Chapter 12
Elizabeth’s situation with Mrs Macy was exceedingly pleasing, far better than she ever could have imagined when she ran away from Gunnersdale.
Upton Park was beautiful, and she had plenty of places to walk and enjoy.
Mrs Macy encouraged Elizabeth to be out of doors as much as possible, from a belief she held that it was good for ladies in a delicate condition to be exposed to fresh air.
The neighbourhood had the notion that she was a niece or a granddaughter, related to some Macy who had been killed…
in the war? An accident? The story varied, but no matter, Elizabeth did nothing to discourage the tales.
After all, she wished to keep some sort of dignity about her, and there was no hiding the fact that she was with child by now.
It would not do to appear as some sort of fallen woman.
She found a great deal in common with Mrs Macy.
The older lady was intelligent and well-read and had many interesting stories to tell of her life.
Elizabeth could not help but wonder whether the doctor had mistaken her malady.
Unfortunately, as the autumn began to gain on them, she started to see an increasing number of signs of Mrs Macy’s illness.
There were bad times interspersed with good, and the doctor who attended her told Elizabeth that she should expect an increasing number of bad times until the good, lucid days were but a rarity.
She came upon the good lady one day on a bench in the garden, weeping over the death of her spring flowers.
“Just look at what those gardeners have done! They killed all the bluebells. Just yesterday, these hills were covered with bluebells, and now the gardeners have gone and killed them all. Why would they do such a thing?”
“My dear, it is nearly autumn. I am sure we shall see the bluebells again in the spring.”
“Autumn? That cannot be,” Mrs Macy protested.
“Indeed, ma’am, it is the end of September,” Elizabeth insisted gently. “We shall see the bluebells again in the spring.”
Mrs Macy said nothing to this, merely nodding uncertainly and allowing Elizabeth to lead her back to the house.
Another time, as they sat in the drawing room after dinner, Mrs Macy announced, “My goodness, I am hungry. What shall we eat for dinner? I do hope for a roast duck.”
“We have just had our dinner, roast beef. Shall I tell cook you would like a roast duck tomorrow?”
Querulously, Mrs Macy said, “I have not had my dinner. Would you starve me to death?”
“Of course not, but we have dined already. Let me see whether there are some biscuits for you to have with your sherry.”
The older lady frowned severely, her jaw trembling. She paid no heed to the offer of a biscuit and instead picked up the sewing in her lap.
Less than a quarter hour later, she brightly announced, “Oh, I am so hungry this evening! What shall we dine on? Mutton? As hungry as I am, anything will do.”
Bennet Fitzwilliam Darcy was born on the second day of January 1813 after a remarkably easy delivery that left Elizabeth thinking she had expected there to be more to it than there was.
Bennet proved an uncommonly easy baby as well, eating and sleeping as he was meant to right from the start.
In both looks and temperament, he closely resembled his father, being a serious, thoughtful child with a burgeoning head of dark curls and a clear tendency towards above-average height.
Even the styling of his hands and feet attested to the fact that he was Darcy’s son.
The arrival of Bennet invigorated the household, which, with the exception of Elizabeth, was by and large older.
The butler and housekeeper, Mr and Mrs Mercer, were only a few years younger than Mrs Macy, and even her nurse, Harriet, was in her fifties.
Yet once Bennet appeared, nearly all seemed to shed decades.
Mrs Mercer revealed a previously hidden talent for singing as she battled Nurse Harriet for the right to rock him to sleep in the nursery, and Mr Mercer seemed to wish for nothing more but the chance to tell him story after story with no recompense but the firm grip of her son’s fist on his finger.
Elizabeth wondered at times whether the old wives’ tale was true that a child carried too much will never learn to walk, for if so, Bennet was doomed.
He spent almost every moment, awake or asleep, in the arms of the many loving adults who lived with him.
For Mrs Macy, Bennet’s arrival restored her senses in a way none of the tonics or elixirs she drank ever could. Throughout the spring and early summer of 1813, she was sharp witted and unconfused, and Elizabeth began to feel she might have recovered after all.
In September, Mrs Macy went to Elizabeth while she played with her son in the nursery.
“Oh, Amelia, just watch! Look what he can do!” Elizabeth beamed proudly as she induced her son, who was crouched uncertainly on all fours in front of her, to make a few shuffling movements towards a small carved horse she held just beyond his grasp.
“Well done, Master Bennet,” said Mrs Macy with a delighted sigh. “You will be chasing him all over the house soon enough, Elizabeth.”
“Just when I think I have the knack of one thing, he comes up with something new!” Elizabeth said with a rueful laugh.
“Come and sit with me,” said Mrs Macy. “I have something less pleasant than our dear boy to discuss.”
With a nod, Elizabeth rose. They had hired a sweet young girl from Wales named Meredith (who preferred to be called Merry) to help care for Bennet—Nurse Harriet had not liked it, but there were many days her hands were too full with Mrs Macy to see to the child—as Mrs Macy thought it unseemly that Elizabeth should have the care of her own child.
Merry went to Bennet immediately, and Elizabeth left them to go sit with Mrs Macy in the parlour.
The old lady situated herself in a swirl of ochre silk and the scent of gardenia.
She had taken of late to wearing ball gowns during the day.
Elizabeth said nothing of it, unsure whether it was her disease or mere eccentricity.
“You must prepare yourself, Lizzy, for I feel very certain I shall not last the winter.”
“But no! You have been feeling so much better, and I think with the new tonic—”
“New tonic,” Mrs Macy scoffed. “Sugar water and laudanum. Does nothing for me but make me sleep through the pain. No, my dear, do not protest. I feel it spreading, this disease, eating away at my bones, and it is gaining on us. I shall not see spring, to be sure. One comes to know these things. But much as I know my own fate, yours weighs heavily on my mind.”
“Do not think of me,” Elizabeth replied immediately.
“But of course I think of you. My dear girl, you have become the child of my heart, the daughter I never had. I treasure the comforts of these last months more than you will ever know.”
Tears sprung into Elizabeth’s eyes, but Mrs Macy was not finished.
“Will you go back to him?”
“To…to Darcy?”
Mrs Macy nodded.
“No,” Elizabeth said immediately. Then, with more thought, “Who is to say he would not take Bennet and divorce me? I have lately read of a case where a woman was sent to the gallows for stealing her husband’s property—that property being his child.”
Mrs Macy nodded. “I presumed as much. I should hope someone from such a family as the Darcys would not stoop to such evil, but you know him, and I do not.”
“I wonder whether I ever knew him myself.”
“In any case,” Mrs Macy continued briskly, “upon my death, Upton Park reverts back to my husband’s family.
Try as I might, there is nothing to stop those dreadful jackals he was related to from taking it.
But I have my own property, a house in Johnstone Row, that has been let for some time.
The tenants are giving it up, and I intend to leave it to you, along with sufficient funds to maintain it. ”
“A house?” Elizabeth gaped and then laughed. “Oh no. You are too generous, and I simply could not—”
“You must. Please do not insist that I waste my dwindling breath persuading you. You have nothing, and I wish to provide for you and Bennet. Do an old lady the favour of graciously accepting the offer.”
It was too much in return for the slight service she had given Mrs Macy, but the older lady held firm.
“One day, you will be old, God willing, and when you are, you will find there is nothing quite as important as feeling loved and cared for. For whatever personal misfortune brought you to me, I am simultaneously grieved and blessed.”
Mrs Macy passed on January 6, 1814. They had come to expect it—she had lain unresponsive in her bed since before Christmas—but it was a shock nevertheless.
Elizabeth sent Bennet off on a walk with Merry and wept hard, long, and loud for the loss of the woman who had become mother, grandmother, and best friend.
“Please stay,” she said in a choked, futile whisper, using the backs of her fingers to caress the wrinkled, papery cheek. “Please.”
But it was not to be. Elizabeth did all she could to honour the lady in death, caring for her household just as she would have wished.
After the good lady was buried, her more primal grief subsided into numb acceptance, though one refrain would not leave her.
It was a phrase used by her mother, and Elizabeth now felt she understood the powerlessness behind her mother’s oft-repeated lament: what will become of us all?
As a household, they moved to the house on Johnstone Row in February.
It was a double-terraced house of stucco with bowed windows and a mansard roof, boasting a view of both the sea and the statue of old King George.
Mrs Macy had purchased it in 1810, newly built, with the intention of letting it out for income.
Elizabeth was pleased by the situation, it placing her near several of the acquaintances she had made: Miss Lillian Goddard, Miss Olivia Lacey, and Miss Jenny Haverhill.
Her secrets prohibited true intimacy with the young ladies—it was easier to remain distant than explain her complicated past and why she was not Mrs Elizabeth, as they called her, but in fact, Mrs Darcy—but they were all pleasant ladies, and one could easily while away an afternoon here or there with them.
She missed her family desperately. She wondered often about Jane, thinking it likely that she was an aunt now and Bennet probably had cousins.
She thought of her younger sisters, hoping that they were well and had matured beyond the stage of trying silliness and youthful over-exuberance.
It was possible one of them might be married as well.
She thought often of writing to them but reasoned they had likely grieved her and moved on with their lives.
A letter from her would only reopen wounds best left closed.
Sometimes her mind wandered to thinking about her husband, though she did all she could to avoid those unhappy times.
It could do her no good to dwell on what was past or what might have been.
Oftentimes, she wondered at her curious lack of anger with him.
Other than her first day at Upton Park, she had never really spent much time crying over her situation nor regretting him.
She had done such an excellent job of maintaining an appearance of happiness that it had become her reality.
She conceded that it was likely best to simply move past that which could not be changed.
In March, she was required to go to London briefly for some last dealings with Mrs Macy’s solicitors.
It was the first time she was in town since she had been sent off, and it roused in her no small amount of anxiety.
Fortunately, the location of the solicitors’ office was in an unfamiliar part of town, though she knew she must remain firm in her resolution not to go anywhere near Gracechurch Street or Darcy’s home.
Alarmingly, she soon learnt that she had met Mrs Macy’s heir previously.
Mr Henry Macy was a gentleman of her husband’s acquaintance, though not of his intimate circle.
Fortunately, she had the foresight to introduce herself as Mrs Bennet.
Thinking she was his aunt’s paid companion, he dismissed her immediately from his notice.
To soothe her nerves and stretch her legs, she decided to take a short stroll in Hyde Park before returning to her carriage for the journey back to Weymouth.
She restricted herself to the quieter, lesser-populated paths to avoid seeing any whom she knew.
It was early enough in the morning that none of the ton could be stirring, although the park was rife with governesses and children.
Just as she entered the park, she passed a pair of small boys being forcefully led away by their governess, who was delivering them a fierce scolding.
“…such horseplay is not fitting to young gentlemen! Why you nearly knocked down that fine gentleman, and if you had, I would not have been a bit surprised if he had switched you right there! You can be sure your mother will hear of this…” Her voice faded away as she pulled her small charges by their hands out of the park.
Elizabeth felt a bit wistful watching them go. Bennet would never have a brother to engage in horseplay with, and it was unlikely he would ever even see Hyde Park, not as a child anyway.