The Last Refuge Read online

  My mind raced ahead. No electricity, no modern plumbing, and grande cappuccinos from Starbucks wouldn’t have been invented yet.

  Jud looked so young, so enthusiastic, so hopeful, I hated to disappoint him. ‘I’m not sure I’m the woman for the job, Jud. Everything I know about living during Revolutionary War times comes from watching the John Adams series on HBO.’ I paused, ticking the items off on my fingers. ‘Let me get this straight. No running water, no heat, privies way out back …’

  ‘Right. And no Internet or cell phones, either.’

  ‘You make it sound so attractive!’

  Jud flashed me a mischievous, schoolboy grin and I felt myself weakening. He stood up, looked around for a coaster – a properly brought-up lad – and set his empty glass down on it. ‘Before you make up your mind, there’s something I’d like to show you.’

  Despite the many negatives, my interest was piqued. ‘Lead on,’ I said, and before I knew it, I was picking up my iPhone, following him out the front door, and walking into history.

  TWO

  ‘You want to see my stays? They’re worn over this shift which doubles as a nightgown, and they’ve got boning from the bust to below the waist, sort of like the corset that Scarlett O’Hara wore in Gone With the Wind, you know, but not nearly so tight. There’s really not room for my bust in this thing, but shit! Check out my cleavage!’

  Amy Cornell, lady’s maid

  William Paca’s five-part, Palladian-style Georgian mansion towers over its neighbors from its perch on an embankment several feet above street level. The three-story, five-bay central house is flanked by symmetrical two-story pavilions – one a former office, the other a kitchen – each connected to the main house by short, one-and-a-half-story hyphens, or passages. Perfectly balanced. Out back, a two-acre formal garden steps gently down to a wall that borders King George Street, a garden that was (and still is) the most elegant in Annapolis. In 1965, exactly 200 years after it was built, the house – which had been converted into a hotel – was scheduled for demolition, but after an eight-year struggle by a group of tenacious Annapolitans, the building and its terraced gardens had been saved and lovingly restored.

  ‘Paca House fits our needs perfectly,’ Jud said as we paused on the sidewalk to admire the impressive façade, which was built of brick laid in the Flemish bond style – narrow end of the brick out – so Paca could show off his wealth.

  Jud pronounced the name ‘Pack-ah,’ and I had to correct him. ‘It’s Pay-kah. According to a rhyming couplet Paca wrote himself in 1771, it rhymes with “take a.”’

  ‘Is it Paca Street in Baltimore, too?’ he asked, correcting his pronunciation.

  ‘Nope. Pack-ah. Go figure.’ I stepped aside to allow a workman carrying a large wooden crate to pass. ‘When I saw all the to-ing and fro-ing, I thought they’d closed the house for repairs.’

  ‘That’s what we asked Historic Annapolis to say,’ Jud informed me. ‘Actually, we’re replacing all the antique furnishing with high-quality reproductions specifically made for us in Wilson, North Carolina.’

  ‘I can’t imagine the expense.’

  Jud grinned. ‘Our sponsor has deep pockets.’

  ‘Sponsor?’

  ‘The show is being underwritten by Maddingly and Flynt.’ I must have looked puzzled because he continued: ‘Paints. They specialize in recreating historical colors. Some of them are pretty vibrant, like Ripe Pear and Presidential Blue.’

  ‘I remember a bit of hoo-hah when historians bored through all the paint layers at Mount Vernon and discovered that George and Martha Washington favored gaudy, Easter-egg colors. Their dining room is green, as in emerald green.’

  Jud grinned. ‘At Paca House, I understand researchers used an electron microscope and discovered more than twenty layers of paint, all the way down to the brilliant peacock blue you see on the walls of the main floor rooms today.’

  ‘I’m familiar with it,’ I said. I’d toured the house often, in fact, whenever we had out-of-town visitors, and we’d attended the occasional garden wedding there, too.

  Jud and I detoured around the moving van where two burly guys, sweating profusely in the noonday sun, were struggling with an eighteenth-century sideboy, and continued down Prince George Street past the house.

  ‘Historic Annapolis – affectionately nicknamed Hysterical Annapolis by some of us locals – isn’t generally noted for their flexibility. How on earth did you get them to agree to closing the place to tourists for three whole months?’ I asked.

  Jud paused to look at me, and tapped his temple with his index finger. ‘Ah, that’s where we had to get creative. Technically, the house is getting some renovations done, but at Lynx network expense. The roof needed to be replaced, for example, and the cypress shingles set us back nearly a quarter of a million. And as a gesture that we weren’t going to eat and run, so to speak, we’ve set up an endowment that should pay for the services of a professional gardener, pretty much in perpetuity, thanks to another sponsor, Hughes Horticultural. We’ve repointed the brick on the façade – a minor expense compared to the roof – and there were things we had to remove, of course, so we could return the house to some of its eighteenth-century functionality. We uncapped all the chimneys and had the flues checked to make sure the fireplaces could be used without burning the house down. Took out the storm windows, too; otherwise nobody would be able to open the windows.

  ‘I’m hoping the weather stays temperate so we don’t have to use the fireplaces that often,’ he continued, ‘but the fireplace in the kitchen will be going pretty much twenty-four seven.’

  We were making our way down a narrow alleyway sandwiched between the Paca House and a private residence that eventually led to a parking lot tucked behind Brice House, another Georgian masterpiece that now served as the headquarters of the International Masonry Institute. Normally, there would have been half-a-dozen cars in the lot, but through some Lynx magic, the cars had been made to disappear – probably to assigned spaces in the Hillman parking garage off nearby Main Street – and the lot was now occupied by two aluminum-sided trailers, their doors standing open in the late August sun. Cables snaked from the Paca garden, through the hedge, along the ground and into the trailer marked ‘Production,’ outside of which several well-tamed coils of wire were connected to a giraffe-like stalk antenna. The second trailer was marked ‘Wardrobe.’

  Jud bounced up the fold-down steps that led into ‘Wardrobe,’ poked his head out the door and motioned me inside. ‘In here.’

  It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the low light inside the trailer, but once inside, I noticed a woman sitting behind a table, head bent over her work which was spotlighted by an anglepoise lamp. When we entered, she looked up, dress pins studding her lips, paused in the act of sewing lace onto something that looked like a collar. She considered me over the top of a pair of half-glasses perched precariously at the tip of her nose.

  Jud introduced us. ‘Alisha, this is Hannah Ives. I’m twisting her arm, hoping she’ll agree to fill in for Katherine Donovan. Can you show her Katherine’s costumes?’

  Alisha laid her work down on the narrow table in front of her, spit the pins out into a glass dish and stood. ‘Sure.’ She led me down a long aisle toward the back of the trailer.

  Rich costumes hung along both sides of the aisle like the seventy-per-cent-off sales at Macy’s, if Macy’s had been unloading merchandise that had been hanging around since 1780-something, that is. Groups of costumes were bundled loosely together, labeled with signs hand-lettered in felt-tip marker: Karen Gibbs, Dexter Gibbs, John Donovan, Melody Donovan and a dozen or so others. Katherine Donovan’s wardrobe hung on padded hangers in a section just past her daughter’s.

  ‘Here you go.’ Alisha shoved the hangers along the pole to make maneuvering room then, to the accompaniment of a soft rustle of silk, pulled out one of the most beautiful gowns I had ever seen. Holding the hanger in one hand, she draped the exquisite garment over her extended f
orearm. It was a pale peach confection, with gold, dark rose and deep blue flowers embroidered all over. ‘This is a ball gown,’ Alisha said. ‘Hey, Jud, hold this for me a minute, will ya?’

  As Jud took charge of the hanger, I fingered the fabric, imagining myself waltzing around in the gown, like Cinderella at the prince’s ball. After a moment, Alisha called my attention to the other garments on the rack. ‘This pale blue linen is for everyday wear, of course …’ She shoved it aside. ‘And this thing that looks like a nightgown is called a shift. Colonials wore them pretty much day and night.’

  I thought about all the clothes in my closet at home – if I stopped shopping at Chico’s, the company would have to declare Chapter 11. ‘Only two dresses?’ I asked.

  Alisha chuckled, tucked a stray strand of wiry brown hair back into the untidy knot at the back of her head. ‘Lord, no. The Donovans are supposed to be wealthy. If you sign on, you’ll have several more made during the course of the show, and your fancy ball gown, of course.’

  I couldn’t think of anything more appropriate for a ball than the gorgeous gown she’d already showed me. ‘Ball?’

  ‘At the State House – the show finale. Every VIP in Annapolis will be attending it. The governor, the mayor, the superintendent of the Naval Academy, senators, congressmen. Your husband will be invited, too … you’ve got a husband?’

  I nodded. ‘Will everyone be in costume?’

  ‘Of course. The ball is the climax of the show.’ Alisha stared dreamily up at the ceiling. ‘Candlelight, music, tables groaning with food.’ Suddenly she snapped out of it. She grabbed the hanger from Jud’s outstretched hand. ‘This is something special, all right. You gotta try it on.’

  I stood rooted to the floor, mouth slightly ajar. ‘Are you making all the costumes?’

  ‘Just for the principals,’ Jud commented from behind me. ‘For the special events, we’ve arranged rentals from A.T. Jones up in Baltimore for the invited guests.’

  ‘Back here,’ Alisha ordered in a time-is-money sort of way, indicating the rear of the trailer with an impatient jerk of her head. She hustled me into a cubicle separated from the front of the trailer by a thin blue and white gingham curtain and, once I was inside, ordered me to strip. When I got down to my bra and panties, she waved an impatient hand. ‘Everything’s gotta come off, sweetie.’

  ‘Everything?’ I felt like I was back at the doctor’s office, preparing for my annual physical exam.

  ‘Well, you can keep the panties on for now,’ she relented, ‘although they didn’t wear panties back then, you know – but the bra’s got to go.’ I turned my back, unhooked, and slipped out of my bra. Although the reconstructive surgeon had worked wonders after the mastectomy that had separated me from my breast, it still wasn’t ready for prime time. Alisha, bless her, didn’t seem to notice, or care. She thrust the nightgown-like shift in my direction. ‘Put this on first.’

  I slipped the garment over my head, smoothing the fabric down over my hips. Before I could even turn around, she wrapped a corset around my waist, adjusted it under my breasts and ordered me to stand still while she laced it up the back like an old-fashioned tennis shoe. ‘I feel like a sausage,’ I said, sucking in my gut as she tightened the laces.

  Next came an under-petticoat that tied around my waist with a drawstring, followed by a delicately embroidered silk petticoat in the same soft peach as the gown.

  I now saw that the gown itself was in two parts – an ankle-length robe, open at the front so the petticoat would show through, and a triangular-shaped piece that served as the bodice. ‘It’s called a stomacher,’ Alisha explained as she clapped it to my chest and pinned me into it. ‘And you’ll be wearing pocket hoops – sometimes called a farthingale – but we’re not going to bother with them now. There’s not enough room to swing a cat in here as it is. Shoes, too, but frankly, dancing slippers haven’t changed much in two hundred years. You could probably get away with Capezios from Zappo dot-com.’

  Alisha seemed to be assuming that I’d already agreed to participate in the Patriot House, 1774 experience. I was simply trying on costumes, though, not committing myself to anything. ‘If I sign on,’ I reminded her.

  Alisha squinted at me, her head tilted, ignoring my remark, then drew the dressing-room curtain aside. ‘Take a look, Jud. Perfect fit. Don’t think we’ll need to do any alterations at all.’

  Jud studied me critically. ‘Jesus, you take my breath away.’

  I felt my face redden. Jud was young enough to be my son, but the compliment pleased me enormously. ‘Is there a mirror somewhere?’

  Alisha tugged on a rolling clothes rack and when it gained momentum, wheeled it to one side, revealing a full-length mirror mounted on the inside of a door that led to a pocket toilet. ‘Who is that?’ I gasped when I saw my reflection.

  I certainly wasn’t what anybody would call fat, but the woman in the mirror had a waist the size of a mayonnaise jar and – Oh. My. God! – a pair of round, plump breasts and a goodly amount of cleavage. I tucked my chin down for a closer view. ‘Wherever did those come from?’ I asked of nobody in particular.

  ‘You can thank the corset,’ Alisha replied. ‘Good for back support, too,’ she continued, flexing her knees in way of illustration. ‘You’ll probably be doing a lot of heavy lifting.’

  ‘Won’t there be servants for that?’ I mused, turning to check myself out in the mirror, back, front and sideways.

  Jud and Alisha exchanged a knowing glance. ‘You’ve decided to do it then?’ Jud prodded.

  I whirled around to face them, petticoats sweeping the dark green linoleum. ‘Not so fast, young man! I’ve got a million questions. I’m curious about the Donovans, for one thing. When Kat Donovan had to withdraw from the show, how come her family decided to stay? There’s no way that Paul would have left me to deal with my cancer treatments all alone.’

  ‘LynxE was set to send all of the Donovans packing and go with another family,’ Jud explained, ‘but it was Katherine Donovan herself who insisted that her husband and children be allowed to stay on.’

  ‘Why would LynxE agree to that?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s purely a practical matter,’ Jud explained. ‘The Donovans were halfway through the orientation, for one thing. For another, the wardrobe is a huge expense. We’d have to remake four sets of costumes, instead of just one. So, with the Donovan family’s full concurrence, we decided simply to replace Kat.’

  ‘But why me?’ I asked as Alisha began to help me undress.

  Jud shot me a crooked grin. ‘Lady of the House number two was a size fourteen, at least. As for Lady of the House number three? We would have had to use a shoehorn to get that woman into the dress that you’re wearing now. So that’s why we cooked up the sister-in-law scenario, and why I thought of you.’

  ‘Just like Cinderella. Her foot fit the glass slipper, and she got the prince. I fit the dress and if I want to, I get to be a television star.’

  ‘You’ll do it, then?’

  Barefoot, stripped down to the shift, I stared at him for a moment, considering my options. Jud was still grinning boyishly, sucking up to me big-time, the rascal. ‘I like to think I’ll try anything once, but … gosh, Jud, I feel like a fish out of water. A beautifully dressed fish, to be sure …’

  ‘Tell me you’ll consider it seriously, Hannah.’

  ‘It’ll take a lot more than beautiful dresses and sweet talk, Jud. Do you have some sort of prospectus with details about the show? And I imagine there’s a contract you expect cast members to sign.’

  ‘If you have time to accompany me to the production room, I’ll see that you get a contract.’ He did an about-face, threw Alisha a kiss, and said, ‘Thanks, doll.’ Then, to me: ‘Get changed and we’ll tour the house. That should answer some of your questions. I’ll wait for you outside.’

  After I dressed, Jud escorted me through the Paca House garden where workmen were busily assembling an old-fashioned wooden well. ‘Colonials had to be careful
about drinking the water,’ he explained, ‘but we’re connecting this well up to the city water supply. Coming down with cholera would be just a bit too real, you know?’

  I had to agree.

  We passed through the spacious kitchen and walked down a narrow hallway that led into a bright English basement situated directly under the main house. Jud paused in front of a door that was secured by a combination lock, its keypad resembling the face of a telephone. ‘Ordinarily, this is a conference room,’ Jud told me as he punched four numbers into the lock and twisted the knob. ‘But we’ll be using it as an on-site staging and storage area.’ Jud pushed the door open and held it aside, waiting for me to pass through. ‘We’ll keep the camera equipment in here, use it as a break area for the crew, et cetera, but as far as the cast is concerned, the room will be strictly off limits.’

  A half-dozen plastic filing crates lined the long, walnut conference table that dominated the room. Jud rummaged through one of the crates, extracted a fat sheaf of papers secured with a paper clamp. From another cube he took a manila envelope.

  ‘Here’s the contract,’ he said, handing it to me. While he scribbled something on the outside of the envelope in black felt tip marker, I scanned the contract quickly. Although the print was minuscule, a phrase on the first page practically jumped out and slapped me in the face: You will be required to wear a microphone twenty-four seven.

  ‘Jud, what’s this about wearing a microphone all the time? I mean, my God, even in the privy?’

  Jud capped the marker, eased the contract out of my hand and stuffed it into the envelope. ‘Sorry about that. It’s a boilerplate contract we borrowed from another show.’ He hauled a cell phone out of his pocket and tapped in a memo. ‘Just reminding myself to have the lawyers modify that clause. We have microphones, of course, but due to the wonders of modern technology, cast members won’t be wearing them. Follow me. I’ll show you something amazing.’