I blushed fiercely, but nodded again.
“My brother was the same,” Miss Hall said, voice gentle.
“But surely,” I said, and then stopped. Surely, if Miss Hall was right, Mamma—or Dr. Grant or my father, or any of the many relatives who showed their concern in hushed voices—should have known, should have realized—
Miss Hall—who never fidgeted—shifted a little on her seat. “I am not a doctor,” she said at last. “I do not know . . . That is, if you have some illness that is truly something only laudanum can control, then of course you must take it. I only know that those sensations are exactly what Richard experienced as the medicine left his body.”
My exhalation was a long and wavering thing. “How long . . . how long did they last?”
Miss Hall squinted. “I . . . am not precisely certain. Several days? Perhaps more? He was terribly miserable. But after, he was clearheaded as ever. And free from pain, except for the ache of his wounds.”
“He is better now,” I said. I sounded very stupid, and felt even more stupid than I sounded. Panic fluttered—I had been told I was ill all my life. I was ill. The wooden busk at the front of my stays was the only thing holding me upright on the bench.
“Yes, for the most part. He’s had a hard go of it, though. He stopped taking laudanum. But it was terribly difficult, and he has . . . returned to it more than once.”
“Please stop,” I said. The world had begun to feel hazy, which was just as well, for I did not like what Miss Hall was saying. There was no logic to it at all. Miss Hall subsided into unhappy silence, opening her book once more, though she glanced at me from time to time as I slipped sideways against the bench until I was curled with my head on its back.
The wind was a warm breath on my cheek, and I could hear the swish of tree branches from the woods down the hill. I had been frightened of those woods all my life; they seemed a fearsome place, shadowed and gloomy. I could never understand the impulse that drew people to seek out such untamed places, my mind skipping back to those old stories from my nurse, to wolves and bears and unnamed beasts with teeth and claws that pierced maidens’ delicate flesh. It was always the maidens being pierced, in the stories.
If I tilted my head just so, I could see the trees above the border of rosebushes, sturdy trunks and snarled branches, and how did they know which way to go, to grow, sending up bits of themselves in all directions, reaching over and around each other toward the sky? I held my breath, straining to hear the secrets whispered between the leaves.
Some of the trees’ branches were bare and brittle as bones, and I felt suddenly, unaccountably, like weeping, because oh, they were dying; slowly, perhaps, by human standards, but they were at the beginning of their end, little desperate shoots growing up from the bases of their trunks as if to make up for the skeletons at their crowns.
“Do you think they understand?” I said.
Miss Hall paused in her reading. “Do I think who understands what?”
“The trees.” I reached out a languid hand. “Do they know they’re dying?”
Miss Hall followed the trajectory of my pointing finger, and I watched her gaze flutter mothlike over the waving branches. “I think,” Miss Hall said in a careful voice, “that trees are not people.”
“Oh, but they are so beautiful,” I said.
“God created many things of beauty,” Miss Hall said. “That does not mean they think or feel as we do.”
I knew Miss Hall was wrong—could she not hear the sadness in the trees’ rustling talk?—but I also knew the uselessness of arguing, particularly when God had been invoked. I pushed my hat—its brim generous enough to cover my face and shoulders—back a little to let the breeze stir the hair at my temples, and closed my eyes, just for a minute.
“I have been thinking about what you said the other day.” Miss Hall turned her teacup in her hands; though it was empty, she made no move to fill it.
“What did I say?” I watched the cup go slowly ’round and ’round, watching the shifting tendons at the backs of my governess’s hands, watching the cup’s shadow shifting, too, against Miss Hall’s pale muslin lap.
“About the trees. About their—feelings.”
I did remember what I had said, but I could hear the trees now, their branches moving subtly, their distress quiet but clear. “Oh?”
“Yes. And I think—I think you ought to read this.” Miss Hall set her cup down and picked up a book, holding it out. I reached for it, my arm dropping a little under its weight. I recognized it at once as the book of poetry Miss Hall had been reading some days before, and looked at my governess inquiringly.
“Mr. Thomson writes of nature in a way I think you might appreciate. But his is a godly appreciation that you would do well to emulate. It is nature as religion; it is nature as God’s great work and glory.”
I grimaced reflexively, and then tried to smooth out my expression. I had read books of sermons, and the Book of Common Prayer itself, so often that I must have seemed a pious girl to anyone who cared to look. But church services were something I endured; religion was just another part of life, its rituals as necessary and inescapable as washing one’s neck or combing one’s hair. The Book of Common Prayer made me itch.
Miss Hall, though, was pious in truth and not merely by rote. I had spent half a decade, after all, sitting beside her in church, watching her when I ought to have been listening to the sermon. But she listened hard enough for both of us, listened with her whole body leaning a little forward, as if to ensure the cups of her ears caught every trickling.
“Mamma does not approve of poetry,” I said, and tried to hand the book back.
“These poems are well known, and all written in praise of God’s work. I am”—here Miss Hall stopped for a moment, considering—“willing to risk Lady Catherine’s displeasure in this. There is no frivolity to be found here, no silliness.”
I looked at her, and at the book in my hands; I suspected Miss Hall was wrong about what Mamma would say, if she knew. But I ran my fingers over the book’s spine, remembering how Miss Hall’s own fingers stroked it, and said, “Yes, Miss Hall.”
That night, after I took my medicine and Nurse left me to my rest, I took the book of poetry from its hiding place in my dressing table and opened it to “Spring.” I leaned close to the light of my bedside candle, pushing my plaited hair impatiently out of the way of the flame, tracing the short lines of text with my fingertip. I had never read poetry before—had only the faintest idea of how a poem ought to sound, of poetry’s purpose—and my lips moved silently, mouthing the words, chewing them like unfamiliar fruit, letting their meanings burst sweet and surprising against my tongue.
Lend me your Song, ye Nightingales!
Shadows from the flickering candle shivered across the page; I blinked, reading the third stanza, my heartbeat faster than it should be with my drops beginning their work. I read it again, whispered the words aloud to myself, my finger underlining each line, my eyes racing from one to the next—
’Tis Love creates their Melody, and all
This Waste of Music is the Voice of Love;
That even to Birds, and Beasts, the tender Arts
Of pleasing teaches. Hence the glossy kind
Try every winning way inventive Love
Can dictate, and in Courtship to their Mates
Pour forth their little Souls.
I felt the slow beginnings of drowsiness; saw sweet souls, bright-colored as their possessors’ feathers, pouring across the page like watercolors. The poem went on for a few lines in a similar vein, making my face heat with some feeling to which I could not quite put words—the only words I had for it were there, on the page—The cunning, conscious, half-averted Glance . . . Their Colors burnish . . . They brisk advance . . .
And shiver every Feather with Desire.
I fell asleep before “Spring” was quite finished; when I woke in the morning, I returned to the poem, but its tenor felt different, less fevered
than it had the night before, the birds and animals retreating to the—far less interesting—realms of nests and burrows, of feeding young and watching them grow.
Chapter Nine
An express came from London at breakfast. I was looking down at my buttered toast, trying to muster some enthusiasm for it when my belly still felt too knotted and heavy from last night’s dinner, and Mamma was talking, with the peculiar talent she had for believing every word she had to say must be of interest to her audience, about our relations’ upcoming visit to Rosings Park.
“You, of course, must have new gowns. It wouldn’t do for Fitzwilliam to see you in the same gowns you wore last year.” Mamma took a bite of cake, chewed, then added, “I fear he does not want to formalize the engagement until you have both reached your majority, but it still cannot hurt for him to see you—and Rosings itself—at your very best. To remind him”—with a smile—“of what his future holds.”
My cousin was widely considered handsome, I knew, and I supposed he was; but as he reached manhood I could not seem to stop my eyes lingering, with a sort of unwholesome fascination, on his side whiskers and the hair on the backs of his hands. I had petted only a few dogs in my life, but I wondered, still, whether the hair on Fitzwilliam’s hands and face, so much thicker and more coarse than the hair on my own body, would feel similar to a dog’s, if petted. It was an odd and not altogether pleasant thought.
But I could not say any of this to Mamma.
I was saved the trouble of forming any sort of response by a pounding at the front doors. Mamma stopped talking midsentence, a forkful of cake held aloft, and both she and I listened as Peters spoke to whomever had arrived. Our butler’s heavy footsteps came toward us down the corridor.
“Ma’am,” Peters said, bowing low before my mother and holding a letter out to her. Mamma set her fork down with a strange deliberateness—as if she, too, felt the same illogical disquiet that I suddenly did—and read the letter quickly. It was, I could see, but a few brief lines. And then Mamma said, “Dear Lord,” in an odd voice that was utterly devoid of inflection. “Fetch Mrs. Barrister,” she said to Peters. “And have my writing things fetched here. I must write to my brother.”
Peters bowed, his eyes moving minutely toward the paper she still held, though he knew his place well enough that he asked nothing. Mamma set the letter down on the edge of the table when he had gone, too far away for me to read it. I took a bite of toast, but it filled my mouth, tasteless and dry, and I had to work hard to swallow it down. Mamma returned her fork to her hand but had yet to take a bite of cake, the fork poised over her plate and her eyes staring, brows gathered together over her nose, at the opposite wall.
“What is it, Mamma?” I said when I could no longer bear the silence.
Mamma gave her head a little shake and put her fork very carefully back down. “Your father has been killed,” she said, still in that strange, calm voice.
It was because of this calmness—because I watched my mother lose her composure when Aunt Darcy died, heard the terrible keening sounds she was capable of making—that I did not immediately understand Mamma’s words. I whispered them over to myself like lines of poetry, puzzling out their meaning. It took several goings-over before I made sense of them; and then something crashed over me—I was back in Brighton, the waves bursting against my back, Mamma remote and distant on the beach. And it was Papa who put me there among the waves, Papa’s choice, Papa’s fault. But Papa was gone, gone off to his friends and his pleasure, leaving me with only Mamma, who was safe on the sand, while I sputtered and gasped in the cold, cold water.
Dr. Grant came to see me as usual after Papa’s death. In mourning black, I was paler even than usual, and my appetite, never strong, was gone entirely. The doctor expressed alarm at the change in me—“Though it is natural, of course,” he assured Mamma. “A shock of this sort can fell even the sturdiest of characters. And Miss de Bourgh has never been sturdy.” He prescribed a few extra drops of medicine to calm my nerves and help me sleep; I drank them down without complaint, welcoming the added protection against the world.
Mamma read out letters from Aunt Fitzwilliam and Uncle Darcy, their condolences and promises that they would visit in a few weeks as they had already planned. Miss Hall sometimes read from books of prayers. Occasionally we had callers—Mr. and Mrs. Applewhite, who came from just down the lane at the parsonage; our neighbors, the Cliftons; Mamma’s friend Lady Mary, who broke her journey at Rosings on her way to visit her son in London. None of them troubled me; I was sometimes aware of their pitying glances, their murmured questions about the future of the estate, put forth timidly lest their impertinence seem too marked. Mamma always answered in the same way, confident and strong-voiced, assuring our visitors that she had taken on the responsibilities of managing Rosings Park until I came of age and married her nephew Mr. Darcy.
My twentieth birthday came and went unremarked.
I had visitors of my own, beginning soon after Dr. Grant increased my dose, but Mamma and Miss Hall knew nothing about them. They were a secret I guarded closely. At night, they appeared inside my room—I never saw how they crept in, and though I asked sometimes whether they used the door or climbed the walls like soldiers with grappling hooks to reach my window, they never answered, only smiled at me gently. Their smiles made my skin prickle, and not pleasantly. I held myself tight as a harp string until tension crept up from my shoulder blades, spread across my shoulders, and set my neck to aching. It was a feat to hold myself so, for my drops urged my muscles to slacken, dragged at my eyelids, tried to tip me over to lie upon my pillow. But I forced myself to stay tense and still until my drops’ pull became too strong to resist.
But this reaction, this instinctive fear, shamed me, for my visitors clearly wanted to spend time in my company. Sometimes they petted my hair, their long, clawlike nails tangling in the strands and pulling locks free of their plait; other times they crouched like gargoyles on the end of my bed, imitating my stillness, just watching me in a manner that felt at once predatory and protective.
One, in particular, came more often than the others, a very fat woman in a white gown who liked to urge me to rest against her comfortable bosom. I always longed to do so—the woman seemed very kind, and it would be so novel to be cuddled—but then sometimes when she smiled the woman’s teeth looked very sharp and pointed, like the tines of a fork; and so I remained wary of her.
My father came once as well, wearing his nightshirt and a lady’s elegant turban. His plumpness gone, he looked ill, as delicate as I did, myself, as if some mysterious fever burned away everything but his bones. He did not stay long, and I could only be glad that he did not come to me wearing the true cause of his death, smashed and bloody after falling from his horse onto the unforgiving London cobblestones.
When Rosings Park itself began to communicate with me, I was not sure I could trust the evidence of my own senses. No one else appeared to notice the whispers in the walls or feel the caress in the way the floor rose up, just a little, to press against the soles of the feet treading upon it. The whispers were just low enough that I had to strain to hear them, a constant murmur like that of a brook, from which I could at first only occasionally decipher a distinct word. Crumble. Fallow. Find. And, more than once, Anne.
At night, the house breathed, and it was this that made me realize I had been hearing and feeling Rosings Park for most of my life. I remembered, when I was a child, imagining that the walls of the house were moving in and out around me, just as my own rib cage expanded and subsided with each of my breaths. It had, I knew now, been breathing the whole time; I simply had not recognized its respiration for what it was.
Night was the only time now that Rosings Park was quiet. During the day, it never stopped talking, never ceased worrying over its every stone, both those that made up the building itself—there was damp running down some of the inner walls, apparently, and slick green things taking advantage, clinging to the stones’ rough texture�
�and those that lay in the fields outside, silent, chuckling to themselves, just waiting to make the plough horses stumble. I wondered sometimes whether it used to nudge Papa as it nudged me, now I had inherited its cares and worries. I thought of it sometimes like a cat that twined about its mistress’s legs, butted its small head against its mistress’s hand, intent on getting the attention it needed.
At night, though, I could relax back into the mattress, breathing in time with the house. Only sometimes was my rest disturbed, when the house muttered something or cried out weakly, like a kitten. Rosings Park, it seemed, sometimes had bad dreams, too.
The day the Darcys and Fitzwilliams were expected to arrive, Mamma ordered the drawing room curtains closed and told Miss Hall to keep me company while I rested. Dr. Grant had warned, on his most recent visit, that too much excitement in the wake of such great tragedy could prove permanently detrimental to my fragile health.
In the dimly lit room, I lay bored upon the settee. Miss Hall dragged her chair near the window and, despite Mamma’s injunction, twitched one of the curtains just a little aside, bending over her sewing in the resulting thin light. I watched her, her stitches so quick, so fine, Miss Hall’s concentration so complete, brows nearly touching over her nose.
The drawing room doors were firmly shut, muffling the sounds, but I concentrated very hard, as hard as Miss Hall was concentrating on her work, and there, there were footsteps, rushing; and there a door banging open. One maid called to another. All of it conducted at a much more frantic pace than usual. I tried to imagine what was going on, but could not; I had watched the servants at their work all my life, had lain quietly as they dusted and polished, arranged furniture and lit fires, working around me as if I were a stick of furniture, myself. But I had little concept of what they might be doing now to cause this unaccustomed bustle.
The Heiress Page 6