A Disappointment
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FaithfulChapter 7: M'Kenna's Disappointment free porn video
Christmas Day 1773 dawned eye-squinting bright in Annapolis. The flickering harbor and the broad Bay beyond lapped quietly at their whitened banks. Elizabeth woke at the first, faint, rose-colored tinting of the high, thin clouds as she had aboard the Janet Lune. Eyes still closed, she savored the sea smell, thought of Clemence, stretched, struggled past a fleeting terror and then suddenly realized where she was. She thought her silent prayer, giving thanks for another day, and tossed back her worn quilt, shuddering as her last dream faded. Glittering eyes, dripping fangs and foul odors shredded and dissipated like a morning fog, leaving bits of bitter foulness behind.
She had never before suffered nightmares that included noxious smells, but this dream had recalled the vicious man who raped her and the vile men who watched in pungent scents. Vernon's whisky breath and the stink of his sweat and burnt tobacco were vibrantly alive in her melting memory, in a dream where she ran and ran toward an ever-receding sanctuary and grasping hands clawed at her.
She splashed frigid water on her thin face and looked into the small, speckled mirror above her wash stand while she raked at her long hair with her fingers and a broken piece of tortoise comb, careful not to stretch her ribs too far. Two, steady gray eyes looked back at her, and she could only discern a small, blue bruise on the point of her left cheekbone, barely visible beneath the tan freckles, just a slight puffiness under that arched eyebrow, a reminder. Her ears still rang and buzzed from time to time, but as with her other physical wounds, that annoyance was fading. She made a stern face at herself, pinching her lips together as she put her hand to her rib cage.
Jolly Dr. Scott had pronounced her ribs sound after being bound for only a few days more than two weeks, but continued to advise her, with a wry smile, to stay off the backs of fractious horses and to dance no reels or gavottes.
She shivered in the chill air, feeling her nipples harden, quickly pulled her only dress over her head and smoothed it down her lean body and the plain linen shift she slept in. Elizabeth tied her sun-streaked hair back with a worn, blue ribbon and made a twisted belt from another piece of the same material Philly had found for her. Around her neck she tossed her new, flower-patterned kerchief, a gift from Anne, and tied it loosely, tucking the ends into the front of her almost shapeless and unornamented dress of nut-brown homespun.
Elizabeth touched the three shiny buttons beside the basin on her small washstand and thought of the bodice they had graced, of the lost life they represented. The violent attack suddenly came back to her mind, and she pushed the aching memory aside, deeper into a remote crevice, behind a rough wall of dark stones but with a sour taste in her mouth. She slipped her bare feet into her old wooden clogs and promised herself she would ask about getting some quieter slippers and some knit stockings.
With her hand sliding along the uneven wall, Elizabeth crept down the narrow, dark, back stairwell from the third floor as quietly as she could and visited the brick "necessary" next to the carriage house in the tidy yard with its small, formal hedges and low, brick wall. She returned to the basement kitchen and found the family's cook standing before the wide fireplace slicing blood-rare beef from a spitted roast onto a large, oval platter. Most addressed the stern cook as "Bess" while Philippa called her "Mama." Philly, who was cutting thin slices of smoked ham, silently pointed to a large tea kettle and smiled her "good morning."
Elizabeth had noticed that the servants in this elegant home spoke as little as possible, even when they were only with each other. Responses were always short, often monosyllables. Subtle nudges and raised elbows replaced orders and answers. Arched eyebrows, shrugged shoulders and crinkled lips had their own quiet vocabulary as did various guttural sounds and throat clearings.
The young woman took a fresh-baked biscuit from a heaping basketful, broke it open and filled it with scraps of fat-tinged ham from the edge of Philly's white porcelain platter. Like most of the ordinary china in this house, it was decorated with large leaves around its edge, tobacco leaves Elizabeth had been told.
She smiled back at the slave and sipped her sugared tea, enjoying the warmth and smells of the low-ceilinged room with its dark beams and wrought iron gear. The kitchen had been extra busy all week with both the wide stone fireplace and deep brick oven seldom empty. Twenty were expected at the table this afternoon for a dinner of seven courses, and the pantry was already chock full of overflowing serving dishes and platters that would be warmed on the iron shelf hanging from the huge andirons. Ranks of dusty wine bottles stood on the side table, waiting to be polished clean and twisted open. Elizabeth had never seen so much food in one place and more was still being delivered at the rear entrance of the clapboard summer kitchen.
Because servants were preparing the dining room for the Christmas feast, hanging garlands and polishing everything including the crystals on the disassembled chandelier, Elizabeth was delegated to carry breakfast trays to the late-rising Conroy daughters. Philippa would take one to the new Mrs. Conroy, a short, prim woman who usually wore her light-colored hair piled high on her head. Elizabeth had nodded to her, guessing she was about fifty years old, but they had yet to speak to each other.
Extra help had arrived from the M'Kenna plantation down in Prince George's County along with smoked hams to be glazed and plucked birds to be roasted and from the ancient manse on the Shore came a barrel of oysters to be stewed plus two unsmiling, coal-black waiters who might well have been twins, mute twins with huge, tan hands. Men were busy waxing the long table's many leaves and fitting new, beeswax candles into all the sconces. Silver gleamed on one end of the cherry sideboard, and the gold-chased flatware was ready to be laid out from the other side table along with a huge pile of napkins. Elizabeth gulped down her food and donned a linen apron and starched cap.
Anne and Priscilla shared a room on the second floor of their father's square town house, a house that still smelled of its white plastered newness. They had been raised, Elizabeth soon learned, at the family's large tobacco farm on the Eastern Shore, in a big, wooden home with three chimneys and a row of dormer windows set into the edge of its tall, slate roof. It was called Pirate's Luck, Anne had told her with a laugh, two fingers to her lips. She went on to say that she never had been able to find out how her grandfather Conroy had made his fortune but that she had her suspicions since the house sat right on a blind curve of the Chester, one of those tidal rivers that led directly to the Bay. Now the young ladies sat at their dressing tables eating corn mush, buttered toast and fatty bacon curls and sipping pale, heavily sugared tea.
"I don' see why we couldn't have invited some of our friends," Anne complained, her mouth overfull of food. "Jus' old, fat-bellied big wigs and their smelly, gossipin' wives in fancy sacques an' monstrous petticoats, that's all we'll see." Her tongue's tip appeared briefly to flick in a golden crumb.
Priscilla glared at her. "For shame, how many times mus' you be told what this party means to father. These are troubled times. Things have been very, what shall we say, very unsteady since Lord Frederick up an' died. You know that, my girl, least you should. Father got on well with Governor Sharpe, but this new man has his own friends to take care of."
"But he's, he was Lord Baltimore's brother-in-law, right? An' Mr. Dulany and the others," Anne bit a piece of bacon and chewed on one side of her mouth while she talked out of the other, her auburn hair still tied in a multitude of small, white rags. "They must've spoken up for father. What's he want, that stuck-up new governor? After all they've named a whole county for his gawky wife an' the county seat for him, Edenton, imagine. Hmph." She wiped her fingers on the napkin that covered her lap and looked hungrily at her sister's untouched rasher of bacon.
"It may have been the old trouble with the minister, that Mr. Allen. Do you remember him?"
"Ho," said Anne waving her huge napkin at Elizabeth like a flag, "the one who preached drunk at St. Anne's, almost fell right out a'the pulpit one Sunday an' went around the colony with that strange woman he claimed was his sister. Ho ho, sister indeed!" She stuck out her slippered feet and spread her knees, tapping her toes to some internal song of joy.
"Yes, I didn't realize how much you heard of that. Mother always said you were one of those little pitchers with big ears. You were what back then, seven or eight?"
"Um hm, and he almost had a duel with Mr. Chew, an' didn't Walter Dulany beat him with his fists? Elizabeth, he did, thrashed the man right out there in the street, the minister in his frock coat and funny collar." Anne turned to look at the woman who stood by the window, her back now toward the harbor. "Liz'beth, it was so funny. They sent this smelly rector out to Frederick Town to get rid of him, an' the people there chased him away he was so bad. And now Mr. Boucher's in the soup over his pay, isn' he? And he's Governor Eden's man, so there." She snatched a piece of bacon from her sister's plate and gobbled it.
Elizabeth smiled at Anne's enthusiasm and obvious happiness. It was a pleasant season despite the growing governmental strife and rampant out-of-doors politics. She turned her mind quickly from the cold sea and her lost husband to her job, her present life, closing off thoughts of her possible future.
"Yes," said Priscilla, lifting her chin and stretching her thin neck, "but it's not just the money, it's more his outspoken ways. When someone made a toast saying he hoped Americans would all hang together, in general accord, Reverend Boucher responded that he prayed it would be a strong cord for the hanging."
"Well," Anne went on, still chewing, "poor father, he's a member of the vestry so he's caught in the middle. He says, well, it's hard to believe, but outside Annapolis many vestrymen are siding with the country party. Imagine! That's what you meant, isn' it, Meg?" She dropped her voice and put on a serious look after licking her fingertips.
"There's more to it, but yes, you're right, and now it's the question of how much all the ministers are to be paid, not just clerics, but people like our father. I think he gets £500 a year, and Mr. Dulany probably has £1500 from the list and Mr. Steuart gets at least two thousand at the land office. That's what's stirring people up. There's a lot of money involved."
"What was that crowd that went by 'ere last Saturday? What're they all upset about then, all that hootin' and cheering?" Elizabeth asked, resting her lean buttocks against the low window sill, at ease to be doing nothing.
"Oh, I don't know," Priscilla said, dabbing at her mouth and then finishing her tea, leaving the rest of her meal almost untouched. "The Assembly either did or did not do something they should have." She shook her head and pursed her lips to show her disgust. "That mob, and that's what it was, my dear Anne, you hear me, a mob, they are really frightenin' at times, despite the fact that there are some well-dressed men and even barristers among the rabble. This had something to do with tobacco inspection. I'm sure I don't understand." She folded her napkin on her knee and took a deep breath somewhat theatrically.
"They were yelling 'bout taxes," Anne said, brushing out her hair with unrestrained energy and tossing cloth ties to the floor with abandon. "I heard them, saw their signs, an' some of the boys from the school were right in the middle of it."
"You didn't go out there!" said her sister with mock alarm.
"I certainly did," Anne said, looking pugnacious and bouncing on her chair. "I pulled on my cape and hood. I could've joined, and they'd never known who I was. I could've paraded right up to the Liberty Tree with 'em."
"Haw, unless they looked at your brocaded shoes, my girl," Priscilla said. "I bet you still had those fancy French buckles on, didn't you."
Anne did not answer but turned back to what little was left of her food.
"One of the boys she likes is a Whig," Priscilla explained to Elizabeth. Despite her servant status, the Conroy girls generally treated the bonds-woman as just another young lady with whom to share gossip and secrets, and Elizabeth enjoyed their talk and jokes although she did not always understand the subject matter or the politics.
"He is not," Anne cried, spraying toast crumbs on the carpet. "His family and the Pacas are good friends, and Mr. Paca and Father are both on the governor's council, so there, smarty. An' besides, you're sweet on that fat, stuck up Dulany. And, an' he's a smelly prig. That's worse."
"Well, Billy Fields is nothing but a Whig and a trouble-maker and a scoundrel, and you best stay away from him at the dances this winter," said Priscilla.
"He's not, but he did tell me that his father's in the Association," Anne almost whispered as though it were a deep and dangerous secret. She attempted to train a hank of auburn hair to curl down to her shoulder, cocking her head to the side as she studied the effect in her mirror.
"What's that?" Elizabeth asked. "The Association?"
"I don't know," Anne said, shaking her head from side to side and admiring the result. "But it's important."
"That's the bunch of incendiaries that tries to keep people from buying English goods," Priscilla said. "And they are no friends of ours or father's or of our governor or good King George for that matter. They preach rebellion and sedition and so does the smug, young Mr. Fields with his buck teeth."
The Christmas dinner went on for several hours and after the ladies left for the parlor and the double table cloth had been removed, the gentlemen continued their talk and drinking well into the evening under a lowering veil of pungent tobacco smoke. The servants quickly cleaned up the leftovers, washed and stored the china and silver that was only used for extra-fine entertaining, and moonrise saw the borrowed slaves and their goods off for a long, cold ride back to the keep called M'Kenna's Disappointment down on the Patuxent.
Once the last guests had departed and the guttering candles were snuffed, Elizabeth retreated to her small room and wondered about several things she had heard that day, including Priscilla's explanation of the mob in the street. The slaves had done all the serving with a black man in a clean white shirt and waistcoat standing behind each gentleman's chair all during the meal. With Elizabeth's help, Bess and Philippa had carried the laden platters to and from the dining room, but were not allowed to enter.
The M'Kenna's ancient butler and Moses, the townhouse major domo, did that service with stoic grace. Elizabeth was stationed just outside the dining room door to signal for the next course, carry off dirty dishes and to fetch needed refills of bowls and platters. There she overheard bits and pieces of various conversations, and now in her chilly garret with her quilt pulled up to her chin, the indentured woman began to put some of these pieces together while she absentmindedly fingered one of her treasured buttons and rubbed her cold feet against each other.
Smuggling was part of many Marylanders' ordinary way of life, she concluded, just as it had been for some of her neighbors back in Cornwall. She had heard men, and a few women, chuckle and even laugh in a coarse manner about the source of some of the delicacies and wines being brought to the table as well as the fancy clothes they wore. One man bragged about how well his ships were doing in trade with the Dutch and their islands in the Caribbean, and another said that many a brig leaving Annapolis and cleared for England never made it past Spain, Portugal or the Azores. "Rum an' sugar an' slaves, by damn," one overwrought guest had cried out in a sing-song manner, "they bring far more than tobacco, pig iron and lumber, no matter what the foggy Parliament says."
Then there was something about Boston and tea that brought general anger to the dining room after the ladies had departed to discuss jeweled stomachers, a notorious play at the new theater and the latest fashion babies from Paris. A tall man in a gold-trimmed uniform brought the news which he said reached Maryland in less than ten days from Massachusetts. Elizabeth had stood with her right ear against the door for several minutes, but had not be able to figure out what they were so upset about. What had gone on in Boston? She did hear someone say that the story had spread faster than ever before, like "wildfire." Many asked what was going to happen, and Mr. Conroy had called it the "last straw." Mystified, Elizabeth had moved on to other chores.
Governor Eden had been the subject of several broken conversations. "Eden hopes for reconciliation," Millard Conroy firmly stated from the table's head. "He believes in soothing measures, and so do I." Some, including white-haired Mr. Paca, the guest of honor since Colonel Sharpe had been called back to England, thought the new governor wise and brave while others, for reasons Elizabeth did not understand, compared him to General Braddock and one said that he was "pig-headed dragoon" and that he drank too freely. Elizabeth had never heard of Braddock nor of the Coldsteam Guards for that matter who seemed to march constantly in and out of that off-and-on debate.
And finally much of the table talk both before and after the cloth was drawn was about what was often called "sot-weed." Elizabeth concluded that the Maryland Assembly had recently passed an act for tobacco inspection, which most thought was good and important if Maryland was to compete with Virginia, but had not included a list of ministers' fees. Opinion was loudly divided on the merits of that action or inaction.
As the dinner had gone on and the wine flowed more freely, the volume and tone of the conversations became much more animated. She actually saw a red-faced guest strike the table and say, quite loudly, that a company of Redcoats could take care of the Annapolis mob without firing a shot. "Cold steel's what they deserve," he snarled to general approval and several cries of "hear him."
Agitated and unable to sleep, Elizabeth left her bed with her quilt about her thin shoulders and stood before her dormer window. She looked up at the cold, lonely moon with its huge circle of crystal haze. She picked up her other brass buttons from the shelf and wondered where Matthew was and how he was getting on as she ran her thumb over their patterned faces. She hoped that he could deal with his lack of freedom, and she realized that she was having some problems in coping with hers. She tried to pray, lifting her eyes above the glowing moon, but she failed; her attention wandered. She felt lost, abandoned.
At home, in Cornwall, out of necessity, many young men and women went into service for a year at a time; she had several relatives who had done that, but here she was little different from the black house slaves or even the rural field hands and so was Matthew. She tried to picture his rough-hewn, freshly-shaved face and failed, able to recall only the breadth of his chest and the stubble on his hard chin. She crawled under her thin quilt and held the cool buttons between her breasts, wishing they were his hand, someone's hand. She conjured up her childhood dream knight, heard his horse approaching on the cobbled street, smiled and slept.
The next morning, Elizabeth asked Philippa and her mother if they had figured out all the excitement about Boston. It had not taken the white servant very long to learn that slaves had some sort of wholly invisible and very rapid network of communication.
"Oh, all that's jes' foolishment," the broad-backed cook said without looking up from her hearth and the spitted birds she was basting.
"But why were they so excited, carryin' on like crows?" Elizabeth asked, sipping her morning tea.
"Answer's right there in your han'," Philly said.
"What, tea?"
"Yes, tea," the young woman nodded and went on about her work.
"Ast them white gals," Bess said, " when they gets up."
"I will. Look Bess, what am I supposed to do in this house then? Nobody's given me a real job."
"Not my say so," said the large woman, putting down her long-handled spoon and wiping her chapped hands on her apron. "You was hurt when you got here, but you right, time for having reg'lar work. Ast them two girls or their new momma. She the one with the say-so in this house."
"I've only seen 'er once, I think. She likely don't even know I'm here."
"She know. Her job to know."
An hour later the Conroy daughters came down for their breakfast, and Elizabeth took the opportunity to talk with them. She stood by the sideboard rubbing a serving spoon with a soft cloth while they ate, and she offered them more tea and toast when it was needed.
"Did you hear people talk 'bout trouble in Boston?" Elizabeth asked after the girls' rapid fire discussion of women's hair, pocket hoops, brocaded sacque dresses, secret pregnancies, naval officers and silken petticoats had died down.
"Yes, of course," Priscilla said. "Those foolish Yankees have gone much too far this time."
"What happened?" asked Elizabeth. "And aren't you all Yankees then, you colonials?"
"Certainly not. It's just Adams and those crazy New Englanders," Priscilla said. "Boston's the worst."
"Yes," Anne chimed in, "they've blown up a ship or burned down a warehouse or sacked the governor's library, something terrible and stupid. It's like that 'massacre' thing."
"No, not exactly, Anne," said her sister. "You were too busy making eyes at that tall leftenant to have paid any real attention to the news."
"I was not," Anne said. "And besides, he's much too old, probably twenty. And what were you and fat James Dulany goin' on about with your hands under the table?"
"Who is too old?" asked Mrs. Conroy as she floated into the room in her lace cap and silken morning robe and took her usual seat at the far end of the table, regal in pink and white. Elizabeth ducked out the door and signaled to the kitchen that she was down and then returned to her post and her polishing rag.
"Elizabeth was asking about Boston, ma'am," Anne was saying.
"I see. Well Elizabeth, we are happy to see you looking so well. The young ladies have told me how you helped them aboard the Janet Lune. We must find a proper position for you, I think, now that our friend and neighbor Upton Scott says you are fit enough to work."
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