Eight. Blood and Thunder in the Ladies’ Saloon
Eight
Blood and Thunder in the Ladies’ Saloon
FIFTH DAY AT SEA
June 20, 1865
For the first four days of the voyage, the SS China lurched with every wave from the tropical winds off Cape Verde and lulled with their every break. These powerful gales had curved back into the central Atlantic due to the dip in a high westerly wind off the Massachusetts coast—at least, this was Captain Norris’s explanation to the male passengers as they balanced their snifters of brandy on the bar or circuited the deck railing with a white-knuckled grip.
The female passengers, for the most part, were rarely to be seen. Years of being stuck in bedrooms and parlors were suddenly of great use. The ladies’ saloon was full of knitting bags, embroidery hoops, sewing, reading and letter-writing, playing cards and dominoes, and the kind of gossip and amateur theatrics with which more fortunate women whiled away their empty hours.
Hours on the China , however, were very full as Louisa Alcott mounted her all-woman production of A Tale of Two Cities. The Charles Dickens novel was set nearly a century earlier at the time of the French Revolution and rife with great scenes to perform. Having previously dramatized other famous works, Miss Alcott put herself in charge of the script.
“We have five main characters. Lucie Manette—the angel.” Louisa gave Charlotte next to her an intimating look. “The book starts when Lucie discovers her father is still alive, after eighteen years of being falsely imprisoned in Paris. Such a scene—look, tears…” Fanning her eyes, she took a second to compose herself. “Lucie brings Dr. Manette back to London, and on the boat to Dover they meet Charles Darnay.”
Louisa paused. “A little too good for my liking, that one. A French aristocrat who has rejected his debauched family and its wealth, and is coming to England for a new life. Two British spies set him up, and he is put on trial at the Old Bailey for treason to the Crown. The courtroom scene is Dickens at his best.” She explained how Charles Darnay is acquitted when his strong physical resemblance to someone else in court—lawyer Sydney Carton—confuses the Crown’s key witness. “Dickens loves his doppelg?ngers. I could talk forever about the character of Carton: The picture of loneliness and self-loathing. All passion misspent in drinking and sarcasm. Hates himself. Shrewd as heck.
“By now Darnay is in love with Lucie, the angel”—Lu’s head whipped about in Charlotte’s direction again—“and in the courtroom Carton, too, falls for her charms. He’s such a dog, though—he’ll work his way into the Manette household under the guise of friendship.” She stopped and gave a mischievous grin. “Justice Nash would be perfect for the role— if men were allowed.”
Louisa summed up the rest of the scenes to dramatize, culminating in her favorite ending in all of literature: to save his family’s servant, Darnay returns to a France roiled by revolution and is promptly arrested and sentenced to the guillotine; Carton, ennobled by his love for Lucie, uses his resemblance to Darnay to ascend the scaffold in his place.
It was when Louisa May Alcott was overheard by the Nelson brothers at dinner, claiming the pivotal roles of both Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton for herself, that the men on board revolted.
Justice Nash was deputized by the male passengers to raise the matter with Miss Alcott, one of the few women braving the storm-tossed deck. She claimed to have been a deer or horse in an earlier life, so greatly did she need to—as she called it— trot it out , and took her morning constitutional with the sunrise no matter the weather. She was inspired by the example of her hero, Charles Dickens, who was known to walk ten, even twenty, miles a day. Seven turns about the ship approximated a mile, during which distance Louisa would inevitably run into Justice Thomas Nash completing the same. It had become a daily ritual between them, and they often found themselves the only passengers on deck as the China pitched and rolled with the wind.
“Soon we’ll be working on the courtroom scene at the Old Bailey— your milieu,” she told Nash on the fourth morning of the voyage as they discussed the progress of the play. “Charlotte is to play the lovely Miss Manette.”
“Of course.” He could feel her watching him as they braced against the wind, heads down.
“And I’m playing both Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay, our two doppelg?ngers.”
“Miss Alcott—”
“I prefer Lu, as you know.”
“Yes, of course—Lu—but should you be keeping out all the men?”
She began to swing around a nearby post while calling out, “I shall, and I will!”
“But we’re starved for activity.”
“What’s good for the goose…”
She smiled at him as she swung back around the post, a wide, lopsided smile that was not remotely coquettish. Nash wondered if Lu possessed any feminine wiles at all. He enjoyed her company and they shared much in common: a love of Dickens, travel, and nature and—if he read her correctly—a tendency toward self-reproof. No one, he was sure, was harder on either of them than themselves. But it was a bond born of likeness, and Nash, with his pride of intellect, was always most intrigued by what he did not understand.
“You could put on your own amusement,” she challenged him.
He laughed. “We seem to lack someone with your talent for direction.”
“Or perhaps you possess too many. We women, on the other hand, are well acquainted with being on the sideline. This is our only chance to play at lawyers and doctors, villains and cads. You will not deprive us!”
They were strolling together on the inside of the deck, just beyond the ocean spray. He thought of offering his arm, but Louisa boisterously swung hers whenever she walked, making it impossible to get close. “You would be a doctor or lawyer, then, if you could?”
“Oh no, not me. I would be an actress.”
Nash often noted this swagger with Louisa. She would play all the men’s roles—she would write an important novel just like Harriet Beecher Stowe—she would be the first woman one day to cast a vote.
“I speak for the men on board in asking you please to reconsider. The Nelson brothers are particular fans of Dickens’s book.”
“And of the Stevenson sisters. The angel .”
Nash turned to her in surprise.
“Don’t look so caught out—the table placement at dinner is excellent for eavesdropping.”
Nash inwardly sighed at the female sex’s proclivity for both talking and listening at the same time, all appearances to the contrary. He would have to warn Nicholas and Haslett to be more discreet at dinner, when he saw them next.
On the fifth day at sea, when the China reached the midpoint of the Atlantic, the winds ceased and rehearsals for the upcoming charity performance could finally begin. The women cleared a corner of the ladies’ saloon farthest from the porthole windows, a shadowy space perfect for running on and offstage and lit by a swinging kerosene lamp. White bedsheets hung from a piece of braided rope, framing the area where two women now stood in costume: Charlotte in a dress of light-colored chintz as the fair and angelic Lucie Manette, and Louisa in her own coat and pipe as Sydney Carton, the self-loathing barrister and Manette family friend. They read in turn from the script that Louisa had copied out:
Carton: I know very well that you can have no tenderness for me—I ask for none—I am even thankful that it cannot be, for I would surely bring you to misery.
Lucie: Can I not save you, Mr. Carton—can I not recall you to a better course?
Carton: No, Miss Manette—but if you will hear me through a very little more, all you can ever do for me is done. You have been the last dream of my soul. I wish you to know with what sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire…
When Louisa and Charlotte finished the scene, there was not a dry eye in the ladies’ saloon.
“‘ The last dream of my soul ,’” repeated Louisa, looking triumphantly at the others. “Find me that in Austen, I say.”
From her stool facing the makeshift stage, Henrietta immediately quoted back, “‘ You pierce my soul. ’” There was more sighing around the room.
“Captain Wentworth’s letter in Persuasion ,” Charlotte explained from the stage. “After all, isn’t everything really about love?”
“Or, at least, knee-buckling desire.” Lu flopped down into a nearby armchair and wiped her brow. “Where’s Sara-Beth?”
“Beating the men at cards. She says they ask her no end of questions about the play.”
“Nash pesters me, too, on our walks,” Lu replied. “Okay, next up, the Old Bailey. I’ll be the prisoner in the box, Charles Darnay, and Henrietta can be the Chief Lord Justice, what with law running in the family and all.”
“Harry would make a perfect lawyer,” boasted Charlotte. “She’s aces at rhetoric. Outtalked the Harvard men when we audited Nash’s lecture there.” The two sisters grinned at each other in memory before recalling their dilemma with Nash on board.
Louisa put down her script. “He says you won’t address him.”
“We never see him,” protested Charlotte. “He even chooses to dine later.”
A hesitant knock sounded on the saloon door, and Louisa marched over to answer it. A young officer stood nervously on the other side, a pile of London papers in his hands. That morning, the China had passed the RMS Neptune , a mail steamer halfway from Liverpool to New York, and been momentarily halted while some hardy crew in a rowboat brought over the latest newspapers and telegrams from England.
“These are just come from the Neptune , miss,” the officer mumbled in announcement. “We met ’n the middle.”
Louisa urged him for any news of the rail disaster at Staplehurst and was passed a copy of The Kentish Mercury . As the other women circled round her, Lu read aloud the horrific details: the passengers who had escaped without injury only to be smothered to death in the riverbed mud, the inquest which learned that the workers on the bridge had not been within reach of telegraphic communication. One eyewitness told a reporter how Mr. Charles Dickens had run hither and thither in his hat, trying to help every “poor creature” he met; another claimed Dickens had saved him from imminent death by suffocation.
Reaching the end of the account, Louisa stood up on a chair and impulsively declared, “We should dedicate our charity performance to Charles Dickens, the hero of Staplehurst, and our proceeds to its victims!”
“Lu”—Henrietta gave a quick look at Charlotte before continuing, none of the women having been eager to raise the matter before now—“might we not sell more tickets if we let the men join the play?”
Louisa whirled about to face her. “What—so they can make love to us onstage, the cowards?”
This was the Louisa that both Henrietta and Charlotte were beginning to know. She wanted to be in charge of everything and had little patience for the foibles of men. But she also had the biggest heart, which the other women sensed would always take precedence if played upon the right way. Eventually Lu gave in to their pleas at the prospect of more donations.
“Fine.” The rolled newspaper was waved like a gauntlet in the air. “But they better behave, is all I’ll say.”