***
Back in the studio, Evie felt discombobulated. She opened the French doors to let the air in and put the canvasses back into their stacks. She could not recall the last time she had felt relaxed. She let the sensation wash over her. It brought back memories of childhood and a world before her parents died when her sister didn’t need twenty-four-hour care and the house didn’t have ramps and bars all over it—memories of when a guy being interested in her was just a guy being interested in her and not a series of “what-ifs” so complex and convoluted that it made her head ache. She would not let herself fall into the trap of self-pity; it wasn’t her.
As she washed up his cup, she realised how much he had surprised her. It was hard to believe that he was the same man who had come strutting into the Cork Street gallery. Without a crowd, he was much kinder, and he hadn’t turned a hair when he saw Clemmie clamped inside her wheelchair. There was none of the toe-curling embarrassment and the bizarre, whispered, patronising pleasantries they had all become accustomed to. He had talked to Clemmie as if she was a normal girl, and the smile on her lips had lit up the room. Evie felt warm from it, but she could not allow herself to think of him as a man or even a friend. She focused her mind hard on him as a potential collector. He had said he wanted to buy two of her ballerina studies, and she took them aside, thinking she would give them a clean. One wasn’t framed, and she contemplated making him a frame that could be treated as part of the work as a whole. She could tell what he liked from the pictures he had homed in on.
It was coming up for six o’clock, and she was just about to lock up and go home when the phone rang its ear-splitting ring again.
“Hello, Evie Pemberton.”
“Hi, Evie. It’s Charlie. I…erm…I just wanted to say ‘thanks’ again, and I wondered what you were doing on Saturday evening?”
There was a silence, and a vision of his confident face appeared before Evie. Her thoughts began to race.
“It’s just that my cousin has just started seeing a ballerina. She is with the English National Ballet. They have four tickets to see Onegin at Covent Garden, and I thought you might like it. They were going to take my aunt and uncle, but my aunt hasn’t been well, and her doctor says she needs rest. It would be the four of us if you’re up for it?”
He was obviously at pains to emphasise that it wasn’t a date, and for a confused moment, she did not know how to react to this. It did not take long to resolve her emotions. Evie loved the ballet and loved Covent Garden, and her feet almost left the floor in anticipation.
“I’d love to. Thank you.”
Chapter 11
August 15, 1820, Pemberley
I could not have picked up my pen at this time yesterday. Today is a different story. I have managed to get up and move around my chamber a little. I am tired, and my back aches like the low moan of an orchestra tuning up. I would like to reach down to check my ankles, but it is uncomfortable to do so. This morning, Hannah said that they were still rather swollen, and they do not feel right even now. Should I walk to the window or attempt turns of the ankle as Mama suggested? I reprimand myself for being so vain, but I do not want Fitzwilliam to see them. The feeling that I have not pleased him sickens me. I am unsteady with the nausea of it. I can recall the touch of his hand upon my body, and I want to scream.
Mama has taken Beatrice and is presently cradling her in my sitting room. I can hear the pitter-patter of her slippers upon the carpet and the soft lilt of her chatter through the door. Occasionally, she makes some remark to Nanny or Hannah, and if I did not feel so wretched, I would laugh at the imperious tone she adopts with them. Although I have made merry at her expense all my life, I am now contrite, for I have never understood my mama better than I understand her now. It was Georgiana’s suggestion that we name our fourth daughter Beatrice. I wanted him to name her and waited, waited for him to make his preference known. If he had named her, as he named Anne, Emma, and Frances then it would have made it better, more bearable. It would have been as though he were saying, “She is mine, and I do not mind that she is another girl.” But he did not. He smiled a pale smile at me as I lay in bed. He peered at her, his hands clasped behind his back. The skin of his face seemed to tighten against his bones, and the blood seemed to drain from my head correspondingly. When she cried a hungry wail, he turned away. I tried to recall whether or not he had turned away thus from our other daughters and could not.
I cannot rid my mind of that awful day in Lambton. At the time, I did not record it here. I fancied that, if I did not write it down, then it would be as if the mortifying business had not occurred. But that was silly of me, was it not? For we cannot wish the past away. We cannot undo it by way of silence. Did I not say when this book was begun that it was to be a faithful record of my days? It was wrong of me to rebel against my own rule. It was also futile, for it has assisted me not at all. The recollection of the event haunts me now just as it did when it happened—more so even, for it has come to seem prophetic as well as embarrassing.
I had been large with the babe but still fit to be seen and to move about. Jane and Mr. Bingley were nearing the end of their stay with us. Jane and I had chattered, wandered, and laughed; it was as though we had not been separated for nearly a year. In the mornings, we sat beside each other and wrote our letters, and in the afternoons, I dozed in my sitting room while she worked her embroidery. Mr. Bingley and my husband kept to themselves, riding after breakfast and sitting up after dinner with glasses of whiskey. One morning towards the end of their stay, Jane expressed a wish to go into Lambton. She had some baby clothes to deliver to a Mrs. Waugh who is an old acquaintance of our aunt Gardiner. Aunt Gardiner had grown up in Lambton, and I was dimly aware that her family had been friendly with the Waughs, who lived in the village opposite the rectory. Jane thought to go alone, but I would hear nothing of that. I was feeling marvellous, and Hannah needed to go into Lambton for ribbon in any event. It was decided that we should all three travel together with Hannah attending to her errands while Jane and I visited the Waugh household.
The parcel of tiny caps and smocks was well received, and we had a lovely tea with the young family, whom I had met on a few occasions. Mrs. Waugh’s mother had grown up with our aunt, and we were told they had played together like sisters. I came bearing a basket, but Mrs. Waugh had made a lovely sweet loaf, which we enjoyed. The children of the house scampered happily about us and stared in wonder at our carriage parked outside on the road. I had begun to feel rather fatigued, and a slight twinge had begun in my side. Confident that Hannah would be finished with her tasks and waiting by the carriage, Jane and I stood, bid our farewells, and made for the door. As soon as it opened, Hannah ceased her discussion with the driver and moved towards me, her beige cape billowing slightly in the breeze.
“Are you ready to depart, Mrs. Darcy?”
“Yes, Hannah, we are—”
The woman seemed to come from nowhere. I saw her low, wide person amble towards me, a misshapen stick and a sprig of flowers gripped like weapons in her red, raw hand. Quite unexpectedly, she alarmed me, and I must have drawn back. She let out a laugh that splintered the air, and I felt Jane’s hand rest lightly on my back.
“Mrs. Darcy, ha!” She extended her gnarled forefinger towards my belly, and I shrank back.
“You will need to keep on with these until you give your master what he needs, Mrs. Hoity-Toity. There have always been Darcys at Pemberley, and they won’t be stoppin’ for you!”
Hannah’s lean arm came from nowhere to push her away. The driver leapt down from his seat, his face ablaze with righteous indignation. I believe that he must have heard the words, for he looked too mortified to speak himself. Hannah suffered no such disability.
“Get away! Shoo!” she said as she put her body between the old lady and me.
The door to the carriage was open and—shaking, befuddled, har
dly knowing what to think—I climbed in. Jane and Hannah followed, and we were away. The words of the strange old woman rang in my head like a bell that would not stop. “There have always been Darcys at Pemberley.” My husband is a Darcy as was his father before him, but where is my son? And what shall I do if he never comes? The unanswered question sits on my belly like a boulder. It hounds me night and day. Now, I realise in horror that it is even worse than I thought. It is not merely a private trial for me to be battled and borne. It is not merely the question of making the boy-child and keeping love alive between Fitzwilliam and me. It is a matter of public business to be gossiped about and speculated on by strangers. It is a thing commonly spoken of by those around us like the price of meat in the market and the weather in the fields at harvest. I tried to speak with greater calmness than I felt.
“Hannah, who was that woman?”
“She is just a mad old crone, madam, well known in the village. She makes a business of spouting nonsense and…” She looked at Jane and then trained her eyes back on me. “Well, nobody heeds her words, madam.”
This was no comfort to me when I knew that, on this occasion, she was right: there have always been Darcys at Pemberley.
“I see. In that case, we shall say nothing more about it. But I do not wish Mr. Darcy to know of this. Hannah? Jane?”
I looked at them both hard, and they knew not to argue with me. If Fitzwilliam knew that I had been accosted by a stranger in the open street about my failure to provide him with an heir, he would be angry, but his anger would avail me nothing, and his pity I could not bear.
So it was that, some weeks hence, the event had not been spoken of. My poor body had swollen to a great size, and I was upon my bed. The village midwife stood over me, winked at Hannah, and said, “It shall be like shelling a pea, Mrs. Darcy.” She had also said that it “would not be yet a’while.” As she said these things, she had raised her eyebrows and tilted her pink round face to one side. These predictions, it turned out were quite wrong. That very afternoon, I began to feel the familiar stirrings and tightenings about my person, the odd discomforts, the overwhelming sense of what was about to happen. We were in the small dining room, and Mama, who had been with us for two weeks, was asking about the number of bedrooms at Broughton Park. My mind narrowed and focussed on the matter at hand. I schooled my body to show no signs until nuncheon finished and Fitzwilliam had gone to his study. His tall frame walked out of the room and away like a flame dying down in the grate. Did he look weary, or did I imagine it? A strange spasm came in the lower part of me, and I pressed my fingers to the edge of the mahogany table.
“Mama—”
“I would not have you think that the credit of a house is all in the number of bedrooms of course, Lizzy! Indeed, it is not. After all, Bollington, elegant though it is, is actually quite ill served for chambers above stairs. But on the other hand, there is a standard below which a really great house cannot fall and—”
“Mama, I think I shall lie down. I am not feeling well.”
A look of anguish for more than the business itself crossed her face.
“Of course, child. Come, stand.”
She gestured to me, and at length, I rose. Her hand came to the silk of my sleeve and brushed off some imagined fluff. For a moment, she was silent, and her eyes met mine, but when I looked away in pain, she began to chatter in her usual manner. The lace of her cap bobbed about, and she wanted assurance that I had eaten enough, and did I want my shawl, and how many hours had I slept the previous night, and so on. As soon as we were in the privacy of my chamber, she closed the door behind me. I crouched on the edge of the bed, dug my fingers into the fabric of the bedspread, and turned to her.
“Mama, please call for Hannah.”
She came, and the midwife came too. The afternoon stretched into the eve, stretched into the night until I was sick with pain and sweat and fatigue. About my person I felt hands unfastening my clothes, Mama’s soft fingers unbuttoning my sleeves, Hannah stripping me down to my shift without seeming to look at the swollen, straining, purple-lined indignity of my body. There were sounds in the room of trickling water and closing doors and linen being shaken out. There was the solid rumble of words exchanged between Mama and Hannah and the maids and the midwife. Were those footsteps outside the door? More than anything there was the ceaseless scream of pitiless agony within me. It raged, and I cried out. Before my eyes, the canopy over the bed shifted shape, and its colours became sharp and angry. Voices around me grew inaudibly quiet and deafeningly loud. The sheets were taken from under me, a great wet wad like a snake beneath my legs.
From somewhere my voice came forth.
“Mama, Mama, it is very bad…”
“Hush, child.”
“But it is very bad, Mama. It is worse. It is worse than before. It is worse than the girls.”
“I know, Lizzy…hush, child.”
She ran a warm, dry cloth across my brow and looked at Hannah who was busying herself with some task on the other side of the bed.
“But it is much worse than the girls…what do you think…?”
“Madam,” said Hannah, stopping her work and fixing me with the steady, green stare of her eyes. “I beg you not try to talk, madam. I fear it shall profit you naught.”
A fresh wave of bone-shaking, frame-splitting pain took me, and I said no more.
When the matter was finally concluded, I fancied that I had been there for a hundred years. Mama held my hand and mopped my brow, and Hannah and the midwife saw the blood-spattered, flesh-squeezed, first moments of my child’s life. The pain was almost beyond me, and in my mind, I clung to the side of a great incline, desperate to survive. The cry went up.
“It’s out. The baby’s out. Well done, Mrs. Darcy. Linen, Milly!”
My head flew back on the soft cushion of my pillow, and my breath came hard, fast, and loud. The cry of my babe soared like a flare on a battlefield. My arms reached up, withered by exhaustion. In the corner of my eye, Hannah was folding blankets around the child, tucking and securing them. When she looked up and advanced towards me with the warm bundle in her arms, I knew what her words would be.
“Congratulations, madam. You have a daughter.”
Chapter 12
London, 16 August 2014
Evie considered herself in the mirror and wondered whether she had been right to let Milena take charge of her appearance for the evening. She was wearing a pale blue shift dress, which had cost more than she could afford, and unfamiliar make-up coloured her face. Momentarily, she worried that she had put too much on or that it was too garish, but the simple fact was that she was so used to seeing her bare face staring back at her that it was a shock to see it made up. She stuffed her phone, bank card, and keys into a clutch bag and recalled her mum saying that nothing ruins an outfit like a great, clunking handbag slung over the shoulder. She looked okay, but was she getting her hopes up? Was she being ridiculous? Milena had tried to force her into heels, but at that, she drew the line. On went her flat, gold ballet pumps, and that was dressed up enough as far as she was concerned. He had texted that morning to say that he’d get a cab and pick her up at five thirty so that they had time for a drink before the performance. She thought of how expensive a cab from Notting Hill to Covent Garden by way of Fulham would be and shoved some cash into her clutch bag. He had made it clear that this wasn’t a date, and she should not behave as if it were. The stairs creaked as she walked down and joined the girls in the dining room.
“Lena, who is this beautiful woman? I didn’t hear the doorbell.” With this, Clemmie smiled broadly, and Evie was ashamed to think of how she had longed to get out of the house on so many nights.
“You look lovely, Evie. You’ll knock ’em dead, as people say.”
“Milena!”
“I know, I know. It’s not a date. Even if it looks like a
date, and he thinks it’s a date, and you look like you are going on a date, it’s not a date, I know…”
At that moment, the doorbell really did ring. Evie headed towards the door, unlatched it, and there he was.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
It occurred to her that, if this evening was to be enjoyable, they would have to break through the “hi” thing. Evie had never had a problem making conversation, and she wasn’t going to be beaten by Charlie Haywood. She looked at him squarely and decided to act as if she went out to the ballet with a devastatingly gorgeous man every night of her life. Spying the waiting black cab behind him, she grabbed her clutch and left the house, light with excitement.
All her life, Evie had loved being in black cabs. The back seat was like a bench and encouraged a sense of proximity to other passengers that was absent from ordinary cars. The cavernous inside suggested unlikely objects and journeys, and the sight of the city racing past the windows set off a song in her. The late afternoon rush was on, and buses jostled with taxis and bikes as people jay-walked and crossed the roads in flocks. The heat of the sun warmed Evie’s neck, and the breeze through the open window rustled her hair slightly. When they arrived, the cobbled square of Covent Garden was littered with street performers, late shoppers, and people heading home from matinee performances and shopping expeditions. The warm buzz of an evening just beginning and of souls who had been cooped up all day letting loose was all around. Evie realised how unfamiliar it was to her.
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