April 1799
For once, John White has an evening free of childish squabbles and marital nagging. The house is silent. Russell and his sister, bless them both, are giving the children supper and keeping them overnight. Miss Russell is showing Ellen a new embroidery stitch for a reticule they are making together. Russell and the boys are looking at insects under his new microscope. Russell, who has quite an interest in scientific experiments, is a good influence on Charles and William. Charles has started talking more of late, so enthusiastic is he about the insect specimens he and his brother have collected on these hot spring days. They have also found some tadpoles, and Russell is helping them track the creatures’ metamorphosis into frogs.
As for Marianne, she has gone to play whist at Mrs. Powell’s house. The judge’s wife will keep her in line. No gambling or indiscreet behaviour will take place under that formidable woman’s eye.
So he is free to try on his new frock coat of blue velvet. He turns round and round in front of the pier glass, admiring the fit of the shoulders and the way the back hangs. He’s run up quite a tally with the tailor Otto, but the velvet collar and cannon buttons are worth it. His head looks so much better now that he has given up powdered wigs. And the lace cravat is perfect. Really, he cuts quite a figure. There’s the cost of this rig, of course, but he’s hopeful that his brother-in-law will be able to help him with a loan, though he hasn’t heard from Sam for far too long.
Mrs. Page comes in with a cup of tea just as he is taking one last swing in front of the mirror. For a moment, he is embarrassed to have her discover him in self-admiration. But when she says, “Quite dashing, sir,” her voice is sincere and entirely free of irony. On impulse he offers her his arm, and the two of them break into a waltz in front of the pier glass. They spin round and round the room, happy together in the moment. Then she breaks away, curtsies, and leaves the room, her face flushed but smiling. A pleasant woman, and pretty, in her way. Somehow big breasts and tiny waists no longer attract me the way they once did.
He puts on a loose silk gown and settles himself in his favourite armchair. These warm spring nights are lovely. For three weeks now, he has not had to light the fireplaces and thus he is no longer troubled by the cough that the stink of smoke brings on. He puts his feet up on the stool and plucks a book from the parcel that arrived this day. The waterways now being open, communication between York and the outer world is again possible.
He is laughing over the ballad of John Gilpin and his runaway horse when he hears a loud thumping on the front door. Opening it, he finds John Small, now a magistrate of the town, standing on the step. Behind Small is a strange little man in a mask. Small grabs this person by the shoulder and thrusts him through the doorway.
“Look to your responsibilities, White,” he says in a loud and arrogant voice. “I have had a fine run-around with this little rowdy tonight. There should be a bloody rule against these damned shenanigans. If you weren’t the Attorney-General, I’d have laid charges.” And with that statement, Small marches down the front walk into the darkness.
White gawks, open-mouthed, at the figure crouching on the carpet before him. Then he leans over and yanks the man to his feet, staring at the filthy masked face and dirty clothing. He’s wearing a broad straw hat, plain shirt, and leather breeches covered with a heavy fabric apron. Is he a butcher? Why is he here? White grabs the candle from the hall table and looks again. Not a butcher. His wife.
“What is this, woman? You went out of here at seven o’clock dressed in your tea gown. You told me you were playing whist with Mrs. Powell. What has happened?”
Stripped of her whimperings and excuses, her story boils down to this: she has lied to him about everything. The evening with Mrs. Powell was a clever piece of fiction. Though she went out the front door dressed in her tea gown, she went straight to a tavern where she met Peggy, Miss Russell’s maid, who was waiting with the butcher’s disguise. In a room in the tavern—her presence there no doubt observed by all and sundry—she changed from the respectable wife of the Attorney-General into a common butcher.
“Why? Why?”
“I wanted to have some fun, husband. You surely cannot think that I would have fun with that bullying harridan and her deck of cards?”
He wants to slap her, but he breathes deeply and tries to keep control. “And what stupidity did your notion of fun lead you into?”
“When I was ready in my butcher costume, I waited at the front door of the tavern. Then two carriages of men from the garrison—do not look so shocked, Mr. White, yes, from the garrison where you waste so many hours—picked me up and took me to a . . .”
“A what, for God’s sake?”
“A shivaree.”
Lord, a shivaree. White knows all about shivarees: a cursed custom that came across the border with the United Empire Loyalists and the rest of those damned Yankee upstarts.
“Old Mahoney, the butcher, died just after I arrived here, remember?”
He does remember something about the man severing an artery during an encounter with his knife while he was cutting up a carcass. “But so what? Get to the point.”
“His wife, she’s sixty-two, and this day she married Mahoney’s apprentice. He’s twenty-five. Wanted to have a second ‘go,’ I suppose.”
Well, he can almost picture the next part. Shivarees always involve shenanigans by local louts who show up at a married couple’s house on their first night, banging pots and pans and demanding money or booze to go away and leave the honeymooners in peace.
“It was a fine old ruckus, they made,” Marianne tells him, now in full flight as she recounts the details. “The men from the garrison put their uniforms on back to front and stuck feathers in their hair like the redskins. Oh it was funny what they did. They banged and banged with their drums and rang cowbells until the apprentice came to the door. ‘Give us money for whisky or we’ll stay here the whole night,’ they said. And he had to give in and hand over some coins to spend in the tavern.”
“And what was your part in all this?”
“Why . . . why . . . I was the ghost.”
“The what?” But do I really want to know the worst? He remembers that sometimes, on these lamentable occasions, if it is a second marriage, the hoodlums bring along an open coffin in which lies a person dressed as the first spouse. Surely the woman, for all her stupidity, would not stoop to this?
But of course she has. “When the young man opened the door, I stood up in the coffin and said I was old Mahoney come back to take revenge on their marriage.” And after a pause in which he wonders how he can face up to the shame of it all, she adds, “Oh husband, the look on his face . . . it was so funny.” A hiccough bursts from her, carrying with it the stench of cheap whisky.
There’s more, I know: the hours afterwards in the tavern drinking with the garrison rowdies, the drunken carousing, the appearance on the scene of John Small, magistrate . . . But I can’t hear another word.
“Get to bed, wife. I can stand no more.”
“But nothing really happened that you must worry about. The children need not know, surely.”
“The whole town will know by tomorrow, idiot woman. Do you think the soldiers at the garrison will keep it quiet? Or John Small, for that matter? Can you not imagine the joy his wife will feel to hear it all?” He puts his fingers on the bridge of his nose to stop the nosebleed he feels coming on. “This is the last straw.”