The White Rose

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  For a time, then, there were no more letters. The homeland of Charlotte’s birth was at war with England, and for the period of colonial upheaval there was silence from 3 Queen Square, London. Then, in the aftermath of American independence, she wrote from a new location, and of a new companion. Settled in a village near Exeter, the forty-one-year-old Charlotte was living with Harry Treglown, the freeholder of a small farm in his native village, and a onetime groom to Morgenthaw. (She ran off with the groom! Marian would marvel, shaking her head in the musty reading room of the Rhinebeck Historical Society. At forty!) At Treglown’s farm in the West Country, Charlotte would remain for nine years, caring for her new mate’s orphaned nieces and performing the duties of any farm wife. There were no further literary works, if you did not count the letters themselves, which now, at this advanced stage of Charlotte’s life, suddenly became lush, textured with description and quite informative about matters agricultural and domestic, as if her American correspondent had asked for specific advice pertaining to cookery, gardening, and animal husbandry.

  Charlotte, who had always been a happy person, now found added contentment in domesticity, which her prior social elevations had prevented her from experiencing. She was like the women of Marian’s own generation, who leaped off the career or tenure track and suddenly discovered the elation of bread dough, the hypnotic lullaby of knitting needles.

  The sweetness of child rearing? thought Marian.

  There were twin girls, Mariah and Anne, snatched from a dying mother (Harry Treglown’s unfortunate sister) and indifferently fostered until Harry and Charlotte’s arrival. In Charlotte’s letters, the little girls attained separate characters—smart Anne, sweet, addled Mariah, who was born second and harder—and grew into jolly, helpful girls. Clearly she loved them, Marian thought. She praised them to her correspondent, excused them, worried for them. Charlotte’s affair would cool in time, but as long as the girls were at home, she would not contemplate leaving them. Nine years passed, then Anne married and took her sister away with her, and Charlotte went away as well.

  Away, but where? She was a forty-nine-year-old woman now, without powerful friends, without funds, without a home. A year would pass between her departure from Exeter and the arrival of her next letter, sent from Windermere and containing pages of rapture at the lakes’ loveliness. Then another six months before another letter, this one from Aberdeen, again rapturous and again without news of any practical matters. It was a mystery of maddening proportions to her biographer, who knew that women of the late eighteenth century did not pick up and travel about, especially unaccompanied, merely for the pleasures of travel (which were dubious at that time) and especially in the countryside. Yet it appeared that this was precisely Charlotte’s endeavor, as if she had decided to see the country that had (mostly) nourished her, to discover and admire it, before leaving it for the last time.

  In 1799, Charlotte wrote to Rhinebeck from her final British address, the Fleet debtors’ prison in London. She did not provide specifics about her financial circumstances, nor which of her creditors had brought about her incarceration, but perhaps this was because she had more pertinent and far happier news.

  She was married. For the first and only time in her life, she had married. And this was no “Fleet marriage,” as sham unions or arrangements of legal convenience in that place were sometimes known, but a love match, and of Charlotte’s many such matches, her greatest one.

  Her new husband, horse thief by trade and a generation his wife’s junior, was an Irishman, giving as his place of birth the city of Portadown in the county Armagh. He would prove Charlotte’s most tender and faithful companion for the remainder of her life, and follow her briskly to death in a new country he had never before seen nor thought to visit.

  His name was Thomas Wilcox, but this was not the coincidence Marian first assumed, for the husband—born Thomas Keane—had taken the unusual step of assuming his wife’s surname, either on or indeed prior to their marriage. Perhaps there were crimes he hoped to leave behind with his old family name. Perhaps he adored his new wife so much that he sought to join her in this way. Perhaps the two believed their outlook as Wilcoxes was simply more optimistic. Optimism must have been in short supply where they found themselves.

  Built in 1197, the Fleet contained mostly debtors and bankrupts at the time of Charlotte’s sojourn. The prison was named for a river that flowed outside its walls, and some cells overlooked the street, enabling its three hundred occupants to beg directly from passersby. Some decades after the Wilcoxes left it, Dickens would send his first hero, the boisterous and lighthearted Mr. Pickwick, to the Fleet Prison for a transformative spell, illuminating the “wretched dungeons” and hordes of unfortunates “not possessed of the secret of exactly knowing what to do with themselves.” And this place, Marian would marvel, this setting of general despair and lassitude was the one in which Charlotte Wilcox would discover the love of her life.

  How they made their escape Marian would not easily discover. Charlotte herself was silent on this issue, and there was nothing in Rhinebeck to explain the circumstances. While the Wilcoxes’ combined debt was not vast, neither did the couple possess any funds of their own, nor any obvious friends rich enough or willing to pay. Marian had come to accept the impossibility of answering the question—though it was obviously a frustrating shortfall—when, only by chance, during her last visit to Charleston House, this final bit of information fell into her path.

  She had grown unavoidably chummy, over those months, with Serena Makepeace, a local busybody who headed the Friends of Charleston House and served as self-appointed apologist for the Forter family. Marian’s habit of breaking from her labors each afternoon to have tea in the National Trust-run tearoom was quickly noted by Mrs. Makepeace, who began to materialize at adjacent tables, noisily turning the pages of her Daily Mail and asking how the work was coming. Marian had learned to tolerate Serena Makepeace, but her obsequiousness on the subject of all Forters, past and present, was tiresome. In the eyes of this local devotee, the family attained divine stature as patrons, philanthropists, and humanitarians. (The fact that their fortune was founded on the sale of human beings apparently did not taint Serena Makepeace’s esteem.) The character of Charlotte Wilcox—colonial orphan, minor novelist, and ultimate Fleet detainee—did not loom sufficiently large in Forter family history for her name to have made an impression on Mrs. Makepeace, but it was one of Serena’s offhand rhapsodies on Forter largesse that nonetheless pointed Marian in the right direction.

  Was Marian aware that Charles Forter (the son of Charlotte’s first love, John Forter) had taken a keen interest in the poor?

  Yes, yes. Marian nodded, mainly to be polite. Charles Forter had, after all, taken up the reins of his father’s business with great enthusiasm, milking the slave trade for every possible piece of gold until forced by British law to desist in 1807.

  Did she know, continued Serena, that Charles Forter had given several local girls, unmarried girls who were unfortunately with child, cottages on the estate?

  No, Marian said, and sighed. How generous.

  Did she know that he had written to a local magistrate, requesting that a local thief not be hanged but instead transported to Australia?

  Marian did not.

  Did she know that he once paid the debt of a poor woman in a London prison, who wanted only to go home to America to die?

  Marian sat up. No, she had not known that. She would like to hear more about that.

  It had been there all the time, but why would Marian have looked for it in the place it waited to be found? Marian’s business was not with Charles Forter but with his parents, and there was no reason at all to think that Charlotte’s point of contact with the Forter family had survived the death of Lady Forter in 1784. But Charlotte, quite cannily, had played this final card from the Fleet Prison in the year 1796, writing to Forter fils in a tone markedly different from that of her other correspondence. In this letter, which Mar
ian would locate that very afternoon in the papers of Charles Forter (1750–1819), Charlotte gently reminded the great man of who she was and what had been her crime against his mother. She then offered him a false autobiography of such suffering and degradation that Forter could only conclude that Charlotte had been granted her just deserts. Now all she wished, she informed him, was to leave England forever and return to her homeland, much changed though it surely was by its unfortunate severance from the British crown. Forter kindness had brought her here, she humbly wrote. Perhaps Forter kindness would send her home.

  He dispatched an attorney with a bank draft within the week, and the Wilcoxes were free to sail.

  Charlotte came home with the new century. En route, somewhere on the wide Atlantic Ocean, she and her husband gave each other titles, emerging at New London as Lord Thomas and Lady Charlotte Wilcox. The only word for this was “chutzpah,” Marian supposed, but she honored the self-awarded rank in her book’s title, because it went to the core of who Charlotte was. From the port, the newly minted Lord and Lady Wilcox made their way to Rhinebeck, to the home of a woman named Alice Farwell, daughter of the man who had sheltered her after the attack on Fort William Henry, so many years before. Alice was Charlotte’s contemporary and great friend, and her longtime correspondent. Lady Charlotte would die two years later, and her husband not long afterward.

  Who is Charlotte? Marian had wanted to know, and now she knew.

  From the Beinecke to the British Library to Brund in Derbyshire, to the great Northumberland House, to the small chamber of records maintained by the National Trust in Exeter, to the tiny museum not far from the site of the Fleet Prison, and finally to the musty local history archive at the public library in Rhinebeck, New York, not ten miles from the home of Henry Wharton Danvers (once) and her own cousin, Barton Ochstein (lately). There was, too, in a cemetery a few miles north in the hamlet of Rhinecliff, a grave, and a headstone, barely legible, bearing the name and dates of this prodigal daughter of the New World, who had fallen so far with such philosophical forbearance. And when Marian found that, she forgot her historian’s reserve and actually wept.

  Of course, Marian did not set out to write the book that would change her life. She set out to write a small book, primly removed from popular tastes and secure within its academic parameters. After all, Lady Charlotte Wilcox, intriguing as she was, had not affected the eighteenth century in any profound way, or influenced her peers, or made any remarkable discovery, or done any single thing for the first time ever. Marian had begun to write this book, and was in agreement with her publisher that it was to have a print run (circumspect) commensurate with its probable popularity (limited). Luckily, as things turned out, she had not actually signed a contract.

  One sticky weekend in the Hamptons, she had gone with Marshall to the home of friends. Not good friends. Not city friends, but Hamptons friends, who hailed one another at the farm stands or from their inert, traffic-impeded cars on Route 27, and met for a single, well-populated meal each summer. Lary and Rorry (Marshall, every year, joked that the husband had given his wife one of his Rs) presented this meal on a grand scale, typically with a cast of sixty or so, a raw bar, and half a dozen Irish lads tending the grill and handing out white sangria. Marian was talking to a woman she knew vaguely when a bright young thing cruised over, clutching multiple glasses. “Oh!” this new person said. “Where’d she go?”

  “Hmm?” said Marian’s friend. “Suzette? Gone to pee, I think. Oh no, she’s over there talking to Rorry. Do you know Marian Kahn?”

  The bright young thing grimaced. With all the sangria she held, she couldn’t shake hands. “You’ll take a glass, I hope.”

  “I will,” Marian said and smiled. She took one, her friend took one, and Marian shook hands with the woman, who turned out to be called Sarabeth Cooper.

  “What do you do?” said Sarabeth, in classic Hamptonian style.

  “Just a history professor,” Marian said. She nearly added: Sorry.

  “History? History of what?”

  Which is how it all began, for it was rare enough that a civilian would even ask, let alone show true interest, as Sarabeth did, drawing forth the long tale of Marian’s passion of the moment, an eighteenth-century no-one-in-particular named Charlotte Wilcox, ascertaining that Marian was indeed well along in her biography, encouraging her to ruminate on the many ways women of today might learn from such an unlikely role model, before revealing that she was in fact a literary agent, and there might be something here, you know.

  “Oh, but it’s already being published,” Marian said. “I mean, thanks, but it’s all taken care of. Columbia University Press did my last two, and they’ve agreed—”

  “Have you signed a contract?” asked Sarabeth, cutting to the chase.

  “No. But—”

  “Leave it to me.”

  What was it that made her agree? Marian would wonder, and not only as she drove home that night, billowy on sangria and—was it possible?—the contemplation of a readership that might actually go beyond the few hundred scholars in her field and the more ambitious of her own students. What was it that had made a historian of her standing, with her tenure and her sweetheart deal for a sabbatical the following year—a sabbatical that would come in handy when her schedule filled with media confetti—suddenly jump the broom into the land of celebrity? With a glass of sangria in her hand, no less.

  Sarabeth, a Vassar girl by way of Pittsburgh (where she had spent formative, fame-hungry summers interning at the Warhol Museum), had come to her profession like a light-seeking moth, climbing so rapidly in her first small but chic agency that she was soon taking exploratory calls from people named Binky, Joni, and Mort. Sarabeth demurred. She knew precisely where she wanted to be sitting, and until the seat in question was ready for her, she opted to remain where she was, honing her list like a Josephine Baker assembling her rainbow tribe. By the time her telephone rang—at home, as was only prudent, in the East Village—Sarabeth had a string of writers capable of floating a small institute of higher education, or at least a really A-list party. In due course, and with a feeling of fateful completion, she went into partnership with Roland Saperstein, the most eminent of an earlier generation of literary agents, with the most lauded client list and the best address, a brownstone in Chelsea. The party for their merger took place at the Union Square Café.

  Within weeks of meeting Sarabeth, Marian found herself sitting down with editors in high, corner offices all over town. It took one or two of these encounters for Marian to find her rhythm, but she soon discovered an unsuspected fluidity in her historical descriptions, an animated quality in her voice as she interpreted Lady Charlotte, until there was even a sense that Charlotte herself had been conjured and was in attendance, nodding encouragement from the chair in the corner. Marian, Sarabeth, the editors and publicists, all of them moved through a cloud of excitement, with suggestions raining down upon the various coffee tables in the various offices: the biography, sure, but what about those novels? An edition of the letters! What about a sort of pillow book of her wit and wisdom? And what a fabulous part for an actress!

  Two hundred years in her undistinguished grave, and Charlotte Wilcox was about to become an industry.

  Even now Marian wondered at the chance of it. Had she not met Sarabeth at that overpopulated party. Had she had not, uncharacteristically, allowed her enthusiasm for a project to trump her usual self-effacement. Had her new agent not been the rare person who saw contemporary significance in a figure neither contemporary nor significant…

  They had their pick of publishers. The whole world, it suddenly seemed to her, wanted to bring Lady Charlotte Wilcox back to life. Marian let her agent make the decision and went to work recasting her book for a layperson. As she did this, she was gratified to sense the way in which Lady Charlotte seemed to emerge—through the cracks, the letters and novels, the centuries—reconstituting herself as moral compass, self-help guru, and fabulous girlfriend, all at once,
her passion for life seemingly untrammeled by the fact that she was dead, and long dead, for that matter. An elaborate publicity campaign was planned and, to Marian’s amazement, set in motion, and the services of a media coach were procured to train her in the art of slipping the book’s title into virtually every sentence. (This Marian never learned to do properly.) The coach expressed approval of her wardrobe (already media-friendly, with its neutral tones and clean, spare lines) but cajoled her into a major haircut (which, she would later admit, was flattering) and blond highlights (which were not).

  At no point during this process did Marian actually believe what they were telling her: that the book was going to be huge. That American women were going to reach back into their own history and embrace Lady Charlotte. That readers would see in her, in her persistent ability to land on her feet and pluck happiness from failure, a model for their own lives. That her version of success was fulfilling and available to all, no matter their circumstances. What Marian thought was that when the book found its way at last into bookstores, readers would remember that they did not like history—that it was too much like school—and opt instead for the latest New Age nonsense or self-proclaimed oracle. She regarded her failure as inevitable and spent much of her time—between media-preparedness lessons, makeover appointments, and actual book writing—preparing her apologies to all concerned.

  The advance reviews were good, but what did that mean? Marian had always received positive reviews for her work (her Triangular Trade: Bristol, the Ivory Coast, and the New World, 1640–1810 had even won a prize from the Historical Association of Great Britain), but she had yet to see a single copy of any of her books on a Barnes and Noble shelf. This time—if one was to be technical about it—was not an exception, for when Marian wandered into the vast bookstore on Broadway and Eighty-first on publication day, her arms laden with Zabars’ bags and her heart in her mouth, she saw the stacks of her brand-new volume, the bright pink Lady Charlotte Wilcox: The Decline and Triumph of an American Adventuress, piled high on a special table just inside the front door, like a breakwater, forcing the flow from the street to reckon with it.