Country of the Bad Wolfes

riverside lawn, to be followed by a ballroom dance that evening.

The day of the picnic was blessed with ideal weather, the turnout large and in festive spirit. A bandstand had been erected on the lawn and a brass ensemble played gaily through the afternoon. Jimmy’s sister, Elizabeth Anne, would not arrive until later in the day, coming by coach from Exeter, where she had been spending the past weeks with friends, following her graduation from the Athenian Female Seminary. Her oil portrait hung on the parlor wall of the Merrimack house and John Roger had often paused to admire it. As pictured, she was truly beautiful. Hair the color of polished copper in green-ribboned ringlets to her bare shoulders, the ribbons matching the color of her eyes. An elegant throat necklaced with pearls. Full lips in a small smile suggestive of some secret amusement. John Roger suspected that the artist may have gilded the lily in gratitude for Mr Bartlett’s no-doubt-hefty commission.

Jimmy told him the painting of Lizzie—as he and his father called her, while Mrs Bartlett referred to her by no name but Elizabeth—had been done less than a year before. “You’d never know by that picture what a tomboy she was,” Jimmy said. All through girlhood she had been one for foot-racing, climbing trees, flying kites, chucking stones. She had badgered their father into teaching her to swim at a much younger age than Jimmy had learned, and then pestered Jimmy into instructing her how to sail his gaff-rigged pram. She was a constant fret to their mother, who was ever upbraiding her to behave herself as a respectable young lady ought. Even though Jimmy and his friends refused to let her join their Adventurers’ Club, she persisted in swimming with them in the river. “We all wanted to dunk her,” Jimmy said, “but none of us could catch her. She swims like an otter. I don’t care to say how many times she beat me in races. She could beat all of us.”

Their mother thought it unseemly that Lizzie was frisking in the river with the boys, but their father, who was proud of her aquatic superiority, believed it was simple innocent fun. Then came the family’s first swim of the summer when she was fourteen and her sodden bathing costume clung to her in startling new ways. “You could see the fruit was getting ripe, if you know what I mean,” Jimmy said. Her evident physical bloom effected an abrupt change in Mr Bartlett’s outlook and he told her there would be no more swimming in company with boys. Lizzie alleged not to understand his objection and for days persisted in asking an explanation of him, and he would every time reiterate that it simply wasn’t proper. But how was it improper, Lizzie would demand to know, and red-faced Mr Bartlett would sputter that she should ask her mother. “She didn’t have to ask Mum,” Jimmy said. “Lizzie knew very well what Father was talking about. She was just deviling him for the fun of it. It’s how she’s always been.”

The same devilment was at the root of what Jimmy called the music scandal. His sister was a fine pianist, trained in the classics, but their parents had been unaware of the bohemian element in her repertoire until one evening when she was entertaining the family after supper and segued from “Fur Elise” into a rousing dance-hall number of recent French import. Jimmy had heard her play the bawdy music once before, when their parents were away from the house, and had cautioned her against it, and she’d shown him her tongue in retort. But as he’d warned, their mother was dismayed by the lewd composition and she ordered Lizzie to desist from it at once. Very well, the girl said, and banged the fallboard over the keys and got up from the bench and— humming the sprightly tune—danced about the parlor with her skirts swirling to her knees. “Mum barely spoke to her for the next couple of days,” Jimmy said.

Mrs Bartlett was finally pushed past her wit’s end with her audacious daughter when the girl was seen mounted astride her stallion as she rode on the public road flanking their property. When Lizzie countered her mother’s angry reprimand with the contention that it was the more sensible as well as more comfortable way to ride, Mrs Bartlett called upon Mr Bartlett to prohibit her from riding until she promised to do so in the proper, sidesaddle fashion. Lizzie was so cross, Jimmy said, that she threatened to run away and live among the Indians. Her parents never knew for sure when she was joking, but such impertinence was anyway the concluding proof to Mrs Bartlett that the girl was in critical need of social remediation before it was too late. “Do something, Sebastian,” she told her husband.

Mr Bartlett dismissed Lizzie’s private tutors and enrolled her at the Athenian Seminary for her final year of schooling. Renowned for its instruction in the social graces as much as for its rigorous academic curriculum, the institution had molded more than one recalcitrant miss into a decorous young lady. When Elizabeth came home for Christmas holiday at the end of her first semester, she comported herself as the very model of refined femininity her mother had prayed for.

“That’s when she sat for that picture on the wall,” Jimmy said.

And now, as John Roger and Jimmy stood talking on the riverside lawn, Mrs Bartlett came up behind them, saying, “John, dear, here is someone you must meet.” The happy matron was hugging the arm of the young woman she presented as her daughter, Elizabeth. In the dusky gold light of late afternoon the girl was smiling at him as in the painting. She was surprisingly tall, her eyes almost on a level with his, and both leaner and more buxom than her portrait suggested. He thought her even lovelier than her picture, and only by force of will kept his jaw from going slack.

“Mr Wolfe,” she said, offering her hand, “Jimmy has written me so much about you, I feel as though we’ve long been acquainted.”

He said the pleasure was entirely his and kissed her hand. Her eyes went brighter. Her mother tittered.

Before the end of their first dance that evening he knew he was in love, though she would later say that he may not have known it until then but she knew he had fallen in love the minute their eyes met. Directly on the heels of his dancefloor insight, however, he had the distressing thought that she might already have a beau—or worse, be betrothed. He could not muster the boldness to ask directly if she were spoken for, and as they waltzed about the floor he was frantic for some clever way to find out.

His worry was more evident than he knew, and she intuited its cause. “If it’s of concern to anyone you know, Mr Wolfe,” she said during a dance, “I’m under no obligation to any party whatever.” He flushed in surprise at both her acuity and her candor. His relief was so manifest she nearly laughed aloud—and so endearing she had to resist the urge to kiss him right there on the dance floor.

Later in the evening they went out to the garden under an oblong ivory moon and followed a winding pathway to a low rock wall bordering the lawn. A mild breeze carried the scents of night flowers and the river, stirring the trees, swaying the shadows. The ballroom music was faint at this distance. Against the house lights filtering through the foliage she was mostly silhouette. An undulant wisp of moonlight played on her hair and glinted on an earring. He said he had heard many an interesting tale of her rowdy tomboy days with the gents of the Adventurers’ Club.

“Oh, those rascals,” she said. “They never did let me be a member, you know.” She leaned closer and said in lowered voice, “But that club was never so interesting as the one I belong to at the seminary. It’s a most clandestine association, so I mustn’t tell you anything of it unless you promise absolutely never to repeat it to a living soul.”

John Roger swore her secret was safe with him.

They were the Sisters of Fortuna, she said, and they performed such rituals as would have surely got them burned for witches not so long ago. He heard a timbre of mischief in her voice and suspected she was having sport with him, yet her daring insinuations at once amused and beguiled him. He asked what sorts of rituals.

She leaned closer still and told him the Sisters met only on nights of the full moon, in a meadow deep in the woods, even on the coldest nights. They would build a large bonfire and then remove their cloaks, under which they wore only thin white nightdresses and black woolen stockings. They would sing hymns to Fortuna and dance like dervishes in a circle round the fire, their loosed hair flinging and nightdresses awhirl.

He felt her perfumed warmth on his face, her breath at his ear as she whispered, “We dance faster and faster, and my heart just pounds against my ribs like . . . like some wild thing in a cage. And then . . .” she took a deep breath, “then we throw off our nightdresses and dance naked but for our stockings. Naked.”

She quickly drew back to look at his face—which felt to him on fire. In a bobbing shard of moonlight he glimpsed a bright eye and flash of grin. Then she kissed him full on the lips—and before he could even think to react she darted away toward the ballroom, glancing back over her shoulder and saying, “Close your mouth, Mr Wolfe, before an insect flies into it. And hurry, or we’ll miss the last dance.”

In the years ahead he would from time to time and with feigned casualness ask her if there had really been a Sisters of Fortuna sorority. And she would each time respond with no more than her smile of secret