Thirteen. Mercury in Retrograde
Thirteen
Mercury in Retrograde
Beacon Hill, September 15, 1865
Charlotte dreaded the arrival of autumn. Where had summer gone? It had been lost to all the anger she was known for in the family, and to tears she thought she hid well. Her father had caught her crying only once, standing before the half-finished painting of George Washington on the top floor of the Athenaeum, wagging her finger at his imperious face as tears streamed down her own. She didn’t like how she was starting to feel about men. Maybe it was punishment for the power she had happily exerted over Nash on that hot and feverish July night—whatever it was, the power was gone. She could not move him anymore—worse, she had left him barely even able to look at her.
Nash had not been to Eleven Beacon Street since their return to Boston. The situation with Henrietta complicated things but frankly, things were already complicated enough. To begin with, their father was rarely home to receive Nash and secretly in love, the single happy result of the family’s short-lived separation. Charlotte and Henrietta questioned how long he might go on as he was, taking his mysterious walks, slipping back into his bedroom in the early morning hours. As for Constance, they felt as close to her as ever, yet she, too, kept her romantic life to herself. Charlotte wondered if this was out of respect for both her father’s wishes and the memory of their late mother. All Charlotte knew was that she really needed a mother right now, and was missing out on two.
Her older sister was understandably of no help. It was bewildering still, all that had happened. Henrietta, a most respectable judge’s daughter, a daughter of Boston no less, was being portrayed in newspapers on two different continents as some kind of hysteric who lured men into marriage, then made off with their property. Charlotte had been avoiding the Common on her solitary walks and had taken to pacing Long Wharf instead. She would stand at the edge of the dock and look out at sea, and remember the poor admiral, and Louisa, and all their dear new friends. Every few weeks, Little Bobbie Acheson would stream past, crying out another lurid headline, and the tears for her sister would start all over again.
For a while, Charlotte had wondered if Nicholas Nelson might end up the knight in shining armor to rescue Henrietta from her plight. He did not care a whit about any local scandal—one benefit of his very interior bookshop-bound Philadelphia life. But the admiral’s efforts appeared to have failed there as well. What would his famous sister have said about his meddling? Jane Austen the writer had always struck Charlotte as the consummate matchmaker: creating her very characters for each other. She could even change her mind as she wrote. Charlotte had a secret when it came to Mansfield Park , which she didn’t dare utter to Harry: she had wished Henry Crawford for Fanny Price all along. She couldn’t help but wonder if Austen had changed her own mind somewhere in the writing of it, so fascinating a couple as they almost became.
Almost , Charlotte sighed to herself.
Perhaps the admiral’s matchmaking had also been a form of storytelling, but one with which he only regaled himself. With Fanny-Sophia constantly hovering, Charlotte suspected the letters across the Atlantic had made Sir Francis feel young again, a second childhood as he neared the end, a chance to share his stories. Despite everything that had happened, she and Harry were happy to have obliged him.
Then, just as August turned to September, a letter from Portsdown Lodge had arrived in Beacon Hill. George wrote to notify the Stevenson sisters of the death of his master and enclose back their original letters to him. He had also included a most cryptic message: “My master wished for Mrs. Scott personally to keep his particular gift and share only as she may later judge. My master claimed the greatest of confidence in Mrs. Scott to do what is best when the time is come.”
Now they waited on this side of the ocean. Would Denham file suit again in England? Was a divorce decree and writ of seizure already making its way across the Atlantic on a mail steamer? Or would Henrietta have to file again in Massachusetts to end the marriage and argue cruelty, or move to Indiana for a year or as far away as Mexico instead—roping a third country into the legal quagmire?
Charlotte’s head hurt: when it came to love and sex and marriage, the law boxed everyone in. And not just women—in Massachusetts, no one could get a divorce without grounds such as adultery, cruelty, or desertion. Graydon Saunders could spin it all he wanted, but according to their father, no court in the history of America had ever established cruelty in a marriage without physical injury—yet no state had rescinded the long-standing legal right of men to beat their wives. Principle versus practice indeed, as Connie would say. Poor Henrietta couldn’t even argue abandonment in her marriage, because she had been the one to desert him .
Him was how both sisters referred to Denham when alone together. They couldn’t pin him down for all their efforts. The posy of bachelor buttons, Biscuit the puppy, the window nook full of books—he had showered Henrietta with all the things he could barely afford, and which she especially would appreciate. Harry had tried to convey to Charlotte the instant understanding she had felt with Denham—how it had made the sudden and startling rupture even more painful. It was so hard to believe that none of it had been real.
Charlotte, for her part, did not speak to Harry about Nash. It was her first secret between the sisters, and it was a big one. She no longer judged Henrietta for losing her head over Denham and not wanting anyone to know: debasing oneself for a man was nothing to share. Charlotte was mortified by what she herself had done for love. She had gotten carried away by so many emotions, but the ones that lingered were the most distressing. How does one grow up a daughter of Boston, a graduate of Miss Pride’s Peacock Academy, a talented enough actress to win a role in the West End—and think only, and far too often, of the brass door handle to the hotel room digging into her back as Nash kissed her so hard, so hungrily, she thought her head would explode?
Charlotte took her walks in the Common at dusk now. She would not run into Nash on his morning constitutional. Louisa had said something once, following her own daily circuit of the China with Nash. She had claimed the esteemed justice didn’t sit alone in the corner of the ship’s dining room, or resist the role of Sydney Carton, merely out of respect for the sisters’ plight. She thought him one of those men who so badly wanted to do the right thing that he didn’t do anything at all. The moral center, like Mr. Knightley in Emma . Except Knightley had eventually given in to his feelings for Emma and vowed his love, even with no promise of return.
Only in books. Charlotte sighed again.
She headed home from the Common, passing the red-leather, brass-studded door to the Athenaeum along the way. She tried her best not to think about the broken heel of her boot months earlier, how she had resisted Nash helping her across Beacon Street, his staring up at their house as if he wished it was his own.
She stepped into the foyer and dropped her bonnet and gloves on the front table, tapped Socrates on the skull with little hope for luck. She could hear the fire half-heartedly crackling in the hearth—Samuel must have set it early tonight. Her father would already have left for the opera; Henrietta spent most evenings working in a local soup kitchen, where no one knew of her infamy, or had the luxury to care.
Coco didn’t come springing out of the front parlor to welcome her mistress as she usually did. Charlotte frowned as she entered the room, feeling even lonelier. “Oh. Hello.”
Nash stood up from where he had been sitting by the fire. There was no glass of whisky in his hand, no pipe. A copy of Emma lay closed on a nearby table; the judges had discussed the novel that very week. Her father had claimed it their best discussion yet, although by no means the weightiest. But what fun , he had told his daughters over another late breakfast of his. The justices had laughed often—at Emma, at Mr. Woodhouse and Mr. Elton, at themselves. What a gift books could be, William had then reminded both his sullen-faced children, especially during difficult times.
“You’ve missed Father. Fidelio .”
She hadn’t seen Nash in weeks, not since Justice Norton had handed down his decision in Scott v. Scott , and he looked quite unlike himself tonight. Even nervous, she thought, as she passed him on her way to stir the fire. Like a little boy with his finger in the jam jar—like he had been caught out.
“I’ll tell him you were here.” She glumly poked about the hearth, trying to revive the embers. “He’ll be sorry to have missed you.”
“I don’t think he’ll be coming back. Not tonight, at least.”
She whirled around to stare at him. “You know?”
He gulped. “Do you?”
“About Connie? Miss Davenish?”
Nash came closer, slowly, then stopped a few feet from her. “Oh, no—I mean yes—I did know.”
“Father told you? Oh, that’s rich—he hasn’t said a word to Harry and me.”
Nash looked both nervous and confused now. He reached out to take the poker from Charlotte’s hands as if wanting to demobilize her, then gently rested it against the painted ceramic tiles that surrounded the fireplace. Nash had always commented on this hunting scene whenever he used to visit. He seemed to love the little touches in the house, how they marked an intent to stay forever— for why else would someone decorate something as ordinary as a hearth? he had once asked, before realizing too late the full import of his words. And the room had grown quiet then as they each thought of Alice Stevenson and her own dreams, and how their leaving the home was simply not a possibility because that would mean leaving her, too.
“You don’t know, then, of what your father and I have agreed?” he haltingly began.
“About Connie?” Now she was the one confused.
His face finally relaxed. “Oh, I see.” He took a deep breath. “No, about us.”
“You told my father about us ? About London?” And now she did want to grab the poker, and hold it between them, because he was moving toward her, and taking her in his arms…
“Nash, have you lost your head?”
“No, I’ve bought this house with it. All five floors.”
“You’re evicting me?” She was squirming in his arms now, and he was kissing her neck.
“No,” he murmured again, his lips against her skin, “stand still for once, I’m proposing…”
Samuel and Mrs. Pearson never came near the drawing room that night. Charlotte had locked the doors ( our doors , she beamed at Nash on the sofa, where he lay back, his cravat already on the floor and shirt unbuttoned) and they had made love there by the fire, and fallen asleep, then awakened to make love again as long as all etiquette was being lost to passion. Mercury—the planet named after the Roman god of communication—was no longer in retrograde, when confusion reigns and the universe is rife with misunderstanding. All the while, Coco could be heard from the hallway, scratching on the other side of the door. By now even she realized that life inside Eleven Beacon Street had changed forever.