Charles and Emma Read Online Free PDF Page B

feelings,” she later said, “as he is so affectionate, and so fond of Maer and all of us, and demonstrative in his manners, that I did not think it meant anything.”
    A few years back there had been talk about matching up Charles with another Wedgwood cousin, Emma’s sister Fanny. Caroline Darwin thought Fanny would be a good wife. She was neat and orderly, just like Charles. She was also a good contrast to another Fanny who had all but broken Charles’s heart—Fanny Owen.
    Fanny Owen had grown up near Charles’s home—a few hours away by galloping horse. Charles visited her often during his college years, when he came home from Cambridge during school holidays. Fanny Owen was petite and dark-haired; she was engaging, flirtatious, passionate, and maybe a bit wild. As his sisters Catherine and Caroline wrote Charles about her in 1826, “Fanny Owen has quite the preference to Sarah [her sister] among all the gentlemen, as she must have every where; there is something so very engaging and delightful about her.”
    Both Charles and Fanny Owen loved to go shooting, and they spent many happy hours in the woods near her house. Charles was impressed with how charming she looked when she fired one of his guns. He loved it that she showed no sign of pain even though the kick of the gun made her shoulder black and blue. The two of them walked through the gardens in the summer sun, picking and eating strawberries. Though it seemed unlikely that they would marry—she was much more interested in society and dancing than he was, and she had many other suitors—Charles was definitely in love.
    One vacation Charles spent a whole week with her.Afterward his lips were so sore, presumably from kissing, that when he got home Dr. Darwin gave him small doses of arsenic to relieve the pain. But Fanny spent time with her other beaux, and Charles had another love, too—beetles. Over the next few years Charles struggled with which love came first—beetles or Fanny. Fanny was not pleased with the competition.
    And it was serious competition, for Charles was passionate about those beetles.
    By the time he had graduated from Cambridge, he realized that like the beetle that burnt his tongue, Fanny might not want to be caught either. Her letters had grown much cooler; she was pulling away from him. Then right before he left for Falmouth, where he was to depart for his voyage around the world, Charles and Fanny Owen saw each other again and rekindled their romance. As Charles suffered through a two-month-long delay of the
Beagle
’s launch, he wondered if he should have proposed to her. When she heard that he was waiting around in Falmouth for the boat to sail, she sent him a letter asking him to “write me one last adieu if you have a spare half hour before you sail…you cannot imagine how I have
missed
you already at the Forest.” Charles folded her letter nice and small and took it with him on the voyage. He did not propose.
    A few months into his trip, when he collected his mail at a port of call in Rio de Janeiro, he read a letter from his sister Catherine. She informed him that Fanny Owen had married someone else. He was stunned. Although he hadn’t written to her yet, and probably had already decided not to marry her, the shock of her marrying someone else so soon was unsettling to him. When he wrote to his sister Caroline, he made light of the news. “It may be all very delightful to thoseconcerned but as I like unmarried women better than those in the blessed state, I vote it a bore…” But by the end of that letter, he confessed his dismay. “I am at a loss what to think or say.”
    He got over it fairly quickly, though, preoccupied with his adventures and his collections. Besides, he knew that Fanny would not have cared at all about that giant sloth head he had found in Punta Alta. He and Fanny would not have been a good match. It would have been a