One Glorious Ambition Read online

  “My grandmother … leased Orange Court to you?”

  “Yes. It was of mutual benefit. I’m sure she’ll explain.” The woman squinted at Dorothea. No, she just has narrow eyes. She wore her hair in a braid knotted around the top of her head the way Hessians do. “I’ve forgotten my manners. You must be weary from your trip and the news of your father. I’ll bring us tea if you’d like.”

  “Better I should visit my grandmother.”

  “I’ll have Isaac bring your trunks in. That’s my brother. He lives here too. You’ll meet the other boarders at supper. Served at seven sharp. I’ll show you to your room.”

  With that, Mrs. Hudson stood and called out to her brother. Then Dorothea followed her to the room in her family’s home chosen for her by a stranger.

  Dorothea removed her hat and gloves and laid them on the dresser, letting her fingers linger on the cool marble top. It was a well-furnished room with an armoire, writing desk, and small fireplace, along with a large four-post bed. Dorothea knew the room had once been her father’s. Her grandfather had told her this when she was a small child, with free run of the mansion. But this was no longer her grandfather’s mansion. She was a guest in someone else’s boardinghouse.

  Isaac brought up her trunks, and she began to unpack them by removing the Thomas Gray poetry book and holding it to her heart. Her aunt Sarah had gifted her with the complete collection. She set the book down. What was she doing here when Charles and Joseph and a reunion were just steps away?

  She descended the steps, nearly skipping past the pear garden to the caretaker’s cottage. The path was well worn with stones lining the walkway. She heard birdsong in the elms, and the afternoon sun felt hot against her head. She bent to smell an iris, then stood and brushed wrinkles from her skirt. She had never been inside the single-story cottage that boasted a thatch roof like those seen in English picture books. The fence had recently been painted, and the flower and herb gardens on either side of the steps were well tended.

  Dorothea knocked, and after a pause the door flung open.

  “Thea!” Charles bounded out and grabbed her, swinging her or attempting to, but he was still an inch or so shorter than she. “You’ve come at last!”

  “I have. Let me look at you!” She held him at arm’s length, then pulled him to her. “Oh, how I have missed you.” She whispered in his ear, their cheeks together, the bones of his narrow shoulders like handles she could hold.

  “And I you.”

  “You look … like a young man. So grown up.”

  “I am grown up.”

  “Where’s Joseph?” she asked as the two separated, Dorothea dabbing at her eyes, gazing at her brother.

  “Walking out back. He’s a favorite of Grandmamma.”

  “I’m sure you are as well.”

  Charles flicked his thick hair on either side of a center cut back behind his ears.

  “I haven’t seen Joseph since he was a baby.”

  “I’m no baby no more.” Dorothea turned to the quiet voice. Joseph led his grandmother from around the side of the house.

  “No, you aren’t,” Dorothea bent to be face to face with him. “You’re a young man.” A small dog waddled beside him.

  “I see you made it at last. Come inside,” Madam Dix directed. “You too, Benji.” Strings from her black cap hung on either side of her wide jaw. “Charles should have brought you out back without my having to come get you. Take the eggs inside, Joseph. Charles, lend a hand.”

  Charles slipped beside his grandmamma. She leaned against the cane as much as against Charles. Joseph smiled over his shoulder at Dorothea as he handed her the egg basket. He patted his grandmother’s waist with his little hand.

  “Hello to you too, Grandmamma,” Dorothea mumbled. A night breeze cooled her warm face as she followed her family, including Benji the dog, inside.

  Eight

  A Touch of Friendship

  Over Cookie’s hearty rabbit stew, Madam Dix informed Dorothea of the change in circumstances that led to the leasing of Orange Court.

  “I’m well into my seventies, and my knees are not so good. Being in the cottage seemed better than climbing the stairs to bed each night. And Orange Court offers an income necessary to care for all of you.”

  Cookie placed fresh bread before the family in the small dining room, then she pulled up a chair and joined them. Butter from an iris mold was passed around.

  “Papa died,” Joseph said.

  “Yes, he did, and that’s very sad.” Dorothea watched Joseph. He didn’t appear to need comforting, and yet their father had died and Joseph was separated from his mother. He must feel sadness just as Dorothea had when she had been sent to Worcester.

  Joseph stuffed his mouth as he spoke, and Madam Dix said nothing about his lack of manners. If it had been Dorothea making a mess as a child, her grandmother would have corrected her. Things were different with boys.

  “So we came to live here,” Charles added cheerfully. “We’re closer to the wharfs. I love going there to watch the ships. They bring in blue porcelain from China and silks from I don’t know where. I’m going to go to sea one day and find out.”

  “After Harvard,” Dorothea told him.

  Madam Dix raised her eyebrows to Dorothea. “That’ll be our hope, at least.”

  So finances were more strained than she had realized if even Harvard wasn’t a certainty.

  Dorothea was about to say something more about her father’s death and the promise of a future with him in heaven when her grandmamma said, “According to my daughter, your school was successful even if our hopes for your marriage were not.” Dorothea nodded. “I’ve already conferred with Mrs. Hudson, and having a school here will be fine. We can advertise in the circulars. The income will be useful. We can hope you’ll meet suitors at church and thus enter the Boston social scene.”

  “I did enjoy the children.”

  “Not necessary to enjoy what one must do to survive,” Madam Dix said. She wiped her face with a napkin, beads of sweat having formed above her lip. Is she ill? “Mrs. Hudson has faithful boarders, many of them divinity students from Harvard. Thank you,” she told Cookie after the cook had poured hot water into the tea caddy before rising to clear the soup bowls. “The others I believe are legislators and their wives. They are in Boston during the sessions.”

  “I’ve met Mrs. Hudson. She seems more than adequate to the task of running the house.”

  They finished the meal. Since it was already late, Dorothea said good night. She hugged Charles and shook Joseph’s little hand when he put it out to her. Then she walked in a daze across the lawn to Orange Court. No one had said a word about their mother. Better that she forget she ever had a mother. This was the family she had now. A lonely hoot owl expressed her feelings exactly.

  Dorothea took her meals with the boarders while Charles and Joseph took theirs with their grandmother at the cottage. The family attended church together since her grandmother had already paid the pew fees. Dorothea’s request that the boys live in Orange Court and attend her school when she started it fell into her grandmother’s brooding silence like a rock sinking to the bottom of a pond.

  “They will be tutored at the cottage,” she said. “Your school fees can pay for it.”

  Dorothea watched her brothers roll hoops on the cottage lawn and didn’t attempt to join them. She knew her grandmother would find it unseemly. Instead, she worked on her school, hoping to recreate the same sense of goodwill she had managed in Worcester. Her students would be girls. She would add her brothers if her grandmother relented. Dorothea expanded the age range, including girls up to age seventeen so that she might use the older girls as assistants and thus extend the number of students she could teach.

  Not two blocks away from Orange Court a best-selling author had begun an academy for young ladies, and everyone praised her efforts. Dorothea could do as well, couldn’t she? Her school might receive a public distinction that would help her find acceptance in Bos
ton society, if not for making a “fine marriage,” for doing something to further the public good. “Doing public good” was a constant theme of the divinity students who boarded at Mrs. Hudson’s table.

  The school began within a few weeks of Dorothea’s arrival in Boston. Her previous success opened the door to parents asking her opinion about managing a child’s behavior or how they could encourage their children at home. A few parents invited her to supper as others had in Worcester. She had even discovered that her youngest student, Marianna Cutter, was a second cousin.

  “How wonderful! We’re family,” she told Marianna’s mother, Grace, after the young widow shared the news.

  “It’s quite down the line, you understand. I believe your grandmother is my grandmother’s cousin.”

  “Close enough,” Dorothea said. She stroked Marianna’s chestnut hair as they talked. The girl carried herself with confidence although she was but five. She had the same Dix blue-gray eyes.

  “I’d invite you to supper,” Dorothea said, “but it’s Mrs. Hudson who permits supper guests or not. I’ll speak with her and hope you can join us at a later date.”

  “In time we’ll invite you.” A grayish pallor painted the young mother’s skin. She was as thin as a knitting needle.

  Dorothea kissed Marianna on the child’s pug nose—definitely not a Dix nose—and Marianna took her seat, waving to her mother as the woman left. Dorothea had already found delight in the girl. Her quick mind and helpful spirit lit up the room. Now she paid even more attention: Marianna was family, right here in her schoolroom.

  After a few months, Madam Dix permitted the boys to attend Dorothea’s school. “Their tutor tires” was her only explanation. Dorothea smiled when Charles and Joseph came into the room the first time and plopped into their chairs, surrounded by girls who simply stared.

  “These are my brothers,” Dorothea said. She wanted to dance at the news. They were together at last. She had told the boys not to call her Thea in the classroom, and they mostly complied. She would hold them to high academic and behavioral standards.

  “You didn’t finish your writing assignment, Charles. That must be completed before you eat your lunch.”

  “Ah, Thea … I mean, Miss Dix. My stomach growls.” She raised her finger at him. “It’s a rule, Charles. You must not defy me.”

  “You’re not my mother,” he mumbled but returned to his work.

  She required Joseph to wear a placard after he pulled up a plant rather than study it when she took the class outside. It was the first time she had used the dreaded placard here, and she wished it hadn’t been Joseph who introduced it to the other students. But at least they all knew she had no favorites.

  “Grandmamma won’t like it,” Joseph told Dorothea as he tugged at the placard.

  “You’ll have to explain what you did then, and we’ll see if she disapproves of the consequence.”

  “Be glad it’s not Papa,” Charles told him. “He used the switch on us.”

  She shivered at Charles’s mention of the willow switch. At least she had found a means for order that did not require suffering.

  “It is your failure that your students need to be disciplined,” her grandmother told her. She had come by the school after the other children had left. The faithful Benji panted at her feet. “Joseph does not need such a placard.”

  “He misbehaved. I cannot show favorites. What would you have me do?”

  “Perhaps your lessons are too easy for him. He’s not challenged. He’s a bright boy. I think he doesn’t need your lessons. I’ll keep him at home.”

  She had failed with her own brother. Maybe others could teach all these children better. The truth of that tempered her accomplishment with the school and made her wonder when Charles would be pulled out as well.

  Cousins Grace and Marianna lived in a modest home, and Grace’s husband, once a sea captain, Dorothea learned, had left them a comfortable stipend after his death. Grace looked much the same, and her fingernails were chipped, her skin sallow. After a light supper of cod and fresh greens, Marianna showed Dorothea her room.

  “See my picture?” The child handed her a pencil drawing of lilies in a common pond done on good paper.

  “I had no idea you were an artist,” Dorothea told her.

  “Yes, Auntie. It’s my favorite thing to do.”

  “Your writing is also excellent.”

  “Pictures make the time go so fast I forget to eat, Mummy says.”

  “When we find things we love, we do forget to eat and even sleep,” Dorothea told her. The child’s eyes lit up as they talked.

  “Oh, I sleep lots. So does Mummy, but that’s because she’s sick.”

  “I’m not sick.” Grace had followed them. She brushed wrinkles from a Dresden doll’s dress holding court on Marianna’s bed. “I’m just tired. Chasing after you, little one.” She poked Marianna’s tummy and the girl laughed.

  Dorothea looked away, not wishing to intrude. But she ached for Marianna. It was hard to have a mother who was ill in body or in mind.

  Dorothea began creating opportunities for Marianna and the other students to paint and draw. She even hired an art teacher. A few more children challenged her order, but she did not use the placard. Instead, she shamed them with words and later felt worse than if she had switched them. She worked harder to find interesting ways of teaching her subjects, hoping that discipline would be less troubling.

  Before long, she returned the supper invitation, inviting Grace and Marianna to Mrs. Hudson’s savory soup. Other boarders supped at the table as well, with the conversation bouncing from theology to politics to plants. A legislator sat at the head of the table, his wife with graying hair to his side. Marianna’s large red bow tied up her curls, and she swung her feet beneath the table, her eyes watching the several guests. During a lull, Marianna’s little girl voice said, “It’s fun to be downstairs instead of upstairs in school.”

  Dorothea engaged her immediately. “What’s so different?”

  “Here Joseph doesn’t tease me.” She looked at her mother who shook her head.

  “He bothers you?” Dorothea frowned. “Where do you see him?”

  “When we’re outside playing. He takes my basket and runs.”

  “You must stand up for yourself,” Marianna’s mother said. “Not complain. Every girl needs to do that.” Grace’s voice sounded breathless, as though she’d climbed stairs to an attic.

  “He’s jealous because I know the names of plants he doesn’t.” Marianna adjusted her bow, lifted her chin with a note of defiance.

  “Girls need to defer to boys,” a divinity student eating at the table said. He pointed with his fork. “It’s only proper.”

  “I’m not certain I agree with you, Mr. Reynolds.” Dorothea looked directly at the boarder. “No one person should be asked to downplay her intelligence simply not to embarrass one of another gender.”

  “Unless they do, they might never marry,” he countered. “A terrible tragedy indeed.”

  Dorothea exchanged glances with a legislator’s wife with raised eyebrows. Neither said a word, deciding not to add fuel to the fire. She clarified the value though: young girls in her charge would be encouraged to pursue the length and depth of wisdom, even if it bristled a young man down the road—including her little brother, whom she would watch more closely when the girls went outside.

  “Thomas Nuttall, the botanist, will be speaking this afternoon,” one of the boarders at Mrs. Hudson’s table announced a few days after Marianna and Grace had visited.

  “And who is he?” asked one of the legislators.

  “He made the trek into the Louisiana Purchase with John Jacob Astor’s party, going all the way to the Pacific in 1811. He recorded his observations and has dozens of drawings of various flora.”

  “Can anyone attend?” Dorothea asked.

  “Of course.”

  That afternoon Dorothea donned her bonnet, gloves, and reticule and walked to the lecture ha
ll. The summer day of 1822 was balmy, with sea gulls crying over the docks and a lingering scent of lilacs in the air. She took a seat next to a stately young woman dressed in fine fashion who nodded toward Dorothea as the lecture began. Lemon oil made the wooden seats shine and gave off a pleasant scent. Or perhaps it was the woman’s perfume. Dorothea had seen the woman at church, but they had not spoken.

  Dorothea settled in to listen, loving the man’s stories. He spoke of places and plants she might never see. The idea of their existence pleased her. Perhaps it was the orderliness, how plants could be classified in such detail, created by a God who had so many larger things to contend with, and yet He remembered Nymphaea odorata, the lowly lily of the pond.

  “Wasn’t that grand?” her seatmate expressed after the final applause for the lecture died down and people stood, gathered their belongings.

  “It was.” Dorothea tugged on her gloves.

  “I’m Anne Heath. I believe I’ve seen you at Mr. Channing’s sermons.” Her dark eyebrows lifted.

  “Yes, Reverend Channing is quite brilliant.”

  “I love information for its own sake,” Anne said. “Whether I do anything with the ideas and facts or not.” She leaned into Dorothea. “I hope it’s not a wasteful practice, listening to ideas, reading books on ancient civilizations or medical procedures or even the history of the making of paper, knowing those facts just rattle in my head until perhaps I can interject them into conversations. Nothing more.”

  Dorothea grinned. “I’m Dorothea Lynde Dix,” she said. “My grandmother is Madam Dix.”

  “Of course. We don’t see her much at Reverend Channing’s sermons. I hope she’s well?”

  “She grows more feeble, I fear,” Dorothea said. “She finds her Puritan roots to be more … uplifting of late.”

  “And you?”

  “I attend Reverend Channing’s lectures twice a week,” Dorothea said. “He’s … charming and inspiring.”