The Heiress

by Molly Greeley

  Earlier, Dr. Grant had come to Rosings Park for his monthly visit, which always put me a little out of humor. Dr. Grant’s fingers were cold when they probed the sides of my neck, and he looked at me as if I were a curiosity in a jar, like the butterflies in Papa’s book room. He peered into my eyes, checked the color of my tongue, felt the pulse beating through my wrist, and grunted to himself after each evaluation, as if he had discovered something very important. He seemed a very old man to me, the top of his head bald and shiny and the ruffle of hair around his ears blackish-gray, but his skin was unlined and his voice steady when he said, “Miss de Bourgh is very well,” to the room at large.

  Usually, the audience to these examinations consisted only of Mamma and Nurse, but today my aunts watched as well, their faces, until the doctor’s pronouncement, politely interested, at which point they both smiled, as if he said something enormously clever. I felt my cheeks flush as if from fever from the force of all their gazing eyes and glowered down at my blue-sprigged lap. Dr. Grant said the same thing every time he came, unless I was actually in the midst of a bout of illness, and it annoyed me every time. If I were truly very well, I would be able to play with my cousins, or to go to London—that thrilling, fabled city—with my father.

  Dr. Grant stood and took a glass bottle of my medicine from his satchel and set it on a little side table. “I see no reason to change her dosage,” he said, bowing to Mamma.

  Sitting on the garden bench with Nurse, I fancied, for all the warmth of the day, that I could still feel the chill of Dr. Grant’s finger pads.

  John had vanished at some point, but now he returned, the pockets of his coat bulging. He stopped before my seat, looking down at me and blocking my view of the game.

  “See what I found,” he said, and reached into one pocket to take out a handful of stones. He dropped them into my lap, where they lay upon the others’ piled coats like an offering. I picked them up one by one. Most were uninteresting at first glance, rough and irregular in varying shades of dun and gray; but when I brought them closer to my eyes I could see why John chose each one. This stone was shot through with silvery flecks that made it sparkle when the weak sun caught it; that one had a vein of pink running through its dull gray body. I looked up at him, my mouth pulling up at the corners.

  “And see here?” My cousin put his hand into the other pocket, which looked flat and empty compared to the first, and took out something hidden by the curl of his fingers. He picked up my hand and dropped the something into it—a fat, furry caterpillar, soft as anything but a little squashed and syrupy about the middle, and clearly quite dead.

  I screamed, flinging it away from me, and Nurse turned a fierce glare upon John, who had taken a startled step backward.

  “What in the world . . . ?” Nurse said. “Bringing a filthy dead thing to your poor cousin—”

  “It was alive when I found it!” John said. He looked down at his hands, which seemed outsized dangling at the ends of his narrow wrists, as if they had betrayed him.

  I had shrunk against the back of the bench, away from my nurse’s vehemence and the lurking possibility of other nasty creatures falling into my lap. But I made myself stir when John, frowning, shoved his hands into his now-empty pockets and began to walk away.

  “Thank you for the stones,” I said; and then, when he did not look around, I raised my voice and repeated myself.

  John stopped, looked back at me over his shoulder, and raised one side of his mouth in a half-smile. Then Edward called to him and he went running off before I could think of anything else to say.

  I saw little of my cousins over the next few days. They spent most of their time outside, their play rough enough that they were banished from the house from breakfast until dinner; I was kept mostly in the nursery except when Mamma called for me to be brought into the drawing room, where I sat and listened as the ladies gossiped and sewed. Their talk was very dull, though, all about what schools my cousins would attend and which women of their acquaintance were expected to soon be brought to bed, and so I did not even struggle when, after Nurse came with my medicine, the usual tiredness came over me. I half-woke a few times, taking in words of their conversation—“Edward’s master says his Latin is improving, but John’s is still atrocious”—before slipping away again.

  “Poor lamb,” Aunt Darcy said one afternoon, her voice dropping.

  I always knew I was being discussed when my aunts’ and even my mother’s voices dropped. They spoke of me in whispers, as if I were a secret.

  “I do hate to see her like this,” Aunt Darcy continued. “Children should not be so still, so silent; it’s unnatural.”

  Moments before, Nurse had given me my second dose of medicine, tucking a shawl around me and murmuring that I should sleep a little now. And so my eyes were already closed; and though my aunt’s words made some stubborn part of me ache to rise up and move, I stayed perfectly still so that I could hear what would be said next.

  “Dr. Grant assures us it’s for the best,” Mamma said. “She requires absolute quiet. You did not have to contend with the screaming when she was an infant, Sister. Nothing soothed her, but her illness is quite well managed with a little medicine every day. It is a wonder, is it not, Nurse?”

  “It is indeed, ma’am,” my nurse said. “Keeps the young mistress happy as can be.”

  “She could be rather pretty, couldn’t she? If only she were plumper.” They had leaned closer, I could tell; and I knew, too, when Aunt Darcy raised a hand, as if to touch my cheek, though she stopped before actually making contact. The shadow of her hand had the weight of folded cloth.

  “Her appetite is always quite depressed,” Mamma said. “Dr. Grant says it is very normal in cases like this, with delicate young ladies.”

  “She is just so—small. And so quiet.” Aunt Darcy lowered her voice still further. “She seems to have no spirit at all. Fitzwilliam is very serious; he will need a lively wife to remind him to—to find enjoyment in life.”

  My eyes squeezed more tightly closed. Mamma always spoke of my smallness as if it made me special, but there was something about the doubtful way my aunt spoke now, each syllable like a slap, that made my body feel brittle, like ice in spring. I thought of Nurse’s story about the ugly prince and stupid princess, and wondered, fleetingly, whether when we married, Fitzwilliam might be able to gift me some of his own strength. But what did I have to gift to him in return? I was very aware of all my bones; of the blue veins showing so clearly under my skin. My face, not round and rosy as a child’s should be, but sharply delineated. Only my hair looked healthy: dark as both Mamma’s and Aunt Darcy’s own, it was my mother’s pride manifested as thick, waving strands, caught up with silk ribbons to match my gowns.

  “It is a good thing my nephew is such a strapping boy,” Mamma said, and her voice was defiant, cutting off any possibility of argument. “He and Anne will make well-proportioned children together.”

  Aunt Darcy’s silence was very loud.

  I would have stoppered my ears if I had to, against that silence. Happily, in this instance, my little glass of medicine made it easy to disappear into my own head. There, I raced along forest paths with the hoop and stick I longed to have in my waking life, my feet fleet upon the earth, nimbly avoiding tree roots and rolling acorns and hazelnuts. My lungs never wanting for air, my hair flying out behind me.

  Chapter Three

  The blunt little church in Hunsford village, with its dark beams spanning the width of the ceiling and its heavy block floor, worn to a shallow trench along the length of the aisle from decades upon decades of worshipers’ feet, did little to inspire feelings of awe or reverence. Nor did our rector’s manner of speaking; Mr. Applewhite was white-haired and thin-voiced, and I spent more time on Sunday mornings staring with fascination at his bristling side whiskers than taking in the content of his sermons. My mind rambled; my eyes roved over the myriad little nicks and grooves marring the high wooden sides of our pew. I wafted along
on the singing of the Psalms as if I had already taken my morning dose of laudanum.

  I was grateful to our pew’s tall sides, which shielded us from view during the service. But after, there was nothing to keep the other congregants—many of whom were my father’s tenants—from looking at me. Papa stopped sometimes as we left the church, though the crowd tended to part for us like water before the prow of a boat; he greeted his tenants and many of the villagers by name, while Mamma merely nodded this way and that, the plume on her bonnet nodding half a beat behind, as if in echo of her condescension.

  Outside, she spoke for a few minutes with other ladies of the parish as we waited for Papa to join us. I stood a little behind her and tried to conceal myself in the shadow of the ancient black poplar that grew beside the church. With its modest spire and gray stone walls blunted by centuries of wind and rain, the church seemed dwarfed by the tree, which shaded the side of the building where the churchyard lay, its headstones cluttered tipsily together. The oldest were as weathered as the church itself, and I watched as the village children, released from the enforced stillness and solemnity of the service, chased one another among the stones, dashing between pockets of shadow and tall grasses speckled with sunlight.

  Snakes of ivy had begun a slow, strangling climb up the base of the poplar. They looped around the bulbous trunk and crept on tough hairy feet along the twisting branches. They moved, of course, far too slowly for human eyes to observe the actual motion, and yet I was able to track their progress over months and years of Sundays. My breast filled with affection for the ivy: its rustling three-pronged leaves, its apparent stillness and inexorable creep. And at the same time, I was sometimes punched by sympathy for the tree, for, just as inexorably, it was being smothered.

  “We go to Town next week for my niece’s debut,” said Mrs. Clifton, our nearest neighbor, one Sunday. The Clifton estate, while rich, was only two-thirds the size of Rosings Park; I knew this because Mamma liked to pepper her conversation with such tidbits. “She’s a retiring sort of girl; I worry that she will faint when her turn comes to be presented.”

  “She’ll need to grow a proper spine if she wants to find a husband,” Mamma said. “She hasn’t much of a dowry, has she?”

  “No, poor girl. Not like my Lucy. But of course we’ve a good dozen years before we need to worry about her debut; even your dear Anne will be presented sooner than Lucy.”

  “Don’t be silly,” my mother said; and her voice was indulgent as cake. “Anne is far too frail to risk exposing her to London’s foul air. And her future with my nephew is quite settled; she will not suffer for lack of a proper introduction at court.”

  Mrs. Clifton’s eyes flicked toward me, and then away. “Oh, yes. Of course.”

  I looked up at the tree in its ivy gown, and at the birds that perched there. I watched a snail, almost as achingly slow as the ivy, make its way down the church’s stone wall. I listened to the thumping of the other children’s feet, and tried to ignore the way the village women’s quick, curious glances burned my cheeks and throat.

  If I had a shell like the snail, I thought, I would tuck myself back inside of it, away from their branding pity. Inside my shell, I would not be able to hear the village children’s laughter, or their mothers’ whispers. I felt at once all-too-visible in my fine gowns and gaudy bonnets, and ill-defined as the edges of a ghost.

  Mr. Applewhite, in his stiff white stock and flowing black cassock, said once with great authority that only humans have souls. But I watched the ivy tiptoe, and knew its clandestine desires; I felt the nervousness in the wings of moths; heard my mother’s voice in the sharp reprimands of crows. I recognized violet flowers’ concurrent reticence—hovering as they did in their shadowed crannies—and eagerness for notice, their petals purple splashes among so much green. I could not help feeling the personhood in all these things; and I was sure our vicar must be wrong.

  Much of my father’s time was spent in London, a place that sounded as exotic and faraway to me as anything in Nurse’s stories. I had little idea what he did there, or why he was so often away; when I asked him, my father said, tapping the tip of my nose, that London was the place for gentlemen to conduct business.

  But it was also the place where girls went to become women and find husbands. It was a place where both of my uncles kept homes, where they and my aunts and cousins enjoyed longer visits than those they took faithfully each year to us at Rosings. It was a place that was quite forbidden to me, and so of course I felt its pull all the more strongly.

  Even when he was home at Rosings Park, Papa was generally out on the estate or tucked away in his book room with our steward. I caught glimpses of him from the nursery window sometimes as he rode out on his black hunter; my father was a large man, with broad shoulders and a broad belly, but he sat his horse as if he and the animal were one creature. Mamma was almost always home, and came to sit with me for a little while each day in the nursery, or instructed Nurse to bring me downstairs to sit with her. Dr. Grant was insistent that my education must not be too taxing, but I learned my letters and the rudiments of stitching, as well as how to count—a useful skill when I was bored, for Rosings Park was filled with things to count. There were twenty gold stripes in the fabric of the drawing room settee, for instance, alternating with nineteen stripes of dark blue. The nursery windows, with their sliding sashes and glass wiped clean of my fingerprints by the housemaids, had thirty-two panes in all. In the rose garden, the number of blossoms on the bushes was ever changing, and endlessly amusing.

  Papa brought a doll back from London for me when I was eight years old. Her gown was a marvel of intricate embroidery; her hair was real, as dark as my own. She smelled, I fancied, like London must, itself: densely sooty, as if my father had carried her in the crook of his arm through the streets until the city’s own perfume seeped thoroughly into the strands of her hair and the fabric of her gown. He lay her in the crook of my own arm when he returned from that trip, so gently that he did not wake me, and I woke to her wooden weight and her heady scent, alone.

  The Sunday of Mrs. Clifton’s and my mother’s talk of London debuts, I returned with my parents to Rosings Park. Nurse was waiting; at Mamma’s order, she led me to the drawing room and made me comfortable on a chaise there. She handed me my doll, with a smile, and then drew the bottle of my medicine from her apron pocket. My body instantly leaned forward a little in anticipation of my drops; I watched as she drew up a dropperful and squeezed the reddish-brown liquid into a waiting glass.

  “There now,” she said as I raised it to my lips and drank it down. Molasses and spices just masked the bitter tang. “That’s it.”

  I handed the glass back to her, my tongue darting out to catch a bead of liquid before it fell, then leaned back, pressing my pale cheek to my doll’s rosy one, and let the prickling sensation of being watched by all the parish recede.

  But Mamma, sitting nearby, began telling Papa about Mrs. Clifton’s niece, and I squeezed my eyes closed. Lucky, lucky girl; even if she did faint, she would first get to see a grand city. London, I thought, my eyebrows drawing together. London, London, London. The words thumped inside my head, slower and slower, in time to my decelerating heartbeat.

  I turned my head, very deliberately, and inhaled of my doll’s soot-scented hair.

  Every year when they came to Rosings Park, it always seemed to me that my cousins had been stretched and altered by some invisible force between one visit and the next. Limbs lengthened, shoulders broadened. Edward, the eldest, always seemed to change the most dramatically; I could not help staring the year that he arrived with wispy dark hairs, like the tacked-on legs of insects, above the sharp bow of his upper lip.

  I changed as well, of course, though less substantially over the years. I remained short of stature and narrow of frame, though Mamma did her best, with the help of the dressmaker in Hunsford village, to ensure I looked as well as possible when my cousins—Fitzwilliam, in particular—arrived. I do not think
that Fitzwilliam, still a child himself, was much moved by her efforts. He and I stole looks at each other, curious and uncertain as forest creatures, but almost never spoke.

  It is a strange thing, knowing from infancy the person with whom you are meant to spend your life. Usually the knowledge felt secure as a lap rug tightly tucked; but sometimes I had the sensation that all my slow and ponderous life until my inevitable wedding day held little meaning. I was forever waiting, without knowing quite what it was I was waiting for.

  Chapter Four

  The express came late one afternoon early in my eleventh year. I lay in the drawing room, my head on the arm of the settee, as Papa read aloud from the newspaper and Mamma improved upon each story with either a noise of assent or a scornful remark.

  Peters brought the letter on a silver tray. “From Pemberley, Your Ladyship,” he said, and Mamma snatched the letter from him before he could complete his bow.

  “Has Lady Anne been brought to bed, then?” Papa said, once the seal had been broken. “It is another boy?”

  Aunt Darcy was supposed to be delivered of a baby very soon; Mamma had spoken of little else recently as the days ticked by and no word arrived from Derbyshire. I felt a vague stirring of interest at the thought that I must have a new cousin; I turned my head so I could see my mother, who held the letter up to the light from the windows, her eyes moving rapidly over the few lines written there. She stopped when she reached the end, but did not say anything; Papa shifted restlessly in his chair, glancing back at the newspaper he held, as if he wished to return to it. Mamma shook her head and shoulders, as if to throw off some terrible, grasping thing, and read the letter again; and then, as I watched, my mother’s hand began to tremble hard enough that the letter rattled in her grip; and then that grip loosened, the letter fluttering to the floor, and Mamma put her hands over her face.