Chapter 24
T hat evening, feeling weary as usual, I stood patiently as Carsten removed my coat. With some sense that the page had turned or a freshening breeze had blown through an airless room, I thought of returning home.
“Did I mention I plan to take a walking tour of the Roman walls?”
“You had not, sir. When will you go?”
As he helped me on with my dressing gown, I nattered on about when I would go, what I wished to see, my intention to travel as a rustic, and that Colonel Fitzwilliam’s batman would go with me.
“I see, sir,” he said.
Was he annoyed not to be asked? He was!
“I assume you would also go,” I said tentatively, “though I do not want to place upon you any obligation. I expect to be uncomfortable and?—”
“Of course I should go, Mr Darcy,” he said. “I once walked through the Highlands of Scotland when at university there.”
“Did you? Well done! But with three of us, Carsten, I wonder if we should perhaps consider making use of your mule to carry our provisions?”
“That is an excellent idea, sir. Shall I make arrangements to have him taken up to Pemberley?”
“What of Mrs Hamilton? Would she feel the loss of him?”
“I had hoped she would make use of him, but instead, she treats him like a pet dog from what I understand.”
“Does she write to you?”
“A poor curate who travels that road visits her and writes for her now and again.”
“Then let her know our plans and ask her to give the cart to the curate to use or sell as he sees fit. I shall ask Keller to send a youngster to collect Trusty and see him safely to Pemberley.” I looked at my valet a touch ruefully and said, “Am I being silly about the fate of that humble animal?”
“Well,” he said philosophically, “he is a very good little mule.”
Thus we began to tie in a bundle our business in London in order to leave it behind us.
The last ball Georgiana and I attended was not so terrible, simply because we knew that we were leaving town.
Fitzwilliam was given an extended leave and left for Pemberley to await our arrival, and Georgiana took callers for one more day at our aunt’s house.
After her presentation, Lady Matlock’s drawing room had been chosen as the place Georgiana would go three days of the week so that her beaus and their mothers could visit her.
On those set days, she went in the morning with an attitude of long-suffering and returned later awash with relief.
When asked about these occasions, she was not terribly forthcoming, and I did not press her.
Her reticence in this regard meant that I did not have much insight into those visits until a letter came from Hertfordshire on the eve of our departure to the country.
This had come in the usual manner, on a silver salver at breakfast. Georgiana broke the seal and read, and I sat, also in the usual manner, in full expectation of hearing the letter read. Only this time, my sister hesitated to do so, reading with great concentration and a sober look on her face.
“Has something happened?” I asked quietly, striving to disguise my alarm but startling her out of her absorption in her letter.
“Oh! Well, no,” she hedged, glancing at her companion. Then, looking up at me more directly, she spoke in a confessional manner. “Only I had written to her about some trifling feelings, and what she has written back is so full…”
“By no means should you ever relate something personal only because I ask. But then again, if you are equal to letting me peer a little way into your life, I would be honoured by your trust.”
Without preamble, Mrs Annesley, who was as wise as she was discreet, quietly excused herself, taking with her the footman who always waited upon us at breakfast. We sat in pin-drop silence for a moment before Georgiana admitted she would feel better to have shared her letter with me than not, and in the soberest of tones, she began to read.
Dear Friend,
I wonder if you might pretend for a moment that I am both older and wiser which would qualify me to give you advice you have not asked for about your weekly callers.
You see, I detected in your letter some flavour of your distress at the painful interest shown to you by the young Lord Talbot.
You are moved by his ardency. I suspect you feel badly you do not return that same painful interest, questioning if you should try harder to like him because he has paid you the compliment of professing to like you.
While I am certain you are not mistaken and that the gentleman is truly sincere, perhaps you should wonder if his motivations are pure. Perhaps his pockets might be empty, and he is only painfully in love with your fortune?
My God. She had described the precise mechanism by which Wickham had imposed on her!
I mention this only because I have twice this year alone learnt that I have misjudged a man.
In one case, I believed a gentleman to be of proper character, and as it turns out, I was woefully mistaken.
In the other, I believed a gentleman to be lacking in character and discovered—again—I had been thoroughly mistaken in my estimation of his worth.
This has shaken my self-opinion somewhat, and I hope in the future I might hold back any judgments of a person until such time as I am more certain of their character.
Did she indeed mention two gentlemen? Could it be—I could not let myself be distracted, for my sister was still reading.
Forgive me for continuing to sermonise, but when you also from time to time express in your notes some slight doubts about your looks and manners, some sense you do not compare when stood next to other young ladies who are out, I am moved to beg you to abandon such thoughts.
You see, hand-in-hand with the lessening of my assurance in my first opinions, I have also come to discover that, for me, character must take precedence over every other attribute.
I have even begun to think that perhaps handsomeness and amiability are impediments to the development of a person’s natural gifts, for these so-called advantages can lead to a certain laziness, a self-assurance that such persons will be well-received wherever they go.
At the age of eighteen, these diamonds, as they are sometimes called, are already at the pinnacle of their lifetime achievements.
With so little cause to improve themselves, why should they strive to be better?
Imagine if you would, sitting in your rocking chair in a cap, now wrinkled and grey, insisting your life had been worth the while because you were once deemed to be an ‘incomparable’ by the haute ton.
It is almost pitiful to consider. How unlucky it would be to be only beautiful!
Having met you, dear Georgiana, I am convinced of your worth—your value. You possess sincerity which should not be wasted on those who do not know it as a purity of heart.
My sister had by this point, reached for her handkerchief and put it briefly to her eyes.
Think of the biblical passage during these moments of self-doubt and choose not to cast pearls before swine.
And as to the subject of husbands, I hope we are both able to be disagreeably selfish and settle upon a man we choose because of our own sovereign inclination, not because we feel guilty or pushed or even obliged.
I conclude this bumptious outpouring of advice with an insight that I have had of late.
We love who we love and cannot make ourselves fall into it.
Moreover, if it is truly love and not merely some means of getting what we believe is lacking or avoiding what we fear, then I cannot see how it would be possible ever to fall out of love either.
This enduring, unshatterable sort of love is a lofty aspiration, I know, and as such, it must be given to us by the mysterious workings of divine providence, for it seems more than what a mere human can contrive.
Still, I hope for this kind of fateful union for us both.
With every feeling of goodwill sent your way,
Elizabeth