I rolled my pen between my forefinger and thumb. “Whatever my sister determines about other people, even if it is unflattering, cannot be far from the truth,” I said.
“That’s a very diplomatic and gracious answer.”
“One has to be diplomatic and gracious in my situation. It is by her kindness that I’m here at all, as you well know.”
“Then I shall leave you to continue your thinking and your imagining, Miss Bennet,” Darcy said, taking the blank sheets of paper he had come for, “while I embark on the considerably less enjoyable task of composing a letter to my solicitors.”
For the rest of the day, I could write nothing, distracted as I was with replaying the horrifying instant in which he’d lifted the first page of Leonora. I am convinced now that I’d merely imagined his censure, but in that moment, I had yet to recover from the humiliation of having my composition known to anyone other than myself. The next morning, as I worked on completing the third chapter, who but Darcy should come charging into the library again. I watched him collect three books from a nearby shelf before proceeding to stand in front of my desk.
“What do you write today?” he’d asked by way of greeting.
“Albert the Good King is dead,” I said without emotion. “Princess Leonora is now Queen of the Danes.”
“Will you tell me what’s happened since yesterday? Then you may take the break to rest your hand, which has turned red from so much writing.”
It was in this way that our meetings began—first, hesitating little accounts of what I’d written, timidly, even suspiciously dispatched while my fingers awkwardly shuffled the pages, and when I was done, he’d raise a few thoughtful questions, which he wondered if I could try to answer for him: What kind of poison killed the king? Other than Leonora, who stood to benefit from her father’s death? Where is Leonora’s mother, and why is she never mentioned? “But I don’t understand,” he’d sometimes say, crossing his legs, or “Could you repeat the end of that passage, please? I was still thinking about that other bit when you kept going.” In a moment of silliness or humor, his face could melt into almost childlike laughter, forsaking every trace of its former solemnity, and I would become pleased beyond all proportion with my meager talents. Chapters soon multiplied in number, as did revisions, and Darcy, perhaps accustomed to occupying a position of authority, oversaw the progress of my novel, now titled Leonora’s Adventures: Chronicles of a Tragic and Deeply Unhappy Queen, as a kind of personal editor.
* * *
—
LOST IN MY reminiscences, I didn’t hear Lizzy come in, or I would have straightened myself to assume a “studious” attitude. But by the time I was discovered, one slipper had already fallen over the back of the sofa with the guilty bang of a judge’s gavel, and the other, wobbling precariously from the end of my big toe, dangled over the dignified roses of the carpet. The mistress of the mansion came, mature of age, a graceful dame, whose easy step and stately port had well become a princely court, I recited from Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake.
“Oh, there you are, Mary,” Lizzy sighed. I sighed, too. Lolling was an indulgence akin to the first outbreak of birdsong in the ambivalent few weeks that mark the beginning of spring or the end of winter. Touch it, and the magic is instantly gone. From the sofa, I peered into Lizzy’s face and imagined myself a mewling, upside-down kitten. Pemberley had turned me soft and nonsensical.
Lizzy stared disapprovingly at my slipperless right foot. She did not look well. Overnight, her face had swelled, flattening the contours of her beautiful features, which at their prime had been almost mischievous in their loveliness. She who had walked miles in damp mud, who had famously trailed a petticoat crusted with horse dung and long grass into the breakfast parlor of Netherfield Park and appeared more gorgeous for the exercise, now moved with painstaking caution. She waved a hand over her distended stomach as if to calm it and puffed out her cheeks. Some unexplainable impulse made me wriggle my own slender, unoccupied body deeper into the sofa. Her transformation, which had begun nearly seven months ago, fascinated me, though I hated it all the same for what it had done and was doing to poor Lizzy. Her face showed no trace of the glow which is said to descend upon those who will soon become mothers. What was pregnancy except an illness which day by day obliterated a woman’s youth and beauty and good humor, all in the name of duty and honor? But Lizzy must have noticed my discomfort, for she looked from Walter Scott to my face and then smiled. Straightening to the extent she could, she gently reproved me for reading “like a worm left out to dry in the sun” and reminded me that I wasn’t a baby anymore, so could I please keep my shoes on properly without being told?
“I wish you would eat more,” I said, sitting up. “And rest. This can’t be good for you.”
At this, Lizzy’s eyes darkened, and a terrible expression came over her. “The other day I heard the servants talking about Lady Winthrop. She died, you know, in childbirth. They saved the child, a son, but she’d lost too much blood. Darcy knew her family. I heard she was a beautiful woman in the prime of health….”
“You mustn’t become morbid, Lizzy,” I urged.
“Oh, but, Mary, I feel so selfish.” And she covered her face with one hand, while I gripped the other. “I didn’t want it to happen this quickly, not so early in the marriage. I wanted to enjoy myself awhile longer. Is that selfish?”
“No, of course not, Lizzy.”
“Jane doesn’t feel as I do,” she complained, flashing into another mood. “Jane eats and sleeps very well, and her appetite has even increased. Just last week, she wrote me a letter, admitting she’d finished half a tray of trifles on her own. Can you imagine our sister doing such a thing! Then Bingley discovered her, and they had such a laugh at…I don’t know…how silly things looked that they finished the rest of the tray between them.” She lifted up her eyes, which were filled with tears, and as they fell and partitioned her face, some of the old beauty returned in fleeting traces. I gazed dumbly at her. “Mary…” she murmured, and I clung harder to her hand. She turned to me. A tender blue vein, a slender estuary in a sea of white, pulsed over her left temple.
“Mary,” she repeated, gasping. “I’m in so much pain, and I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die like Lady Winthrop!”
For all my sympathy, I was powerless to help her. It is easy to contemplate Death when he is only a small god that frequents the pages of literature and materializes in the sermons of religion. But when illness takes us, when the pall of darker and nebulous worlds threatens to vanquish the one in which we have lived since our birth, we shrink from it, and even the promise of heaven proves insufficient comfort.
I held Lizzy and told her she would not die. She would get better. A few months from now, a little Darcy would keep all of us too tired and happy in its bawling company for us to think any more sad thoughts, and I would be delighted to save the family the expense of a governess by offering my own humble services, if she would honor me with the post, and teach the child poor penmanship and even worse fingering at the piano. And so I went on, without stopping, until one or two things I said seemed to comfort and amuse her long enough to keep her from further crying. At last recovering, she rebuked herself for acting the hysterical fool, while laughing and dabbing her face with both of our handkerchiefs. She then revealed the real reason she had come to look for me in the library.
“Tomorrow we’re expecting a guest,” she said, becoming at once less Lizzy and more Pemberley in her attitude. “He may arrive very early in the morning; certainly, I am told, before midday.”
“Who?”
“You may remember him from the wedding—Colonel Fitzwilliam?” She paused to give me time to consider the name, which registered nothing. “Very gentlemanlike and tall,” she added, as if that would help! Yet another amazing attribute of the landed gentry is that its members tend to physically resemble each other, which is
what will happen when a relatively small and confined population of lords and ladies resolve to marry among themselves. Nearly all Darcy’s acquaintances (and now Lizzy’s) were either “very gentlemanlike and tall” or “very ladylike and tall.” What short persons they did host at Pemberley were commonly old, and as it is a well-known fact that elderly people shrink, there is the considerable possibility that they, too, had boasted at one time or another a superiority of height in addition to the many other inheritances of the idle rich.
“I’m sorry, Lizzy,” I said, trying not to smile. “There were a great number of people at your and Jane’s wedding, and I can’t remember everyone.”
“The middle son of an earl? Single? Around thirty?” Lizzy offered, growing increasingly desperate. I shook my head. “Cousin to Darcy? Nephew to Lady Catherine de Bourgh? Joint guardian of Darcy’s sister?” Like a dumb pupil, I seemed to advance no further in my lesson.
“He trod on Kitty’s dress and tore it when we were walking out to the carriages.” Spoken with an air of tired finality.
“Ah, yes, thank you. I know exactly who you’re talking about now.”
“Well, that’s Colonel Fitzwilliam,” Lizzy said wearily. “As you’ve been staying with us for some time now, I wish you’d make more of an effort to familiarize yourself with Darcy’s relations.”
“There would be no point to that, as you well know,” I replied, and hoped my saying so would be the end of it. “I’ve been blatantly ignored at every social gathering you’ve assembled since my arrival here. I can still never sustain conversation beyond the first course with the person seated next to me, and on the very worst occasions, it isn’t a quarter of an hour before he—yes, it’s no use to protest your innocence in this case, Lizzy, don’t think I haven’t noticed that it is always a he, and a single he at that, who occupies the chair next to mine—begins to look helplessly towards the other guests for some way out.”
“That’s as much your fault as it is his,” Lizzy snapped, sounding more like our mother than she perhaps intended. “A little more effort on your part would make a world of difference.”
“No amount of effort can convince a man to take an interest in a woman he has already determined to find uninteresting, unless she miraculously grows beautiful, which is unlikely, or is left ten thousand pounds by some deceased relative, which is more likely but not by very much,” I argued. It was a subject on which I held several impassioned opinions, a few of them controversial. “It would be easier to carve Pemberley out of a mountain with a fish knife. Men see with their eyes, not with their souls.”
“I only wish for you, Mary, the same happiness in marriage which has blessed me,” Lizzy said. “You dedicate yourself so fully to whatever you do that I know if you spent a little more effort in certain areas—”
“Hello, Aunt Philips. I could have sworn it was Lizzy who sat here just a minute ago.”
“Ha-ha,” Lizzy said, and I couldn’t tell whether she was annoyed with me or amused. “You’ve certainly missed a fine career as a fool in a king’s court.”
“I thought I was going to be governess to your hundred children, Mrs. Darcy,” I replied.
We argued and teased until neither of us had anything clever left to say, and conversation degenerated to idle speculation about how long Colonel Fitzwilliam would remain at Pemberley. We had just settled on a month when Mrs. Reynolds, Pemberley’s ancient and most estimable housekeeper, crowed from the doors of the library that Mrs. Russell and her daughter were come to visit Mrs. Darcy.
“Oh, not those two again,” I lamented. “How could they have anything new to say in just two days?”
“I wouldn’t underestimate Mrs. Russell, if I were you, Mary. She is a virtual sage when it comes to keeping her finger on the pulse of society.”
“Well, on pain of death, I shall not go,” I said, “unless I may bring my book and read quietly in front of them.”
Lizzy laughed. “They might reasonably take some offense if you did, dear Mary.”
My sister was led away on her swollen feet, a heaven-ordained vessel, though not even Mrs. Reynolds’s expert and fretful maneuvering of her patient around the library’s cluttered furniture could prevent Lizzy from launching some three to four battles between the sofa and the door. On a diminutive walnut table, a pair of obsidian Turkish dancers rattled their festive vengeance with smiling faces and outstretched arms. And beyond, an ornamental egg beset with sapphires and lapis lazuli rolled off its flimsy perch and into a carpet-bed of woolen chrysanthemums. A miniature warhorse handed down from Darcy’s paternal grandfather proved unequal to the earth-shattering force of Lizzy’s pregnant girth and toppled, defeated, onto its side. But the horse was soon righted, the egg restored unharmed to its jeweled pedestal, and the Turkish dancers’ tasseled fezzes cheerfully patted to assure them that peace was at hand before I was able to return to my sofa for another episode of aimless and leisurely lolling with, as Mrs. Reynolds put it so well, my “ladies in the lake and other medieval tomfoolery.”
Dinner at Pemberley was a very different affair from dinner at Longbourn. With Georgiana in Bath, that left only three to occupy Pemberley’s expansive dining parlor, and when conversation was lacking, the sound of a fork being laid to rest against one’s plate resonated like a bell in all corners of the room.
Since her marriage, Lizzy had unexpectedly acquired a taste for the finer things of life. The mud-splattered petticoat, along with other articles of clothing deemed perfectly charming while she was at Longbourn, had since been parceled out among the younger servants and replaced with lush frocks of intricate pattern and exotic dye. Even her slippers proved too delicate to tread any ground which was not either carpeted or a finely cultivated lawn.
The majority of her monthly allowance now went towards the purchase of items she most certainly would have ridiculed in the days when they had still been unaffordable to her. In the first week of my stay, we’d passed much of our time marveling at the various treasures she’d procured since her installment as mistress of one of England’s finest houses. In her richly furnished rooms, she had permitted me to finger the beadwork of her crepe dresses and the thousand colored threads which made up a single flower on the bodice of her gowns. Ornaments of pure gold proliferated in her several jewelry boxes, and strands of pearls, varying in luminescence and size, seemed as ordinary to Lizzy as cheap ribbons. As untidy as ever, she required two housemaids to clean her room each morning, and it was a common enough occurrence for one or the other to discover in the rug some dazzling brooch of rubies or a sapphire earring that had mislaid its partner.
Lizzy’s expanding figure, far from subduing her extravagance, seemed only to increase it, and this evening, she entered the dining parlor swathed in layers of crimson taffeta. At her throat hung a stone which matched her dress, and silver bangles made light music whenever she moved.
Darcy sat at the head of the table, looking much as he always did—tall, his cravat a sculptural marvel, face fixed in an attitude of thoughtful gravity.
This night, we were served brown soup, salad, and roast fowl. Mrs. Russell’s visit earlier in the day had excited Lizzy, and over a slippery chicken thigh, she expounded all that she had learned from the most feared gossip of Derbyshire.
“Mrs. Russell tells me that Lady Munroe has redone her gardens and is throwing a party to celebrate the occasion,” Lizzy said. “She was very surprised to hear that we hadn’t received an invitation. Don’t you think it peculiar, Darcy, that Mrs. Russell should be invited but not us? You’ve known the Munroe family much longer than she has.”
Darcy waited until he had swallowed his meat. “Oh, but we have, my dear. I meant to tell you but forgot. I have already declined on behalf of us both.”
Lizzy looked down at her plate. “I would have liked to go,” she said, pushing a fragmented joint with her knife.
“The party is in two weeks,”
Darcy replied calmly. “You’ll hardly be in a fit state to attend by then.” Venturing a small smile in his wife’s direction, he added, “There are some pleasures you’ll simply have to forgo during this period. After all, it can’t be too grievous to miss an ordinary garden party hosted by a garrulous crone.”
Lizzy continued to prod her chicken. “I’m sure you’re right, Darcy, as you always are. You see how fortunate I am, Mary,” she said, turning to me and grinning. “I have become the most delicate flower. I cannot take one step, even indoors, without Mrs. Reynolds supplying her hand, though I doubt she could bear my weight if I did fall. I cannot stick my head out of doors to feel the sun or the wind without one of my maids fetching a shawl to throw over my shoulders in the event I should faint dead away from a slight chill.”
“Now, now, Lizzy…” Darcy said, laughing, though his expression betrayed his discomfort.
“But you are right, Darcy,” Lizzy sighed. “Even if I did go, I don’t think I would be able to enjoy Lady Munroe’s party at all. No sooner would some elderly gentleman cough into his handkerchief than our poor servants would have to lift my person and transport me to a place of safety at least a hundred feet away. And, of course, my love, you would have to ascertain the freshness and cleanliness of every bit of cake, fruit, and pudding that passed my lips, and that would be a trial for you as well, which I think I shall spare you from enduring.”
I couldn’t withhold my laughter anymore. Whatever her physical condition, my sister had lost none of her wit, and it was hard not to be in awe of her during such moments.
“I am like the fabled princess in the tower,” Lizzy said dramatically, curling a lock of hair around her finger. She was really playing it up now, probably encouraged by my giggling. “But no prince shall rescue me, Mary, for as soon as I look out my window, they will see that I am large with child and give up their cause, riding their white stallions away.”
Mary B Page 15
