One Glorious Ambition (21 page)

“She has already sent me a note. She asked me to come and be her mother.” Couldn’t they see how the girl longed for Dorothea to claim her? Why wasn’t she here?

“She already calls me Auntie,” the maiden cousin told her. The woman’s pinched eyes shone greedily inside a face with cheeks dotted red.

Dorothea felt that same slow seethe that had brewed inside her all the years she stitched her father’s tracts. She named it
powerlessness
. Marianna, too, was a pawn and not allowed to choose her destiny. She was aware that the cousins all stood and were waiting for her to leave as well. She did not stand, however. She was not finished.

“Why not let Marianna decide?”

The male cousin stopped at the door, his hand on the gold knob. “She has no say. She is a girl.”

The solicitor shrugged his shoulders.

The cousins filed out, and after a few moments of silence, the solicitor asked if Dorothea was all right.

“I will be.” Her hands shook. She didn’t know if it was a lie.

She made an appointment to meet with the executor of her grandmother’s estate later in the week. The following day she hired a cab to Orange Court. At least here was something firm. She would have a place to call her own. Property mattered in Boston society. From here she could launch her campaign for Marianna and her own future, whatever it held.

The estate looked even more forlorn than when she had left. Fall always stripped the mansion bare: the porch held no wicker chairs, leaves already clustered at the roots of bare trees. The Hudson brother must have slowed in his age or perhaps no longer tended the grounds at all. She walked up the stone steps that needed sweeping, opened the mansion door and gasped. Where was all the furniture?

Dorothea walked through the house, her footsteps echoing on the pine floors, the brush of her crinolines as she turned this way and that exerted small pressure against her stockings. She heard herself gasping, taking in breath. She stopped, gained control. She would not be ill.

In the parlor her eyes went to the fireplace where a single settee and two chairs sat forlorn. The room had once been filled with chairs and end tables and three divans, ferns on plant stands waving their fronds at passing guests. Gone were the porcelains, the statues, the treasures her grandfather had brought back from Europe. She climbed the stairs to the library. Only a few books lined the shelves.
Had they sold the collection book by book?
The long table where she had taught school remained, but the ladderback chairs had been replaced with benches. Cobwebs already gathered on the chandeliers.

She opened a bedroom. A simple bed, a nightstand, and a small armoire. A room bare of all but necessities. There were clothes inside the armoire. People lived here? In what had been her room, a single trunk sat in the center. She lifted the rounded cover and peered inside. She moved aside her camisoles, corset covers, and a pale chemise. Beneath were pens and ink, books, and older diaries that she had stored in her writing desk. And the desk was no longer in the room.

A porcelain candle stand that had been her father’s lay alongside several beeswax candles. First-edition copies of each of her books made a small stack. She looked around, grateful she had not had her trunk sent to Orange Court when she had arrived. Someone lived here, someone with spare taste.

She took the path through the pear garden to the cottage. It was locked. She looked through the window to see that nothing remained, no dishes on the shelves, no pictures on the walls. She
hoped she would have some personal memento of her grandmother to claim. What had happened to Benji? Without a key, she couldn’t enter.

As she walked down the hill to locate a cab to take her back to her hotel, Dorothea let the high and low of her day wash over her. She had not coughed. She would find out about the stripped mansion. Greenbank had rescued her, saved her. While she faced a terrible loss on the first day of her arrival—the custody of Marianna—she would continue a relationship with the child, she was committed to that.

Potted ferns graced the executor’s office, but these were well watered and lifted their fronds to the window heights. Outside, autumn scampered across the street in the form of little children chased by the breeze as they held on to their bonnets and mothers’ hands. A fire burned in the fireplace, the logs crackling perhaps because they were damp from the first light snow, which had fallen overnight.

“I have a number of things to share with you, Miss Dix,” the executor said. He stood taller than Dorothea, and she noted how pleasant it was to be looking up into the eyes of a man without having to crank her neck. “Would you like tea?”

Dorothea nodded and they passed the time waiting for it by discussing the weather and her book sales. He had a mole on his high cheekbones.

“Ah, here we are then.” The executor poured her tea, then returned to his perch behind his desk, where he opened a thick file.

“Your grandmother left a number of small bequests to different acquaintances throughout New England, and she hoped you would be the one to assist me in locating the recipients.” Dorothea thought that was his job but said nothing. When she did not respond, he continued. “Ah, then.” He rifled through the pages, pulling up one. “She has left you her cane, hand carved and used by her very hand to steady herself. It’s a fine symbol of her care for you, don’t you think? Her wish to help you be a steady woman.”

“I’ll appreciate that.”

“An English tea set she left you, which we have stored here. She said you liked tea and so wanted to be sure you had it. There are small items for your brothers who, as they continue abroad, received this information by post.” He cleared his throat. “Your grandmother’s bequest to you is one-sixth of the estate. Charles and Joseph will receive one-sixth each. Your brother Charles has bequeathed his share to you to manage, and Joseph’s share will be managed by his uncle Thaddeus until Joseph is twenty-five. He intends to live with them at Orange Court.”

“Oh? It was my understanding that half of Orange Court was to go to me and my brothers.”

“Ah, and well it does. Your grandmother wanted your minister uncle and his fine wife to have use of the house for free until they died.” He showed her a codicil of the will, dated while she was recovering at Greenbank. “The best way to arrange that was
that I simply sold the house to your uncle after Madam Dix died. I thought it best for everyone. You are a single woman, and the upkeep of a mansion would be extraordinary. The income will be yours, of course, along with the profit from the sale of some of the furnishings. Your uncle’s simple tastes meant they had little need for many of the heirlooms.”

“The mansion … I have no claim on it? No … property?”

“It was in your best interest. With a small bequest left from your grandfather, the money from the sale, your own earnings, which I imagine provide you a little from your writing and teaching, you ought to have—”

“But I have no … home.”

“Perhaps your uncle will welcome you.”

Dorothea shook her head. Her uncle and aunt had been stuffy and prim when she had stayed with them. Her aunt had complained the entire time she had been with them. “I find no hope in their interest in having me be a part of their household.”

“Ah, then. You will simply have to stay in hotels or inns or take rooms in Boston. Did you not rent a home on your own some years past? You can do so again.”

Yes, she could do so again, but it was not his duty to tell her how to live her life. Everyone tried to tell her how to live. Except the Rathbones. They accepted her as she was.

“Is there anything more I need to know?”

He cleared his throat. “Yes, yes, there is. It’s of your mother.” The executor sighed, though he seemed well versed in giving clients bad news. “She has passed away in New Hampshire. I was
forced to pay the burial expenses out of your share of your grandmother’s estate.”

“My mother is … dead? How?”

“Appears to be a wasting away. No known cause. I’m sorry.”

Dorothea left his office like a child alone, as though walking through smoke.

The letter to Marianna was addressed to Marianna Davenport Dix Cutter. She underlined the
Dix
. Marianna answered in a day. “Please come to see me. Let us go riding if you’re able. Come tomorrow. I will be waiting.”

The maiden cousin opened the door, and before she could close it in Dorothea’s face, Marianna ran toward her, a young woman, slender as a lily with skin as white. “Mummy!”

“She is not your mother,” the whining cousin corrected her.

Dorothea held the girl, the wrap of her arms like a quilt of warm wool around her. “I will always call you daughter, whether you are legally my own or not,” she whispered to the girl.

“And you will be my mother.”

Dorothea nodded, held her back, and looked at her. “You’re beautiful as you always were. So grown up. A young lady at eighteen already.”

“That they’ve tried to marry off.” She laughed.

“Don’t accept a suitor you don’t want,” Dorothea told her.

“You best come inside,” the cousin said. “You’ll catch your death.”

“We’re going riding, cousin. Aren’t we … Mummy?”

“It’s way too cold. No. I forbid it,” said the cousin.

“But I don’t,” Marianna said.

“It’ll be a chilly ride but invigorating,” Dorothea said.

The cousin scowled. “She has a mind of her own.”

“Definitely of the Dix line,” Dorothea told her, a happy stream she would cherish in this lake of disappointment.

At the hotel the next day, Dorothea pondered her future. She and Marianna were both orphans now. But orphans who had a heavenly Father where they would always belong. She would remind Marianna of that. Dorothea had lost her mother, her grandmother, and her home. But she had her health back, she had a now-and-then daughter, and she had been reborn in the womb of the Rathbones’ love. It would be enough. She pondered the present as she gazed out the window at walkers pushing against the wind. Maybe she could visit and stay for a time with former students. The Fesser family had returned to Boston. She might winter with them. Sarah Gibbs and the Channings might welcome her. Brookline and the Heaths could be an option. They might take pity on her until spring.

What were her choices? She did not want to strain her renewed relationship with Anne. She had come to see her off, and since then there had been letters without the carping but also without the intimacy they had once had. She had no place to begin another school, and she wasn’t certain that was what God
intended for her as it seemed whenever she taught, her health soon declined. Both the Rathbones and the Channings expressed concern at how the schools drained her, threatened her spinning top.

She reread her grandmother’s will. She could at least deliver the items left to the various people remembered by her grandmother. She would also visit a banker to help manage her finances and Charles’s share of the estate. Should she buy a house? It would use up too much of the principal. She was a frugal woman and would have to remain so if she was to live without dependence on uncles or aunts or brothers or sons.