Chapter Seventeen
The journey to Rosings was miserable for all parties involved.
I alternated between staring out the window and staring down at a mostly blank piece of paper, hoping for inspiration to strike.
I had Darcy’s name at the top, but the perfect words that would persuade him to let me reside anywhere other than Rosings eluded me.
Emma had to endure my pitiful attempts at conversation. She tried to persuade me to engage, but I lacked the enthusiasm for anything but moping. Eventually she gave up and we sat in silence.
It was dark when we turned onto the long road that led to Rosings Park.
It had been years since I’d visited my aunt, and those stays had resulted in few happy memories.
I still remembered being made to play the piano endlessly, until I could perform whole sonatas by heart without making a mistake.
It had turned me off practise for weeks afterwards.
With the late hour, I’d hoped to avoid my aunt entirely for the evening.
Neither she nor my cousin seemed likely candidates to stay up into the night.
But rather than being ushered straight to our bedrooms, Emma and I were shown to a drawing room which lived in my memory predominantly for its overstuffed seating and terrifying oil paintings.
The olive-green walls with their gilded moulding were not particularly inviting, instead giving off the distinct air of ostentatiousness.
While it seemed my cousin Anne had not been forced to welcome us, her mother stood proudly in the centre of the room, dressed for visitors. Emma had the luxury of staying in the shadows while I stepped forwards to greet my aunt.
“Miss Darcy,” she greeted me, with a slight nod.
I dipped into a deep curtsey, almost at risk of toppling over, but I still remembered her telling me my bow was not sincere enough and forcing me to hold the position beside her while she wrote several letters.
My legs had ached for days afterwards, and I doubted she would take my fall off a wall as an excuse not to do the same thing again.
“Lady Catherine,” I greeted her. “Thank you for taking me in at such short notice.”
They weren’t the words I wanted to say, but I knew I would only be damning myself if I spoke honestly about how much I didn’t want to be there.
“Yes, well, it has been an inconvenience to my staff, but arrangements had to be made,” she said, every bit as haughty as I remembered.
“And I have been insisting that your brother release you into my care for years. Particularly after the choices he has made recently. Really you should have been sent here the moment your father died. You and Anne could have received the same education. It is a pity you are so far behind. I will do my best, but I cannot work miracles.”
Part of me wanted to reply in Greek. Then in Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian, just to prove there was nothing lacking in my education.
But a larger part of me was committed to self-preservation.
I had no allies here the way I did at Pemberley and Longbourn.
The only person I was going to be able to trust within the walls of Rosings was Emma, and she had even less power than I did.
There was no choice but to swallow the injustice of my aunt’s words and my despondency that Darcy would choose to send me somewhere he knew I hated.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Thank you.”
The part of my education that taught me to be obedient was far from dormant.
Even if my time living with Darcy and Elizabeth had encouraged me to carry myself as an equal, and time with Kitty had eroded the finer points of my deportment training, I was still Georgiana Darcy, and I knew exactly what behaviour was expected of me.
The trouble was, I much preferred being Kitty’s George.
Despite clearly revelling in holding court, Lady Catherine stayed only long enough to look me despairingly up and down and instruct me to make myself more presentable for breakfast in the morning. Once she’d swept out of the room, I finally let myself breathe.
“Ready for bed?” Emma asked, stepping forwards from where she’d been holding perfectly still at the edge of the room.
I nodded, allowing myself to be led upstairs to a room lacking all my favourite things: no piano, no chessboard, no stack of books. No Kitty. Even when I was tucked under the sheets, my toes heated by the residual echo of a warming pan, I knew sleep would take its time to come.
It was the kind of night most productively spent in the library, ideally with Kitty at my side.
Rosings had such a room, but I wasn’t confident I could find it, especially in the dark, and I doubted I would be particularly welcome there, even during the daylight hours.
There was only one book in the bags I’d brought with me, and I climbed out of bed to dig around for it in my valise.
The Disposition of an English Lady came everywhere with me, so I’d taken it to Meryton without a second thought.
Between my initial confusion over Kitty’s feelings and my contentment once things had settled, the book had not even come out of my bag.
Now, left alone at Rosings, I craved its familiarity.
I had memorised every word inside with how much I’d read and reread it over the years, but it was still a comfort to hold the volume knowing my mother had done the same.
I couldn’t help but wonder whether she’d agree with my aunt in thinking that I was uneducated and conducted myself poorly.
I found it hard to imagine her disapproving of Darcy’s marriage to Elizabeth in the same way Lady Catherine did, not when they were both so clearly in love and all the happier for it.
My mother existed for me only in my head, conjured out of the pages of this book, but I could not imagine her to be cruel.
Despite my best effort, I had strayed far from every rule in the book.
I wanted desperately to believe that my mother would understand, but she’d found the rules important enough to underline and annotate, her writing cramped into the margins.
They mattered to her, perhaps in a way that would eclipse the way Kitty mattered to me.
The question would never be answered, so I doubted my guilt over the matter would ever fully subside.
I was not the woman my mother would want me to be.
Setting the book down on the table beside my bed, I curled up underneath the blankets and waited for my exhaustion to overwhelm me, my fingers knotted around Kitty’s ribbons at my wrist.
I tried to reassure myself that this was not what my forever looked like, but I knew it could be.
If Darcy never let me move back to Pemberley, this was all I had.
It was not an asylum like I had feared, but it wasn’t much better.
My aunt seemed to take so much joy in the power she got from being unattached to any man, but her sole aim was nevertheless to see me shackled to an eligible suitor I did not love.
The incongruity was bitter and biting. She seemed happiest unmatched, but unwilling to consider that I might be, too.
The tears that fell onto my pillow were silent but heavy, and hot with suppressed anger.
Breakfast at Rosings was far more formal than at either Pemberley or Longbourn House.
I had taken Lady Catherine’s words to heart and implored Emma to help me look my best. Walking around in a chemise and an old coat with my hair loose around my shoulders was not an option unless I wanted to invite abject criticism.
I needed to do what I could to make this stay bearable.
When I was shown into the dining room to find Anne de Bourgh already dressed to receive visitors, I knew I had made the right choice.
“Miss de Bourgh,” I greeted her, as formally as I had addressed her mother the night before. “I hope you are well?”
I had never known her to be well. Despite being cousins, we had socialised little together when I had been younger, owing to Anne’s weak constitution.
It was, on occasion, hard to tell how much of her sickness was genuine and how much was a figment of Lady Catherine’s imagination, but the result was the same.
Anne spent much of her life resting, unable to travel or go to balls or even hold a stimulating conversation.
It was no secret that my aunt had hoped for Anne to marry Darcy.
Financially, it would have been a most convenient arrangement, but I never could imagine this pale, fragile girl as my brother’s wife, and nor, I was sure, could he.
She shared too many of my features—the dark hair, the harsh jaw, the thick brows.
Marrying Anne was a notion Darcy had never entertained, but Lady Catherine seemed to blame Elizabeth solely as the reason her plan could now never come to pass. Unless, of course, she was hoping for the current Mrs. Darcy’s death.
Anne’s own opinions of a potential marriage to my brother had never been clear to me, but her smile when she saw me suggested she did not entirely share her mother’s newly intensified disdain for the Darcy name.
“Miss Darcy! I was delighted to hear you’ll be staying at Rosings,” she said, beaming up at me. It brought some colour to her cheeks, reviving her complexion.
“Your mother was very kind to take me in,” I said, focusing on graciousness rather than my anger at being sent away.
“What brings you here at such short notice?”
Explaining Kitty was out of the question, but I could have at least vaguely sketched out the circumstances with Wickham.
I would not be the first woman to flee a county to avoid the pursuits of an unrelenting man.
Still, I didn’t seek to embarrass Lydia for the poor behaviour of her husband and wasn’t sure I could tell the story without being talked out of anonymity.
So I opted for a carefully constructed lie.