I straightened in my seat. “If he had lived, I would never have suffered so.”
She paced a bit, and then settled in the other chair, a cushioned wingback next to the fireplace. “What have you suffered? You seem so elegant. So knowledgeable. Two languages learned well, fine handiwork. Father told us nothing of whence you came, only that you were to be our ward. Only your want of returning to your homeland would suggest you were not as Bostonian as any of His Majesty’s subjects.”
“I have lived my life waiting to return home. I am going, thanks to Mr. Spencer.”
A look of displeasure crossed her face, as if my saying his name were an affront to her. “He is most kind. You must have accompaniment, and protection. Perhaps Wallace and I should go. The West Indies? Could be adventurous. A memory to last all our lives.”
“Serenity, I should tell you about Wallace and me.”
“Tell me what?” She seemed to shrink into her clothing then, as if a blow had been dealt, a real blow, much closer to the bone than her father’s death. “He’s going with you? Is that it? But not I? Does he not intend to take me along? You have plotted behind my back, whilst I show you the tenderest affection?”
“I implore you, Serenity. I cannot deny our affections.”
“Your affections? You have seduced Wallace? You cannot presume to speak for him as well for I have known him my whole life.” She stamped one foot, rose and made for the door. My new bonnet hung on a hook near it. She clutched it and threw it toward the fireplace as she went out. One of the ribbons caught fire but I pulled it out before more damage was done.
Mistress Roberts came to me an hour later. “Your scheme will not happen. I have sent a letter to Lady Spencer with all the details. The only person who will convince me of it is young Wallace himself. I hope you know how ashamed I am of you. How sorry that we showed you all the kindness of family, to be repaid by this.”
“Madam, he and I are quite in love.”
“Love? What has that to do with it? Men have their dalliances. It means nothing compared to a proper marriage.”
“But we will marry. In Jamaica.”
“You shall not. He has promised Serenity. Even if you travel as a paramour with him and go around the world, you shall not marry him.”
After that night, my presence in their house was tolerated but coldly. I made a promise to myself to suffer any bitterness until I could leave. For a few more days, I could stand anything.
Three days later, when Mistress Roberts’s personal serving maid unbolted the door to a knock in the morning, I thought nothing of it until I happened to look up from my packing and see out the window. A file of eight uniformed men on horseback waited in two lines under the carriageway. It was too intimate a place for a cadre of uninvited soldiers. I joined the Roberts daughters on the stairway as Mistress came into the receiving parlor. We heard shouting, Mistress crying out. Betsy and Tipsie ran down the stairs and I followed close on their heels with Serenity, America, Herbert, and Henry.
The boys darted between us to plant themselves squarely in the midst of their mother and the men with whom she argued. Between Mistress Roberts’s cries and the sobbing of the staff and daughters, what we learned was that Mr. Roberts had put up his house against the promised boon from a ship that did not exist. The Roberts family had been cheated out of everything by Peterson Cole, who before the ink was dry had sold the wager to another and disappeared. The new owner, Mr. Barrett, had called in the debt and was taking possession of the house and all its contents. We were to be put into the street that very day with what personal effects we could carry. Mistress begged for more time, but the man in charge told her she had already been given two months in which to make things right.
I ran to the carriage house. After I pleaded with the groom, he drove me to Lord Spencer’s mansion on the finest avenue in Boston. I walked inside the cool entrance, breathing in the smells of wood and coffee, rum, tobacco, and old wool carpets. It smelled like home.
I followed the butler to where Wallace sat reading in a drawing room furnished in shades of umber, so dark that it needed candles lit at noon. “Oh, my dear,” I said when I saw him. I ran to him and knelt at his knee. “There is terrible news at the Roberts home.”
Wallace raised one hand. “Bring us tea, Oswald.”
When Oswald left, I said, “They are to be turned out.”
Then he faced me. “Turned out?”