The Last Refuge (7 page)

‘I didn't think they'd be filming us quite so soon,' I commented before taking the trick with my queen to end the game. ‘Considering the contracts we signed, that was probably a naïve assumption.'

‘We call them Thing One and Thing Two,' French said. ‘From
Cat in the Hat
,' she added, just in case I didn't get the reference.

‘What role are you playing at Patriot House?' I asked French as Amy began to deal the next hand.

‘I'm the housemaid,' she said. ‘One of the indentured servants, supposedly from Scotland. I finished up early over at the Wythe House today. Sweeping, mopping, turning the mattresses – all good preparation. When I got back, Jud cornered me, saying they needed a fourth for whist. Not that I'll be playing cards with any of you upstairs types, mind.'

Four hands later, Amy and I were ahead by two points and the beginner in me was feeling rather smug.

Jack was shuffling the deck, preparing to deal again, when a woman rushed in. She paused for a moment in the doorway, one hand clutching the door frame, the other pressed to the small of her back. She was dressed as a household slave in brown homespun, and her gray apron was dusted with flour. Her head was wrapped, turban-like, in a white scarf from which a few dark curls had managed to escape, bobbing like tiny springs over her forehead. Her mahogany skin glistened with sweat.

‘You better finish up in here if you're gonna want time to freshen up before dinner,' she drawled. ‘They said to let you know that they start serving in twenty minutes. Me? I'm for the shower.' And she disappeared as quickly as she had come.

‘That's Karen Gibbs,' Amy told me before I even had time to ask. ‘She's our cook. They've had her working over in the Raleigh Tavern Bakery for a couple of days. Her boy's with her, too. Cute kid named Dexter. Dex. Nine or ten, I should think.'

‘What's Dex going to do?' I wondered aloud. ‘Chop wood? Pump water? Build fires?'

‘Whatever a little slave boy would do in 1774,' Jack muttered without taking his eyes off his cards. ‘Empty the chamber pots, too, I imagine. Wouldn't want
my
boy saddled with that. Don't know what the woman can be thinking.'

Amy's eyes blazed. ‘Karen's got a PhD, Jack. She graduated from Oberlin College and has been teaching sociology there for ten years. That's more than most of the rest of us can say.'

I had graduated from Oberlin College, too, but quite a few years before Karen, I suspected. When Oberlin opened its doors in 1833, it never occurred to the founders not to admit blacks or women. The college had a long association with progressive causes. It had been one of the breeding grounds of abolitionism and a key stop along the Underground Railroad. When I visited the campus in 1965, in fact, Martin Luther King had been the commencement speaker.

‘Oh, I'm not questioning the woman's intelligence,' Jack hastened to add. ‘I'm sure she has her reasons.'

‘As a black woman and a sociologist, this experiment must have seemed a unique opportunity for Karen to understand her own history by actually living it,' I commented. ‘I'm not sure I would have involved my son, either, Jack. Dex seems a little young to really understand what slavery was all about.'

‘I don't think she had a choice,' French said as she slapped an ace of hearts on the table and took the trick. ‘She didn't have anyone at home to leave him with.'

‘She's not married?'

French shook her head. ‘Never has been.'

I knew about Jack's marital situation, of course, but was curious about the others. ‘I've got a husband waiting for me at home, probably wondering where his next meal is coming from about now. How about you two?'

‘I'm engaged to an investment banker in Boston,' French said. She glanced quickly at Amy who was studying her cards intently, silently. ‘Amy's a widow.'

Amy, who I guessed to be in her mid to late twenties, looked too young to be a widow. A look of such sadness passed over her face that I could have kicked myself for bringing the subject up. ‘I'm so sorry, Amy.'

She glanced up, eyes glistening with unshed tears. ‘It's OK, really. Drew was a Navy SEAL. We both knew the risks when I married him.'

I stared at her pale face and shuddered. During our long association with the Naval Academy, Paul and I knew a number of midshipmen who'd gone into Special Ops after graduation, but we'd not lost any of them . . . yet. ‘Was he an Academy grad?' I asked.

‘No. UVA.'

I was about to comment on the high quality of naval officers coming out of the NROTC program at the University of Virginia when Jack took control of the conversation and made a U-turn. ‘I went by the bakery this afternoon. The apple pies looked fantastic. Seems like our Karen can actually cook.'

‘Speaking of Karen,' I said, laying down my cards and rising to my feet, ‘I'm going to take her suggestion and go freshen up. See you at dinner?'

As I left the parlor, Derek disengaged himself from the dance lesson. He and his Steadicam shadowed me out of the room, down the hall and onto the elevator, a red light near the camera lens indicating that he was filming me the whole way. As I slotted the key card into my door, I turned and waggled my fingers at the camera before slipping inside and closing the door in his face.

‘Cameras already dogging my tail,' I texted to Paul on my iPhone from the bathroom a few minutes later. ‘Apparently I'm today's fresh meat.'

Dinner that night was a buffet affair – mixed green ‘salat,' sliced roast of beef, and an oven-roasted potato and vegetable combo, all set out in very twenty-first-century chafing dishes on a dark oak sideboard in one of the hotel's private dining rooms. Cast members, some already in costume, continued to arrive in dribs and drabs as they finished their training at various locations throughout the ‘plantation.'

My costume consisted of the same jeans and T-shirt I'd ridden down in, although I had washed my face, put on a bit of eyeliner and a smear of lipstick.

I loaded up my plate, snagged a brandy-spiked bread pudding from a side table and sat down opposite Jack Donovan, who was already tucking into his beef. His daughter, Melody, sat to his right, her plate heaped with vegetables, but she was having the bread pudding as an appetizer. At sixteen her baby fat was not likely to go away without a bit of push-back-from-the-table discipline, I thought. Fortunately, the mistress of Patriot House (me!) was not planning to serve quarter-pounders with cheese in 1774, so perhaps she'd make some headway when we got back to Annapolis.

Melody's little brother, Gabriel or ‘Gabe,' as he was more commonly known, and to whom I'd been introduced in the game room, had finished his meal and from the sound effects leaking out of his iPod Touch, I gathered he was playing Angry Birds. Since discovering my role in the cast, he was pointedly ignoring me, as if holding me responsible for his mother's absence.

‘How's your wife doing?' I asked Jack Donovan, genuinely concerned.

Jack swallowed the morsel of steak he'd been chewing, looking surprised that I asked. ‘The prognosis is good. She still needs the chemo, but we are all optimistic.'

‘It must be hard for her back in . . . sorry, I forget where you're from,' I babbled.

‘Texas,' he said simply.

I paused, a fork loaded with potatoes halfway to my mouth. ‘Texas is a big state.'

He sawed off another chunk of steak. ‘A little town north of Dallas. McKinney. You've probably never heard of it.'

Surprisingly, I had. ‘Didn't
Money Magazine
rate McKinney as one of the top five places to live in America?'

‘It did. After that,' he grumbled, ‘and all the publicity from this show, I worry that the population is simply going to
explode
, although I have to admit it'd be good for business.'

‘Does Katherine have anyone staying with her during treatment?' I wondered.

His gray eyes caught mine and held. ‘Of course. What kind of a person do you think I am? Kat's being treated at MD Anderson in Dallas, so no worries there, and her mother lives close by.'

‘I text her, like, every minute,' Melody said, her manicured thumbs flicking rapidly over the keys of her Droid, ‘Except the cell phone signal here really sucks.'

‘Better get used to it, young lady,' her father warned. ‘There'll be no cell phone service at Patriot House at all.'

Melody's head jerked up, her green eyes wide and disbelieving. ‘No way. Cell phone signals are everywhere!'

‘Not when they're jamming it,' Jack informed her.

Jamming. Great. There went any prayer of clandestine Facetime tête-a-têtes with Paul, assuming I'd even be able to smuggle my iPhone in.

‘Is that true, Mrs Ives?' Melody wasn't buying it, seeking a second opinion.

‘It's technically possible to jam cell phone signals,' I told her. ‘You have to have permission from the FCC, of course, but movie theaters, restaurants, concert halls and churches are issued permits for jamming equipment every day.'

‘That sucks,' she said, and I had to agree.

‘You'll write to your mother every week,' Jack said. ‘The old-fashioned way, with paper and pen.' His eyes darted in Gabe's direction. ‘You, too, Gabriel.'

All the while we'd been talking, I could feel Gabe's ice-blue eyes boring into the side of my head. I leaned across the table and lowered my voice. ‘Are the children really on board with the experiment, Jack?'

Jack's steely gaze dropped away, back to focusing on his steak. ‘You're a Johnny-Come-Lately, so you're probably unaware of the rigorous screening they put us through.
Of course
the children are on board.'

‘When Mom was diagnosed, we were all going to quit,' Melody cut in. ‘But it was Mom who insisted we stay on. The show was mega important to her.'

‘Kat has been home-schooling Melody and Gabriel, but what could be a better educational experience than actually having an opportunity to
live
in the eighteenth century?' Jack added.

From across the table a male voice said, ‘May I butt in?'

Back in the parlor, I'd been introduced to the voice's owner, a gangly young man in his mid to late twenties with a fringe of dark hair, but I couldn't remember at the moment whether he was Alex Mueller, the dancing master, or Michael Rainey, the children's tutor.

‘The children's education will continue,' he said, so I figured it was Michael. ‘They've converted the Paca House gift shop into a schoolroom. I'll be teaching Gabe and Melody, of course, plus four other homeschoolers who will be brought in for classes every weekday.' He snorted softly. ‘I almost said “bussed in.” That would have been a neat trick in 1774.'

‘That's historically accurate,' Donovan stated airily, just in case I'd been wondering. ‘School teachers were thin on the ground in colonial times. Only the gentry could afford to hire them, so children from neighboring estates would be often be included, and the expense shared.'

I'd done my homework, too, so this wasn't news to me. Over the weekend, I'd poured over the material in the orientation packet Jud had given me,
The Compleat Housewife, or Accomplished Gentlewoman's Companion
, for example, and
The Frugal Housewife, or
Complete Woman Cook
, a cookbook from 1772 where I learned how to dress a turtle (don't ask!) and prepare such finger-lickin' fare as ragout of hog's head and ears. Particularly helpful was
The Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian
, a charming and extraordinarily detailed account of Fithian's year at Nomini Hall, the Robert Carter estate in Virginia, as a ‘plantation tutor' to seven of the nine Carter children. Although Fithian wasted a good bit of time mooning over his girlfriend back in New Jersey, his impressions of daily life in Virginia are recorded with insight and the kind of detail one might expect of a tourist visiting a foreign country which, to a divinity student from Princeton University in 1774, Virginia almost certainly was.

Thinking about Fithian being so far away from home prompted me to ask, ‘So, what do you do in real life, Mr Donovan?'

A corner of his mouth turned up, half smile, half smirk. ‘Ah, I see you're getting into your role already, Mrs Ives. The head of the household is always referred to as “Mister.”' He chased a wayward carrot around his plate, stabbed it with a fork. ‘Or, “sir,” depending.'

While Donovan was busy popping the carrot into his mouth, Michael shot me a look:
Asshole
.

I stifled a giggle, narrowly avoiding spewing iced tea out my nose. Playing sister-in-law to such a stuffed shirt and mother to his two sulky children was likely to be a challenge. Didn't Jud tell me that the cast had been carefully vetted? Of course he did, I realized as I mashed my vegetables together with a fork and applied a generous pat of butter. But if every applicant received high marks under the ‘Plays Well with Others' column, it wouldn't make for much of a TV show. ‘Conflict,' I could almost hear Jud saying. ‘That's what makes good television.'

‘So,
sir
,' I continued, ‘what do you do back in McKinney?'

‘JD's Auto Mall,' he said. ‘I sell cars. And I'm very, very good at it.'

A used-car salesman as our lord and master. How could we be so lucky?

‘Having servants is awesome! I ring a bell and they bring me stuff!'

Gabriel Donovan, son

O
n my first day as mistress of Patriot House, I was awakened by a gentle tap on the door.

‘Mumppf,' I managed as I opened my eyes, squinted into the semi-darkness and tried to figure out exactly where I was. I struggled into a half-sitting position and patted around on the bedside table looking for my watch before remembering that I didn't have a watch. When the cast arrived at Patriot House the previous afternoon we'd gone through a sign-in procedure more thorough than a security checkpoint at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. Watches, jewelry, iPods, iPhones, Droids, even Jack Donovan's hearing aids . . . those technical marvels that make twenty-first century life worth living, all had to be surrendered before we were given a tour of the house and shown to our respective rooms.