Charles and Emma by Deborah Heiligman Page A

they were married they did not expect to be spending time apart. “The house is in such a bustle,” Charles told her, “that I do not know what I write. I have got the ring, which is the most important piece of news I have to tell.”
    Finally, on Tuesday, January 29, Charles, with the ring, and Emma in a green silk dress, went to the church at Maer. Emma was thirty, Charles would turn thirty in two weeks. Neither one liked pomp and ceremony, so the service was quick and attended only by a few members of their close family. Emma’s mother, Bessy, was too sick to leave her bed, and Erasmus didnot even come in from London. Charles’s sister Caroline and Emma’s brother Josiah were there, but their infant was very ill, which set a pall over the whole day.
    The group went back to Maer Hall, where Emma quickly changed out of her fancy clothes, and the two newlyweds said their farewells. Emma tried to say good-bye to her mother, but Bessy was still asleep. This was actually a great relief to Emma, who had been worried that her mother was lying there feeling terrible for missing the ceremony.
    With a packed lunch in hand, Emma and Charles took the train back to London. “We ate our sandwiches with grateful hearts for all the care that was taken of us, and the bottle of water was the greatest comfort,” Emma reported in a letter to her mother.
    As Charles had arranged, when they got home to Gower Street, the fires were blazing in welcome.

 
    Chapter 13
    Definition of Happiness
    Â 
    A thousand thanks to you, dearest Emma, for your delightful
letter which from the cheerful happy tone of it drew tears of
pleasure from my old eyes. I am truly thankful to find you
so happy, and still more so that you are sensible of it,
and I pray heaven that this may only be the
beginning of a life full of peace and tranquility.
    â€”B ESSY W EDGWOOD TO E MMA , F EBRUARY 1839
    Â 
    I n Jane Austen’s novel
Pride and Prejudice,
Charlotte Lucas tells her friend Elizabeth Bennet that it is better to go into a marriage blind to the other person’s faults. “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other, or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least.” Charles and Emma had gotten to know each other through letters and visits, but like any couple, they would only really get to know each other by living together.
    But happiness in marriage, as Austen’s heroine ElizabethBennet knows, is not only a matter of chance. It’s also a matter of love, and a matter of determination on both sides. And willingness to compromise. “It is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life,” Charlotte Lucas continues in her speech to Elizabeth Bennet. After a short time with Emma, Charles knew he was going to have to make a serious compromise. Little Miss Slip-Slop had grown up into Big Mrs. Slip-Slop. Unlike Charles, she was not careful to put things back where she got them; the freethinking atmosphere at Maer had not inculcated order into her as the strict atmosphere at the Mount had into Charles. Their new home was not going to be as neat and organized as Charles liked. But Emma was worth it; so, as his daughter Henrietta wrote much later, he “made up his mind to give up all his natural taste for tidiness.” He decided he “would not allow himself to feel annoyed by her calm disregard for such details.” He would keep his study neat and orderly, but the rest of the house would be how Emma wanted.
    In their first few days together, they mostly stayed in—it was snowing. But they also did some shopping for furniture, dishes, and clothes, including a morning gown for Emma. It was “a sort of clarety-brown satin,” she wrote to Elizabeth, and she felt it was “very unobjectionable.” They borrowed some