“Well, there you are,” he said. “Have I done better than you thought I would, Miss Bennet?”
I had no chance to answer. A knock sounded at the door, and Mrs. Reynolds emerged from it to bid the colonel come immediately. In a fit of temper, Marmalade had bit one of the stable boys, and nothing would appease the beast except the soothing whispers of her master.
Prince Wilhelm, who had disguised himself upon his arrival in Denmark with the wearing of a servant’s livery, made his way unrecognized through the castle. Having expected to find Leonora in her rooms, he was surprised to discover that her chambers were empty and took advantage of the time offered to change into his own clothes and wait for her. Several months had passed since he’d last laid eyes on the Queen of the Danes, and he could not predict how she would receive him. The journey to her kingdom had proved difficult, marred and delayed by a succession of violent storms, which had prevented him from resting more than two to three hours each taxing night. His whole body ached, but the discomfort of his limbs was nothing to the soreness and unease of his heart. As he waited, he warmed himself by the fire and, unable to fight the heaviness of his eyes, soon fell asleep. Whole hours elapsed before consciousness finally returned to him, and when it did, he realized he had company, for sitting opposite him in an imposing, velvet-draped chair was Leonora herself. By then, the blaze of the fire had died to a few lit embers. One half of her face was hidden in darkness, the other weakly illuminated by the faint glow of the hearth.
“How many hours have you been sitting there?” he asked when he found courage to speak.
“I’ve lost count,” she replied, and the sound of her voice, the reminder of what he had missed for so long, temporarily stunned him.
In the near dark, he stood. The distance between them might well have been another ocean, but in time, he crossed it and offered her his hand, which, after a pause, she accepted. For several moments, they stood facing each other. Then he touched her cheek and found there tears, which he dried with a light caress of his thumb. In her heart, she felt uncertain of him. An inner voice told her she should not trust him, as she should not trust anyone. And who could blame her for the suspicions she still harbored? More than once she had been hurt by others, and the long intervals of solitude which served as medicine for her pain had since annihilated any trace of those memories that might formerly have brought her happiness. Yet she was still a woman—a queen, yes, but a woman also—and these feelings which stirred to life at the end of a caress were not, could not be a sign of weakness. Rather, she knew them to be no more than a reminder of her own human nature. So at last she relented to them, and she and Wilhelm kissed.
The page balanced thoughtfully in Darcy’s hand, and I waited for him to make some comment. But when he finally spoke, it had nothing to do with the progression of events in my novel.
“You don’t look quite yourself tonight,” he said.
To this, I shrugged, as I was loathe to speak of my earlier encounter. “It is nothing,” I replied. “I think I have sat indoors too long today.”
“That may be the cause,” he said. “Or it might be something else. The colonel, perhaps.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. “What cause would you have to think such a thing?”
“Mrs. Reynolds,” Darcy answered, leaning paternally back in his chair. “She claims to have caught the two of you standing, as she put it, ‘unnaturally close together’ in this library.”
“There was nothing to catch, I assure you. Mrs. Reynolds misconstrued what she saw.”
“There is also the matter of your performance at dinner today….You made no conversation, played with your food, and did not laugh at any of the colonel’s jokes.”
“That is because I did not find them funny.”
Darcy stood up. He began to walk restively around the perimeter of two footstools, glancing briefly at me every now and again, as though to ascertain that I was still there.
“Out of a sense of duty, I am obliged to caution you against developing any familiarity with my cousin. My intention is not to blemish his character, which has been, in all our interactions, irreproachable. To be sure, he is a gentleman. His breeding and education are both excellent, his career laudable. But he is one who has always laughed at life and deprecated the idea of marriage, both in my company and in the company of others. For a man, he may be the best and most amiable of friends; there is not a soul among my acquaintance who can claim to dislike him. But for a woman, particularly to one such as yourself…” Here Darcy’s expression grew stiff, and he could not finish his thought.
“One such as myself?” I repeated.
Darcy exhaled. “Eloquence has never been among my greater gifts.”
I picked up a pen and twisted it between my fingers.
“I think I understand your meaning,” I said, staring at an ink-stained nib. “I am, I suppose, the daughter of a gentleman, but what relations I possess are nothing to the de Bourghs and Darcys of this world. My fortune, too, is so negligible that any man who chooses of his own free will to pursue me would be instantly cleared of wanting to marry me for my money. As to schooling and the cultivation of fine ladies’ accomplishments, I confess I have never benefited under the tutelage of a governess. By these standards, my deficiencies would seem to speak for themselves. I possess no breeding, I am woefully uneducated, and I am poor. Yet for these faults I feel I might still hope to be forgiven had I been blessed with a little charm and beauty. Even if I were a dull woman with a pretty face, I doubt that my being the favorite of any man would be the cause of so much alarm and suspicion.”
My words had flustered Darcy. As his disquiet increased, so did the boundary of his walks, and he made an outline of a settee, a lounge chair, and a divan before circling back to me.
“You are a woman of substance and intelligence,” he said. “I did not warn you against the attentions of my cousin because I believed you to be inadequate but because anyone who is familiar with his situation will know that he is entirely dependent on the benevolence and generosity of his family, having no fortune of his own.”
“And so must marry a woman of wealth.”
Darcy’s face brightened. “Yes, exactly. I’m glad you understand.”
“And because he must marry a woman who is rich,” I repeated, “it naturally follows that I am the most unwelcome of distractions, being, as I am, both unaccomplished and poor.”
“He would never be able to marry you. Therefore, any communication outside of what is agreeable and polite would not only be pointless but also discouraged,” Darcy said with finality, and I half-expected him to emphasize his declaration by pounding the table between us.
“Has it occurred to you, sir,” I rejoined, “that the basis for this conversation rests entirely on two things, neither of which carry any weight: one, the highly imaginative report of a self-important housekeeper who must be seventy if she is a day, and two, the fact that I did not eat my sprouts at dinner?”
Darcy colored and immediately proceeded to make another round of the furniture. He emerged from his thoughts just as I reached the door to take my leave.
“Before you go, Mary,” he said, “I feel I must extract two guarantees from you. The first: Will you promise to keep your distance from the colonel at all times? And the second: Will you also assure me, in your own words, that you’ll do nothing to encourage his attentions? It is both for your sake and for my peace of mind that I ask this of you.”
I noticed then that his hand still clutched the page from which he had read earlier and that it shook a little.
“No,” I replied, and the danger, the excitement of my defiance was enough to make the hairs on my arm stand on end.
“No?” he repeated, almost in disbelief. “Then you acknowledge by your refusal that there is something between you…or that there could be something between you.”
“Mary, please…”
But it was too late. As I left, my hand acted faster than my intent and shut the door between us. I heard it close with accusing finality behind me before running to my room.
Darcy’s lecture had quite the opposite effect of what he’d intended. After the initial wave of insult had passed, it dawned on me that the prospect of such an unlikely romance ever visiting my life was, in actuality, rather flattering. I was determined to think no more of it, however. The colonel made a convincing German prince, but his performance, masterful as it was, revealed little more to me than a penchant for the dramatic.
Yet in the days following, I saw him everywhere. Entering the library to begin my work, I’d discover he was already there, sprawled luxuriantly across a divan, napping, or swinging his legs from a desk, reading a letter. But even in such proximity, he never went out of his way to make conversation, and we might have spent whole afternoons occupied with our own diversions had he not yawned in a manner to fill up the room or dropped a book so loudly as to make me blotch my writing. Only then would we happen to look at each other, and he’d feel inclined to launch into some subject, such as his sister’s engagement to a marquis or how ghastly he found the food at Pemberley ever since a neighboring estate had poached Darcy’s cook. When I made my rounds of the gardens, it was not uncommon for me to find him seated on a bench which it was my habit to pass, and he’d offer an excuse to accompany me for the remainder of my walk. He would then tell me of the grounds of his ancestral home, how there was once a tree from which, in their youth, he and his brothers would swing and fall into a lake, laughing and naked. He diverted me with tales of his three favorite dogs, no less dear to him than his thoroughbreds, and the abundance of pheasant shooting to be had at the end of the year. He claimed a weakness for buttered prawns and salmagundi, for cheesecakes and lobster. As a child, he had stumbled upon a pool in the wilderness, and for years afterwards, believed it to be sacred, until an extended drought depleted its crystal waters.
I neither sought the attentions of the colonel nor refused them. They were a novelty and a distraction from the lonely pastimes of reading and writing. I told him about Longbourn, about the squeaking stair my sisters claimed was haunted and the superstition we had concocted that whoever stepped on it after dark would be visited by a ghost. As a young girl, I had watched my father put down an old workhorse. It had kicked out its legs and stiffened, like someone playing dead, and I could not sleep for days afterwards without Mama or Jane holding me. My descriptions of Kitty and Lydia made him laugh, and, in turn, he entrusted me with the secret knowledge that Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s breath smelled perpetually of onions. I learned the names of his siblings and those of his horses and terriers, both living and dead. I familiarized myself with the easy pace of his walk. Blue was his favorite color. He hated mushrooms because he couldn’t stomach the idea of eating fungi. And the scar on his chin was the result of a boyish scuffle turned unexpectedly violent when his opponent pulled a penknife. Suddenly, not a day passed that we didn’t spend some portion of it in each other’s company. Even the solitude of writing no longer felt complete if he was not draped over a lounge chair and watching me over the top of a book.
Had I been more attentive to concerns outside my own pleasure, I might have noticed the silences which lengthened and proliferated between Darcy and my sister. I would not have then neglected Lizzy, as I did, the duration of my visits growing shorter and shorter, as my appetite for the colonel’s stories increased. Indeed, he could spin tales better than anyone I knew. A cloud with curling edges put him instantly in mind of his mother’s wigs; a gust of wind inspired him to recount a tale of twelve horned women and a cake baked with blood. At meals, we made up the only lively conversation, and Darcy observed our bantering cheerfulness with an expression of brooding solemnity.
When I reflect now on the tragedies that followed, and the series of unexpected losses which resolved to afflict a family considered by many to have been blessed for a time with unusual good fortune, I am able to mark, as if with a thin line of chalk, the exact moment that heralded the beginning of the end.
Lizzy kept largely to her bed. Though she recovered her appetite, she seemed to grow disproportionately thinner to the bulge that jutted like an unnatural hill from the narrow dimensions of her body. The morning of calamity, I’d read to Lizzy from William Godwin’s St. Leon until she grew tired, and afterwards, I’d met the colonel at the stables. I found him brushing Marmalade’s silky mane, while the mare snorted and tossed her head with pleasure.
Seeing me, he stopped, approached, and said in a grave voice, “Well, Miss Bennet, today is the day.”
It occurred to me that he meant to leave Pemberley sooner than expected, and I nearly fell down.
“Today is the day,” he repeated in a lower voice, out of the range of the groom, “that you will experience one of the greatest delights life can afford. Come.” He guided me towards his horse. “Don’t be afraid.”
My arms felt as though they’d turned to wood. “I’m not,” I muttered.
“Then get on.”
“I told you before, sir. I cannot ride.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty, thank you,” I said shortly.
He laughed. “By the time I turned ten, I’d already fallen twice off a grown horse, and the second incident would surely have crippled me had I not been delivered into the hands of an unusually competent physician. But that did not stop me. No, I’ve decided that I will not permit myself to be dissuaded by your protests, Miss Bennet. You will realize how wonderful it is just as soon as you’ve mounted.”
I hesitated until even Marmalade grew restless, and the colonel settled the matter as barbarians have done for centuries by lifting me, kicking and screaming, onto the back of his oversized pet.
“There!” he declared and commenced to guide us out of the enclosure of the stables.
“Oh no, please, let’s go back,” I implored, once we’d entered the paddock. “You may lead me about in a few circles, if you wish, and I shall be more than contented by the experience.”
The colonel paused, looking up at my wobbly perch. “Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.”
“Well,” he said, seeming to give in, “I have no intention of frightening a woman, particularly one as fainthearted as yourself. If you have no objection, I will just get on as well and lead Marmalade back the way we came. How does that sound?”
“Just fine, thank you, Colonel,” I said, exhaling with relief.
Smiling, he mounted Marmalade, who neighed in complaint at the additional weight. As I felt his shape settle behind me, my whole body stiffened.
“Now,” I said firmly. “Will you kindly escort me back to the stables and let me down from this animal?”
He never responded. His hands took the reins and lashed the horse’s neck before I could scream, and the landscape melted away, dissolving the wilderness ahead into mere color. I closed my eyes against the thrusting wind, then opened them, when I’d mustered the courage, to a world of brighter green and blue and gold than I remembered. I leaned into the colonel, and the back of my head grazed his shoulder. He said, “Steady on, old girl,” and I didn’t know whether he meant the animal or me. Behind us, Pemberley became a smidgeon of yellow-white paint in an emerald canvas, a mirage in a desert that disappeared in the space of a single breath. I felt my hair loosen and tumble in curly waves over my shoulders, and my spirit transformed into something as light as the hollow bones of birds.
Perhaps it was the wind that sent my head spinning, or the height at which I sat—I don’t know. I suppose I could blame the hills, whose roun
ded shapes suggested fertility, or the warmth of the summer day, which covered my body in a fine sheen of moisture after the first half hour of riding. The colonel sensed that Marmalade was growing tired, and we soon circled back. When we reached the stables, he lifted me down, and in the dark of the enclosure, I behaved like a woman who wanted to be kissed. So he obliged, guiding my mouth gently to his lips. Our faces did not slide off each other. He did not pull away so that my mouth landed on his chin. No mishap occurred, and the kiss was held long enough to mature and flower. Marmalade whinnied and beat the ground with her hoof, so he kissed her, too, and fed her some fresh hay. “I’ll return tomorrow with a bright, shiny apple,” I promised, tracing, with the tip of my finger, an immense nostril that flared at my touch. I’ll believe it when you bring it, her placid stare said to me, and the colonel and I waved goodbye to her before commencing to walk back to the house. He kissed me again when we were out of Marmalade’s sight.
“What was that for?” I panted, annoyed but only because I’d been taken by surprise.
“Nothing, my ugly little thing,” he said. “I just wanted to kiss you.”
I’d previously kept in step with him, but at his words, I stopped.
“Must you call me that?” I asked. I didn’t want to grow angry. I’d just been kissed, after all, and successfully, too. When I spoke, I could still feel the impression of his mouth, solid and warm, as it had settled over my own.
“I was teasing,” he said by way of apology, which didn’t help, for I thought immediately of that idiot Thomas Lucas. A joke, Mary. It was only meant to be a joke. “Don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud,” the colonel added.
“I’m not,” I retorted. “Just I’d prefer you didn’t call me that again. You were a complete ass to me when we first met.”
“Are you still not over that?” he said. “My God, woman, you do hold on to things. Well, what would you prefer I call you? ‘Most beauteous maiden’? ‘Brightest light of this sceptered isle’? Would that please you?”
Mary B Page 19