She had exhausted herself working to make money for her trip. On a typical week, Charlotte played Portia on Wednesday, Lady Macbeth on Thursday, Goneril in King Lear on Friday, Queen Elizabeth on Saturday. Still, she made time for a widening circle of friends, and sometimes was their benefactor. When one friend suddenly fell ill, Charlotte lent her husband money for medical expenses. (When the poor woman died a day later, her husband returned the three dollars.)
As the time for her departure to London neared, she and Rose began to make plans to commit to each other in a secret ceremony. Charlotte bought Rose a ring, and they agreed that, though they did not have a marriage contract, they would be married.
Charlotte spent the rest of the month tying up loose ends: collecting money owed to her, making sure her clothes and costumes were repaired and ready for London. Sallie sewed tassels and braided trim on Charlotte’s silk-linked handbag, and Charlotte bought Sallie a new hat and gloves for the journey. Then on Friday, July 5, a little more than two weeks short of her twenty-eighth birthday, Charlotte took a cab to Rose’s house, had dinner with her family, and spent the night. The next morning, she and Rose were privately married. “Slept with Rose,” she giddily recorded in her diary. “Married.” As a wedding gift, Rose gave her a tiny, coin-shaped portrait of Fanny Kemble, whom Charlotte still admired, attached to a tightly woven bracelet of Rose’s light brown hair. A week later Charlotte and Rose slept together again. Afterward, Charlotte went home and spent the afternoon burning letters she didn’t want her mother stumbling on while she was away.
Hoping to spend her ocean voyage improving her mind, Charlotte filled her suitcases with books. She chose authors who might be talked about in London’s high society, including Mme. de Staël, eighteenth-century France’s most celebrated female intellectual (ironically, a famous letter writer); the economist Adam Smith; Charles Darwin, whose book The Voyage of the Beagle had become a bestseller (Charlotte listed his name in her diary under the heading “imagination unchecked”); and the Romantic poets Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose poems made her curious about “nature-worship” and “pantheism.” Like the Romantics she admired, Charlotte often saw her passions reflected back to her in nature: in cloudburst, tempest, and the sudden reemergence of the sun after a storm.
In early October 1844, Charlotte performed in a benefit performance for Macready, and he had promised to perform in hers the following day. In the morning, however, she discovered with horror that Macready had sailed to London in the night. She scrambled, managing to find an actor she had performed with before, George Vandenhoff, but he was not as big a name and she fumed over the money Macready had lost her.
On October 26, Charlotte boarded the Garrick to set sail for Liverpool. Sallie Mercer accompanied her, though she sailed in a separate, third-class berth. When Mary Eliza discovered Charlotte had been putting aside money in secret, she was furious, but she agreed it was a good idea. Mary Eliza had her own reasons for wanting Charlotte out of the country. Someone had been gossiping about Charlotte’s relationships with women. They’d found out about her marriage to Rose and also about a flirtation with a young woman named Lizzie Gardette. “I have always said that time’ll show whether I deserved all the unkind feeling that has been believed and harbored against me,” Charlotte later wrote to her mother, “and I think time will show it.”
The boat shoved away from the dock with a great bellow, and the passengers watched as New York became an island and then a horizon and then disappeared from view. As Manhattan faded, Charlotte wrote a quote from Longfellow’s novel Hyperion onto the front of her diary: “Look not mournfully into the past, go forth to meet the dark and shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart.”
In her berth, Charlotte opened her trunk to begin unpacking. In her luggage, alongside dresses, gloves, shawls, books, and a few precious pencils for writing in her diary lay a clutch of apples: Golden Russet, Golden Pippin, Carpenters. She planned to save the seeds to plant with Rose at Clover Hill when she returned.
Immediately, Charlotte felt nauseated. Like a woman gripped by morning sickness, she was wrung by competing urges to seal herself in her bed and climb up and out onto the deck to gulp fresh air. Every time she thought of home it made her “more wretched.” Rose’s sister Blanche had warned her that when she was seasick she “could not think of anything at all,” yet Charlotte couldn’t stop thinking. She heard Rose’s voice as plainly as if she stood in front of her. “I see Rosalie in her painting room,” she wrote miserably in her diary. “I hear her sigh for her absent friend and spirits fall. I feel almost her arms about me… I wonder what I should do without her, I would not care or wish to have another home, deprived of her or of her affection.”
Charlotte had rarely had so much time to think, and she didn’t like it. She worried that Rose would forget her or fall in love with someone else. She worried she would fail and this would all have been for nothing. She cried, feeling like her “heart would break.”
Sallie was also miserably seasick, and they took turns taking care of each other. Once Charlotte had to rush to Sallie’s
