The Clergyman's Wife

by Molly Greeley

THE SILENT GARDEN holds no comfort for me. I walk the familiar paths, past the hedgerows and the dormant fruit trees, past beds of flowers I will not see bloom again.

  I reach the edge of the garden and stop. Here, beside the lane, the roses stand sleeping as soundly as the other plants, their branches nearly bare of leaves.

  Autumn, I think. He said autumn was the best time, and I have missed that; it has grown too cold, perhaps.

  I could try anyway. A knife, I need a knife—

  I rush to the little outbuilding where William and John keep their tools and find a small pruning knife. Back to the roses, my boots scattering gravel, but here I pause. I am no gardener, and I do not know where to cut.

  At last I take the knife and grasp a stem between the thorns, cut it off, then move to the next bush, and the next, and the next, until I have cuttings from each. In my hand, they look like a bundle of dead sticks, and I feel silly even as I return the knife to its proper place and put the cuttings at the bottom of the basket I usually use for carrying herbs and flowers into the house. Then I hurry through the garden and out the gate before I can think better of it.

  In the woods, the ground is hard and cold beneath a thick brown blanket of dropped leaves. My skirt rustles through them, the only sound besides my increasingly labored breathing. I move faster and faster until I am nearly running, the trees a blur to either side of me, my blood beating wildly, until at last my breath runs short.

  I am accustomed to extensive walking but not to more vigorous activity. I stop, press one hand to my breast and the other against the trunk of the nearest tree. I wish we could stay here for another half year so I can see the woods once more in the spring: the ground lightly furred with green; the shy faces of the first violets; the gentle slant of the sunlight through the trees’ new leaves.

  I wish that we could stay forever.

  I begin walking again, my pace quick but not so fast as before, and soon I have reached the fields. I feel strong and reckless, the grass crackling under my feet.

  When I reach the last familiar hill before the Travis farm, the muscles in my legs are burning. At the top I look down at the buildings spread out before me, thinking of what I ought to do; it is an indecent hour to pay a call, but I hope Mr. Travis, keeping a farmer’s hours, will already be at work outside somewhere.

  And I blink, for there he is, walking up the hill toward me. My heart’s rhythm is suddenly fast enough to hurt as it thumps behind my ribs. His head is down, and so he does not see me, and as he nears me I can hear him muttering to himself, though I cannot make out the words.

  “Mr. Travis,” I say when he is nearly upon me, and he lets out a startled noise and steps back, head jerking up to look at me. He gapes.

  “Mrs. Collins! What are you—what are you doing here?”

  I am intensely aware of the absurdity, the impropriety, of standing here at such an hour, but I swallow the apology that rises in my throat and say instead, “We are leaving today.”

  In the early light, I cannot quite make out Mr. Travis’s expression. “I know.”

  “I . . .” I thrust the basket toward him. “I brought you cuttings. From the roses.”

  “The . . .” He stares down at the basket, and I am suddenly flooded with the heat of humiliation. I begin to draw the basket away.

  “It was foolish,” I say, speaking too quickly. “It was your father who would have really appreciated them—I do not know what I was thinking—”

  He reaches out, his hand closing over mine around the basket’s handle. My teeth click together as my mouth closes abruptly. “It was not foolish,” he says, and there is a roughness to his voice that makes me uncertain where to rest my eyes. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” He releases my hand very quickly, as though suddenly aware of what he is doing. Though we are both wearing gloves, I wish he would touch me again. The thought should shame me, but I am too full of other feelings, just now, to allow shame any space.

  I hand him the basket. “I did not know what I was doing—I hope they will grow for you.”

  He takes one cutting out and holds it up, squinting. “I think I can make it root,” he says, and then he looks at me. “They will remind me of you.”

  I do not know what to say. The sun is rising higher, far too quickly. I need to return to the parsonage, but I cannot make my feet move or my mouth form the words it ought, words of polite farewell.

  “I should not have been so ungracious, when last we met,” he says after a moment.

  I shake my head. “I was . . . I do not know why I said the things I did. I pushed you, and I . . . cannot explain myself.” I do not ask whether he will offer for Miss Harmon, after all; I do not need to know.

  “And when I learned that you were leaving . . . I thought I would not have a chance to say good-bye.” He looks down. “I have been a coward. Even now—even now, just before I met you, I was trying to talk myself out of walking toward Rosings.” A quick glance up at me, and then away again. “I thought that even if I chanced to see you, we would not be able to speak; and I feared that if we were, by some good fortune, able to exchange a few words . . . I would not be able to speak as I ought.” He swallows, and I track the movement of his throat with my eyes.

  My voice catches so that it is nearly a whisper. “What do you feel you ought to say?”

  A faint, ironical smile. “I ought to wish you well in your new life. I ought to have done so long ago, when I first heard the news, instead of . . . But I am more selfish than I had thought myself to be. I did not think of your good fortune, but of my own—my own loss.”

  The words will fester inside me if I do not release them. “It is my loss, as well.”

  Mr. Travis reaches one hand into the basket and withdraws two cuttings. He stands holding them for a moment before looking up and offering them to me. “You should have some, as well,” he says. “For your new home.”

  I reach out and take them gently. His words echo in my head—They will remind me of you—though I dare not speak them aloud. We stand looking at each other, and then I glance at the sky, which is streaked with pink and gold. “I must go,” I say. “We leave soon—I should not have come. But I am—glad—to have had the chance to see you again.”

  Mr. Travis glances from me, to the fields I will travel to return to the parsonage, and back again. He looks as though he wishes to speak, but then he shakes his head. Now that it is growing light, I can see that he seems as tired as I feel, his eyes shadowed with purple, the lines about his mouth cutting deep.

  “I am grateful to have known you, Mrs. Collins,” he says at last.

  The space behind my eyes burns. “And I you.”

  There is so much else I could say, but I touch my fingers to my mouth before any more words escape. From the corner of my eye, I see Mr. Travis lift a hand as though to reach out; then his fingers curl into his palm, and his arm drops back to his side.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  I return to a house in uproar.

  John is outside, busy piling our trunks so they can be quickly loaded onto the carriage when it arrives. Lady Catherine’s generosity has extended to the loan of one of her carriages to convey us to the posting station, from which we shall catch a post chaise for the rest of our journey. John nods when he sees me but continues his work without pause; I remove my gloves and rub one palm quickly over my face. With luck, any redness about my eyes and nose will be attributed to a walk in the cold air.

  When I step inside the house, I can hear William’s voice raised in agitation. He is no doubt as much in Mrs. Baxter’s way as Louisa, and I feel the smallest stirring of guilt; I should have been here to corral him into some quiet, useless activity.

  I open the door to our bedchamber to find William fussing at Martha over the proper way to air the room before Mr. Bolton takes residence. He barely looks at me except to say, “Oh good, my dear, you are back—Mrs. Baxter has left some breakfast out, I believe.”

  I watch as Martha ta
kes the linens from our bed, bundling them into her arms and listening without expression to William’s precise directions about their washing. “I am not hungry,” I say, though no one is listening. When I leave the room, I close the door behind me.

  I LONG AGO determined to live my life not in noisy discontentment but in quiet acceptance.

  There is no use exhausting oneself by railing against the vagaries of fate. Doing so leaves no room for any of the good in life—and, I tell myself firmly, there is much good. Outside the carriage window, I can see Kent’s gentle hills. Louisa sleeps soundly in my arms, her body warm and sturdy. Seated across from me, William catches my eye and smiles his odd, stiff smile. I find that I am able to smile back.

  And yet. There is a pounding at the back of my head, and when I look out the window again, all looks blurry. I keep my mind empty, away from useless thoughts.

  “I do hope Mr. Bolton tends carefully to the roses,” William says suddenly. “I ought to have told Mr. Travis to look in on them from time to time.”

  I reach with my free hand into my reticule, where the cuttings are nestled gently together, and draw one out, just a little, so that I can see the dry and thorny stem. There is a strange heaviness upon my chest. “I am sure Mr. Bolton will understand their value, just as you do.” I keep my eyes focused upward to prevent any betraying tears from falling.

  William shifts forward a little. “Are you all right? What have you there?”

  I lift the hand that had been resting upon Louisa’s head and wave it with what I hope is a careless air. “Perfectly.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “It is only—I took cuttings from the roses this morning. I hope that they will root at Longbourn.”

  His brow creases. “Longbourn has its own rose garden, I believe.”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  But William’s expression has cleared. “How thoughtless of me—of course you would want a reminder of our intimacy at Rosings.”

  I laugh; it is a damp sound. “Of course.”

  William settles back. “You have a female’s sentimental heart,” he says, smiling, and closes his eyes.

  My hands tighten around Louisa, who sleeps on. I think, just for a moment before I shake my head to banish the thought, of Mr. Travis’s reaching out to touch her cheek; of the way he knelt to look at her when he spoke. I am plagued by the shadow of if only. I was brave, once; I made my own chance. If only I—

  Useless thoughts, all.

  My finger strokes Louisa’s hair back from her forehead. I will tell her, someday, about how I was brave; and when she is old enough, I will tell her that she needn’t sell herself as cheaply as I did. That she must recognize her own worth, whatever others say. I will do everything I can to make sure my daughter has as substantial a dowry as we can provide. She will never be an Anne de Bourgh, heiress to a grand estate and able to marry, or not, at her own discretion—Longbourn’s entail has seen to that—but with a large enough settlement she will have greater freedom of choice than I had. When love finds her, she may choose it over prudence. And oh, I will make sure she knows how to recognize love when it arrives, even if it comes humbly, quietly.

  Louisa shifts against me, and I prop her head more securely in the crook of my arm. I look out the window, where the view is of fields lying quietly in wait for spring.

  Beauty comes in many forms.

  The carriage rolls on, bumping over ruts in the road.

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to many books that were incredibly helpful resources, most especially Jane Austen’s England: Daily Life in the Georgian and Regency Periods by Roy and Lesley Adkins, In the Garden with Jane Austen by Kim Wilson, and Jane Austen and the Clergy by Irene Collins. A great big thank-you as well to Nancy Mayer for being kind enough to respond (and so quickly!) to my many questions about the fiddly ins and outs of Regency British life.

  Thank you to my early readers, especially Emily Cahill and my parents, Chris and Abbie Innes. Your feedback was invaluable (as, Mom and Chris, was your encouragement to give up on a college major that would lead to stable employment and “just write” instead!). Thank you to my agent, Jennifer Weltz, for taking a chance on me and my book, and to my editor, Rachel Kahan, for seeing Charlotte’s as a story worth telling.

  And finally, thank you to my husband, Stuart Campbell—for spending countless hours listening as I read each chapter aloud, for your constant enthusiasm, and for your selflessness in encouraging me to take time to myself each week in order to write (even when things were more than a little crazy at home).

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  About the Author

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  Meet Molly Greeley

  About the Book

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  Behind the Book Essay: Why Charlotte Lucas

  Reading Group Guide

  About the Author

  Meet Molly Greeley

  MOLLY GREELEY earned her bachelor’s degree in English, with a creative writing emphasis, from Michigan State University, where she was the recipient of the Louis B. Sudler Prize in the Arts for Creative Writing. Her short stories and essays have been published in Cicada, Carve, and Literary Mama. Greeley works as a social media consultant for a local business, but her Sunday afternoons are devoted to weaving stories into books. She lives with her husband and three children in Traverse City, Michigan.

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  About the Book

  Behind the Book Essay: Why Charlotte Lucas

  It took about a year of once-weekly writing sprints to finish my first novel, The Clergyman’s Wife, but the idea had been slowly germinating for a long time. I have, in fact, been thinking about Charlotte Lucas and her choice for more than twenty years, ever since I first read Pride and Prejudice. Back then I was ten years old, and with a child’s understanding of what I read, my first and strongest reaction when Charlotte chose to marry Mr. Collins was complete revulsion. Mr. Collins was gross, and worse, he was a little bit stupid. Someone like Charlotte, who was friends with Elizabeth Bennet and therefore must be intelligent, would be miserable married to him. I agreed completely with Elizabeth’s first reaction to the news of her friend’s engagement: Charlotte had made a terrible mistake.

  But time, and many subsequent readings, softened my take on Charlotte’s decision, and as I grew up, she became the character in Pride and Prejudice who fascinated me most, her choice to marry Mr. Collins less horrifying than the circumstances that led to it. Charlotte had neither money nor the means to earn any, and she had no beauty, which was, of course, its own form of currency. Even when she was young, the likelihood of attracting a husband equal to or above her in station was fairly slim, but as the years passed I imagined the constraints of her situation tightening around her like a net.

  The truly sad thing about Charlotte’s circumstances, I realized, was not so much that she married Mr. Collins but that she lived in a time when an intelligent, capable woman had only two choices: remain unmarried and risk becoming a burden to her family, or accept the proposal of a man who could offer her security, even if he also happened to be a fool. Her story was all too common in Jane Austen’s time; a woman married the most practical choice available because a woman’s security, unless she was exceptionally fortunate, was always linked to the prosperity and generosity of the men in her life. The remarkable thing about Charlotte is that she set out to seduce Mr. Collins—not with her body, but with her attention and sympathy. Rather than wait passively for a man to notice her, she saw an opportunity and took it, and in doing so, she took charge of her own life in the only way available to her. I felt punched by the courage and, yes, selflessness of her decision, for in marrying the heir to Longbourn, she ensured that neither her parents nor her younger brothers had to worry about her future.

  We get so little of Charlotte’s inner world in Pride and Prejudice, and I wanted more. Austen tells Charlotte’s story mostly from Elizabeth�
��s perspective, with a few interjections from the novel’s nameless narrator, and Charlotte seems, above all else, calm, practical, and more than a bit calculating. But Elizabeth, as it turns out, is not actually the most astute judge of other people’s feelings and motivations. So I started thinking: what if Charlotte was just good at making the best of things, even if she didn’t feel as cheerful about them as she appeared? What if she was grateful enough for the security Mr. Collins offered her to be genuinely pleased with her new life when Elizabeth visited in Pride and Prejudice—but what if security was not enough to make her truly happy in the long run? What if she finally fell in love?

  Some of my favorite books take well-known stories and delve into the minds and hearts of characters who were peripheral to the original. Charlotte has never felt peripheral to me; even as a child, I couldn’t read Pride and Prejudice without having a visceral reaction to her story. It’s a story about a woman’s worth, a woman’s place in society. It’s about mothers and daughters, because it’s impossible to imagine Charlotte’s own worry about her prospects as the years pass without also imagining the strangling fear her mother must have felt. And it’s about love, or the lack thereof, and what place it would have had in the lives of women who did not have a man with ten thousand pounds a year waiting to rescue them from the terrifying uncertainty of the future. Such women, like Charlotte, had to rescue themselves.

  Reading Group Guide

  Where do you stand on Charlotte’s much-discussed decision to make “a very eligible match,” as her mother puts it? Is she exercising agency and practicality, or making a terrible mistake by giving in to social pressure and fear of spinsterhood? What other paths might she have chosen?

  “I found his manner at once endeared him to me and irritated me thoroughly,” Charlotte admits about Mr. Collins. Did you, the reader, find him endearing or irritating? Both? Something else?