Charlotte

by Helen Moffett

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  A Note on the Text

  Reading Group Questions

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  For Sarah, Paige, Lauren, Tom. My book children.

  1811

  PROLOGUE

  NO PROSPECTS – OR SO the neighbourhood believed. Her own family thought it. Her dearest friend Elizabeth assumed it with the blithe arrogance of someone who could give her own wit and liveliness free rein because she had the gloss of both youth and beauty.

  Charlotte was about to prove them all wrong, God willing. That morning, that very minute in fact, she intended to go out and roll the dice with all the bravado of a rake in a London night-haunt. She brushed down the folds of her best poplin day dress, with its pattern of minute sage-green flower fronds against a white background – no chainmail and pennant, but armour of a sort. Peering at herself in the glass, she was satisfied with what she saw, in as much as a tall, plain, and angular woman of twenty-seven and no prospects could reasonably be satisfied.

  She took one more look at herself – her hair was at its best in the mornings, freshly released from the curlpapers that tackled a tendency to lankness, and her colour would be higher once she had been walking a little. Then she reached for her new straw bonnet, trimmed with the same fabric as her dress. Gentlemen did not notice such details, in her limited experience, but they responded to a sense of order, of patterns meshing. Anomalies in appearance startled them.

  She tiptoed down the stairs, feeling no need to advertise her early rising. In the passage that led to the kitchen, she thought for a moment, then donned an apron that would protect her gown, slid her feet into sensible boots, and took up a trug and cutting knife. She intended to show off not only her physical charms, such as they were, but her more practical attributes; that, while fond of healthful exercise, she was nevertheless attentive to the gifts of the fields and woods. She would collect mushrooms and pick apples. And, if necessary, choose and cut late roses and early chrysanthemums for dressing the house. Her intention was to appear something more than handsome; she wanted to look like a chatelaine. Someone who would run a small household with efficiency, taste, and economy; someone who would bestow comfort and order.

  She knew what she needed to do.

  1818–1819

  CHAPTER I

  THE BOBBING LIGHT AND SHADOW thrown by the candle woke Charlotte. She sat upright, not alarmed, but alert: there was no soft wail or snuffling from the room alongside. Her husband stood by her bedside, looking down at her with speechless compassion. His face shone wet in the sliding glow of the candle-flame; it gave the impression of movement to his face, and she realised that the hand that held the candlestick was shaking.

  And then she knew, before he spoke, reaching for her with his other hand: ‘Come, my dear.’

  They stood beside the cot, still as statues, the only movement in their enmeshed fingers, kneading convulsively at each other’s knuckles. Charlotte always imagined that if, when, this moment came, she would snatch up the little form, would shake, cajole, love it back to life. But after that first long look, bending over Tom with the candle held close to his beloved face, she had not moved. Even in the unreliable light, the purple stains under his eyes and the waxen appearance of the pinched nose were unmistakable. No breath disturbed those nostrils, or raised his chest.

  Eventually, she tried to speak, but only a hoarse growl came. Mr Collins nevertheless understood her: ‘About half an hour ago, dearest. I came in to see him, and it was immediately apparent. I touched him; he was already quite cool.’

  ‘What were … why did you go to him? Was he fretful?’ Even as she spoke, she knew she made no sense. If Tom had made the slightest sound, she would have reached him before his father. She had had an extra ear attuned to him since the day of his birth more than three years ago, a sensitivity to any distress he might feel or encounter far more heightened than she had experienced with her daughters.

  Her husband’s hand clenched in time with the bobbing of his Adam’s apple. ‘I came in to pray for him. I do so every night. When I … when I found him, I could see there was no help. So I prayed, like I always do. I stood by him and prayed.’

  And then Charlotte broke, a sheet of salt tearing from her eyes and nose as she scooped up the body, not yet cold, but long since past the warmth of a living child. She clutched him to the breasts that had nurtured him, a process that had given them both such delight, happy animal satisfaction on his part, pangs of more complicated joy on hers. She stroked the long little fingers, with nails like soap bubbles, that would never slide trustingly into her hand again. She kissed his neck, soft and pliant under the weight of his head, palmed his sturdy back, fixing the familiar scent of his skin in the atoms of her body. For one moment, the world slid sideways and righted itself: he still smelled like Tom, he couldn’t possibly be dead, they would prove all the surgeons wrong, he would wake and burble ‘Mama’ and she would kiss him and kiss him, all over his chubby hay-fragrant little body and face, and the globe would resume spinning on its everyday axis.

  But the child in her arms did not wake. And looking across at her openly weeping husband, she knew that he never would.

  A small mercy: it was a mild, soft day, the sky a bowl of curds. Charlotte could not have borne the mockery of sunshine, or the misery of rain and spiteful wind, as they stood, a cluster of crows, in the churchyard. She adjusted Laura’s weight on her hip. Her second daughter’s warm body was the only thing anchoring her to the earth, to this place. Nothing else made sense, not the sexton, not the grave into which the pitifully tiny coffin was being lowered, not the words being intoned by the parson, not even the grief coming off her husband so thick she could almost taste it catching at the back of her throat.

  He stood by her side, allowed on this occasion the role of the bereaved parent. Not even the most stoic clergyman could be expected to bury his own child, and so Lady Catherine had sent for a parson from a neighbouring parish to conduct Tom’s funeral.

  Charlotte, in that slice of her mind that continued to function rationally, conceded that Lady Catherine had indeed been useful in the past few days. She had written messages and made arrangements, she had offered mourning garments and shades, had even sent her carriage to Meryton to fetch the elder Lucases. She had objected to Charlotte’s intention to bring Tom’s small sisters to the graveyard, claiming that at almost five and six years of age they were too young – but, for once, she had allowed herself to be overruled without argument.

  Charlotte, unable to look down into the grave, st
ared across it at the other mourners present. Her sister Maria was in tears, and her mother sobbing into a handkerchief, supported by her father, whose usually rubicund face was pale with distress. Lizzy had arrived the night before, escorted by her husband, Mr Darcy, who was standing beside her, all bleak gravity.

  On some level, Charlotte was moved – even if slightly surprised – that her old friend, the mistress of Pemberley, should have made the journey down from Derbyshire to Kent for Tom’s funeral. She and Mr Darcy were guests of Lady Catherine – an arrangement that might have been desperately awkward if not for the solemn circumstances. With pressing business to attend to, Mr Darcy would be leaving for London the next day, but Elizabeth would be staying at the Parsonage to keep Charlotte company during the first weeks of mourning.

  Although, Charlotte noted – in the dispassionate way she kept noticing the crack in the glass of one of the windowpanes in the drawing room, the fungus speckling the leaves of the late roses in the garden – that Lizzy was gazing across at the bereaved family with an expression on her face that could only be described as forlorn.

  Laura wriggled in her arms as the first clods of earth fell on the coffin. ‘Mama, I don’t want Tom to be cold,’ she wailed into her mother’s ear. ‘He doesn’t like the dark.’ Charlotte murmured the same lies she had been telling both girls since the day that had dawned relentlessly after the night Tom had perished: that their brother had gone to be with the angels, where there was no cold, or dark, or pain. Although how could she possibly know for certain? Was her husband certain?

  She glanced over at him and Sarah, her little changeling: thin and whippy like her mother, and with her father’s dark hair, her dark brown eyes were nothing like the grey and blue of her parents. She was in as much distress as Laura, flinching as each spadeful thudded onto the coffin, but remained silent, leaning against her father’s side, a thumb jammed into her mouth.

  Trying to keep herself tethered to the moment, to prevent herself floating outside the scene, as she so often had in the last days and hours, a state in which she looked down on herself with both detachment and such acuity she could see the pink line where she parted her hair, Charlotte turned her head back towards Lady Catherine, who stood on the other side of the grave. Like herself, her ladyship was wearing unrelieved black – although this was not so much a statement of condolence as a matter of habit. Nevertheless, Lady Catherine was gazing at her with a rare expression of sympathy on her craggy face and, as she caught Charlotte’s eye, she gave a small, tight nod of something close to approval. She had earlier complimented Charlotte on her fortitude, while seeming to use the words as code for something else.

  Laura wailed again, softly, now just a general expression of misery and confusion, and at the same time, Mr Collins began to shudder. One hand still resting on his eldest daughter’s shoulder, the other pressed a handkerchief to his face, and a long, low moan emerged from behind it. Something burst and surged through Charlotte’s veins: it was as if he was feeling her agony, voicing it, giving her relief via emotional ventriloquism. She held Laura still more fiercely to her and, in a spasm of gratitude so violent it threatened to stop her breath, she stretched her other arm towards her husband, who still clasped Sarah. The hand she covered was cold, but their daughter’s hair falling over it was warm and soft. And so it was at the grave of her son, with both her daughters present, that Charlotte Collins, née Lucas, realised that she loved her husband.

  Mrs Darcy paced up and down the drawing room, as Charlotte tried in vain to make both herself and her guest comfortable, offering a seat by the fire, to send for refreshments. Since finding her son dead, she had found it impossible to settle – to lie or sit or stand in any one place for more than a few minutes – without wanting to leap to her feet and hasten elsewhere, anywhere. It was a while before she realised she was trying to escape pain the same way a mouse would try to escape a toying cat. This made condolence visits even more than usually difficult – while gratified at the kindness of parishioners and neighbours, every several minutes she found herself battling the impulse to rise and flee the room. But this morning Elizabeth outdid her in restlessness. Her face was wan, and there were shadows under the famously brilliant eyes, now immortalised by one of London’s most sought-after portrait artists.

  ‘I cannot comprehend the enormity of your loss, my dearest Charlotte,’ she said. ‘To lose a beloved child, and a son, not yet four years old! It is too cruel, no matter how much reason – and indeed the teachings of your husband, and the convictions of mine – may attempt to console or soothe.’

  She paused and wrung her hands. With the detached part of her brain, Charlotte registered that she had never seen her friend do such a thing before. Elizabeth went on, ‘I do not mean to burden you. That would be unfeeling, a piece of unkindness. But I must impose on our friendship, your patience, and good heart, even at such a time. I miscarried a few months ago. The baby was a boy.’

  Charlotte raised her head, surprised and yet not surprised, uncertain what to say. Lizzy burst out, ‘It is the second child I have lost in these past three years. Charlotte, forgive me – while I cannot pretend to understand what it must be to have a living, breathing child perish, how my own losses gnaw at me!’

  Now the brilliance of Elizabeth’s eyes owed something to the tears that trembled in them. ‘It has been a shock – a ruinous shock – to realise how ill-prepared I was for marriage. How ill-prepared both Mr Darcy and I were. We believed our regard for each other had been tested, that it had grown to overcome all that stood in our way – the distinctions between us, the differences in our temper, his pride, my hasty prejudice. He had done so much for me, my family. His love was in no doubt, and the strength of my feelings matched his. There was nothing, I thought, that we could not discuss, could not face together. I was a fool.’

  She sat down at last on the sofa next to her friend, and said, ‘I did not see the truth that stared me in the face: a great man, from a great family, marries for one reason primarily: to beget heirs. Neither of us gave this any thought. We believed that children, a son – or two or three – would present themselves as if by magic. But it has been five and a half years, and there is still no infant in the nursery. I walk through the chambers of that great house, knowing myself to be the envy of many who do not consider me fit for the office of being its mistress. And I pass beneath the eyes of all those portraits, those Darcy ancestors, all witness to my failure, watching me break the chain.’

  Charlotte murmured the necessary words of hope and encouragement, or at least she tried to, but Lizzy went on: ‘I live in terror of one of the stone-faced doctors who attend me opining that there can be no more children, or attempts to bear one. If that happens, Charlotte, I swear I shall jump off the Pemberley bridge.’

  She began to weep in earnest, as her friend sat dry-eyed beside her. ‘Fitzwilliam would have been better off wedded to a brood mare. For that is what is required for these great estates, these honourable names. Succession. And my husband is of course too much the gentleman to reproach me for my failure in this regard. So we do not and cannot speak of it. And we speak less and less.’

  Charlotte’s mind took a vertiginous leap: she had not yet thought of Tom’s death in these terms – of what it might presage for her daughters. And even as she stumbled through the required assurances that Lizzy would surely indeed soon have issue, the thought occurred to her at the same time as her friend put it into words: ‘But what if I give birth to a girl?’

  Charlotte felt an old rage rise up in her. Tom was beyond her help, but this was a new anxiety. With her beloved and damaged son gone, and with him the security of his inheritance of the Longbourn estate, how could she safeguard her daughters? How was she to assure them a home and the respectability this proffered, beyond the lottery of matrimony? If Lizzy had daughters, they would at least have considerable dowries – in which case, Pemberley could go to Bonaparte for all Charlotte cared.

  Her mind scoured clear by grief,
the reality of her situation came into sharp focus: she and her daughters were at risk of falling into the same trap that had yawned before Elizabeth’s family, the Bennets: their future inheritance entailed away from them because they were mere females.

  Why had she never taken Mrs Bennet’s anxiety, the ‘nerves’ they had all mocked, seriously? The business of her life was to find her daughters husbands: what else could it be, given the blind roll of the dice that exposed them all to the kind of poverty perhaps worse than that seen in hovels; that of genteel beggary, of imposing upon distant male relatives who had their own children to set up in life, of being grateful for a roof, no matter how reluctantly or resentfully it was offered.

  Elizabeth’s marriage had changed all that; indeed, her sister Jane’s alliance with Mr Bingley alone had offered the remaining unmarried Bennet sisters, Mary and Kitty, a substantial degree of protection. While they might one day lack a home to call their own, they need never fear want as long as they could reside with one or the other of their elder sisters. But on the other hand, Charlotte could see there was no way out for the Darcy line; only males could inherit an estate as profitable, as visible as Pemberley.

  Charlotte set her lips. Silently, she vowed to spend the rest of her days circumventing the law of the land so that her daughters need fear neither penury nor charity, as had been the case for herself and her sisters, and indeed many of the daughters of the families she knew. She had no idea how to proceed in this regard, and little understanding of what instruments could be useful, but she knew better than most what dogged determination might do.

  Besides, she had an unexpected example of success in this regard, perhaps even an ally, right next door: Lady Catherine had inherited Rosings upon becoming a widow. Even more impressive, she had secured the inheritance for her daughter, Anne de Bourgh. And if Lady Catherine, with her strictures on rank and society, could manage such a thing, surely it was within the bounds of possibility?