‘London. You surprise me. I understood his business was in managing his estates and as a local magistrate.’
‘Then you were misinformed.’ There was a silence while Mrs Elton sipped her drink with a finger so genteelly raised as you could hang another cup on it. But good manners must not be entirely abandoned and Emma knew she carried the responsibility of a hostess, even if her guest was pushing and patronising and in no way to her taste. She cast about for a more convenient subject and remembered that Mrs Elton had made a mention of Mrs Bates. Perhaps she could find out how that old lady continued. But before she could get to that she must submit to Mrs Elton’s recovering her aura of friendly goodwill and telling her much more about the Sucklings’ visit than a positive admirer would have wished to know.
At last a conclusion was reached with words of honest satisfaction, ‘They are so much above everybody here that I must cast wide to keep them in spirits – save for yourself, of course, Mrs Knightley.’
Emma managed a gracious bow at this and did not give her visitor time to start again before asking, ‘You spoke of Mrs Bates. Is she no better?’
‘Better? No, far worse! When Mr Elton returned to me, he was quite shaken, quite pale. He was fond of her, of course, although she was very old, very deaf. I hardly conceived what he saw in her but he reminded me that she had been a vicar’s wife—’
‘Was! Was?’ Emma interrupted her. ‘She has not, not—’
‘Not yet. But she is not expected to recover.’
‘Whatever has occurred?’
‘Poor old woman – After the tragedy of her dear granddaughter’s delivery she could not sleep at nights, so she was in the habit of getting out of bed and going to the parlour – you know their rooms are so small, so close together. In particular, she went to poor Mrs Churchill’s pianoforte. She would sit there on the stool – in the cold, in her nightwear. Miss Bates told all this to Mr Elton and I had it from him. Oh! It hardly bears thinking about how people come down in the world. A vicar’s wife to be so low!’
‘But how did she get worse?’ Emma dreaded to hear, but must – and yet she half guessed already what was to come.
‘Last night she escaped poor Miss Bates again – she blames herself most dreadfully – and sat at her usual place by the pianoforte when a dreadful face appeared at the window—’
‘Oh no!’ The cry came from Emma’s heart.
‘That was really the finish very nearly. Her terror was so great that she had a stroke, fell – lost the use of limbs and speech—’
‘If she could not speak, how can you tell she saw this – this apparition?’ quavered Emma.
‘She fell below the window, hand reaching upwards.’
‘Perhaps she was looking for air?’
‘No. No. I assure you.’ Mrs Elton became a little irritable as someone whose story is doubted. ‘She confided in Miss Bates a day or two earlier. This face had been at the window – a man’s – violent – I do not know how we shall all sleep in our beds. The terror has been the death of her—’
‘She is not dead,’ objected Emma with desperation.
‘She will not recover.’
‘No! Poor Mrs Bates. Poor Mrs Bates. And yet, and yet the face is most likely to be in her imagination.’
‘It is best you believe so, with Mr Knightley out of Hartfield.’
‘Thank you. I am not afraid for myself. But I shall not tell my father. It is bad enough that he should know his dear friend, Mrs Bates, so ill, perhaps dying.’
‘Assuredly dying.’
Now Emma was even more keen to see her visitor out through the front door and into her carriage. Her news was so terrible that she must be alone to face it fully: Mr Churchill had killed old Mrs Bates, killed his own wife’s grandmother. As Mrs Elton returned to the theme of the Sucklings’ visit, Emma’s thoughts raced with hideous self-accusation. If she had told Mr Martin, Mr Churchill could have been taken away, and there would have been no ghastly face in the window. In worrying about the fate of a young man – however unhappy – hale and hearty in body, she had sacrificed the life of a poor old lady who had never done any harm to anybody and had, moreover, given her father many happy hours at the quadrille table.
‘Oh!’ Emma gasped and put her face in her hands.
‘You are not well!’ Mrs Elton interrupted herself in joyful anticipation of not a night passing without ten places on the table, to peer curiously at Miss Woodhouse.
‘Yes. No.’ Even in her state of nerves, Emma at once perceived that Mrs Elton did not link her cry and her pallor to poor Mrs Bates. She did not rate her sufficiently important for such a reaction, but attributed it to quite another cause – a cause that all Highbury perfectly knew was her dearest wish for herself.
‘You are faint – I can see it – I understand,’
Emma, who had lifted her head to see the expression on her visitor’s face – false concern, ill-concealed envy and absolute certainty – dropped it again. Mrs Elton thought Mrs Knightley was with child because it was what she herself most desired. Emma could almost wish that in this one case Mrs Elton’s understanding – in her experience invariably wrong – had, for once, been right.
‘No. I am perfectly in health – it is nothing.’
‘I shall leave you.’ Mrs Elton rose – her happy mission, thoughts of the Sucklings, turned to dust in her mouth. ‘Do not see me out.’ Her frills subsided and her feathers failed to flutter.
‘I shall inform Mr Knightley of your invitation.’ said Emma, for even a dinner with the people she least desired to meet in the world was a better prospect than what lay in her head. She must tell Knightley everything, however painful the telling – that was her only hope. He would put it in a better light for now she could see only black.
Chapter 9
It was to be expected that Mr Knightley, after a separation from his youthful wife of several days, would be looking forward to the reunion.
Emma, of course, had particular reason to await his coming home with eager anticipation. From the moment the hall clock struck two, she was unable to sit still but was constantly moving from room to room, always making sure she had a good view of the front driveway. She had ordered Mr Knightley’s favourite dinner of minced scallops followed by roast mutton and potatoes (he was never fond of elaboration) and put on the gown he favoured – a light muslin of a pale blue which he had confessed, at Emma asking why he stared so, put him in mind of the sky in spring.
Emma was prepared; the dinner was prepared; Mr Woodhouse was all happiness at the return of the only man who could have made the marriage of his daughter the opposite of a reason for mourning. There remained only for the hero to return and to make Hartfield a happier place.
At last, just half an hour before their usual time for sitting down, there was the unmistakable clatter of well-shod hoofs – not the creaking of boughs nor the banging of pots in the kitchen nor even the rattle of firearms in the grate – and Mr Knightley, mud-spattered and fresh-faced from his ride, came through the door.
‘Oh, Knightley! Knightley!’ Emma threw herself into his arms – so close that the spring sky became cloudy with brown spots – and burst into tears.
‘Emma, my Emma. My dearest.’ She was hugged. ‘Now, now,’ she was pushed away a little.
With tears and smiles Emma watched as his greatcoat was removed, his boots – ‘Oh, I have missed you so!’
‘Tears on your face – my dearest—’
‘It has seemed so long.’ Upstairs they went, without even giving Mr Woodhouse a chance to express his own relief at a safe escape from dangers unimaginable, and Emma stood as Knightley washed himself. ‘I am so glad you are returned. It has seemed like weeks, not days.’
‘Where is my independent Emma?’ – smiling.
‘Disappeared quite’ – serious.
‘But what if I were a sailor, gone f
ar away – to the Indies or China – for months or even years?’ – still smiling.
‘I would never have married a sailor’ – still serious, for all the while, through all the delight at his return, she was thinking of the moment when she must tell him about Frank Churchill; she looked forward to it with dread and yet longed for it, as a wounded soldier begs for the pain of the surgeon’s knife. She felt, also, a barrier between them as long as she had not told him. He thought his warm reception only a demonstration of her affection but she must show him it sprang from another source as well. They were not in perfect understanding until she spoke and yet her father waited and dinner must be got through first.
‘I had not thought I would be quite so missed.’ Knightley tucked her arm in his to lead her down the stairs.
‘You do not place enough emphasis on your importance at Hartfield – we are like sailor men without our Captain.’
Knightley looked pleased, even very pleased, at this revival of Emma’s more playful manner and so they greeted Mr Woodhouse and went into dinner.
The meal was long and tiresome to Emma who had to convince her father that such hearty splendours as she had produced for Mr Knightley would do him good rather than harm.
‘The liver after such a ride as you have just taken – so shaken about – perhaps even twisted. Some light soup – gruel – ?’
‘No, papa. Dearest papa!’ interrupted Emma, who had been defending visitors against her father’s kind frugality and obnoxious gruel from the moment she could speak. ‘Mr Knightley’s liver has the firmness of a mattress – the springing of a sofa – the strength of a stone wall—’
She broke off as the owner of such a liver began to laugh and confess that he had such an appetite that only a man who had been in London could build up.
‘There!’ said Emma, triumphantly, and signalled for more roast for the returned hero.
London was then discussed – or rather Mr Woodhouse, having failed to find fault with his son-in-law’s constitution, inquired fearfully as to the health of that dear family in Brunswick Square. Knightley answered, firmly enough, but Emma, made more sensible by her own secret anxieties, noticed that there was something not quite like himself in his manner, as if he were holding himself under restraint. He bantered with her father but his face smiled only with the lips; there was a shadow, she made certain.
With all her preoccupations, Emma only now asked herself why Mr Knightley had stayed so long in London when, as she knew only too well, and he must have discovered, he could have found no trace of Mr Churchill – his reason for the visit – since Mr Churchill was hiding in his own house in Surrey, when not making faces at windows and scaring old ladies to death.
‘Ah!’ Emma gave a little unconscious groan.
‘What is it, Emma?’ – Knightley, anxious.
‘It is the fat – you cannot roast without fat’ – Mr Woodhouse, nearly exultant.
‘No. No. I bit my tongue—’
‘There! Did I not say such an excess was a danger—’
So the dinner carried on with only a little more interest for Emma when Knightley inquired how she had amused herself in his absence and she described her visit to Abbey-Mill Farm and how pleasant a scene she had found there. She knew his fondness both for Robert Martin and Harriet so that she expected her words would give him pleasure and indeed, almost for the first time, his face lit up.
‘I am so pleased, Emma, that you have seen them for what they are – good people, good, honest people, and not as uncultivated as they may appear to those who do not know them as well as I do.’
Such commendation struck a note too far for Emma and, although she had fully intended to confess to her visit to Donwell as a prelude to the real confession later, she now felt disinclined. The Martins were farmers, whatever he might try to convince her otherwise, and Harriet hardly sensible at all. Dinner finished.
Afterwards there was backgammon where Mr Knightley took Emma’s place so that she wondered at his patience, and she, more to give occupation to herself than to give pleasure, sat at the piano and played the sort of light easy airs that required no dedication. But even this lowered her spirits for she imagined Jane Fairfax’s clever fingers flying over the keys and her pale face, ghostly face, staring into the distance.
At last, just as Emma felt she must scream or fly at her father for his gentle pleasure in his children’s company, Mr Woodhouse rose and declared, ‘You have kept me up much beyond my time’ and the evening was at an end, or, rather, now the evening, the true purpose of the evening, might begin.
Emma’s bedroom was large, a corner room with windows in either wall. In the middle stood the four-poster bed that had been constructed for their marriage. On the other wall a fire, burning low, illuminated a pretty mantel, two comfortable-looking chairs and a small dressing table.
Emma lay in bed and listened impatiently for Mr Knightley’s quick brisk stride. At last it came; she sat up. ‘There is something I have—’ but he was distracted, stood staring down at the fire. She hesitated, ‘You did not find Frank Churchill, I surmise?’
‘Churchill!’ – he started, as if the name was far from his thoughts, turned to her. ‘No, no. At least, I am clear what he has done with himself—’
‘Clear?’ in tremulous voice. Could he know? It was impossible!
‘As I would expect of such a man – he has fled—’
‘Fled?’
‘Fled abroad. He was always talking of it, apparently – the Grand Tour – such frippery as he would think to make him more fashionable-seeming – so he has taken the opportunity of his wife passing away to tear off on a trip—’
‘But how do you know?’
‘He left a note – Mr Churchill found it – not exactly a note, but making his intentions clear enough – Florence, Venice, Rome – leaving all the sorrowing behind him, father, child – My opinion of him was never high, as you know, but – still, I must not be so vehement – it is not my business.’
‘Oh, Knightley,’ Emma, feebly, ‘do not stand there in the cold. Come to bed.’
Now he came to her, clasped her hands in his. ‘Oh, Emma, my dearest child. How lovely you are. You know nothing of the evil in human nature – evil is perhaps too strong a word – the weakness – it is all weakness. Ah, and others suffer.’
Returning to the fire, he sat down heavily on one of the chairs and bowed his head, apparently in such despair that Emma, even in her own perturbation, was surprised. It seemed too much. Where was the strength – good sense – she was relying on? ‘There is something else wrong?’ she inquired eventually, timidly, almost reluctantly. But her love and woman’s instinct told her it must be so.
‘No. Yes. But I cannot tell you, although it concerns you.’ He was up again and close. ‘It is another’s secret, not mine to tell you’ – A groan, a look into Emma’s frightened eyes. ‘You must trust me, my dear. I am so much older than you and this is a burden I must bear on my own a little longer.’
‘I am not a child.’ But as Emma whispered this her mind raced into despair. For how could she tell the story of Frank Churchill now? It would be too cruel.
‘I will get into bed. But be patient. Trust me.’
They lay in bed, close in body but both staring into the dark. ‘Is it a business matter?’ whispered Emma, after five long minutes had passed.
‘Yes, Emma, a business matter, but not mine.’ There was a pause. ‘I must go back tomorrow. I meant to have one night and not tell you till the morning, but now I have said so much—’
‘But not all—’
It is not my secret – I repeat. Oh, I am so tired, yet it is such a comfort to see you, my dear – your face, your innocent enjoyment of my return. How people can lie, deceive those they are closest to – you would not believe it!’
‘But, Knightley!’ Emma threw her arms round her husband and might th
en have spoken but he held her carefully, like a child.
‘Good, sweet Emma. I rode all this way to look on your bright face – to give me strength to return to what I must deal with.’
The moment had gone. She could not speak. He could not, or would not, tell her his secret and she could not, or would not, tell him hers.
‘Good-night, dearest Emma, I must sleep now.’ A gentle hug and he had turned from her; soon the evenness of his breathing announced that he slept – even in such anxiety, he slept.
Emma, more anxious still or less tired, lay awake until the sky had lost its deepest hue and the evening star no longer shone. Feverish in her thoughts, she considered whether it was a change in her, not in him, that had made it impossible for her to speak out. As an unmarried girl she had always minded confronting him with her own differing views, but had never avoided any occasion. Often, she had thought herself in the right. They had been equal, she in high spirits, he in good sense. But now she was his wife. The foolish and spoilt young lady who had made so many mistakes in the year before her marriage, now bowed to Mr Knightley – as a wife. She was a wife! Never had the word seemed less happy. Knightley now assumed they were one – and yet – and yet – she could not think further. It was too much. Out there Frank Churchill waited, wild-eyed; at her side her husband lay – not very close, he had turned on his side away from her. She perceived that she must hold her secret, after all; if it were defiance, then it was a defiance forced upon her – an independence that she had not sought but which had chosen her. If her nature was not utterly set against such a course, if she found the strength to sustain the secrecy, then she must be glad of it.
Mr Knightley gave a snore and, by a barely perceptible inch, Emma moved further from his side.
At last the mists of Lethe came to close her eyes and she slept.
Chapter 10
It seemed that every day was bright now – a last gilding of autumn before winter. The days of rain preceding, combined with the high winds, had washed down many of the leaves which lay on the dark ground like patterned Turkish rugs.
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