I was nearly to the end when I closed the book; I wanted to enjoy the anticipation a little longer, and keep the end as a bit of a treat before bed. How thrilling to both long and dread to reach the end of something. Poor Mamma—her imagination so slender as to be nearly nonexistent. It was little wonder she scorned such books; she had no means to understand them.
Setting the volume aside, I reached for another. This one came to me by way of John’s butler, who took my letter for Mamma and, like a magician, produced a parcel for me in turn. “From Miss Eliza Amherst, Miss de Bourgh,” he said, and I took it eagerly. The seal on the accompanying note broke with a satisfyingly crisp sound.
It’s rather radical, Miss Amherst wrote of the book, and has not been in print for more than twenty years. But after our conversation last night, I find myself curious to know what you make of it.
I opened the book now, turning the pages slowly. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft. It was not a novel, but an intellectual work, and my mind did not reach toward the text as it had toward Udolpho but shied away from it with instinctive fear. Miss Amherst would want to discuss it once I finished, but that old, clutching sense of incapability tightened my skin. It was with the sense of batting away cobwebs that I managed to skim through the long dedication, to a gentleman of some importance whose name I had never heard, and begin on the introduction. And then my lips moved quickly, silently; I read sentences over again, felt my brows rise and my blood rush like a springtime stream, fed by snowmelt and eager to be on its way.
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.
I was accustomed to reading sermons—I could still hear Miss Hall’s voice, jarring over the sentences of Mr. Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women like a badly made carriage over a rutted road. But this—this was a sermon of a different sort.
Let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man.
The parish bell tolled four as I closed the book. I had retired to my room long ago, and at some point I heard the muffled sounds of my cousin and his party returning from their dinner, but even that was three hours ago or more. The candle at my bedside was burned down almost to a nub, my eyes smarted from squinting so long in the dwindling light, and yet there was a coiling within me, promising . . . something. Sleep was elusive.
I wanted to creep downstairs to John’s book room and avail myself of all the knowledge to be found there; I wanted to rush out into the early morning, past the first rising merchants with their carts, past servants hauling water and emptying chamber pots, until I reached Miss Amherst’s street. I smiled to think of throwing pebbles at her window until her face appeared, sleep-smudged and framed by her bright hair, just so I could speak to her a few hours sooner, hear her thoughts, and let my own cascade waterfall-like from my tongue. Foolish fancies; but my smile only widened when I imagined my friend leaning her head and shoulders out of the open window, the cold morning air brightening her cheeks, and giving one of her laughs at the sight of me, all refinement abandoned to the giddiness of feeling the muscle of my mind pumping at last.
Heady though the thought was, I knew it to be impossible. But though prudence dictated that I sleep, at least for a few hours, my mind was awake and alive, bursting with ideas as spring woodlands burst with life, and I simply could not rest. I remembered how Miss Hall struggled to interest me in improving my reading; had she been free to offer me a wider selection of material, I think she would have found that my head took to words as easily as it took to numbers.
There was a fresh candle on the mantelpiece; I lighted it with the last gasp of my bedside flame, and took up Mrs. Radcliffe’s novel, turning it to catch the light, and indulged in its last few pages.
Churchgoing in Town was, I found, almost exactly like churchgoing in Hunsford. The only real differences were that many more of the parishioners at John’s church were smartly dressed, clearly there to be seen as much as for spiritual enlightenment; and that the building itself was so much more stunning in its proportions than our little village church. In John’s church, all is tall graceful lines, pillars curving to meet and form arches, the ceiling soaring above the congregation if in reminder of what awaits us in heaven. Looking up at it, all that stone held aloft as if by magic, I wished I could conjure just some little fraction of the sublime feeling the architecture—and the sermon, and the choir in its high gallery—was meant to inspire.
In Hunsford, I was wedged between Mamma, who bellowed out the words of the Psalms as if she were commanding a servant, and Mrs. Jenkinson, whose voice was thin and high as air blown through a reed. When I was younger and Miss Hall sat beside me, I used to watch her slantwise; my governess listened to the sermon with her whole body, every muscle and nerve focused on the rector in his pulpit, and I sometimes had the wish—vivid and unholy enough to make my face blotch with embarrassment and my eyes wrench themselves back to the trough in the floor—that she would turn just a portion of that devotion my way.
Sometimes, after Papa’s death, when Miss Hall was already more companion than governess, she tried to draw me outside myself, to reassure me that my father must be truly happy now, in union as he was with God. But I wondered how happy he could possibly be. Like myself, he was a regular attendant at church, but he never displayed anything like religious feeling outside its confines. Or, really, within its confines, either.
Today, I sat in the pew beside Mrs. Fitzwilliam and remembered Papa, how his eyelids drooped sometimes in church, the breadth of his hand not quite hiding his yawn. He never actually fell asleep, as far as I knew—even if he had, the clerk, acting in his capacity as sluggard waker, mightn’t have dared rap Sir Lewis on the head with his stick as he would any other drowsing congregant. But his mind, like my own just now, always seemed to be on other things. If—and oh, that if is a perilous word, a whisper of blasphemy—if heaven was what the preachers claimed, mustn’t Papa be very bored there?
Our pew had low sides and a little door that latched with a snick, as if to remind us that we must corral our thoughts and bodies both. But my thoughts—blasphemous whispers, all—darted and dashed. I thought of Mr. Fordyce’s ridiculous sermons, which no one else seemed to find ridiculous at all. I thought of Miss Hall’s arm brushing mine as she turned the pages of her prayer book. I wondered why the words in that prayer book spoke to her so eloquently, while for me they always remained hollow as trees about to fall.
I thought the reason might have had to do with my slowness. Poor dear Anne. She cannot be expected to exert herself. There was safety in being treated like a child; I was not expected to do much, or understand much, and so I did not. And yet, I could still recall, most vividly, the first time I read The Seasons and was left with the quivering sense that there was so much more to the world than I had been told. There was feeling in those stanzas; Miss Hall described the poet as being a godly man, and I could hear holiness in his descriptions of nature, in the thrill of the connection I felt to his creatures. My mind was capable, I saw for the first time, of something like real understanding.
And now—now I had felt that thrill again and again and again; but not here, not in the hallowed halls of this lovely church, but in theaters and concert halls and the pages of books. My mind was never still anymore, never quiet; it was as if it had been held in check for twenty-nine years and now, given free rein to exercise itself, could not stop its rushing movement for fear it might again find itself dulled and coddled, all independent thought quelled.
But I had no wish to quell it. I thought again of all the times that someone—Mamma or Mrs. Jenkinson; any one of my aunts or uncles; Dr. Grant and various visitors to Rosings Park, all so solicitous of my health—murmured what a shame it was that I could not. Inside my head, I stamped on their could nots; my slippered foot squashed their words, ground them into so much dust on the c
hurch’s stone floor. Each time I rose to greet a caller, each time I conversed with someone in spite of the nervous vibration behind my breastbone and all the voices in my head that strove to remind me that a doll has as much of interest to say as I do, each time I opened a book and my mind hummed to the cadence of its printed words, I was doing more than I ever thought I could.
I tilted my head back so that I could look up at the ceiling without any obstruction from my bonnet’s curving brim, and as the vicar spoke on I listened instead to the thumping of my own heart and saw not an impenetrable heaven made of stone, but everything that lay beyond it.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Mrs. Fitzwilliam insisted we must purchase a present for the newest member of the Darcy family. “We can choose it together,” she said. “But it must be today; I expect we will have word that Mrs. Darcy is ready to receive family before the week is out.”
“Miss Amherst said she would call this afternoon,” I said.
Mrs. Fitzwilliam clucked her tongue. “We can send her a note. She may join us, if she wishes. Julia, too, if she is at home. I want to hear more about her Mr. King, in any case.” She did not really look at me, instead smoothing and resmoothing her fine embroidered shawl over her arms.
And so I found myself trailing after my cousin’s wife as she entered shop after shop, fingering the wares and, again and again, declaring none of them suitable. She was a woman seized by some undeniable urge, and though her face remained tucked away behind her useful courteous mask, there was something frantic about her eyes as we exited our third warehouse, still with nothing for little George.
Miss Julia seemed as interested in the hunt as Mrs. Fitzwilliam, but Miss Amherst and I dragged a little behind. We had seen infant caps trimmed with flowers in colored silk thread; infant gowns decorated in exquisite holly point lace. We felt blankets impossibly soft and warm, and we tested the high tinkling bells inside silver rattles. I was beginning to think we were on a quest for something that did not exist.
“Harriet lured us out with a promise of sweets,” Miss Amherst said in an undertone, watching as Mrs. Fitzwilliam examined a pair of miniature shoes. “But I doubt we shall have time to stop at Gunter’s at this slow pace.”
I stepped a little closer to her under the pretext of inspecting a blanket of wool spun so fine it felt like cobwebs. “And here,” I said, “I thought it was the promise of my company that lured you out.” But the words did not sound as playful once spoken as they did inside my head; I had the unnerving feeling that I just unwittingly made my first attempt at flirtation, and that the attempt was a poor one.
I thought of Miss Hall, and the thought stopped my heart for an instant. But Miss Amherst merely looked sideways at me and smiled, and I stumbled into a display of sweet lace caps. The excuse of righting myself and catching a cap that tumbled toward the floor gave me a moment to collect my likewise tumbling thoughts. It was entirely possible that Miss Amherst did not hear anything awkward in my words; or perhaps she was better at politely not noticing than I thought she was. I took more time than necessary setting the cap back in its place.
There was a little patch of damp on the back of my chemise after the ball. I felt it—an odd tensing of my lower belly at the circling of Miss Amherst’s thumb, and then a rushing forth of something, secret as tree sap, but slick as water over river rocks. It was still there when Spinner undressed me, though I did not think she noticed. After she left me to sleep, I reached down and discovered that same disconcerting slickness between my legs.
In the days since, I thought about it often—how so innocuous a touch could cause so torrential a reaction from my body. And I had been so much more aware, each time Mr. Watters caught my elbow to help me to the carriage, or kissed my hand when I retired for the night, that my body had quite the opposite response that it had to Miss Amherst’s handclasp. It shrunk into itself; not visibly, or so I hoped, but I could feel it, my muscles going tense instead of soft, my skin almost contracting, if skin can be said to do such a thing.
The vague stirrings I occasionally felt in the past had been strange things, made stranger, perhaps, by my drops. Was it normal, I wondered now, to see another person and feel pulled to touch the tender underside of her wrist? To be moved by clever fingers as they flew over ivory keys? To think of those same fingers doing other things—things my lack of experience ensured I could not entirely imagine, blurred pictures in my mind that elicited cascading physical reactions despite their formlessness.
Whenever I set foot in some public space here in Town, my eyes still swept over the throngs of people, searching for a familiar turn of head or slope of shoulder. I wished this odd impulse would pass, but it never did. But how familiar would Miss Hall even be to me now, after the passing of nearly ten years? How might her face have changed, her figure, the color of her hair? She might be married; she might have a pack of small children. That was the benefit of time and distance, I supposed; that she would always be young in my mind, all the rough edges of our time together smoothed over so that what I recalled most vividly was the quiet rush of pleasure her attention afforded me, and not the painful awkwardness of our parting.
Mrs. Fitzwilliam settled at last on a silver rattle, cunningly shaped like a horn with small bells attached. It was perfectly sized and contoured for tiny fingers, but she looked on with an expression of dissatisfaction as the clerk wrapped it.
But then she turned to the rest of us and said brightly enough, “Shall we take some refreshment?”
Gunter’s tea shop was crowded with groups of ladies and with couples leaning toward one another across its little tables. We were fortunate to find a place to sit, and put in an order for tea and cake. Mrs. Fitzwilliam immediately set herself to the task of interrogating Miss Julia about Mr. King, and Miss Julia was only too happy to talk about how often he called on her and what they spoke of and how handsome he was.
I glanced at Miss Amherst, to find her gazing at her sister with an empty expression, as if she had already heard all this many times. Then she looked at me and life returned to her eyes.
“I am very happy for your cousin,” she said. “A sweet little boy. You must tell me all about him when you meet him.”
“Of course,” I said, and she drew back a little, looking me over, a peculiar half-smile lifting one side of her mouth.
“Do you not care for children?” she said.
“I—”
“I don’t,” she said, and took a bite of orange cake. She chewed for a moment, patted her lips with exaggerated delicacy, and said, “I have shocked you.”
“Well.” I looked at our companions, but they were reminiscing about Mrs. Fitzwilliam’s wedding cake, which was, it seems, created at this very establishment.
“I mean.” Miss Amherst leaned toward me, in unselfconscious mimicry of the courting couples surrounding us. “I have nothing against children. In theory, they are darling creatures. But I have no idea what to do with them. Julia”—with a glance at her sister—“is eager to have a large family; I suppose when I am an aunt I shall have to learn to converse with her offspring.”
“You do not want children of your own?”
“Have I any choice in the matter?” she said. “If I marry, it is a natural assumption that children will follow. I hope I shall understand my own better than I do other people’s.”
I paused. “What do you think Mary Wollstonecraft would have to say on the subject?”
She leaned forward. “You read it?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“I am very ashamed.”
“Oh, no,” she said, and reached out, though her fingers stopped a hand’s breadth from my own. “That was never my intention in lending it out! Why should you feel so?”
I looked down at the space between our hands. “I am—I have been—one of those women of whom she speaks so . . . so eloquently.”
She tilted her head like an inquisitive bird. “You mean . . . devoted to appearance, abov
e all else? Thinking of nothing but . . . pleasing men?”
“No,” I said, and then, less vehemently, “No. But . . . I have been made small—have allowed myself to be made small—for the entirety of my life.”
And if my own circumstances were perhaps a little out of the ordinary, I had not seen very much to make me think that Mary Wollstonecraft was mistaken in her opinion that my sex in general had been held firmly back from the fullness of our potential through a lack of education and an insistence on focusing our energies on the most frivolous of pursuits. But though these thoughts were clear and definite inside my head, I feared they would spill from my mouth in an incoherent patter, like pebbles from the pockets of a child. To the child, each pebble was lovely and valuable as an emerald; to the grown persons to whom she showed them, they were merely rocks.
Miss Amherst said, “I believe Mary Wollstonecraft had children; though I suppose that is not proof of whatever feelings she might have had on the subject.”
“I do not know whether I like children,” I said. “I’ve little experience of them. Mr. and Mrs. Darcy brought their firstborn to visit us once in Kent, but he remained with his nurse most of the time.”
She looked down at her cake, but made no move to take another bite. Then she looked back at me. “Forgive me for my impertinence,” she said, lowering her voice, “but Harriet once mentioned that you were expected to marry Mr. Darcy.”
I felt myself flush, and glanced at Mrs. Fitzwilliam. I wondered what else she had told her friends about her husband’s odd, sickly cousin. “It is true,” I said. “Or my mother thought it was, which made it an irrefutable truth in my mind. I do not know that Mr. Darcy ever saw it so, though, even before he met Mrs. Darcy.”
“Your mother sounds formidable.”
“Oh, she is,” I said. “Though not formidable enough to make my cousin marry me. Which was a hard blow for her; she is unaccustomed to having less than perfect control.”
The Heiress Page 18