Twelve. The Sinking of the Admiral DuPont
Twelve
The Sinking of the Admiral DuPont
Back Bay, June 13, 1865
Constance Davenish was the proud owner of a well-appointed home in the Back Bay, a neighboring district to Beacon Hill. Here she held weekly salons at which the city’s dissatisfied women could congregate. Constance was dissatisfied but also very social, and enjoyed bantering with men. This was how Henrietta and Charlotte Stevenson found themselves in Connie’s rococo drawing room of white and gold, sitting across from reporter Denham Scott, an exquisite tea tray on the silk damask ottoman between them.
“We dine en famille after all,” he announced, alluding to their recent encounter in Harvard Yard and Charlotte’s invitation to dine that Henrietta had quashed.
“I shall pour.” Henrietta busied herself with the tea service.
“We call that ‘being mother’ back home.”
“I thought we were home.” Henrietta added a slice of lemon before passing the cup and saucer to him.
“If one wants to be so specific with words—which, of course, you always do.” Denham sipped the tea and grinned approvingly. “Just like England, my home, then. Thank you.”
“You must miss it.” Charlotte accepted her own cup of tea from Henrietta while not-so-discreetly rolling her eyes.
“I miss my brothers and sisters. There are eight of us.” Failing to catch Henrietta’s eye as she passed him a plate of French delicacies, Denham turned back to Charlotte. “They rather depend on me, being the eldest by many years—as your sister here is to you. This assignment was too remunerative to turn down.”
“Harry and I have always dreamed of visiting England.”
“I hear the two of you plan to do that very thing on the China .”
“Now, where did you hear something like that?” Charlotte asked in surprise, the madeleine created by Constance’s French chef suspended halfway to her mouth.
“It’s the talk of the town,” replied Denham. “Actually, I’m off as well.”
“You are?” Henrietta finally looked up from her cup to regard him.
He nodded at her. “With the war done, the paper just this morning recalled me.”
“You’re not sailing soon, though?” Charlotte burst out as if panicked by the very thought, and Denham turned back to her with a charmingly boyish laugh. “Not on the China , if that’s what worries you! My stipend is insufficient for the cabins it has left—I send most of my wages home. So, you and your own travels are safe from me.” He met Henrietta’s eyes again over the porcelain cups and saucers and she quickly looked away, choosing to examine the series of mountain landscapes by local artist Sarah Freeman Clarke on the drawing room walls. “I’m just back from Nantucket myself. I’m filing for the Herald on the sinking of the Admiral DuPont —have you ladies heard? It’ll be in the morning edition.”
Henrietta stifled a gulp as she glanced over at an equally nervous Charlotte. They could only hope that their father would somehow miss this particular item of news.
“An awful business, that. So many lives lost—enough to make any protective parent change course.” As Denham spoke, Henrietta returned her gaze to the paintings while Charlotte busily finished the last madeleine on her plate. He was forced to break the silence again. “What’s the real reason for the trip?”
“Hmm?” Henrietta absentmindedly asked.
“Miss Stevenson, you won’t find your answers on the walls.” He raised both his eyebrows at her in amusement. “My sources mention a certain Admiral Austen of Portsmouth and your recent correspondence there.”
“It’s hardly worth a mention,” countered Charlotte. “We only wrote to the admiral out of devotion to his sister’s books.”
Denham sat back admiringly. “I call that cheeky—and the timing awfully coincidental.”
“We call it an ultima ratio,” Charlotte insisted while Henrietta refilled her plate of delicacies as if to feed her into silence. “No one’s eager to let women like us do much of anything—not even to write about it.”
“I know several women working in Fleet Street” was Denham’s quick retort. “Most of them married, of course.”
“Why does it matter whether a woman is married?” Charlotte angrily demanded to know.
“Perhaps England is simply more advanced,” Henrietta suggested.
“I highly doubt that,” declared a new voice.
All three of them turned around as Constance came and perched on the arm of Henrietta’s chair. “Women in England still lose all property to their husbands upon marriage, whereas Massachusetts women can now keep any earnings and bequests, make a will, and much more easily divorce .” She gave Denham a pointed look at this last word.
“Someone has to be the head of the family,” he matter-of-factly stated. “Shouldn’t it stay the man, who engages the most with outside commerce and trade?”
“Which begs another question altogether,” Connie quickly countered again, while Denham pulled out the ever-present notebook and pencil from his jacket pocket.
“You don’t mind?” he asked his hostess.
“Not at all. I encourage such transcription of our views— and their dissemination.”
“Men must succeed outside their home, for their family to do so within,” he continued to argue. “There is only so much employment available in the world—surely we fare best when a wife is a friend to our interests, rather than a rival.”
“They should each be a friend to the other.” Constance nodded at the pencil now moving with such haste in Denham’s hand. “But until women have the vote, we are at the mercy of men and their decisions.”
“Men have the better experience and education to protect women’s interests. It would take years—decades—to alter that. Do you not think you are putting the cart before the horse with such matters?”
“Not when men won’t even let us ride!” exclaimed Charlotte, and all three women looked at each other and laughed.
“Yet you say Massachusetts law is being reformed in your desired direction,” Denham pointed out. “Does that not give you hope for future suffrage?”
Constance waved a dismissive hand. “Politicians can be quite crafty with their hidden motives. Indiana may soon allow women to attend law school—even to divorce without grounds. And yet still—no vote.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“We have a shortage of women when it comes to the western expansion,” Henrietta readily answered.
“Something your little island doesn’t suffer from,” added Charlotte.
He looked taken aback by their shared cynicism. “Perhaps lawmakers here are simply having a change of heart, rather than trying to rustle up more settlers?”
The three women laughed in unison again.
“Oh, Mr. Scott.” Constance stood up and clasped her hands together. “As our great abolitionist and friend to women, Mr. Frederick Douglass, has said—‘power concedes nothing without a demand.’”
“Or as your poet Byron once wrote,” Henrietta chimed in, as she and Charlotte also stood to join her, “‘who would be free themselves must strike the blow.’”
The next morning started like any other for William Stevenson. Henrietta sat on his right, sparsely buttering her toast, which she then slathered with jelly; Charlotte slouched on his left, her nose in the latest instalment of Our Mutual Friend after devouring Mrs. Pearson’s cider cake with a helping of bacon.
William’s own meatless plate of eggs and hashed potatoes sat untouched. How could one eat? His daughters were trying to leave him—and by transatlantic steamship, no less! With a pang in his heart, William realized that if they were successful, he and Charlotte would no longer be finishing Dickens’s latest masterpiece together by the fire at night; the serial would run its course that fall, long before she was likely to sail back.
Even more distressing was the discovery by his junior law clerks of two dozen British and American shipwrecks in the first week of June alone. Some of this was the cost of doing war: the ferrying of troops, the shallow seasonal waters, the poor communication now that telegraphy with the Southern states had stopped. At least, this was how William tried to console himself as he wavered back and forth. The decision of whether to stop his girls from sailing must soon be made, with the SS China due to depart in two days. Meanwhile his physician had detected a new irregularity to William’s heart, which the doctor chalked up to a state of worry that must be overcome. The prescription: confront the very thing that terrified him.
William turned the page of his newspaper and felt anew that strange, butterfly-like sensation in the vicinity of his heart.
SINKING OF THE ADMIRAL DUPONT
By Denham Scott on guest assignment for the Boston Herald
June 14, 1865
The steamship Admiral DuPont , from New-York for Fortress Monroe, was run into and sunk on the night of June 10th by the British ship Stadacona , from Philadelphia for St. John, New Brunswick. The steamer sunk in three minutes of the collision. The Admiral DuPont was a 473 gross ton iron side-wheel steamship built in West Ham, England, in 1847, and formerly a blockade runner for the Confederacy until her capture in 1862. The ship had left the port of New-York on June 9th with a small detachment of United States troops amongst the passengers on board, and encountered dense fog on the morning of the 10th. Capt. Simon Pepper and all the officers of the steamer are safe and have landed at Nantucket, together with other survivors. There were 17 persons drowned: 15 soldiers, one fireman, and a colored woman. The names of the lost are as yet unknown.
This is the latest in a series of steamship disasters which are giving rise to great concern and alarm among the public at large. The Boston Herald contacted for comment Sir Edward Cunard, 2nd Baronet, of the Cunard Company of Britain, who promptly invited any Herald correspondent to voyage on one of its fleet, in attestation of the particular safety of its vessels and of sea travel in general.
“Father, what is it?”
William did not look up. Instead, he answered Henrietta by reading aloud the entire account in the slow, stentorian voice he normally reserved for court.
“Father,” began Charlotte the very second that he finished, “this is really nothing to—”
“Charlotte, no .” William heard his youngest daughter push her chair back hard, intending to come over and embrace him or take his hand—to somehow soothe him out of his worry. But he alone knew how impossible that was. The worry was as much a part of him as anything else. His love for his daughters, his admiration for their spirit, his confidence in their intellect: the worry was at least equal to all of that.
Head still down, William put out his left hand at Charlotte’s approach, then heard Henrietta also get up. She joined Charlotte to stand before their father as if facing a tribunal—as if there was anything they could do or say to move him. But he had the world on his side. A world that would always give him the final verdict, and would always let him say no.
His daughters kept to the attic, paining him with their silence at his refusal to let them go. Mrs. Pearson’s meals were passed on trays through the door in the floor; there would be no more reading Our Mutual Friend aloud by the fire.
On the second night of this estrangement, William lay in bed, dreaming. Alice was back, neatly tucked in his arms. Soft crying could be heard coming from the fifth-floor attic bedroom above. Someone had fallen from the old oak tree on the Common… developed an abscess in a newly missing tooth… left behind a rag doll in a hansom cab. Alice stirred and William pulled her closer. For once, she didn’t try to leave. Instead, they reminisced over other past injuries, the small relief when the hard, physical earth itself was at fault. Most terrifying, like everything in life, were the dangers one could not see.
Alice sat bolt upright in bed. “What was that?”
“Darling, it’s nothing.”
“No, listen—there—a scraping noise, along the floor.”
“Shh, my love. Please. Go back to sleep.” He kissed the top of her head. It was not like Alice to worry so much. He didn’t wonder why tonight was different—why he was the one being carried along for once, not resisting, not fretting. Things aren’t falling apart, they’re only changing , he heard a voice inside him proclaim. Suddenly he could hold all the possible dangers of the world within his imagination and not mind one whit. For the moment at least, the horizon ahead looked free and clear.
This must be the key to happiness , he heard the voice say next. He was stunned by the ease and simplicity of it all: you could clear your own horizon. Just keep hoping for the best, stop worrying about the worst, stop fighting so hard. The fighting pushed away the very thing you were trying to hold on to—the thing you were most terrified of losing. Shh he told Alice again, while also telling himself it will all work out .
He opened his eyes at a sound. From the street below, a carriage door could be heard slamming shut, followed by the gentle thumping of horses’ hooves. The sweet chorus of American robins in the summer lilac tree put the hour at just past four. The night men with their “rude carts” had come and gone. All of Boston slept. William took a deep breath, turned over onto his side, and wondered how real any of it was, before going back to bed.