C. M. MAYO

      The
      Last Prince of the Mexican Empire

      A
      novel based on the true story

      
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From the opening chapter, "The Darling
      of Rosedale"



      ONCE
      UPON A TIME there
      was a little girl named Alice Green who lived on what people
      who don't know any better would call a farm, but which her family
      called their country estate. Rosedale's
      main house was not especially fine, a clapboard box with a center
      hall and, upstairs, a warren of bedrooms (one of the smallest
      of which Alice shared with two sisters); however, it had fireplaces
      in every room, a gleaming piano in the parlor, and Hepplewhite-style
      chairs in the dining room. It was said that Pierre L'Enfant,
      who had laid out the plan of the city of Washington, had advised
      with the landscaping. There were avenues of dogwood and ornamental
      hedges; peach, pear, cherry, fig, and apple orchards, grape arbors,
      strawberry bushes, vegetable patches, including sensationally
      prolific asparagus beds. ("O Moses," Alice's mother,
      Mrs Green, would lament each spring with scarcely disguised pride.
      "What am I to do with all this asparagus?") One might
      also mention their chickens, ducks, geese, prize hogs and, feeding
      on the hilly pastures that, here and there, dropped down to the
      wooded canyon of Rock Creek, a herd of scrupulously tended milk
      cows. As was common in those days, the family owned slaves; these
      had their dowdy little cabins out back behind the stables, so
      as not to ruin the pleasing view from the main driveway. Rosedale
      crowned the heights above Georgetown, the then nearly century-old
      tobacco port town that had been drawn into the western corner
      of the District of Columbia. From the dormer window of her bedroom,
      Alice could see hills undulating down for the few miles yonder
      to the one they called "Rome" where the national capitol
      sat: then no more than a tooth of a building. To the south, below,
      lay the Potomac, with its jerry-built wharves and, shooting out
      from the foot of the Francis Scott Key house, the rickety-looking
      Aqueduct Bridge. On the opposite shore, in the blue distance:
      the chip that was Arlington House, with its back to the fields
      and forests of Virginia. Alas, oftentimes this vista was sullied
      by smoke from one of Georgetown's paper mills or bone factories.



      Rosedale had been founded by Alice's maternal grandfather, General
      Uriah Forrest, who had served with General Washington and, famously,
      lost a leg in the Battle of Brandywine. Her maternal grandmother
      was a Plater who had grown up at Sotterley, one of the grandest
      of the Maryland Tidewater tobacco plantations. But so much had
      been lost by the time Alice was born: decades earlier, General
      Forrest had been bankrupted; as for Sotterley, the story was
      it had slipped from a great uncle's fingers in a game of dice.



      Alice's father worked in an office in the city of Washington,
      but when he was a young man, he had seen action in Tripoli with
      Commodore Decatur. Her father's uniform was in his seaman's trunk,
      an impossible-to-lift wooden box with handles made of rope. Alice
      and her brothers and sisters were allowed to take turns trying
      on the hat, which had an enormous plume, and posing in front
      of the mirror. They could take out the rusty musket and the saber,
      too (but they had to keep that in its sheath). There were a pair
      of high boots with cracked soles, once snow-white but now yellowed
      breeches, and a coat that smelled strongly of camphor but was
      nonetheless riddled with moth holes.



      When she was seven years old, Alice knew: she loved uniforms.
      She wanted, with all her heart, to go to Tripoli.



      "Girls can't wear uniforms," her older brother George
      said.



      "Silly," an older sister said, rolling her eyes.



      "Saphead," another brother, Oseola, said, and he stuck
      out his tongue.



      Thus was Alice persuaded to abandon her first ambition—
      but never the yearning for her destiny, which she felt as a blind
      girl might, laying a hand upon an elephant's side: this huge,
      warm, breathing thing. She had no notion of what it might be,
      no word to describe it, only the dim but solid knowledge that
      it was altogether different and inconceivably grander than the
      others's. She, being the youngest of eight, had always felt small
      but very special, and so this did not disconcert her. She took
      it as a given, as the color of the parlor's sofa was a given,
      that while whites went in that parlor, Negroes, except to dust
      and polish and serve tea, did not. What was to ponder in the
      fact that winter was bitter, summer steamy and buggy? Whether
      it were clear or cloudy, the sun rose every day, and that included
      Sunday, which was the day Mr and Mrs Green and all the little
      Greens crammed themselves into the big carriage and drove down
      toward the Potomac and, to save their mortal souls, sat through
      mass (no talking, no pinching) at Georgetown's Holy Trinity.



      And then came finishing school. At the Georgetown Female Seminary,
      in addition to French, music, and drawing, the history of Rome
      and such, Alice studied geography. She was diligent and she had
      a knife-sharp memory. Shown the Sandwich Islands once, she could
      pick them out of the Pacific cold. In the parlor, her father
      had a gold-edged Atlas of the World. She would sometimes lie
      on her stomach on the carpet, and propped on her elbows, study,
      say, Australia. Chile. Iceland. North Africa. She loved to trace
      her finger along the ragged curve of the Barbary Coast until
      it landed on Tripoli. 



      Tripoli. Alice whispered the names of the Arab cities: Tangiers.
      Algiers. Tunis. Cairo. She would close her eyes and imagine the
      musky scents of their bazaars, the tables piled with bangles
      and silks, oranges sweet as the sun. Her father had explored
      ancient temples, ridden a real camel, and held in his own hands
      a 2,000 year-old kylix painted with the figure of the Minotaur.
      He had seen Malta, Mallorca, Gibraltar. On the map, Alice would
      touch each of these magical places, and then slide her pinky
      over the aqua-blue swath of paper that was the Atlantic. And
      then her finger would arrive at Chesapeake Bay, sliding up the
      sinuous Potomac to... 



      Oh, Dullsvania. Blahsberg! Boringopolis!!



      She knew there was another life waiting for her, a life that
      would be as romantic as anything out of The Thousand and One
      Nights. Here, in the country, it sometimes seemed that she had
      nothing to do but sit at the window, her chin in her hands, and
      watch crows alight on the fence-rails. (Her mammy said that in
      the night the crows flew to Mexico, to feed on the dead soldiers.
      In the day, they digested the flesh. But Alice knew better than
      to pay heed to Negro talk.) Sometimes, early in the mornings
      before school, her mother would make her help feed the chickens,
      and inspect the dairy. Was that not the rudest thing in the world?
      One day, she would wing across an ocean. She would be adored;
      like Commodore Decatur, she would be remembered for a hundred
      years. 



      No: more than a hundred years.







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      Photos:
      Rosedale