The Last Refuge

THIRTEEN

‘I’ve never been a morning person, so waking up at 5:30 a.m. to start cooking breakfast for a whole houseful of people is a real chore. It’s getting so I don’t mind eating porridge, but the next time one of the cameramen sashays into my kitchen with an Egg McMuffin, I’m going to kill him.’

Karen Gibbs, cook

After Drew left, I couldn’t get back to sleep. I lay in bed with my heart pounding, trying to calm it. Breathe in, breathe out. Repeat. But my heart still pulsed hot in my ears like a piston.

I lay shivering in bed until dawn’s pale light began to filter in, giving shape to the room’s spare furnishings. I got up, pulled Amy’s robe off the hook on the back of the door, wrapped it around my shift. Leaving my ball gown lying in a heap on the floor, I crept from Amy’s room, tiptoed into the hall and down the stairs, through the hyphen into the main house where the occasional wine glass abandoned on a window sill or on the steps of the Chippendale staircase were reminders of the excesses of the previous evening.

On the second floor I paused, smiled demurely at the camera. So what if future viewers thought Hannah’d been bed-hopping? It might even juice up their ratings.

When I let myself into my room a few seconds later, everyone was still asleep, but sometime during the night, Amy had awakened and pulled the bedcovers over Gabe and tucked him in.

I approached the bed and shook Amy gently by the shoulder. ‘Amy,’ I whispered. ‘Wake up.’

There was no response, so I shook her again until she stirred.

One eye opened. ‘What?’ As if suddenly realizing who she was and who she was supposed to be, she propped herself up on one elbow and said, ‘Oh, Hannah, I’m sorry. I must have fallen asleep. What time is it?’

‘Dawn. Sunday,’ I said. I needed Amy wide awake before I told her about Drew. ‘We need to talk, but not here.’ As Amy climbed out of bed and began tugging at her corset, smoothing her rumbled clothing, I slipped out of her robe and began rummaging in the half-light through the chest at the foot of my bed, coming up with one of my everyday gowns, a simple linen frock – could have been blue, could have been black – that laced up the front.

‘In the kitchen?’ Amy asked, sounding worried.

‘No. Meet me inside the summer house. There are no cameras there. And go quietly. I’ll join you in a few minutes.’

In the garden, dew glistened like cobwebs on the grass. To save my shoes, I kept to the terraced walkway that bisected the garden and led straight down to the two-story summer house that had been William Paca’s pride and joy. A statue of the god Mercury balanced on tiptoe at the peak of its octagonal roof.

I crossed the Chippendale bridge that spanned the fish pond and found Amy sitting on a bench inside the folly. I sat down next to her and took her hand.

‘It’s bad news, isn’t it?’ she said.

I squeezed her hand. ‘Honestly, Amy, I don’t know. You’ll have to be the judge of that.’ I’m not one of those break-it-to-’em-gently kind of people. Best to dive right in, get it over with. ‘Drew’s alive.’

Amy covered her mouth with both hands and screamed into them. She turned to face me, eyes wide and dry. ‘No, no.’

‘It’s true. Last night I slept in your room, and sometime in the middle of the night, Drew broke in. He expected to find you there, of course.’

‘Why didn’t he…’ Amy fumbled for the words.

I finished the sentence for her. ‘Why didn’t he simply knock on the front door, say, hey, it’s me, the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated?’

She nodded.

‘Drew believes it’s important that he stay dead for a while, but he wants to see you very much.’

‘I don’t understand. The helicopter…’

‘I’m not sure I understand either, Amy, not entirely. Drew will have to explain. He knows that we’re going to church this morning, and is going to wait in the restroom. During the service, we’ll have to figure out a way to get the two of you together for a talk.’

Amy didn’t look happy at the prospect of seeing her husband again, which puzzled me until she said, ‘But, I don’t want to leave the show.’

‘Why would you have to?’

‘You don’t know Drew.’

That was true. I didn’t even know what her husband looked like, since carrying wallet-sized photographs of loved ones in our handbags had been forbidden, too. And nobody had any Hans Holbein miniatures, either. But I figured if Drew had been trained to extract a foreign dictator from his armed compound in a foreign country, surely he could extract his wife from a historic home in Annapolis, Maryland. There must be something holding him back. ‘You’ll need to talk to him, Amy. Then you can decide what you need to do.’

Jack Donovan was out of sorts at breakfast Sunday morning. Not long before dawn, George Washington (Founding Father informed us) had been whisked away. Not the way he had come – on horseback – but in a black limo, in order to make an early morning flight from BWI to New Orleans, where he would be shooting an episode of Treme.

Jack took Washington’s desertion as a personal insult. ‘Inconsiderate,’ he sputtered as he stood at the buffet heaping smoked bluefish on his plate. ‘Especially when we went to all the trouble preparing this spread.’

We? What do you mean, we? Jack’s sole contribution to the breakfast feast spread out before him had been the bluefish itself, a ten-pound beauty given to him by one of his Middleton Tavern cronies at their last meeting. Karen – who had smoked the fish, scrambled the eggs, pickled the herring, sliced the ham and balled the melon that Jack was busily tucking into – Karen was the only individual with any claim to being put out, in my opinion. Or possibly French Fry, who stood behind Jack’s chair at that particular moment, crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue.

I had to smile. At least we would be attending St Anne’s that morning, a real church, rather than experiencing the torture of sitting through one of Jack Donovan’s bowdlerized versions of Morning Prayer. As I slathered butter and a glop of Karen’s strawberry jam over my bread, I remembered a previous Sunday when gusts of wind had hurled sheets of rain furiously against the windowpanes. Jack had pronounced the day too unspeakably foul to consider going out in it, and ordered Amy to pass the word that our presence was required in the parlor, where we found Jack, balancing the Book of Common Prayer on his open hands. When all had assembled, even little Dex, Jack – heeding the admonition to ‘read with a loud voice’ – had stumbled over the hasts and doeths all the way to the end of the Apostle’s Creed where, good Baptist that he was, he skipped over the troublesome bit about the ‘holy Catholick Church.’ I had been amused rather than annoyed when Jack refused to pray for ‘the King’s majesty’ or to ‘bless the royal family,’ but fully half his captive congregation seethed in silent anger and for all I knew were seething still when – for some reason known only to Jack – the New Testament scripture lesson was taken from Luke 17, verses 7-10, the Parable of the Dutiful Servants. Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’

‘A beautiful day,’ I commented to the table at large. ‘Nice and sunny. I shall enjoy the walk to church.’

Melody shot me an as if glance. Judging from the cockeyed arrangement of curls on her head I gathered that Amy had been too preoccupied with worries over Drew to help Melody with her toilette. Thank goodness for mob caps and bonnets, I thought, fingering my own hack-handed do. They covered a multitude of sins.

At a quarter to nine, wrapped in our cloaks against the cooler weather, Jack Donovan and his little family, including several of his Dutiful Servants, began the Royal Progress toward St Anne’s where our (very) late benefactor, William Paca, had served as a vestryman from 1771 to 1773.

I attended St Katherine’s Episcopal Church in West Annapolis where my friend Eva Haberman served as rector, so I didn’t know whether the black-robed rector who greeted us when we passed through the door was a regular at St Anne’s or some ‘talent’ that LynxE had brought in for the day. Would we get to sit through an hour-long sermon delivered by a firebrand like Peter Muhlenberg from Woodstock, Virginia who, in 1776, threw off his clerical robes and stood before his startled parishioners wearing the full uniform of a Virginia militia officer declaring, ‘It is a time for war!’ Or would the service be more or less business as usual for the nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost?

Little had changed with the actual language of the Anglican service since the 1662 Book of Common Prayer was first published. Even Thomas Cranmer (who began working on the first version more than a century earlier) would have been right at home that day in Annapolis, Maryland. Priestly vestments hadn’t changed much since then, either, but gratefully, the Reverend Thomas Dyer kept them on as he delivered a long, rambling monologue based on the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Next to me, his arm often brushing mine, sat Jack, listening intently, nodding in agreement whenever Reverend Dyer made a point with which he agreed. Amy sat in the pew directly behind me, between the two Donovan children who had to be separated. They’d been squabbling over an origami frog that Gabe had folded out of a scrap of his father’s fine vellum writing paper.

‘Some among you may not appreciate the do-gooder interpretation of this parable,’ Dyer was saying when Amy tapped me lightly on the shoulder with her gloved hand, as we had arranged.

‘I don’t feel well, Mrs Ives,’ she whispered feebly. ‘I need to visit the necessary.’

‘Perhaps, then, it could better be characterized as the parable of a man who is saved by an enemy.’ Dyer droned on.

I patted Amy’s hand and whispered back, ‘Go ahead.’ I turned slightly, observing with an obvious show of motherly concern as Amy gathered her skirts close about her and eased past Gabe, out of the pew and into the aisle. She dipped her head in reverence to the cross, then spun around and drifted toward the rear of the church.

A sudden movement in front of an elaborately carved screen in the north transept drew my attention. Chad, Steadicam attached to his chest like a phantom twin, was making a move to follow.

I caught his eye, glared ferociously and mouthed ‘bathroom,’ which seemed to settle him down.

The service wore on, and Amy had yet to return. The final hymn – ‘O For a Closer Walk with God’ – was appropriate to our century, having been written by William Cowper in the 1700s and set to Caithness, a seventeenth-century tune. I noted this arcane fact as I paged nervously through the hymnal, trying to distract myself and not worry about Amy.

She had still not returned when, from the chancel steps, the Reverend Thomas Dyer raised a hand in blessing. ‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore. Amen.’

‘Amen,’ I repeated softly, desperate to leave, but the singing of the final hymn intervened.

As the last note of the organ died away, I tensed, ready to bolt for the door, but Jack looped my arm through his and escorted me down the aisle, greeting the congregation, nodding and smiling, paternally patting my hand where it lay in the crook of his arm, acting oh so lord of the manor.

In the narthex, I reclaimed my hand. ‘I need to check on Amy,’ I told him.

He looked puzzled. ‘Amy?’

‘In the necessary,’ I said, bobbing my head in the direction of the restroom. Jack hadn’t even noticed that my lady’s maid had gone.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We’ll wait outside.’

But Amy wasn’t in the restroom, and there was no sign that she had ever been there. I checked all the stalls. No discarded clothing, no telltale twists of toilet paper, no messages scrawled on the mirror with a bar of soap.

Amy Cornell, my lady’s maid, had disappeared.