Thirteen. An Impassable Space
Thirteen
An Impassable Space
NINTH DAY AT SEA
June 24, 1865
Ticket sales slowed when news got out that Charlotte Stevenson was no longer to play Lucie Manette. A beautiful woman in a theatrical lead role was no accident—it was its lifeblood. But the men on board the China were also desperate from boredom and looking for sport. When the play’s director stepped into the role, the notion of a homely spinster feigning at being an ingenue struck the men—still smarting from Miss Gleason’s daily triumph at nines—as a form of entertainment in and of itself. Ticket sales picked back up and soon approached the record set last spring when Captain Norris cajoled an operatic troupe from Drury Lane to perform while on board.
By curtain time, it was a full house in the dining saloon. Charlotte hobbled in on a cane and new boots from the goods store, and Sara-Beth joined her in the front-row seats that Louisa Alcott had reserved. Lu peered out from behind the curtain, relieved to see that Fawcett Robinson was also back. She knew from experience that the final performance of a play was often the best, chalking this up to a peculiar mixture of finality and regret that could stir even the most placid of performers.
Louisa felt for Charlotte’s missed opportunity to shine brightest of all tonight, but she was so full of youth, beauty, and charm that there would surely be other chances ahead. By stepping into the younger woman’s shoes this one time, Louisa hoped to transcend her usual position on the bottom rung of the ladder in life, always looking up, even in the full blossom of her own, long-expired youth.
She had taken extra time that afternoon to prepare her hair and dress. Stepping onto the stage, she knew she looked nothing like Lucie Manette as described in the book—Dickens’s blond, blue-eyed angel. But Lu wasn’t worried. She didn’t act for the reasons that Charlotte Stevenson did. Charlotte did not act to disappear but to pull everyone into her charmed orbit instead. Like Lu’s youngest sister, May, she was one of those lucky people in life to whom others naturally gravitated. Louisa, on the other hand, could put people off—at least, this was what she was sometimes told. She never noticed while it was happening, which was probably why it happened to begin with.
But onstage, Louisa knew she could do no wrong. If a man was supposed to fall in love with her, no degree of sallow skin or darting eyes could repel him—the words magically masked the reality. This made Louisa feel very brave and daring, like that young girl she had once been, so full of life, serenading her beloved Thoreau beneath his window, leaving a posy of violets on Emerson’s front step. That woman was gone, and the more she disappeared, the more Alcott wrote to find her.
She wrote in her cabin all night long, in the vortex. She penned tales of sisters, secret engagements, and the lure of Europe for a young and “precocious” American girl. Travel was creatively stimulating Louisa, just as she had always hoped and dreamed it would. She was not booked to return home until the following summer of 1866: what fanciful stories might be stored up by then, what personages encountered, what hearts might she finally have stirred and perhaps even conquered?
With Louisa having cast herself as Lucie Manette, Thomas Nash felt even less enthusiasm for his own role. Just when he feared that his feelings for Charlotte Stevenson ran deeper than those of a chaperone ever should, Nash was forced to acknowledge their limit when it came to Miss Alcott.
How pathetic, to so thoroughly enjoy one’s time with someone—to experience a true meeting of the minds—yet fail to overlook their shortcomings in appearance. How shallow Nash felt, how feeble, how male . Miss Sara-Beth Gleason terrorized the men on board with her bottomless luck and aggressive manner, yet they could not resist such questionable charms in light of her surface ones. And Henrietta Stevenson might not share her sister Charlotte’s apple-cheeked perfection, but she possessed a statuesque figure and striking almond-shaped eyes. No wonder William worried for his daughters. They were attractive enough to marry well, and were so well off themselves as to attract less fortunate men.
Nash’s own attraction to Charlotte was increasingly hard to deny. Onstage he was pretending to be a man who has spent his life pretending not to care about anyone, only to end up pretending to be someone else so that he can sacrifice himself for all those people he is pretending not to care about. It struck too close to Nash’s own heart, and the genius of Dickens was that eerie relatability: had the great author, like Shakespeare, covered all possible ground with his plots?
These were Nash’s internal musings as he ascended the stage for his first scene of the night opposite Louisa. She had done something with her hair—he wasn’t quite sure what—and there was a large amount of pink powder on her cheeks. Most of all, there was a glint in her eye, a storing up of energy, a sudden luminous demeanor.
Lucie: Have I no power for good, with you, at all?
Carton: The utmost good that I am capable of, I have come here to realize. Let me always remember that I opened my heart to you, last of all the world, and that it lies only in your own bosom, shared by no one—not even the dearest one ever known to you.
Lucie: Mr. Carton, the secret is yours, not mine, and I promise to respect it.
Carton: Miss Manette, in the hour of my death, I shall hold sacred this one good remembrance—that my last avowal of myself was made to you, and that my name, and faults, and miseries were gently carried in your heart.
(pauses)
I make one last supplication, and then I will relieve you of a visitor with whom I know you have nothing in unison, and between whom and you there is an impassable space: please know that for you, and anyone dear to you, I would do anything.
(Carton puts her hand to his lips and moves toward the door.)
Nash brought Louisa’s warm hand—calloused by writing, browned by the sun—to his lips. The meeting of minds flared between them, the understanding of what was never to be—and of where that left Louisa May Alcott. Thomas Nash was solely responsible for the impassable space between them , as much as Sydney Carton was with Lucie Manette, for all his protestations that he did not deserve her.
Standing onstage together, closer than an unmarried man and woman should ever be, Nash felt all the energy and passion contained within the heart of the sad and lonely woman before him. No one had ever felt more real to him than at this moment, and all this while the real world was perversely stripped away. In pretending to be someone else—someone younger, prettier, more innocent, and much more desirable as a result—Louisa could fully relax into herself without fear of being teased or mocked. She could face a man like Nash with the sheer power of her soul: The one part of her that should matter the most. The part that the world ignored—the part that it preferred women like her to hide.
Standing up straight from kissing Louisa’s hand onstage, Nash did not immediately let go as he had done in rehearsals. For one brief moment, he believed his own act. He was not tied to a script or bound by any precedent of fact or emotion. How he felt about Lu in the real world ceased to matter. In fact, time itself seemed to slow down before him, molasses-thick yet strangely permeable in his hands. In that moment, he could do as he wanted—he could do as she wanted—with absolutely no repercussions.
There was audible sniffling from all corners of the dining hall, men and women alike; Louisa was triumphing tonight in every way. As the audience continued to hold its breath and applause, Nash looked deeply into Lu’s eyes and held her gaze far longer than was proper. He would show her all the appreciation and adulation that she was due. With his manifold faults, the opposite of Sydney Carton’s yet their equal in disappointment, Thomas Nash could not give Louisa Alcott anything more than that.
He could only hope that she, too, would always carry it gently within her own most real, and tender, heart.
Once the makeshift curtains had fallen on the final standing ovation and the audience had retired for the night, Henrietta Stevenson and Denham Scott stood alone before the captain of the China on its moonlit prow. Charlotte had refused Harry’s one invitation to the secret ceremony, leaving no witnesses in her stead. This did not concern Captain Val Norris, however, who was an ebullient man always eager to exercise his authority at sea in the service of love.
On the open water, life and law both seemed very far away. Henrietta had gone from her father’s house, where her every move was noted, if not by him then by Mrs. Pearson or Samuel or another servant, to a place that almost didn’t exist: the high seas, which belonged to no one and everyone. Louisa could become Lucie Manette and win over a room; Charlotte could impress a world-famous theater impresario while on holiday; Henrietta could cast aside caution and pledge herself to a foreigner for life.
“Your sister won’t come?” Denham’s beaming face fell. “Oh, my darling—should I try?”
“She needs time—only I can remedy that.” Henrietta breathed in the calming fragrance of her posy of white bachelor buttons. Tied in purple ribbon, the bouquet had been cut from a pot by the ship florist that afternoon and the dirt gently shaken off.
“Let me make amends.” Captain Norris reached into his pocket and pulled out a shiny silver sixpence. “A brand-new ‘Young Head Victoria’ coin. The father of an English bride places it in her left shoe for luck—not that such a handsome, well-suited couple needs any, I must say. May I have the honor?”
Smiling her permission, Henrietta extended her foot toward the captain as Denham lent his left arm for support.
“Well then, if no one else is attending,” the captain happily boomed following the good luck gesture, “let us begin.”
When they reached the exchange of vows, Henrietta noted the cadence of the lines from the Book of Common Prayer , the lulling rhythm, the way the language kept building and building to the inevitable climax of death—the one finality, the only thing that should ever separate a husband and wife. It was a masterpiece of rhetoric and had worked its charms for centuries for a reason.
“‘I, Denham, take thee, Henrietta, to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.…’”
For better for worse. It was hard to imagine anything but death keeping her and Denham apart. No wonder their father stayed on at Eleven Beacon Street, where the memory of their mother was writ large on almost every wall and surface, his only way to keep it alive. Yet it rendered him, too, a ghost—a lonely, half-spent widower who threw himself into work and the safeguarding of his daughters’ lives, such was the longstanding power of these vows.
“I, Henrietta, take thee, Denham, to be my wedded husband, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish, and obey, till death us do part.…” She did not stumble at these sentiments, although the word obey caught somewhat at her ear. Alone in the moonlight on the deck of a ship, sailing through waters that belonged to no one—even here the difference between the sexes, as enshrined in the law, still reached them.
“You may now kiss the bride.”
Denham grabbed her so hard that he crunched the bachelor buttons between them—Captain Norris laughed at the sound—Henrietta felt all the happiness of the moment. Even the word obey seemed transformed, no longer a blind promise but a pledge on which to build a family. She had just given over her whole world to Denham out of mutual respect and love; he had as much as pledged the same to her. When looked at in that hopeful light, what could the difference of one word matter?