Рита Браун - Probable Claws

“And he never lets us forget it.” Catherine grimaced for they were the same age but taught by different tutors.

“Too much Cicero.” Rachel smiled. “I quite liked the poetry though.”

“You’re good with languages.” Catherine complimented her younger sister. “I’m good with numbers.”

“Ah yes,” Ewing said. “I received a letter today from Baron Necker, my friend in Paris. It’s interesting the people a young man meets on his grand tour. My father was wise to send me. Here it is thirty years later and the baron and I still write, he’s somewhat younger, full of ideas. He told me the royal treasury is almost bankrupt, the French deficit is over a hundred million livres, and repayment of their debt is two hundred fifty million in arrears. Payment to the Army and Navy is now erratic, as it is for government ministers. You have a head for numbers, my dear, but clearly Louis XVI does not.” He looked at his elder daughter.

“The numbers are so big it’s hard to fathom.” Rachel shook her head.

“We have domestic and foreign debt enough. Virginia is faltering at paying down her war debts. Indeed our leaders during the war appear not to have been able to add or subtract.” Ewing relished the long slanting rays of the sun on his face. “I think we will discharge our debt but what about the other states? Then what?”

“Well, it can’t be as bad as France.” Rachel took some comfort in that, plus she wasn’t too interested in politics.

“The king must call an assembly. There’s no other way.” Ewing sighed, for an assembly would bring problems of its own.

Any time a group of men gathered to decide upon weighty issues, little good rarely came of it, in his opinion.

“All France has to do is declare a war on Austria or Spain, march in, and steal whatever that nation has lying about. That’s the way they do things over there.” Catherine shrugged.

“Now, where did you hear that?” Ewing turned to her.

“From you, Father. You’ve always said they are a lot of squabbling children with an idiot at their head.”

“Did I really say such a thing?”

“You implied it. You are much too gracious to be as blunt as I.” Catherine reached for his hand and squeezed it.

“Well, no one in their right mind will lend France money.” He stopped at the edge of the timber tract. “And if we don’t set our own house in order, no nation will lend us anything either. No credit. You can’t move forward without credit.”

“Father, you have vats of credit.” Catherine, who worked with her father, admired his business acumen.

“But I am not a nation. I can see to our increase but I can’t manage the affairs of thirteen states, each of them so different from the other.”

“We’d be better off if you did.” Catherine praised him.

“Now you sound like your mother. She was always puffing me up.” He grinned.

“Speaking of puffing up. Have you heard that Maureen Selisse Holloway”—Rachel used both her married names for Maureen’s first husband had been murdered—“is rumored to be trying to buy a title for Jeffrey?”

Jeffrey was the second husband, divinely handsome, perhaps fifteen to twenty years younger than his fabulously wealthy wife. She wasn’t telling.

“What?” Catherine’s jaw dropped.

“Yes. DoRe told Bettina.” Rachel mentioned the head of Maureen’s stable, a middle-aged widower who was courting their head cook and head slave woman, herself a widow. All crossed their fingers that this would work out and each feared, but kept silent, that Maureen would find a way to hold back DoRe.

“We don’t have titles here,” Ewing forcefully said.

“She’s painted her coat of arms from her birthplace in the Caribbean on her coach. She’ll buy him a title then pretend it’s of no consequence, but we will be expected to address them as Count Pooh-bah,” Catherine predicted.

“Foolishness.” Ewing turned for home.

“But amusing to watch.” Catherine slipped her arm through his as did Rachel on his other side.

“Father, if DoRe asks Bettina to marry him, you will have to buy him. It’s only right.”

“Yes, yes.”

“And you will have the two best coachmen in Virginia. Won’t that give Yancy Grant hives.”

Catherine mentioned their head coachman, Barker O., as well as another horse breeder.

“Maureen will make it difficult.” Rachel knew how petty and vicious Maureen could be.

“Oooh,” Ewing drawled, “if the baronetcy or dukedom is dear enough she’ll sell and sell quickly.”

“How do you feel?” Rachel asked her sister, changing the subject.

“Fine. I’m only in my third month. This is it. No more. Two children is enough.”

“Three,” Rachel announced. “Three and I also have three.”

Rachel had two girls.

“No, I am not having three children.”

“You have John and I have Charles.” Rachel laughed out loud as she mentioned their husbands.

“You girls go to the same school. Your mother used to say that about me. She’d call me her ‘old boy.’ ”

“It is true, Father? Men don’t grow up.” Rachel pinched him as she said that.

“I feel old enough. My bones creak,” he complained.

“Pfiffle. You can wear out men half your age. You’re trying to work on our sympathies,” Catherine remarked.

They all laughed as arm in arm they strolled back, the air chilling now that the sun had set. Three people bound by blood, by the times, by deep love. How fortunate that they could not see the future, but then no one can.

5

December 29, 2016

Thursday

“You have a sharp eye,” Cooper noted.

“I don’t know about that but I try to notice things.” Harry stood in the small foyer of Gary Gardner’s office. She’d been asked to meet Cooper there as she knew his office work habits well.

“He worked alone. Small operation. He was the creative one. He really didn’t need other people, especially with what computers can do now.”

“That’s what he always said. That’s why he moved here. The company became too big in Richmond, too many layers of people piddling in his work. He was happy here.”

“The way of the world these days. Nothing gets done quickly, that’s for sure. Everyone wastes time covering their ass.” Cooper noticed the framed photographs on the walls. “So I’ve been talking to former clients. No one has had a bad word to say about him.” Cooper turned to face Harry. “How often would you say you’ve been in his office?”

“A lot. He came here in the mid-eighties. I was a kid when he moved here, but he and Mother got on so I’d accompany her to his office. He designed homes or additions for friends; as I got older I’d see him socially. He did a beautiful job for Nelson and Sandra Yarbrough, also Sara Goodwin. People saw his work. He helped Tazio Chappars and our group with the old school buildings we’re returning to their original state but with modern plumbing, etc. They researched old photographs, building materials of the time, really the late-nineteenth century. He made it fun and since neither one could design anything new, they didn’t butt heads. I doubt that they would have anyway.”

Tazio Chappars, in her late thirties now, moved to the area after graduate school. Her family and college friends, Midwesterners, warned her that Virginia, a Southern state, would not be welcoming. They were wrong. Then again Tazio, warm, good-natured, could win over most people.

Cooper returned to the expensively framed colored photographs. “I’m not an architectural historian but I do read. Mostly everyone around here wants the Georgian or Federal look, he seemed more influenced by the French.”