The Right-Hand Shore by Christopher Tilghman

Author:Christopher Tilghman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

10

Well now. Miss Mary came back from France in July of ’82, seventeen years old, went back to Baltimore to Miss Davis’s, and the next year entered the Notre Dame of Maryland Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies in Baltimore, all part of her mother’s plan, announced to Mister Wyatt one night without consultation. Notre Dame, she had heard, was now offering college-level studies for the daughters of elite Catholic families all over America, especially the Catholic daughters of Maryland. These daughters had brothers; Mary would study for two more years and then, certainly, would have attracted a suitable husband. This was the plan. The School Sisters of Notre Dame were from Bavaria, but quite acceptable nonetheless; Mary would acquire German. In 1876 President Ulysses S. Grant had presided over the first commencement; he was not a favorite, but his niece, Bessie Sharp, was a student there, a good Catholic girl. Notre Dame was in the process of seeking a charter to become the first degree-granting Catholic college for women in America.

Wyatt called it an attractive novelty and left it at that. They were sitting at dinner, a rare family gathering. Ophelia and Mary had returned to the Retreat for the summer. It was hot, with almost no air coming in the open French doors on two sides of the room; the candles didn’t even flicker. Mary and Thomas were both silent, appraising each other back and forth across the table as their parents’ awkward reunion unfolded. What Mary saw was a young male of the species, which was a promotion of sorts for him. What Thomas saw was a slightly less perverse version of the older sister who had bedeviled him for years. Neither Mary nor Thomas could know that from this time onward, few decisions she would make in the years to come would be unrelated to calculations about Thomas’s well-being. He would never have imagined that Mary was his guardian angel, and at least for him, it turned out that the power of angels was almost unlimited. For Mary, it turned out that the source of angelic power was self-sacrifice.

Solomon brought in the dinner, a roast pheasant, which he deposited warily. He seemed to regard Mary with curiosity, Ophelia with fear. He backed into the darkness of the pantry without the usual banter about the weather or the occasional wry comment about Zoe’s mood. Wyatt had forgotten how the staff mistrusted Ophelia, and as one more complication in these moments of conflicting emotions, it struck him as unfair that she should be forever shackled to her father—the Duke. No one was trying harder to escape what went on at the dock with the man from Virginia than Ophelia; she had sailed to Europe trying to outrun the schooner.

Wyatt looked at Mary, his daughter so long away that at times he simply forgot about her, thought of the two children in his life as Thomas and Randall. The light accentuated her profile; it was her blunt chin rather than

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