Chapter 226: Harriet sweet Harriet

Harriet!
Harri-et! Hard hearted harbinger of haggis!{br}

Beautiful! Bemused!
Bellicose butcher!{br}

Untrusting! Unknowing!
Unlove-
ed?

“He wants you back!” He screams into the night airLike a fireman going to
A window that has no fire
Except the passion of his heart...

I am lonely! It’s really hard!
This poem sucks!
– (So I Married an Axe Murder, Mike Meyers 1993)

Echoes of the future.

Stupid movie futures for sure, but it kind of goes with the territory when the future is your past and vice versa.

Harriet was basically a dead name in the future, something only issued in the days of yore.

And then that movie came along.

That stupid, hilarious, fun movie that put the name Harriet back in peoples minds again. I really like that movie. Liked it enough to purchase it.

So when Henry introduced me to his wife Harriet Lovejoy Leavenworth I wanted to snicker out loud; in fact I was hard put not to do so. Add on the fact that I knew she was wife number three and that Henry liked them young, well ... you get the picture. The Lovejoy surname was just icing on the cake.

Under the guise of being the attentive hostess who was starved for social news, she soon had me seeking escape. Particularly so once she’d learned of my travels to St. Louis. She desired to escape the boredom associated with a socialite’s life on the frontier and I was, at the very least, a momentary respite. Also a shiny new toy to be examined and enjoyed. Tedious boredom was her curse, and I was being sacrificed at the altar of her social ambition.

You can’t really blame her. She had married a successful and promising lawyer who held a seat in the New York State Assembly with a promising future ahead. Never mind that he was a divorcee and widower with two children already, even as wife number three a grand social life in the halls of power was meant to be her destiny. War changes many things and, while that successful and promising legal career had turned into an impressive military appointment of great promise, the actual results weren’t quite stellar. Henry wasn’t a hero and proved to be more of an administrator than warrior; while never failing, neither did he ever quite achieve victory. A track record of zero wins, zero losses and five draws does not exactly earn the accolades of the common man.

Exhaustion and alcohol are enough to challenge any man’s moral restraints, lust simply piles on top to eagerly tip the see-saw into the realm of questionable behavior. Harriet herself wasn’t a beauty, she was however a healthy, wholesome version of pure womanhood; and she was extremely ripe at that very point in time.

What do I mean by ‘ripe’, well it’s simple – she was flinging pheromones about like candy from a float at a Christmas day parade. Just to be near her was enough to put a male under her spell. Pheromones are a difficult thing to ignore, particularly in a small space.

The base commanders quarters at Fort Atkinson were not anything approaching glamorous or even stately. Fact was it was a simple, if larger than average, one and half story log cabin with two small wings. The main building consisted of a large living-type room with fireplace and appropriate furniture for group meals or relaxed conversation. There was a full loft above the main room which their daughter had full use of and otherwise remained a mystery to me. The right wing consisted of the kitchen and a door leading to the private bedroom.