The Heiress

by Molly Greeley

  But tonight was my first night on my own in my own house, and though my body ached with weariness, I found I could not sleep. I went with the rector’s wife to visit some of the least fortunate among the cottagers that afternoon, those who were too old or infirm to maintain farms, and who existed on Rosings’s charity, and was shocked by the meanness of their homes. I knew not what could be done about their sad circumstances beyond what we did already, however; I would have to bring up the matter with Mr. Colt. The thought was not a pleasant one; for all his geniality, Mr. Colt’s one fault was an excessive devotion to my father’s memory, which made it difficult to criticize any long-standing practices that Papa had initiated.

  But this was not the reason for my sleeplessness. While I was out, Mamma and Mrs. Jenkinson—my companion no more, she had formally become Mamma’s—moved with the last of their things to the dower house. Breakfast that morning was almost entirely silent, the sounds of silverware on china dramatically loud by contrast. Mrs. Jenkinson seemed glad enough, but even she was solemn, her eyes downcast, as if in consideration for Mamma’s unspeaking anger.

  I quit the room as soon as I could, saying, truthfully enough, that I had letters to write. But I did not write them; instead I locked myself in my book room and cried, a shawl pressed to my mouth to cloak the noise.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  She appeared in the doorway to the book room—my book room—without any warning whatsoever. If I were less engrossed in my book—An Exposition of English Insects, which I discovered among Papa’s collection, and which was teaching me the names of some of the beautiful flitting, scuttling creatures I had observed in ignorance for so long—I would have heard the front door being answered, and perhaps even Peters’s request for Mamma to wait for him to announce her. But then again, until just the week before he was her butler, and he, and the other poor servants, were all having to accustom themselves to this strange new world, wherein Lady Catherine was a guest, and not the mistress, in this house. I stared at her now, losing my place as my book dropped to my lap, and wondered whether Peters hovered just out of sight in the hallway.

  “Close your mouth, you are not a simpleton,” she said, and swept into the room to sit across from me without invitation. My jaw obeyed her reflexively, my teeth clicking together.

  “You spoke falsely when you returned to Rosings,” she said with no further preamble. “I am here to fix the record.”

  I could think of nothing to say but, “Very well.”

  The muscles of her face relaxed at my words, and she looked down, just briefly, at her lap. “Men,” she said, looking up at me again, “haven’t the faintest notion what it means to be a mother. They do not feel what their children feel as mothers do. Your father was very proud of the seed he planted in me, but it was my body that tended it, increasing to give it space to grow. I brought you into the world. That is not something that can be—cut away, not even once the birth is completed. I felt you on the inside, and I thought, once you were outside my body, that I would no longer be able to feel you so intimately; but that was not so. I felt your every cry—every scream tugged at me as if the navel-string still tethered us and your cries pulled on it.”

  I flinched. She saw it, and nodded.

  “Yes. You screamed without ceasing, and I felt every second of it in pulls and scrapes, like nails over my skin, and your father just—slept on.” A flick of her fingers. “He never heard you in the night, and he was out of the house all day. He never felt your distress as I did.”

  “He tried to help me,” I whispered. “At Brighton—”

  “Do not speak to me of Brighton,” she said, and there was a wildness to her that I could never have imagined. She turned her face from me and spoke to the bookshelves lining the wall. “Your father and I had the most spectacular argument after Brighton. You were perfectly well, perfectly contented, and he insisted we go to that—that place. I endured your screams as they pulled you into the sea once; I refused to do it again, not even if it turned out to be the cure Sir Lewis believed it to be. It was all very well for him, away from it all; he did not have to stand in the bitter cold and listen to his child suffer. And then you became so violently ill, as I knew you would—!” The fingers of one hand rubbed a circle around the rounded edges of her brooch with its plait of dark hair. “Well, when he said we should try Bath next, I refused. Dr. Grant said it was a city of charlatans, and I believed him. My judgment was always sounder than your father’s. A mother,” she said, looking up at me, “cannot be wrong, not when she is acting for the good of her child.”

  I held on to the edge of the desk. My fingernails bit into the wood like teeth.

  “I know not by what methods my nephew’s physician tended you, nor how he managed what Dr. Grant could not. Whatever his methods, they have proved incendiary; I never thought my daughter could treat me with such disrespect as you have.”

  I thought of how I felt when I returned to Kent and confronted her; but now she was the walker, and I the runaway cart, forcing her from the road she knew and onto another, unfamiliar one. Like a thief, I had stolen her life from her, and for all the hurt and anger I carried inside me like a brazier, and for all that it was mine to take, my shoulders hunched now in shame.

  “Mamma,” I said, but she talked over me in the old familiar way.

  “You shall never understand what I mean, I suppose,” she said, “since you are being so bullheaded about marriage.”

  “I do not want Rosings Park to belong to my husband,” I said. “Depending upon his temperament, I might have no hand in its running at all—”

  Mamma squinted at me the way she always did when she thought I said something stupid. “Rosings Park,” she said, “is yours now and forever. Just as my father’s estate will always be mine, even if my brother is the official master there. Our ancestral lands are in our bodies, our blood; we are part of England in a way that lesser citizens can never understand.”

  She stood. “Even so,” she said, “I am glad to see some stubbornness in you; it is a necessary attribute in a woman.” She looked at me down the sharp curved length of her nose. “You get it from me, of course; your father melted like wax in the face of adversity.”

  And then she departed, and I was left with a mad desire to laugh, for it turned out Lady Catherine de Bourgh—like her daughter!—was something of a poet.

  Though it was evening, I had to walk once she was gone. I went out on the grounds, where darkness crept across the lawn, the sun no more than a faint red light at the horizon. I looked out at the edge of the woods, where the trees crowded together, and was almost tempted to slip between them. The air carried the faintest nighttime chill under its warmth, and I walked faster and faster until I was running, running, my skirts bunched in my hands, my poor slippers thumping against the grass. My breath came sharp and fast, but it came, and as I passed one of the benches on the lawn, I imagined my younger self sitting there, watching me pass.

  There was a peculiar buzzing in my ears, as if I had stumbled into a hive of bees, and my eyes smarted as if from bee stings. I staggered the last steps to the wood, as the stinging resolved itself into blinding tears. Catching myself on a tree—palm scraping against the rough bark—I clung to it. For just a moment, I half-expected the droning in my ears to become intelligible murmurs, my heart tight with missing. Almost, I called Rosings’s name.

  But then: “Mamma,” I said instead, choked and helpless, sorry and glad at once for the way the word felt upon my tongue. It was so like her, that when at last she said exactly what I always needed to hear, it should be in such self-righteous terms.

  When at last the torrent passed, I opened my eyes. The woods were water-blurred; I had only soft impressions of trees and undergrowth, made softer still by the gathering dark. It was, I thought, the way a newborn babe must experience the world, and almost, I smiled. I was made fresh again.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “A letter from London, ma’am,” Peters said, interrupt
ing my concentration.

  I murmured a distracted thank-you and nearly set it aside to return to the list of costs from Mr. Colt. But it was from Harriet, and the novelty of thinking that she chose to write to me was enough to arouse my curiosity. I broke the seal.

  The first few lines were full of questions about how I was enjoying my return to country life. But then—

  Eliza was wed this morning with much less fuss and fanfare than Julia, though with no fewer good wishes. She and Mr. Andrews are off to visit his relations in Scotland next week for their wedding trip, though why they would choose a place so wild and dreary I cannot fathom. She asked me to tell you about the marriage, which surprised me, as I thought the two of you were on such terms that she would have written to you herself. I do hope there has been no falling-out.

  I should have expected this. But distractions were plentiful in this new, busy life, and whenever thoughts of Eliza tried to intrude, I quickly found something pressing that I must immediately see to, sometimes to my steward’s bewilderment. And so the sight of her name—and linked so inextricably to another’s—was like a boxer’s blow, leaving me gasping. I shut my eyes tight as spring buds, but still I saw Eliza behind the lids—showing me her teeth and asking if they were clean; leaning over me, cheeks bright and lips parted, as I rocked, shuddering, against the heel of her hand. She had offered me a world inside books, and taught me that joy was something bodies could feel, as well as souls.

  But after several moments, I set Mrs. Fitzwilliam’s letter aside and returned to Mr. Colt’s list. Yet even as I did, my mind began composing a response.

  Give her my warmest felicitations, I would say. And please do tell her that I would welcome correspondence from her, whenever she has time.

  Mamma’s butler showed me into her drawing room, where she and Mrs. Jenkinson were taking tea, sitting in two chairs beside the window. I glanced about the room for a moment before my mother acknowledged me; she had made the house her own, the paper hangings and furniture all similar in color and style to those she chose for the great house when she was its mistress.

  Mrs. Jenkinson offered me a thin smile in greeting; Mamma made a show of taking another sip from her cup before looking at me. “Your hair is a disgrace,” she said. “What in heaven’s name have you been doing?”

  I put a hand to my head. “Driving.”

  “Was there a gale I missed?”

  “No,” I said, and endeavored not to blush. “I was—” But I stopped, for to explain myself would be too much like offering an excuse, and I needed no excuse for enjoying a brisk drive over my own property.

  “I came to tell you that I am going to Pemberley for a short while,” I said instead.

  “Pemberley! Did my nephew invite you?”

  “Not . . . precisely. I rather invited myself.”

  “I was not informed that the family had removed to Derbyshire! They are not still in London?”

  “It is August, Mamma; almost no one is still in London.” I thought, fleetingly, of Eliza and her new husband, who would, I assumed, return to Town once their wedding trip was over; but my words did not apply to them, as they had no country house. And, of course, I was trying not to think about Eliza.

  My mother swished her fingers. “Of course it’s August.” She frowned, as if this were something about which I should have been aware.

  I hastened on before she could inquire further. “Also, I have a . . . that is, Mr. Colt and I . . . We have been considering a new, ah, project. And I wondered—I hoped—that you would help us with it.”

  She tapped the nail of one finger against her teeth. “Such condescension.”

  I swallowed my instinctive retraction of the offer, and waited; I meant it as an olive branch, after all. She rewarded my patience in a few moments by saying, “Very well, what is it?”

  “A school,” I said. “So many of our tenants’ children—of Hunsford’s children—are taught at home by their mothers, if their mothers have the learning and time to teach them. You have so many more connections than I do; I feel certain you must know a woman—either within the village or outside of it—who would be a willing and able instructor.”

  Mamma pushed her tongue into her cheek, twisting her mouth off to the side. “Rosings, I presume, will be paying this woman’s wages?”

  I nodded. “I have been over the accounts scrupulously; we can easily afford the modest wages a teacher will reasonably expect.” A pause. “You and Mr. Colt have kept the estate prosperous.”

  There was a flicker at the corners of her mouth, before she turned them down as if by force of will. “And what shall these children be taught? And to what purpose?”

  That she was asking rather than telling me was rather unbelievable. “All the usual things—reading, writing. Sewing for the girls. Chores and basic deportment.” Unwillingly, my mind flew to Eliza—Let them learn to use their minds, as men are taught to do—and with a wrenching pain, I pulled it back.

  Her eyes slid away from mine. “I might know a suitable person.”

  “Well—wonderful.” I paused, but she did not invite me to sit down, or ask if I would like some tea. She did look me over, frowning again at the state of my hair and raising one brow at the cut of my pelisse. That she had no further criticisms said as much as if she had actually condescended to offer me praise. “I will write you when I arrive in Derbyshire; I do not think I will stay more than a week or so.”

  “You have done something different with your hair,” Mamma said. She glared at the flyaway strands.

  Again, I touched my head. “Ah—yes.”

  “It is becoming. Though if you are truly serious about this nonsense of never marrying, you ought to start wearing a cap.”

  I blinked, recalling how Miss Hall’s caps somehow seemed to hide not just most of her hair, but much of her spirit. “I will consider it, Mamma.”

  I arrived in Derbyshire, travel-weary and stiff from several days in a jolting carriage and several nights in lumpy inn beds. Beyond the stiffness of my body, however, a terrible nervousness was spreading like a root system within my chest. Pemberley estate sprawled, lush and hilly; the house itself was larger even than Rosings, and very beautiful. I was grateful to Eliza, for it was her influence that prompted me to dress so well for the journey, in a pelisse of blue and a bonnet adorned with lace and curling feathers. A memory pricked me, very suddenly—sharp as a seamstress’s pin, bringing tears to my eyes. It was, perhaps, the very earliest memory I had: Mamma, seated across from me in the nursery, her back very straight and her mouth smiling. She was describing Pemberley, in terms almost as loving as those she would use to describe Rosings, and she was stroking the back of my small hand.

  “It is very grand, my dear. I have excellent taste in architecture, and I was happy to be able to tell my sister when she wed that her new home was every bit as attractive as she claimed. And with such extensive grounds! When you marry your cousin, your union shall also unite two of the richest estates in the country.” She smoothed my hair as tenderly as if it were her beloved sister’s. “Your aunt and I promised you to one another when you were both still in your cradles. Nowhere could be found two more affectionate sisters than ourselves; how could our children fail to feel less for each other?”

  Inside the house now waited two people whose opinions of me had never been high; what I meant to ask of them was ridiculous in the face of Mrs. Darcy’s laughing dismissal and Fitzwilliam’s words, so long remembered: How exactly does one converse with a doll?

  Others, though, found me capable, people who knew me far better than my cousin or his wife ever cared to. I held this truth in my mind as I ascended Pemberley’s steps, my half-boots a little too loud upon the stone.

  My cousin greeted me with his usual stiff formality; his wife was cordial, though as usual she appeared to hold some private amusement just behind her eyes. She apologized for not rising when I was led into the airy family parlor, but she had good reason to remain seated, as little George was
deeply asleep in the curve of her arm. I stumbled over an assurance that I was not offended, glancing at the infant with some apprehension only to discover, to my surprise, that the sight of his slack, toothless mouth made me smile. Tea was rung for, and then we all subsided into an awkward silence that probably would have stretched interminably had Darcy not had the good sense to marry a woman with far more social grace than either he or I possessed.

  We passed an amiable enough hour, during which Mrs. Darcy expressed pleasure in seeing me look so well, and actually laughed—though she quickly stopped herself—when I thanked her and said I truly was well, so much so that I had taken over my proper duties at Rosings Park, much to my mother’s dismay. Even my cousin’s mouth quivered a little, as if he were inclined to smile.

  They very politely did not ask why I was there, and I was glad enough to take a little time to acclimate to this strange new reality, in which I was no longer a doll but a person able to not only converse but also amuse with my conversation.

  At dinner, however, Darcy and his wife exchanged a significant look, and he sighed and put down his fork and knife and patted his mouth with the edge of the tablecloth. “Cousin,” he said, “you know we are very happy to receive you, but I must admit to some curiosity. You said in your letter that you had an important matter to discuss.”