Despite the many negatives, my interest was piqued. ‘Lead on,’ I said, and before I knew it, I was picking up my iPhone, following him out the front door, and walking into history.
TWO
‘You want to see my stays? They’re worn over this shift which doubles as a nightgown, and they’ve got boning from the bust to below the waist, sort of like the corset that Scarlett O’Hara wore in Gone With the Wind, you know, but not nearly so tight. There’s really not room for my bust in this thing, but shit! Check out my cleavage!’
Amy Cornell, lady’s maid
William Paca’s five-part, Palladian-style Georgian mansion towers over its neighbors from its perch on an embankment several feet above street level. The three-story, five-bay central house is flanked by symmetrical two-story pavilions – one a former office, the other a kitchen – each connected to the main house by short, one-and-a-half-story hyphens, or passages. Perfectly balanced. Out back, a two-acre formal garden steps gently down to a wall that borders King George Street, a garden that was (and still is) the most elegant in Annapolis. In 1965, exactly 200 years after it was built, the house – which had been converted into a hotel – was scheduled for demolition, but after an eight-year struggle by a group of tenacious Annapolitans, the building and its terraced gardens had been saved and lovingly restored.
‘Paca House fits our needs perfectly,’ Jud said as we paused on the sidewalk to admire the impressive façade, which was built of brick laid in the Flemish bond style – narrow end of the brick out – so Paca could show off his wealth.
Jud pronounced the name ‘Pack-ah,’ and I had to correct him. ‘It’s Pay-kah. According to a rhyming couplet Paca wrote himself in 1771, it rhymes with “take a.”’
‘Is it Paca Street in Baltimore, too?’ he asked, correcting his pronunciation.
‘Nope. Pack-ah. Go figure.’ I stepped aside to allow a workman carrying a large wooden crate to pass. ‘When I saw all the to-ing and fro-ing, I thought they’d closed the house for repairs.’
‘That’s what we asked Historic Annapolis to say,’ Jud informed me. ‘Actually, we’re replacing all the antique furnishing with high-quality reproductions specifically made for us in Wilson, North Carolina.’
‘I can’t imagine the expense.’
Jud grinned. ‘Our sponsor has deep pockets.’
‘Sponsor?’
‘The show is being underwritten by Maddingly and Flynt.’ I must have looked puzzled because he continued: ‘Paints. They specialize in recreating historical colors. Some of them are pretty vibrant, like Ripe Pear and Presidential Blue.’
‘I remember a bit of hoo-hah when historians bored through all the paint layers at Mount Vernon and discovered that George and Martha Washington favored gaudy, Easter-egg colors. Their dining room is green, as in emerald green.’
Jud grinned. ‘At Paca House, I understand researchers used an electron microscope and discovered more than twenty layers of paint, all the way down to the brilliant peacock blue you see on the walls of the main floor rooms today.’
‘I’m familiar with it,’ I said. I’d toured the house often, in fact, whenever we had out-of-town visitors, and we’d attended the occasional garden wedding there, too.
Jud and I detoured around the moving van where two burly guys, sweating profusely in the noonday sun, were struggling with an eighteenth-century sideboy, and continued down Prince George Street past the house.
‘Historic Annapolis – affectionately nicknamed Hysterical Annapolis by some of us locals – isn’t generally noted for their flexibility. How on earth did you get them to agree to closing the place to tourists for three whole months?’ I asked.
Jud paused to look at me, and tapped his temple with his index finger. ‘Ah, that’s where we had to get creative. Technically, the house is getting some renovations done, but at Lynx network expense. The roof needed to be replaced, for example, and the cypress shingles set us back nearly a quarter of a million. And as a gesture that we weren’t going to eat and run, so to speak, we’ve set up an endowment that should pay for the services of a professional gardener, pretty much in perpetuity, thanks to another sponsor, Hughes Horticultural. We’ve repointed the brick on the façade – a minor expense compared to the roof – and there were things we had to remove, of course, so we could return the house to some of its eighteenth-century functionality. We uncapped all the chimneys and had the flues checked to make sure the fireplaces could be used without burning the house down. Took out the storm windows, too; otherwise nobody would be able to open the windows.
‘I’m hoping the weather stays temperate so we don’t have to use the fireplaces that often,’ he continued, ‘but the fireplace in the kitchen will be going pretty much twenty-four seven.’
We were making our way down a narrow alleyway sandwiched between the Paca House and a private residence that eventually led to a parking lot tucked behind Brice House, another Georgian masterpiece that now served as the headquarters of the International Masonry Institute. Normally, there would have been half-a-dozen cars in the lot, but through some Lynx magic, the cars had been made to disappear – probably to assigned spaces in the Hillman parking garage off nearby Main Street – and the lot was now occupied by two aluminum-sided trailers, their doors standing open in the late August sun. Cables snaked from the Paca garden, through the hedge, along the ground and into the trailer marked ‘Production,’ outside of which several well-tamed coils of wire were connected to a giraffe-like stalk antenna. The second trailer was marked ‘Wardrobe.’
Jud bounced up the fold-down steps that led into ‘Wardrobe,’ poked his head out the door and motioned me inside. ‘In here.’
It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the low light inside the trailer, but once inside, I noticed a woman sitting behind a table, head bent over her work which was spotlighted by an anglepoise lamp. When we entered, she looked up, dress pins studding her lips, paused in the act of sewing lace onto something that looked like a collar. She considered me over the top of a pair of half-glasses perched precariously at the tip of her nose.
Jud introduced us. ‘Alisha, this is Hannah Ives. I’m twisting her arm, hoping she’ll agree to fill in for Katherine Donovan. Can you show her Katherine’s costumes?’
Alisha laid her work down on the narrow table in front of her, spit the pins out into a glass dish and stood. ‘Sure.’ She led me down a long aisle toward the back of the trailer.
Rich costumes hung along both sides of the aisle like the seventy-per-cent-off sales at Macy’s, if Macy’s had been unloading merchandise that had been hanging around since 1780-something, that is. Groups of costumes were bundled loosely together, labeled with signs hand-lettered in felt-tip marker: Karen Gibbs, Dexter Gibbs, John Donovan, Melody Donovan and a dozen or so others. Katherine Donovan’s wardrobe hung on padded hangers in a section just past her daughter’s.
‘Here you go.’ Alisha shoved the hangers along the pole to make maneuvering room then, to the accompaniment of a soft rustle of silk, pulled out one of the most beautiful gowns I had ever seen. Holding the hanger in one hand, she draped the exquisite garment over her extended forearm. It was a pale peach confection, with gold, dark rose and deep blue flowers embroidered all over. ‘This is a ball gown,’ Alisha said. ‘Hey, Jud, hold this for me a minute, will ya?’
As Jud took charge of the hanger, I fingered the fabric, imagining myself waltzing around in the gown, like Cinderella at the prince’s ball. After a moment, Alisha called my attention to the other garments on the rack. ‘This pale blue linen is for everyday wear, of course…’ She shoved it aside. ‘And this thing that looks like a nightgown is called a shift. Colonials wore them pretty much day and night.’