Mother tended to keep to herself, her devotional reading occupying the better part of her days.
Maria was growing taller and more slender, a dark-haired sapling with a studious demeanor that belied her youth. From her sixth year I had undertaken to educate her, stuffing her young head with the same kind of knowledge—of the sciences, astronomy, philosophy, and mathematics—that had been branded as a “masculine education” when I myself had been mentored by Meribah Lorrington. So much did I feel I owed to that unfortunate woman’s tutelage that I deemed it my crusade to pass on Mrs. Lorrington’s curriculum to my own daughter. While Maria excelled in her studies in our idyllic cottage retreat, she had developed a weakness for printen, the local confection that resembled a cross between gingerbread and masonry. If I did not despise gambling, I’d level a wager that the stuff had been used for roofing in Charlemagne’s day. And with the state of dentistry as ancient as the Roman ruins that could still be found about the spa city, I despaired of Maria’s losing all her teeth to a sheet of printen. My eleven-year-old also deplored the odor of the hot springs. “Why would anyone bathe in rotten eggs?” she repeatedly questioned. Because of the stench, she refused to join me, and would not believe the benefits of such a foul-smelling place could in any way be healthful. Too much the cynic for her tender years, Maria was convinced it was all a clever joke, a ruse concocted by generations of town elders to bilk the tourists and increase the municipal coffers.
When we were not availing ourselves of the spa city’s social whirl, which was nearly as lively as London’s, it was a cozy domesticity we four enjoyed, although I doubt Ban and Maria would have been natural allies had I not been the link between them. What they shared in common was their love for me and their desire to ease my nearly constant pain. I never complained of it, but they could read it in my face, and in the amount of time it took me to complete a line of poetry on the page once it had been forged in my imagination.
In our little cottage Ban himself drew my baths, sprinkling them with fragrant rose petals harvested from our garden.
To cheer me, the two of them had taken to standing below the window of the bathroom, serenading me as I soaked. Ban had purchased an old viol from a luthier in the village, and though he was an abysmal musician, his baritone was clear and pleasant, and Maria’s sweet soprano harmonized charmingly.
As I languished in the tub one morning, contemplating the damp gray walls, the scratchy low moan of the viol wafted through the tiny window, accompanying a song that went like this:
Oh, Mary is my flower
Asleep in her fairy bower;
No one can overpow’r my senses
Like my Mary.
You crumble my defenses—
And shatter my pretenses
Be my amanuensis.
If you write my story you’ll cover with glory
The battlefield triumphs of Ban
Much better than I can…
By this point I was convulsed with laughter. I had not felt better in weeks. “Thank heavens you have no poetic aspirations!” I exclaimed. “Maria had a better talent for scansion and rhyme at age four!” My daughter, in fact, with her studiously observant eye, had the makings of a true writer.
“The lyric was Maria’s idea—you know. She thought it would give us both a project.” Ban slipped a fragrant bloom through the narrow opening of the window. It fell limply to the floor, fracturing the tender connection twixt blossom and stem.
“Sort of a riposte, if you will, to Clinton’s scurrilous assaults of me in the London press,” he added.
I smiled in spite of myself. The man could be maddening. “Oh, is that what Maria says? I had no idea my eleven-year-old daughter was reading Sir Henry Clinton’s Narrative.” The seventh edition of Clinton’s military memoirs had been discussed at length in the English papers. Fox saw to it that Ban and I were kept abreast of developments back home by sending us clippings of import. Sir Henry Clinton’s published correspondence with Ban’s mentor, General Cornwallis, revealed the blunders made by the British army in the Carolinas during the campaigns of 1780–81, and in particular eviscerated Ban for his ignominious showing during “the unfortunate day at Cowpens”—a defeat that presaged our loss of the American colonies.
“O, be my ghost, for I love you the most,” Ban sang. I could hear Maria giggling beside him.
Though we were both Whigs, my lover and I did not often see eye to eye politically. For example, the Tarletons’ fortune had derived, and continued to thrive, from the slave trade in the Caribbean. I had long held that no being should be disgraced or degraded by another because of the color of his skin. What good did our Enlightenment do to exalt the merits of humanism if we treated our darker brethren as less than human?
Yet Ban had also won many days on the battlefield and had sacrificed part of his body in the service of our country. He was legitimately a military hero…moreover, he was my hero. Though we often scrabbled like a pair of cats, and he could wound me like no other on earth, he was also capable of exquisite tenderness and night after night had led me over the brink of sublimest ecstasy; and I could deny him nothing. If my skills with a pen could extract clarity from the fog of war and rub away the sooty accusations that besmirched Ban’s name in the public eye, I would gladly lend my cramped hands to the cause.
Eyes shut, I clasped
