“That comment was perhaps unwise,” Mr. Collins began. Noisy sipping followed.
“What comment, dear?” Charlotte inquired absentmindedly, for I think she had already mastered the delicate art of freely ignoring one’s husband without provoking him.
“When you suggested that Mary should stay on indefinitely at Longbourn.”
“Well, she should….” Charlotte stumbled over her response. “That is, to an extent. And you as much said the same thing!”
“What? When?”
“When you agreed that she should take as much time as she needed to grieve her poor father.”
“What else could I say?” Mr. Collins lamented. “Oh, this has turned into such an awkward business, Charlotte, which is exactly what I feared!”
“I wonder why she did not go to Jane’s or Lizzy’s with her mother and sister….” Charlotte said slowly, chomping away at a biscuit.
Mr. Collins gave a little gasp. “Do you think it is because of a scandal?”
“Mary?” His wife chortled. “We are talking of Mary Bennet, aren’t we? The one who’d sooner put coals in her pockets and swim across a lake than stand up with a man and dance with him? Please, Mr. Collins! Don’t speak nonsense.”
Mr. Collins said nothing, or at least I heard nothing. I imagined his clever brain turning the matter over, as one inspects a precious stone beneath a magnifying glass, delicately, caressingly handling it before slipping it into an inner pocket. At length, he spoke: “Well, I can’t understand why anyone would prefer these rooms to the ones at Pemberley, my dear. There must be a reason.”
Charlotte removed the jewel from her husband’s pocket and inspected it for herself. “Why does it matter what the reason is? The fact remains that she is here, and we cannot turn her out without appearing like monsters to the rest of the neighborhood.”
“No, of course not,” Mr. Collins agreed. “That might reflect poorly on us.”
“But perhaps,” Charlotte continued, still fingering the jewel, “perhaps we can come to some agreement with her that would also be beneficial to us.”
Another short interval of silence, and then a firm statement of assent from the man I’d once presumed to love and even hoped to marry. “Yes,” he said, the jewel dropping discreetly back into his pocket. “Yes, I think that’s an excellent idea. Her father is no longer the proprietor of Longbourn. Why should she not make herself useful to us in exchange for our many kindnesses?”
* * *
—
UNDER THE COLLINSES, there was no suffering which I hadn’t encountered before. I did not mind the work, and so long as they believed they had not been taken advantage of for their charity, Charlotte and Mr. Collins were both civil enough to me. They always framed their requests as “favors”; to refuse would have been impossible, but I’m grateful that they gave the impression of choice. For instance: “As Sarah is doing the washing, would you mind going to the milliner’s and picking up that bit of lace I pointed out to you the other day? I’d be so pleased if you would.” And: “I don’t think Mrs. Hill will have time to go to the butcher’s; her gout is acting up again. Would you terribly mind going in her place? I’ll make up a list for you, if that would help you to remember.”
When I’d lived with my family, they had generally ignored me, but their indifference had, I think, been the natural consequence of there being four other sisters and a mother who at all times would demand as much attention towards her own person as any one of us. I mention this because I now consider that my years of sitting quietly had prepared me to survive this long interval of stillness. There existed no sense of obligation between Charlotte and me, and friendship, which can subsist only on terms of equality, seemed a dim and unlikely, even undesirable, prospect. So Charlotte and I were no longer friends, and I converted instead into a kind of useful and complaisant companion. I accompanied her wherever she went and stood submissively within her oversized shadow in shops. I sat with her at home, read to her, sewed with her, conversed with her on whatever subject that happened to occupy her thoughts, and offered mild opinions which, in stating the obvious, seemed to satisfy her entirely. Sometimes she asked me to play for her, and she would interrupt me midway through a piece to make a request for a song she desired to hear more. And if I did not know the song in question, then she would call me back to her side and speak to me about something else—preparations for dinner, Maria’s recent engagement to a wealthy merchant and what she thought of the man, her brother’s letters from overseas, her father’s excellent health. She made a point never to be cruel to me, but she visibly enjoyed the new formality with which I was compelled to treat her.
Occasionally my hand would itch to write again. The urge would come and go like an inconstant flame, ideas transpiring and departing from my brain as ephemerally as fairies. The notions I’d conceived ranged from the noble (a disfigured prince’s tragic love affair with a shepherdess) to the ridiculous (could it be possible to write, I wondered, from the perspective of an English sheepdog?). They’d form in the most inconvenient moments—the second-long lull between Julius’s squalls, the undecided pause before Charlotte asked me my opinion of a new lace cap. But whatever candle of inspiration burned, I just as soon put it out again. I could not write without also remembering the wrinkly velvet green sofa. The fragrance of ancient books. Him. I had no editor, no critic, and no audience without Darcy. Leonora’s Adventures had finished and come to nothing; a subpar work born of a conventional mind, I thought. What could be the point?
Days, weeks, then a whole month passed in this manner. Mornings dissolved inextricably into afternoons, and entire evenings vanished in the space of a single breath. Occasionally I lost count of what day it was; each hour of consciousness felt like an exact duplicate of what had occurred before. I listened so carefully to Charlotte’s stories that I believed myself in danger of forgetting everything else I’d ever learned or read in my life. For the sake of appearing useful, I’d begun to spend more time in the garden with Sarah, cutting flowers and weeding. It was after such an occasion that, returning to the house with my basket, I heard Mr. and Mrs. Collins again conversing about “the state of affairs.”
“Are you satisfied with her, Charlotte?” a full mouth asked.
“Mr. Collins, you refer to her as though she were some pet animal,” the wife gently rebuked.
“Well…”
“Mary keeps me wonderful company, and I don’t think I’ve heard her complain once about anything, not even when Julius threw up his dinner on her dress two nights ago.”
Mr. Collins said nothing for a lengthy interval. At last, in the tone of a resigned employer who has found no excuse to dismiss a worker he would eagerly get rid of, he added, “Well, my dear, I am glad she is behaving herself.”
“I would tell you, William, if she wasn’t. Did you notice she’s started to help Sarah with her chores? I saw her the other day hanging up the washing and working in the garden.”
“Say nothing about it, my dear. She’ll look, I’m sure, for any excuse to do less, so give her none.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Charlotte protested. “Just look how nicely this situation has turned out for us, when a month ago you wanted to get rid of her.”
“I still wonder why she should want to stay here.”
“To keep me company, of course.”
“Oh really, my dear! How naïve you are. I mean to say—does she not wish to marry?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” Charlotte said cheerfully. “She hardly has anything to tempt her here, does she? She doesn’t meet anyone. She has no friends in the neighborhood. But Jane, Kitty, and Mrs. Bennet write her often enough, and when you consider how much attention I personally pay her, it is more than ample company to keep any young woman’s spirits lively. I wager, Mr. Collins, that in a month she’ll have started the ironing, and if she does that, we won’t even have to keep Sarah
on. I’m sure that miserable girl hates me, and it is so disturbing to have one’s servants hate you when you’re forced to live with them.”
The rest of the conversation became a petty argument over whether the three servants of Longbourn, excluding myself, did in fact dislike their new mistress. I knew for certain that they did and that they felt the same or slightly worse about her self-important, miniature husband, who scuttled around the house like an undergrown cock.
But I gave no more thought to either of them. As I moved away from the door, the basket still dangling from my wrist, I was aware of a change, not in my surroundings, or in the Collinses, or in the air—but in myself.
This change might have been prompted by any number of things: the reminder that Mr. Collins was and always would be an ass, the memory of books, of brave Leonora, of Pemberley. It stirred, like the first worm of life twisting in anger, and awoke me from my diffidence.
The transformation continued that night as I was going downstairs to retrieve a cup of warm milk for Charlotte. I found Sarah asleep at the kitchen table.
“Sarah,” I whispered.
Catlike, she stirred, opened a pair of green eyes, and stretched her freckled arms, curling her sooty fingers as though they were claws flexing.
“What is it, miss?” she yawned. “I’ve just had such a strange dream.”
“Mrs. Collins wants her cup of milk. She can’t sleep without it.”
“I’m glad you woke me when you did,” Sarah continued, stumbling to the stove. “Can you believe what I dreamed just now? I dreamed I was mistress of this house! Me! Mistress of Longbourn! It’s laughable, isn’t it? And everyone around me was calling me ‘Charlotte’ or ‘Mrs. Collins,’ including you, miss, and I could hardly move for being so fat. Someone had to push me down the hall and up the stairs ’cause I couldn’t walk on my own two legs.”
“Sarah, you’ll want to be careful how you talk about Mrs. Collins, even behind her back,” I warned, more for her sake than that of the impatient woman upstairs.
“The devil with Mrs. Collins!” Sarah cursed, becoming, for all of five seconds, less greasy-smocked human than auburn-haired goddess. We laughed together, for since Mama and Kitty had left, we’d become good friends, and I returned upstairs with “the mistress’s” milk. After this duty had been dispensed with and the cup washed and dried and replaced in the cabinet belowstairs, I was permitted to retire for the rest of the evening. In my room, I slipped out a single sheet of paper. I prepared a pen and a bottle of ink, and I began to write the story of innocent Sarah Ellis, a maid-of-all-work in a small but understaffed household who is regularly thrashed within an inch of her life by her overfed and frugal mistress. The mistress’s husband I described as a slender and snobbishly erudite young man two years her junior with a secret proclivity for wearing women’s bonnets and shawls. Sarah Ellis wakes up one morning to find herself in the bed of Mrs. Caroline Collingwood, and Mrs. Caroline Collingwood wakes up several hours later in a “small, confined room” belowstairs. I wrote until I had depleted all the candles, paper, and quill pens in my room, and the only survivor of my creative tempest remained a bottle of ink which could perhaps eke out another two sentences or three before outliving its usefulness.
When at last I laid down my pen, I read over what I’d written.
The twenty-first of October held special meaning for Mrs. Caroline Collingwood, mistress of the ancient house of Middlebourne in Bedfordshire County. For one, it was her birthday, and she had arranged several weeks earlier that it should be nothing less than a grand occasion with many people present in order to congratulate her on her accomplishment. This accomplishment, the aging of precisely one year since the previous twenty-first of October, also marked the anniversary of another singular event: her marriage to Mr. Aloysius Collingwood, a religious scholar whose article elucidating the four cardinal virtues of Saint Thomas Aquinas had received praise from sources as high as the bishop. He was a gentleman of truly delicate constitution, slender, with hands as soft as lambskin and veins of faintest blue, as though the blood in his body had been diluted in equal parts with icy water. To their neighbors, they could not have been a more unlikely couple. She was prone to being loud, and he so accustomed to whispering all his “good evening”s and “farewell”s that their closest friends instinctively bent their heads and craned their necks to hear him. Mr. Collingwood had come from a good family, and throughout his life a rumor persisted, never disproved or affirmed, that he had for an ancestor a duke who’d ridden into Agincourt beside the king. The superiority of Mr. Collingwood’s relations and the bestowment of a comfortable income from his late father had a very different effect on his wife than it did on his own diminutive person. For Mr. Collingwood, the security of wealth necessitated that he should turn his mind to greater, immaterial things, and thus he passed most of his evenings after supper with the composition of fine religious sonnets by candlelight. For Mrs. Collingwood, the possession of an immodest income meant that she counted among her dearest friends nearly all of the shopkeepers of her industrious little town.
The evening of the twentieth of October boasted no remarkable events for either of them. Mrs. Collingwood enjoyed her dinner of boiled chicken, sweetbreads, tongue, and venison, and Mr. Collingwood washed down the meat of two small prawns with a spoonful of cabbage soup. Waiting on both of them was an emaciated girl of yellow complexion and ginger hair whose name was Sarah Ellis, the only maid employed by the Collingwoods and responsible for a good many things that in any other house would have been divided between two or even three fit young women.
Dinner was nearly over, and all had gone smoothly and well until Sarah Ellis spilled gravy into the lap of her mistress. This was not, as Mrs. Collingwood instantly assumed, a malicious insurrection on the part of her maid. It was only a mistake caused by the many sleepless nights in which Sarah Ellis was obliged to sit belowstairs and polish the silver or finish the washing. But Mrs. Collingwood did not know this, and even if she had, she mightn’t have cared. So she called for Mr. Haines, who knew to bring Mrs. Collingwood her riding crop, and Mrs. Collingwood thrashed Sarah within an inch of her life using this monstrous instrument, until her own arms grew too tired and sore from the constant whipping of the poor girl’s back.
“That fool has no mind for work,” Mrs. Collingwood despaired to her indifferent husband once her victim had been dismissed. “And she despises me. She’d murder me in my sleep if she had the chance. Have you seen the way she looks at me?”
“Tut, tut, my dear,” Mr. Collingwood whispered and, taking another spoonful of soup, excused himself from the dinner table.
That night, Mrs. Collingwood retired in high spirits. She fell asleep with the taste of chicken in her mouth, and her thick fingers gripped the sheets of her bed as though they each held a large slice of cake. Sarah Ellis, too, fell asleep for the first time in many days, while in an undusted corner of the house that remained forgotten to all but one, Mr. Collingwood paired a new bonnet with a pretty shawl his wife had given up for lost.
The next morning, the house awoke to screams, no sooner in one quarter of the house than they began with equal fire and liveliness in another.
“Mr. Collingwood!” Mrs.-Collingwood-who-was-really-Sarah-Ellis screamed.
“Mrs. Collingwood?” Mr. Collingwood whispered doubtfully.
“Aloysius!” Sarah-Ellis-who-was-really-Mrs.-Collingwood bellowed, coming up the stairs from the small, confined room she had slept in all night. “What on earth is happening here?”
That was when she set eyes on herself and screamed. To the Cook and the Gamekeeper, to the Butler and the Valet and the Footman, all of whom had run upstairs to see what was the matter, Mrs. Collingwood could be no other person than who she appeared to be. Little surprise then that when she fainted, no one in the whole group of able-bodied men ventured even halfheartedly to catch her.
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING, I awoke at my desk with a sore head and a throbbing hand. I heard a rash of hurried footsteps outside; then a fist rapped like an angry woodpecker on my door before the real-life inspiration for Mrs. Caroline Collingwood entered. From the looks of it, she was most upset about something.
And yet she smiled, too.
“Mary, do you not know what time it is? It is nearly a quarter to ten. And you aren’t even dressed, by God!”
I began to offer apologies for my remiss behavior, but she batted these skillfully away.
“Never mind all that, Mary,” Charlotte scolded. “We have a visitor, and you must come immediately and not keep our guest waiting any longer!”
I smoothed the front of my dress, feeling a flash of excitement. “Has one of my sisters come? Is it Jane? Or perhaps Lizzy and Kitty traveled together from Pemberley to see me?”
“No, no, and no!” Charlotte repeated, flustered. “It’s Mr. Darcy!”
Mr. and Mrs. Collins could not account for the honor of Mr. Darcy’s visit, but they endeavored to make the most of it all the same. When Julius began to scream in his mother’s arms, his warm, fidgeting body was promptly relegated to my lap, where it squirmed painfully against my ribs and bony thighs.
“You’ll never get him to be quiet if you hold him like that, Mary!” Mrs. Collins chastised through close-set teeth. Mr. Darcy glanced at the baby, then looked briefly at its bungling caretaker. Our eyes met. He had on his best blue coat, the one which made him appear invincible, like a hero in a painting. Though only two months had passed since we’d last parted, I wondered if he found me changed.
“I hope you are in good health, Mr. Darcy,” Mr. Collins suggested in a childish voice.
“Thank you, I’m perfectly well,” the gentleman replied.
“We’re so pleased to hear it,” Mr. Collins declared, and Charlotte, too, nodded her assent over her teacup.
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