Marian shook her head, as if to dislodge the flutter, and went back to her work, readying her paper for the Tucson conference.
But the nameless young woman did not leave her consciousness entirely, and though she would not directly impel Marian’s trip to Yale that morning, some six months later, she did come along for the ride, and Marian did wonder, idly, idly, if there might be some additional trace of her in the Forter cache at Yale, some clue to her vague mystery.
So Marian rose that grim gray morning and took a cab to Grand Central and drank terrible coffee aboard the New Haven Line for nearly two hours, but when she arrived, clutching her books and her contraband latte (this, thankfully, from the Starbucks on Chapel Street), the library personnel held her up for a good half hour because one of her two required identifying documents lacked a black-and-white photograph.
“Have a seat,” the woman said. She might have been nineteen or twenty, a pasty Midwesterner with four silver studs through the cartilage of her left ear. “And drink your coffee,” she said pointedly, as if she were truly a librarian and not an undergraduate doing her work-study job. “You can’t take it in, you know.”
Marian sighed. She looked at her watch, calculating the lost day. The librarians huddled over her credentials. She drank her coffee and sulked.
There was a bulletin board opposite her bench, just next to the garbage can, and when Marian went to throw away her cup, she remained for a minute or two, scanning the notices, so similar to the ones that papered her own campus: films, plays, speakers, clubs, pleas for rides, queries about used books, bikes for sale. There was a repeated pattern, she noted, stepping back, of bright green sheets of paper with the banal query, “WHO IS CHARLOTTE?” This turned out to be a flyer for a play based on the Somerville and Ross novel The Real Charlotte, and Marian, who had long ago read and enjoyed the book, actually took note of the performance dates, which were mostly past. It wouldn’t make a bad play, she was thinking when the student called her back.
“Okay,” she said. She was filling out Marian’s official Beinecke ID form, her head down at the desk, and Marian for the first time noticed the girl’s own ID, which had a Yale crest and a gray picture and a name, which was also, oddly enough, Charlotte. This made Marian smile. The juxtaposition of the name, so old-fashioned, and the ear studs gave her a welcome moment of levity.
“Who is Charlotte?” Marian heard herself say. She put the emphasis on the second syllable, as in the Somerville and Ross title.
The student looked up, frowning. “What?”
“Who is Charlotte?” she repeated. Then she pointed at the many green flyers on the bulletin board.
“Oh. Yeah. But it’s Charlotte.”
“Yes.” Marian took her new card. “Thanks. Can I go in?”
“Sure.” She pointed. Then she took up her own book, a Mary Daly text, and sat back down at the desk.
Marian climbed the stairs to the Osborne Collection, where the bulk of the eighteenth-century material was ensconced. From the outside, the Beinecke’s famous marble walls were sleek and gray, like sheets of snow, but from the inside they appeared almost green, like murky flames or climbing algae. The novelty of this had worn off for Marian years earlier, during the innumerable hours when she had toiled in the Osborne Collection as a Yale graduate student, but the novelty had been replaced by a grudging pleasure in the design: books at the spine of a building encased in stone, with the light of the outside, everyday world trying to poke its way in, and not quite succeeding. The whole thing, Marian thought, was some kind of too-obvious metaphor for academia, as if the architect had laughed at scholars throughout his design’s conception, and was still laughing in the stone walls themselves. But the truth was that Marian, like most of her peers, was willing to be ridiculous to the wider world. Scholars know—or ought to know—that they are privileged to lead their lives with their books in their groves of like-minded people. It is a privilege to devote the principal portion of one’s waking thoughts to the evolution of the starfish, or to the fate of an artist, dead these long centuries, or to the brief tenure of one particular Ottoman emperor. Anyone who does not feel privileged ought not to be doing it, Marian thought. Anyone incapable of appreciating the rare jolts of delight that can come from finding something out—something wild and obscure, buried in history or chipped from the unknown—ought to be in another line of work.
She was about to get one of those jolts, herself.
Upstairs in the Osborne Collection, she sat down at a terminal and perused the screen. The Forter will, Marian saw to her relief, was indeed accounted for, and she quickly filled out a request and gave it to one of the curators. Then, returning to her chair, she began to browse the collection with reference to the Forter family, fanning forward and backward from the date of the company’s demise. Bills of sale for the Bristol property. Letters from Lady Forter. Archival photographs of family portraits (the originals still on the walls at Charleston House). Then she noticed a legal document listed oddly as “Deposition pertaining to matter of Charlotte Wilcox, 14 June 1765.”
Who is Charlotte? Marian thought.
She went to the desk and filled out a request for that, too.
The will arrived, brought in its own acid-free box, and was placed before her by the curator, who handled the maneuver as if she were serving an extravagant meal. Marian began making notes: the disposition of property to three of the sons and one daughter, small gifts to an army of servants, the endowment of a memorial dinner at Hertford College, Oxford, to be named the Forter Feast and held each October 8 (the anniversary of John Forter’s birth), the horses and kine, the transfer of tenants’ rents, the disposition of the living at Brund (which Forter was, evidently, keen to keep from his wife’s pious younger brother), and a small house known as Mill Cottage, comprising “four rooms and upstairs two, as well as outbuilding and land,” for Charlotte Wilcox, “young lady presently residing at Bristol, known to my family and having no relations nor income.”
Who is Charlotte Wilcox? Marian wondered again. Now it was nearly funny. She began to get to her feet. She wanted to see what was holding up that legal document. But even as she did so the curator approached with a second box and placed this, too, on the table. Marian could barely restrain herself. She began to read.
The deposition was created in the office of a Bristol attorney, and neither the constraints of legal idiom nor the formality of eighteenth-century language could mask the rage of its complainant, Lady Forter. It was a rage that leaped from the old wove paper, having crossed an ocean and simmered two hundred years in wait for some person willing to attend to it.
Which is me, thought Marian. And she immediately began writing it all down.
By the time she returned home to the city that night, she knew only these few facts, but there were clues to bring her forward. Eventually, over the following year, Marian would return to the British Library, to Derbyshire, to Bristol, and to points as far north as Newcastle and south as Naples, in avid pursuit of a woman never less than diverting, and quite frequently amazing.
Finally, Marian, like her subject, would come home to Rhinebeck, New York, where in the local public library—a building far humbler than either the British Library, with its grand dome, or the Beinecke, with its laughing marble walls—she would locate the substance of Charlotte Wilcox, and begin to rebuild her out of the past.
This is what she built.
Charlotte Wilcox was not a Forter, not even a distant one, but the surviving child of James Wilcox, a bosom friend of John Forter from their academically undistinguished days at Hertford College, Oxford. Wilcox, a younger son, opted for a career in the army and accepted a commission that soon brought him to the American colonies, where he married a young Englishwoman similarly displaced and took up his post at Fort William Henry, near Lake George. In August 1757, however, the fort came under siege by the French, and when the English surrendered, Iroquois warriors did the dirty work. James Wilcox, most probably, died then and the
re. Marian never learned the precise fate of his wife and other children, but the survivors of the massacre were few, and Charlotte surfaced in Rhinebeck only several years later, when a letter was written on her behalf to John Forter of Bristol and Brund, Derbyshire. The year after that, the girl was in Philadelphia, awaiting the arrival of the Hart, and in May 1762, all of fifteen years old, she went to England to stay with the Forter family at Charleston House.
Only one likeness of Charlotte Wilcox—a drawing by her husband rendered weeks before her death—would survive, so there was no telling how lovely she must have been as a teenager, or how well she might have embodied the qualities Humbert Humbert was to extol two centuries later. It appeared, however, that Charlotte had transfixed her patron within months of joining his household, and that the connection they made was as affectionate as it was lustful. It did not remain hidden for long. Letters (unearthed at Charleston House) flew between Lady Forter and her brother, the Reverend Jonathan Basking-Newton, on a raft of bile, and did not cease until John Forter himself passed away, quite possibly from heart trouble aggravated by the rigors of his love life. This left Charlotte, now seventeen, in some difficulty, for though Forter took pains to provide for her with one of his smaller properties—the Mill Cottage cited in his will—Lady Forter’s campaign to prevent this inheritance was nasty, brutish, and long. And successful.
After this information, there was a gap, but when Marian located her subject once again, she was amazed to discover that Charlotte was actually thriving, due to the unquestionable social altitude of the girl’s new patroness, Rowena Thomases, duchess of Northumberland. The duchess, possessor of three homes, five sons, and a husband whose vast benevolence was matched only by his vast stupidity, was precisely the kind of woman who might do precisely as she wished, and what she wished was to have this otherwise friendless girl in her presence, constantly. Charlotte would be the duchess’s companion for several years.
The duchess was a committed diarist, sparing future generations no detail of her daily irritations and hourly pursuits of pleasure. She was also, as Marian (being a not-unaccomplished scholar of the period) already knew, a hostess of wide and significant acquaintance. Every contemporary personage of note made a pilgrimage to Northumberland House, passing the long evenings in political discussion, literary chatter, and social gossip. Dr. Johnson particularly favored the summer months here, installing himself (and the ever present Bosworth) in the border country to escape the London heat and to watch Capability Brown lay out the gardens. The bluestockings flitted through, buzzing with industry and sniping at one another. Richardson and Fielding came, although naturally not at the same time. And politicians from both sides of the divide undertook the long, dangerous, and greatly uncomfortable journey north.
Charlotte passed safe and formative years in Northumberland, London, and on the Continent with her new friend. She also took the opportunity to hone her skills of observation, and of satire, for it was in Northumberland Charlotte wrote the novel that would prove Marian’s single greatest discovery, the pseudonymously published Helena and Hariette: The Literary Ladies (1771), a work long known to scholars of the early novel (chiefly due to its cameos of the famous and infamous of its day) but compelling little of their attention. The book had been of no interest at all to scholars of Fielding and Richardson, Defoe and Swift, and when the feminists came along in the 1970s, there were, it had to be said, far bigger fish to fry (Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Wollstonecraft alone would keep them busy for years), and only a later generation of academics would be forced to reach down to lesser strata of authorial talent, where Helena and Hariette abided. Still, the book had a charm and a lightness of touch that would survive the intervening centuries, and Marian—who would eventually persuade Columbia’s library acquisitions committee to procure for her a copy from a rare-book dealer in Leeds—was thrilled by its razor-sharp caricatures and pervasive wit.
By the time it was published, however, Charlotte was gone from Northumberland. She had left the duchess—and the duchess’s good graces—and run off to the Continent with a man named Lord Satterfield, inaugurating the period of her life that, two centuries later, would attract so much speculation, censure, and general glee. It was a happy connection, Marian discovered (working from the great cache of letters at the end of the rainbow in Rhinebeck, New York), but it would have been happier had there not been an already existing Lady Satterfield, who was understandably put out by the affair. Lady Satterfield, in allegiance with her husband’s debtors (he was an ungifted player of whist) managed to track the couple to Paris, but in Paris, Satterfield’s epiphany awaited.
Lord Satterfield was fair and physically slight (this Marian would glean from the Thomas Gainsborough portrait in the National Portrait Gallery), and perhaps that is what inspired him to do what he did next. He and Charlotte remained in Paris for nearly six months, but when they left the city, they left as two women traveling together, with Satterfield’s male servant as escort. They went south, naturally enough, to Italy, then Greece, like any English travelers on a grand tour: two young English ladies, quietly prosperous and not very interested in mingling with their countrymen.
Charlotte wrote charmingly of their game, reporting near misses when she and Satterfield strolled in a Roman piazza, not ten feet from Lady Satterfield’s brother (sent expressly to hunt them down), and when they shared a boat in Greece with one of the duchess’s circle. Even so, legend about them began to filter back to England, and caricatures appeared in some of the London papers, showing Charlotte and Satterfield as milkmaids hand in hand, or else gossiping behind a fan, bosoms pointing to the heavens.
This, naturally, would prove the most infamous period of Charlotte’s life, and Marian would be able to count on one hand the interviewers who did not lead with a question related to homosexuality and drag (though their poor preparation often meant they assumed Charlotte to be a cross-dressing lesbian). But the entire subject was a bit of a red herring as far as she was concerned. Marian believed, and would argue, that Satterfield’s masquerade had been a practical, strategic move, based on an idea that was already in wide circulation. Paris, after all, had been captivated by its own curiosity, the Chevalier d’Eon, who had recently published his Lettres, mémoires, et négociations particulières about his years as a French spy in England, and who alternately wore a dress and his uniform, that of a French dragoon captain. Opinion was divided about whether d’Eon, who, like Satterfield, was slender and short, was a woman who sometimes dressed as a man or a man who sometimes dressed as a woman.
Across the channel, too, an autobiography by the “notorious troublemaker,” Charlotte Charke—a cross-dressing English actress—had recently been published, and was much discussed by the duchess and her friends. In other words, Marian would argue, it might as easily have been Charlotte in trousers, had not Satterfield been the more widely recognizable of the pair.
Born to his title, ten years Charlotte’s senior, and altogether too well known in the London gambling clubs, Satterfield simply couldn’t travel anonymously, and so the burden of drag had fallen to him. Then again, perhaps it was not much of a burden, after all. Italy and Greece would have been jammed with British travelers, but by the time they reached Syria—their final destination and home for nearly two years—the couple must have felt safe. Yet Lord Satterfield did not, evidently, revert to men’s clothing. What had begun as a pragmatic course of action might well have evolved into a comfortable habit. The conclusion that he was enjoying himself seemed, to Marian, inescapable. They set up house in Aleppo and lived cheaply and happily until Satterfield died—cholera, Marian thought. He must have been deeply mourned, for nearly one year later Charlotte would write from the same spot about her reluctance to leave his grave were her financial situation not so pressing.
Charlotte’s next incarnation was as the consort of a London financier named Morgenthaw—encountered in Rome, secured in Naples, and accompanied back to England in some degree of luxury. Fo
r its trade implications as much as its Jewishness, this was a connection that could only have set her farther than ever from her lost associations in Northumberland, but Charlotte would use 3 Queen Square, London—the house she shared with Morgenthaw—as her address for eleven years, and her letters were filled with companionable pleasures, trips to the Continent, and the friendships she formed in the city’s merchant classes.
It was now the great age of the Gothic novel, and Charlotte returned to her literary efforts with a suitably spine-tingling tale, set largely in Syria amid dark, malevolent natives. This work, privately published in Bristol (of all places), was entitled The Terrors of Aleppo and proved so obscure that even the mighty British Library contained only references to it. It took Marian nearly a year to find a copy, and this—to her amusement—was in the collection at Forter House. (Clearly, Lady Forter—now in her dotage—had kept up with her former ward and rival.) The Terrors of Aleppo (1781) was no match for even its literary predecessor, however. It was a paper-thin tale, more risible than terrifying, of an English girl abducted to Syria by a mad sultan convinced she has wealth enough for a ransom. She escapes the harem with an older woman (revealed as English in the final chapters), setting free the sultan’s many prisoners as she goes.
The White Rose Page 10
