I touched Amy’s arm. ‘No, no. Just a little light-headedness, is all.’ I smiled (weakly) at the gallery of concerned faces that hovered around me. ‘These costumes…’ I waved vaguely. ‘Very hot.’
Befuddlement turned to smiles. Nodding. Tight corset. Of course.
Several observers went on about their business while Amy helped me to my feet. Others stayed, cell phones held at the ready in case I took another spectacular fall that they could upload immediately to YouTube.
We shuffled back to Pit Boys with me holding on to Amy for support. As we passed Chad, I snapped, ‘I could have been having a heart attack, you jerk!’ Then I smiled toothily and strolled on.
‘What the hell were you doing on your cell phone?’ I whispered to Amy when Chad was out of earshot.
Amy stopped dead in her tracks. ‘You saw me?’
I faced her, eye to eye. ‘The whole world was about to see you! Why do you think I faked the faint?’
‘You were certainly convincing,’ she whispered back. ‘Georgette Heyer would have been proud.’
‘Flattery will get you nowhere, Miss Cornell. I thought we agreed that you’d put the phone away.’
‘You’re not going to rat me out?’
‘No, but you’re either going to put that phone away, or turn it in.’
Amy clouded up. I thought she was close to tears. ‘I can’t, Hannah.’
Chad was closing in, so I rested a hand on Amy’s shoulder, inclined my head toward hers. I kept my voice low. ‘You must. And you didn’t answer my question. Why were you talking on that damn phone?’
‘When we got here, I pulled it out and saw that I had a message from my Navy contact about Drew. I’m sure it’s something to do with the paperwork declaring him officially dead, but I won’t know until I call the guy back.’
‘So, did you talk to him?’
‘No. I left a message, though.’
‘Amy, if you want to stay in the cast, you have got to get rid of that phone. Change your voicemail message, for heaven’s sake. Say you’re away and that if they need to reach you in an emergency, call the number that Jud gave us.’ I tugged on her arm, and set off in the direction of Pit Boys. ‘Frankly, I can’t believe you didn’t do that already.’
‘The battery is about to crap out anyway,’ Amy confided. ‘I’ve got the charger, too, but it’s no freaking good without electricity.’
Just as we caught up with Karen, I extracted a solemn promise from Amy that she’d deep six the iPhone. Her face looked sincere enough as she spoke, but I worried that she had her fingers crossed behind her back.
With four-dozen fresh Maryland oysters wrapped in paper, not plastic, tucked into my string bag, we headed home. Our last stop was Vivo, an eco-friendly shop at the foot of Fleet Street where everything was strictly off limits except their homemade soaps and candles. I charged six-dozen candles to the Donovan account and asked that they be delivered. Perhaps in his day William Paca had been more frugal, but we had been running through candles at a rapid clip. I had learned how to make candles in colonial Williamsburg out of meat fat and ashes, but like so many things about being a card-carrying member of the gentry, I was happy that our family was rich enough that we could afford to buy them.
NINE
‘I just got my period and they expect me to deal with it by stuffing rags down my panties. It’s totally gross. If you can’t bring me some Tampax, I’m out of here.’
French Fry, housemaid
They say you get used to the cameras; that after a while they become invisible. As if. Derek and Chad followed us around like malevolent shadows. I always seemed to be tripping over one or the other, or knocking into them with my skirts. Not surprising, considering my farthingale gave me the hip-span of a Boeing 747. Moving around the house became an obstacle course. Like an enthusiastic, tail-wagging collie, I could clear a low-lying table of knick-knacks with a single sweep of my skirts.
That day Thing One and Thing Two must have been working on overtime because they filmed us at breakfast, zooming in for a close-up on my fresh strawberries and cream, and tag teamed Amy and me as we kept our appointment at the dressmakers for a second fitting.
At the dressmakers, or in the shops, whenever I made purchases, the shopkeepers simply added the items to our tab, the colonial equivalent of ‘charge it.’ I had no idea what Jack Donovan made per year – it’s not something a wealthy colonial gentleman like Mr Donovan would share with his household minions, but several days later, I learned that thanks to our Founding Father, Jack’s pockets were apparently not bottomless.
Jack found me in the parlor where I was squinting in the flickering candlelight, reading aloud from a book I had been delighted to find on the bookshelf in the library, shelved between Middleton’s Life of Cicero and Friend on Fevers and Smallpox – namely, A History of Tom Jones, Foundling, the actual 1749 edition. Amy was sitting on a low stool by the fire, knitting a balaclava out of beige wool for the troops in Afghanistan. From time to time, I would put the novel down to help Melody with her sampler, demonstrating, for example, how to tie the French knots that formed the stamens of the tulips beds that bordered her work.
Jack loomed over me, fidgeting until I came to the end of a paragraph. ‘Wasteful!’ he grumbled when I raised my eyes from the page to his face, ruddy even in the semi-darkness. He waved a bit of parchment under my nose. ‘Mrs Ives, do you have any idea how much these candles are costing me?’
‘Peasants in India are sewing sequins on T-shirts under twenty-five-watt bulbs that generate more light than these candles do.’ I paused a beat. ‘Sir.’
‘Be that as it may, I must ask you to economize, madam.’
‘Papa!’ I felt, rather than saw, Melody rolling her eyes. Her skirt rustled as she rose, cupped a palm around one of the three candles flickering in the candelabra on the table next to her chair and blew it out. ‘There. Happy now?’ She plopped back into her chair, bent her head over her work. ‘Besides,’ she added, picking up her sampler, ‘it’s not like it’s real money.’
‘Of course it’s real! Who do you think paid for that frock you’re wearing?’
‘Lynx Entertainment?’
Jack scowled. ‘The dressmaker sends me the bill, young lady. That frock cost me four pounds, eleven shillings and five pence.’
‘What’s that in real money?’ Melody wanted to know.
Jack’s forehead furrowed as he considered his daughter’s question. ‘Allowing for inflation over the past two and a half centuries, you’re gallivanting around in a $700 designer original.’
Melody, who once confided that her normal taste in clothes ran to Forever21 and Topshop, gave her father the satisfaction of emitting a delighted gasp of surprise. ‘No way!’
‘Best you remember that, young lady.’
I wondered what kind of a dent my ball gown had put in his majesty’s exchequer, but wisely decided not to ask. Lord knows I’d tried to get the hang of British money – twenty shillings to a pound, twelve pence to a shilling had been my mantra. But, a pound is twenty shillings, except when you add a shilling and it turns into a guinea, and don’t get me started on farthings, quids, bobs and groats. And there’s no Tylenol here when I need it.
Melody bent over her work, squinted, wrapped the embroidery cotton several times around her needle, took careful aim, and plunged the needle into the linen, drawing the thread slowly down through the cloth and back up again. ‘Like this?’ she asked, turning the work in my direction for inspection.
‘Exactly like that.’ Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jack shift uncomfortably from one silver-buckled shoe to the other. ‘Well then, ladies, I’ll bid you goodnight.’