“Mind your own business,” Mr. Hagan tells her sharply. “If I glean a profit from this worthless land, it will be through hard work and a miracle.” His anger grows the more he speaks. He calls Mother a series of names, lewd names, names intended to remind her that she lived for years with Father unmarried, names she hasn’t heard since Adelaide stopped following her about.
Mother returns to the house in shock. She tries to tell Rosalie and Asia, but the story is frequently interrupted by her sobbing. When John comes home to dinner, Mother and Rosalie are sequestered in Mother’s bedroom. Asia gives him the full and furious report.
He goes immediately out to confront Hagan, then returns more quickly than Asia anticipated. “He said you were a liar,” John tells her. “You know he’s a friend of Woolsey’s.” Asia feels her face growing hot. She did lie about the turkey, of course. But does that make her a liar? She doesn’t think so.
John doesn’t appear at suppertime nor in the dark that follows. A red moon rises over the treetops. The house is hushed, only the fire crackling and whispering in the night. Mother seems to have recovered. She sits with her sewing while Rosalie reads in the yellow lamplight. They appear calm, but, like Asia, they’re drawn tight, waiting for the release of hearing John coming home. “I expect he’s gone to Bel Air for the evening,” Mother says finally, but it can’t be true as Cola remains in the stables.
The women put out the lights and go to bed. I won’t sleep at all, Asia thinks, but then she does. She dreams of riding into a river, thinking she can cross, but feeling Fanny’s feet lose purchase. She dreams she’s being swept away, one of a great many unlikely things bobbing in the current—books, cats, hats, chairs, a cow, and a banjo.
In the morning, Asia finds the evidence of John’s breakfast, but he’d gone out again before she woke. The sun is high and the dew gone when Hagan arrives in a cariole with Mr. Woolsey and the sheriff. Hagan’s head is heavily bandaged. One eye is red with burst blood vessels, the skin around it black. The other is covered by the dressing. Woolsey helps him out of the cariole. The sheriff has a warrant, charging John with assault and battery.
“He near to murdered me,” Mr. Hagan says. “And no doubt would have, if he weren’t stopped.”
* * *
—
The trial takes place in the Booth parlor. Mother sits by the window, the brooch of Byron pinned magnificently to her collar. Rosalie takes the chair beside her. The Hall children crowd the doorway between parlor and kitchen, telling each other to shush.
Asia thinks that John looks splendidly defiant, his black eyes shining. He speaks passionately of the insult to the Booth women. He notes that there is only him to defend them, that his mother is widowed and his sisters otherwise unprotected.
In response, Hagan produces the stick with which he was beaten. It has a serious heft. To Asia’s astonishment and fury, John is found guilty, given a fine of fifty dollars, and bound over to keep the peace. Apparently Woolsey has gotten to the judge. Apparently calling a respectable lady a whore is only a trifling matter nowadays.
For weeks afterwards, the Hall children can be heard about the place, singing a song of their own creation. The chorus: “Oh, we’s bound over to keep the peace, glory, glory, we’s bound over to keep the peace.”
Magnanimous in victory, Hagan sends Mother a letter, committing to a shorter, kinder working day. His spelling is atrocious. But then, so is John’s. Although Asia argues that Hagan was barely scratched, in a letter to his friend William, John boasts that he beat Hagan until “he bled like a butchr.”
ix
Suitors and visitors:
The weather cools, the leaves begin to turn, coins of gold amongst the green. Asia wanders through the woods, her thoughts autumnal. She wonders idly why this leaf is still green, when the one next to it is not. Why does God put his finger on one leaf, yet not another? Why are good people struck down and the wicked sometimes spared?
The lineage of Newfoundland dogs is ended, but the Halls have a litter of big-footed, liver-spotted puppies and Pink Hall, a tall boy, nearly as black as his father, Joe, and about Asia’s own age, brings them sometimes to Tudor Hall so Asia can watch them play, hold a snoring puppy in her lap. The Halls seem to think she needs cheering up, but really, she doesn’t. Her life is good. She’s as contented as she’s capable of being. The end of harvest means John has time for her again. Joe Hall manages the cider press and the dairy without much help. John and Asia are back at work on Father’s biography.
Although she still prefers her old Baltimore set, she’s made new friends. There are teas, the final picnics of the season, an occasional ball. Asia and John attend these together, all heads turning when they enter a room—this handsome, high-spirited couple. John’s friends fall in love with Asia. Asia’s friends fall in love with John. Bel Air society is not as lively or as elegant as in Baltimore, but Asia makes do.
John tells William O’Laughlen that he has his eye on three girls, and Asia knows who two of these are, but is mystified as to the third. Years later, a fellow actor will say that John Wilkes “cast a spell over most men . . . and I believe over all women, without exception,” but he hasn’t yet come into his full powers and tells William he only hopes he gets enough.
Asia sends a letter of her own to Jean, tucking a second letter inside. The letter enclosed is for a boy named Walter Scott. Jean is to post this letter so that Walter will look at the postmark and think Asia has visited Baltimore without telling him. It’s meant to be a joke. Walter has given her a ring, engraved with a heart and Asia’s name. Asia is smitten.
A few days later, she encounters Walter’s older brother Dan in Bel Air. He’s out riding with his friend Jim Crocker. Asia teases them into racing her home. She can feel Fanny’s pleasure at being the faster horse. Her strides lengthen. The ground streams beneath her.
Asia turns into the farm lane, pulls up at the porch, and drops to the ground. She’s light-footed, lighthearted, giddy, laughing. Fanny is breathing hard, but triumphant, and Asia takes her soft muzzle in two hands, kisses her. Dan comes galloping on his large bay. He is, or so Asia writes Jean, red, white, and blue with anger.
“You were determined to win, weren’t you?” Dan asks her coldly. He thinks considerably less of her for doing so. Later he will ask Rosalie to accompany him into the fields to pick wildflowers. Rosalie can be counted on to know her place.