Marcia Talley - The Last Refuge

Melody’s little brother, Gabriel or ‘Gabe,’ as he was more commonly known, and to whom I’d been introduced in the game room, had finished his meal and from the sound effects leaking out of his iPod Touch, I gathered he was playing Angry Birds. Since discovering my role in the cast, he was pointedly ignoring me, as if holding me responsible for his mother’s absence.

‘How’s your wife doing?’ I asked Jack Donovan, genuinely concerned.

Jack swallowed the morsel of steak he’d been chewing, looking surprised that I asked. ‘The prognosis is good. She still needs the chemo, but we are all optimistic.’

‘It must be hard for her back in… sorry, I forget where you’re from,’ I babbled.

‘Texas,’ he said simply.

I paused, a fork loaded with potatoes halfway to my mouth. ‘Texas is a big state.’

He sawed off another chunk of steak. ‘A little town north of Dallas. McKinney. You’ve probably never heard of it.’

Surprisingly, I had. ‘Didn’t Money Magazine rate McKinney as one of the top five places to live in America?’

‘It did. After that,’ he grumbled, ‘and all the publicity from this show, I worry that the population is simply going to explode , although I have to admit it’d be good for business.’

‘Does Katherine have anyone staying with her during treatment?’ I wondered.

His gray eyes caught mine and held. ‘Of course. What kind of a person do you think I am? Kat’s being treated at MD Anderson in Dallas, so no worries there, and her mother lives close by.’

‘I text her, like, every minute,’ Melody said, her manicured thumbs flicking rapidly over the keys of her Droid, ‘Except the cell phone signal here really sucks.’

‘Better get used to it, young lady,’ her father warned. ‘There’ll be no cell phone service at Patriot House at all.’

Melody’s head jerked up, her green eyes wide and disbelieving. ‘No way. Cell phone signals are everywhere!’

‘Not when they’re jamming it,’ Jack informed her.

Jamming. Great. There went any prayer of clandestine Facetime tête-a-têtes with Paul, assuming I’d even be able to smuggle my iPhone in.

‘Is that true, Mrs Ives?’ Melody wasn’t buying it, seeking a second opinion.

‘It’s technically possible to jam cell phone signals,’ I told her. ‘You have to have permission from the FCC, of course, but movie theaters, restaurants, concert halls and churches are issued permits for jamming equipment every day.’

‘That sucks,’ she said, and I had to agree.

‘You’ll write to your mother every week,’ Jack said. ‘The old-fashioned way, with paper and pen.’ His eyes darted in Gabe’s direction. ‘You, too, Gabriel.’

All the while we’d been talking, I could feel Gabe’s ice-blue eyes boring into the side of my head. I leaned across the table and lowered my voice. ‘Are the children really on board with the experiment, Jack?’

Jack’s steely gaze dropped away, back to focusing on his steak. ‘You’re a Johnny-Come-Lately, so you’re probably unaware of the rigorous screening they put us through. Of course the children are on board.’

‘When Mom was diagnosed, we were all going to quit,’ Melody cut in. ‘But it was Mom who insisted we stay on. The show was mega important to her.’

‘Kat has been home-schooling Melody and Gabriel, but what could be a better educational experience than actually having an opportunity to live in the eighteenth century?’ Jack added.

From across the table a male voice said, ‘May I butt in?’

Back in the parlor, I’d been introduced to the voice’s owner, a gangly young man in his mid to late twenties with a fringe of dark hair, but I couldn’t remember at the moment whether he was Alex Mueller, the dancing master, or Michael Rainey, the children’s tutor.

‘The children’s education will continue,’ he said, so I figured it was Michael. ‘They’ve converted the Paca House gift shop into a schoolroom. I’ll be teaching Gabe and Melody, of course, plus four other homeschoolers who will be brought in for classes every weekday.’ He snorted softly. ‘I almost said “bussed in.” That would have been a neat trick in 1774.’

‘That’s historically accurate,’ Donovan stated airily, just in case I’d been wondering. ‘School teachers were thin on the ground in colonial times. Only the gentry could afford to hire them, so children from neighboring estates would be often be included, and the expense shared.’

I’d done my homework, too, so this wasn’t news to me. Over the weekend, I’d poured over the material in the orientation packet Jud had given me, The Compleat Housewife, or Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Companion , for example, and The Frugal Housewife, or Complete Woman Cook , a cookbook from 1772 where I learned how to dress a turtle (don’t ask!) and prepare such finger-lickin’ fare as ragout of hog’s head and ears. Particularly helpful was The Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian , a charming and extraordinarily detailed account of Fithian’s year at Nomini Hall, the Robert Carter estate in Virginia, as a ‘plantation tutor’ to seven of the nine Carter children. Although Fithian wasted a good bit of time mooning over his girlfriend back in New Jersey, his impressions of daily life in Virginia are recorded with insight and the kind of detail one might expect of a tourist visiting a foreign country which, to a divinity student from Princeton University in 1774, Virginia almost certainly was.

Thinking about Fithian being so far away from home prompted me to ask, ‘So, what do you do in real life, Mr Donovan?’

A corner of his mouth turned up, half smile, half smirk. ‘Ah, I see you’re getting into your role already, Mrs Ives. The head of the household is always referred to as “Mister.”’ He chased a wayward carrot around his plate, stabbed it with a fork. ‘Or, “sir,” depending.’

While Donovan was busy popping the carrot into his mouth, Michael shot me a look: Asshole .

I stifled a giggle, narrowly avoiding spewing iced tea out my nose. Playing sister-in-law to such a stuffed shirt and mother to his two sulky children was likely to be a challenge. Didn’t Jud tell me that the cast had been carefully vetted? Of course he did, I realized as I mashed my vegetables together with a fork and applied a generous pat of butter. But if every applicant received high marks under the ‘Plays Well with Others’ column, it wouldn’t make for much of a TV show. ‘Conflict,’ I could almost hear Jud saying. ‘That’s what makes good television.’

‘So, sir ,’ I continued, ‘what do you do back in McKinney?’

‘JD’s Auto Mall,’ he said. ‘I sell cars. And I’m very, very good at it.’

A used-car salesman as our lord and master. How could we be so lucky?

‘Having servants is awesome! I ring a bell and they bring me stuff!’

Gabriel Donovan, son

On my first day as mistress of Patriot House, I was awakened by a gentle tap on the door.

‘Mumppf,’ I managed as I opened my eyes, squinted into the semi-darkness and tried to figure out exactly where I was. I struggled into a half-sitting position and patted around on the bedside table looking for my watch before remembering that I didn’t have a watch. When the cast arrived at Patriot House the previous afternoon we’d gone through a sign-in procedure more thorough than a security checkpoint at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. Watches, jewelry, iPods, iPhones, Droids, even Jack Donovan’s hearing aids… those technical marvels that make twenty-first century life worth living, all had to be surrendered before we were given a tour of the house and shown to our respective rooms.