Chapter Six #2
“That sounds splendid!” Serena clasped her hands together. “Ruthie is already sturdier from the swamp root I have been giving her this summer. More fresh air will only improve her delicate constitution.”
In typical fashion, once the plan was incubated, Nora wasted no time in getting it hatched.
When, two days later, Anna climbed aboard Duncan’s motorboat, she experienced some trepidation.
The girls had only been told that their mothers felt they deserved their own retreat.
Anna knew she was here to help them “get up some pretend games,” but she wondered if it would feel contrived.
As they motored around to the southeast side of the island, where the irregular shape of the cliff created a small hidden cove and a little beach, she scanned her mind for ideas.
As it turned out, her presence was all that was required.
The moment Duncan pulled the boat onto the beach, Julia jumped out and said, “Let’s pretend we’ve been shipwrecked!
” Anna made them carry the picnic baskets from the beach up to the clearing at the center of the island, but once that was accomplished, the girls were off.
The island was ringed by spruce trees. While spots were visible from the mainland, the clearing was mostly sheltered from view and wind, and the girls were never out of earshot. (Anna’s earshot, at least. Fortunately, they were well out of earshot of Haven Point.)
They had a string of fair days that first week. Duncan dropped them off every morning and returned to pick them up later in the day. The girls christened their arcadia “Jumaru,” after Julia, Maudie, and Ruthie. They were in heaven.
Since they were effectively stranded, Anna’s one nagging worry was what they would do if a sudden storm came up. On the third day, however, Duncan arrived early.
“We need to pack up and go. Some weather is coming,” he said.
The girls grumbled at what they considered an unreasonable prognostication.
Other than a few clouds in the sky, the day had been perfect.
Not thirty minutes after they returned to Haven Point, however, a thunderstorm came out of nowhere.
Assuaged by Duncan Douglas’s occult powers of weather prediction, Anna was now free to enjoy watching the girls play on Jumaru.
A few days later, it rained again, and Elizabeth took the children to Portland, so Anna had the house to herself. She sat at her desk and arranged her notes for the Margaret Fuller biography. An hour later, she had written one paragraph, and she did not even like it.
What is wrong with me?
Anna had told herself that the reason for her lack of progress was that she could not feel truly ready until she finished the research.
She finally wheedled Mr. Wimborne into sponsoring her to use the Athenaeum Library and spent many late afternoons there, perusing books and papers and taking copious notes.
She had been so diligent, she thought it would be an easy matter when she sat down to write the unfinished chapters, but her progress had lagged.
Anna sat back in her desk chair, looked up, and sighed. I’m sorry, Mother.
Anna was fourteen when she began helping organize Father’s notes for classes and scholarly papers.
They had begun talking about the Fuller biography a few years later, not long before Mother died.
They both knew how deeply Mother admired Fuller, and that she worried her contributions would be forgotten.
What better way to keep alive the values and traditions Mother held dear than to honor a woman who embodied so many of them?
That said, in their last private conversation, Mother had tried to ensure that Anna did not feel obligated.
“I think Father will struggle when I am gone,” she said. “I know he likes working with you, and the idea of this book brings him comfort.”
“I hope so. It brings me comfort, too.”
Mother was quiet for a moment, and Anna saw a wrinkle in her brow. “Only if it is your inclination, Anna,” she said finally. “I want you to follow your own affinity.”
Anna understood. Mother did not want her to feel as if she had made a deathbed promise. She was leaving room for a future day when Anna might have different ambitions. Anna, who knew that day would never come, had replied with certainty: “Don’t worry, Mother. I promise to follow my inclinations.”
It had not occurred to either of them that someday it might not be Father’s inclination.
Anna’s work for Mr. Wimborne had done little to help Anna focus.
His directives were as incoherent as ever.
Just last week, in fact, Anna had received a letter from him, requesting that she visit some grizzled old man in Bath who had once carved ship’s figureheads.
Fortunately, Anna happened to grumble about it to Nora.
“You’d have to see him at the cemetery,” Nora said. “He’s been dead ten years or more.”
Anna had at least learned how to extract payment from the man, who persisted in asking why she needed money.
“I need to see a fortune teller,” she told him one week. (If he would not be honorable, she felt no need to be honest.) When Mr. Wimborne, predictably, asked why, Anna cast her eyes down and said, “It is a very deep secret. I cannot tell you.”
“Is it a man, Miss Bradley?”
Eyes still on the floor, Anna shook her head and tried to make herself blush. Whether she succeeded in changing the tint of her cheeks, she could not say, but she got her payment. The next time, she told Mr. Wimborne that the fortune teller had told her she must purchase a red scarf and hat.
“To be worn at a particular moment?”
“Yes, but she instructed me not to speak to a soul about it.”
When that particular line felt exhausted, Anna invented a friend in “desperate trouble.” In response to his inevitable questions, she twisted her handkerchief and said, “Oh, please do not press me. I would not wish you to be involved.”
“Why, Miss Bradley! Your life is far more interesting than I ever imagined.”
Only because I am imagining it to be more interesting than it is, she thought, as she took the proffered check.
Anna had managed to save some money, but acting as a research assistant to Mr. Thatcher Winslow Wimborne was neither satisfying nor a sustainable path to independence, and she needed that path.
Though Anna did her best to absent herself when Lillian was around, that was not always possible. Thanks to Judith, who hung on her godmother’s sleeve and watched everything like a hawk, Anna’s sense that she was an object of suspicion had only increased.
That said, Mrs. Fairchild had actually given Anna an idea.
Irma Bellingham’s older sister Sally, a fellow Radcliffe graduate, worked as a reader for their uncle’s publishing firm, Fanning and Scott, which put out a number of successful magazines.
One of these, Young Friends, targeted children of Julia’s age and older.
Send me stories! Sally often said. A three-thousand-word story, if accepted, could fetch fifty dollars.
Anna did not entirely relish the idea. Writing children’s stories felt like an official declaration that she was not a scholar, or even a serious person. She needed the money, though, and if she wrote under a pseudonym, no one would need to know she had stooped so low.
She also found some pleasure in the thought of anonymously thumbing her nose at Judith Fairchild, whose latest newsletter extolled stories that “encourage girls to aspire to the womanly virtues of domesticity, docility, piety, and submissiveness.”
It seemed worth trying, at least. Anna put her notes aside, got some fresh foolscap, picked up the fountain pen Elizabeth had given her for Christmas, and did not put it down again for three hours.
Using Julia and her friends as inspiration, Anna wrote about four girls on an island, two pairs of sisters who were cousins.
Their mothers had died, and their fathers, who were off fighting in the Spanish-American War, had left them in the care of a spinster aunt.
(For the aunt’s character, Anna borrowed a good deal from Lillian Demarest, with a few dollops of Clarissa thrown in for good measure.)
The girls’ liberal-minded fathers agreed to let them camp on an island with a chaperone. Through various mix-ups and a bit of chicanery, the girls ended up on Liberty Island unchaperoned, where they had many adventures.
Anna looked it over and felt satisfied with the results.
The girls had given her so much material to work with, and she had read enough children’s stories to know that it would at least entertain her hard-to-entertain niece.
(Whether Julia was at all representative of the average reader—or the average anything—she could not say.) And as her characters were untainted by “domesticity, docility, piety, and submissiveness,” she had succeeded in thoroughly transgressing Judith Fairchild’s rules for girls’ fiction.
I’ll shine it up, send it off, and leave it to the publishing gods, she thought. If it turned out she could make money this efficiently, it would be something worth knowing, a bit of security in her back pocket.
Anna sent the story to Sally, asking that she be called Miss Crane (the maiden name of Margaret Fuller’s mother).
She resolved to tell nobody at all, including—perhaps especially—Elizabeth.
Jerome was only vaguely aware of the girls’ adventures on Gunnison Island, and Anna suspected her sister would like to keep it that way.
So thoroughly had Anna surrendered the story to the publishing gods, she very nearly forgot about it until the letter came from Sally.
I was thrilled with your submission, and my uncle shared my enthusiasm. So much so, he made room for it in the next issue. The check is enclosed. My uncle would like to see more of your work, and so would I!
Anna looked at the check. As with Mr. Wimborne, she was making up stories for money. This was a far more straightforward and efficient transaction, though, and vastly more enjoyable.
Anna could do this until the cows came home.