The Heiress

by Molly Greeley

  Out on the lane, I passed the dower house, where Mamma was no doubt enjoying her afternoon nap, and waved to the rector in his garden at the parsonage. There was a figure a little distant, standing before the gates to Rosings; I shaded my eyes with my hand to better make it out. A woman, wearing a blue pelisse and a spectacular bonnet, her head tilted sharply, as if she sought a face at one of the upper-story windows.

  A little closer now, something tickled at the nape of my neck; there was a discordant familiarity to her, to the span of her shoulders and the way she held her hands together at her waist. I thought, No, even as my pace increased without my conscious intention, and my quickened footfalls on the lane reached her ear. She turned her head, and even from so far away I could read the leaping, colliding hope and terror in her expression as easily as if she were one of her own letters.

  “Anne,” she said as soon as I was near enough to hear her, and then she was in my arms and I was squeezing, squeezing, squeezing, as if she might disappear if I let go.

  “My trunks are still in the village in the carriage. I thought there would be an inn,” she said hours later, laughing into my hair. And then, sobering, “I should have written before coming—I just—I could not. I could not take the risk that you might turn me away before I even had a chance to see you again.”

  “I would not have turned you away.”

  “You might have. I did not know—”

  I looked at her, so very close—our brows touching, our toes tucked together. Four years added a few freckles to her nose, a new solemnity to her eyes, though her smile, when it appeared, curled wickedly as ever.

  “I would not have,” I said again; and when she opened her mouth to say more, I closed it with kisses.

  “What happened?”

  It was almost the first question I asked her, but she refused to answer then, and I allowed her to demure. If this was but a passing fancy for her—if she had not come to stay, as I immediately thought she must have when I recognized her in the lane—I did not want to know until I had to. But now it was morning, and the world insisted upon intruding; already, Spinner disturbed us, startled, when she brought my usual morning cup of chocolate, to discover that I was not alone. She said nothing, however, except to ask in a voice that sounded half-strangled whether Mrs. Andrews would also like a cup.

  We meant for Eliza to return to the guest quarters, but sleep claimed us both before she could. I wondered what her maid would think when she saw the undisturbed sheets on her bed; and then I had the unwelcome thought that perhaps her maid was used to such things; perhaps, after I left London, even after her marriage, Eliza enjoyed the company of other women. The thought cut, even as I tried to dismiss it, even as I wondered about my other servants and how they might react to seeing my friend leaving my chamber so early. But I knew almost nothing about her married life, and so I rolled until I was pressed against her side and said again, “What happened?”

  “You keep such ungodly hours in the country,” she said; but then she saw my face and scrubbed her own with both palms, leaving it blotched with red. “Charles—Mr. Andrews—died a fortnight ago. At a card party, of all places—just—slumped over and died.” She pushed herself upright and spoke to the blanket over her legs. “It was dreadful, as I suppose you can imagine.”

  “I—”

  “Do not say you are sorry,” she said, and gave an odd little smile. “Because the terrible, terrible truth is that I—am not. He was—a good enough man, in his way. He was not a bad man. But I . . . regretted my choice almost from the first day of our union, and now he has . . . freed me. You will think me the worst sort of person, but when he died I thought, Thank God. And then I prayed God would forgive me, for Charles did not hurt me, he did not—but I could not speak—I could not speak when I was in our house, I could not . . . It was the strangest thing—”

  She scrubbed her face again, and then her hair, which already lay loose and tangled around her shoulders, but which stood up in a frizz under her hands’ abuse. Her words came faster and faster, all the things I imagined she wanted to say in her letters, but that were stoppered inside her as if she were a bottle.

  “He loved my playing—he loved to show it off to his friends—I don’t think I ever hated the pianoforte more. They talked and they talked about business and politics, and we wives sat, and I was the only one who knew how to play, so he trotted me out like a trick horse, and then I sat down again and exchanged pleasantries with the women and served coffee and . . .” She looked around at me, eyes full. “It sounds so—petty, saying it now. To hate a life like that? It’s the same life most other women live—fortunate women—I was fortunate compared to so many women, and I wanted to—to scream.” She gulped a laugh that sounded more like a sob. “And I missed you so very much, Anne—all I could think, once the funeral was over, was that now I could come to you.”

  She reached out for me, but let her hand drop back to the coverlet before she touched me.

  “He wanted children so badly,” she said; and now she took her hands and ran them over her own body, over the gentle, empty slope of her belly. “He never said he blamed me for their lack. But when he—when we—” Her fingers tightened into fists. “When he touched me, it was . . . my body recoiled. I cannot imagine he did not feel it.”

  She was wretched, hideous with tears; and I wanted nothing more than to kiss her. That other women endured lives of such smallness—that other women were less fortunate, still—did not mean that Eliza ought to have resigned herself to a similarly frustrated existence. I knew this, I knew it, and though I could not quite find words eloquent enough to express it fully, I hoped, when I took her hand, that at least some of what I felt transferred to her through our fingers.

  To the rest of the world, we must have seemed quite the pair of eccentrics.

  Eliza was a widow now; respectable and rich and able to do as she liked. I was at once glad and ashamed of that gladness; hurt that it took his death to bring her to me, and grateful, with a beautiful, uncomplicated gratitude, that she came with such immediacy once she had absorbed the first shock of her husband’s passing. And she came to me free now, unencumbered by dependency or fear; the jointure her husband settled upon her was more than generous.

  I did not introduce her, as I once imagined I might, as my companion. Instead, I called her my friend Mrs. Andrews, a truth that even Mamma accepted easily enough, though Eliza’s quick tongue and propensity toward over-loud laughter and the discussion of novels proved more difficult for her to accept. But Eliza slipped into Hunsford society with an easiness that I rather envied. And so when, after several weeks, I finally mentioned to the rector’s wife that my friend decided to move into Rosings Park permanently, she looked startled for a moment and then said, “How lovely! We do all need companionship, do we not? Even someone so independent as you, Miss de Bourgh.”

  Eliza did endear herself to my mother at least a little with her effusive compliments on the village school, for which Mamma did indeed furnish a woman from somewhere within her web of acquaintances who instructs the children of Hunsford parish from the back parlor of her house. Here, Eliza found a purpose in village life, though she was careful to be discreet in her augmentation of the school’s books and supplies; I wondered how long it would take for Mamma to realize the narrow course of study she urged upon Mrs. Lynch was being expanded upon, inch by patient inch.

  When we grew restless, we traveled. To London, often, to visit Eliza’s family, and to Surrey to see John and Harriet and their children: a boy and a girl who grew, tangled tight together, and surprised everyone with their double birth after so many years of barrenness. And to the Continent, all the places whose exotic names—Venice, Geneva, Paris, Lisbon—I used to trace on my geography puzzle. But always we came gladly home again to Rosings Park.

  I grew accustomed to this new life of purpose and parity, though it was impossibly far from anything I imagined could exist between husbands and wives. In the evenings, I looked at E
liza across the dining table. Sometimes we were joined by neighbors, but more often, it was only the two of us, and as she smiled at me over our mutton or fish, occasionally I felt myself falling backward, the jolting fall of a dreamer about to wake. As if I had slipped, somehow, into a dream world, and that someday, inevitably, I would wake to the real one. I licked my lips for traces of bittersweetness, but found none; and on nights when these thoughts intruded, Eliza held me close and murmured reassurances. “Does this feel real?” she whispered. “And this?” I felt the weight of her upon me, the reassuring way the mattress dipped when she moved; dug my fingers into her skin and reveled in the sourness of her evening cup of coffee on her breath.

  Yet the sense that I must be dreaming, that this life was all unreal, persisted in coming back; and would, I feared, until my dying day.

  Part Four

  The End

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  I wake to the sound of weeping.

  For a moment, I cannot remember why I ache so in all my bones; why it feels as if someone has set a thick book upon my chest. The weeper cries as if her throat is being torn open; as if her heart bleeds. I hover between concern for myself, my own heartbeat ponderously slow, my breaths shallow and rattling, and for her, whomever she is.

  My eyelids are heavy as stones; there is a vague memory, scratching at the edges of my mind, about stones on the eyes and why I should be afraid of them. But I bat it away, actually managing to raise one shaking hand before it falls once more to the coverlet.

  When I wake again, it is to my maid’s familiar arm under my neck, and her voice urging me to drink. Cool glass against my lips; bittersweet liquid on my tongue. A shock of recognition, though it has been more than forty years since I last tasted it. A feeble attempt at protestation, though I have already swallowed.

  I float along a placid river, my body, unnaturally heavy, undulating with the currents, my thoughts scattered like autumn leaves along the water’s surface. A part of me knows that my true body lies still and alone in my high soft bed. But this body—the floating body—is so much freer than the other, which is tucked into the bedclothes like a child, and the eyes belonging to this body can open, can enjoy the way the sunlight flickers through the remaining leaves of the willow trees along the river’s banks.

  I pass my father, fishing; he is hatless and coatless, his sleeves rolled up so his pale forearms are exposed to the sun. I think at first that he does not recognize me, with my hair silver as shillings and my skin crinkled from years. But he turns his head at the last moment and watches as I drift past him. “Anne!” he calls, and grins when I wave.

  If I had the power to stop my forward momentum, I would pause before him and stand with him awhile in the shallows, the minnows dashing about near our ankles. I would ask him whether he watched at all, these many years, as I took hold of my birthright at last and refused to let go; and, too, I would ask whether the taking hold pleased him, or if, like my mother, he could never quite believe me strong enough.

  But I cannot stop, and so I watch as his figure grows smaller and smaller, until at last the current carries me around a bend and I lose sight of him altogether.

  This river meanders through my favorite parts of the estate, and for all that I know no such body of water truly exists on Rosings’s many acres, I am content merely to enjoy the journey. I pass the cows grazing in their pasture on the home farm and the pasture containing Mr. Montgomery’s herd of heavy-wooled sheep, where I turned my ankle once in the early days of my return to Kent. His wife, who refused to let me return to the great house without a good rest by the fire and an herby poultice, became the first of my tenants with whom I was on truly friendly terms. I glide through the rose garden, which blooms more prolifically now even than it did in my father’s day, the roses twining lovingly around the arms and throats of the sculptures he had placed there.

  The river skims along the edge of the lake I ordered dug when George was still a small boy; and here I find Darcy, looking younger and more hale than he was when he died by a good twenty years. He is laughing, one hand shading his eyes as he watches someone paddling in the shallow reedy waters near the lakeshore. It must be George himself, though his figure is hazy, as if he does not quite belong in this netherworld with the rest of us. I suspect, watching as I pass, the river’s current mercifully slow here, that I can only see him at all because this particular part of his life is over; he will never again be a small boy swimming in a lake.

  I must make some sound, or perhaps he only feels the pressure of my eyes, for Darcy turns. When he sees me, his handsome face is so glad, so easy, it is hard to recall a time when he was stiff and uncomfortable in my presence. It only took a journey to Derbyshire and an offer of adopting George, removing all the uncertainty that is necessarily attendant upon a second son. Darcy brought George here often when the boy was old enough; he and I stood together in this very spot and watched him test his swimmer’s strength in the calm water of the lake. As husband and wife we could never have been happy, but in our odd arrangement as far-flung guardians of this sweet, sturdy soul, we found a peculiar form of contentment together.

  George must come here soon, I think—the real here, with my bed-bound body from which I am so grateful for this brief escape. He has been in London with his brother, but my steward will have summoned him by now. He will be riding through the night to reach Kent quickly. I think of his dear face, framed on either side by ears like pitcher handles, for which he was teased mercilessly at school but which now, in his middle years, look like nothing so much as parentheses drawing attention to the gentleness of his countenance. He was not always so dear to me, of course; indeed, he remained a sort of curiosity to me for years, until he grew old enough to come to Kent for extended visits. But time and familiarity can indeed breed love, it seems.

  The river continues on its illogical, wandering way, through meadows I once trod in fair weather and foul; beside the lane where I used to drive my ponies. I think of their warm, happy greetings upon my return, their breath moistening my palms, the way they nudged their noses against my belly. They were the first residents of Rosings who seemed truly glad of my return.

  Beside Hunsford’s church, in a shaded, snaking curve of riverbank, Nurse squats beside the water, dress and petticoat hitched up around her knees, bare toes wiggling in the mud. She sees me and smiles. “It’s good to get my feet out of those boots,” she says, and I see her boots and striped stockings where they lie abandoned a little distance away among the tough snarled willow roots that form a trailing shelf over the water.

  I pass Miss Bennet—Mrs. Darcy—who pays me no notice, her attention on the blue of the sky and the satisfying briskness of her walking pace. I pass Aunt and Uncle Darcy, who walk with arms linked and look after me with mild surprise, and Uncle Fitzwilliam, who is so intent upon the novel over whose pages he is chuckling that he only waves at me absentmindedly, without any true recognition. I pass others, walking, riding, picnicking on the river’s shady banks. Some I remember clearly—Mr. Collins, the previous Hunsford rector, and his wife, an infant lying on the blanket between them, fat legs kicking at its long white dress; Mr. Colt, who stands beside a stone wall, conversing with a cluster of farmers—and some are like wisps of recollection from dreams, their faces nearly familiar but still unplaceable. One, a stooped old woman whose long fingers curl around the knob of her walking stick, startles at the sight of me, squinting with eyes that are the only familiar thing about her. I thrash a little in the water, turning my head to see her more clearly, to place those eyes; and it is only when she is nearly out of sight that I think, Oh, it is Miss Hall! with the faint pleasure that comes of seeing an old friend.

  John waits around a bend near the woods, hands behind his back and back still straight despite the whiteness of his few remaining hairs. He passed this way only a few years ago; not a month past, I received a letter from his widow, with whom I still correspond regularly. John says nothing, but he does not need to. He nods
in welcome, affection in his eyes; and it is enough.

  At the entrance to the woods themselves, the water flows more quickly, as if eager to speed me on my way to some unknown place. It steers me with unnerving splashes and jolts around sudden rocks, leaves and sticks rushing along before me. Then a swift, frightening turn around a gnarled tree, and a drop of several inches down a miniature waterfall and at last into a slower spot, where I swirl in the cool and struggle to catch my breath.

  There are two figures on the shore ahead of me, and they I would know anywhere. Mrs. Jenkinson smiles in her bland and dutiful way, but Mamma, her hair magnificently white, her eyes dark with displeasure and hurt feelings, begins shouting the moment she spies me. In a fit of instinctive cowardice, I nearly block my ears, like a child being told to return to her nursery.

  We lived uneasily together until her death, every day a battle still, the war never won by either of us. I do not know what winning would have looked like to her; Rosings Park back under her control, I suppose, and myself with it. But there were moments—scarce as they were, tender, and easy to overlook as early spring ferns—when she praised some choice I had made, be it a new carpet for the breakfast room or a settled dispute among my tenants, and her face flashed with pride for me. These make me uncertain of the size and form her victory would have taken, and make me all the more embarrassed for my display when I returned from London, like a child asserting its independence.

  For myself, who veered wildly between shutting out the noise of her and seeking her counsel like a supplicant before a saint, I think perhaps victory would have been the sort of sinew-deep understanding of my mother that is impossible between humans except in those rare, shining moments of connection that occur only once or twice in a lifetime.