Regency Christmas Gifts (13 page)

Trust Margaret to concoct a scenario favorable
to her. “That won’t do,” Sally said.

“
It will if I say so.”

Sally sank down beside her friend, wishing she
had never agreed to write Margaret’s letters, and at the same time,
grateful she had been part of John’s North American adventure.
Without even knowing it, he had opened a window on a wider world
she knew existed, but which she never thought to see, except
through someone else’s eyes.
I can be philosophical
, she
told herself, even as she wanted to push Margaret aside and pull
the coverlets up, too. She took Margaret’s hands in
hers.

“
He’s going to come here, and you
are going to tell him the truth,” she said, using her teacher voice
as though she were advising an eight-year-old, which somehow seemed
appropriate. “He’ll be humiliated and leave Dumfries as soon as he
can. Your fiancé will never know, and we will regret having played
such a deception on a good man.”

It sounded reasonable. It sounded rational, but
oh, the pain in her heart. She knew it had to be impossible to fall
in love with someone through a handful of widely spaced letters.
Once John heard the worst from Margaret, he wouldn’t linger in
Dumfries longer than to see his ramshackle relatives—if any still
lived—and be grateful he got out with a whole skin.

“
It’s only John McPherson,” Margaret
said with a sniff, her expression militant now. “No McPherson has
ever amounted to anything.”

Tired of Margaret Patterson, Sally rose to go.
“You started this and you can settle it.”

“
You are no friend,” Margaret
snapped. “Kindly do not bother to show up at my
wedding.”

“
As you wish,” Sally murmured. “Do
the right thing, Margaret. For once, do the right
thing.”

***

John McPherson stayed in Bristol for three
days, walking the waterfront, eating in good restaurants, and
remembering the lean days when he arrived in Bristol, poor but
determined not to remain that way.

This visit to the principal port on the west
coast of England was night and day, compared to his unheralded
arrival in a rainstorm, cold and trying to stay out of everyone’s
way. He had been hungry—he was always hungry—and swiped two apples
and a pear from a vendor near the waterfront.

He remembered that thievery and walked the
waterfront until he located the market with the tables of fruit
empty now. He went inside and removed his beaver hat, looking
around for the owner.

“
Sir? May I help you?” said a man
wearing a dingy apron over his work clothes.

He spoke with a deference that startled John,
even though he knew he looked the part of a gentleman, from that
beaver hat, to a suit of unmistakable American cut, to his
well-shined shoes. For a small moment, he had been remembering
himself thin and starving, and dressed in shabby clothes that
hadn’t been washed in months.

“
Help me? Yes, you may,” he said,
recalled to the moment. He reached into his coat pocket for his
wallet and drew out a pound note. “Eight years ago, I stole two
apples and a pear from you because I hadn’t eaten since Carlisle.
Please take this and give me no change. I owe you considerable
interest on that loan.”

The merchant stared at the pound note, but took
it. He was a shop owner, after all. Christmas loomed and he had
three hopeful children. “This will constitute the first time a
beggar boy has done such a thing, so I thank’ee,” he told
John.

“
I’ve thought about it through the
years,” John replied. “I didn’t mean to be a thief.” He replaced
his hat and left the market.

His next visit was to a purveyor of Bristol’s
famous blue beads. He bought a single strand and had it wrapped in
pretty paper while he waited.

“
For your missus?” the jeweler
asked. He motioned for his young shop assistant to press down her
finger to make the bow tight.

My missus?
John thought.
We shall
see.
“Perhaps,” he told the man.

A visit to a bookstore consumed more time. He
scanned the shelves, still amazed that he could purchase any volume
he wanted. He settled on Jedediah Cleishbotham’s
The Heart of
Midlothian
in four volumes, wondering why Walter Scott still
used a pseudonym.

The bookseller recommended a book containing
both
Persuasion
and
Northanger Abbey
, “by a
respectable lady, sir,” the man assured him. Reasoning that all
play and no work would make Jack an even duller boy, he bought a
new tome,
A History of British India
, probably destined to
put him to sleep. It might prove useful if any of the inns he slept
in going north had noisy public rooms, making sleep
difficult.

Dusk was fading quickly to evening, even though
the hour hadn’t advanced much beyond four of the clock. He ate a
good dinner, popped into the posting house to make certain all was
ready for an early departure, and returned to his hotel.

He spent a few minutes in a deep leather chair
in the lobby, reading the
Bristol Chronicle
. He had acquired
the newspaper habit in New York City. As he read, he heard the inn
keep talking to another traveler. He heard whispered “American,”
and “going north to Scotland,” and knew he was the object in
question.

So I look like an American, he thought, with
quiet pride. I wonder who Margaret will see, the man of business or
the raggedy lad who left?

He thought of little Sally Wilson, who had seen
him off to seek his fortune, sitting on the back of a hay wain, and
wondered if she would even recognize him. Of the two young ladies,
he thought that Sally would be the least surprised to know of his
success, even though he sent his letters to Margaret Patterson. He
had a theory about that; time to test it.

Travel by post chaise was far superior to the
hay wain. It was certainly a stride in seven league boots from
travel in the backwoods of the new United States, which meant days
on teeth-rattling corduroy roads made of logs, or horseback for
weeks on roads that were barely trails. He preferred the canals of
New York State, and even the flatboats on the Ohio River to
stagecoach. At least there wasn’t much worry from Indians, pushed
farther and farther toward the unexplored West near
Missouri.

John read and dozed, and then gazed at the
alternating rain, drizzle, and snow as they traveled on roads that
the Romans had probably laid down years ago, if he remembered
aright the lessons from Mr. Wilson, minister of St. George’s
Church. He thought of Mrs. Agatha Wilson, who had left this vale of
tears two years ago, according to one of Margaret’s letters. Yes,
he would certainly have to pay a visit to Reverend Wilson and
Sally.

Evenings in the inns were lonely for such a
gregarious man as John McPherson. This trip served to remind him of
the great gulf in England separating those served and those
serving. Left to his newly acquired American ways, he would have
dined with his post riders and played cards with them in the public
room.

He had timidly suggested such an evening to one
of the riders, who shook his head sorrowfully. “Maybe in America,
but not here, sir,” the man had said. His following question
sounded wistful to John. “Would such a thing happen in the United
States?”

“
All the time,” John replied,
missing his new country with surprising longing. The post rider
walked away, shaking his head.

They arrived in Dumfries late in the afternoon.
The innkeeper at the Garland Hotel—a place he would never have
dared enter eight years ago—moved smartly to assure him of a room
with dry sheets with a warming pan between them.

“
You’ll be staying for a few days,
sir?” the man asked, again with that deference that John was
beginning to find uncomfortable.

“
A few days.”

“
You’re here for the wedding,
sir?”

“
No. Just to visit a few old
friends,” John replied. “A wedding?”

“
Aye, Mr. … Mr. ….” The
keep turned around the ledger. “Mr. McPherson. Miss Margaret
Patterson is marrying a foreigner from England on Christmas
Eve.”

Margaret, Margaret
, John thought, more
amused than surprised, somehow. Funny that she never mentioned such
a life-changing event in her letters. Perhaps it was sudden. It
occurred to him that even with his little note sent from Bristol,
she had not been expecting him, which nearly made him laugh out
loud.

Once he had applied a chapter of
History of
British India
to his brain, he slept the sleep of the pure in
heart. The book had proved surprisingly useful on his trip. Before
he drifted off, he wondered what Margaret would say when he knocked
on her door in the morning.

He enjoyed a leisurely breakfast at the
Garland, then strolled to the Patterson mansion on the edge of
Dumfries. A cold mist fell, reminding him there were some things he
would never miss about Scotland.

He had never even approached the Patterson
manse before, basing all his knowledge of it on a lengthy,
tree-lined private road and a mere glimpse of a stone house beyond.
Skeletal limbs and a few tired leaves tossed here and there would
be his memory now.

He gave a firm knock to a door he never thought
to enter, and was let inside, after a brief explanation, by a
footman who would have shooed him away ten years ago. He found it
gratifying, if a little sad, that no one so far in Dumfries had
recognized him. His life here as one of the ramshackle McPhersons
had amounted to nothing. Put a man in a good suit, low-crowned
beaver hat, and a cloak, and the world opens wide.

I am the same man I was
, he thought, as
he was shown into a sitting room, after leaving said cloak and hat
with the footman.
I am older and wiser, but I am the same
man
.

He looked around the lovely room and went to
the fireplace, because his hands were cold. No, not just his hands.
The room gave off no warmth. A more comforting memory came to mind
of the parsonage at St. George’s, book-filled and untidy with paper
clutter. He had been there a time or two, right after the death of
his mother, whom no one lamented except the McPhersons, because no
one took the trouble to know her kindness amid squalor. He turned
away from the fireplace. Such thoughts were unprofitable. He was
here to test a theory.

Someone cleared her throat and he looked up.
Margaret Patterson stood in the doorway, as lovely as he remembered
her at age fifteen when she approached him and said she wanted to
write to him in Canada. Suspicious, he assumed it was a prank, but
the hunger to belong had made him agree to her nonsense.

The letters had come to him through the years,
kept in the North West Company office in Montreal until a fur
trader was heading in his direction, and then in New York City.
They had been his lifeline; he had kept every one.

“
Margaret Patterson, you have not
changed even a little,” he said, and gave her a proper
bow.

To his amusement, she gawked at him, looking
less lovely and self-possessed. Her curtsy was proper, but
perfunctory. She looked both put upon and irritated, which he
charitably put down to her surprise at actually seeing that man she
had corresponded with for a decade. She gestured to the
hall.

“
Mr. McPherson, my father wants to
have a word with you. I’ll be here in the sitting room.”

Surprised, he followed her gesture and then a
footman down the hall to what turned out to be a bookroom. He was
now in the presence of the great Mr. Milo Patterson, who could
squeeze a penny until it yelped in pain and slunk to a dark corner
to nurse its wounds. Patterson had owned that pathetic scrap of
land the McPhersons farmed and showed no sympathy when Mam died.
What do you want with me
, he asked himself as he bowed and
was left standing in front of the desk like a sorry
petitioner.

“
What are you doing here?” the big
man growled, with no preamble.

No, not a big man. Mr. Patterson’s shirt looked
too large for him. John smiled at a rather ordinary-looking fellow
who appeared to be ill. He was small and the possessor of a
pinched, sour expression. John wondered why he had ever feared him.
And, come to think of it, his expression mirrored
Margaret’s.

“
I thought merely to visit Miss
Patterson,” John replied. “I am now situated in New York City and
work for Mr. John Astor as a purveyor of furs for the European
market. My life has changed significantly since
Dumfries.”

And then he was asked, in kinder tones, to sit
down and say more, which he did, stifling his amusement as Mr.
Patterson decided he was worth talking to. He told the man of his
own personal fortune, and his growing career with America’s largest
global corporation.

“
I came here to say hello again to
Miss Patterson,” John concluded. “She was always so kind to me in
school, and I never forgot.” A little lie in the interest of
self-preservation couldn’t hurt.

“
Do go see her, John … Mr.
McPherson,” the little man said, rising to shake his hand, even
bowing a bit. “Please stay for luncheon.”