The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (10 page)

We were finally seated, that afternoon, tired yet excitable from our labors, and discussing the painting when Mr. Spooner brought in his customary bottles of wine, usually a smooth red Bordeaux. The late light of that September afternoon had cast its blush upon the works and tools and furnishings of the huge room. As we sat in convivial conversation, still in our bespattered smocks, Mr. Spooner began to steer us toward a new project he had been contemplating.

It was to be a portrait of an unnamed woman standing by an open window at midday. Outside the window would be a profusion of sunlit blossoms. She would be just rising from her escritoire, a letter in her hand, perhaps dangling, a freshly opened envelope on the floor. Her face would capture the movement of moods, the very transition, he said, of serenity and poise passing over to discomfort and agitation.

“What news?” Mr. Spooner asked. “What news in such a letter?”

“Death of a loved one?” Julian speculated immediately.

“Or death of Love,” Gibbon offered after a moment.

Mr. Spooner smiled. “Perhaps,” he said. “Or perhaps not. Part of the difficulty will be discovering what news.” He sipped his wine, then smiled.

“Not to mention the changing moods,” Julian added, with a wave of his arm, “in the very moment of sweeping across her face.”

“Ah, to be sure, Julian,” Mr. Spooner said. “Perhaps the heart of the difficulty, after all. But once in England, at Panshanger, I found a self-portrait by Andrea del Sarto which accomplishes just such a moment of transition in a face. He depicted himself standing over a table where he had been writing—and in the very act of looking up from the letter before him, his face full of nobility and melancholy. A moment of marvelous ambiguity and unpretentious self-knowledge. You see, he had been writing to his wife, the enduring object of his foolish desire, the infatuation whose blandishments he was helpless to resist, and against whose betrayals he continually turned a blind and innocent eye.” He paused to frown. “I've been thinking about it for some time, you see, and I've been putting off the difficulties.”

“You have a particular woman in mind, father?” Gibbon asked.

Mr. Spooner did not answer immediately. He got up out of his chair, placed his empty glass on a nearby table, and poured off among each of us the residue of a third bottle. When he came to me, he asked again, “What news, then? What do you say, Mrs. Fullerton?”

“Betrayal?” I asked. “Perhaps betrayal in love? Some mysterious betrayal nonetheless, I should think. Wouldn't death be too direct for the face you have in mind? The more commonplace the news, the greater the difficulty in capturing that facial nuance, the mutability, you speak of. Wouldn't the danger be that one might overstate the mood, the motion, the … ambivalence you want, if I understand you correctly, sir?”

“There is something in what you say, of course,” he answered. He bent down and set the empty wine bottle on the floor, then stooped over me and took my face in his big hands. I believe I trembled slightly. A thick lock of hair fell over his brow. His fingers were firm yet gentle as he turned my head a little side to side. “Your face is quite perfect, Mrs. Fullerton,” he said. “At once strong and well proportioned. You have got me thinking about the painting again. But I've hesitated to ask whether you'd sit for me. I know of course I'd have to make recompense for the time away from your own work.”

As his hands dropped to his sides, and he regained his full height above me, I let out a little laugh.

“A model for the ambiguous face, then?” I asked. I was a little startled by his closeness and familiarity, yet I felt a kind of tenderness in my response to his presence and his request. He alone among us worked in his linen painting shirts, open at the neck, spattered, often sweat-stained by the end of day. I had caught the strong scent of his flesh, not unpleasant, and saw his thick throat and the top of his deep chest while he bent to me and gently held my face. My feelings were an admixture of admiration, longing, and uncertainty. He was, to be sure, of my father's generation, yet so unlike a father. And he was a man of such energy, of such passion for his calling, of such accomplishment, that I did not know quite what to make of my own odd feelings.

I knew I wanted to pose for him, however, in his new undertaking. So after some moments of silence (how long I could not begin to say), I simply looked up at him and said yes. Yes, indeed, I would be delighted to play a role in such formidable work, even as a sitter.

That fall, in short (I believe it was in early October) I began to sit for Mr. Spooner one day each week. But after the second sitting the painting did not go well, or at least Mr. Spooner was dissatisfied with his work. He could be even harsher in judging himself than in judging his apprentices or pupils. But I felt there was something more here, some deeper fault or difficulty or confusion he could not address yet. Two or three times he began all over again through those winter months, until at the end of February he threw the project aside and we dared not even speak of it. Or whenever he did mention it, his references were oblique and arose from an excess of wine.

In May, however, he suddenly asked me if I would be willing to sit for him again, and it was just after I began to sit that my life abruptly changed once more. My lingering presentiments, as I have called them, proved at length to be all too substantial. The sudden, baleful change in my circumstances occurred as follows.

After posing for Mr. Spooner one day, I returned at dusk to my rooms. Tom was out on some errand or adventure of his own. Fatigued, I undressed so that I might wash and change into a comfortable dressing gown, as was my habit after long days. But midway in my ablutions, a knock on my door announced a young lady in a well-cut dress and cloak of rather vulgar, strong colors. She presented herself as a friend of Julian Forrester who wished to make my acquaintance. She had heard much of me, she explained, from Julian. This interview proceeded amicably enough, and at first I took her to be a young woman not unlike myself who wished to make her way as a likeness painter. As we sat in the outer room, which served as my studio, bedroom, and parlor, she said during our conversation that she would be honored to see my work, and she asked how I had learned my craft. I assumed that she had come to me for advice and to see what kind of competition I might make as a portraitist and a student of George Spooner.

As we spoke further, however, I began to see that her knowledge of painting was inexplicably shallow. No sooner had I probed a little further into the nature of her own work than the arm of a man grabbed me around the throat and placed an ill-smelling cloth over my mouth and nose. The rest is very confused in my memory, rather like a dream as one tumbles into sleep. I recall only that the young lady seemed to wrap her arms tightly around my legs, even as the strong arm of another about my neck threatened to choke off my air if I resisted. I could not cry out. Each gasp for breath brought deep into my lungs a foul odor from the cloth pressed against my face.

The next memory I have is that of waking up in an unfamiliar bedroom, a prisoner, indeed, of whom I knew not. My head ached terribly, and I felt a nausea that kept me prone on the bed. Thus began a period of captivity that was, until that time, the most difficult adventure of my varied life. If the poet wrote that hell is a city much like London, I was soon to believe that hell is a city much like Boston, no longer bright and green to me, but where all are damned to breathe a smoky air “thick, infected, joy-dispelling.”

EIGHT

A mysterious opportunity for liberty

M
y days and nights of captivity passed in memories of my adventures on the road and in Boston, just as I have related them. And I suffered many moments of deep sorrow thinking about the likely effects of my sudden disappearance on my friends and master. What could they possibly imagine, I wondered. A month after having alerted the city's constabulary and police, they must have secretly given up hope for my life. And what strategies of detection could have had the slightest success in finding me buried in this obscure room?

I thought often of Tom: he who had promised me every protection and aid, now as helpless as I. And Julian: spirited Julian, whose tendency to skim the bright surfaces of life must have been bludgeoned by my mysterious vanishing. Those very qualities, I mean to say, that made Julian such a delightful companion were sure to open the poor man to great pain. Were he a more driven artist with fewer companionable sympathies, he would be, I supposed from my cell, suffering less. Moreover, his admiration of my work and his fondness for me had remained untouched by those carnal tensions that so often mar relations between men and women who would be friends. It often occurred to me that he was so different a man from my captor that one might think them separate species! And my master, who would no doubt by now have given up once more on his portrait of an unnamed lady; what must his thoughts be in my disappearance?

Such sorrows (along with the dreams, memories, and fears I have related, and many more still) filled my days and nights. But as I have also related, my time under Mr. Dudley's discipline gradually changed, after he began to mistake my subterfuges for compliance. Some of our excursions were among company of even lower character than those I have described. I was ever alert to the main chance of escape. But however firm the grip of his hand or of his arm about my waist, I confess that any contact with humanity, however lowly during our excursions—to say nothing of the open air, sky, trees, seasonable florescences—had become a source of vitality and courage to me. I know not how else to express it.

But allow me to describe still one other of these outings, not only to depict the lowest among them, but to relate the wondrous strange nature of my deliverance.

One evening (it must have been sometime in February of 1840 during a thaw), I was lying upon my bed when Mr. Dudley knocked and entered. He drew the curtain and held out a hand to stay any movement or protest. His other hand held a riding crop.

“Please do not disturb yourself,” he said.

I watched as he edged closer to the bed.

“I wish to propose a further … outing.” He leaned toward me and whispered, “Tonight we shall have enjoyments unlike any encountered so far.”

I did not speak. As he leaned closer and kissed me, I recalled myself to the need of giving the appearance of acknowledging his attentions. What other chance might I have of freedom?

He sat down beside me and began to run the crop lightly over my chin, my lips, my stomach. With his other hand he then caressed my hair and cheek. I was unable to move. I do not think I even blinked, perhaps not even breathed. He stole another kiss while his hand began to stray, but again without insistence or desperation.

Then he sat up and slowly untied my dressing gown, slipping it apart with the tip of his riding crop, which soon began to meander smoothly over the length of my body.

When his hand finally slid beneath my loose chemise, I dampened my impulse to rebuff him and began to relent instead. He inflicted no pressure or pain; his satiny fingertips were well-practiced—nay, exquisitely subtile, and my heart began to flutter like a bird deep within my bosom, a bird which soon flew out to settle in a high corner of the room—aloof and untouched.

But that evening it was only his hand, as if he were indeed perfectly willing to possess me by degrees, as if his ploy (his desire and amusement perhaps) had evolved since our initial contretemps in the garden. My own ruse, moreover, again bore fruit, for that evening I found myself once more beyond the confines of my room and house.

Although the sidewalks grew muddy and ill-lighted, we walked but a short distance to our destination, his arm tight about my waist. In my own neighborhood, so to speak, I now had many chances to observe humanity in one extreme of its development. A number of the houses had their first-story shutters closed, but I could hear many voices from within or through a door as it opened, and sometimes music and dancing. Or ribald curses mingled with the cries of children. Or a frowzy maid screamed at an entry for a boarder someone sought. A few houses left their shutters open on the first floor, but most on the second opened to shine forth a blaze of light. I glimpsed through the redly-illuminated kitchen of a cellar tavern a fire leaping in a fireplace with two long spits, the uppermost of which held three suckling pigs whose drippings basted as many turkeys suspended on the lower. Grog shops, oyster cellars, and more suspicious looking places of every description abounded.

Women huddled in doorways or stood on sidewalks smiling and watching, and once we had passed them as often as not I heard some jeer or laughter behind us. A number of girls, perhaps between the ages of eight and fourteen, came and went among these houses. Though we so often hear that the greater number of the women who enter into this life are victims of cunning and seduction, and from a more respectable breeding, perhaps as many others are immersed in the life of vice from the start.

At times I could hear one of those women suggesting that some sailor or shop lad or rowdy “Come here,” or another would ask, “Where are you going, dear?” I was glad even of Mr. Dudley's protection among such people as these, and I newly appreciated the stout, hard-knobbed cane he boldly carried during our pedestrian outings.

At one such house, where I had noticed carriages rolling up to the door and away again, where men of trade loitered along with foppish young men and half-grown boys, we stopped and descended to a large cellar room furnished for dance and drink. Such a din I heard as we entered! And such an odor of overheated humanity, tobacco smoke, and soured liquor!

We were accosted immediately by the largest man I believe I have ever seen, and whom Mr. Dudley called simply Bo'. Unshaven, greasy, wearing a tattered sailor's jersey, this Bo', or Erebus rather, seated us at one of a score of small tables set before a narrow bench that ran along the walls, under salacious pictures. The entire middle of the room was given over to a sanded floor for dancing, if one could call such wild jigging and senseless circumambulations “dance.”

At the far end of the room a black fiddler sat on a three-legged stool mounted upon a sugar hogshead. Just below him a boyish tambourine player sat on an empty gin cask. At the other end was the bar at which a bloated man of middle years and a ruddy-faced ogress sold rum, cider, brandy, and wine into the tin cups and pewter ale pots of the girls and their patrons. It was soon clear that any man who would dance must pay the fiddler and treat his female partner to “a smile” at the bar following each musical interlude. And as soon as some men left, new ones entered to replace them.

The revellers on the dance floor seemed to be in every stage of drunken animation, dissipation, and lethargy. The women, of course, were of the lowest character, but the men, if predominantly drawn from the mariner, truckman, and common laboring type, seemed also to include a few respectable merchants and young men of leisure larking among them. And of course one saw idlers, pilferers, reprobates, and swindlers of every sort here as up on the streets.

Some men sat or stood about in conversation with one another or with such women as I have mentioned. There was plenty of hard talking. But most, as I say, were engaged in varying degrees of enthusiasm and horse-play upon the dance floor. Here the swarthy faces of Negresses glistened with excitement beside their pale antic sisters and their black and white brothers in sin. All on the dance floor stomped or whirled through their reels, jigs, hornpipes, and double shuffles in a most disorderly fashion, spurred on by the screeching fiddle. One enthusiast, a girl of perhaps eighteen, unintentionally kicked a Negro man wearing a sailor's hat in the back as they spun and lurched about, accelerating to the allegro of “Devil's Dream.”

Only during momentary pauses when the music makers gulped their gin and blackstrap could I hear the rattle of coin in the change drawer and the curses at the gambling tables tucked into nooks and corners. Mr. Dudley and I had been served strong spirits immediately, which I took to be slightly watered, cheap brandy, and which I merely tasted once or twice. I did not know how long I could support such dreadful turmoil and dissonance, and I wondered what Mr. Dudley could possibly have in mind in leading us to such a vile spectacle. And how might I discover in such an establishment and neighborhood any unperilous opportunity for flight into the labyrinths of the city?

After we had been watching this bacchanal for half an hour, one of the women whom I had observed came over to us. At first, she had seemed somewhat prettier than most of her sisters in service, who even at a distance and in the poor light appeared to have been wracked by disease and drink. This girl, as I say, seemed healthier until I had the chance to examine her close up. Her eyes were bright, if oddly wild, and her beautiful black hair hung beside her face in smooth ringlets. Yet now I saw the stigmata of degradation—the bones beneath the tightened flesh, the sunken chest, the cavities beneath her eyes, a pitiful frisette fastened to her death's head. For one frightful moment it was like peering into a mirror and seeing a costumed and painted corpse, rather than a woman of living animations and passions.

I was reminded of a most astonishing display in a traveling caravan and circus that Tom and I once encountered. After the lions and anacondas, the clowns and acrobats, the professors of galvanism—having just acquired the fresh corpses of a man and a woman hanged for murderers—burnished their plates of copper and zinc and set the dead bodies adance through the most horrible contortions imaginable, much to the amusement of the crowd who had witnessed the execution and then got themselves, many of them, drunk in celebration.

This woman, however, now spoke to Mr. Dudley, who in turn handed her a few bills. She then led us out into another room, better lighted, more spacious still, set up as if for an intimate theatrical performance. Seated in simple low-backed chairs arranged before the proscenium of a small stage were a number of men of a standing higher than most of those I had seen in the outer room. Beside these men, here and there, sat a woman of dubious character but, generally, of more splendid dress than that of the poor creatures I have described in the dance hall. One could just hear the movements of stage hands or actors behind the curtain drawn across the stage. But I could not have imagined the little pantomimes we were about to behold.

I call them pantomimes, but these were more a series of
tableaux vivants
whose Harlequin would, after a minute during which the audience might consider the frieze, call out the title of each tableau, “Guinevere and Mordred!” or some such, and during the remaining moments prance ludicrously about the stage among the living statues. These profane depictions hardly merit description, but it might clarify the nature of such theatricals, and the more sordid depths of my experiences, if I provide an example of the least offensive.

Imagine my state of mind when the curtain drew back for the first time! Black muslin drapery at the back and sides of the stage framed the picture before us. Stagelamps, some of them globes of colored water, had been adjusted carefully to accentuate by light and shadow, or rather to throw into relief, the characters who stood like statues, in this instance three women and three men in outlandish costumes and postures. At center stage a young shepherdess knelt facing her rampant shepherd in an obvious attitude of sexual congress. Both were draped by the flimsiest of cloths. Otherwise they were naked and enwhitened as if by chalk.

Set back somewhat to their left and right knelt four masked figures also unclothed and powdered but for their masks and loose sheepskins tied along their backs. They were meant to represent four sheep engaged two-by-two, the rams entering their ewes from behind. The white ewe masks were exaggeratedly playful and feminine, and only incidentally sheeplike, while the ram masks were both desperate and demonic, their bold expressions painted in red and black, their horns curling fiercely outward like orange flames leaping from their heads.

In these strained postures they remained, for about half a minute, without the least movement. Then Harlequin entered, looked directly at the audience, spread his arms out over the scene, and announced: “The Shepherdess Prays to Her Shepherd.” From off-stage light flute music began to caress our ears while Harlequin slowly danced among the still motionless shepherds and sheep. Just before the curtain closed, he became more buffoonish, tweaking the noses, ears, and posteriors of the motionless actors, asking whether they enjoyed their timeless dalliance, commenting sharply upon their parts and upon the subjugated postures of the women.

There was a burst of applause and laughter as the curtain swung across the tableau after one or two minutes of exposure. Mr. Dudley seemed to be greatly enjoying himself, as did the others, at such salacious dumb shows. I can only conjecture that Mr. Dudley had hoped, by introducing me as he had to successive levels of coarseness and debauchery, to make me pliable and game to be dragged with him at length into a secret life of dissolution.

By the operation of my own play of light and shadow upon his overheated imagination, Mr. Dudley must have come to believe that such pernicious company and such extended diversions would eventually wear down every barrier to ultimate relations between us, perhaps later that very evening. How a man of his education and means could be such a fool is surely one of the mysteries of life beneath the sky. How could he have so misjudged my character, even despite my own dissembling to garner a little more freedom of movement and opportunity of deliverance? I can only guess that his obsessions and his selfishness blinded him to others, to the truest nature of myself. It was useless for me to look for clearheaded explanations of the machinations of a man deranged by his obsession. He had come to accept my sham, but his acceptance was to lead, I now saw, to such evenings as these!