A Fugitive Truth by Dana Cameron Page A

later, if it could be done at all.
    Even without those questions, I had plenty to occupy me. When you are studying the life of someone you will only meet through documents, it doesn’t matter that you have no way of knowing for certain, but you begin to develop instincts about and even feelings for your subject. I began to develop a picture of Margaret Chandler’s character. She was certainly strong-willed, so much so that if she’d publicly vocalized the tart opinions that she revealed in her diary, she would certainly have been pilloried for a shrew. She thought well of the way she looked, and by the number of references to cloth and sewing, I gather that she kept at least one maid busy dressing her in keeping with her wealth and station. Margaret knew how to run a household and had obviously been well trained in the domestic and social side of her life: There were many accounts of dinners and parties that apparently facilitated her husband’s legal and political work. She was truly pious in a way that I found touching; having no belief myself, I am sometimes envious of faith in others.
    And at the end of most of the entries, even the briefest ones, she mentioned what she was reading. Sometimes it was the papers from London. These, it was quite clear, she had shipped over by her family, several weeks’ worth of issues arriving at a time, as was evident from the entry, “Tommy obliges with the Trumpet and sends word that he will send me others, if he thinks them not too political to be of interest to me.” With other books, however, it was clear she was ordering them from booksellers in London and in Boston, or borrowing them from her husband, Matthew Chandler: “Mr. Chandler has recommended Dryden’s translation of Ovid to me after I have done with the Plutarch.”
    It was still just a hunch, but I got the impression that she might have been hiding her voracious appetite for reading from everyone except the man to whom she was referring as “Mr. Chandler, my dearest friend,” with increasing frequency. This was compelling for a couple of reasons. Even though referring to one’s husband as “Mr.” might strike the modern reader as unduly formal, it wasn’t unusual right through the nineteenth century. But the use of the expression “my dearest friend” was sentimental and emotional to an almost extravagant degree. Based on what I knew of the times, Margaret was probably shrewd to conceal the extent of her interest in books; wit in a woman was compared to an unsheathed sword, dangerous to herself and everyone around her. And the fact that her husband helped her in this subterfuge indicated that trust and affection, if not true love, was growing on both sides of the marriage.
    I knew that I was beginning to like Margaret when I started becoming frustrated with her contempt for the Irish, her class-bound views, and her dislike of life in the rough frontier of early eighteenth-century Massachusetts. I tried to remind myself that they were common views for someone in her position, but cheered for Madam when she recognized some good quality in Nora, the Irish maid she had been so unwilling to take on, or when she observed how the odd manners of her New England neighbors worked well within their own society.
    Margaret became a little more real, a little more human to me in spite of her tremendous personal presence in writing, when I recognized that some of the spatters on a page full of the mysterious code were caused by teardrops. I wondered what the rest of the diary would eventually reveal.
    So I was able to keep my professional worries behind me until about eleven fifty on Wednesday, when Sasha reminded me about my lunch with Director Whitlow. I bit back a curse; I had planned on just a quick bite eaten in the staff lunchroom, so as not to take any more precious time away from my work on the journal. Making nice-nice with the officialdom just wasn’t as appealing as the life that was unfolding before me.
    As I