered really surprised me. Paul and I had been married on October the tenth, but it was a rare year when he got the date right, usually over- or undershooting by a day or two, if he remembered it at all. One year, he had invited me on an outing to the county dump. I was thrilled: a surprise party in the offing! I went along, helped him offload a trunk full of old computer components, then went home to bathe and read a good book when it was clear he'd completely forgotten our special day. ‘We'll have other anniversaries,' I stated with confidence. ‘Our thirty-fifth will be coming up in a few years. We can do something really special then.'

He frowned. ‘I'm not sure I can manage three months without you.'

‘Oh, for heaven's sake, I'll be half a block down the street!'

‘Might as well be the other side of the world,' he grumbled. ‘Security will be as tight as Fort Knox, if only to keep out the paparazzi.'

‘It's not like we had any special plans, is it?' I said.

Paul gave me a poor, big-eyed orphan sort of pout. ‘Not really. And I know that I'll be tied up with teaching, but still . . .'

I got up from the dining table, stood behind his chair and wrapped my arms around his neck. With my lips close to his ear, and the lingering smell of his aftershave teasing my nose, I whispered, ‘I really, really want to do this, Paul.'

Paul grabbed both of my hands and held them tightly. ‘You said Hutch has looked over the contracts?'

I nodded, Paul's five o'clock shadow gently scratching my cheek. ‘He did.'

‘And he's OK with it?'

‘Not OK, exactly. He consulted with a colleague and they agreed it was typical of such contracts, and there were no surprises.'

Paul sighed deeply. ‘Seven dollars an hour. Christ! Cashiers at the checkout counters of Safeway make more than seven dollars an hour!'

‘I know, darling. But they don't get to wear fabulous silk ball gowns with hoop skirts while they're ringing up my extra virgin olive oil and coffee beans.

‘You'll get to attend the final ball at the State House,' I hastened to add. ‘Everyone who's anyone is going to be there. The governor, the mayor, the supe . . .' I went through the list of dignitaries as I remembered it. ‘I can't wait to see you in panty hose and a powdered wig, Professor Ives.'

‘I'm going to miss you, Hannah Ives.' He kissed each of my palms in turn, then pulled me around to sit on his lap. ‘Be sure to spend time in the summer house, and I'll blow kisses to you over the King George Street wall. When do you start?'

‘Once the revised contract has been signed, immediately, I should think. The rest of the cast has been down in Colonial Williamsburg for a week already getting orientation training.'

‘So, Sunday? Monday?'

‘Probably. I won't need to pack much.'

‘And you'll be back in Annapolis when?'

‘Taping starts on Labor Day.'

‘I wonder if they'll keep Patriot House locked up at night?' Paul, it seemed, was already planning a midnight expedition over the Paca House garden wall.

‘It's my understanding that as mistress of the house
I'll
have all the keys.'

‘Ah, ha. In that case, madam, would you prefer a roger or a flourish?' he whispered, nibbling gently on my ear lobe.

I pulled away from his embrace and looked directly into his luminous, dark-chocolate eyes. ‘What the hell are you talking about?'

‘You think you're the only one who reads historical fiction, my dear?' He tapped my nose affectionately with his index finger. ‘“Roger” and “flourish” don't seem to be defined in
my
edition of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, but from extensive reading of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century diaries – some of them written in code – I've been able to deduce that a flourish is properly done while in bed. A roger, on the other hand, is accomplished while the couple is standing up, preferably after a chase round the billiard table.'

I laced my fingers with his. ‘Unfortunately, we don't own a billiard table.'

‘Improvise, improvise, improvise,' my husband said.

A few minutes later, in my own twenty-first century dining room, I got rogered, good and proper.

‘I've been wearing the same dress for a week and, look at it! It's a road map of kitchen disasters. This grease spot was yesterday's roast and this crusty one over here is where I slopped egg yolks all over it. There's burn marks from practically falling into the fireplace, and I can't tell you how many times I wiped my face with the hem. I stink to high heaven! I would kill for a hot shower.'

Karen Gibbs, cook

I
t actually took until Wednesday before all the paperwork was in order and I found myself and my overnight bag of toiletries being whisked away from Annapolis in the back seat of a black Lincoln Town Car, heading south to Williamsburg, Virginia where I'd meet the rest of my television family.

After a four-hour slog down Interstate 95 – a nightmare commute, no matter what the hour, but at least
I
wasn't driving – the chauffeur dropped me off at Providence Hall Guest Houses on South England Street, one of Williamsburg's finer hotels in the heart of the historic district, directly adjacent to the posh Colonial Williamsburg Inn.

As part of the orientation packet Jud had promised, I'd been given a handout from Colonial Williamsburg entitled ‘Daily Schedule for an Urban Gentry Housewife' which I'd read in the limo on the way down. I was relieved to have it confirmed in writing what Jud had told me earlier: that the Donovans were well-to-do. I'd have domestics – both indentured servants and slaves – to perform the grunt work around the house, although I'd be expected to supervise their efforts. In the days to come, Jud's memo said, I'd be taken in hand by re-enactors and given crash courses in cooking, cleaning, gardening and dairying, eighteenth-century style.

Also in the packet were several sheets of 8-1/2 x 11 with color photographs of the cast, their names and ages underneath their headshots; a kind of
Who's Who
of
Patriot House
. The cover sheet was stamped ‘Confidential: Not for Dissemination' and I could understand why. It'd been thrown together in a hurry. I'd seen more flattering photographs on Most Wanted posters.

Arranged in four rows of three like a high school yearbook – but without the autographs and scrawled endearments – were my TV family. John ‘Jack' Donovan, Patriot, his red hair as abundant and perfectly coifed as the Nightly News anchor on WFXM. Jack's children, sixteen-year-old Melody – looking like she'd rather be anywhere else – and nine-year-old Gabriel, eyes full of mischief and cute as a button. Katherine Donovan was included, too, with an ‘X' over her photo, one black line marring the perfection of her pale Irish skin.
Harsh
. I hoped her children hadn't seen this; it seemed a touch insensitive, to say the least. The list continued: Amy, Gwendolyn and Karen, Michael, Alex and Dex. Jeffrey Wiley, too, eyes huge behind his glasses, with a toothbrush-style moustache – think Adolf Hitler as geek. Over the next three months, I'd get to know them all, and their roles, very well indeed.

I'd checked into the hotel, found my room and was pressing a hot washcloth to my face when Jud knocked on the door armed with my schedule for the next four days. A few minutes later, with cursory introductions all around, he inserted me into a late-afternoon training session on colonial games and pastimes, already in progress, before rushing off on some important errand.

Sprawled in an armchair in one corner of the hotel lounge, a girl who looked about fifteen or sixteen was scowling over a piece of embroidery. Embroidery cottons, each color wrapped around an hourglass-shaped bit of cardboard, were lined up on the arm of her chair like soldiers. A strand of her stick-straight black hair – a stark contrast to the girl's pale skin – hung over her left cheek as she worked. She swiped it away impatiently, revealing a multi-studded and be-ringed earlobe. This had to be Melody Donovan, my ‘niece.' Eventually somebody would have to tell Melody that the earrings – and the stud that presently decorated her nose – would have to go. I'd dealt with sullen teenagers before – my daughter, Emily, had been a worrisome handful at that age – but I hoped it wouldn't end up being me.

At a table to my right, a bespectacled youth was playing checkers with a boy who, judging from his black hair, had to be Gabriel, Melody's little brother. As I stood stupidly in the doorway of the room where Jud had abandoned me, Gabriel – playing black – jumped three of his older partner's pieces and snatched them triumphantly off the board. ‘Woot, woot!'

At a square table in the center of the room, four people sat playing cards. ‘Here. Sit,' one of them said, leaping to his feet. ‘We're about to start another hand. You can partner with Amy.'

I started to object, but he flapped a hand. ‘No, no. It's fine. I have to work with Melody on her dance steps anyway,' he said, glancing toward the girl in the armchair. ‘She can probably use a break from, well, whatever it is she's doing over there.'

The dancing master, then. What the heck was his name? Alex something. That meant that the guy playing checkers had to be Michael Rainey, the children's tutor.

The trio remaining at the table looked up from their cards, expressionless, almost as if they resented the interruption. I squared my shoulders and pasted on my friendliest smile. ‘Hi,' I said, directly addressing the only male at the table, a stout, forty-something fellow whose pale red hair, already long, had been pulled back into a neat ponytail at the nape of his neck. ‘I guess I'm your sister-in-law. What are you playing, then?'

John ‘Jack' Donovan, Patriot, smiled at me, revealing a row of teeth as white and even as George Washington's famous ivory choppers. ‘Whist,' he said as he shuffled the cards for the next hand.

I sat down in the chair Alex had just vacated. ‘I've never played whist,' I said. ‘Is it difficult to learn?'

‘Easy peasey.' Amy Cornell, lady's maid, smiled at me then, and her face was transformed from a mask of indifference into a face of such natural, youthful beauty that it belonged on the cover of
Cosmopolitan.
Her honey-blond hair was cut in a stylish, fuss-free shag with a fringe of bangs that almost hid her gray eyes. ‘It's like bridge,' she informed me. ‘Except there's no dummy. You play bridge?'

‘My husband and I used to, but we had so many arguments over it that we decided to quit. He's a mathematician,' I explained as Jack began to deal. ‘He can remember every card that's been played, and who played it.' I picked up my hand and fanned the cards, sorting them into suits as I went. ‘For me, bridge was just a game. So what if I trumped his ace? To Paul, though, it was a blood sport.'

‘I hear you,' the woman on my right said as she picked up her hand. ‘Like I always say: there are three kinds of people in this world. Those who are good at math, and those who aren't. I'm Gwendolyn Fry, by the way, but people call me “French.”'

It took a moment for all that to sink in, but when it did, I laughed out loud. ‘French Fry? You're kidding.'

French shrugged. ‘Anything's better than Gwendolyn.'

Jack dealt the last card, face up, in front of him. The seven of diamonds. ‘Diamonds are trump,' he announced. Amy, on his left, immediately played a four of diamonds and I smiled, knowing I held the king. French played a two, and when Jack laid his seven next to my king, Amy and I took the trick.

All the while we were playing, I kept one eye on Melody and Alex and the dancing lessons going on over in the corner. ‘One, two, three, curtsey . . . four, five, six . . . hand up, now turn, turn, turn . . .' I recognized the minuet, and realized that the dancing lessons I'd taken prior to Ruth and Hutch's wedding – where we learned the waltz, tango and foxtrot – were probably not going to be relevant to my new life in the past. It was a good thing that dancing lessons had been blocked in on my schedule, for two o'clock the following day.

A sudden movement caught my eye. A dark shape seemed to materialize from the shadows on the wall next to a highboy. I gasped, then relaxed as I realized it was only a cameraman, clad in black from head to toe, like a ninja, wearing a Steadicam strapped to his chest. As the cameraman passed behind me, I pounded my chest to jump start my heart and said, ‘Gosh, you scared me!'

‘That's Derek,' Amy said calmly, slapping a ten of clubs down on Jack's nine. ‘Chad's around somewhere, too. They don't talk. You'll get used to them eventually.'