Twelve. Emma
Twelve
Emma
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court
September 14, 1865
The full court was back in session and Emma was on the docket.
“How did we debate Austen all summer and not yet speak of love?” asked Chief Justice Adam Fulbright. Several men snorted, the chief justice being by far the most romantic member of the court.
“We’ve discussed romanticism plenty enough,” countered Justice Roderick Norton.
“Yes, but not desire. The kind of desire that makes a man weak in the knees.”
Justice Philip Mackenzie frowned. “Austen’s characters may seek marriage as a means to happiness, but one does not see in her works the persistent flame of a Dickens or the violent passion of a Bronte.”
“I beg to differ,” said Justice Conor Langstaff. “I think what Austen so shrewdly—boldly—does is expose how much hidden desire drives us all. Look at Mr. Knightley in our text tonight. The man is utterly besotted and has no idea.”
Justice Thomas Nash shifted uncomfortably in his chair, while the chief justice replied with a laugh, “Knightley is indeed the worst of the lot. He greatly desires Emma Woodhouse, yet insists on her improvement. He insists on her becoming the woman he wants and needs her to be.” Fulbright sighed. “I must confess, Emma as she is would be enough for me .”
“She would be enough for most men,” Langstaff readily concurred. “She has all of Highbury twisted around her little finger, and it’s not only due to wealth and social standing. There is a wonderful confidence in her, a charm and vivacity, that I, too, find most appealing.”
The end of the parasol, digging deeper and deeper into the ground, flashed through Nash’s head and he shifted again in his seat. God help him.
“What is Austen saying, then?” Justice Ezekiel Peabody inquired of the rest. “That there is little rhyme or reason to whom we love?” He firmly shook his head. “That is not love—that is lust.”
“Like Zeke here, I must dissent,” Justice William Stevenson announced, “but for very different reasons. Mr. Knightley most definitely loves Emma, but as much for those qualities he thinks he wants to change as in spite of them. The attraction he feels for her is based on anything but an ideal—Darcy’s, too, for Elizabeth. These women act exactly as they are and have attracted these men by doing so—it is the men’s social expectation of what a woman should be that complicates the plot. Yes, Emma now acts more graciously toward her neighbors, she might even one day finish a book—but that is not why Knightley finally declares his love.”
“You mention plot.” A befuddled Justice Ezekiel Peabody leaned forward in his chair. “Where is one?” The other men laughed at their most literal colleague, who had reams of scripture and essays memorized but no notion of subtext.
“It’s all plot,” asserted Langstaff, and the group turned to him in surprise. “There is not a single unnecessary happening in Emma .”
“Surely you jest!” exclaimed Norton. “Never have I read so many unnecessary happenings in a book! Pages are lost to discussions of Frank Churchill and his haircut, or a letter from Jane Fairfax, or the gift of a piano.”
“I posit that everything happening in Emma is happening around these so-called unnecessary events of the plot,” persisted Langstaff. “Every key incident is hidden by the mundane of life, from the characters, even from us. This was my fourth enjoyment of the book, and still I discovered more.”
“Do enlighten us.” Norton smirked.
“The strawberry-picking scene, for one. Frank Churchill arrives sweaty, foul-tempered.”
“He is late.” Norton shrugged. “His aunt has imposed on him again, if I recall.”
“No. He has run into Jane Fairfax , and no one knows of it—not even the reader.” Langstaff grinned in victory as Norton narrowed his eyes, then read to himself the relevant section of text which did indeed prove his colleague’s point.
“But what are its great lessons, its themes?” Ezekiel persisted. “ Mansfield Park and Persuasion have such relevance and meaning.”
Langstaff paused for effect. “I submit, the picnic scene.”
“Emma’s insult of Miss Bates—so uncomfortable,” remarked Peabody.
“Precisely because we’ve all experienced it,” agreed the chief justice. “We’ve either perpetrated it ourselves—who among us hasn’t made an utterance they wish they could expel from their head?—or been the recipient of such. The most careless words often injure the most. That is why we are in this profession, is it not? To ensure that the exact word is always selected, in order to convey the most precise meaning, never anything more or less. To never cause undue harm to a citizen, or prevent its full redress.”
“I believe Knightley’s reaction in this scene to be Austen’s own,” replied Langstaff. “He is reminding Emma, in all his anger, that they must use their good fortune in life to keep the Miss Bateses of the world from falling too low—its most noble purpose.”
Mackenzie now lit up, having hungered all evening for such philosophical talk. “It’s Cicero again!”
Everyone laughed as the chief justice stood up to retrieve the decanter of Madeira and share it among them. “ E pluribus unum again, indeed. Treat others as we would want to be treated. There is no currency in dominating others—as I myself know, it’s a very lonely, unsteady perch at the top.”
William sat alone on the phaeton in front of Constance’s house. The discussion with the judges had run late, and his daughters would have retired to the attic for the night. He stayed on the high dimpled seat, reins still in his hands, ruing the great unhappiness of both his children as well as his share in its many complex and continuing causes.
The scandal surrounding his oldest daughter continued to consume Boston society, although Constance was helping William not to fixate on that, surrounded as she was by more radical and permissive minds. Connie coped with uncertainty by taking action: the white-and-gold drawing room was now full of large placards and various pamphlets being drawn up in protest. She was garnering the signatures of hundreds of Boston bluestockings in support of Henrietta’s plight and rallying all her formidable resources—resources which continued to include Graydon Saunders. Just the thought of that man drove William to distraction. The ice-blue sapphire ring—the exact same color as her eyes, he had ordered the jeweller—now rested in a pocket of his waistcoat, where it waited for him to find his nerve.
“William?”
He was startled by Connie’s voice below him in the dark.
“I thought I saw you there. Are you not coming in?”
It felt rude, to stay up there on the seat looking down at her, but he wasn’t ready yet to enter the house.
“My boy, are you all right? Is it Henrietta? Has there been news from London?”
He shook his head before patting the seat next to him. “Would you mind joining me for a moment, my darling?”
She smiled and ascended the narrow carriage step as he gently pulled her up next to him. They sat there beneath the plaid wool blanket on his lap, bundled together against the first cool night of autumn. She pointed out Mercury, unusually visible in the dark sky. “It’s at its greatest elongation tonight. Twenty-seven degrees east of the sun.”
He turned to her, constantly surprised by all she knew. Knowledge acquired instead of babies—that was the draconian decision women everywhere were forced to make. But the babies grow up and leave you all the same, he thought to himself, while knowledge never does . He loved the operation of Connie’s mind as well as its content—her humor and enthusiasm, her intuitive and incisive understanding. Most of all, he loved her passion, which she had also awakened in him— no small feat, he said to himself, and only one reason why he desired even more.
“I don’t want to enter this house tonight as a guest.”
She patted his arm in hers. “Oh William, you know you’re not. Is that why I found you out here?”
“Connie, we are not bound by law to each other.”
“We are bound to each other all the same.”
“But it’s not quite the same, is it? If it was”—he found himself resorting to his best lawyerly logic—“you would have no objection.” He looked up at the lit windows of the front foyer and drawing room and other guest salons, then, two floors above that, the soft candlelight of her rooms upstairs. The bedroom itself was a masterpiece of Baroque design, everything outsized and large enough for two: the elaborately carved four-poster bed, the divan where she read in his arms (and, he blushed, once did something more), the massive stately dresser drawers. Twelve drawers, in fact—plenty to share.
“What we have is so free, my love,” she attempted to soothe him. “No ownership—no rules. We make our life together every day.”
“I don’t want to own you, Connie.” He was treading carefully; any whiff of Protestantism or possession, any display of jealousy over the friendship with Saunders, and he knew she would bolt. “I am just so proud that you have chosen me . What a joy, truly. I want to revel in it, and shout it to the world. I want people to look at us and know what we mean to each other. The respect, the love.”
“William, what are you saying?”
He removed the ring from his waistcoat pocket and held it out to her. “Constance, dear, will you be my wife?”
She stared at the ring for several uncomfortable seconds before speaking. “This comes with too many strings, William, too much alteration. I love you, I love your beautiful, brilliant daughters, but I love my life, too—too much to change it.”
“I don’t want to change your life.” He frowned, the unspoken jealousy over Saunders gripping his heart. “Is there… something else?”
“William, my sweet boy, I just can’t. I can’t live in your family home. I feel—well, frankly, it feels disrespectful to poor Alice.” To his surprise, tears filled her eyes, their icy blue finally melting. It was his first glimpse of any vulnerability in her. But surely we all possess that, he asked himself, whether we show it or not? He thought of Nash and the other men on the bench, how their judicial decisions must be informed by a hidden inner landscape of their own, the law sometimes even cut to fit their individual sense of purpose. We are carried along in life by everything that has come before, the lawyer in him was forced to admit, and far more than we can understand.
“Your poor wife,” Connie spoke again, “who knows none of what is happening, who can’t comfort her girls in their time of need. She has missed everything. For all we talk, we never speak of that . Such unfairness—I can’t add to it.”
“I’m not asking you to. I’m asking to live here.” He nodded up at the lit windows of her house.
She stared at him in shock. “What are you saying? You would live here, in my home—you and the girls?”
“If you would take us.”
“If I would take you?” She threw her arms about him. “Into my home—my beautiful home—that I have worked so hard to make mine? To not give it up, and still have you?”
“Oh, Constance,” he said teasingly, as he placed the sapphire on her ring finger, “if you tell me all these months of anguish rested on a matter of interior style…”
She buried her head in his shoulder and they laughed together, then kissed at length under Mercury. The planet was in its final night of retrograde ( all that she knew! he marveled again when she told him this—he who rarely looked up at the stars). When William pulled back, his eyes were as tear-filled as hers.
“My daughters…”
“They do want to come, though?” He hesitated at her insistent tone. “Oh William, no—I could never ask them to leave their home, especially not now.”
“Somehow I don’t think that will be necessary.”
“They would stay at Eleven Beacon, then? But you are certain they would understand your leaving them ?”
He had to grin at the irony in light of his past behavior. “I have not set good precedent there. But fortunately, my daughters are much more tolerant of my own wishes. They only want my happiness. Look at all that has transpired, from my not wishing the same for them.”
“What a strain on poor Harry, the waiting and not knowing what Mr. Scott will petition the court next. That cursed telegraph line breaking down…”
“I pray for a swift resolution, of course. But Henrietta will always redeem whatever ill opinion of her is out there. She is the most honorable person I know.” He leaned back in the carriage seat and pulled Connie against his chest. “The trial has taken such a toll.”
“She is heartbroken, William. Both your girls are.” He gazed curiously down at her head, wondering if she knew what he suspected. “Charlotte had to leave behind a great deal as well—imagine, the London stage, and performing before the greatest personages of our time.…”
“I think Charlotte left behind even more than that. I think I set wheels in motion last June that could only crash in the end.”
Constance pulled back to examine his face. “What are you saying?”
“It’s not for me to say—not yet.” He smiled hopefully at her. “But you’ll be proud to know I took a gamble tonight, in more ways than one. I can only hope it pays off for us all.”