Nine. Holding All the Aces
Nine
Holding All the Aces
THE PRESENT
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court
August 1, 1865
Charlotte and Nash had not been alone together since.
The five of them had caught the morning train to Liverpool. Arriving in that northern port city, Henrietta and Nash had immediately sought out Dr. Richard Pankhurst, a highly recommended barrister who had chambers there. When the group met up again at the Albert Dock, Henrietta looked as distraught as Charlotte had ever seen her, and no wonder: she had forsaken her entire life for a man in a matter of days, and was now just as quickly forsaking him .
In the privacy of Charlotte’s room at the Grosvenor, Henrietta had shown her the telescope and the hidden letter, adamant that no one else know of it. It was only a piece a paper, Charlotte told herself, a routine marital squabble—not enough cause for Harry to flee for home as covertly as she had left it. Everything would be resolved soon enough, and surely in Harry’s favor, once Denham understood how much the admiral’s entrustment meant to her: he simply did not know his new wife well enough yet. But an equally loud voice inside Charlotte screamed over the injustice of it all, the idea that Henrietta had lost her personhood and her property to her husband immediately upon marriage.
They boarded the RMS Neptune separately from Nash and Nicholas Nelson, while Haz waved goodbye from the Liverpool dock. Over the ship horns he shouted his promise to find Louisa and Sara-Beth— if I have to search every last casino on the Continent! Charlotte still wondered at his older brother joining the voyage home, and worried that Henrietta—demure, practical, principled Henrietta—might end up breaking hearts on both sides of the Atlantic. When they were in calmer seas, Charlotte would warn Harry about the Philadelphia bookseller’s affections. For now, Nicholas claimed it his gentlemanly duty, as the admiral’s other correspondent, to help bring the bequest safely to America and away from the clutches of both Fanny-Sophia and Denham Scott.
Nash, on the other hand, appeared to suffer from no such gentlemanly compunction. He was behaving as if nothing had happened between Charlotte and himself—as if he had merely lost his head after a night of carousing in Cremorne Gardens. If possible, he was acting even more remote toward her sailing west than he had heading east as an unwanted chaperone. Well, two could play at that , she vowed.
Back in Boston, Nash no longer came to Eleven Beacon Street to sit by the fire after dinner, and she no longer hoped to bump into him in the Common on his morning walk. She had been particularly relieved by his absence from the courtroom during the hearing of Scott v. Scott . But now, with Norton’s minutes-old decision still ringing in her ears, Charlotte raced down the hallway of the courthouse to Nash’s private chamber. The clerk in the front room barely had time to address her as she ran past.
“Charlotte, my God—the decision?” Nash jumped up from his desk in alarm.
“Norton’s sent the case back to England!”
He took a breath. “Renvoi?”
She nodded. Of course he knew of it, rare though it was.
“Mr. Saunders calls it a blue antelope. He and Father are at a complete loss.”
“I can’t believe Norton—to what godly end? Their laws are in retrograde over there when it comes to women.”
“Harry will lose it all.” Charlotte flopped down into the chair and watched as Nash paced back and forth, deep in thought. “Isn’t there anything that can be done?”
Nash stopped, stared at the shelves of case law before him, grimly shook his head. “There’s no right of appeal from this supreme court. Norton’s decision is a final one, I’m afraid.”
“Poor Harry. Everything we’ve done, and she’s right back where she started.”
Nash brought a few volumes from the shelves over to his desk and sat down. “Not entirely. Mr. Scott will first have to renew his lawsuit in England, where the courts did already reject it once.”
“Denham will never have a change of heart. Harry swears it.”
“There’s also a small chance Cresswell will apply American law if the matter comes before him again—although such deference to a former colony is unlikely, I won’t pretend there.”
The clerk knocked and entered with a more junior clerk’s notes from the courtroom, and Charlotte watched impatiently as Nash read the reasoning behind Justice Norton’s decision. “The fact that the instance of ownership arose in England is a damning one, I’m afraid—even more than your sister’s arguable loss of citizenship here.” He pushed the notes back from him on the blotter. “Our only hope, should the matter come before Cresswell again, is that he will rule against the validity of marriages at sea altogether.”
“Can someone please explain to me,” Charlotte pleaded in anger and desperation, “how my sister is no longer an American citizen?”
“Our case law is at sixes and sevens with respect to that legal issue, and Congress has yet to act to resolve it. With no clear guidance from our legislature, Norton had much judicial discretion to work with.”
“So, we women are wanted to settle the West , can even get a divorce in Indiana, I hear, as if that’s any kind of a lure—you can leave your husband in a thrice, ladies, if you move out here! Just please, please come out here and breed—”
“Charlotte!”
“—lots and lots of babies for us , but God help you if you marry a foreigner to do it! ” She put her head in her hands and could feel him watching her, struggling over what to say. When he did speak, it wasn’t what she expected.
“You and Henrietta both gave up a lot, leaving England as you did.”
“I didn’t think twice.”
“I know.”
She jerked her head up at his tone. “If I can secure a role in London, Nash, I can do so here. I have to believe that.”
“Still, not everyone as ambitious as you would have walked away from the Adelphi.”
“You think me so ambitious?”
“I think you the most ambitious person I’ve ever met.”
“And you think that unseemly.”
“Not at all.”
She smirked at him. “Oh yes, you do. It was fine when you thought you were leaving me to London and the stage—attractive even—attractive enough to kiss in a hotel corridor and most likely more—”
“Charlotte, my God—that’s not—”
“—but it would never pass muster in a wife!”
“Charlotte!” he cried again in disbelief.
“You think it of Louisa, too. Poor Lu, who because of her appearance gets nothing—only what she can make for herself. We women are handed either everything or nothing, based on how much we entice you . Well, I tell you”—she stood up, her anger over the court’s decision now merging with all her other resentments of late—“if ever a woman could make the world bow to her, it will be Louisa!”
“I don’t doubt that, Charlotte—I don’t doubt it of you, either.”
“Don’t flatter me.” She shook her head as if she didn’t believe a word he said—as if he didn’t even understand what they were really talking about.
“I would never do that, Charlotte, I—”
“ I won’t ever fit your or any man’s notion of what a woman is supposed to be! And neither will Harry—no matter how many laws you men hurl at her!”
Charlotte stormed out, past the confused clerk, past her father approaching his chamber from the other end of the hall. She had played in this hallway as a child, hidden under her father’s desk, looked up at him and all the other men in robes. Back then, she had never once wondered why there were no women about. But today each door she passed represented something much less awesome to her, yet full of even more power: the men who made and administered the law, and were holding all the aces.