The Heiress

by Molly Greeley

  Another moment, and then Miss Hall said, “I’m going to my sister in London. She is overwhelmed with the new baby; I hope to help her. I will—I will miss you, Miss de Bourgh.”

  Still, I stared, stared until my eyes watered. Miss Hall had been with me for eight years; what she was saying now was impossible. But even as I thought this, Miss Hall’s fingers tightened impossibly further around her work, an unlikely, angry noise coming from her chest. I blinked, and a little of the wetness rolled down the slope of my cheek.

  Miss Hall stood so quickly that I could not possibly track the movement, gathering the rest of her things in bursts of action like the explosion of grouse taking flight. She made as if to leave but stopped, just briefly, turning to look at me over her shoulder.

  “You could be—you are more than this,” she said. She still sounded angry. “I have seen it. But no one else will tell you so; no one is going to help you become the woman you might be, if you did not stun yourself so thoroughly with your medicine.” She paused, then said in a rush, “Rosings Park is yours, Miss de Bourgh. You are an heiress no longer; you are now the owner of a grand estate. Have you no understanding of what that means?” Miss Hall covered her eyes with one hand, just briefly, then looked at me through her fingers. “You have so much,” she whispered. “And you are letting it go.”

  “My—”

  “Do not speak to me of Mr. Darcy.” Miss Hall shook her head. “Do not. Even if you marry him, you should still feel some responsibility to Rosings. And to yourself.”

  “I was going to say,” I said, slowly and carefully, “that my mother has the estate well in hand.”

  “Even Lady Catherine,” Miss Hall said after a moment, “cannot live forever. Please—think on it.” She looked down at me for a long, hard moment. “Goodbye, Miss de Bourgh.”

  I had to speak—had to say something to hold Miss Hall there a little longer. I opened my mouth, imagined my jaw creaking like a door in need of grease, and said the first words to present themselves.

  “Fitzwilliam thinks me a doll.”

  I had not been able to get his words out of my head ever since I heard them; I felt the hot-cold horror of them engulf me during quiet moments. John’s protestations, at the time, of our cousin’s unfairness, did little to dampen my humiliation; nor did John’s coming to me later, while I was still reclined beside the fire. Anne, I heard him say; and in his voice was a pity so cloying I might have vomited. Anne, you know that you have many people who would be happy to have you visit, do you not? We all of us care about you—

  I could not answer him—his words were too pretty to be real.

  Useless, I whispered inside my head, little mortified arrows that pierced my softest inner places. Useless, stupid, useless.

  But in the days since, when Fitzwilliam’s words came back to me, a little anger slunk into my mind along with them. Was I a doll to him, I thought, only because of my illness? Or did he suspect the amount of time and attention that was given to my gowns and hair when he came to visit? In which case, I thought—and here, the slinking anger rose like a cornered beast onto its hind legs—how was I different from any other young woman adorned for gentlemen’s pleasure? True, I did not play or sing; but what were accomplishments except another form of ornamentation to attract men? If I was a doll then Georgiana, with her carefully curled hair and beautiful gowns, was a doll in miniature; the only real difference between us was our state of health.

  Now, though, Miss Hall was the one staring. “Fitz . . . you mean young Mr. Darcy?”

  I blinked, and hoped my governess could recognize the nod in it.

  “You are no doll,” Miss Hall said after a moment. She smiled just a little, without showing her teeth; but she was not one to speak or smile falsely, and pleasure rushed through me, from the top of my head to my aching core, so swift and strange and unexpected in the wake of so much lethargy that for a moment I could only stare at her, my mouth a little open.

  “That is why I wanted to marry you instead,” I said at last, though that was not the whole truth of it. But it hardly mattered that I could not seem to articulate my thoughts, for Miss Hall stood looking at me for a long moment, her smile falling away, leaving intolerable sadness in its place; and then she walked away.

  My head dropped back upon my arm. I looked at my hand, where the fly still stood, twitching its wings as if in preparation for flight. I could not feel its weight at all, or the tickle of those wee legs against my skin.

  My eyes closed.

  When I opened them again, the light had changed. Rosings Park looked innocuous—not a fearful, clutching thing, but a house, just a house. I raised my head, and my arm was assaulted by dozens of pinpricks.

  Miss Hall was still gone, and I was not certain whether she had ever been there at all, sitting silent on the bench beside me. Perhaps, I thought, I dreamed the entire encounter. There was a hissing sound of negation from the garden beds; the shadows slunk toward me, suffocation in their eyeless faces. I stood, throwing them off; but the feeling of breathlessness remained.

  Very suddenly I recalled my little fly friend and raised my hand, searching. But though I flexed my fingers as if the fly might be hiding somewhere between them, it had disappeared entirely.

  Chapter Eleven

  The next few years blur messily together in my mind. They are The Years After Papa and Miss Hall Left. It is a shameful truth that the latter leaving hurt most; but not, I suppose, a surprising one.

  Uncle Darcy died quite suddenly only a few months after he and his children returned to Derbyshire from Kent, and Mamma, who always had to be useful, left me in the care of a new companion while she rushed to her nephew and niece’s aid. She wrote me from Pemberley estate—Georgiana and Fitzwilliam are too stricken by grief to properly express their gratitude for my attentions, but I know they feel it just the same. They set their table far too richly; it is no wonder my niece is so retiring. I have already informed their cook that there are to be good English dinners from now on rather than the French fare to which they have become accustomed.

  I would have felt quite sorry for my cousins, had I room, just then, in my own head for others’ suffering.

  Mrs. Jenkinson, my new companion, was plain as unadorned cotton and a consummate nodder-and-smiler—the very opposite of Miss Hall, which pleased Mamma tremendously, for Miss Hall’s defection was, to Mamma’s mind, a sign of the grossest ingratitude. Mrs. Jenkinson seemed entirely composed of gratitude and awe, and within ten minutes of her arrival, she had agreed with Mamma twice as many times without ever having uttered an opinion of her own.

  A childless widow whose husband’s estate had passed to his brother after his death, Mrs. Jenkinson had been recommended to Mamma by Aunt Fitzwilliam, who knew her before her prospects took their sudden downward turn. She seemed to me the sort of person who had been five-and-forty forever—despite being, in reality, nearly a decade younger—and who would be five-and-forty until the day she died. There was nothing else worth knowing about her; she was boring as the toast she liked to urge me to eat in greater quantities every morning at breakfast time. When she wrote her weekly letters to her one living sister and four nieces, I wondered what she could possibly have to tell them, for she spoke little of her life before coming to Rosings Park—had lived so little, it seemed, that she had nothing interesting to say. I felt cross just looking at her.

  In addition to keeping me constant company, Mrs. Jenkinson took over from Nurse, whose weak chest and bad leg afforded her a necessary rest from toil, in the dispensation of my drops. When Mrs. Jenkinson remarked on Mamma’s generosity on letting Nurse stay on past her usefulness, Mamma smiled and said, “She has the strongest affection for Anne—and for myself, of course. Rosings Park has been her home for twenty years; after such long, devoted service, I see no reason not to give her a little corner of the attic to live out her last days. She knows better than to be a bother.”

  When the Hunsford rector died, Mamma found a replacement in the
form of a young man named Mr. Collins, whose awkwardness rivaled my own. He was lavish in his compliments to the point of absurdity, once going so far as to commend my mother on her robust health in nearly the same breath that he praised my delicacy as being a clear indication of my noble birth. Mamma, being Mamma, was perfectly capable of holding two such incompatible truths in her mind at once, and merely smiled.

  It was raining, many months later, when the letter arrived, a raging storm with thunder that I noticed only dimly, though water poured down the great windows as if men were standing on the roof tipping buckets over the side of the house.

  I was preoccupied by my left hand, by the way the long bones that ran down to my wrist shifted under my skin as I moved each finger. Miraculous.

  Then Mamma came into the drawing room, bringing another storm with her.

  “Mrs. Marchbank,” she said, rattling a paper, “has written with the most outrageous story.”

  I moved another finger. I could not remember who Mrs. Marchbank was; nor did I particularly care to. Mrs. Jenkinson, though, seated across from me, turned in her chair to give Mamma her full attention. “What is it, Your Ladyship?”

  “Only this—that my nephew—my nephew Mr. Darcy!—is engaged to be married to none other than Miss Elizabeth Bennet!”

  My companion gasped, and my hand dropped to my side. I looked down at it, uncertain how it got there. Inside my body, something else dropped as well, some organ swooping down, down, but, sickeningly, never landing.

  “Mrs. Marchbank had it from her sister, who heard the news from someone intimate with the Bennets. There can be no truth to it, but . . .” Mamma stopped, the letter crumpled in her fist.

  “Surely Mr. Darcy would refute the claim if you wrote him?” Mrs. Jenkinson said.

  That my mother did not immediately take up a pen told me everything I needed to know: however strongly Mamma might rail against the story as a falsehood, the larger part of her must believe it true. I remembered Miss Bennet well; she visited Mr. Collins’s new wife when John and Fitzwilliam made their yearly trip to Kent, and she called with Mr. and Mrs. Collins at Rosings Park several times, and instantly distinguished herself by not only having opinions of her own when Mamma spoke to her but actually voicing them, though they ran contrary to Mamma’s own. Rarely did anyone contradict my mother—even Papa, when he was alive, avoided confrontation with her unless it was truly necessary. In that moment, I thought Miss Bennet the most marvelous person I had ever met.

  She did not seem to find me so marvelous, however. Civil enough when we were introduced, her notice of me devolved, over the course of her visits to Rosings, into arched eyebrows and a vaguely turned-up set to her mouth. It was obvious that something about me amused her greatly, and between her clear scorn of my frailty and Fitzwilliam’s utter disregard for my existence over the course of his visit, I felt as though I were sinking into a swamp of mortification, sludgy waters closing over my head and cutting off all air.

  But still—one morning, when I and Mrs. Jenkinson were driving out to the village, we came upon Miss Bennet on one of her frequent walks through Rosings’s woods. Her hem was a little dirty, her curls a little windblown. The wind had whipped pink into her cheeks; I could not seem to look away from her.

  Later that day, I studied myself in the glass—something I rarely did, for my features were familiar enough, my clothing and hair the purview of my mother and my maid. I ran my hands over my body above the white fabric of my shift, fingers bump-bump-bumping down my rib cage, over the dip of my waist, the knobs of my hip bones. My shift fell to just below my knees; my calves, beneath it, were narrow and very pale. My maid, Spinner, would be in soon to dress me for the day, swathing my form in a morning gown, disguising the horizontal ridges on my chest, just above the slight swell of my bosom, with a pretty fichu.

  How would it be, I wondered, to move through the world like Miss Bennet, with such energy and sureness? There was strength in Miss Bennet’s form, and health in the brightness of her cheeks. Her muslin gown showed the full outline of her legs as she moved, and they looked so very sturdy. I imagined running my palms down their length, feeling the soft brush of fine hair and the solidity of muscle. Cupping the backs of her calves. They would feel, I thought, very different to my own.

  Now Mamma’s anger hummed like the air just before a lightning strike. She called for her maid. The bit of me that had been falling settled then, with gentle care, into the cradle of my pelvis, and as Mamma made furious plans to set out for Hertfordshire, I observed my altered prospects with detached curiosity.

  Over the course of the following week, Mamma returned from an unsatisfactory meeting with Miss Bennet, and Darcy wrote to formally announce his engagement. My mother was like a cornered beast in her fury, and I found myself teetering between a blank sort of fear, the unfilled years stretching like great sheets of empty paper before me, on which I had no idea what to write; and a curious giddiness for which nothing logical could account. Everything changed with my cousin’s letter; all certainty was gone from my life, save the one that surrounded and contained me at all times. Rosings Park, I had always known, would someday be mine; but always, there was the understanding that Fitzwilliam would be the one to ensure the smooth running of both our estates. No one—no one except Miss Hall—ever expected that the burden of Rosings Park might fall to me, or that I would be able to shoulder it, if it did. The house’s walls seemed to press in on me from all sides, moving themselves, their stones grinding against one another, inch by inch. I lay, terrified and perfectly still, waiting to be crushed between them.

  And yet, even as I felt the house closing around me, I had the strangest sensation of freedom, of having escaped from something, so narrowly that the something nearly rent the skirt of my gown with its claws as I raced away from it.

  My drops were such solace then, letting me float until at last the passage of time dampened my mother’s disappointment. I awakened to find everything exactly as it had been before, except for the tattered and singed remains of my own future.

  It was a time of change for everyone else, it seemed, though our life at Rosings Park continued quite the same as ever.

  When Mrs. Darcy produced a son, Mamma released the very last of her anger. I could see it when the announcement of little Thomas’s birth came; her fingers unclenched, and scraps like ashes fluttered out of her open palms, disappearing at last, ghostlike, into the air. A few months later, my cousin and his wife were ensconced unhappily in our drawing room, the baby, drooling in his cap and gown, on Mrs. Darcy’s lap, and Mamma’s eyes bright and curious as a robin’s when she held out a papery hand to greet her sister’s first grandchild.

  Darcy cast me one or two glances, but for the most part ignored me, though there was a slanted set to his mouth. Mrs. Darcy, for once, did not laugh at me, as if conscious that I might have feelings.

  But my feelings were not what they assumed. I sat in my chair, looking at the infant that might have been mine, if only my body and spirit bloomed riotously. Like Mrs. Darcy’s. Envy spread along my limbs, black as mold; but I could not be sure what exactly I envied. Not the child; not marriage to my cousin. Something else, something less solid than either of those things. There was a hint of it in the way I felt, watching the easy line of Mrs. Darcy’s shoulders and hearing the quick way she answered questions, as if she had never had reason to doubt her own opinions. Mrs. Jenkinson fussed, as usual, telling the footmen to reposition the fire screen and urging me to try a slice of seedcake. A slow bloom of irritation started at the back of my skull, and I knew that, if I hadn’t laudanum to temper my reactions, all the dark inky things that huddled in the hollow of my chest would come screaming from the hole of my mouth.

  Clouds scudded across the sky like dust chased by a broom. I watched them through the drawing room window as my cousin John introduced his intended bride to my mother.

  “Her manners are pretty enough,” Mamma said to John, as if Miss Watters were not sitting beside h
im, hands folded and a smile, taut as fabric inside an embroidery hoop, on her small pink mouth. I turned my head from the window to look at her. She wore a fortune on her body, everything, from the slim feathered bandeau on her head to the slippers, stiff with embroidery, on her feet, chosen to display her wealth to the world. That her wealth came from manufacturing mattered less than it would have if it were Edward, heir to the earldom, who courted her, and not John, a mere second son.

  I could not like her, for all that their marriage would enable my favorite cousin to live a more comfortable life than that of an army colonel; Miss Watters, when she acknowledged me at all, made me feel intolerably stupid, speaking to me as one might speak to a child, if one were not accustomed to being in the presence of children, or to a dog, if one did not particularly like dogs.

  Miss Watters’s brother traveled with her and John; he leaned now against the mantel, reminding me of a cat in the long, affectedly unconcerned line of his body. His feet were crossed at the ankle, his chin lifted above his cravat’s intricate knots. He bowed to me when we were introduced; and then he dismissed me. Between one blink of his pale eyes and the next, I knew he had quite forgotten my existence.

  John, however, did not. He glanced at me a few times as my mother interrogated him and Miss Watters; once, when Mamma’s head was turned away, he gave me a comical, exaggerated grimace. I smiled a little, though there was something vaguely sad, like the last dull days of winter, in the careful way he and Miss Watters spoke to one another, a lack of intimacy that I might not have noticed had I not recently seen Fitzwilliam and his wife together.

  He came over to me when Mamma ordered Mrs. Jenkinson to the pianoforte to entertain us all. A complicated melody drifted over the room, and John bent his head to me.

  “How are you, Anne?” he said.

  “Oh, she’s very well,” said Mamma before I could respond. She nodded at Mrs. Jenkinson, whose back was a little humped as she leaned over the keys. “She is always at her best when there is music to be heard; it is one of the reasons I allowed Mrs. Jenkinson an older instrument in her room, that she could practice daily for Anne’s enjoyment. Music is truly Anne’s greatest joy.”