The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton Read Online Free PDF Page A

When she did turn it toward me, I recognized a portrait of myself—perhaps she had painted it!—and I began to cry out. My own cries awakened me, and I slept no more.
    Recalling that dream now, I stood up and began to pace about my enclosure, as if movement would help ward off panic. Perhaps my only hope of liberation would be through some subterfuge directed at Mr. Dudley, some masquerade of compliance that might raise opportunities for escape. But I sickened at the thought of the cost of any degree of compliance.
    No, until I knew the circumstances of my captivity in every dimension, I now thought, I had better not act rashly. Survival and quiet resistance, held in some difficult balance under Mr. Dudley’s discipline, was all I dared. His reasonableness and gentility, his apparent concern for my well-being, like his impeccable opera-suit, seemed all too shamlike for me. How could I ever willingly capitulate to his momentarily restrained passions? I would, for the immediate future, have to live under the oppressions I have described, lying in wait, in hope and cunning, for the first occasion of my deliverance.

TWO
    How I became an itinerant painter
    H ow I came to live in such a state of vulnerability is not a simple tale. But I cannot imagine, reader, that you have not asked such a question yourself. All during my captivity memories washed over me—memories which may now enlighten my reader as much as they sustained me in my fear and loneliness.
    To begin, I should say that during my twentieth year my husband passed away, in June of 1836, in the agonies of bilious fever. I soon found that I must shake off my sorrows and turn my mind to getting my own living. Of course, I did not contemplate marriage after such a loss. My parents had both passed away of the consumption during my childhood and we children (there were four of us, two sisters and a brother) had scattered about New England to come into the care of family relations. My brother and I were taken under the wing of my mother’s sister Sally Wentworth and her husband, a dairy farmer in Willoston, New Hampshire, near the border with Massachusetts.
    Wrought with new sorrows and confusions upon my husband’s death, I returned in mourning to Willoston. I found repugnant, however, the ceaseless drudgeries of farm life, and I gradually began to feel the necessity of turning my hand to some other labor that might allow me to earn my keep in my uncle’s household.
    I had, it seemed to me, but one pleasurable skill the world might willingly remunerate, and that was limning—painting true likenesses.
    Previously, I had on occasion taken likenesses in waters and oils of the farmers and merchants of Lexington, Massachusetts, where I had lived with my husband after our marriage. These were accounted well done, and true. And although I had begun merely to amuse myself in idle moments, before long several people of the town came to me and offered to pay modestly for similar portraits of their children or themselves. Whenever I could discover time for it, I delighted in this avocation, always considering it more a diversion than a competence.
    Sometime after returning to Willoston, as I say, I took up my brushes, paints, palette, and boards in earnest, and before long was spending not mere idle moments but my most industrious hours plying my craft to earn my way in the world. Indeed, any roving artisan who brought his trade to Willoston soon discovered little public desire for his services. “Oh, but we have Widow Fullerton, you see,” or some such thing people would say, “and her likenesses are serving quite well.” In point of fact, however, Willoston being a limited and generally impecunious community, I found myself out of regular commissions within several months.
    The subsequent year of 1837 was, moreover, a time of great financial panic across the land, a time of inevitable winter which men had forgotten in the summer of their