Rebecca Wentworth's Distraction (6 page)

Chapter 9

A
MESSENGER BOY CALLED
upon Sanborn in his rooms one day in late autumn with an invitation to wait upon Madam Browne. His services were required once again, this time to execute a portrait of the grande dame herself.

When she came into the familiar parlor, she immediately congratulated him on his ever-growing reputation. “My husband is away, traveling with the surveyor general on matters of timber and the law,” she explained. “But he suggested I give you this offer, and that if you find it satisfactory, we may begin at your first convenience.” She handed him a folded sheet of paper. On it Squire Browne had written a price, ten guineas, and made suggestions as to positioning and attributes.

Ten guineas was as good as anyone, save Smibert himself, painting in America was likely to receive. Sanborn was pleased to express his agreement, and they arranged for sittings to begin within the week.

A
T THEIR FIRST SITTING
he did not mention Rebecca. Madam Browne remained affable if dignified from the first as she sat in her armless Lady's Chair, accommodating her voluminous skirts. Her demeanor emboldened him by their second day together.

“I have not seen or heard the young lady, Mrs. Browne,” he said incidentally as they conversed lightly on several topics. “So vivacious and accomplished a child is an adornment to the household.”

Mrs. Browne paused a moment in her idle chatter, smiled at Sanborn politely, and with a movement of her wrist and hand only, so as not to disturb her careful pose, said, “Oh, yes, she's a considerable adornment whom few forget, upon once meeting her.”

“She is well, I pray, madam?” He feared she intended to speak no further of Rebecca.

“Very well, Mr. Sanborn. Thank you. Just now she is abroad with relations, so she has, as you suggest, not graced our household. May I place this volume on the table? My arm is quite asleep, I'm afraid. It would not disturb your progress?”

“Madam, it is your comfort and ease that speed my progress.”

She placed the book on a nearby oval table after taking up a fan to make room for the book. She twice moved her arms outward not unlike a roosting seabird, to enhance her circulation. Despite the awkward movement, the artifice of her coiffure, costume, and toilette were becoming. She was a woman whose striking presence and dignity he knew he must transfer, well placed, to his canvas. He was plying every effort and care, well within the orthodoxy of Squire Browne's requests, to the task she had set him. He thought his work went very well, thus far, and he was full of confidence as he brought out the pearly tones of her watered silks, the white crispness of her laces, the softness of her velvets. It would be a three-quarter portrait, a dark curl falling over the right shoulder, and the whole set in painted spandrels—quite after the fashion they would emulate.

“Is this correct, Mr. Sanborn?” she asked upon resuming her seat.

He posed her further, if only slightly, to his advantage. He wanted to display fully her white under sleeves, just below the elbows. “Well done, madam. You are an excellent sitter.” Though he regretted that note of hireling praise, he hummed a pleasant ditty as he returned to his easel.

“With certain of my Portsmouth patrons of the highest quality, I assure you, it is quite a different matter. Some seem unused to the slightest restraint or inconvenience.” He smiled complimentarily before he began again, and she returned his smile. He wondered if there were a bit of the coquette in her still. Her décolletage was fashionably appropriate but daring as well, only the slightest hint of a fichu moderating the temptations of her ample bosom. He imagined how as a young unmarried woman she must have taken the widower Colonel Browne wholly into her powers. Yet such elements of her nature he would of course subdue in his portrait. Even if he had the capacity, he thought, he would never display, as Rebecca surely would, this inmost heart of Madam Browne's character.

“Is she gone to London, then?” he asked idly. “I believe I recall her saying something about the possibility of traveling to London as she sat for me.”

“London?” She looked at him without her smile. “Oh, no, Mr. Sanborn. She is visiting relations of Mr. Browne's, of the Wentworth line. She is seeing something of the woodland operations and her cousins, you see. The country air and vigor of climate shall do her good.”

He thought of winter coming on and wondered how she could blithely say such a thing. But he himself had not been to the frontier, nor had he an inkling of the timber trade, nor how even the higher families or proprietors might live there. He had heard that the more prosperous proprietorships were quite convenient, having little of the rude frontier settlements of a century ago about them. Still, the whole arrangement sounded now, just as it had on Miss Norris's lips, utterly ill considered.

None of this could he speak to Madam Browne. He had to settle for worrying such thoughts in silence, even as he presented to his patron the most genial appearance.

Yet the lady had confirmed everything Miss Norris had said. He began to wonder again how difficult it would be to travel inland and find the child whose self-portrait arrested and enchanted him more and more the longer he studied it.

He tried one or two further conversational gambits to elicit information, but Madam Browne rather too apparently tired of the subject, so he was pressed to give it over for the remainder of her sittings. She wished to speak, rather, on the talk about town—the role of people of fashion in the great celebrations upon the return of Mr. Wentworth from London and his installation as first provincial governor, the Wentworth's renting of the Macpheadris house, and so on. Sanborn's mind, however, insisted on its wayward pursuit of the absent child.

Chapter 10

T
HAT SPRING,
when Daniel Sanborn had lived and worked successfully in Portsmouth for nearly a year, he called upon Jeremy Weeks in his room by the customs house to invite him for a bowl of punch.

He had conversed with Weeks two or three times since first meeting him in the waterfront tavern shortly after his arrival in the city. He had come to respect him as a man who was particularly informed about the timber and fish trades, and about the merchants and captains who orchestrated such trade, at times illegally, to their conspicuous advantage. And he indicated now, during convivial conversation, a knowledge of the slave trade as well. He announced rather theatrically behind his hand a current scheme.

“Vinegar, sir,” he said with a knowing wink.

“Vinegar?” Sanborn looked at him somewhat amused.

“Better than seawater alone for washing out decks during the passage. Greater cleansing, so fewer deaths. Black ivory.”

“I see. Still, speed is the essence, I understand.” He tipped the punch bowl, drank, and handed it over to Weeks. “You've shipped yourself then, I take it, Mr. Weeks.”

“On diverse occasions. Not anymore. Usually out of Newport or Providence, aboard a forty-tonner built for speed. Rough but profitable duty it was, but such days are behind me.”

“So, vinegar it is, now.”

“Sell it to the slavers, for the Guinea Coast and the West Indies–New England trade as well.”

“I had once thought of shipping for Africa,” Sanborn said wistfully. “A country worthy of a painter, to record its strange beauties and barbarisms.”

“Aye, but you're better off having not done so. It's a brutal place for a man of your kidney. A sea without harbors, a world of sandbars and shipwrecks and sharks. And murderous climate, sir. Murderous.” He shook his head and looked down. “Sudden mists that chill the very center of your bones. And heats that drain men of life or drive them mad. Calabar, Piccaninny, Goree, St. Paul de Loango, The Bight of Benin and of Biafra. A journey to hell, sir, but profitable—more so than any other journey—for those who've the constitution for it. And a good shake of blind luck.”

“That's what turned me away—rumors of the coast, the trade. And the much greater market for portraits than for land and seascapes.”

“Death rides your shoulder every minute.”

The two men were silent for a moment, as if contemplating an alien world, one from rumor, one from experience. Sanborn rose to go to the bar.

“The adventure of your life, sir, nonetheless,” Sanborn said upon returning and placing another bowl before them.

“It was always that, aye. It's a world you can't imagine, even for all your tales of voyagers, unless you've seen it, braved the dangers yourself. A whole fever coast dotted with the slave compounds of the English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and French. All fortified against rival traders and native tribes. They're a bloody lot, the tribesmen. If amidst the slaughter of their enemies, the chieftains spare some few men, women, and children from the hideous tortures and deaths of their wars and raids, they demonstrate their power.” He drank of the punch. “But once they saw how profitable in rum and cloth
every
slave could be, they turned their ancient enmities to the production of slaves for the European trade. A hundred gallons of rum—some ten or a dozen pound's worth—for a good Negro, sir.”

“But three times that in Barbados or the Indies?” Sanborn asked.

“Yes, and more again in Charleston or Bristol or Boston, or wherever you please. And their own laws, too, are productive for the ships waiting off reef and shore. Thieves are enslaved and sold, lovers of errant wives, defilers of another man's god, even surplus wives and children are sold to a black man's good profit.”

Sanborn shook his head in awe. “I begin to understand the minister I once heard thanking Providence for bringing to our land safely another cargo of ‘benighted heathen,' as he put it, ‘to enjoy the blessings of a gospel dispensation.'”

Weeks snickered. “And why should not the sagacious merchant and the dogmatic priest join in singing the praises of this most profitable of all traffic?”

“Indeed, Mr. Weeks. I'm certain it will continue to prosper.”

“I'll make you a prediction, sir.” Weeks took a shrewd tug on his tobacco pipe. “Mark my words, Sanborn. The white traders, should the supply ever diminish, will foment renewed warfare among the natives, even deep into the interiors, to insure the unchecked flow of gold.”

“And vinegar is the solution, you say, to more Negroes surviving the passage and ensuring the flow of guineas all round?”

“Many's the shipmaster who swears by it.” Weeks tapped the side of his nose.

“Every survivor, they've finally come to appreciate, is one or two hundred pounds more toward the profit of their investors, themselves, and their daring crew.”

“The secret of the vinegar! Would you be interested yourself, Sanborn—even a modest investment?”

“The trade in vinegar, you mean?”

Weeks nodded. “Ask your captains and masters all, if you like. There's a bright future in it, mark me, Mr. Sanborn. Vinegar will not fail, I'm telling you.”

“Let me think it over,” Sanborn said. “You have, I admit, led me into temptation.”

They both laughed. What troubled Sanborn somewhat about such investment, beyond the need to carefully husband his slowly accumulating resources, was the instability of the trade in other ways. He had heard tales of the folly of trusting many of the captains of the passage, who rendered themselves debilitated by taking below a choice young black woman who, as one informant had phrased it, “kept the good master in a continual stupor of sensuality to the neglect of his duties.” But as he thought about it, the mere trade in vinegar seemed protected against individual folly, for there was no denying the enormous general profitability of the trade.

Now Sanborn decided would be a good time to exchange such considerations for the true object of his meeting with Weeks—a growing obsession with Rebecca's welfare on the frontier.

By way of transition, he made a few jokes at the expense of some local dandy and official. Weeks enjoyed this new tack of the conversation. “Fools, fops, and knaves grow as rank as formerly,” Weeks said and laughed.

“Mr. Weeks, I thought I might rely on you for some information that could be of help to my own trade in portraits.”

Before he could go on, Weeks laughed and said, “You take me for an idle dauber, sir!”

Sanborn laughed at himself. “My good Mr. Weeks,” he began again, “I have decided to extend the range of my clients, as you might well understand, and see something more of New England so long as I'm here and seeking my fortune, by traveling from time to time to the towns and settlements this side of the Merrimack. Of course I would search out only the better sort in those regions—the overseers, surveyors, officers of the governor, and the like. But as I'm still comparatively new to this country and have never been west of the great bay, I wonder if you might advise me as to how one might best go about it.”

Weeks smiled, showing several missing teeth. “I'd heard you've painted the phiz of every man and woman of substance in the port,” he said, and laughed under his breath. “Well, I expected you'd wear them out before you wore out your arm, so there's no reason I suppose not to extend your trade to the west, as indeed everyone has but the fishermen. As the king's men complain, we New Englanders are wont to exhaust the forest bounty hardly sooner than we encounter it.” He paused as if for philosophical reflection, yet his face was twisted up almost comically and his cheap wig set slightly askew. “But why not return to Boston to ply your fine trade, Mr. Sanborn? You're more used to the conveniences of the city, are you not? And there's plenty of august folks looking to hang their foresides ‘pon a Boston wall, I'll lay me.”

Sanborn laughed. “There's little doubt of that, Mr. Weeks. As a matter of course, I do intend to return to Boston before the onset of next winter, but I expect to travel and consider this other trade as well.”

“Good then; you'll be looking after your interests better in Boston. But as to the western parts, yes, I think I can put you in touch with one who travels there. He works on occasion for the surveyor's office, and for the governor, and even the competing merchants as they have need of him. I lay he'll know everything you require.” He paused and addressed himself to the meal, which Sanborn had ordered and had just been delivered to their table. The two men ate quickly and in silence for a time. The rumble of the afternoon crowd caused enough of a din that neither man took much notice of his companion's eating in silence.

“Mr. Ladd, Joseph Ladd,” Weeks said finally, smacking his lips. “A good man with a horse or an ax, or a woman for that matter. Regular Buck.” He continued eating.

“I'd be in your debt, Mr. Weeks.”

“Not at all. It's only a matter of introduction. You'll have to convince him yourself of your plans and projects.” He drank from the second bowl. “But he's a fellow you can talk to, once he takes your measure.”

“Thank you, sir. If there is any service I can do for you, at any time, please feel free to call on me.”

“Think nothing of it, Mr. Sanborn. This is excellent mutton, and tolerable punch. Well charged with spirits.” He finished his meal and stood up, bowing slightly. “Back to my customs labors,” he said with a grin as he wiped his face. “Don't want to disappoint Squire Solly!”

In Sanborn's estimation, he had but one more obstacle to surmount—the precise whereabouts of Rebecca. He felt sure Miss

Norris knew more than she had told him, either out of some consideration for her former employers or for some fear of his bungling.