The Heiress

by Molly Greeley

  John glanced at me, as if to assess my joyfulness, and my lips turned up passively.

  “How fortunate that she gets to hear it regularly, then,” he said. “But if she truly loves music, she really must come to London sometime and experience a true concert with a full orchestra.”

  “And die from the poor air? Certainly not,” Mamma said, less reprimanding than dismissive. “And those concert halls are always so hot. And the noise!” She gave John a narrow-eyed look. “If you and your wife intend to take a house in Town, I hope you will avoid crowds.”

  John inhaled a little, just sharply enough that I heard it over Mrs. Jenkinson’s playing, then said, “Too right, Aunt.”

  A moment later, after Mamma turned to say something to Miss Watters, John leaned close to me.

  “We do intend to take a London house, in addition to a country estate,” he said. “You are welcome at either, Cousin, whenever you like.”

  Chapter Twelve

  It was the letter that truly changed everything.

  I woke early one morning, for no reason I could discern, early enough that the sky was only turning dusky at the horizon and the birds were just testing their morning calls. I lay for a time looking up at the canopy, which seemed heavy and precarious, something that might sink down upon me at any moment.

  When I got out of bed, it was with the succulent feeling of doing something illicit. The carpet rasped against my stockinged feet, and my fingers reached for the doorknob as if they were detached from the rest of my body. But then that body went on through the doorway, glancing in either direction for early-waking servants.

  I passed the door to Mrs. Jenkinson’s chamber—which would always, in my mind, be Miss Hall’s—then on, down the long, darkened corridor and up another set of stairs until at last I reached the school room. Which was, of course, of course, my destination all along.

  There was a sense of waiting inside the room, of breath held and held until the very walls were blue and desperate for release. Unlike the rest of the house, this room was entirely awake; I felt it rouse further upon my entrance, like a servant whose mistress has entered the room unexpectedly, spine lengthening, chest thrust out. I stood in the middle of the room, taking in its familiar contents—the chairs and table, the shelves for books. The bench below the big window, where I had spent so many afternoons of my life. The writing desk.

  Miss Hall had been gone longer, now, than she had been with me. Nine years passed almost without my noticing; and I had not entered this room once since she left.

  My eyes caught now on the hatbox perched atop the desk, incongruous as a plume-topped turban on the head of a washerwoman. I stilled entirely.

  And then, without warning, my body moving without my brain’s conscious direction, I rushed at the desk—my hands grasped the hatbox, fingertips pinching around the lid—and with a great heave, the hatbox went flying, landing halfway across the room with a dull thump.

  And something else: the faint, barely-there rustle of falling paper.

  I kept all of Miss Hall’s letters in a little wooden box, inlaid with silver, that my father brought back once from Town. “A happy place for girlish treasures,” he said, and at first I could not think what I might have to put inside. But then I thought of the letters my governess and I had, at that time, just begun to exchange, all of which I had been keeping in an increasingly untidy drawer in my dressing table.

  The letters were such innocuous things; certainly, to objective eyes, not worth treasuring. I asked increasingly impertinent questions, which my governess rarely answered. Most often, Miss Hall used her responses to criticize my handwriting or the flow of my words. Only occasionally would she drop tantalizing bread crumbs about herself; I felt like a sparrow, hopping along behind, eager for whatever she cared to toss my way.

  This letter was different.

  It had been waiting quietly in the letter box for my notice of it for nine years. I held it for long moments before I unfolded it, my breaths coming fast and quivering. Almost, I did not want to read it; it felt a hot, augural thing in my hand, and the thought that it might be just another note criticizing my penmanship was horrible. But at last I opened it, though my stomach churned and my head fogged.

  Dear Miss de Bourgh, Miss Hall began, and I could not help imagining her as she penned the words: the curve of her neck, the slant of her wrist. The serious, studious expression she would have worn as she wavered over her next words. The words she finally chose had clearly been written in haste, her impatience getting the better of her penmanship so that, briefly, it sprawled inelegantly across the page in a way she would never have countenanced in her pupil.

  I wish you nothing but good in your life, Miss Hall wrote. Your life should be nothing but good—for you are the most fortunate and unlikely of creatures, Miss de Bourgh: a woman with land and wealth enough to live exactly as she pleases. You may marry your cousin, as your mother has decreed; if this is your wish, too, if he will make a good husband and a good master to Rosings Park. Or you may marry elsewhere—or not at all, and retain complete control over your life and your estate.

  I regret many things from my time as your governess, but chief among them is this: that I did not push harder for you to learn; that I allowed my own need for security in my position to keep me from doing my best by your education, and your health. But I risk little in forcing this conversation—one-sided though it is—upon you now, and I hope you will forgive me for it.

  I tried to tell you once before, about my brother. He wrote to me only last week; he is well and whole and still quite free of laudanum’s curse. I—

  But here there was a trail of ink, as if Miss Hall thought the better of whatever she might have said. Instead she wrote: In so many ways, I failed you.

  But you needn’t fail yourself. You have the advantage of having the most secure position possible for a woman in this life. Use it. Learn from Mr. Colt, and Mrs. Barrister, and your mother; and when you are of age, take up your responsibilities as mistress of Rosings. Seek the advice of other doctors about your health. You’ve a good mind, full of surprising creativity, and if only your senses were not dulled and your impulses not made so strange by laudanum, you could put that mind to useful purpose.

  I can see you scowling as you read this. But really, my dear—have you no sense of all that you have?

  I am sorrier than I can say that we are parting badly. But please know that I remain your most affectionate friend,

  Alice Hall

  Our neighbors, the Cliftons, came that day for tea. Mamma invited them often, as they were clearly sensible of the honor bestowed upon them by such frequent attentions. She greeted them warmly on this afternoon, asked Mrs. Jenkinson to pour the tea, and proceeded to launch a discussion about the merits of traveling in winter, for she intended to embark on a brief trip the next day to visit her brother, the earl, and was certain the clear weather would hold for the journey.

  My mind was filled with Miss Hall’s note; it was upstairs, folded in my treasure box, but I had to knot my fingers together in order to keep them from worrying at the shawl spread across my lap, pressing the edges of it like the creases of a letter and drawing Mamma’s or Mrs. Jenkinson’s attention. It was not until my mother’s voice rose with incredulity that I pulled my thoughts back to the assembled company, with a sensation like trying to pull a great stone out of clutching mud; they came forth only with difficulty, and with a terrible sucking noise.

  “Dr. Grant knows his business,” Mamma said. “I wonder that you would question him on a matter as important as your grandchild’s health, Mrs. Clifton! Why, a little laudanum never hurt anyone, and there is nothing better for an infant cutting teeth.”

  Mrs. Clifton looked into her teacup, and her husband cleared his throat. I rolled my eyes away from them, away from the twin looks of embarrassment they wore, as if my mother had just spoken of something they had been for years leaving tactfully unremarked-upon. But even turned away from them, I could see their
faces inside my head, familiar from a lifetime of calls paid and neighborly dinner parties attended. Mr. Clifton’s bald head always captivated me, his scalp shining like a polished table from the natural oils on his palms, which he often rubbed over his pate in a distracted manner. His wife had hair the color of winter clouds and a cluster of tiny moles, like pink pebbles, just under her jaw, and was usually everything ladylike; but set a pack of cards before her, and she suddenly reminded me of Papa’s hounds before a hunt. When she won a trick, I imagined her tearing out the throat of a fox.

  I knew these things about the Cliftons, and many others besides. Their son was at Cambridge; their daughter, Lucy, a few years my junior, married around the time Mr. Collins arrived in Kent, then produced two daughters in quick succession. They had all formed a sort of comfortable, familiar background to my life, people whose own lives I had been observing in a distant sort of way for as long as I could remember. But somehow I had not realized that they had been observing me just as closely all that time, closely enough that when the word laudanum was spoken aloud they felt the need to politely avert their eyes from me.

  “Of course, we do trust Dr. Grant, Lady Catherine, and your own sound advice,” Mr. Clifton said at last. “But I wonder, sometimes, at how freely such cures are dispensed. Too frequently, the papers have stories about their abuse. Why, just the other day I was reading a most tragic tale—a mother who accidentally killed her own child by giving him too much laudanum for a bellyache.”

  His words tumbled over and around me like boulders down a cliff, and I nearly raised my arms to shield my head from the force of them.

  “That is why I do not subscribe to a newspaper,” Mamma said. “Reading such dour news does no one any good. The mother was poor, I suppose? Did she have the advice of a good doctor?”

  “Probably not,” Mr. Clifton said. “If I remember rightly, she sent her elder child to an apothecary for a draught.”

  “There. You see? The poor may be excused for their ignorance in such matters, I suppose, but there is nothing to be done in such cases. And no need to use valuable ink and paper discussing the matter.” She gestured toward me and said, “And listen to Dr. Grant. Only see what miracles he has worked with Anne! Though her health will always be delicate, she has overcome such violent afflictions under his care.”

  All eyes turned to me, considering the miracle. Feeling vaguely that I ought to offer something to support Mamma’s faith, very purposefully, I picked up my cup from its place on the table near my elbow, and took a sip of tea.

  When Spinner left the room and Mrs. Jenkinson brought my nightly dose, I could not keep the dead boy from the newspaper out of my head. I regretted taking my medicine for almost the first time I could remember, and squeezed my eyes so tightly closed that blue pricks of light appeared behind the lids; but still the thought of him remained. In my imagination, he was dark-haired and round-cheeked, his eyes open and staring. One arm hung off the edge of his cot. He was very dead.

  All the voices of Rosings Park—the walls and floors, attics and cellars, gardens and streams, ploughed fields and fallow—spoke to me at once as my drops began to work. They rose and fell almost in unison, a cacophony that prevented me from understanding a single word and left me crying with my hands over my ears. On the dressing table, I could feel my treasure box with Miss Hall’s letter, perched like a crow, and with a crow’s eerie watchfulness.

  Tell me what to do, I thought, or said, or screamed; but the voices only rose in agitation, until at last my medicine sent me keeling over toward sleep.

  I woke sometime in the night, to the fire nearly out and the room shrouded in a blackness so thick I reached out to touch it. My hand found, instead, another hand, grasping at me through the dark, small stiff fingers and a cool, greasy palm. I pulled my hand back, thrashing under the bedclothes to push myself upright.

  The dead boy from the newspaper sat by my feet, calm and quiet. His lifeless eyes did not quite meet mine, staring a little off to one side. It was difficult to see without good light, but there was something terrible about the color and texture of his skin. As I watched, my breath trapped behind my breastbone, he turned his head with an impossible motion, and gave me a sorrowful look.

  Part Two

  London

  Chapter Thirteen

  I first saw London through a ferocious rain, the view from the carriage window all but obscured by the water sluicing down the glass.

  Everything was gray and brown: the hazy forms of horses and carts, of people walking, of buildings rising steeply on both sides of the street. There were so many people, in spite of the rain. Some carried umbrellas but many did not; their clothing must be wet through. The tip of my nose bumped the cold window as I looked out, and my breath made fog upon the glass, blurring the scene still more.

  Even through the muffling carriage walls and above the sound of the rain on the roof, I heard the sounds of the city like an assault. I did not know where in London we were, only that this was the most noise I had ever experienced all at once. How was it possible that horses and coaches and calling voices could produce such a din? I could not stop my thoughts from going to Miss Hall and her description of London’s sounds and smells from one of the many letters we had exchanged in our makeshift letter box during her years as my governess. You cannot imagine the noise, a ruckus from dawn until well after dark, people talking, carriages clattering along the streets, merchants calling for custom. And the smells of all that humanity in one place—we are odorous creatures, to be sure! There is nothing to compare to it in the country.

  But with so many other things on which to rest my attention, the thought of her was not so poignant as usual; more dull ache than lancing pain.

  Across from me my maid, Spinner, sat with wide eyes and pink cheeks as she peered through the window; she was so excited that I could actually hear it, a high, happy, tuneless humming coming from her throat. My own nerves snapped like nervous dogs, but in the forward motion of the carriage, the indistinct picture of the world outside, even the overwhelming tumult of the city, there was also something tentatively glorious.

  I leaned my brow against the window, tucking my chin down toward my chest to hide the smile I could feel madly blooming.

  In the scramble to get out of the rain, I did not take in much of my cousin John’s town house until I was ensconced in the drawing room, a cup of steaming tea in my hands and John’s wife seated across from me wearing as polite a mask as I had ever seen. She tilted her head, smiling with lips pressed closed, her eyes like shuttered windows for all the feeling they displayed. My eyes flitted birdlike around the room, keeping away from her face of their own accord, taking in lace curtains and framed landscape paintings and the graceful lines of the furnishings. The paper hangings were more pleasing than those at Rosings Park, an entire garden scene along one wall, archways and balustrades printed to look like marble with climbing plants bursting through every crevice available to them.

  “If only you had time to write before coming all this way, Miss de Bourgh,” Mrs. Fitzwilliam said, and I forced my reluctant eyes back to her masked face. “We expect my brother in but three days, and if he brings a friend, as he so often does without warning, I fear we haven’t enough guest rooms for you all.”

  The implied rebuke made me feel as if I were surrounded by her on all sides. Multiple Mrs. Fitzwilliams, each more civilly disapproving than the last. There was an odd feeling, like insects crawling upon my limbs; I took a sip of tea and tried to ignore it, and nearly scalded my tongue. When I put my cup down again, it rattled against the saucer.

  “I should have written,” I said. “I am sorry; the decision to come to Town was an . . . impulse. John said once that I was welcome any time I wished.”

  Though that was years ago, now, before my cousin married. John had probably long since forgotten. Not to mention that the last impulse I obeyed sent the only person who ever truly cared to talk to me careening out of my life, and so logic would suggest th
at listening to my own impulses was . . . unwise. Yet Mamma left just that morning for a short visit to my uncle Fitzwilliam’s estate, and not two hours later I was dressed for travel, urging Spinner to pack more quickly, and crossing frequently to the window, as if my seeking eyes might make the carriage ready sooner.

  “John said . . . ?” Mrs. Fitzwilliam frowned into her tea. “Well. It would not be the first time he invited guests without informing me.” She looked back up at me, false smile back in place. “The Season is just beginning; you’ve come at exactly the perfect time, if you plan to stay. Perhaps the Darcys have space for you.”

  A sip of her tea, a tip of her head. I flinched, reminded, with breathtaking sharpness, how much I disliked Mrs. Fitzwilliam when first we met.

  “I must confess myself surprised,” Mrs. Fitzwilliam said now. “I thought you never came to London, Miss de Bourgh.”

  “I do not. I mean, that is, I never have. Until today.” I swallowed and tried to ignore the strangling way my heart beat in my throat.

  “How extraordinary,” she said. “I always understood you to be too unwell to travel. Is Lady Catherine not with you?”

  “No,” I said. “Mamma is visiting Lord Brightmoor.”

  “John’s father? How nice for her to see her brother; and how odd that you are here, and not there with her. And you did not bring your companion, either? Mrs. . . . oh, what was her name? That quiet woman who played the pianoforte so nicely?”

  “Mrs. Jenkinson.” I shook my head, sniffed a little; my nose was suddenly dripping, as if I had a cold coming on. “No, I—she remained at Rosings Park.”