The Heiress

by Molly Greeley

  The meat I was chewing turned to leather in my mouth, and it was a struggle to swallow it. I set my own cutlery down with great care and took a fortifying sip of wine.

  “Yes,” I said at last. “There is.”

  I paused, trying to decide how best to state my purpose, and Mrs. Darcy leaned forward. The candlelight gleamed in her dark hair; her round face shone with interest. “This is all very mysterious,” she said, smiling.

  I could not make my mouth work properly in order to smile in return. “I do have a question of great importance to ask you both,” I said. “And one, I fear, that you will find . . . impertinent.” I swallowed, but my mouth was too dry, and I took another sip of wine to wet it. “I told you I have taken my proper place as Rosings’s mistress. What I did not say is that I . . . intend to remain single. Which makes the matter of inheritance rather . . . difficult.”

  Again, the couple exchanged one of those glances that speaks to a deep intimacy of minds. I blinked away the thought of Eliza, my lips tightening. “It does, yes,” Darcy said. “But—Anne—there is no reason in the world that you should not marry. Particularly now that you are in such robust health. If it is a question of . . .” But here he stopped speaking, clearly at a loss as to any possible explanation for a woman to choose spinsterhood.

  “The more intriguing question, I think,” his wife said after a pause, “is not why Miss de Bourgh would remain single, but why she has come all the way to Derbyshire to tell us so.”

  “As I said,” I said slowly, “the matter of who will inherit Rosings Park is made uncertain by my decision never to marry. My steward looked into the matter, and there is a distant cousin on my father’s side who would stand to inherit should I die without an heir. I have never met him; apparently he has a smallish estate somewhere in Hampshire. It might be that he would be good for Rosings; but Papa was . . . well, in his way, he always did what he thought best for the people who relied upon us. Though he was never cruel enough to say so, I think it was a burden to him, believing his only child was unfit to take on the responsibilities of the estate once he was gone. Since I am able to do so, I feel the—the weight of ensuring that the person who inherits after me has the same care for the property and the people that I do.”

  I had been looking down at the table, but I now dared a glance at each of my companions; both wore the same startled look, as if a piece of furniture suddenly began addressing them in French. I looked down again.

  “I am here because—it seemed too impersonal to ask something so . . . large . . . in a letter. I would like to name your son George my heir.”

  There was such utter silence that it felt like a physical thing, pressing against my ears.

  It was Mrs. Darcy who finally spoke. “George?” she said, and in that single name was a world.

  I held the child for the second time since his birth on the day I was to leave Derbyshire. I would write to my solicitor in London as soon as I returned to Kent; it was time I made a will.

  George was heavier in my arms than he was a few months ago, and much more alert. I’d seen only glimpses of him and his elder brother, Thomas, in the few days I had been in Derbyshire, through windows or in the distance when I walked over the grounds. Most of the time they were with their nurse, but once I spied them with their parents, picnicking beside the lake. Fitzwilliam invited me to join them, of course, as civility demanded, but I declined; to break into their happy little party felt like an intrusion of the worst sort. I did not want to imply that I was one of them, part of them. That their son should take my surname was intrusion enough.

  I was dressed for travel, poised to say my goodbyes. My cousin was called out to one of the tenant farms on some urgent business, but Mrs. Darcy waited with me for my trunk to be loaded into the carriage. The children were here as well, on the steps with their nurse, Thomas squirming a little to get away from the stillness imposed by her patient hand upon his shoulder. Mrs. Darcy shaded her eyes against the midmorning sun, then finally turned to the nurse and took her youngest son into her own arms.

  And then, to my startlement, she pressed him into mine.

  My arms dropped slightly at the unexpected weight of him, and he looked up at me with eyes that were beginning to change color. He was a person—small and untested, but a person—and I had taken on much of the responsibility for ensuring his future. The intellectual question of who would ensure Rosings’s survival was quite suddenly answered here, in this child’s mind and muscle and eyes, which would be brown.

  “George Darcy de Bourgh,” his mother said, the second time she had spoken his new name; there was less bitterness now, and a more testing quality to the words, as if she put them into the world to hear how well they rang out there.

  “Yes,” I said, staring down at him. We agreed, my cousin and I and Mrs. Darcy, that George would come yearly to Rosings when he was old enough, that he might begin to learn the breadth and secrets of the place that would someday be his. Otherwise, he was still, and always would be, theirs.

  It was Mrs. Darcy, to my great surprise, who saw the merit in my proposal before Fitzwilliam did. “He will have a home,” she said, “ready and waiting for him, just as Thomas does. He will not have to scrabble his way up in a profession like Colonel Fitzwilliam; or marry for baser reasons as he did, either.”

  The lot of a second son can be a challenging one; indeed, John’s situation served as the inspiration for my proposal. The thought that I could offer greater freedom to Darcy’s child than our cousin had enjoyed, while also having some influence over the education of Rosings’s heir, was a heady one, tempered only by the fear that his parents would not be so excited by the thought of my influence.

  But Darcy nodded at last, slowly enough that it might have been reluctant, but with the comment, “You are, as ever my dear, in the right.”

  “People surprise me but rarely,” Mrs. Darcy said now, taking her son back from me. She stroked a finger down his nose, wrinkling her own at him in a playful way that made him smile. Then she looked up at me with the forthright dark eyes George seemed to have inherited. “You have, and I am not ashamed to say it.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Dearest Anne, began the letter that waited for me when I arrived back in Kent, in a hand so familiar and dear that it brought me, shamefully, to tears. The rest of the letter was nothing exceptional—anyone reading it would see only correspondence from one friend to another, a series of busy, flippant sentences about bonnets purchased and books read, with very little information offered about the sender’s new married state. But then, at the very end, she wrote, I hope you meant it, darling Frank, when you invited me to write you; for you see, I have missed our correspondence greatly, almost as much as I have missed your company.

  And so began four years of letters.

  “It’s absurd,” Mamma said. Mrs. Jenkinson held her arm, and today, for the first time, I realized that my mother, somehow without my noticing, had grown quite old. I recoiled from the understanding, my teacup halfway to my mouth, my mind, which had been only half-attending to whatever complaints Mamma was about to voice, stopping in place like a horse whose reins were tugged too hard. Even from this distance, several feet between our two chairs—Mrs. Jenkinson lowered my mother into hers, then scurried to the teapot to pour her a cup—I could see the new yellow cast to the whites of her eyes and the flaccid skin of her lower cheeks and jaw.

  Mamma took her cup and glared at me, and I realized I was meant to respond to something. “I am sorry, what was that, Mamma?”

  “I said, it is absurd for a woman of your age to have engaged a dancing master. Particularly a woman who has chosen to forgo the joys of courtship and marriage! I hope this rumor is not true.”

  “Oh, but it is true.” I smiled. “My friend Mrs. Andrews was good enough to recommend a dancing master who is very much in demand by the best families in London. He arrived yesterday, and I am confident that with his tutelage I shall be able to open the harvest ball this ye
ar.”

  There was a deep, tender ache under my breastbone whenever I referred to Eliza by her married name, like prodding a bruise that is still new enough that it keeps changing shape, the purple spreading. I wondered whether enough time would ever have passed for it to start yellowing about the edges.

  “You have entirely lost your senses,” Mamma said; but then, delightfully surprising me, moved on to other matters.

  When George was three years old, Darcy brought him for the first time to Rosings Park.

  I spent the days leading up to their arrival in a panic. Everything had to be perfect, from the menu planned for their visit to my own wardrobe, which felt suddenly inadequate. I snapped at Spinner as she dressed my hair on the morning they were expected, my paper curls coming out limp and drooping in the summer’s unaccustomed humidity. And then I had to bite the side of my finger to keep from crying.

  When their carriage had been sighted down the lane, I stood to wait for them on Rosings’s front steps, which had been swept and scrubbed so vigorously it was a wonder the maids had not worn right through the stone. My hands locked together before me; all I could think as the carriage rolled to a stop was that this was lunacy. I knew nothing of children; my cousin would regret our agreement before the first day of their visit was over.

  But: “Anne!” he said as he alighted, and came all tall and stately up the steps to kiss my hand. “You look very well.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and then, before I could think of anything else to say, he turned back to the carriage and reached inside to lift a small, sturdy little person down from it. He set George on his feet and took him by the hand.

  “Bow to Cousin Anne,” he murmured in the boy’s ear, and George, after giving me one rather terrified look, bobbed a bow, awkward as a trained bear.

  I licked my lips. Fitzwilliam had stepped back and was watching us. Stooping so my face was in line with his, I said, “It is so good to see you, George. You must—be very hungry after your journey. Cook has made her best seedcake, just for you—shall we go inside and have some?”

  To my ears, my words were terribly stilted; but George’s long, homely face changed. He smiled, showing impossibly small, square teeth with funny little gaps between them, and let me take his hand. I felt again that odd lurching behind my breastbone when I felt how soft and round his hand was, still; with dimples like divots at the root of each knuckle.

  They stayed for three weeks. There were, of course, the required calls paid at the dower house, and dinners at Rosings with Mamma and Mrs. Jenkinson in attendance. But most of our time was spent exploring. On fine days, we went marching out over the estate, George running through the fields, dragging a stick behind him, while Fitzwilliam and I trailed in his wake. When it rained, George and I explored the house, every hidden cranny of it, while my cousin wrote letters to his wife and steward. George taught me how to make a diver-call, and we stood in the shut-up ballroom letting loose those trilling, ghostly bird sounds, which echoed off the tall ceilings until Mrs. Barrister came running with two footmen to investigate.

  When the rain had mostly stopped, we walked in the sopping gardens, the air still gently misting. George discovered a toad among the hedgerows, and we crouched to admire it; and then a dragonfly, with its long brown body and flickering wings of lace.

  “I have a book inside,” I said as the dragonfly flew away, “that teaches about all sorts of insects. Would you like to see it?”

  George looked up at me doubtfully.

  “There are pictures,” I said, wheedling. “Lovely illustrations, almost as good as seeing the real thing. And it shall be your book someday, you know, just like the rest of Rosings Park.”

  On this point, George had seemed puzzled throughout our visit. But now he looked after the dragonfly, which disappeared behind a cluster of flowers, and then down at the toad, still fat and bumpy and happily damp on the path beside us. “This is my toad, then,” he said, and seemed so pleased by the notion that I could do nothing but smile in agreement.

  My letters to Eliza were not nearly as frequent as they were when we both resided in London. Indeed, sometimes I had the miserly thought that I should ration my attention to her, as punishment for her desertion. And yet, whenever a letter from her arrived, I found myself reaching for a pen almost instantly so that I might answer it. Inside me existed a depthless well of things to say—little daily happenings, amusing passages from books, worries I could not voice to anyone else—filling and filling to an almost unbearable level over the weeks between our letters; and then, in the action of putting pen to paper, a little of the well was drained.

  I foresaw, with an odd brew of gratitude and dread, a lifetime of such meager pleasures, scratched out in lines of ink, replacing what I had once imagined would be a lifetime of talking and touching and working and resting together. Eliza mentioned her husband only peripherally, in the sense of, We are considering a trip to the Lake District or Our housekeeper has grown terribly forgetful of late. She never spoke of him as a distinct person, never gave any hint as to whether she had any affection for him, or he for her. I was by turns thankful for her discretion, and seared by the sort of curiosity that would likely only burn me further were it satisfied. I waited miserably for the day when a letter would arrive bearing news that she carried his child inside her belly; but it did not come.

  Sometimes I noticed other women—at church, in the village. But Hunsford was so very small, and I could never be sure that my body’s response to a pressed hand or tilted head would be reciprocated. And my heart was entangled in lines of ink and strands of bright hair; I could not seem to free it, however I sometimes wished to.

  In her letters, Eliza never spoke of love for me, though her words tumbled across the page as messily as my own, as if her thoughts came too quickly for her pen.

  I never thought I could find such joy in work, I wrote. But I have—I have! There is nothing so satisfying as greeting a tenant by name, and his wife, and his children, too; in being part of something that enriches us all. I used to be so frightened of the world, and now I am a part of it.

  Mamma’s school is doing well; there are eighteen children in attendance this year. Fewer than I would like, but too many farms cannot spare any hands, even small ones, that might help in the fields. There is more emphasis on sermonizing than I would prefer, but for now I am content that the children are at least learning their letters and sums. Educational reform will wait for another day; today I am merely glad that they have any education at all.

  She wrote back: You write of your satisfaction, and I am so very happy to hear it. I have found my own, as well: Lady Godwin complimented me in the most generous terms on the cushion I embroidered for our parlor. I cannot think of anything more satisfying than having so noble a lady approve of my work.

  I read these lines over and over, and could not decide whether they were meant in earnest or in jest. The chance that it was the former, somehow, felt sadder even than the latter. I traced her signature with my finger as I once traced the curve of her cheek.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The oak lived deep in Rosings’s woods, where the shadows were thickest. I imagined it might have been there for hundreds of years, patiently edging its way up through the canopy to reach the sun, sucking like a greedy child at the light until at last it spread so tall and wide that little except moss and mushrooms could grow close around it. The tree should not have been beautiful, lumpy and misshapen as it was, its trunk a mass of tough knots, its branches stretching up and up like the muscled arms of strongmen. But when I found it, I loved it instantly. I reached out to cup my hands over one of its great whorled knots and felt a prayer beneath my palms.

  I had braved Rosings’s woods at last in the earliest days of my return to Kent. Before Mamma and Mrs. Jenkinson removed to the dower house, when they were united in their disapproval of my insurrection and even a house the size of Rosings felt too small to contain us all, I sometimes needed, quite desperately, a pl
ace to disappear for a time—even just an hour. A reprieve from the oppressive atmosphere of the house and, yes, from my new responsibilities, from columns of numbers and the newfound sense of visibility, which was by turns exhilarating and disconcerting. All my life I had seen other people—my cousin John, for instance, or Mrs. Collins, when she lived in the parsonage—slipping away for walks in our woods; it took desperation for me to follow their example, but oh, how glad I was that I finally did.

  Today it was autumn, that quivering period when some leaves have turned to fire and others still cling to summer green. My footsteps were muffled by last year’s leaves, and I wore no bonnet, my skin shielded from the sun by the forest canopy. I’d spent the morning sequestered with Mrs. Barrister, going over the details of this year’s harvest ball, and I relished, now, each lungful of chill-edged air. I followed the narrow deer trails to my oak; leaned against its friendly bark and listened for a time to the chattering of squirrels and scolding of birds before turning at last, reluctantly, for home. My fingers brushed the mossy trunks and low slender branches of trees as I passed them, my mind still full of all the particulars that are so necessary for a proper party, but that invariably left my head aching.

  There was still much to do today. But I paused before stepping out from the trees and onto the lane, as I always did, though with increasing brevity as the years passed. My feet pressed against the earth; my ears would have pricked like a fox’s if they could, listening for something—a greeting, a cry, anything at all to show me that Rosings Park lived, still; that its sentience matched my own; that it was glad I had returned. But, as ever since I stopped taking my drops, there was no response, even as I sent my own whispered greeting into the air.