The Role of a Gentleman
Harry Frost
Few things are more comforting, as Christmas approaches, than familiarity on every hand.
The same scenes unfolding in their accustomed places and, if at all possible, the same people playing their accustomed roles.
As Elizabeth Darcy smartly stepped up the two worn steps from the rock garden and turned onto the straight avenue that led past the mirror pond to the south entrance of Pemberley, she felt that comfort profoundly.
Away to her right, Jessop the under-gardener was gathering mistletoe, while Mr. Hart, his superior, held the ladder with a foot on the bottom rung.
She had seen this tableau each year on this date, the twenty-second of December, for the last eleven years on end.
Once in the house, she removed her outerwear and headed upstairs while meditating on mistletoe -the ancient belief in its magic, the idea that it might take that power from the oak it parasitised, the pleasure of being kissed beneath it.
The house was largely quiet at this hour, the fires having long since been laid.
Suddenly, as she arrived at the first landing, she heard a voice raised to a shout.
A man’s voice, but none she had ever heard before.
Roughly accented, booming, alarming, though she could not hear the words.
Dread filled her. It sounded as though it came from the children’s nursery.
She darted into the nearest room, seized a stout poker from the rack and raced up the next flight of stairs, down the corridor, and was about to burst into the nursery like a lioness…when she was stopped by the sound of riotous, juvenile mirth. She lowered the poker and listened.
“Do thou amend thy face, and I’ll amend my life. Thou art our admiral, thou bearest the lantern in the poop, but ’tis in the nose of thee. Thou are the Knight of the Burning Lamp,” came the voice once more.
She frowned. It sounded as strange as ever -the accent that of a field hand or soldier- but with a perfectly-observed, somehow self-effacing pomposity. It reminded her a good deal of a baser-born Sir William Lucas.
“Why, Sir John, my face does you no harm.”
Another voice, quite another, though this time not unfamiliar.
No less surprising, however, for it was, beyond any doubt, the voice of Mr. Hart the gardener.
His Yorkshire lugubriousness, his slowness, his cadence exactly, yet she had seen him not two minutes past up a ladder in the grounds. The laughter began anew.
Leaning the poker against the doorframe, Elizabeth knocked once and entered.
The particular, wonderfully familiar smell of the nursery enveloped her; something like oat porridge and paper underlying mild woodsmoke and the hot iron of the fireguard.
On the rug sat her two children, three-year-old John beside Eleanor, who was five.
Opposite them, on the nursery chair, sat her husband.
He scrutinised the open book in his hand for a few moments more to show her he had not been startled by her appearance, then looked up and smiled.
“Ah, good morning my dear, you are returned from your walk I see. I am told that Mrs. Nurry’s carriage is stuck in the mud near Bakewell so, instead of normal lessons, the children and I have been looking into Shakespeare.”
She regarded him. As always, he was perfectly turned out, his elegantly greying hair immaculate, the silver buttons where his breeches fastened polished to a mirror shine.
She had always congratulated herself on having cured him of the excessive pride she had once found in him (and congratulated herself, too, that he had cured her of her own), yet his dignity had never left him.
Nor would she want it to, necessarily. It was such a part of him.
There was no knowing what of his character would survive its removal.
There had been times in the twelve years of their marriage when she could have borne a husband who could act sometimes from impulse rather than consideration.
One who could forget himself a little more, forget himself so far as to, for example, give Falstaff and Bardolph comic voices.
She had never heard the like from him before.
“Should you like to join us?” he asked, vacating the room’s only chair so that she might sit while he stood.
Nothing loath, and curious to see whether this odd behaviour persisted with an adult audience, she sat and neatly folded her hands on her lap, watching and listening as raptly as the children.
“No, I’ll be sworn, I make as good use of it as many a man doth of a death’s-head or a memento mori,” he continued in his normal voice, completely without disguise. “And what Shakespeare means by this, my dears, is that…”
As his explanation wound on, Elizabeth was conscious of a most ignoble disappointment.
Throughout their marriage, he had treated her as quite his equal in every regard, in a way she knew was the envy of every other wife of her acquaintance.
He shared everything he had with her without a moment’s hesitation, trusting her implicitly as joint steward of their wealth and reputation.
It was not as if he were without joy; they laughed together often and he played charmingly with the children.
It was more that he had always done so -always done everything-as Mr. Darcy of Pemberley.
When he had been affectionate, or playful, or reckless, it had always been within the bounds that might be expected of a man of his position.
She had never, before now, had any indication that there was any more to see than what he would willingly show her of himself.
***
While the children were occupied with a game of snapdragon in the drawing room, Elizabeth slipped into the gunroom, which was where the trove of Pemberley’s Christmas presents was kept against premature discovery.
The housekeeper was in on the secret, and had left the box of ribbons, colourful cloth and brass bells she kept for prettifying gifts on the table usually used for polishing barrels and casting shot.
The room was not, however, empty. Major General Fitzwilliam, her husband’s favourite cousin, was there before her.
“Ah, Richard!” she greeted him, their friendship more than sufficient for the informality. “I see we are about the same task.” She unlocked an unused gun cabinet, withdrew the basket containing her gifts, and set them on the table beside him. He grinned.
“If you would?” he asked, inclining his head to where he held a finger over the knot of a ribbon he was in the process of securing about a quite enormous wooden box. She tied the bow, and he snatched his finger away as she pulled it tight.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Turkish delight. For the children,” he replied.
She sighed inwardly. If the box’s dimensions were anything to go on, this might easily mean four and a half pounds of the confectionery per child.
There were cannonballs that weighed less.
This present might just inadvertently be misplaced into a locked cupboard when Christmas Day arrived.
“So thoughtful of you, Richard,” she said as she began securing a bell to a toy soldier for John. “A beautiful box; where did you get it?”
“We had a Turkish envoy over, and they stuck him with me. Curious fellow. Seven wives. Still, he brought presents and I got the lot. Sent the hubble-bubble to Aunt Catherine.”
“The what?” Elizabeth asked.
“Water pipe, for their sort of tobacco, you know.” He peered at the toy soldier. “He’ll be in for it with his commanding officer, poor fellow. A grenadier with a cavalryman’s trousers? He’ll be flogged for sure.”
Elizabeth chuckled. “If only the toymaker had a major general on staff to consult on such matters.”
They proceeded about their tasks for a few minutes in companionable silence, Elizabeth working her way through her basket while Richard wrote out a label to Darcy in laborious copperplate and affixed it to a pair of curly-toed oriental slippers.
“Richard,” she asked at last, “Might I ask you something. And, just for now, might it not get back to Fitzwilliam?”
“Isn’t there something against that in your vows?” he asked with a look of false piety.
“No, actually, I checked,” said Elizabeth, “Honour, serve and obey, yes, but I believe the church fathers were realistic enough not to forbid a wife to conceal certain things from her husband. Particularly if they’re in the service of those vows I did make, and this most certainly is.”
“Very well,” he said, agreeably.
“I heard him yesterday, before you arrived, reading to the children. He was…altering his voice, acting the parts, clowning, one might even say.”
Fitzwilliam turned to face her fully, his eyebrows raised in surprise. “My goodness, really? Well, I never. Never thought he’d do that again.”
“Again?” asked Elizabeth, the disagreeable feeling that she might not know the man she had married quite as well as she had always thought returning afresh.
“Yes. Must have been, oh…thirty years since I heard it. He was famous for it at school; other boys used to come to our dorm just to hear him. Remarkable talent, it was eerie, really. Thirteen-year-old chap sounding like…well, anything. Dairy maid. Latin master. Member of parliament. People used to write things down on slips of paper. Can’t remember one he couldn’t do. ”
“And did he…” Elizabeth gestured with what was to be Eleanor’s tortoiseshell comb as she searched for the words “…like it? Was that something he enjoyed?”
“Ha! Yes, it does seem unlikely doesn’t it? But I think so. Nothing compelled him. Didn’t need to make himself popular. Tall chap, good at games, noble connections; he was there with me.”
“So why do you think he stopped?”