Mrs. Roberto - Or the Widowy Worries of the Moosepath League Read online

  MRS. ROBERTO

  OR

  The Widowy Worries of the

  Moosepath League

  Also by Van Reid

  CORDELIA UNDERWOOD

  — or —

  The Marvelous Beginnings of the Moosepath League

  MOLLIE PEER

  — or —

  The Underground Adventure of the Moosepath League

  DANIEL PLAINWAY

  — or —

  The Holiday Haunting of the Moosepath League

  FIDDLER’S GREEN

  — or —

  A Wedding, a Ball, and the Singular Adventures of Sundry Moss

  MOSS FARM

  — or —

  The Mysterious Missives of the Moosepath League

  PETER LOON

  A Novel

  MRS. ROBERTO

  OR

  The Widowy Worries of the

  Moosepath League

  Van Reid

  Camden, Maine

  Published by Down East Books

  An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  www.rowman.com

  Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 2003 by Van Reid

  Maps by James Sinclair

  First Down East edition 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2002032419

  ISBN: 0-670-03225-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-60893-524-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-60893-525-3 (electronic)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  To my brother, Rick,

  and

  to my sisters, Terri and Cassie.

  For everything that family does

  for a person

  —just by being,

  and for everything else

  they have done for me—

  simply by being themselves.

  CONTENTS

  from The Journal of H. St. Ronan, Christmas Eve 1927

  PROLOGUE: THE ASCENSIONIST

  May 7, 1897

  BOOK ONE

  May 27, 1897

  1. THE PROPITIOUS PRESERVATION OF THADDEUS Q. SPARK

  2. A BILL OF FARE

  3. A PLAN TO STAVE OFF MELANCHOLY

  4. KITCHEN IMPLEMENTS AND ANIMAL INTUITION

  5. NO WAY TO HANDLE THE UPRIGHT

  BOOK TWO

  May 28, 1897 (Morning)

  from The Portland Courier, May 28, 1897

  6. THE FAMILY SPARK

  7. SINCE LAST SUMMER

  8. THE ATTEMPTED RECIPROCATION OF THADDEUS Q. SPARK

  9. LETTERS FROM THE WIDE WORLD

  10. NOT QUITE GOOD-BYE

  11. OAK AND ELM

  12. RAIN AND ROOF

  13. SUS SCROFA IN MELANCHOLIA

  14. THE FAMILY FERN

  BOOK THREE

  May 28, 1897 (Afternoon and Evening)

  15. WHAT HE ONCE HAD BEEN

  from The Dresden Herald for the week of May 28, 1897

  16. THE AFTERNOON OF MAY

  17. THE OMINOUS CARD

  18. MR. PARKMAN’S BONES

  19. THE WOMAN IN 12A

  20. THE HIGH ROAD

  21. SIGHT UNSEEN

  22. WHAT THEY PROMISED PHILEDA

  23. MORE THINGS IN HEAVEN AND EARTH

  24. THE FALLACIOUS EXTREMITY

  25. THE FATEFUL REINFORCEMENT OF THE FAMILY SPARK

  26. THE UBIQUITOUS IMPRINT

  27. PIG IN THE LOFT

  BOOK FOUR

  May 29, 1897 (Morning)

  28. “... SLEEP IN SPITE OF THUNDER”

  29. HERCULES UNBOUND

  30. THE FORMER MAILON RING

  31. THOUGH IT WAS SATURDAY

  32. DOLLARS TO DOUGHNUTS

  33. PANTS AND TROUSERS

  34. SOMETHING PAST THE HOUR

  35. A BULLY FOR JASPER PACKET

  36. FIVE TINS OF TECUMSEH

  37. FERN AND MOSS

  BOOK FIVE

  May 29, 1897 (Afternoon and Evening)

  38. HOW TO BE TWO PLACES AT ONCE

  39. THE SUDDEN COMMAND OF BIG EYE PFELT

  40. RESCUED BEFORE DROWNING

  41. RESCUED AFTER THE FACT

  42. ANGELS UNAWARE

  43. THE UNREQUITED

  44. ROOM TO CONSIDER A LACK OF HAPPENSTANCE

  45. THE INN AT BLINN HILL

  46. WATCHPIG ON DUTY

  47. PHILOSOPHY AMONG THE TREES

  48. ALL SOMETHING BREAKS LOOSE!

  BOOK SIX

  May 30, 1897 (Before Dawn)

  49. THE CRACK BEFORE DAWN

  50. DEUS EX MACHINA

  51. THUMP IN A PUNT

  52. HERALD OF THE HENCEFORTH

  53. THUMP WAS DILIGENT

  54. AND EPHRAM AND EAGLETON, TOO

  55. WHERE DILIGENCE LEADS

  56. DARKNESS, FIRE, AND CHAINS

  57. EVERYTHING THEY WANTED TO KNOW ...

  BOOK SEVEN

  May 30—June 2, 1897

  from the Eastern Argus, June 1, 1897

  58. BRIEFLY ASCERTAINING THE WHEREABOUTS OF SEVERAL PEOPLE (May 30, 1897)

  59. BRIEFLY ASSOCIATING THE PATHS OF SEVERAL INDIVIDUALS

  60. BRIEFLY BACK AT FERN FARM

  61. THE HOSPITABLE RECIPROCATION OF THE FAMILY SPARK (June 1, 1897)

  62. ... AND WHAT THEY DIDN’T KNOW (June 2, 1897)

  63. DEEP AND PHILOSOPHIC

  64. A LETTER FROM ABIDJAN

  65. ANOTHER KNOT (OR TWO)

  EPILOGUE: THE WOMAN HERSELF

  June 3, 1897

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  from The Journal of H. St. Ronan,

  Christmas Eve 1927

  ... but couldn’t manage it in a state of drink while standing on his head.

  Last night, the Charter Fellows were also up at the Dash-It-All, and quite intent on celebrating the holiday—the old duffers! We thought they would have a round or two and fall asleep in the corner somewhere, but Midlothian began to bluster about his prank the other day outside the police station, and old Durwood, Waverley, and Brink perked up like startled cats.

  They promised us we didn’t know what a good prank was, and regaled us with instruction on the art by way of reminiscence. Several stories we had heard before, particularly the one about the Egyptian sarcophagus that was displayed at the Public Library some years ago.

  We were much surprised when the name of the Moosepath League came up, however, and amid the laughter we inquired what they could have in common with that respectable group of adventurers. It seems that one of the Moosepath League had been smitten by a woman parachutist, of all things—something about a boxing match and this woman landing atop the fellow and their getting tangled together. (Waverley proposed a toast to “The Provocative Tangle!” which we all liked very much.) Durwood then narrated how, some time after this
historic event, he slipped a card with the woman’s name on it into this fellow’s coat pocket and presumably the man thought she had placed it there. As I am to understand—and Durwood was a little vague on this point—the upshot of the matter didn’t come about till some months later.

  The oddest—and perhaps the most pleasing—aspect of the story was that they seemed unconcerned with the sequel and believed that the prank in its purest form should be perpetrated and left alone. They were, in fact, quite sure that, “being cubs,” we younger fellows were not up to the strict formulae of their code. Kenilworth gave them the raspberries.

  There is more talk of repeal ...

  PROLOGUE

  THE ASCENSIONISTMay 7, 1897

  Skelly Wilson was fond of the rain, as he imagined it hid his footsteps, particularly amid the tangle of buildings above the York Street embankment in the western end of town. Here among the many levels of roofs and the crowded alleys between Brackett and Winter Streets the weather gave voice to a thousand surfaces, and a single drop of rain might splash twenty times before reaching the ground. The ancient materials, too, rattled more surely than did the stately brick and stone on the wealthier side of Portland.

  Skelly was well nicknamed—he was pale and thin as a skeleton. There wasn’t much to Skelly Wilson. His footsteps were like a cat’s, rain or otherwise, but when one relies on silence and wit to earn their daily bread (or, as in his case, beer), one is thankful for whatever assistance nature provides, so Skelly was fond of the rain. People stayed indoors, if they had an indoors; creaks and groans in the back rooms were often lost behind the wind and weather, and stores and warehouses stood dark and empty. The rain itself, he imagined, hid his footsteps.

  Skelly stood at the mouth of an unlit alley, his night-accustomed eyes articulating the dark wall of one building from the shadow of another. A single pocket of darkness was of especial interest to him tonight, as it had been for several days now; it had been only several days since he first took notice of the small window, covered on the inside with pasteboard. It was the pasteboard that drove him to distraction; he could hardly stand not to see what lay beyond and two or three days of careful study had been necessary for him to even guess where it led. On the pretense of visiting an acquaintance he had been through the building itself—a hodgepodge of rooms and cubbyholes and tiny annexes rented to people of meager income and as storage for out-of-port sailors; but when he ciphered out which door gained access to the same room as that window, he was confounded by an overabundance of bolts and locks. So Skelly turned his study back to that window and the jumble of roofs and gables about it.

  The building went by its owner’s name; “Down to Bergen’s,” people said. Nicholai Bergen was a well-thought-of fellow, for such a place in such a section of town—an old warhorse who’d fought in the Wilderness Campaign. He was quiet and honest. His building was not much to look at, but folks living there did so in peace, more or less, and homecoming sailors could expect to find their belongings untouched. The block itself was not such a “den of iniquity” as others nearby. By day, it was next to respectable.

  The window was small, but people couldn’t imagine what Skelly might crawl through. He’d had a business associate, some years ago, who’d been amazed, in a stone-faced way, at Skelly’s ability to squeeze through a narrow place.’A mouse will creep under a door,” said the fellow.

  It wasn’t the size of the window that held Skelly back but the puddle beneath it. (’A small pond,” he muttered to himself.) For a man who welcomed rain, Skelly wasn’t so fond of water as a general thing, and he peered through the rainy darkness of the alley to consider the roofs and eaves nearby.

  Blind, if not deaf, the room beyond the window sounded with the rain and dreamed in darkness till a scratching at the sash and a tapping at the paste-board, like the work of a small animal, led to a single bar of gray among the black and the sough of a labored breath. The pasteboard came loose and dropped to reveal the silhouette of a shaggy head against the night beyond.

  The increased sound of the rain was of more note than that of Skelly dropping to the floor of the room. He crouched below the level of the sash and listened. The rain without was enemy as well as friend now, for it hid other sounds than his—it masked warning as well as error. The grayness that entered with him—an ambiguous glimmer that was the end of the reflection of a reflection of light—barely gave news of the room’s tiny dimensions. Skelly waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark, but they were not up to this depth of night and he fell to exploring with his nose and his hands.

  There was a stir of odors—he could smell hide and wood and oil and other things beyond the dust. His nose brought him near the right-hand wall and a scent he could not identify. He brushed his hand past a series of objects on a shelf, some rough with fabric, others smooth with leather. He tugged at one of these and it levered into his hands before he realized that it and its neighbors were books.

  “Gah!” he mouthed silently, but he opened the object in his hands and rif-fled its pages. Here was the unusual smell; he wrinkled his nose, smelling the paper and ink and must. Further along the wall there was the hint of perfume. His hands ran over garments—female garments (he chuckled to himself as he fingered these soft things); he managed not to kick over a row of boots and shoes—and again, a woman’s boots and shoes; and then, along the opposite wall, he discovered several silky things that were folded neatly in heavy piles and seemed to have enough fabric in them to cover a house.

  He ran his hands over these mysterious articles repeatedly. He ran his hand in between their cool, soft folds. He pressed his nose to them and thought he smelled summer. A strange and unaccustomed pang of sympathy (for what, he couldn’t have said) touched something in him like a hand brushing a tightened line of gut. He laid his unshaven face against the material and drew in another breath. It was summer! But he had experienced summer for thirty-two years and had never known it to fill him like this; he suddenly knew a delicious sense of pain and longing and he fairly embraced the pile of soft fabric, closed his eyes against the near-blind darkness, and drew a shuddery breath through his bony nose.

  Skelly’s heart suddenly rose in his throat. The door behind him was ajar. He hardly dared to open his eyes, but, when he did, the soft light from a lamp in the hall clarified stripes of red, white, and blue upon the fabric beneath his cheek.

  “I’ve been watching you, Skelly,” came the steady voice of Nicholai Bergen, along with the creak of hinges. “Everyone knows you like to work on rainy nights.”

  Skelly sat up on his knees, startled as much by this intelligence as by Bergen’s rugged form in the doorway.

  “Just needed a place to sleep, Nick,” said Skelly, realizing, even as he spoke, that his voice was too mewling and thin to elicit clemency from the old veteran.

  “What are you doing there?” said the man in the doorway. “Get away from those things!” Anger rushed into Bergen’s voice. He stepped forward, and, while Skelly let out a bloodcurdling cry, Bergen grabbed the narrow burglar and, in one movement, thrust Skelly through the tiny window as he might the plunger into the mouth of a cannon. He let go this plunger, however, and Skelly disappeared, conspicuous thereafter as only a splash and a series of offended shouts that rose up through the rain till Bergen slammed the window shut and replaced the chuck he had removed that evening.

  Nicholai dusted his hands and wiped them on his jacket. He surveyed the tiny room in the glow of the hall light and made a mental inventory of the objects along the shelves—the books (he reached out and brushed the backs of some of these as if he might wipe away the trace of Skelly’s presence), the garments and shoes (he righted a boot and set it properly next to its mate), the perfume bottles and the box of theatrical makeup, and finally the articles on which he had discovered the intruder resting his head. What was he doing? wondered Nicholai. He might have understood but never would guess the swarm of emotions Skelly had experienced as his sensitive nose detected the grasses and skie
s of summer. Nicholai touched one of the striped parachutes.

  Some would have treated Skelly Wilson a little more gently, or wished they had after the first flush of anger, but not Nicholai. Skelly was part of Fuzz Hadley’s gang, and everyone along the Portland waterfront knew that Fuzz was looking to take over Adam Tweed’s place ever since that street boss was jailed the previous fall; but Fuzz Hadley, mean as he might be, held no terrors for a grizzled old vet like Nicholai Bergen.

  The old man heaved a bit of a sigh, and his heart thrummed with a vibration not unlike that experienced by Skelly moments before.

  Nicholai swung the door to so that he might look at the bill fastened to the wall behind it. The colorful printed image of a beautiful robust woman in a suit of tights and a theatrical skirt stood out from the surrounding print. She was not smiling, but she appeared regal and generous and kind. Something like a crown was in her raven-black hair. Her skirt wafted about her thighs and she consequently showed more of her well-rounded calves than was common to public experience. There was a blossom of red, white, and blue above her. She was descending toward a crowd of people, tiny with distance.

  The legend read, NEWLY ARRIVED FROM EUROPE! EXCLUSIVE TO PORTLAND’S DEERING OAKS THIS SATURDAY! Three separate hours of a long past afternoon were noted alongside her hourglass midriff, and beneath her energetic figure was the astounding message that Mrs. Roberto, of many European courts and audiences, will parachute in her patriotically designed parachute from an ascended balloon! 2,500 FEET! IN HER ATTRACTIVE SUIT OF TIGHTS!

  Nicholai had read it many times; he had a bill much like it in his own room, as well as several other attempts at representing the extraordinary Mrs. Roberto (in her attractive suit of tights). None could hope to do justice to the original. He scratched at his beard.

  He was not a young man. He was not exactly a young man when he joined the Union Army, and that was thirty-six years ago; but Mrs. Roberto, in the flesh or on the page, spoke to him of youthful wonder and warm summer evenings and a breeze off the harbor on a bright summer’s day. She was no spring maid herself, though less than half Nicholai’s age (it seemed indelicate to conjecture any further on this point); but even a man of his years could consider Mrs. Roberto in her attractive suit of tights and feel like the youth who loves his schoolteacher or the young man who sits in heart-struck awe while the mature soprano commands the stage with her lovely voice and her operatic form.