Thirteen. The Bequest
Thirteen
The Bequest
Portsdown Lodge, July 2, 1865
Henrietta and Nicholas paced the admiral’s study, both too nervous to sit. They circled the square patch of unfaded carpet where the captain’s desk once stood, glanced at the other treasures left in the room. But nothing could be as special as what had been destroyed.
“Nicholas…”
He looked up from the book in his hands. “Yes, Mrs. Scott?”
“Please—Henrietta.”
“But not Harry?” he asked, surprising her with a grin.
“How we must have confused you at first!”
“I fear we were often confused on ship, my brother and I. From that first night at dinner— Harry, Charlie, Lu…”
Only then did Henrietta realize that she and Nick had not been alone together before. “Dear Louisa, how I miss her—even her formidable direction onstage!”
“And still how weak my performance.”
“It seems a lifetime ago.” Henrietta came away from the bow window, where she had been looking out to sea. “I suppose that one of the joys of travel, the retreat of everything you know and have suffered, and the chance to quickly forge a new life—a new world—in its place. Although that is not at all why I rushed into marriage.”
She stopped herself, confused by her own babbling ( why had she used the word rushed ? ), while Nicholas busied himself by returning the book to the shelf and taking down another.
“You’re in the book trade, Nick. Tell me—why do you think Charlie and I so desired the signature of Miss Austen? Is it about feeling close to her, as we did on our visit to Chawton?”
“I have wondered the same with our first editions in the shop. I know that for Haz, there’s the thrill of the hunt—he will never be deprived of that.”
“Ahh!” Henrietta laughed. “Poor Sara-Beth!”
“Oh, I see, how right you are!” His face brightened with sudden understanding.
“And you? Why do you hunt down books?”
“I suppose to be part of something that will last forever, small as my role of caretaker might be.” He came over to her and held out the volume in his hands. “That feels even more important to me after the war.”
“A dusting of immortality, perhaps?” Henrietta took the book from him to read the spine.
“It’s a first edition of Mansfield Park —inscribed.”
“My least favorite of Austen, although even that I love more than most other books.”
“I think one loves Mansfield Park with the head rather than the heart.”
“Oh, well put, Nick.” Returning the book to him, she noticed how pleased he looked by the compliment. “You always speak so eloquently on literature—is its stock-in-trade satisfactory to you?”
Nicholas slipped the volume back in its place on the study’s walnut shelves. “I think I should always be happy as long as I am surrounded by books, valuable or not.”
There was a cough from the open doorway to the study. Henrietta and Nicholas turned in unison to see George, the admiral’s trusty manservant, standing on the threshold with a foot-long wooden box in his hands. “Excuse me, Mrs. Scott, Mr. Nelson. I’m afraid the admiral remains confined to bed.”
“Of course, George. Please let Sir Francis know we understand—our every concern is for him alone.” Henrietta’s voice caught in her throat as she recalled the admiral’s words to her in the walled garden: you do understand, don’t you? It felt like a lifetime ago.
“Sir Francis did instruct me of late to give this expressly to Mrs. Scott, should it come to…” He looked down at the box in his hands with red-rimmed eyes full of tears. “I was to send it on to Hanbury Street.”
“To me?”
“Yes, madam. It was his most particular wish.”
Henrietta came forward in surprise to accept the slender walnut box, which had been meticulously carved in a pattern of lilies surrounding a coat of arms and the initials “F. A.”
“He made that box there himself,” George proudly announced. “He could make most anything, my master, he could.”
Henrietta turned the wooden box about in her hands, hesitant to open it. The kinship she felt with the admiral already came with a burden: the resentment toward Fanny, whose failure that day to attend on Henrietta and Nick hung palpable in the air. The discovery of a special gift from Sir Francis to a young American woman would only make matters worse.
Nicholas noticed her apprehension and came to her side. “Shall I?”
“Yes, Nick, thank you—please do.”
She handed him the box and watched as he carefully unlatched it.
“My word,” Nick muttered in shock. They all three stared.
It was the telescope.
“ But why would he leave it to me?”
Henrietta held the spyglass to her eye and peered down the lawn of Portsdown Lodge toward the harbor. She and Nicholas sat by the bow window in matching wingback chairs, a tea tray resting untouched on the embroidered footstool between them. “It’s such a beautiful instrument, in and of itself. Oh look, you can see the very waves of the sea from here.…” Only when the view of the water became blurry did Henrietta realize there were tears in her eyes, and she carefully placed the telescope back down in her lap.
“No wonder he spent so much time alone in this room.” Nicholas held out his monogrammed handkerchief to Henrietta and motioned for her to keep it. “Think of all those voyages, each ship a little world unto itself, and he in control of it all.”
“In control of everything but Fanny.” Henrietta wiped her eyes, then nodded toward the unfaded patch of carpet. “I worry she somehow planned it all. Sir Francis hadn’t left the house in so long, and Fanny was always to accompany him if he did. Then the very moment we take him to Chawton, she goes and… but no, that’s not right, is it? Charlie and I invited ourselves here first—Fanny had no part in that. She could have no idea we were coming. When I think back on our brazenness…”
“This bequest is proof enough against that.”
“But why not leave it to others in the family?”
Nick hesitated. “Fanny would learn of it.”
Henrietta stared at him in surprise. “You don’t think she knows?”
“I think George may have presented it to you as he did for a reason.”
Henrietta felt such inner turmoil at the thought. To be caught in this way between father and daughter was both unnatural and unnerving. “Poor Fanny. She must have had it in her head for years, how to get at the contents of the desk. I remember when Sir Francis showed us all the Bramah lock—so proud he was, like a child who has a secret on a parent.” Henrietta looked about the room. “He was the child to Fanny’s disapproving parent. Years of taking care of him perhaps took its toll.”
“I fear that doesn’t explain all of Fanny.”
Henrietta eyed him with interest. Their shared reserve was such an unremarked quality in society. It might be appreciated by some, even if selfishly, but it didn’t yield the kind of rewards that risk-taking did. Yet all that quiet watching did gain one insight into the behavior of others. Nick was always so temperate and considerate as a result. Perhaps her younger sister could be diverted after all, Henrietta thought to herself, until she remembered Charlotte forgetting her lines onstage, and that strange moment in the tavern yard—the blush on her sister’s cheeks over nothing. But Henrietta knew it was not nothing: it would in fact be disastrous for home, should something happen abroad between Nash and her sister that could not be undone.
“May I have a look?” Nicholas asked, breaking her reverie.
“Of course.”
He took the telescope from Henrietta with both hands as if accepting a mantle, and cradled it for a few seconds. “I was admiring it in the carriage from Chawton,” he recalled, raising the telescope to his right eye while rotating its lens. “We men were talking about the telescopic lens fitted to my rifle in the war. A new contraption. A way to—”
He stopped talking as the twisting of the telescope made a little clicking sound, and Henrietta watched his expression inexplicably shift.
“Sir Francis didn’t want to let go of it—what did he say at the time?” Nicholas began murmuring to himself. “ Little whatnots for the children ? Keepsake boxes , like this one here… hidden compartments…”
Suddenly Nick stood up like a shot, then separated the brass draw tube of the telescope from its walnut barrel to peer inside. “My word, of course—he as much as said it!”
Henrietta watched in astonishment as Nick began shaking the barrel upside down until the folded piece of paper fell out, tumbling onto the Persian rug between them.
My family has always been apt to hide things.