The Heiress

by Molly Greeley

  “The roof leaked here; my father was forever having it patched,” Papa said, pointing. “And there was so little light that we used candles even on the brightest days.” His hand hovered above my shoulder but did not touch down. “I wanted a more comfortable home for myself and my family, but I also wanted to create something befitting the de Bourgh name. When Rosings Park is yours, I am sure you will make your own improvements.”

  He let his hand drop then, resting it heavily on my narrow shoulder for a moment. Beside my father, I felt even smaller than usual; at twelve years old, the top of my head reached just past his shoulder. He could have fit more than two of me inside himself.

  When Rosings Park is yours. Contradictions clicked against my teeth. Rosings Park was mine; it was the only place, save our brief journey to the seaside, that I had ever known. But the thought that it would be mine—my responsibility—caused a quiver of anxiety inside my chest. And, too, was Mamma’s constant refrain, that my cousin Fitzwilliam and I would marry—in which case, as the law dictated, our two estates would belong to him.

  Do you think I can? I wanted to say—meaning, could I do all the things my father did to keep Rosings Park whirring like a child’s top, profitable for us and for the people who worked its land? My cheeks pinked.

  But before I could begin to figure out how to voice these thoughts, Papa released me and looked around the hall, as if searching for something. “Why are you on your own?” he said, as if only just noticing. “Where is that pretty little governess of yours?”

  “She went to her chamber to fetch a warmer wrap,” I said. “We are going to take a turn in the garden.” I frowned. “Miss Hall is not pretty. Mamma said so.”

  My father looked amused. “Did she, now?”

  “Yes. She said . . . it is the first duty of any governess, to not be too handsome.”

  Papa shook his head, smiling a little; and then his face grew serious. “And how do you like your not-too-pretty governess?”

  He never asked my opinion of anything; I felt certain that I must give the correct answer now. “Very much,” I said, but the words were muttered, and my eyes dropped so Papa would not see the lie in them.

  But he put his fingers under my chin, tapping there so my head came up. My nostrils filled with the smell of his glove—leather and oil and horse—before he took his hand away. It was the second time he had touched me in only a few minutes; I could not remember when last he had touched me, could only remember brief dry buffs of lips to brow, the occasional, merry tugging of me onto his lap. But that was when I was small; I was becoming a young lady now, or would soon, at least. And Papa was so rarely home now. I thought of his large form galloping away across the fields; even when he was at Rosings, he was never within my reach.

  Papa looked at me for a moment. Then he sighed in a way that told me he was ready to move on with his day. His gaze drifted down the hall toward his book room, and I took an instinctive step closer to him, trying to draw his eye back to me. The book room was where Papa and Mr. Colt conducted business; it was not a place for ladies or children.

  “Whether you like your governess is immaterial,” he said, looking back at me with clear reluctance. “You have the privilege of a good education. And you will need it. Your husband will have the running of a grand estate, and you will have the running of the household. These stones”—with a motion that took in the house that he had built—“those fields out there, that rich timber—all of it will be yours. You need a sharp mind if you are to help your husband secure the future of this estate for your children, and their children. And on and on.”

  Ah, I thought. My husband. My jaw tightened.

  And then my father stepped back, closing off from me as surely as if he had already withdrawn to his book room and shut the door behind him.

  “We must improve your penmanship,” Miss Hall said.

  It was an overcast day and I had been squinting at my embroidery, trying to understand at what point my thread became so dreadfully tangled. I looked up to find Miss Hall grimacing at some lines of scripture that I had copied out for her the day before; she held the paper between her thumb and forefinger as if it were a soiled petticoat.

  My body pulsed with indignation—could I do nothing right? Other than mathematics—Miss Hall had taken to giving me increasingly complicated problems to solve, involving bushels of this or that, and all manner of questions about crop yields and the cost of lengths of fabric—our lessons were still mostly exercises in frustration, for both teacher and pupil. Nothing came as easily to me as figuring, and while Miss Hall praised my quickness with numbers—“You’ve a mathematical mind!” she exclaimed just yesterday, making me blush and shake my head, wondering what on earth Mamma would say to hear such a pronouncement—she was quick to remind me that hard work could, if only I let it, make up for a deficiency in natural ability in my other subjects.

  “Put aside your”—Miss Hall looked down at my work, lifting one eloquent eyebrow—“embroidery for now. We are going to write letters.”

  “Why?” I said, not troubling to moderate my tone.

  Miss Hall gave me the same look she gave the embroidery. “Because you need to practice if you are to improve. Lady Catherine”—and here she rose from her chair, moving about the room with confusing swiftness, gathering pens, ink, and paper, setting them out on the table so that she and I would be squared off, facing each other like street fighters—“may have decided that you are above learning to draw or play, but even she must agree that a lady who cannot pen a legible line is a useless creature.”

  She pulled out a chair for me, hard enough that the front legs thumped against the floor. I lowered myself into it warily, watching as Miss Hall sat across from me, dipped her pen, and began writing the date at the top of her page in a slow and elegant hand. After a minute she looked up, sighing when she saw that I had yet to write a word.

  “What is the problem, Miss de Bourgh?”

  My jaw hurt where my back teeth pressed too hard together; I unclenched them with an effort. “I . . . I have no one to whom I can write.”

  Something—something—flickered in Miss Hall’s eyes, there and gone too quickly for me to read it. But when she spoke, her voice was gentler than usual.

  “Surely you must. You have cousins, do you not? Aunts?”

  “One aunt living,” I said. “And . . .” I paused, counting in my head. “Four cousins. But we do not correspond.” Though it was amusing to wonder, if only for a moment, what my family would think if they received a letter from me. I could see the puzzlement on Aunt Fitzwilliam’s handsome face; the baffled panic in my cousins’.

  Another sigh, louder than the first. “Very well. You may write to me, if you must—but your hand must be steady, and you must think of something to say. No recitations; your own words, Miss de Bourgh.”

  For some reason, the suggestion was startling. My shoulders hunched; Miss Hall must be mocking me.

  “Will you write back?” I said. My voice was strange; I had never heard myself sound so hard, or so daring.

  Miss Hall considered me for a moment. “Yes,” she said. “I will write back.”

  I nodded slowly. Miss Hall nodded in return, then bent her head over the letter she had already begun. Watching her, I wondered to whom she was writing; and then I glanced down at my own blank page. I could, I supposed, ask.

  I smiled a little, and dipped my pen.

  Chapter Eight

  I slipped my latest letter into the school room letter box before hurrying out to meet Miss Hall in the rose garden for the morning’s lesson. On fine days, Miss Hall thought fresh air could only do me good, and so we spent as much time in the garden as possible, always with hats and shawls at the ready. There had been many such little changes in the years since Miss Hall arrived; small enough that Mamma either did not notice them, or did not think them important enough to rail against, but large enough that my world felt wider, just a bit. I even had ponies and a phaeton of my own, which I
was allowed to drive into Hunsford village in the mornings before my first dose of medicine. They were a gift from Papa on my seventeenth birthday, even-tempered beasts, which would—he said with a pointed look at Mamma, who raised immediate objections to the scheme—be easy even for a delicate young lady to handle. I thought, rather hopefully, that Papa would teach me to drive the ponies himself, but one of the grooms was given the honor instead.

  Today I left the letter box—a fanciful thing we created from an old hatbox when our correspondence first started—and hurried out into the garden where Miss Hall waited, as promised. She was bent over a book; I sat on the bench beside her, but Miss Hall did not look up until she reached the end of the page, and though I leaned over a little, Miss Hall’s sleeve and fingers hid most of the page from my view. So instead of reading, I found myself studying those fingers—long, much longer than my own, tipped by round nails, neatly trimmed, and affixed at the roots to hands that were soft and dimpled at the knuckles. The sleeve was muslin, ending at an elbow as dimpled as the hand, leaving Miss Hall’s forearm bare to the wrist, pinkish skin above and blue veins below. Her hair was smoothed back into a modest arrangement, and from this angle I could see the curve of her cheek and the tip of her long, straight nose. I exhaled, fidgeting, and finally, finally Miss Hall turned to look at me with an exasperated expression.

  “You,” she said, closing the book with a thump, “are late.”

  I smiled. “Not very.” Feeling rather daring, I reached across and turned the book over so I could see its title. “The Seasons,” I murmured, and glanced up at my governess. “What is it about?”

  “It’s poetry.” Miss Hall set the book aside, signaling quite clearly that the discussion, such as it was, was over; and though this in no way answered my question, I subsided, only frowning a little.

  “Are you ready to begin your French lesson?” Miss Hall said.

  I sighed, suddenly weary, leaning my head back so that I could see the whispering movement of the leaves and petals above her head. The gardens in general my father allowed to be Mamma’s domain, and under her direction they were very beautiful in a precise sort of way. But occasionally, Papa got notions into his head; over the years, he had instructed our head gardener to add bits of whimsy to the otherwise straight and geometric lines of the beds. A hermitage, round-walled and half-overtaken by quick-growing vines, stood in a little hollow near the woods. The rose garden where we currently sat was adorned by classical sculptures Papa ordered, sculptures with long, curving lines, round-limbed women whose state of general undress displeased my mother. The one nearest us now had one shoulder hitched invitingly; I liked to imagine she looked back at me with a fascination equal to my own as I studied her.

  I disliked French; was embarrassed by the clunky way my English-rooted voice spat out syllables that, from Miss Hall, fell quite naturally—like jewels and flowers from the mouth of the girl in one of Nurse’s old stories. I was more like the sister cursed to gag up vipers and toads with every word she spoke; my French landed with moist splats. But:

  “Oui,” I said.

  When Nurse appeared with my medicine, Miss Hall, who had been laughing in exaggerated exasperation at my pronunciation only moments before, went suddenly quite still, her mouth tightening at the corners. I kept one eye on my governess and one on my nurse, who was making her way along the garden path very slowly, grumbling to herself, the ruffles on her cap and apron bobbing as she moved. Her gouty leg must be paining her.

  “Here you are, Miss,” Nurse said, and handed over the glass of laudanum. She fanned her face with one hand and fixed Miss Hall with a sharp look. “What a long walk that was! Too far for this old body. Does her ladyship know you are out here? It isn’t good for the young mistress to be outside during the heat of the day.”

  Miss Hall had picked up her book again and was leafing through its pages with every appearance of indifference. “We are in the shade,” she said. “Miss de Bourgh is quite safe from overheating, I think.” She looked up at Nurse with a mild expression. “And you needn’t have made the walk yourself; surely a maid could have been sent?”

  A scandalized intake of breath. “Trust a maid with Miss Anne’s medicine? Absolutely not.” Nurse nodded to me. “Drink up, Miss.”

  I leaned my head back, swallowed the liquid, and put the empty glass back into Nurse’s waiting hands. Nurse nodded once and set off, grumbling again, all affronted dignity and tipping a little from one side to the other as she favored one leg above the other. Whether it was my mother or my father who had made the decision to let Nurse stay on beyond the point that I actually needed her, I had no idea, but Nurse still clung fiercely to her duty as the only person who knew exactly how to dispense my doses.

  Miss Hall was frowning at her book. This part of the garden was shaded by climbing roses, leaves and blossoms forming a dense thicket overhead, and I reclined back against the bench, looking up at them. But my governess’s silence felt close and heavy, and I could not enjoy the sight and scent as I usually did.

  The first time Nurse arrived in the school room with a little glass of medicine, Miss Hall had stared openly; now, after five years together, she only shut up our books as soon as we heard the older woman’s heavy tread outside the school room door, looking away, as if from something obscene, when I cupped my hands around the glass and drank down the red-brown liquid inside. I had ignored my governess’s responses for years now; but sitting here, as Miss Hall pretended to read her book while simmering with something—something I could not place, but that still pricked me with a shame I did not entirely understand—I felt reckless enough to speak.

  “What bothers you so?” I said, staring up at the roses.

  Beside me, Miss Hall went still as a hare feeling itself caught in a hunting bird’s sight. “Bothers me?”

  I shifted so that I was facing Miss Hall. “You always look so—disapproving. Whenever Nurse brings my medicine.”

  Miss Hall ran her fingers along the spine of her book as if she were stroking a cat. “I have never asked this before,” she said, “because I did not feel it was my place. But . . . why do you take it?”

  “Why do I—” I blinked. “Because I need it. I am too ill to do without it.”

  “But you seem perfectly well in the mornings, before you take your first dose. I have . . . long wondered why Lady Catherine and Sir Lewis do not use these hours when you are fully awake and aware to allow me to teach you some of the—” But here she stopped, fingertips pressing her lips closed.

  Yet I could guess what she might have said, for Miss Hall had hinted at it before, if never quite coming to the point of speaking out of turn. In the afternoons, while I rested, Miss Hall practiced the pianoforte—Mamma allowed that an older instrument, long out of use, should be brought to the school room for my governess’s use. More than once, Miss Hall tried, despite my mother’s injunctions against anything too vigorous, to encourage me to learn to play as well; but I found my stumbling fingers too stupid, the notes twisted and jarring and not coming easily enough to satisfy.

  “That is why you must practice,” Miss Hall said, irritation tucked just behind her teeth. But my mother had spent years mourning the fact that Aunt Darcy’s vaunted musical ability could never be given full expression in her niece, for I was too unwell to withstand the many hours required to master an instrument. When presented with the confusion of notes Miss Hall copied so carefully, it was far easier to let Mamma’s voice, always so assured of the rightness of its own words, drown out Miss Hall’s.

  But Miss Hall surprised me now. “You are to inherit—all of this,” she said, sweeping one arm out in a gesture that encompassed the house and extensive grounds, and the acres and acres of woods and farmland beyond. “You should be—learning about your inheritance, learning how to manage a great estate. If you were not stupefied . . .”

  I shook my head. “I am to marry Fitzwilliam,” I said. “He shall have the management of Rosings.”

  “Ah, yes. Yo
ung Mr. Darcy.”

  There was a snideness to Miss Hall’s tone that I did not like. She had, of course, met my cousin on each of his five yearly visits to Rosings Park since her arrival; he had done nothing to merit such derision. “We have been betrothed since I was an infant—”

  But Miss Hall waved my words away like pipe smoke. “I apologize. It is only . . .” She clutched her book in both hands so that the binding must press painfully into her palms. I had the sudden, disconcerting urge to loosen my governess’s fingers and smooth away the red marks left by the book’s edges. To lean against Miss Hall’s shoulder as my drops began to work, to enjoy the warmth of her, the soft give of flesh. Miss Hall looked at me, and I flushed.

  “It is only—I truly wonder, sometimes, what you might be without your medicine, Miss de Bourgh.” If anything, Miss Hall held her book more tightly, leaning forward a little, her words quick and quiet and unfamiliarly urgent. “I have some . . . experience with such things. I have not wanted to say anything—again, it is not my place, I know this—but you are given too little credit, I think, and it is hard to see, to sit daily beside you and see you and your family squandering all that you have.” She shook her head. “I think—Miss de Bourgh, forgive me this impertinence, but I truly think that it is your medicine, and not your constitution, that sickens you. My brother—he was badly injured many years ago in an accident with a cart. He was given laudanum for the pain, and he became . . . quite a slave to it.”

  I shifted away from her. You have no idea what I endure, I thought, but forced myself to say instead, “I feel most . . . clearheaded when I have not yet taken my first dose. But I become very ill if I go too long without it.” Proof, I was certain, that my drops were vital to my well-being.

  “Pain?” Miss Hall said in a conversational tone, and despite myself, I warily nodded. “Violent chills? Sweats?”