Three. The Reluctant Chaperone
Three
The Reluctant Chaperone
FIRST DAY AT SEA
June 16, 1865
Thomas Nash felt the stubble along his jawline and debated what to do next. He was ravenously hungry, only half shaven, and completely unprepared for the day ahead.
Keeping an eye out for a familiar pair of bonnets, he circled the celebratory crowd gathered on the main deck where the dining and lounging saloons were located. The passenger cabins were on the first deck below, ranging in size from narrow single rooms with double cots to state cabins with two rooms and windows to the sea. Nash’s own room was small but functional, all of the state cabins being fully occupied. One more deck below was steerage, where families slept and cooked together, bathroom amenities were crude, and access to the outside was permitted in turns for only a few minutes a day.
The ladies’ saloon on the main deck was closed to men, and Nash did not feel it proper to barge in on the Stevenson sisters’ cabin to announce himself. He could either send them a message or wait until they ran into each other in person, although the element of surprise was unlikely to work in his favor. In the meantime, Nash purchased some hard soap, linen, and undergarments from the goods store. He returned to his cabin and, despite the ship’s rocky start, attempted to shave with the bowl and pitcher of water.
Once he felt more presentable, Nash ventured back up to the main deck. Determined to get his morning exercise, he counted one hundred and twenty paces after completing his first circuit of the ship. He calculated that if he walked the entire deck seven times a day, he would finish a mile: that would have to suffice on board for both exercise and fortification for the encounter ahead.
During his second circuit of the ship, Nash noticed a woman writing while furtively watching the other passengers and chewing on a little corncob pipe. She was dressed in a long woolen coat to protect against sea spray as well as rain—the kind made by boiling the wool, something his own mother had done to economize. Nash was a self-made man, although he did not mention this as much as his dear friend Stubby—Professor Child—did. Nash wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t due to shame, but it wasn’t due to so much pride, either. He simply liked the life he had built for himself, despite the odds, far more than the life he had happily left behind. He was always a man to stay focused on the future— ambition , his widowed mother would have called it.
The woman in the deck chair stopped writing and stared up at Nash with dark-circled, deep-set eyes. Suddenly, she lifted the pipe and gave him a little salute. She looked to be his age or older and rather beaten down by life. Immediately he felt a pang of pity for her, alone on deck, watching everyone else.
“Ahoy,” the woman called out. Her voice, low but energetic, startled Nash out of his thoughts.
“Ahoy there,” he replied with a smile, tipping his hat. “Thomas Nash. And whom do I have the pleasure of meeting?”
Her sallow face softened at his introduction, and she tucked the notebook under a pile of newspapers by her feet. “Louisa May Alcott—but my friends call me Lu.”
“And how are you enduring this first day at sea, Miss Alcott?” Nash asked, coming closer.
“Oh, splendid—and you?”
He smiled. “Yes, splendid. Are you traveling alone?”
She shook her head and gave the side of her nose a little scratch. “No, sir, I’m accompanying a family friend as a nurse of sorts. I’ve not much training, mind you—just some time at the Union Hospital. Though the ol’ gal below really doesn’t need much tending to. She’s sleeping even now.” Louisa leaned forward and tapped her right temple hintingly with the bowl of her pipe. “A change in scenery might do her wonders.”
“It might do for us all.” Nash was charmed. He thought of Austen’s Emma and Elizabeth, Dickens’s Bella Wilfer, Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Viola. The lively ones. It was a shame that the marriage market too often offered up the opposite—not that he would contemplate marrying someone like Lu, and he winced again on her behalf.
“Are you off to London, too?”
With her many questions, Nash wondered if Lu was a lady journalist; he had heard that someone from the London papers was on board snooping around. “May I join you?” He nodded at the empty deck chair next to hers before sitting down. “I am indeed visiting the great city on holiday.” He had no intention of volunteering his more pressing, private mission to anyone.
“I can’t wait. I plan on seeing all the places Dickens writes about.”
“How intrepid of you.”
She vigorously nodded. “Yes indeed, starting with the home of Sairey Gamp. Another nurse of sorts—like me!” Nash smiled at the reference to the tippling, irascible character from Martin Chuzzlewit . “Then Mr. Dombey, Tiny Tim, Artful Dodger…” Lu continued to happily recite the names of characters from Dickens as if they were as real as any of the thousand people on ship.
Noticing the empty mug on the deck next to her scuffed boots, Nash waved over a steward. “Allow me,” he said to Lu before ordering them both tea with milk.
“There are two cows in the pen below, did you know? Bessie and Sugar. I’ve already said my hellos. That’s a few hundred cups of milk a day for those of us in first class.” She pointed at the copies of Lloyd’s List and The Times resting on deck near her booted feet. “We even get the London news up here—days before home.”
This was one advantage of traveling on a mail steamship, although the postal sorting rooms came at the expense of certain first-class luxuries ( No barber shop, for one, thought Nash with a grimace as he felt the burn along his chin). He had recently read about plans for the SS Great Eastern to begin laying undersea telegraph cable across the Atlantic from Ireland to Newfoundland, which would change news delivery forever. For now, everything reached America in exactly the time it took a mail packet to sail from Liverpool or Portsmouth to Boston or New York and beyond.
At Louisa’s nod of invitation, Nash lifted up the newspapers and caught a glimpse of the notebook underneath. “Forgive me.” He hurriedly dropped the papers back down, but she waved off his compunction with quiet pride. “You are a writer, then, as I surmised? I envy such talent.”
“There’s not much to envy. It’s hard grubbing, getting paid by the word.”
“I myself would surely starve, then.” Nash gave her an encouraging smile. “I cannot write words to excite—only to explain.”
“Oh—are you the reporter they talk of?” Her face lit up.
“I’m afraid not. I sit on the Massachusetts state bench.”
“But we should be the ones afraid—what power! Did you study the law at Harvard? My friend Henry James just finished his year there. Just a year, mind you—nose always in a novel, that one.”
The Jameses were a socially prominent Boston tribe, and Nash was intrigued. Perhaps he had been passing too much judgment on her clothes and demeanor. “How do you know Mr. James?”
“Our families.” She cleared her throat. “My father is Bronson Alcott, the educator.”
“And famous reformer! Yes, I know of him well.” There was much to know: good and bad. Alcott had innovated teaching through conversation and the importance of play, and admitted a Black child to his last school over parents’ objections, resulting in its closure—but he also held scattered, self-indulgent lectures on the lyceum circuit and once founded an ill-conceived Utopian community on a Harvard farm. Then there were the disturbing whispers in Boston society of which even Nash, who always did his best to avoid gossip, was aware.
The steward returned with two mugs of milky tea. As they drank and chatted together, Nash noticed Lu begin to withdraw. She didn’t seem to want to talk anymore about her father or the stories she wrote. Nash’s one glance at the notebook had caught sight of a rather lurid title. He wondered if the rumors were true, that the father made no money, only spent or gave it away—and whether the dark circles beneath Lu’s eyes, the trip as an invalid’s companion, belied who in actuality was supporting the Alcott clan. Sensing she wanted to be alone with her writing again, Nash stood up, mug of tea in hand.
“Miss Alcott, it has truly been a pleasure. I hope we will meet often during our time at sea.”
She saluted him again with the cob pipe, a gesture that suddenly smacked of performance, and Nash recalled the gothic title of the story he had glimpsed: Behind a Mask . He wondered how far away Louisa traveled in her head when she wrote; how much she tried to leave behind. Nash had known hardship, too, but had surmounted it through brains and education. Where did the smart women go, when they lacked either looks or situation?
Justice Thomas Nash nodded goodbye to Louisa May Alcott, thinking her a most interesting female specimen who didn’t quite fit conventional society. He wondered where that left her. At least she had her writing , he thought to himself, as Louisa picked notebook and pencil back up. But even strides away, Nash could tell that her hooded eyes—and eagle-like interest—remained firmly fixed on him.