The Last Refuge

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.’

‘Night, Papa,’ Melody muttered without looking up.

‘Goodnight, Mr Donovan,’ I said, opening my book to the page where I’d left off: ‘“I saw two farmers’ daughters at church the other day, with bare necks. I protest they shocked me. If wenches will hang out lures for fellows, it is no matter what they suffer.”’

From the corner by the fire, Amy said, ‘It holds up well, doesn’t it, Tom Jones? Although I have to confess, I much prefer the movie.’

‘Bare necks. How shocking!’ Melody laid her embroidery down on her lap. ‘Well, aren’t you going to go on? Read, Hannah, read.’