The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (3 page)

I recalled the day my brother Tom, my companion in travel, and I had entered Worcester—an industrious town of woollen and cotton mills—feeling hopeful, as if our luck were turning for the better once again after a bad day in Fitchburg. Even the broad, tree-lined streets with handsome buildings and shops, a perfectly delightful, well-shaded Common, and surrounding undulant hills with well-regulated homes and farms seemed to welcome us.

“Spaulding and Harrington,” from
Worcester Business Directory for 1842–43.
Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

We no sooner saw our own advertisement for taking likenesses in the newspaper late the next afternoon than a most prosperous-looking gentleman called. It was immediately clear to us that he had his suspicions about traveling painters. While we sat on the settee in the sitting room of our lodging house, Mr. Augustus Dudley asked if we knew of “this fellow Grimmage, Mr. Jason Grimmage, a limner like yourselves.”

We were pleased to say we knew nothing about him; Mr. Dudley's manner suggested that his association with Grimmage was not a happy one.

“A most ridiculous and disrespectful fellow, this Grimmage,” he said. “My wife nearly boxed the man's ears; she sent him packing in no uncertain terms! I can tell you that.”

“How dreadful for you and Mrs. Dudley, sir,” I offered. “Was his work so poor as that?”

“We never discovered the measure of his work, for he was most intemperate.”

“Ah, I see, sir,” I said, “and that was his offense, then. Mrs. Dudley did well to send him away directly.”

“His commission was to paint a family portrait and one each of me and Mrs. Dudley. But at each sitting he seemed more intoxicated than at the last. So on the third attempt we threw him out.”

We conversed for some time, and eventually Mr. Dudley seemed satisfied with our deportment and offered to accompany us to see his manufactory, which he wished to be evidenced in his own portrait. The mill was located below the town in one of the many villages on the south-flowing Blackstone River. And his splendid home, where he wished us to take the sittings, was on a rise nearby, among the farms neatly enclosed by fence and fold. His portrait alone was my most handsome commission yet, and I expected to spend nearly three days on it. Since we would need to stay on a considerable time to execute all the work he had in mind, Mr. Dudley offered us lodging, with only the cost of our meals to be deducted from the commissions.

It was late in the second day of his sitting that I began, from sketch-studies, the depiction of his mills through a handsomely draped window. The mills were white clapboarded buildings, with the main building topped by a cupola and a full clerestory monitor roof. Here was a man who had weathered the financial storms that had undone so many others, including Tom's former employer, and who clearly intended his portrait to celebrate his emergence as a commercial patrician with whom the world must now reckon.

It was at the end of the second sitting that I met his eldest son, Joseph, who entered to see how the portrait was progressing as his father was leaving to attend to more important affairs. I had just turned my attention to the representation of his mills. Mr. Dudley introduced us, but I felt as though I already knew the young man. For his father had spoken to me proudly of his family, and especially of this eldest son among eight children who were the products of his three marriages. His first wife had died of the consumption, his second in childbirth. It was Joseph who worked alongside his father in their textile business.

He was a handsome young man, and he knew it, but given to an inordinance of pomatum and Old West India bay water, to a stiffness of waistcoat, a tightness of trouser, and an exorbitance of silk cravats. And he was quick-witted. I knew, however, of his betrothal to the daughter of a prominent judge. Moreover, I found rather discomposing his one immobile glass eye—which his father had informed me was the result of a factory accident. It detracted nothing from his agreeable appearance but added a slight, inexplicably sinister element to his aspect. As soon as his father left the room we discussed the portrait briefly, and then Mr. Joseph asked after “my husband”—meaning Tom. I explained my situation as a widow and my true relation to Tom, who was out posting handbills in the city. Thereafter, Mr. Joseph grew attentive toward me. I had no idea just how things stood between him and his betrothed, but his behavior seemed improvidently forward.

As he fumbled with his watch chain and seals in departing, he had the face to ask if I would walk out with him after tea to enjoy the cooler evening air, a summer habit, he assured me, of his own. I made no promises but let him talk on. He confirmed, also, that I would be staying on somewhat longer to take a likeness of his mother, and he suggested that Tom and I might do well to advertise among the mill girls, whether in the village or elsewhere, for portraits.

That evening Mr. Augustus Dudley seemed pleased to have us at his table, spread over a Saxony carpet and laid with every silver goblet, spoon, knife, and fork imaginable, with every bright French china vase, silver tureen, olive boat, plate, and compotier. He and Tom conversed much of business, the recent financial debacle, and current machinery of textile manufacturing. At one point while we were with the Dudleys, Mr. Dudley did indeed offer Tom work in his mills, but my faithful brother declined, saying that he had promised his devotion to my own success and that a gentleman could hardly leave such a “comely and talented young widow to fend for herself on the open road.” Nevertheless, Tom suggested, he would be pleased to consider the offer if extended again once my independence had been assured.

During these mealtime colloquia, I found myself engaged mostly by young Joseph and Mrs. Dudley. On the evening before our final day, Joseph renewed his invitation to walk out with him in the evening, and because I had seen that he did regularly take the cool air after his evening meal, and because I had come to make his acquaintance a little better, I saw no harm in it.

The evening was lovely, the moon casting a white iridescence over everything it touched. In the distance whippoorwills called and everywhere crickets sang their love songs in that great thrumming of the night, as if moonlight and cricket song were the obverse of sunlight and the throbbing of bees among summer blossoms. Had any of our artists, I wondered for a moment, ever quite captured on canvas this effect of unearthly moonlight laid gently upon our terrestrial surface, that enwhitened American landscape punctuated only by the shadows of houses, barns, and trees? Even the divine Allston generalizes.

“You are warm enough, Mrs. Fullerton?” Joseph asked as I admired his mother's blue-and-white planting bed at the center of her garden, which was all the more striking for the moonlight.

“Quite. It's a lovely summer's eve.”

“All the more so for your company,” he said.

I remained silent. I supposed he might mean no harm; a certain forwardness seemed to be his natural manner, or perhaps what he had been bred to by so enterprising a father.

“Your father tells me,” I began as we walked on, “that you are to be married soon.” He hesitated. “You must feel elevated at the prospect.”

“Not particularly,” he said. “You see, I've known the young lady all my life; we were at times playmates as young children. She's an eminently worthy person, and makes for me an excellent marriage, but we are, so to speak, fulfilling the enduring expectations of others more than our own inclinations.”

“I'm sure that knowing one another so well, you'll learn to love lastingly, as do so many others in time. Familiarity merely allays infatuation.”

“Ah, you are no doubt right, Mrs. Fullerton. Why don't we rest a moment here,” he said, indicating the fanciful wrought-iron garden bench separating two large flower gardens. “I don't wish to tire you at this hour.”

“I'm not at all tired, Mr. Dudley. But we may sit if you like.”

He turned the conversation to his plans for the family properties and business, which one day he would pass on to an heir of his own as an estate enlarged beyond even his father's ambitions.

He seemed a little too insistent in pressing upon me his future prospects, and he hinted of my own appeal to him, all in spite of his betrothal. At length, he began to insinuate that he had experienced certain interludes, of a questionable nature I had no doubt, with several available young women. I tried to change the tack of his conversation, but with little effect. For he suddenly turned to me and took my hand, with a remarkable delicacy I seemed unable to shun, and looked into my eyes.

“Does not a beautiful widow such as yourself, Mrs. Fullerton, suffer the absence of a husband's tendernesses?”

“What I suffer, sir, is my own affair, and hardly any concern of yours.”

It was then that he stole a kiss. He was most insistent, as if he were used to women's pliancy. He quickly stood up as I pulled back from him, but he retained my hand and kept his good eye on mine. I admit that he was shockingly handsome in the moonlight, especially in his moment of passion, but I could hardly let this man have the advantage of me, even though he had most likely had the advantage of nearly everything and everyone he desired. I was not about to become another of his playthings.

Yet he was relentless, the grasp of his hand had grown alarmingly forceful, and I began to fear my situation, as we were completely alone in the garden and some distance from the manse. Moreover, as he stood before me like a passionate hero in some giddy tale, it was clear that he was most certainly aroused and capable of almost anything.

I confess I felt an unsettling mixture of terror and excitement for a moment. Here stood the first man to confront me with his feelings since I cast off my weeds in favor of the open road and the unrestrained practice of my humble arts. Here stood the first man, indeed, to seize my hand—nay, my arm—in passion since the loss of my husband whose many tendernesses I sorely missed, as young Mr. Dudley's words had so starkly reminded me.

I now saw clearly my own weaknesses, and I saw further that Mr. Dudley was a man adept at perceiving the weaknesses and wounds in another. That he was not above utilizing for his own gratification what he perceived in others was now equally clear to me. I suddenly stood up and backed away a step, yet his hand still clutched mine.

“Mrs. Fullerton,” he said, “there is a summer house, completely private I assure you, just over here.”

“Mr. Dudley, you behave like a precocious child, with no concern for the effects of your behavior upon others. I must insist that you allow me to return to my room. Please do not follow. I will complete the promised portraits of your father and mother, and then be on my way.”

He pulled me toward him, as if to interrupt my little lecture on his behavior, whereupon I gave a small cry of surprise. At that very moment, dear Tom, who had come out to see what kept us, stepped in between Mr. Dudley and me and calmly threatened to spoil that young man's face to such an extent that no woman would look at him twice ever again.

“And you may count your blessings, sir,” Tom added, “if I do not expose your brutal actions toward this innocent woman to your father.”

Young Mr. Dudley evinced the slightest sneer of contempt, turned on his heel, and walked briskly away.

I lay troubled all that night. And how was I to remain calm the following day as my generous patrons sat before me while I completed their portraits?

But the next morning I arose early, set Tom to priming three canvases with a base coat of light gray, and went directly into the sitting room where I was to finish Mr. Dudley's portrait. I adjusted the damask draperies as I knew he desired, set up my easel, palette, and maul stick, and steeled myself to complete these commissions expeditiously. Indeed, I completed his before noon, and worked on Mrs. Dudley's from about two o'clock.

She chose to sit in her favorite room (the music room on the second floor, with prodigious mahogany gilt mirrors and a rosewood pianoforte) where she had arranged a satin daybed before a large window, swag-curtained in double silks, that looked out over her gardens. Here she sat in her modest, pleasing manner, wearing a bright blue, tight-waisted gown set off by a stunning necklace of coral beads, as if to charm away any intrusion of bad luck or evil in her life. At first she engaged me in pleasant if trivial conversation about her children, her garden, and fashion—commenting particularly upon my own habit of simple dress.

“Few,” she offered approvingly, “have the grace and trim to be so free of artificial compressions about the waist, of binding ligatures that prevent the natural movement of one's limbs. You are a most fortunate and unusual young woman, Mrs. Fullerton.” She smiled.

“I sometimes feel a little unusual, Mrs. Dudley, but hardly ever fortunate.” I returned her smile.

“I hope my stepson has behaved well, Mrs. Fullerton. I suspect he might be a little distracted by you.”