Seven. City of Brotherly Love
Seven
City of Brotherly Love
Nelson Brothers and Co., May 11, 1865
Nearly three hundred miles south of Boston, just north of the kaolin clay beds that had forged Alice Stevenson’s tea set, lived two brothers two years apart in age. Nicholas and Haslett Nelson were bachelors and proprietors of Nelson Brothers and Co., the antiquarian bookshop they ran together on Chestnut Street. They lived above the store on two separate floors, where over time thousands of books for sale had invaded their private rooms like seaweed. The brothers were raised by another bachelor, their uncle, following the tragic loss of their parents in a theater fire. Called Nick and Haz by each other—for there were few others to do so—they could live and work wherever they pleased now that the fighting was over. Instead, they stayed in the very house where they were born, the war having forestalled their adulthood in more ways than one.
“Haz, listen.” Nick sat with his brother after supper, a well-worn copy of Emma open on his lap; he read it every spring like clockwork. “Listen to Miss Bates.”
“Looking for more clues?” Haz was an enthusiastic but much less diligent reader than his older brother.
“‘The chaise having been sent to Randalls to take Mr. Frank Churchill to Richmond. That was what happened before tea. It was after tea that Jane spoke to Mrs. Elton.’ There, right there—Miss Bates gives it up. All that babbling is telegraphing the plot—Jane’s accepting the governess position has been precipitated by the departure of Frank, her secret love.”
Haz put down his snifter of whisky. “But who would bother listening to Miss Bates, that ninny?”
“Nobody—not even the reader.” Nick shook his head in wonder. “How does Miss Austen do it? Keep clues like this hidden in plain sight?”
“Perhaps her brother the admiral will shed some light—should he write back.”
While the Stevenson sisters of Boston were spritzing their correspondence in jasmine and mimosa, the Nelson brothers of Philadelphia had recently written Sir Francis of the first American edition of Emma in their possession. Mathew Carey, a turn-of-the-century tradesman on Chestnut Street, had published the novel in 1816 within months of John Murray doing so in London—the only known foreign edition during Jane Austen’s lifetime. Since then, London publishers continued to print books by authors not resident in England without their permission, and American publishers—in the spirit of the freedoms afforded by the First Amendment—returned the disfavor.
“The Austen family may have no idea of our early edition,” Nick reminded his brother, “for all Mr. Charles Dickens’s efforts in decrying such piracy abroad. He writes even more outrage on the matter in today’s Tribune , alongside mention of the Anti-Slavery Society meeting in Boston—did you see Mr. Frederick Douglass’s words of warning to that audience?”
This was a question solely out of brotherly politeness. Haz never kept up with reading the news; they both knew his older brother would always do it for him.
“Douglass says the Anti-Slavery Society should not disband after the war,” Nick continued, “without their knowing ‘in what new skin this old snake will come forth next.’”
After the war had been the brothers’ shared refrain during its course—but what if the war never really ended? After all, there was a Confederate bullet lodged in Nick’s leg to remind them, and Lincoln’s assassination last month had thrown a whole new wrench in the works. Black cloth still covered the windows of the bookshop, the spring air hung heavy with waste and regret. So many years spent fighting and killing, so many dead, in service to a time that the Nelsons were beginning to fear might never come.
Seen in this light, the letter to Sir Francis Austen was more than transatlantic literary diplomacy, aimed at keeping authors apprised of unauthorized editions of their works: it was also a last-ditch effort by the brothers to stir up enthusiasm of any kind. Nick now read his beloved Austen at night with the hope of one day hearing back from the admiral, while Haz genially indulged all his talk. The brothers would love to have been part of a discussion group far less exclusive than two battered young men living above a shop. They would be as surprised as anyone to know that in another state, a group of argumentative supreme court justices was doing that very thing. For now, the Nelson brothers only had each other.
And one lonely old sea captain, sitting in Portsdown Lodge, staring out his bow window through a handcrafted telescope, watching for any ships from oceans away.