Louisa and the Missing Heiress by Anna Maclean Page B

speech I have promised for the Boston Vigilance Committee.”
    “Don’t give it a thought,” I said quickly. “Finish your work.” The last thing Mrs. Brownly needed was one of Father’s lectures on reincarnation.
     
     
    I SPENT THE next morning at home seeing to my little schoolchildren, since I had left Abba and Lizzie at home with them the day before and May was still too young for such responsibility. Such days, locked indoors with wailing six-year-olds and sulky ten-year-olds, could be difficult. But even with its moments of drudgery, such work was bliss compared to last year, when I had taken work as a housemaid. I sometimes thought that the world offered women tedious choices when one must select between wiping sticky noses and chanting the state capitals over and over, or cleaning boots and emptying bedpans for strangers.
    By two o’clock in the afternoon, Johnnie had been sick all over the carpet and Betty had wept because she could not remember Albany in New York, and Ruthie hit James when he hogged the pickup-sticks at playtime, and I was wishing I could flee to my garret and my desk, and go back to that other world I was creating, the world of Italian opera, with its prima donnas and handsome admirers. “It is whispered—and with truth, I fear—that she will bestow the hand so many have sought in vain upon the handsome painter yonder,” I whispered to myself, rehearsing dialogue for the next scene in the story as I cleaned up after my little charges.
    But my writing would have to wait. I had a condolence call to make at the Brownly mansion. I dressed with careful attention to each detail of my costume and then made a face at myself in the mirror for even trying, for I knew that I would never come up to Mrs. Brownly’s standards.
    If the Brownlys of Boston did not arrive on the Mayflower , it was the ship right after it, beating even the Lowells to that marshy landing spot near Plymouth Rock. The first Brownly of Boston was a planter with the sense to marry a wealthy widow and invest her fortune in a glass manufactory, one of the first in the country. There was Brownly glass in every church in New England, at one time. Along with wealth the family acquired a retroactive family tree: It was said (in whispered, jealous tones) that every deposit made to the family safe seemed to bring the family one degree closer to William the Conquerer, the most coveted of English ancestors.
    The most recent Brownly mansion had been built fifty years before the events surrounding Dorothy’s death, on Beacon Hill, of course, and while the façade of red brick and white columns was demure enough to meet even Boston standards, the interior of that home was garish with carved wood paneling, gilt mirrors, marble floors, stuffed peacocks, mounted boars’ heads, and overstuffed sofas and armchairs covered with floral patterns.
    There were three parlors, and a maid for each, and I had rather hoped myself and Mrs. Brownly might converse that day in the little green parlor, for in that velvet-tufted, Moorish-tiled room hung some lovely Fra Angelicos, which some earlier Brownly had had the wiser taste to purchase than whatever Brownly had commissioned for the carved inglenook. The inglenook, large enough for a child to hide in—as I knew from my own experience—and therefore to scorch from the fire both frock and matching lace petticoat, was covered with leering gargoyles and virulent wreathing vines. It had been oft commented that when the Brownly clan rebelled against the simplicity of the Regency style, that rebellion was not subtle. So despite gargoyles and inglenooks, I had hoped to gaze once again on Madonna and Child in an Olive Grove . But no, the upstairs maid was sent to fetch me upstairs, to the nursery. Mrs. Brownly was one of those unfortunate women who, after decades of childbearing and child raising, had anticipated a happy retirement from such responsibility, only to discover at the age of fifty that yet one