The Heiress

by Molly Greeley

  A raised brow and a little silence as Mrs. Fitzwilliam looked at me, clearly waiting for something. But I’d no idea what she was waiting for, and so the silence built around us like walls.

  She had not thrown me out. She could not throw me out, I realized, with an unexpected thrill. My back straightened, like a plant stretching up to meet the sun. I was the mistress of Rosings Park. She had married into consequence; I was born to it. Mrs. Fitzwilliam folded her lips together, and I looked back at her, trying to hold on to my own sense of importance.

  “The colonel will be home for dinner,” she said at last. “No doubt you will want to refresh yourself before he arrives. Your things will have been put upstairs.”

  There was a pause, and then I stood, slow and careful as an old woman. “Thank you,” I said, and followed the footman to whom she gestured through the drawing room door, down a short hall, and up two long graceful staircases to the guest rooms near the top of the house.

  When the door to my chamber closed behind me, I released my breath and slumped against the wall. Spinner was waiting for me, but she stood, quiet and attentive, allowing me time. Away from Mrs. Fitzwilliam’s scrutiny, my body began to shake, the enormity—and the boorishness, the thoughtlessness—of what I had done cascading through me. I was grateful for the wall’s solidity.

  At last, I raised my eyes and took in the room. Well proportioned, with elegant furnishings and pale blue walls, it was less ornate than my chamber at Rosings Park, and somehow calming. The floor was dark wood, polished to a high shine, and softened by a carpet woven in a pattern of flowers. At the far end was a window framed by curtains that looked like they were heavy enough to keep out all light when drawn. It was here that Spinner stood, hands clasped before her waist, looking at me.

  “I have unpacked your things, ma’am,” she said.

  I cleared my throat. “I do not know how long we will be staying. It seems my cousin is expecting other company.” I glanced at the bed, which was big and soft. “I think I will lie down for a little while.”

  “Very well, ma’am.” She moved toward the bed, as if intending to help me into it, then stopped, swinging back to the window. “But first—come look.” Her smile was a heady thing, her fingers beckoning me closer.

  I crossed the room to stand beside her and looked out. We were up high enough that I had to look down, down, down toward the street below. It was much quieter than the areas through which we drove earlier; just one or two people were walking, and only a single carriage was driving past. The street curved out of sight, a long line of handsome brick town houses pressed cheek to cheek, each with an identical black door. The rain had stopped, and water puddled at low points in the road. Then my gaze rose above the roofs of the houses across the street, and oh, oh—there it was—London unfurling before me, a jumble of rooflines and chimneys that poured smoke out into the gray-white sky, on and on as far as I could see. My mouth opened; I leaned closer to the window.

  Beside me, Spinner let out a soft laugh. She looked very young in the pale light from outside, much younger than her four-and-twenty years. “It’s even bigger than I imagined it,” she said. “Think of all the people in all those buildings! You hear such stories of the city, but seeing it—”

  “Yes,” I said, breathless. “It is as if the whole world is . . . right there.”

  “Well, not quite the whole world, ma’am,” she said with a sideways smile that made me suddenly very glad that she was here with me; that I was not entirely alone on this mad adventure. “This is not even the whole of London, I’m sure.”

  “Of course,” I said; but I did not entirely believe it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The canopy above me, pale blue and thickly fringed, was deliciously unfamiliar.

  So was the coverlet upon which I lay, and the room’s furniture, and the walls, and the corridor outside. Beyond the window stretched a city I had longed to see for nearly all of my twenty-nine years. London lay only forty miles or so from Kent, but like so much of the world, it had always seemed like something out of the stories my nurse used to tell me as I fell asleep, a place I knew I would never see.

  Yet here I was.

  I thought of the doll Papa had brought me from London. I used to try to imagine where that doll had been to have acquired its smoggy perfume, only to be thwarted by my own lack of experience. It was galling, really, to think that my doll had seen more of life than I had, myself.

  But today—just today, though it felt as if years had passed since I made my impulsive choice—I had seen more of the world, had done more of my own volition, my own choice, than ever before. I stood in the garden after Mamma’s carriage rolled away. Surrounded by rustling hedgerows and the earliest February buds showing tight and green on the trees, I tipped the entire contents of my medicine bottle into one of the flower beds, watched the liquid soak into the soil, and felt myself pulled into two parts, like a paper roughly torn. One part of me blazed with triumph; the other had to resist the urge to kneel on the wet ground and lap like an animal at the dark drops before they disappeared into the earth.

  The sickliness that defined my entire life felt entirely removed from me just now, here, on a wide bed in a house in London. I could feel my heart beating, a little too quickly, in my breast and in my fingertips. My body pulsed with life, like the city outside, whose clamor and rush was so distant from the incessant quietude of my life until today. My world had been limited in scope to the pattern in the Turkish carpet in Rosings’s drawing room; the ornate plasterwork on the ceiling; the portraits on the walls. My father’s portrait, staring sternly down at me, and my own, opposite his, showing a young woman with unfamiliar pink cheeks and an exaggerated fullness to her bosom, a book that I never read dangling from her painted hand. It was painted for my eighteenth birthday, and when it was hung, try as I might, I could not recognize the girl on the canvas.

  My joints ached a little. I rubbed at my left wristbone with my right hand, and tried to ignore the foreboding knowledge that I knew what was coming. Instead, I concentrated on the room, which sparkled so with unfamiliarity; I breathed in and out of its foreign air. But insects were, once more, scuttling up and down my arms and legs, and beneath them my bones were beginning to ache in earnest.

  When I began to shiver, I knew that I was not going to make it downstairs for dinner.

  By the time Spinner returned to my chamber some hours later to help me dress, I felt truly ill. Cold crept through my body like frost along the last clinging leaves of autumn. My breath came in shivering puffs; almost, I expected to see it whiten the air it touched. But no, the cold was not in the room, for the fire burned strongly in the grate; it existed deep within me, and I knew, with a despair that stole through me as insidiously as the cold itself, that I would never be able to get warm, no matter how many blankets I lay beneath, no matter how hot the fire.

  I clutched one of the cushions as a child would a doll, squeezing it to keep my body from rattling apart. Spinner clutched her own hands. I would feel sorry for the position I put her in, but I was too full of my own misery to allow space for anyone else’s.

  I recognized my cousin’s voice, but it was all too much—too much pain, drawing deep within my joints, too much embarrassment that he was seeing me this way—and I could not look at him, even as he said, “Anne? Anne?”

  Spinner spoke quickly, so quickly that her voice was like an assault. I caught snatches of it—“She poured it out, sir, and she made me swear I would not let anyone give her more—”

  But it was not until John said, “Hell and damnation—I’m sending for Dr. Carter,” that I shook my head against the pillow.

  “She doesn’t want a doctor, Colonel—”

  “She cannot come to my house in this state and not be seen by a doctor,” John said. I could feel him standing over me. “How much laudanum does she usually take? He will need to know.”

  “I—do not know, sir—it was Mrs. Jenkinson who administered it.”


  My cousin swore again, more colorfully this time, and left the room.

  My body seemed a vengeful thing, trapping me inside of it. I tried to crawl out of my skin, to shed it like a cicada sheds its husk, but it would not let go, and when I crawled across the bed, I merely dragged my skin with me, and my aching bones, and my heavy cotton-stuffed head. My skin wept perspiration, and I wept, too.

  Spinner and Dr. Carter spoke above my head, my maid’s voice off-key and high as a note poorly played upon a flute, his deep and calm as a church organ.

  “But sir—”

  “—necessary, Miss Spinner—stay with her; her distress will not last forever—”

  I had been here before. But this time was different; this time I chose this. I keened like a babe, and thought I must be as mad as Mrs. Jenkinson claimed when she understood that I meant to leave Rosings Park.

  I was alone when I awakened. All was quiet, and very dark. Though I felt limp as a wrung handkerchief, my body was my own again; the aches were gone, and the chills. My skin was neither pebbled like gooseflesh nor damp with perspiration, though when I raised my arms to stretch, an unpleasant, sickbed smell wafted from my person. But the linens upon which I lay, and the chemise I wore, were both fresh; I had a vague recollection of Spinner helping me to the desk chair to sit while other maids changed the bed. With gentle prodding, she coaxed me to raise my arms above my head, undressing me as she would undress a child, replacing my soiled shift with a clean one. Smoothing my hair back from my brow.

  I lay now for some time, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark room. Outside, I heard a carriage pass on the road below, but otherwise everything was nearly as quiet as night in Hunsford. I strained, trying to hear something—something—something like the voice of Rosings Park, which always whispered good night, and whose even, sleeping breaths helped lull me to sleep; but John’s house was silent.

  Slowly—as the hulking dark shapes around me reconciled into identifiable pieces of furniture; as a clock chimed four somewhere in the house below me—the full greatness and horror of what I had done stole over me. I imagined my mother returning from my uncle’s house to find me gone; I felt her rage and worry like a gathering rainstorm, and wondered how long I had before she descended upon John’s house and drenched me.

  But I rocked my head against the pillow; I did not want to think about Mamma.

  Nor did I want to think about the truly unthinkable—I have left Rosings Park. But the guilt twisted inside my belly and made not thinking impossible. Mr. Colt was still there as steward, and it was not as if I had ever had a hand in the actual running of the estate; but Rosings needed me. It said so, Papa even said so, just the once in the entrance hall standing before the painting of the old manor. And I knew the estate more intimately than my father ever did—my knowledge ran down into the house’s very foundations; into the tree roots that ran below the wood.

  And I left it.

  As we drove away, I thought I could hear the turrets keening above the treetops. If I looked back, I felt sure I would see the trees themselves reaching out, branches extended like snatching hands. This despite not having taken my morning dose, my mind so accustomed to thinking of the estate as sentient that it did so now of its own accord. And so I clutched myself, arms tight across my rib cage, like a mother who does not like to leave her screaming infant, but knows she must.

  I left Mrs. Jenkinson as well, left her angry and afraid, fingers flying to her mouth. Miss de Bourgh, have you gone mad? bursting from between them.

  When I left—the bemused footmen, unused to taking orders from me, piling my hastily packed trunk and Spinner’s small bag on the back of the carriage—Mrs. Jenkinson was near tears. What would I do, she pleaded, without a companion? Would I really travel all the way to London with only my maid? When I told her again that she could not come with me—trying to be as immovable as Rosings’s stone walls, or as my mother, while my heart thumped within my breast hard enough to hurt—she cried, What am I to tell Lady Catherine? And I could not answer her.

  It was an unkindness, I supposed, to leave her so; but it was suddenly so clear, so perfectly clear, that I could never get free of my drops with her always, always there, incessantly fussing, drawing up a dose with the punctuality and precision of a clock. That this was not her fault—that Mamma engaged her for precisely this purpose—did not make me like her any better. It was not Rosings’s fault, either, that I spent all my years there in a mist; but I knew not how to exist there outside that mist, feeling the full force of sun and wind and rain without my drops’ shrouding protection.

  I rose now and went to the window, leaning over the little writing desk positioned before it to shift aside the curtains. The darkness was nearly complete outside, too, but for a small pool of illumination cast by a tall lamp on the farthest corner of the street. I could see, dimly, other lights in the distance, little bright dots scattered across the blackness like stars across the sky. Somewhere out there, among those lights, down one of those myriad twisting streets, my father died. But so, too, did he live there; for all the pride he took in Rosings Park, he was in London more often than he was in Kent. This was the place, I could only assume, that he loved best in the world. I stared out at the trembling lights; the sight made something inside my chest unknot, and I sank slowly into the chair before the desk, reaching my arm forward until my fingers knocked gently against the window, as if I could touch the city beyond.

  I must have fallen asleep again, slumped over the desk with my head in my arms, for Spinner’s cry of alarm woke me next. There was sunlight showing between the curtains, and my neck was crooked and painful.

  “I am well,” I said, though in truth I could not decide if this was true. I sat bemused as she ordered John’s housemaids about, watching as they lugged a great copper tub into my room. One built up the fire while two others hauled bucket after bucket of scalding water up from the kitchen three floors below. When at last the tub was full, the sides lined with linens, Spinner helped me bathe. I kept mostly silent as she gathered my heavy hair and draped it over my shoulder, the better to wash my back and the nape of my neck. I was weak and wasted, as if I had weathered a grave illness; which, I supposed, was not far from the truth, for Spinner told me how I burned for two days with fever; how I vomited until nothing was left inside but bile.

  I watched my hair tips splay as they touched the steaming water, and wondered what I was going to do now.

  “Has Mr. Watters arrived?” I said at last, and Spinner paused in her ministrations.

  “Yes, last night,” she said.

  I turned to look at her. “I assume he did not bring another guest, as I was not turned out of the room?”

  A little smile. “No, ma’am. He did not bring anyone with him—though I do not think Colonel Fitzwilliam would have stood for your being turned out in your condition. He was that worried for you.”

  The thought of facing John made me dizzy; or perhaps that was merely the heat of the bathwater, which turned all the skin it touched an unlikely shade of pink. I thought, fleetingly, tantalizingly, of my drops, which provided such lovely padding from anxious thoughts, and then I shook my head, as if in doing so I could shake the memory of them from my skull entirely.

  The cloth began moving again, over my right arm from shoulder to wrist, and she added, “There was another visitor. Lady Catherine was here two days ago.”

  I put my fingers to my lips, then spoke around them. “Dear God. What happened?”

  “I was here with you, so I did not witness the . . . altercation . . . myself. But her ladyship was, ah, forceful enough that I could hear her tone through the floor, if not her actual words.”

  No—no—oh, the dizziness was, without a doubt, entirely due to the anxiety that was rising, rising within me like the flames of a well-stoked fire. My breath felt trapped inside my chest, emerging from my mouth only in little frantic puffs. I caught hold of either side of the tub for fear I might slip under the water. I chose this, I
thought, and then, I hate this. The thought did not make me feel any better, and I wanted my drops with such frightening intensity that I bit my tongue until it truly hurt in order to keep myself from sending Spinner to the nearest apothecary to procure some.

  “Is there laudanum in the house?” I said, voice tight, fingers flexing against the damp linen lining the tub, toes pressing, hard, against the tub’s smooth bottom.

  My maid dropped the cloth and took a step back from the tub. “No,” she said. “Dr. Carter told Colonel Fitzwilliam there mustn’t be.” A pause. “Since you said you did not want it any longer.”

  That is good. I looked at the whiteness of my knuckles, and tried to believe myself. Very good. I repeated the words to myself as she helped me from the tub, and felt a deep, blooming gratitude for her gentleness as she dried me, and her steady presence when I was ill.

  In the looking glass, I saw her nod, her eyes on my hair, damp and dark and snarled. My own face in the glass was pale and tight, the skin under my eyes smudged with purple. My body was shrouded in linen, my damp skin making translucent patches on the fabric, and above the linen’s upper folds my collarbones spread, long and sharp as sticks.

  Dr. Grant always said it was an innate frailty that kept my appetite so slender. My insides were knotted with nerves, but there was something else, an uncomfortable stirring in my belly that I could not account for. I sat very still for a moment until I realized, with some surprise, that the feeling was hunger.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A maid found me hovering at the bottom of the stairs, and told me when I asked, pointing down a narrow hallway, that Colonel Fitzwilliam was in the breakfast room.

  To my relief, I found my cousin alone. But still I hesitated before entering the room, my fingers curling around the doorframe, my feet refusing to cross the threshold. I was as stupefied by nerves as I ever was by my drops, but without the easy detachment my drops also offered. I wanted to turn around and return to my room two floors above; to burrow under the covers like a mouse hides in the underbrush. But I came here—without warning, I came here, and promptly became violently ill, and brought nothing less than my mother’s wrath down upon my cousin’s household. At the very least, I owed him thanks, and explanation.