Only Charlotte
By Rosemary Poole-Carter
ISBN-10: 1935722999
ISBN-13: 978-1935722991
Top Publications, Ltd.
Hardcover: 458 pages
October 10, 2018
Genre: Historical Romance
Only Charlotte, a novel of entanglements in New Orleans, 1880
Lenore James, a woman of independent means who has outlived three husbands, is determined to disentangle her brother Gilbert from the beguiling Charlotte Eden. Chafing against misogyny and racism in the post-Civil War South, Lenore learns that Charlotte’s husband is enmeshed in the re-enslavement schemes of a powerful judge, and she worries that Gilbert’s adoration of Charlotte will lead him into disaster. Inspired by a production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Lenore adopts the role of Paulina for herself to discover how far Charlotte’s husband bears the blame for his wife’s fate and whether or not he is capable of atonement. In her process of unraveling the intricacies of the lives of others, Lenore finds that Gilbert’s love for Charlotte is, indeed, his saving grace while Lenore’s passion for creative expression is her own.
Women of Magdalene (Fall 2007)
Juliette Ascending (Spring 2007)
What Remains (Fall 2002)
Guest Blog
Staging Intrigue in New Orleans By Rosemary Poole-Carter
In my new historical novel Only Charlotte, narrator Lenore James does not settle for merely reporting what she uncovers about other characters: Lenore dramatizes her scenes.
Early in the story, which is set in 1880’s New Orleans, Lenore’s latest suitor, actor-manager Ambrose Parr, escorts her to a theatrical production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Enthralled by the drama, Lenore soon casts herself in a role similar to that of the play’s Paulina as Lenore unfolds her own tale of her brother Gilbert’s dangerous involvement with the one and only Charlotte.
Like countless others who pursue creative endeavors, I find Shakespeare’s work an endless source of insights and inspiration. My fascination with his plays began when I started high school and has never left me. The old story on which Shakespeare based The Tragedy of King Lear traveled as folklore from the British Isles to the American South. My children’s play Mossy Cape is based on that lore mingled with fairy tales that lead to a happily ever after finish. Aspects of Othello appear in my Southern Gothic adult drama The Little Death, and Romeo & Juliet inspired my YA novel Juliette Ascending, in which a Creole girl and a young Yankee private find a way to live for love, not die for it.
Now comes The Winter’s Tale and its hold on Lenore as she relates amorous and murderous entanglements in Only Charlotte. Acknowledging dark times in the post-Civil War South, Lenore avows that “music, art, poetry, beauty of all sorts have a way of enhancing one’s imagination—stimulating ideas for extricating oneself from difficulties.”
Soon Lenore is not only dealing with a dangerous situation but also envisioning events as material for a stage play of her own devising. To that end, she jots down ideas for dialogue and plot twists and consults with Ambrose regarding staging and direction. Thus, Lenore learns that “while the audience might be guided artfully to focus on the words or gestures of a particular actor, something else might be happening on the stage at the same time, right in front of the audience’s eyes, and go unseen until the deed was done—until it was too late.” Lenore is intrigued—and I hope you will be, too, by the story that she unravels.
Only Charlotte by Rosemary Poole-Carter
ISBN978-1-935722-99-1
(Available April 2019 through your local bookstore and online)
Rosemary Poole-Carter explores aspects of an uneasy past in her novels Only Charlotte, Women of Magdalene, What Remains, and Juliette Ascending, all set in the post-Civil War South. Her plays include The Familiar, a ghost story, and The Little Death, a Southern gothic drama. Fascinated by history, mystery, and the performing and visual arts, she is a member of the Historical Novel Society, Mystery Writers of America, and the Dramatists Guild of America. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, she was a long-time resident of Houston, where she practiced her devotion to reading and writing with students of the Lone Star College System. She now lives and writes by the Eno River in Durham, North Carolina.
https://www.poole-carter.info/
https://www.facebook.com/rosemary.poolecarter
Only Charlotte
by
Rosemary Poole-Carter
A tale of Dr. Gilbert Crew’s entanglements in the city of New Orleans
as told by his sister, Lenore James.
Act I ~ Interment
Chapter One
Draw the shadows, and the shapes will appear. Charlotte taught us that—my brother Gilbert and me. Before my witnessing her profound effect on Gilbert, I might have argued against the idea, whether as art lesson or metaphor. I had once been a fanciful girl but had matured into a sensible woman. I had taught myself to avoid lingering long on the romantic and the ephemeral, for I knew the tangible was as tenuous as anything for those of us who had come of age in the midst of the War Between the States. I had encouraged Gilbert, ten years younger than I, to do the same, to cultivate some commonsense—not that he, as a boy, would listen to me. Nor when he, as a man, first laid eyes on Charlotte. Oh, then how I watched my brother shade truth and circumstance, as if they were no more than charcoal shadows in one of Charlotte’s sketches, and he could conjure out of the darkness the shape he most desired.
While I have never learned all the details of what happened to my brother on the night he first met Charlotte, I saw the alteration in him the morning after that particular evening in October of 1879. Gilbert and I sat as usual in the parlor, engaged in quiet pursuits, he reviewing his medical case notes and I writing a letter of tender advice to my married daughter in North Carolina. But our domestic tranquility did not hold. A sudden frantic rapping at the front door gave me a start, causing the pen to jump in my hand and ink to blotch my final words of wisdom. I should have taken that as a sign. Gilbert dropped his notebook and answered the summons.
But I get ahead of myself. Months before that particular evening, I had urged Gilbert to leave Baltimore and join me here in New Orleans to share my home in Faubourg Marigny. I had discussed the idea with Ella, my long-time housekeeper and friend, and we agreed Gilbert needed looking after. He had only been married a year in 1878 when he lost both wife and infant son to a difficult lying-in. His father-in-law and mentor, Dr. O’Brien, blamed Gilbert for their shared loss—despite the fact that Dr. O’Brien had shut Gilbert out of the bedroom in which Estelle labored on grounds that the young husband could not maintain proper professional detachment. Meanwhile, O’Brien, himself, wasted precious minutes arguing a course of action with the attending physician. My poor brother was now detached, indeed, from wife and child and mired in melancholia. He needed to get away and begin again elsewhere.
On his arrival here, Gilbert expressed little confidence that the change of scene would change him. I remember he said to me: “Lenore, you know I’ve just traded one turbulent port city for another.” I saw his point. Although the war had ended more than a decade ago, the indignities of defeat, Union occupation, and purported Reconstruction still rankled with the population of New Orleans. Every household was in some way haunted by its losses, whether from the collective grief of the war years, or from a summer’s devastating outbreak of yellow fever, or from other sorrows, intimate and unnamed. Would it be any wonder if Gilbert’s own sorrows grew more importunate traveling south with him? But even if they had and even if Gilbert were what he appeared to be—a haunted soul—he had come to us, and Ella and I welcomed him. And until October, he seemed to be settling well enough.
Ella was fond of saying, “Mr. Gil scatters himself and sometimes he needs gathering up.” Indeed, for as far back as my memory of him went, fragmentation of thoughts had plagued him—as it had me on a few occasions. Our mother with her sharp voice, our father with his leather strap, and a schoolmaster with a hickory switch had all tried and failed to keep the boy in the moment. But later, Gilbert had found his own way: work was his salvation, as it had been mine. I felt sure his mood would lift after that dark time in Baltimore and his confidence return when he built a new practice in New Orleans.
My brother kindly gave me credit for inspiring his choice of profession, both pleasing and surprising me. I had thought Gilbert would follow in our father’s footsteps and become a pharmacist, especially given Gil’s early curiosity about and experimentation with materia medica. Besides, I was gone so much of his boyhood, we rarely saw each other. A slip of girl considering herself a woman, I had run off from our strict household to marry a soldier in wartime. Oh, the romance and the squalor! And then the horror of it all—losing my gallant young husband at First Manassas. Galvanized by grief, I turned my energies to nursing the wounded sweethearts of other girls. Then, on my few trips home, I shared tales of some of my adventures with Gilbert, hoping to turn him away from any notion of enlisting as our brothers had—I had seen a twelve-year-old courier lose his right arm to a Minié ball. Gil had hung on my words and, sure enough, he concentrated himself, not on soldiering, but on the healing arts.
Soon after Gilbert came to New Orleans, I introduced him to Dr. Rufus Baldwin, whom I knew slightly through mutual acquaintances. The old gentleman, as I’d heard, had lost interest in treating all but the wealthiest of his patients and was willing—for a fee—to refer less desirable patients, mostly laborers and tenant farmers and children of all sorts to Dr. Gilbert Crew. This arrangement suited my brother well, for his sympathies, whether moral or political, had always rested with the downtrodden and the vulnerable.
Which brings me to October and the rapping at the door.
Gilbert left the parlor for a moment or two, and on his return from the front hall, even before he spoke, I surmised he had been called to a sick bed. He was holding a note, transferring it from hand to hand as he stuffed one arm and then the other into the sleeves of his frock coat.
“A boy is ill—a baby,” he said.
I heard the catch in his voice, knowing the memory he carried of his child, and rose from my desk. He would be fine when he got to work. Gilbert would focus entirely on treating the child, whether the babe were one of a dozen in a boisterous family in a crowded house or alone but for an anxious mother in a single room.
“The messenger came by way of Dr. Baldwin’s house,” said Gilbert. “Who knows how long the old man dithered before sending the boy here?”
My brother was already on his way back to the hall, gathering his hat and medical bag from the stand, when I caught up with him. “Do you know where you’re going?” I asked. His six months in the city were hardly time enough to learn all its streets and byways.
“Yes,” he said, glancing once more at the note before stuffing it in his pocket. “Just off Frenchman Street. I can walk it in minutes.” Gilbert opened the door. “The house of Victor Eden,” he called to me over his shoulder before he was gone.
Victor Eden—I knew the name, knew the man mostly by his reputation as an ambitious architect with influential patrons. Some of them had been associates of my third late husband. Yes, after my love-match with Grady, my doomed private, and before the war was half-over, I married again—and years later, yet again. My second husband, Samuel, was a major, then a college professor in peacetime. Our companionable union was blessed with twins, and somehow we made ends meet in those lean years of the war’s aftermath. But before the children were grown, their father’s heart failed him. Thus, I accepted a third suitor, the wealthy, aged Bartholomew James, and entered a marriage of expedience—by which I acquired the funds to raise my children, send my son to a university in Virginia, and provide a dowry for my daughter, who married as young as I had my first time around. Add to all that a lovely Greek side-hall cottage in Faubourg Marigny and the wherewithal to travel, enjoy art and theater, and support my charitable concerns, and I had profited well from the hardest work of my life—that last marriage.
And so my thoughts turned back to Victor Eden—whose name sparked my recollection of his wife, Charlotte, not yet Mrs. Eden when I first met her.
Mr. James had passed just before Christmas 1875. His prominence in life dictated the lavishness of his funeral and of my mourning couture. Of course, I went to Madame Joubert’s Hat Shop for my bonnet, where her most talented young assistant, Charlotte Varcy, created exactly what I requested: a dream of midnight with an impossibly long, weightless veil. I told the girl I envisioned myself wafting my way through the cemetery with that endless veil trailing after me in the breeze, like a ribbon of smoke.
“Or like a dark ghost following you,” Charlotte had whispered.
“Who will never catch up with me,” I whispered back, and we shared a fleeting smile.
She had charmed me—soft-spoken, pretty, and artistic. Or had she really been artful, then and later? I may never quite make up my mind.
I barely had time to order another hat of her design in Nile green, a shade that particularly complements my auburn hair, planning to wear it as soon as my period of mourning was over, before Charlotte abruptly left the hat shop to wed Mr. Eden. Ensnared him and married above herself, said the gossips, who predicted a baby’s arrival within six months of the wedding day. The ladies preferred to believe that society had lost a dashing and chivalrous bachelor to his sense of obligation, not to love. They were disappointed when the first child, a daughter, appeared a decorous eight and half months later. By then, I was resigned to the loss of Charlotte’s millinery magic and thought no more about her as she disappeared into the duties of wife and mother.
It never crossed my mind that one day—in fact, late one night—Gilbert would discover that Charlotte had not disappeared at all.
As a thrice widowed lady, who had sworn off ever marrying again, I had, on occasion, considered writing my memoirs. I had even begun and abandoned several versions of my experience. But I have always been too caught up in living to finish the undertaking. Besides, at shy of forty, I may yet have time for reflection. Or perhaps I am not compelled to write my own past because I do not mystify myself. It is my brother’s story—what I know of it, what I was told, what I suspect but may never know for sure—that I wish now to unravel.
