Nine. Midsummer
Nine
Midsummer
The Road from London, June 29, 1865
The admiral rode back to Portsmouth in the gentlemen’s carriage, giving his female companions the privacy to rest. It had been a tiring visit for them all, ending on a sad note as the carriages drove past the graveyard where several of Sir Francis’s family lay buried. He would not be joining them there; he would never pay his own respects again.
The men did not watch Sir Francis as solicitously as the women had done. Instead, they spoke of the ship journey they had just made, asked the admiral about the battles off Santo Domingo to interrupt the slave trade, pined over the loss of their beloved president.
“The immensity of the sea is a great tonic for loss,” Sir Francis shared with them. “I so yearned for it at times. I was out of service for thirty years, you know.”
They did not know. He still wore his uniform, still carried his telescope everywhere he went.
“With America’s defeat in the War of 1812 and Napoleon’s soon after, I took leave as our brood grew. We lost Mary in childbirth with Cholmeley, our eleventh, only to lose him in infancy as well. Years passed, a fog really, until I remarried and purchased Portsdown Lodge—thirty-five acres—and there I set my efforts in the main. The contentment of family life, although I was old for it even then. I built the children little paddocks for cricket and archery, netted my Morello cherries, and had no desire to see the sea beyond the view from my hill.” He gazed out the carriage window as he spoke. The past swirled before him, a kaleidoscope of images: family picnics on the hill, ice-skating on the meadow, racing chaises down the lane. All that merriment gone—in its place, only memory and pain.
A quiet fell in the carriage, and Justice Nash removed his tobacco pouch and striking match for the men to light their pipes. The sun was still high in the summer sky—it would not set until almost ten, by which time they should be back in Portsmouth.
“Sir Francis, why did you return to sea after so long?” Haz asked.
“I lost my second wife, then two daughters. I sought distraction, and was called to command the North America and West Indies Station on the Vindictive .” His face brightened at a happier recollection. “This time I took as many of my family as could fit on ship. My sons George and Herbert, a captain himself, and daughters Fanny and Cassandra as hostesses. My eldest boy—my brave Frank—was already away, commandeering boats to suppress slavery off the Isle of Pines in the West Indies. He was injured there—his arm.” The admiral looked over at Nick, whose limp he had earlier noticed. “You boys also served that great cause of abolition, I see.”
“It was indeed great,” agreed Nick. “We held on to that when the unimaginable was asked.”
“Brothers killing brothers.” Haz stopped as Nick, who sat next to him, laid a hand on his shoulder in comfort. “I once aimed the barrel of my gun in the face of a classmate from St. Joe’s, just as our eyes locked. It haunts me still.”
The admiral shook his head sadly. “To ask this of men—no matter the justness of the cause—should demand particular attention and salve afterward.” He lifted the telescope. “I was spared your unique pain—my enemy was too far for me to see without this.”
“May I?” Nicholas asked, and the admiral passed the spyglass to him.
“My brother was one of the first sharpshooters for the Union,” explained Haz as Nick ran his hands along the wood. “They fitted a lens to the rifles.”
Nick was about to twist the telescope into focus when he noticed the admiral’s hands still outstretched toward him. “It’s very handsome,” he said instead, and quickly passed the spyglass back. “You have a good hand.”
“I made toys for the children—little whatnots—keepsake boxes with hidden compartments only they knew about. My family has always been apt to hide things.”
Nicholas nodded. “All families do, I think.”
“That’s what keeps us united,” added Haslett with a laugh.
The mood was lightened by the younger brother’s words, and the admiral thought of Miss Charlotte’s own high spirits—fiery like Fanny but in an altogether more pleasing way. He wondered if his plan to make a match might not succeed after all. It had always amused the family, Jane’s own perspicacity when it came to the eventual romance between Martha and himself. Frank’s favorite line from Persuasion now came to mind—“ she had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning .” For all his own efforts at love, the admiral had to acknowledge that some things will always out, no matter what you or others do to encourage or prevent them.
He did not have long, and he longed to have a hand in something new again, to feel his own efforts mattered. To not yet be a ghost in the room, but a real, magnetic force between others. Jane must have felt that very consolation with her writing. Perhaps that was the source of her pleasure from strangers’ compliments on her books—the knowing that you have left a mark far beyond what any eye could see, and everlasting.
An hour north of Portsmouth, they stopped at a coaching inn along the road to take refreshment. Everyone congregated around the outside table, still full of talk from seeing where Jane Austen had lived.
“Meanwhile our friend Louisa’s off to find the haunts from Dickens,” Charlotte informed the admiral. “He wrote about so many real places, as if standing in that very street or drinking in that very tavern with his imaginary friends.”
“Perhaps it is very real to him—perhaps that’s why he also acts it out,” Nash suggested.
“Acting isn’t about real life,” Charlotte replied. “It’s about making others believe it is.”
A strange silence followed this exchange until Henrietta spoke. “Sir Francis, may I ask, why did your sister decline to particularize places in the novels?”
“Some of it was propriety, of course,” the admiral replied. “My sister was a woman of her time—that is not where her genius lay, in any rejection of it. She wanted to portray things as they were, but without offense. Certainly, we knew one or two Mr. Collinses in our day—I had my own contretemps with a Lady Catherine de Bourgh of sorts, an admonishing aunt. But that is all forgotten now, as it should be.”
“The justices and I—our literary circle—have a theory,” Nash spoke again.
The admiral noticed everyone else sit up in keen interest. How he loved these moments: the eternal puzzle that was his brilliant sister.
“She is looking down at us from her position of genius—through that parlor window—like the eye of God that can take everything in,” Nash continued. “She is not really part of any of this”—he waved his hand about the tavern yard—“and I mean that, Sir Francis, most favorably.” The entire group fell quiet again at this notion, while Nash left to summon more refreshments for the table.
“Will you be seeing Louisa in London?” Haslett asked Charlotte.
“She’s at the mercy of her employer now. They are to leave next week for Brussels and Cologne, then down the Rhine.…” Charlotte answered Haz with an air of distraction, for her eyes were not on him.
Meanwhile, Nash stood in the tavern’s low-timbered entranceway, instructing a serving maid. But his eyes were not on her, even though her cheeks shone bright pink in his presence. Instead, as he spoke his order, Nash stared straight above the young woman’s head at Charlotte, who continued to watch him from yards away. Suddenly she, too, blushed, just like the serving maid, while the rest of the table fell silent. At that moment, there were only two people in the tavern yard who mattered—two people engaged in a most intriguing struggle—and all eyes and attention were firmly fixed on them.
Charlotte finally turned back to the rest of the group, breaking her own spell. “I do hope to join Lu soon on the Continent.”
Nash caught these words as he returned to the table. “You will not be long in London?”
“Only long enough to meet with Mr. Robinson of the Adelphi.”
“An audition?” Nash stared at her in surprise. “I didn’t know.”
“We just heard this morning by post. It is this coming Monday, then I am to let Henrietta and Mr. Scott settle into married life and shift for myself.”
“Justice Nash.” Miss Gleason turned to him with a mischievous air. “When does your court next convene?”
“The second Monday in September.”
“Why, right when Charlie and Lu could be gallivanting about Italy and most in need of a chaperone!”
Nash downed the whisky he had just been brought. “I’ll not be doing any more of that,” he stated quietly, as if to himself.
“And you two boys—what do you have planned?” Sir Francis asked the Nelsons. “I sincerely hope the group is not entirely disbanding.”
“To see Mr. Dickens speak, for one,” Haslett answered. “We were only toddlers when he last visited America. Who knows if he will come to our shores again?”
“Then we should attend his next reading together,” Nash offered. “Such a remarkable actor—with just a desk and gaslight onstage, he brings all his characters to life.”
“I am so eager to know, Sir Francis—did Miss Austen ever do the same?” Henrietta asked the admiral.
“I can say this—no one enjoyed reading aloud their own work more.”
“Oh, that is just as it ought to be!” Charlotte happily nodded. “To take such delight in her words—just like her readers do!”
They returned to the carriages and the final leg of their journey. The men settled back, lit their pipes again, and quietly smoked as day turned to night. But it was the night of midsummer, that abundance of sun and time. With it, one could return home, confront the ghosts of the past, and stir the flames of love for at least one young couple—all in a day’s work, the admiral thought pleasingly to himself.