Ten. The Crystal Palace
Ten
The Crystal Palace
THAT SAME NIGHT
Portsdown Lodge, June 29, 1865
She finally had the house to herself.
Her father wasn’t expected back from Chawton until sundown, and the staff were dismissed for the night. Fanny had urged all six servants to attend the traveling fair in town, watching from the bow window as they disappeared over the incline in the hill. The two youngest maids giggled and straggled behind the rest, featherheaded ducklings just like the American girls in bright bonnets who had early that morning whisked her father away. Fanny felt her face tighten. She could keep watching through the window, now as then—although her father’s trusty telescope was gone, the four-pull one from Admiral Gambier rested on its nearby stand at the ready. But she did not have long.
Fanny took a first sip of the Madeira from the pantry—she had never before touched a drop—then crouched down beside her father’s desk. Removing a hairpin from her bun, she began to fiddle in the keyhole to the famous Bramah lock. She had some idea of what to do: fourteen summers ago, she had watched Boston locksmith Alfred Hobbs demonstrate how to pick the lock at the Great Exhibition of 1851. But even Hobbs, first in the world to break the Bramah, had taken fifty-one hours to do so; she had nowhere near as much time.
It was her father who had wanted to visit the world’s first fair being held that summer in London’s Hyde Park. He was in desperate need of occupation, having recently retired from the sea and still not recovered from the death of their stepmother Martha. She had always been Martha to the children, some of them already adults when she had literally stepped into their late mother’s shoes, once wore her shoes, for goodness’ sake! There had always been a touch of the common about Martha that she had not seemed interested in rising above: the menial household chores better left to servants, the indulgence of dogs as if children themselves, the loud spasms of laughter ( Oh, how jolly their Martha liked to be ).
Fanny had agreed to escort her father to the Great Exhibition against her own inclination—rarely did the two of them travel alone together. She could not have known how that day would lead straight to this moment: on her knees, fiddling with the lock in the desk between sips of the Madeira, going over and over Hobbs’s demonstration inside the shimmering crystal palace built especially for the fair. The inventor had shown the spectators how to apply the most careful touch and pressure on the bolt, then to insert a steel needle—as thin as a hairpin—through the keyhole of the barrel-shaped lock. Inside the barrel were eighteen steel sliders, thin as wafers and of varying lengths, which allowed for nearly half a billion different permutations and required perfect alignment. Sir Francis had stood next to Fanny in the crowd, exclaiming in delight at Hobbs’s display of skill and proclaiming him a genius like his sister.
Father and daughter had silently returned from the Great Exhibition, and one week later something new arrived at Portsdown Lodge: a Davenport captain’s desk from cabinetmaker Gillows of Lancaster and London. Her father was as enamored of it as he was of his handmade wooden toys, and from outside his study she could hear him showing George the secret compartments and extra-secure Bramah lock. This was where her father soon moved all his private correspondence, previously stored in an old ship’s chest at the foot of his bed.
The desk’s turned legs were cupped in brass caster wheels, just one of its many oddities. Sometimes at night, lying in bed pretending to snore, Fanny could hear the Davenport being rolled across the Persian carpet toward the bow window in the study below. She would lie there, still as death, and picture her father standing before the desk as if at the helm of the Vindictive and in charge of hundreds of men, or planning military maneuvers on a battle map before him. All the while he wore the special round key to the lock about his neck as if a medal.
Over an hour passed in the empty house and still she fiddled, and still the lock remained as impregnable and mysterious as her father himself. How ironic that of his many children, she was the one left at Portsdown Lodge. He had preferred almost anyone else to her growing up, Cassie Elizabeth most of all. She and their father had picked cherries together, raced the chaise down the lane, painted en plein air with their easels side by side. Now the older Stevenson sister was constantly at his side instead—or was her new surname Scott ? It was all so confusing, the husband of a few days nowhere to be seen, and that Nicholas Nelson mooning over Henrietta what’s-her-name as mortifyingly as her father.…
On aching knees, Fanny continued to fuss and push and twist with none of Hobbs’s success. Part of her was glad for the security of what was locked inside: Aunt Jane’s private letters, the very opposite of her published work. The mere gossip and musings of a spinster relation whom Fanny had never met but with whom she felt a kinship nonetheless. It was clear from the books—was it not?—that Aunt Jane also considered duty and decorum to be paramount to society: the glue that held everything together.
When it came to their famous aunt, the family knew its duty—Jane had made her wishes abundantly clear. Even if she hadn’t, everyone deserved a sphere of privacy that would outlive them, no matter the value that strangers might one day place on their words. History was only necessary as a moral corrective on others—if one could learn something charitable and instructive from it. What happened inside a single family, of any intimate nature, could be of no importance to anyone else.
The family had held hard to this notion for nearly fifty years, yet her father was clearly at risk of softening on this point: corresponding like a lovesick schoolboy with young women in America, inviting a group of rough-and-tumble Americans into their home, traipsing about Chawton with his collective chaperone. He was the one forcing Fanny to take action. Who knew what might happen if tradesmen like the Nelsons got their hands on what was in the desk? Family history was kept hidden for a reason.
Another hour passed, another sip of Madeira. She banged the side of the desk in frustration and felt the Davenport shift on its caster wheels. Sitting on her heels in thought, she shoved the hairpin back into her tight bun so hard, it hit her skull. But she didn’t feel a thing. So this is why men drink , she heard herself think.
She stood up and pushed the captain’s desk again, this time letting it roll inches forward and backward on the carpet. The sun was beginning to set. Her father would want the carriages home before dark and would have timed the journey with his usual precision; the poster for the traveling fair promised fireworks. She had just enough time.
The desk slid easily through the study doorway and into the corridor—where George did not hover about, for once—then along the oak floorboards to the front foyer with its checkered marble floor. The desk rotated on the smooth tiles as if with a mind of its own, the turned cabriole legs swerving sharply around the pedestal table in the center of the room before rattling toward the front doors.
This was where she struggled. There were three steps descending to the lawn and here the desk refused to behave. She decided to stop pushing and break its path with her own weight instead. She shimmied sideways and backward down the steps, the desk pressing hard against her until she felt the prickle of the dry parched lawn of midsummer beneath her cloth slippers. She stood on the top of the hill and took a deep breath, then pushed the desk one last time until it came to rest in the grave of white sand and red bricks piled there.
Down the hill, then up, then down again, the carriages traveled. It was Frank’s favorite view in all of England, coming over the hill one last time from Horndean, that first glimpse of the harbor full of Her Majesty’s fleet. Here the old Saxon forests disappeared as the land prepared to meet the sea, and the green of England turned sail-white with the downland’s chalk cliffs.
The other men in the carriage dozed about Sir Francis, but he was too happily agitated for sleep. Hearing the admiration of relative strangers for his sister never failed to stir him. The entire family had known they had a genius in their midst. Thank goodness for his Martha who, by joining the Chawton household of women, had helped free Jane to write.
Following the death of their father, each brother offered up their various rented homes to their mother and sisters. During this nomadic time, Jane wrote very little. Not until Chawton, and the cottage, and the little twelve-sided table. It had turned out, most fortuitously, that there was nothing like a settled view of the world for his sister to look deep inside it, her eye cutting through the layers of grime and gloss that mire us all, as if a microscopic lens. The expansive hustle and bustle of Dickens’s London could not provide the best view for her.
He stared impatiently out the carriage window, waiting like a child for the curve of the River Solent, the sight of the Spithead, the entrance to the sea. The same view as from his own hill and the dozens of windows of Portsdown Lodge. The letter stayed safely hidden on him for now; he would keep it secret a little while longer. Life revealed most everything in its time—just like the chalk of the cliffs, which no force of wind or violent water could wash away. It was there all along, waiting to be found. So, too, was Jane’s legacy.
The adoration for his sister’s writing was destined to grow. This hadn’t always been the case. After her death, the books had quickly gone out of print. But the radiance of her words somehow persisted, the flame of her intellect lighting one reader to the next, from the servant William Littlejohn whose descendants still owned the little round table to his daughter Catherine completing the story of the Watsons—from the justices of a state supreme court in the New World to his kindly new friends in the carriage, the poor brothers who struggled still with a very different kind of war. God help this world should there ever be another like it.
He gazed up from the horizon of the harbor, above the line of trees that marked the start to his property. The sun was beginning its descent, setting the summer sky aflame with the colors of the tropics. This was when the admiral could most imagine himself anywhere in the world: from the coral reefs of the Caribbean to the crystalline rocks of the Baltic Shield. The sea connected everyone in this way, gifting the same view of the setting sun no matter where one stood.
He brought the telescope to his eye, twisted the brass joints, heard the clicking noise from inside. Through the spyglass he saw the tangerine sun setting on his right, its low rays bouncing off the water to the west, then on his left, the eastern sky another ball of orange—the entire heavens were on fire tonight. A thin ribbon of smoke cleaved the horizon behind his beloved Portsdown Lodge, winding upward like a snake, melting the tops of his own trees with its haze. Only one word this time resounded in his head.
Fanny.