The White Rose (10 page)

He might have apprenticed himself to one of these people, but he was impatient, so he began by dropping into restaurants in the late afternoon, casually introducing himself to managers and sometimes chefs, offering to do their flowers. Most were curt, but Oliver had charm, and often enough he found himself at a bare table with a cup of tea and a couple of serious, nodding men, showing them photographs of flowers and containers and making notes about their color preferences, heights, shapes, and prices. During this period he created his arrangements on a plastic sheet stretched on the floor of his studio, and when they were done he transported them to their destinations in a child's red wagon, the vases wedged tightly and the flowers wrapped against the wind. After the first month, he'd accumulated eight regular clients and a host of sporadic customers. He added office lobbies, doctors' offices, two clothing shops, and an antique store on Bleecker Street. He began to leave business cards beside his arrangements, with the new address optimistically printed and his current phone number. He began to get calls.

All of which made him ever more impatient for his own home.

When the pleasurable part of the day—the mornings on Twenty-eighth Street, the hours working with the flowers, the deliveries—was past, Oliver went to Commerce Street and confronted the creeping pace of his renovation. Termite damage had been revealed in one post, dry rot in a wall, the six-over-nine windows he'd bought by special order from a reproduction glassmaker suffered repetitive delays, meaning that plywood continued to cover the window openings. The upstairs fireplace was declared unusable, then probably unusable, then probably okay, so long as he wasn't intending to actually light fires in it. The missing front steps continued to flummox him; he could not imagine where he might obtain an appropriate replacement. The water ran brown, earthen brown.

Caroline came by as often as she dared. She was in the city fairly often, working with the New York City Ballet Guild and meeting Oliver's stepfather for dinner. She didn't necessarily want Oliver in an antiseptic suburban castle, but the atmosphere of his future home, with its flying plaster and rat droppings, was more than her maternal heart could easily withstand. The choices Oliver was making daily were baffling to her, including the decision to preserve a spectacular crack in one of the original walls, or the failure to install a shower in the bathroom, where Oliver was having the existing fixtures—a worn pedestal sink and a long, rusted, claw-foot tub—reporcelained. She despaired when it at last became clear to her that, having lifted a layer of plywood and two of rotten linoleum from the floors, her son did not intend to recover the original planks, with their scars, knots, and gaps. She assumed an air of quiet martyrdom, bringing carpeting catalogues and samples of fabric for a theoretical couch, proposing paint colors for the bedroom, which Oliver intended to fashion from one end of the open upper floor. Apart from one small victory (a particular green paint he took to so avidly that she was soon begging him to relieve the ubiquity he intended for it with some—any—other color), her failures were comprehensive. When the building was at last ready for furnishings, Oliver rented a U-Haul and went to Brimfield for the May show. He got up at five with the rest of the madmen (the early hours on Twenty-eighth Street were good preparation for this), parked at Quaker Acres, and walked the dewy, muddy fields with a large roll of bills, retracing his steps in the truck that evening to pick up the bed, the vast wooden table for arrangements and the smaller one for dining and the smaller still for his computer, the mismatched chairs, the wardrobes (he had ignored his mother's plea to build closets), the chests, the candle stand nobody wanted because it had been refinished, the trio of luscious still lifes of pansies, a fortuitously discovered edition of
Modern Roses
from the 1970s, and, to his absolute amazement, a three-step block of marble that would prove to fit so perfectly it might have been stolen from his own threshold.

When it was finished, he invited his mother to dinner. He also invited his stepfather, a gesture so magnanimous on his part that it effectively offset Caroline's residual distress. The business was kicking. (He had just done a wedding at the Puck Building, he told them, and one of the guests, a publicist for Ungaro, had called to book him for Fashion Week, which meant at least one huge, slavishly kowtowing delivery to each of the twenty or so opinion makers in the industry. A good gig.) Henry Rosenthal, himself on enforced good behavior that night, seemed actually impressed. Caroline was happy.

Home: check.

Work: check.

But there still was the little matter of his being single. Oliver would have liked to reassure his mother on that point, but anxiety of his own had set him adrift, and he was unprepared to discuss the situation with anyone, especially her. His relationship with Matilda, his girlfriend since sophomore year of college, had been petering out, though she still came to Greenwich with him occasionally and had moved to the city as he had, settling into the Upper East Side postcollegiate den of Rupert Towers, where she shared an apartment with three other initiates in the training program at Morgan Stanley. Matilda had become an aunt in the months after graduation, and now spoke fervently about children. Her intentions were unmistakable, and Oliver, who had never shared with her his own concerns, began to withdraw. He wasn't what she needed now, he explained to her in a final, pained dinner near her apartment (he didn't want her to have to cry through a long taxi ride), but he would always think of her with love, which was true.

Afterward, there was no one. Of course, Matilda had not been anomalous in her desire for children—children someday if not someday soon. Women wanted children—he understood that, and what right did he have to ask a woman to choose? It seemed safer to keep himself to himself, to watch his friends pair off and marry, and not to dwell on what was unavailable to him. Then he had met Marian.

Oliver turns off the light in the shop and goes upstairs, the bag of bottles clinking once, twice against the wall of the narrow stairway. In his apartment, he goes first to the kitchen and puts away the artichokes and frisée, the chocolates and orzo, for his dinner with Marian. He tips the short ribs into a stockpot and opens one of the bottles of wine, covering them by a few inches. Then he puts in some pepper and bashes a couple of garlic cloves, which he adds, and places the whole thing in the refrigerator. The apartment, long like its downstairs twin, is serene, even with the bed unmade and the morning's newspaper on the bathroom floor. His resistance to music and the backwater quality of his street combine to produce a rare silence in a city that's elsewhere frantic with perpetual noise. Oliver, looking around, feels again what he has felt intermittently throughout the day, that he is living the right life, in the right place, with the right people in it. It is a feeling of deep pleasure (and some guilt, because the rest of the world cannot, apparently, be so fortunate), but little security, because while he himself does not fear the future, he knows that Marian does, and he hasn't a clue what to do about that.

H
istorians, as a rule, are not fanciful. They do not speak of inspiration in the way that fiction writers do (or at any rate, in the way that fiction readers speak of it to people who are not fiction writers). No one, for example, has ever asked a historian where he gets his ideas. At least, no one has ever asked Marian that.

Which is not to say that there is never a story. Sometimes, there is a story. Sometimes it's even a haunting one, replete with stray breezes, the slamming of doors, the spontaneous, serendipitous appearance of a new idea. Marian, for instance, has a story about the day she became aware of Lady Charlotte Wilcox, but she has never told it, because no one has ever asked.

Her story began when she walked into the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale on a raw March morning some years earlier. She had removed her heavy coat and slung it over her arm, and with her other arm was holding two books from her own library—that is to say, the Nicholas Murray Butler Library at Columbia—to her chest, while simultaneously trying not to spill a take-out latte.

Marian had not been to the Beinecke in years, and if the truth were told, she didn't want to be there now. The day trip was meant to finalize a paper she was scheduled to deliver two weeks hence at a conference of eighteenth-century scholars in Tucson. Marian's subject, well within her habitual stomping ground of the Age of Reason, was the decline of the Society of Merchant Venturers, a happy band of Bristol-based slave traders who only faltered when the Anglican and Methodist churches began to condemn their trade in the late 1770s. She was particularly interested in the family of John Forter, whose six ships made the three-part journey from the Gold Coast to Charleston and back to Bristol hundreds of times, eventually funding the purchase of a great townhouse near the port (now a Lloyd's Bank) and a stately pile near Brund, Derbyshire, called Charleston House (now owned by the National Trust). Manifests of a number of voyages bankrolled by Forter, and the general records of the company, were enshrined in the British Library, but the Beinecke—through a quirk of transatlantic marriage and the Yale-o-philia of one of its alumni descendants—had come into possession of some of the family's personal papers. The official grail of Marian's excursion was a copy of John Forter's will, which was inexplicably absent from the British Library holding, but there was something else, too. There was a stray reference, encountered the previous summer while Marian was doing preliminary work on this paper, in London. It had been bugging her.

The reference occurred in two letters from a Forter ship's captain, one posted from Charleston in April 1762 to his sister in Hertfordshire, the second following some three months later to the same recipient, this time from Bristol. The Charleston letter was a terse grumble. The captain, whose name was (as near as Marian could decipher his signature) George Hartwell, would not be able to take his much anticipated holiday with Anne Beckwith, née Hartwell, because orders had reached him in Charleston compelling a detour to Philadelphia, where he was expected to collect a young lady for the passage to England. Hartwell's crew, the captain wrote, would not mind the digression—Philadelphia was held to be nearly English in its comforts and diversions—but he would miss his sister's company and the hunting he had long been anticipating.

That was the first letter.

The second letter was all about the young lady herself—so sweetly pretty, even with her hair much more plainly arranged than that of the English ladies her age, so witty, so clever with the men, half of them mad in love with her enough that he had had to speak with them severely, for wasn't she scarcely more than a child and entirely alone in the world except for strangers to whom she was bound in Derbyshire?

As in Charleston House near Brund, Derbyshire? Marian wondered.

Marian was intrigued. After all, there wasn't much in the way of west-to-east transatlantic relocation in the 1750s, still less undertaken by a woman. And a young, unaccompanied woman? This, Marian had never encountered. The fact that Hartwell's orders apparently came from John Forter himself was just slightly…interesting.

The young lady did not seem to have a name, Marian had noted at the time, looking up from this document and frowning. She was under the dome of the old British Library, so soaring and noble. She loved it there, loved the fishbowl feel of everyone gathered in their concentric circles of desks, as if all worshiping some central deity, which perhaps they were. Gazing up at the curving vault above her, Marian felt the insubstantial, anonymous, forgotten young lady give a little flutter, like the beating of hopeful wings at her temple. This was an instance of the long dead making a thin but eager claim on the living, a not-unprecedented sensation for her, or for any historian, she supposed. The lost person wanted to be known, and yet there was little to substantiate her claim on awareness. After all, the wisp of the unknown young lady of two and a half centuries before surely had not very much to do with the decline of the Forter family or the Society of Merchant Ventures of Bristol, England, or the Age of Reason and its cultural implications.

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 Char
lotte?
” 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 Char
lotte?
” she repeated. Then she pointed at the many green flyers on the bulletin board.

“Oh. Yeah. But it's
Char
lotte.”

“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 there. 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.