early this morning, hoping the Boston gazettes had arrived. Colonel Mayhew and his sparkish nephew were overseeing the unloading of I do not know what merchandise, while two ladies, most elegant ladies—and I have seen some in Boston—all frills and ribbons—came ashore, escorted with many a flourish by the captain himself—Frobish by name, I know him well. I heard them babble to each other in French. A gig was waiting for them, though ’tis only fifty paces to Swain’s Inn. A mighty load of luggage was loaded into a cart, and off they all drove. I do not think that the Mayhews saw them. But to the point. Frobish told me that the older of the two ladies had asked for directions to the house of Judge Thomas Weamish. They will undoubtedly be calling on you before long.”
“I’m speechless!” cried Weamish. “Allow me, sir, if I may—”
“Oh, I’m off!” said Applegate with a chuckle, “but I’ll stop by this evening for news.” A minute later he was on his horse again.
“Jenny! Jenny!” Weamish shouted over the landing, “Two French ladies are calling on me! Come up at once!”
The excitement was understandable. The chronicles of Nantucket do not report any previous visits to the island by Frenchwomen, elegant or otherwise.
Jenny came up the stairs.
“Hurry down again and tidy the parlor! French ladies! Perhaps they speak no English.”
“The parlor is always tidy, Mr. Weamish.,” said Jenny peevishly.
“Well, prepare a collation. And use the silver, not the china. Hurry while I dress. And let me not hear any farmhand familiarities when they come.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Weamish,” said Jenny even more peevishly, as she descended the steps. About to rush into his dressing room, Weamish became aware of Mamack again, who had been watching rather more attentively than attending to his work.
“That will do for the day, Mamack,” cried the Judge. “Go down to the kitchen, have Cook give you something to eat and drink, and come back tomorrow.”
Without waiting for a reply, Weamish dashed into his dressing room. His clothes and wig had been laid out as usual by Jenny, and it did not take him long to dress and scent himself—a little more generously, perhaps, than usual. Mamack had disappeared by the time Weamish returned to his desk, where he busied himself, or tried to busy himself, with some legal papers.
After a while, he heard a carriage approach his house and stop at the door. He peeked down through the window as two women descended from the chaise, which was being driven by old Moses. The elder of the two knocked at the door. As Weamish gave himself a final preening, he heard Jenny, fussy and flustered, invite the ladies into the parlor. Then she called her master, who took hold of his dignity coming down the stairs as he entered the parlor, closing the door behind him.
“Allow me to welcome you in my house,” he said; “I am Judge Thomas Weamish.”
“And I am Aimée de Tourville,” said the lady, raising her head. “This is my daughter Madeleine. I hope you will forgive this unannounced intrusion. I have come to you from the inn without changing, because the matter is urgent.”
Madame de Tourville spoke with a surprisingly slight French accent. Her daughter, it may as well be reported here, had none.
“Pray sit,” said the Judge.
2
THE FORTY-FIVE-YEAR OLD Aimée de Tourville was not simply fine-looking; she had eyes and lips that showed her, even to the most obtuse observer, to be a creature of high spirits. She was probably more attractive and more striking in her dark-haired maturity than she had been as a young girl. Her daughter, growing up under that radiance, showed more reticence in looks and dress, as well as an intelligence that kept to few words.
Who were these women?
Candor is best. The Marquise Aimée de Tourville was in fact Aimée Binette, only child of an honest Lyon locksmith, who married her off, naturally enough, to a Lyon jail-keeper named Jean Pichot when she turned seventeen. High luck befell her two years into her marriage when the Vicomtesse de Brion was incarcerated for poisoning her husband instead of only crying over his brutalities, as the law required. Before the vicomtesse was hanged, Aimée spent hours, days and months in the lady’s cell. That bold woman taught the whip-smart turnkey’s wife to speak, walk, sit, behave and even think like an aristocrat. As a result, even before Monsieur Pichot died, she easily became the mistress of an aging nobleman, a relation of the vicomtesse, who had occasionally called on the lady in her cell. Aimée had taken over her father’s rather successful keyshop, but the baron enabled her to live at a station higher than what selling keys, even many keys, would have allowed.
Intimacies with the baron—the aging baron, as mentioned before—satisfied only a fraction of Aimée’s large capacities for pleasure. Though ever kind and charming to the gentleman (Aimée had a heart) she became the mistress of one of her much younger clients, a sturdy sergeant by the name of Christian Deudon. A couple of years later—in 1752, to be precise—the baron was called to Paris by the king and Madeleine was born, tenderly acknowledged by both the baron and the sergeant. The girl was destined so to resemble her mother, physically speaking, that the question of who was her father would have been impossible to resolve by the method of comparison. Aimée never did resolve it.
In the last days of the year 1756, the sergeant slapped his lieutenant’s face. This pre-Jacobin act obliged the couple and their baby to flee to Montreal, where Aimée taught the sergeant what she knew about the business of selling keys and repairing locks. But unable to bear the cold, Deudon, though sturdy, succumbed to a weakness of the lungs. He left mother and child a dented sword and a tunic with braids out of which Aimée made a pretty skirt for the baby.
In 1760, during a dreadful winter in the first year of English rule, mother and daughter nearly froze to death. But this low kind of death was not meant for Aimée. General Thomas Gage had given an order—in French and English—that beef was to sell at no more than ten sous the pound. Aimée had not been in Montreal long enough to deserve special favors from the butchers. To keep her baby alive, she ran from one to the other, an ounce here, a slice there, sometimes as far as the Arsenal, knee-deep in snow or falling on the ice. Yet somehow she was always dealt the worst cuts, meat that stank in spite of the cold, never a bite more than her ration, and her pittance handed over the counter with sour distrustful faces. Pretty soon, however, she noticed a detail. Every butcher displayed an alms box for the hospital or the Ursulines that no eye could miss. Aimée thought, “How wonderfully generous they all are! Everybody’s freezing and starving, but never a trip to the butcher’s without a few pious coins into those boxes.” One day she saw one of the good ladies of Montreal drop a coin and throw the butcher a wink. That wink was sufficient. Aimée sent a note to Monsieur Maturin, who was Gage’s secretary, named herself, humble widow of a late sergeant in the light infantry, the butcher got ten lashes, the alms boxes disappeared, and Aimée quietly entered the Governor’s service, sending elegant and witty notes at STORIES 25 a regular pace concerning the doings and the temper of a restive French population. The two called it “taking the pulse” of the people. They also took that of each other.
Presently General Gage was transferred to New York. Aimée, though she kept her little étage in Montreal (one never knows), followed soon after. That was where the key-shop persona disappeared once and for all, and where the Marquise de Tourville settled with her daughter in unpretentious but comfortable quarters, enjoying a monthly retainer quietly paid by the British crown. Tutors gave little Madeleine lessons in French and English. Aimée herself mastered the new language with ease. As a Frenchwoman she appeared in New York, and made
