I was eleven when my father became the mayor of Meryton and fourteen when he was presented to the king. His knack for giving heartfelt compliments so charmed His Majesty that my father was knighted, and he and my mother returned from London flush with the excitement of his audience and with the pleasure of now being known as Sir William and Lady Lucas.
But then my father announced quite suddenly at dinner one evening that he had found a buyer for his shop and had secured the purchase of a new house for us, larger and more befitting his new title, about a mile outside the village.
“It is a charming place,” he said, and looked around the table at us all expectantly. My younger siblings obliged him by expressing delight, but when I looked at my mother, her face was pale and shocked.
An hour later, I came upon her crying helplessly in the larder. “We will all starve,” she said, hands clenched tight around the edge of a shelf, her face, usually so composed, wrecked by emotion. Then she turned a fierce look upon me. “Beware men’s vanity, Charlotte,” she said. “It too often leads them to stupidity.”
THE WORLD BECAME smaller after we moved.
Without the income from the shop, we had to economize. It was a strange reality that, having moved substantially upward in terms of gentility, we had grown substantially poorer in terms of ready money. My mother, a gifted manager of household expenses, had from the earliest days of their marriage insisted my father invest a good portion of each year’s profits in the funds. The sale of the business bought us our new, grander home, with a little left over, and this, along with the interest from my father’s investments, gave us something to live on. But it was not much, and any extra money was saved toward my brothers’ future educations. There was nothing left over for dowries, and certainly not for governesses, and so my mother continued to educate my sister and myself in the best way she could, which meant we learned a very little about a few things, and never grew proficient enough in anything to have any talents worth exhibiting.
I came to see my father’s knighthood as less boon than burden; though it elevated the circles in which we moved—thereby elevating my own and my siblings’ chances at rising still further—those chances often felt insubstantial as wishes, at least for myself and Maria, paired as they were with a lack of money, both for dowries and for circulating us in London during the Season. In theory, as the daughters of Sir William Lucas we might still have gotten husbands possessed of both good breeding (my father’s hope) and great wealth (my mother’s); but our options in Meryton were few. Indeed, as the years passed and the likelihood that I would make a good match grew ever smaller, it sometimes seemed to me that my sister and I, at least, would have been better served had our father chosen financial prudence over social climbing, for there were many young men in the neighborhood who might have offered for us when we were still a merchant’s daughters. But in severing all ties to his past as a tradesman, our father had pulled us out of their sphere and into another, where we dangled, just out of their reach. I imagined their hands, reaching upward but unable to grasp us, while our hands scrabbled for purchase above our own heads; I, in particular, with no money and not even Maria’s prettiness to serve as currency, felt my fingers slipping further as time went by.
It is a little different for my brothers, for though knighthoods cannot be inherited, they benefited from both increased marriage prospects and the chance to make their livings in genteel professions as clergymen or barristers. They were tugged upward by our father’s decision, just as Maria and I were, but unlike us, they will have the means to keep themselves there without relying upon our father or any other man.
Our new home, dubbed Lucas Lodge by my father, was large and handsome enough to satisfy his newfound vanity, and it came with a small library already intact, shelves and shelves of books that no one, it appeared from their pristine bindings, had ever opened. My father also left their spines largely unbroken, though it pleased him to be able to show off so fine a collection of books when our neighbors came to call. He was also very proud of the pianoforte, for all that it was mostly our neighbors who played it, during the parties we could ill afford to host. But here my mother’s vanity, as much as my father’s, emerged—she could not bear to be seen as inhospitable, especially when we were invited to parties at other houses in the neighborhood.
Most of the books in our new library held no interest for me, being mainly histories written in so dry a manner that even the most exciting battles sounded dull. But tucked among a few other volumes on various topics of scientific inquiry was The British Herbal. I took it down from its high shelf one rainy afternoon, bored enough to try it but expecting little, and found, to my delight, pages and pages of the most exquisite engravings of plants, every detail of leaf and stem meticulously captured.
Our garden at Lucas Lodge was very modest, tended by a man hired in the village for a pittance, but still it provided plenty of subjects for sketching. And though we’d no money for formal training, the careful lines of those botanical engravings gave me some small idea of how to start.
“You are an artist,” Elizabeth said to me once from her seat on our garden bench. I had abandoned any pretense of ladylike posture and was kneeling on the ground, my face close to a great bush of lavender, the better to capture the particulars of its leaves. Her voice was gently laughing. “Clearly, you are willing to suffer all manner of indignities for your art.”
“An artist would not have so much trouble with perspective,” I said, frustrated by my lack of expertise. I longed to have lessons. Sometimes, in the course of a call I paid to this or that young lady in the village, her mamma would insist she bring out a sketch or painting she had recently completed under her drawing master’s tutelage, and I had to shove my jealousy roughly aside, that I might respond civilly. But despite my frustration, I amassed a trunk full of pages over the years, of not only plants and flowers but, somewhat more crudely, landscapes, and a few, rather unflattering, portraits of my family.
I HAVE NOT drawn at all since my marriage; I am, in fact, in possession of neither drawing paper nor pencils, and despite the many hours I spend alone, the thought of taking up the pastime again has not once occurred to me. The garden, excepting the vegetables, is purely William’s domain, and I’ve had no wish to intrude upon it; our separate spheres suit me perfectly. And yet. As I look at the primrose, so innocuous, something hungry rises within me, something that cries, Mine, mine! I rub my fingers together, the ghost of a drawing pencil rolling between them, and sigh.
Louisa will be awake soon, and she will need to suckle before we leave for church. And William, no doubt, will be anxious about my absence. I look down at my boots, spattered with mud; they must be changed.
I look up again, at the dense tangle of branches above my head.
With great reluctance, I turn for home.
Chapter Five
I realized, very early in my marriage, that I had been spoiled in Hertfordshire. Our parson, Mr. Johnson, was an aged man, but his sermons managed to convey sincerity of faith without resorting to long-windedness. By contrast, William’s sermons are as rambling as his everyday speech, and those most strongly influenced by Lady Catherine tend to meander longer still, as if he is so afraid of giving too little weight to each of her ladyship’s points that he dwells instead too long upon all of them. Today’s sermon is particularly digressive, and from behind me I can sense restless movement, pews creaking as congregants try to ease the discomfort of sitting upon the unforgiving wood.
The service ends at last, and I stand with William, greeting the churchgoers as they go outside. Lady Catherine, Miss de Bourgh, and Mrs. Jenkinson pause outside the church doors, effectively blocking the remaining congregants from exiting; I make my curtsy and then move aside to allow others to pass. I can hear Lady Catherine’s strident tones and William’s harried responses, and I glance back; he has his shoulders hunched about his ears as though he is trying to make himself smaller for his patroness’s sake. Lady Catherine at le
ast once, in my hearing, has proclaimed that men ought to be more accommodating of women by not growing so very tall.
I look around for Martha and Louisa, and find them standing a little distance away, encircled by Martha’s brothers and sisters. There are eleven in all, and Martha, at fifteen, is the eldest. They surround her like leaves swirling in an eddy, each dragging at her attention, and yet still she manages to mind Louisa, reaching down and removing a twig from my daughter’s hands before it makes its way to her mouth.
“Good morning, Mrs. Collins,” someone says, and I turn with a practiced smile, which becomes genuine when I see that the speaker is Mr. Travis. He stands with the fingers of one hand curled around his father’s arm; the elder Mr. Travis squints at me from under the brim of his hat before nodding in recognition.
“Good morning. I hope you are both well,” I say. My fingers move as if to smooth down the front of my gown; I stop them consciously, and hold them folded in front of me in a way that feels artificial.
“Very well, thank you,” Mr. Travis says. “And you? I hope I am right in assuming young Miss Collins’s affliction has passed, as I have not recently had the pleasure of encountering the two of you taking the morning air.”
“Oh—yes—entirely passed, at least for the time being, and she has not one but two lovely little teeth for her trouble.” Louisa has slept soundly since the teeth finally poked through, but my own body seems to have developed a preference for waking at dawn. Most mornings, I force myself to lie abed, eyes closed, willing sleep to overcome me once more as I feel the weight of the covers on my body and listen to my husband’s and my daughter’s even breaths. But this morning I allowed myself to rise; as I dressed it was with a clandestine quickness, escape in the soft thunks of my boots upon the stairs and the click of the latch when I opened the door.
“I am glad to hear it,” Mr. Travis is saying, though his attention is diverted by his father, who is tugging his arm out of his son’s grip and moving, with a short half bow in my direction, away from us; when Mr. Travis reaches out as though to steady him, his father makes a grumbling protest.
Mr. Travis watches him go, the line between his brows deeply defined. Then, appearing to recollect himself, he looks back at me.
“He dislikes it when I fuss,” he says, nodding in his father’s direction. The elder Mr. Travis is picking his way with exquisite care over the uneven ground, one hand raised in greeting as he approaches a group of other men.
I keep my eyes upon old Mr. Travis as I say, “I have been remiss,” my voice too thin, like a note played poorly upon a flute. At the edge of my vision, I see the son’s head turn toward me, brows raised, and I cough a little and try again.
“You have full responsibility for your father’s care yourself, do you not?”
“Well—yes,” he says. “Though he’s content, mostly, to sit quietly or potter in the garden. He is well enough that he does not require much in the way of special care.”
“Only a little extra attention when traversing uneven ground?”
He laughs. “Yes, there is that. He rarely comes into town anymore.”
“I am pleased he was able to make the journey this morning. Is there . . . anything I can do to help? I do feel . . . neglectful—I had no idea your father had such difficulty.”
“There is no reason why you should. He has been a . . . less-than-regular attendant at church these last few years, I fear.”
I am silent. He is wrong—I know he is wrong, and I suspect that he knows it, as well, and that he is merely being kind. As William’s wife, my knowledge of his congregation should be more intimate than it is, and I feel a flush of shame all along the length of my body. I wish, for perhaps the hundredth time since I came to Kent, that this role I chose for myself came more naturally to me.
“Would he—would your father welcome a visit?” I say at last. “I’ve no wish to intrude if he prefers his privacy, but . . .”
Mr. Travis’s eyes assess me with unsettling frankness, though he says only, “I’m sure he would appreciate a visit, Mrs. Collins.”
“I will call soon, then,” I say, just as Martha joins us, carrying Louisa.
“If it’s all right, my parents are leaving for home,” she says.
“Of course.” I take Louisa from her arms; Martha waggles her fingers in the baby’s direction, then bobs a curtsy to me and another to Mr. Travis.
“Thank you, ma’am,” she says, and, one hand holding her bonnet in place, half-runs down the path after her family.
“Does she always join her family on Sundays?” Mr. Travis says.
I nod. “Unless we have an invitation to Rosings.”
“That is good of you. Her family must enjoy the extra time with her.”
“I believe they do.” We both look back at the family as they make their rowdy way down the road. Martha has taken her youngest brother’s hand; as we watch, she draws him away from the mud puddle for which he was headed.
Mr. Travis turns back to me and bends down, as he did that first morning in the garden, putting himself at Louisa’s eye level.
“I heard about your achievement,” he says to her, and as if she knows exactly what he is talking about, Louisa grins, displaying her new teeth; his laughter, in turn, is warm and full and unreserved.
“There you are, Mrs. Collins!” comes William from behind me, and I turn quickly; Mr. Travis’s laughter dies in his throat almost at once. “We must get home, and quickly—Lady Catherine and Miss de Bourgh have been gracious enough to say they will visit this afternoon, so we must make haste.”
He holds out his arm, impatience clear in his face.
“Yes, of course.” Already I am thinking about what we might have ready to offer her ladyship with her tea.
“I expect the roses to arrive sometime this week, Mr. Collins,” Mr. Travis says.
William looks around, clearly startled to find the farmer standing beside me. “Oh! Wonderful news, wonderful—Lady Catherine will be pleased, indeed.”
“Indeed. And I should like to find a convenient time, once they are planted, to instruct you in tending them.”
But William has caught sight of Lady Catherine and her party making their way to their waiting carriage, the remaining congregants bowing hastily, one after another, like meadow grasses in the wind, as the noble ladies pass, and he merely nods distractedly before saying, “Come, Mrs. Collins, we really must make haste . . .”
I take his arm this time without further prompting; Mr. Travis is still completing his bow as William and I hurry away.
Chapter Six
The roses were delivered two days ago. Nearly the moment they arrived, William sent our manservant, John, to fetch Mr. Travis, but to William’s consternation, John returned alone. It had been raining for the better part of three days, and the ground, John relayed, needed time to dry out a little before the roses could be put in it. And so we have all endured many hours of William’s fussing and fretting.
I have neglected the kitchen garden because of the weather, but this morning I rise, leaving William and Louisa to slumber on; exchange brief, tired greetings with Mrs. Baxter in the corridor; and go out through the kitchen door. This part of the yard does not have the same drowsy quality as the rest; the air is awake with the sounds of the chickens chortling to one another and William’s bees humming around their hive. Only a short distance away, the pig snuffles and snorts its way through the scraps John has tossed into the pen.
A few days, and a great deal of rain, have done the magical work of completely transforming the beds—the early lettuces have proliferated wildly, the spring cabbages have grown fat, and the first tender asparagus heads are just poking from beneath the soil. I crouch and breathe deeply; the air is heady, damp and earth scented.
I am harvesting the very last of the winter parsnips when someone clears his throat from behind me. I twist to look over my shoulder, and there is Mr. Travis, silhouetted by the fast-rising sun.
“I am sorry to both
er you,” he says; he smiles in apology and holds his hat in his hands. “Mrs. Baxter told me where to find you. I’ve begun planting the roses, and I was hoping Mr. Collins might be available after I’m through—”
“To learn how to keep them alive,” I say, smiling. “Yes, he should be waking soon; I will ask him to come out after breakfast.”
“I’m obliged,” he says, then hesitates. “Would you . . . would you care to look at them, and see whether their placement is suitable, before I continue?”
Startled, I say, “I—well, yes, thank you.” I wipe my hands on my apron, then follow him down the path. The rosebushes were delivered to the edge of the property and left heaped together, but now Mr. Travis has carefully spaced them out. Each bush is compact, but as they grow I can imagine how they will form a dense thicket of flowers. Mr. Travis points to each, naming the different varieties.
“You will, of course, need to be careful of Miss Collins among the thorns,” he says, smiling.
The truth of this strikes me all at once; just yesterday, I was playing with her in the nursery when she pushed herself onto her hands and knees and stayed there, rocking back and forth gleefully.
“She is nearly ready for short dresses,” I say. My voice breaks a little on the last word.
He is quiet for a moment, and then he says, “They grow very quickly. Or so I am given to understand.”
“Children? Or the roses?”
A grin. “Both.” He clears his throat again. “Does the arrangement of the bushes suit? I planted the first few, but it is, after all,” he says with a slight quirk of one brow, “your garden.”
I assure him that they are very agreeably positioned. Most of the bushes will not flower until next year, but one that has already been planted bears a single, nodding bud, still closed so tightly that only the very tip shows creamy white above the dark green sepals. I touch it, very gently, aware that I am tarrying and yet stuck fast as though I, too, am rooted in the soil.
The Clergyman's Wife Page 3
