PEMBERLEY TO WATERLOO
Georgiana Darcy's Diary, Volume 2
ANNA ELLIOTT
with illustrations by Laura Masselos
a WILTON PRESS book
PEMBERLEY TO WATERLOO
Georgiana Darcy's Diary, Volume 2
(c) 2011 Anna Elliott
All rights reserved
Approximately 72,000 words
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's (or Jane Austen's) imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
• • •
For more information, please visit www.AnnaElliottBooks.com
Anna Elliott can be contacted at [email protected].
WILTON PRESS
Product Description
Can their love withstand the trials of war?
Georgiana Darcy and Edward Fitzwilliam want only to be together. But when the former Emperor Napoleon escapes from his exile on the Isle of Elba, Britain is plunged into renewed war with France ... and Edward is once more called away to fight.
To be with the man she loves, Georgiana makes the perilous journey to Brussels, in time to witness the historic downfall of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. But when Edward is gravely injured in the battle, she will need more courage than she ever knew she had to fight for their future together.
Author's Note
Pemberley to Waterloo is the sequel to Georgiana Darcy's Diary, the first book in the Pride and Prejudice Chronicles series. And thank you so much to all the readers out there who wrote to me, asking for more of Georgiana and Edward's story!
Pemberley to Waterloo can be read alone, but it does build on the events of Georgiana Darcy's Diary (link goes to Amazon.com page). For new readers, I will explain that these books were born of my love of all things Pride and Prejudice, and the character of Georgiana Darcy in particular. After (many, many, many) readings of Pride and Prejudice, Georgiana was the character whose fate I wondered about the most. And I always felt that she and Colonel Fitzwilliam belonged together. As I explained in the author's note to Volume I, the modern reader may be surprised, since Georgiana and Colonel Fitzwilliam are cousins. But in Jane Austen's day, marriages between cousins were common--even to be encouraged. In fact, Jane Austen herself wrote about such romance in Mansfield Park: Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram are first cousins.
Georgiana Darcy's Diary, Volume I is the story of Edward Fitzwilliam and Georgiana discovering their love for each other. But--as you will see in Pemberley to Waterloo--they still have a long journey and a great many obstacles to overcome, including the threat of renewed war with France.
In writing Georgiana's experiences in Brussels during the Battle of Waterloo, I drew heavily on the period accounts of Charlotte A. Eaton, Magdalene De Lancey, and Juana Smith--three fascinating women, all of whom actually experienced the terror of being a few short miles away from the field of battle, just as Georgiana does. Nick Foulkes' Dancing into Battle: A Social History of the Battle of Waterloo was also an invaluable resource.
It was an incredible privilege and a delight to live in my imagination inside the world of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. And--as with Volume I--Pemberley to Waterloo is meant as an entertainment only, written for readers who love Jane Austen's story as much as I do. I certainly would never compare my books or my writing style to the immortal Jane Austen's.
I am especially excited in Pemberley to Waterloo to be able to write that my incredibly talented friend Laura Masselos has provided all original drawings for the illustrations. Thank you, Laura! You truly brought Georgiana's love of drawing to life.
Wednesday 21 June 1815
I'm writing this on the inside cover of my diary. Which means that the rest of my entry may be entirely illegible. There's barely space for a tenth of what I wish I could write--and besides, the cover was dampened by sea-water on the journey here, so that it's still slightly bent and smells of old seaweed.
There's no other paper to be had. Half the shops in Brussels are still closed, since the shopkeepers fled to Antwerp or further with everyone else, and are only now beginning to trickle back. I've no other blank writing books with me--and we've used up all the writing paper in our house to take down letters for the wounded men in our care. They're all desperate to send word to their families back in England. Assurances that they are alive and expected to recover and return home. Or in the saddest cases, bidding their loved ones good-bye.
I wrote one of those letters just this morning. For an Irish rifleman who was shot in the stomach and has been slowly dying of the wound for the last three days. He's so young--younger than I am, and I'm nineteen. Or rather, he was so young. He died this morning, just after dictating his words to me, addressed to the girl he'd been engaged to marry. His face was stark, livid with pain, and his lips were so dry they were cracking because the surgeon said that with a wound like his, he mustn't be allowed to drink.
But he whispered his message to me, telling his betrothed how much he loved her--and that his last wish was that she go on living without him, make a life for herself, marry another man. Be happy. He said she was too young to be lonely for the rest of her life.
And then he died.
That's really why I'm writing this--hoping that it will help me put the memory of it somewhere I can bear to keep it. Just now, I feel as though I could cry for days--except that if I once let myself start, I would not be able to stop.
This entry will make quite a prologue to the first proper entries in this diary, which, flipping through, I can see are mostly an account of our Christmas at Pemberley.
That seems so far removed and unreal now that even glancing at what I wrote all those months ago is like reading a novel, or looking through a window into another life. And poor Kitty--I'm so sorry for everything I wrote about her now.
I feel as though we've been trapped in Brussels for an eternity, feeling the noise from the city outside beat on the walls of the Forsters' house like a physical force. First the artillery fire from the fighting at Quatre Bras. Then the thunder and rain on the night before the battle at Waterloo. The cries and alarms from the street during the following endless day and night, when every moment it seemed brought another report that all was lost, that Wellington's troops had been defeated and the French armies would be pillaging the city by dawn.
Now even the wild celebrations of our army's victory have died down. But still the city is not quiet; it is filled with the rumble of carts carrying the dead and dying. The groans of the wounded. There are so many wounded soldiers that hundreds of them are lying in the streets on whatever beds of straw can be thrown down for them.
Even the Duke of Wellington--who was in the thick of fighting throughout the battle, but by miracle came through it without even the slightest wound--is sad and downcast, so they say. Napoleon has been defeated, finally and completely--but at what heavy a cost.
And I have had no word of Edward. No word of whether he is alive ... or prisoner ... or--
Edward would have been in the thick of the battle, too. I know him well enough to be certain of it. And he was one of Wellington's aides-de-camp.
The last report we had was that before the French turned tail and fled, they killed all the British officers they had taken prisoner.
I keep thinking that if Edward were killed, some part of me would know. I have turned the ring on my finger round and round a thousand times, feeling as though the emerald would have split--or something--if he had been killed. That I would--must--feel som
ething myself. But would I?
I have said prayers for Edward's safety every moment of every day. Please, please let him be alive, let him come back home to me, and I'll--
But then I always stop short. Any clergyman would probably tell me it is bordering on the heretical to try to bargain with God. But I would--I'd do it in a heartbeat, if only I could think of anything to offer up against Edward's life.
But what do I have to bargain with? What exactly does one offer an omnipotent Divinity?
And besides, other women have said those same prayers. I have nothing, really--no possible assurance or guarantee that in the midst of so much death, my love should have been one of the few to survive.
BOOK I
Sunday 18 December 1814
If I hear the word 'beau' one single time more, I am perfectly convinced that I am going to scream.
To think that a mere three weeks ago, I did not even know the meaning of the term. Of course, anyone who has spent any time in London has heard of the famous Beau Brummell, the ultimate arbiter of men's fashion--or so it's said in all the circles of high society that Mr. Brummell still frequents, despite his quarrel with the Prince Regent. But I had never heard the word used as a simple descriptor. As for example: There were a vast number of smart beaux at the party last night.
Or, Oh, if only Mr. Norton were not engaged to that horrid, freckled Miss Price, I think he would be quite a beau.
Or, Mr. Osborne tried to kiss me under the mistletoe last night, wasn't it shocking? But he is such a beau that I gave him my hand to kiss to show we were still friends.
Or any of the other several dozen uses of the term I have heard from Kitty this morning alone.
Kitty of course is Kitty Bennet, Elizabeth's younger sister, who has come to stay with us here at Pemberley for the Christmas holiday.
This year our Christmas celebrations will be very quiet, since Elizabeth is so close to her confinement and naturally cannot travel or go out very much. But our neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Herron have their granddaughter Maria here on a visit. The Herrons are an older couple, Mrs. Herron plump and comfortable, Mr. Herron devoted to sport and still wearing an old-fashioned powdered wig. But they are both very kind and love to have young faces about them. This last fortnight, they have been organising almost nightly supper parties and dances for Miss Maria's amusement--and Kitty has been to them all.
And I am probably being unkind writing of her this way. As well as Kitty, we also have Thomas and Jack Gardiner here for the holiday. They are Elizabeth's nephews, the children of her aunt and uncle Gardiner. Thomas is five and Jack is nearly seven. And they've come to Pemberley because Mr. Gardiner's mother has been very ill, and has come to stay with the Gardiners for a time. She is, it seems, in need of complete quiet and rest. And, as Mrs. Gardiner wrote Elizabeth, 'complete quiet,' is more or less an impossible dream with four children under the age of ten in the house.
Thomas and Jack also have two older sisters, Anna and Charlotte; they've gone to stay with Elizabeth's sister Jane.
Part of the reason Kitty came here was to help with looking after the boys, because Elizabeth is so near her time. She thinks the baby will be born by the end of the month, so just two weeks at the most, and really it could be any day now at all. And of course Thomas and Jack scarcely know me. They've only come to Pemberley with their parents once, and I was on a duty-visit then to stay with Aunt de Bourgh.
Elizabeth thought a familiar face would help--and Kitty is very, very good with them. Poor boys, they were so homesick right at first for their mother and father, and wishing they could be in their own home for Christmas. Kitty plays spillikins and hide-the-slipper with them all day long, and she's been working tirelessly on Christmas preparations for them: cutting up paper stars and angels for decorations, speaking to Mrs. Reynolds our housekeeper about having bullet pudding and snapdragons and all the other traditional children's Christmas games. Of course I have helped, but it has all been Kitty's ideas first and foremost.
It's just that for all her endless talk of 'beaux' and dancing and parties, Kitty is already engaged to a perfectly nice young man of her own. Her betrothed, John Ayres, is a captain in Edward's regiment. I've never met Captain Ayres, but Edward speaks of him as a good soldier and a good man, sober and responsible and kind-hearted, as well. And Elizabeth has met him once and says that she liked him very much indeed.
Elizabeth is worried about Kitty. Or rather, what she said to me this morning was, "I'm not entirely sure whether to hope Captain Ayres never hears of Kitty's behaviour--or to hope he does."
No fewer than seven notes had just arrived for Kitty by the first post, and she'd read them all one after the other, giggled, made a show of putting them away in her reticule ... looked hopefully at me and Elizabeth as though wishing we would ask her what was in them ... and then left, still giggling, to take Thomas and Jack outside to play.
Elizabeth and I were left alone in the morning room. I was painting a rendition of a pirate ship's flag that I'd promised to Jack for one of their games, and Elizabeth was lying on the couch looking cross. Or rather, as cross as its possible for Elizabeth to look, which is not very.
Elizabeth is so active and vivacious that she's not used to having to be quiet so much of the time, having to lie on the sofa and rest in the afternoons or stop to catch her breath climbing stairs. The other day I asked how she was feeling--and she made a face at me and said, "Like an over-stuffed goose in a much too small oven." But then she smiled and put her hand over the swelling mound of her stomach, and I saw the fabric of her dress move as the baby kicked hard in response.
We both laughed, then, and Elizabeth said that the baby must be as anxious to be born as she was to have it be born.
This morning, though, she was frowning as she looked through the window to where we could see Kitty and the two boys playing chase up and down the paths in the winter-frozen garden. Kitty has dark hair like Elizabeth's, but where Elizabeth's hair curls, Kitty's is perfectly straight--unless she tortures it into ringlets with the curling iron--and her eyes are hazel instead of Elizabeth's brown. But I can see the resemblance between them; their faces are the same shape, and they both have the same creamy-pale skin. Kitty isn't as lovely as Elizabeth, perhaps, but she's very pretty even still, and so high-spirited and ready to laugh that I can see why the young men flock round her so.
I watched her make a jump at Jack from behind a mulberry bush, sending him shrieking with laughter off down another path, then said to Elizabeth, "Do you mean you hope that Captain Ayres may break off the engagement if he hears of Kitty flirting with other men?"
Elizabeth sighed and shifted and rubbed her lower back as though it ached. "It is a horrible thing to say about my own sister, isn't it? But maybe I do, a little. It's just that Captain Ayres is ... good. Good and earnest and a little shy. When I met him, I thought he was an unlikely choice for Kitty to have made--I would never have expected her to find him anything but dull, much less accept a proposal from him. But I thought it showed that perhaps she had more good sense than--" Elizabeth stopped, her mouth twisting into a small, wry smile. "More good sense than I'd given her credit for, though that is more or less a horrible thing to say about my own sister, too. But I thought Captain Ayres might ... might be a steadying influence on her. That maybe his earnest good-sense was exactly what she needed." Elizabeth looked out into the garden and sighed again. "And maybe it still is. The trouble is that Kitty doesn't seem to think it so. If Captain Ayres hears of how Kitty has been behaving, he'll be hurt--maybe heartbroken. He truly does love her, I think. But even still, that might be better than if he actually marries her, and finds he has absolutely nothing in common with his wife."
Elizabeth's eyes went distant and pensive, and I knew she was thinking of her and Kitty's own parents. I have met them, of course, and Elizabeth has spoken of them enough to me that I know theirs has not been the happiest of marriages. Mr. Bennet is a rather reserved, scholarly man, with a dry sense of humour and a
sometimes sarcastic tongue. And Mrs. Bennet is ... well, when she was young, she may well have been very much like Kitty. Though from what Elizabeth has said, I think without Kitty's genuinely affectionate heart.
"Have you tried speaking to Kitty about it?" I asked.
Elizabeth nodded, her eyes on the garden. "All she does is roll her eyes at me and say that she's engaged, not dead and buried. And that she means to keep on enjoying herself as much as she possibly can for as long as she can, before she has to resign herself to all the dull duties of being someone's wife." Elizabeth let out her breath. "And if I scold her too much--or refuse to let her go out to the Herrons' parties--she's likely to leave Pemberley altogether. She'll either go back to our parents, or she'll go to Lydia, which will be even worse." Elizabeth rubbed her back again. "Every time I debate the question with myself, I come to the conclusion that letting her stay is the only way of preventing her from getting into even worse trouble than she's likely to get into here. If only it weren't for--" she stopped abruptly.
However she feels, Elizabeth looks just as lovely as ever. Her face fairly glows. And her dark eyes have always been bright with laughter, but all these last months there has been a kind of deep, quiet happiness to them, as well, even when the baby has made her uncomfortable or ill.
This morning she was wearing a morning dress of peach- and white-striped percale, with a lace cap perched on her dark curls. But she looked tired, I realised all at once, with faint bruise-like shadows under her eyes. And when she fell silent, she looked, not back at Kitty and the boys out in the garden, but down at her own two hands, resting in her lap.
I hesitated another moment--and added a few more streaks of white paint to the skull-and-crossbones design I was painting onto the black background of the boys' flag--then asked her, "Elizabeth, is there something ... something wrong? Besides Kitty, I mean?"
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