A Buss from Lafayette Read online

  I looked at her, truly astonished at the last item she had named. “But you know that Father does not drink spirits, ma’am. He promised Mother he would never do so.”

  “This is for wetting down the paper to seal the preserves, Clara, not to drink. I suppose someone could suck on the paper, but somehow I doubt Samuel will do that. Ask Mr. Towne to put it all on our account, and tell him we will pay him next week in preserves. You know, I am still not used to paying at a store with things other than money. You may be sure that no one I know in Boston uses strawberry jam to pay off a debt!”

  I wished she did not have to remind me so often that she had lived in the city, and that we were only country mice.

  I removed my pinafore and hung it on the peg near the door. There was certainly no need to wear an extra layer on what promised to be another scorchingly hot day. If only I could take off my ankle-length pantalettes as well! My green-checked gingham dress, well-patched and faded, hardly covered my knees, however. I knew Prissy would be scandalized if I even thought about going out of the house barelegged—heat or no heat.

  “You had better ride Feather to the village so that you get to Towne’s before the stagecoach does,” she said.

  “Could I please ride bareback? I hate to burden her with a saddle in all this heat.”

  “Do not be silly, Clara. You must use my sidesaddle. You are so small and light for your age that even with a saddle it will not be much of a burden for her. And do not even think of going barefooted or bareheaded in the village. Young ladies do not go about with naked feet or uncovered heads.”

  Not to mention bare legs, I thought, stifling a giggle. “You do know, ma’am, that some say it is better for a girl to have her face tanned and freckled by the sun than to have her mind tanned and freckled by vanity through excessive concern about preserving her beauty.”

  “Yes, that’s all very well. But in your case, I think your face has a much greater danger of freckling than your mind does. Now run along, my dear. And when you return, I need to take your measurements. That dress is far too small for you. We shall have to see about getting a new one made. It is also high time you stopped wearing pantalettes, so you will need longer skirts from now on.”

  “Very well, ma’am.” It occurred to me that addressing Prissy this way nearly fulfilled Father’s command to call her “mama.” After all, “ma’am” contained the same letters, rearranged, and was not quite so painful to utter.

  Well, at least wearing skirts without pantalettes might be cooler, even if my skirt is longer, I thought, as I pulled on my brown leather shoes and laced them up. Slapping on my floppy straw bonnet, I tied the black ribbons under my chin and went through the back of the house into the connecting barn.

  CHAPTER 6

  When I got to the barn, I greeted Humpty and Dumpty, the two oxen who pulled the plow in the springtime, the wagon at harvest time, and the sledge in the winter. Too bad I cannot ride an ox, I thought. I doubt anyone could put a sidesaddle on Humpty or Dumpty. I patted the noses of the large, gentle, brown beasts and fed each of them a handful of fresh hay before moving on to Feather’s stall.

  Taking the detested sidesaddle off its stand, I put it on Feather and cinched it tight. Once that was done, I took a small chunk of sugar out of my pocket and held it out for Feather to lip happily into her mouth. Then, leading the mare outside to the mounting block, I climbed up, put my left foot into the single stirrup, and carefully settled my right knee around the pommel.

  “This is ridiculous! Riding half a horse,” I muttered.

  Feather turned and looked at me as if puzzled by my words, let alone the unfamiliar lopsided leather contraption on her back.

  “I do not like this anymore than you do, Feather Hargraves, but Father made it clear I must obey his wife’s rules. So we shall try to make this work. But no trotting, if you please!”

  While Feather plodded down to the road, I savored the splendid display and wonderful fragrance of the red and white roses climbing up the stone wall bordering our yard. As Father often reminded me, his grandfather had built this stone wall out of large, heavy stones hauled one by one from our fields.

  Soon we were passing by the Putney Tavern, a venerable old inn catering to farmers and others traveling with goods to deliver. I always loved to watch the long wagons pulling in and out of the field adjacent to the building, and enjoyed imagining what distant places they came from and were going to. There were some smock-clad drivers cooking breakfast over campfires, and others lifting buckets of water for their horses from the well. I gave them a cheerful wave as I went by.

  After we turned onto the road leading down to Hopkinton Village, I did not try to hurry Feather. I knew that the southbound stagecoach would not be coming through town until noon. Besides, perched on the stupid sidesaddle, unable to grip with both knees, I might slide right off Feather’s back if the horse went any faster than a leisurely walk.

  Just before reaching the slight incline leading up to the village, I stopped at Dolloff’s Brook and dismounted. While Feather drank her fill from the burbling stream, I took off my bonnet and splashed water on my face and hair. As I did every time I stopped there, I peered into the thick woods, trying to spot the large cleft rock where there had once been an Indian camp, many, many years before. I am certain that the girls who lived there did not have to ride on a sidesaddle, or wear bonnets or hard leather shoes, I thought.

  Then, remembering that there were one or two busybodies who would love nothing better than telling my stepmother that they had seen me bareheaded in the village, I replaced the bonnet and tied the ribbons under my chin. With a sigh, I took hold of Feather’s reins and walked on in an admirably sedate manner, leading the mare towards the village.

  As we went past the schoolhouse on the right, I could hear the voices of the children inside chanting their lessons. The sound of the youthful recitations made me sigh again. Only very young children went to school in the summertime, as we older children were needed to work on the farms. Now I worried that I was nearly too old to attend a village school in the winter.

  I liked everything about school, right down to the sound of the pencils scritching on our slate tablets. Most of all, however, I loved hearing the teacher read stories and fairy tales to us aloud. Even the more youthful fare read aloud in the classroom seemed to transport me right out of Hopkinton and into more exciting times and places. Not all the stories the teachers read had been so enjoyable, however. One in particular, a sickening story named Goody Two Shoes, had a heroine so sweet and, yes, so extraordinarily good that she could give real girls the toothache faster than the hard peppermint candy in Mr. Towne’s glass jars. Goody Two Shoes was probably just the sort of person my stepmother wished me to be: the kind of person my cousin Hetty pretended to be when adults were around.

  “Hetty is actually more ‘Goody Two-Faced,’” I murmured to no one in particular, turning my mind to the puzzle of why Hetty was so mean to me now. When I was in leading strings, I followed her around like a puppy and she was very good to me. I thought about this for a moment and chuckled. The strings attached to the shoulders of toddlers to keep them from wandering off were actually quite similar to the leashes used to control puppies, so I had indeed been following Hetty exactly like a puppy.

  After Feather and I reached the town common, I gazed down the main street beyond, admiring the line of beautiful houses. I knew that they had all been built when Hopkinton was a half-shire town—a part-time county seat—as well as the part-time capital for the state. During that glorious time, the General Court had met there from time to time, and several governors had even been inaugurated in the Hopkinton Town Hall. Lawyers and other well-to-do people had moved to town in droves and built many homes in the modern Federal style. With elaborate entries crowned by fanlights or pediments and flanked by sidelights or pilasters, these village houses were the pride of our little town.

  I carefully tied Feather to the fence in front of the store. The notices tacked
up outside caught my eye: a wrestling match at “the usual place,” a shooting contest at the Muster Field, and a horse auction at the Wiggins Tavern.

  I noticed that the final item posted on the front of Towne’s store was a notice for a dance at the Perkins Tavern on Saturday night. I thought about the dancing school taught by a traveling dancing master at Perkins Tavern about a year and a half before. My mother and father had insisted that I attend. I had reluctantly agreed to go, since I had not wanted to vex my mother, so very ill at the time. No boy had asked me to stand up with him, however. Not one. As I had been far too shy to line up on the dance floor without a partner, I had sat by the wall in the best wallflower tradition. In the end, I had learned the steps, but only by observing others and listening to the dancing master’s instructions.

  I would not be attending any of these posted events. For the first three, I was either too young or too female. As for the celebration at the Perkins Tavern, well, I had no wish to play the wallflower there again. With a sigh, I turned from the notices and went into the store.

  CHAPTER 7

  As I did whenever I entered Towne’s or any of the other stores in the village, I stopped in the doorway, closed my eyes, and took a deep sniff. Several deep sniffs, actually. How I loved the smells: cloves and nutmeg from the Spice Islands, cinnamon from Ceylon, ginger and pepper from South America, and coffee from the West Indies. It seemed to me that the general store smelt strongly of worldly adventure.

  The usual band of elderly men was standing inside the store. On most days, there were about a half dozen of these ancient idlers, who whiled away their daytime hours telling tales, some mostly true and some extremely tall. These taletellers often sat on a bench in front of the store, but today was too hot even to idle outside and the darker interior was a little cooler.

  I spied Mr. Towne, his gray hair combed forward in the fashionable “Brutus” style, although his receding hairline made this look a bit odd. He leaned over his counter, which was laden as always with large glass jars of pickles, candy, and other delicacies. Behind him, shelves reached to the ceiling, stuffed with items fascinating to the eye. On one wall, the lower spaces held large wooden barrels of brandy, rum, gin, wine, and molasses, with boxes of oranges, lemons, figs, spices, and sugar loaves on the shelves above. My eye was drawn to the other wall, however, where a rainbow of lace, silk, cotton, wool, linen, gingham, and calico occupied most of the shelves. On the very top level were more personal items: hairbrushes, mirrors, pomatums, patent medicines, and combs. My miracle-working lead comb was up there waiting for me.

  There seemed to be more than the usual crowd gathered in front of the shopkeeper, but I went straight up to him. I had an important question to ask.

  I took a moment to summon my courage, then spoke up. “Excuse me, Mr. Towne. Can you tell me how much—”

  “Sorry, m’girl. Cannot talk now,” the storekeeper said brusquely.

  “But, sir, I only want to know—”

  Mr. Towne, usually so friendly and easy-going, shushed me with a finger to his lips. “I must hear this fellow’s story!” he said.

  Stamping my foot in frustration, I turned to see whose presence was interfering with the fulfillment of my plan. Among the familiar characters, I saw a tall, skinny stranger who looked to be nearly eighty years of age. He was wearing a rather moth-eaten old uniform of buff and blue. His pure white hair was also in a bygone style, long—if a bit sparse in front—and tied behind with a black ribbon. He held a black tricorne decorated with a black and white cockade. Even through my irritation, I could see that the most interesting thing about the stranger was not his antiquated clothes, his overly long hair, or his three-cornered hat with its leather flower, but his excitement. He was about the most animated person, especially of his age, that I had ever seen.

  I moved closer to the old gentleman. If I had to wait until he was done talking to get what I wanted from Mr. Towne, I might as well listen to what he had to say.

  “You will never guess who I was mistook for yesterday!” he exclaimed. His merry eyes looked at each of us listeners in turn.

  All of our guesses fell wide of the mark, from Mr. Towne’s boisterous, “President Adams?” to my softly spoken, “Old Father Christmas?”

  “No, t’was for the Nation’s Guest!” the stranger declared, slapping his thigh.

  “What? Someone thought you to be Lafayette? Are you jesting?” Mr. Towne spluttered.

  The stranger went off into gales of laughter. “I am telling you the truth of it: folks in the hundreds—nay, the thousands—thought me to be Lafayette himself!”

  He told us that he lived in Vermont and had traveled with friends to Boston to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. “I never saw such a sea of people in my life,” he added.

  “A hundred thousand,” I said. “There were nearly a hundred thousand. That is what it said in the Concord Patriot.” I was blessed—or cursed, I sometimes thought—with an extremely good memory. Father sometimes teased me about it, calling me “the family sponge” because of how I retained nearly everything I heard or read. Besides, if I supplied what details I knew, we would not have to wait until the old gentleman found the words to speed his story along.

  The stranger turned to look at me. “Very good, child,” he said. “You are correct. Nearly a hundred thousand. All to see ‘Our Marquis’ dedicate a memorial at Bunker Hill. He is the only general from either side of our War of Independence still living. But then, he was so very young when he joined our cause. A mere stripling! A good ten years younger than me.”

  “Nineteen,” I said. “He was nineteen when he came to America.” I could not help it: if I had information inside my head, it simply spilled out at times like these, whether I wanted it to or not.

  He complimented me for my interest in history and pointed out that his own grandchildren were not the least bit interested in the dusty old days. “And this despite the fact that their own grandpa is a veteran of our War of Independence.”

  I could feel my cheeks blushing as red as my hair, partly from embarrassment at being the center of attention and partly from the fact that I was not really that interested in the dusty old days. I just wanted this fellow to finish his story so I could buy my lead comb!

  “But why did people think you were General Lafayette?” Mr. Towne asked.

  The old gentleman explained that after the festivities, he had found that his friends, excited by the events of the day, had driven off and left him behind. After that, he had learned he had missed the last stagecoach heading north and had no means of returning home.

  “Whatever did you do, sir?” I said quickly, trying to forestall questions from the elderly audience that would only slow down the man telling his story.

  “Well, my girl, just then, what did I see but an open carriage—a most elegant barouche decorated with roses and flags, drawn by four horses. Both the driver and his passenger appeared to be uncommonly annoyed. It turned out the driver was Nathaniel Walker, who drives the regular stagecoach between Concord and Boston. His passenger was Mr. Amos Parker. That gentleman was officially representing the New Hampshire governor in welcoming Lafayette.”

  Mr. Towne nodded. “Do go on with your story, sir.”

  I soon learned the reason for Mr. Walker and Mr. Parker’s annoyance. Apparently, Walker was supposed to drive Lafayette and his party from Boston up to New Hampshire, but the Massachusetts Governor had insisted he and his aide and militia must escort the general all the way to the state line! The stagecoach driver had told all his friends on the way down to Boston that he would be driving Lafayette to Concord.

  The old soldier concluded by saying that Walker had feared that everyone would think him a liar. “Instead, those infernal flatlanders had stolen his thunder!”

  “I should think so, poor man!” one of the younger idlers put in, his face ruddy with indignation on Walker’s behalf, not to mention with aversion towards those miscreants from the state south o
f his own.

  “Anyway, I told them of my predicament, and they cheerfully agreed to give me a ride as far as New Hampshire. And what a ride it turned out to be!”

  CHAPTER 8

  “What happened, sir?” I asked the old soldier eagerly, surprised to find my interest in his story was starting to turn more genuine.

  “Well, lass, we moved along at a right smart pace. But when we approached Malden, there was a great crowd assembled, with bells ringing, cannons firing, bands playing, and ladies strewing rose petals on the road. When we got close enough to hear that people were shouting ‘Welcome Lafayette,’ we realized that everyone believed me to be the Nation’s Guest!”

  The listeners started to laugh heartily. This was the best tale anyone had told in Towne’s for years.

  The veteran told how Mr. Parker had stood up to address the crowd, explaining that his fellow passenger was not General Lafayette, but a veteran of the Revolution who had been stranded in Boston. He also had assured them that the real Nation’s Guest would arrive very soon.

  The old gentleman chuckled. “Then Mr. Parker said I was a worthy Revolutionary soldier and deserved three cheers. The crowd cheered me, I stood up and saluted them, and we drove on.”

  “Bravo, sir!” said Mr. Towne. “You must have really enjoyed that!”

  The stranger agreed, but said he did not enjoy disappointing everyone, especially the small girls clutching posies of flowers at each place, waiting to present them to the real General Lafayette.

  “Their little faces would look at me with such nervous excitement,” he said, “until Mr. Parker explained who I was. Then they would look away with big sighs. It was very hot, after all, and the poor things had been waiting a long time.”

  I suddenly wished that I could be one of the girls to present flowers to Lafayette. I suppose I am too old, I thought. But I would not be surprised if Hetty wangles a way to do it, though she is even older than I. It would be just like her!