Chapter 7 Winter #2
“I make no such claim. You may draw your own conclusions. I just suspect there are certain sorts of access you may wish to acquaint yourself with. Mrs Reynolds would not dream of withholding the information, but she might consider it, shall we say, of lesser importance.”
“I thank you. Perhaps you might return after luncheon?”
“It would be my pleasure, and if I may say so without being impertinent, it is lovely to meet you. I have hoped for a mistress for quite some time.”
Elizabeth sighed, unwilling to disappoint the man by telling him that she was not a real mistress, and seemed unlikely to ever be.
“It is lovely to meet you as well. I hope your grandchildren are mischievous.”
Bates bowed, and left Elizabeth to her breakfast and her thoughts, one of which was far more enjoyable than the other.
At length, she opened the purse and found the exact coins she had given Mr Baker. Two were distinct because of damaging marks, so she was certain it was her money. She saw a small, folded paper and opened it to find a note that lacked all the usual parts of a letter.
I know you are angry with your entire
family right now. I will not opine whether
it is justified or not. I simply suggest
you remember your promise to give your
situation six months of best effort. Perhaps
it will become something better than it presently
appears, but it certainly will not if you
do not bend a bit and try.
Have some faith. That is all I ask.
Elizabeth looked at the note for quite some time and walked over to the fire to burn it a dozen times—but in the end she just stuffed it back in the purse and put it in a hidden corner of her dressing table for a rainy day.
Taking marital advice from her father seemed akin to engaging a fox to guard her chickens.
Twelfth Night came and went without ceremony. Elizabeth was accustomed to a large, boisterous family gathering, engaging in all the traditional activities including games, punch, wassailing, and small exchanges of gifts.
At Pemberley, snow fell heavily during the day, so nobody was leaving the estate for any reason, and Elizabeth would not have known where to go or what to do anyway.
She was still in false mourning, so nothing much was expected of her, and she wondered if she would be doing anything the next year or not.
It was difficult being in Limbo, or Purgatory, or whatever this in-between state was called.
She vacillated between hating her husband, being afraid of him, and wondering if she was being too harsh or too generous.
She occasionally thought he was a better man than he appeared, and she had not caught him at his best. She would occasionally sit in the library, particularly after she had read a novel with a likeable male character, and imagine it was all explainable.
He was distraught in the first assembly because…
because… because something awful had happened in his family.
He was awful the rest of the six weeks because he was hunted mercilessly by Caroline Bingley and annoyed by the matrons of Meryton.
He was awful after the engagement because common sense suggested Elizabeth conspired with her mother to entrap him, and based on how men seemed to think, she had been flirting as outrageously as Miss Bingley the whole time, just with more subtlety.
When she encountered those thoughts, which were rare and hard to believe, she liked to imagine all the horrible things that might have led him to such behaviour.
Maybe his sister had disgraced the family, or his uncle, or—well—she actually did not know a single thing about his family except that he had a younger sister, his uncle was the Earl of Matlock, and his aunt was Lady Catherine de Bourgh, the patron of her silly cousin Mr Collins—and that his mother’s taste in decorating was frightening.
Her flights of fancy were at least entertaining, with everything from elopements to gambling to heavy debts to murder and duels.
The more ridiculous the scenario, the better she liked it.
Seductions between Mr Wickham and Miss Darcy, cousins in debt, pirates, privateers, estates lost to gambling—nothing was too outlandish for her imagination.
Of course, such thoughts were diverting, but all she had to do to contradict the idea that they were exculpatory was think of any random sentence he had actually said, after she had told him in plain English that she had nothing to do with the compromise.
Her favourite way to rouse her anger, which was a pointless exercise but diverting, was to remember something like: ‘Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connexions? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?’
Now, that was a useful phrase for wooing your wife if she ever heard one.
January gradually passed as they usually do.
The snow mostly melted or at least became manageable, and she walked into Lambton with Molly to reacquaint herself with Mr Bartlet.
He was just as congenial as he had seemed, and she spent several hours in his shop every time she visited the village, which gradually became several times per week.
Mrs Reynolds, out of pity or self-preservation, explicitly instructed Molly that she was to be at Elizabeth’s beck and call, even though the mistress did not actually need much of anything except some footmen to carry bathwater periodically, her meals, and some company.
Of course, she supposed the servants were probably grateful that Elizabeth’s decision to forego formal dining reduced their work but not their number.
Overall, January was occasionally pleasant, occasionally vexing, but mostly dull and dreary, aside from her time with Molly. Being with a sixteen-year-old who was neither vicious like Lydia nor complacent like Kitty was a pleasure.
Elizabeth was satisfied with Molly’s reading progress thus far, but if she wanted any hope of convincing her husband to make the young woman her official lady’s maid, she had better be up to the task.
She spent quite a lot of her copious leisure time tutoring the young woman through January, and they often sat in the library with Molly practising and asking help for difficult words.
In mid-February, Elizabeth stumbled into the music room.
She still had not asked Mrs Reynolds for a tour, and to be frank, was a little afraid to do so, though she had no idea what exactly she feared.
Would she find she hated the house that was to be her home for the rest of her life, or would she love it and feel trapped in a gilded cage?
Perhaps she would come to love it, and Mr Darcy would shuffle her off to the dower house or some remote estate in Scotland; or even annul their marriage and throw her out to starve in the hedgerows.
The hateful thing about her situation was that she had almost no control over her destiny.
Just as before the wedding, her choices were to take what he chose to dish out, or to make her escape—only this time at the expense of breaking a vow.
She was educated enough to know that she would not be the first or last married person to break a vow, and she thought she could make an excellent case that her husband already had—but still, it rankled to be so powerless and far worse to be so ignored.
That was by far the worst of it. Would it have killed him to write one note?
Just one tiny little note. A line or two would do!
Discovering the pianoforte gave her yet another dilemma to ruminate on.
Should she practise? Should she engage a master?
A master was out of the question, since she had to pay out of her pittance money.
Any master worth his salt would cost an awful lot, and she was not about to waste half her allowance doing something to attract a husband when she already had one too many.
Aside from that, Miss Darcy was supposed to be ever so accomplished, and Elizabeth was unlikely to compete anyway, so she eventually concluded that a master was out of the question.
She did however, decide some modest practice would not kill anybody.
Pemberley was so big that anyone who did not like her playing could avoid it readily enough.
Practising would allow her to improve the ever so silly accomplishments that were supposed to be so useful, and it had the added benefit of chewing up several hours for a few days each week, not to mention the sheer pleasure of sitting at an instrument without fighting Mary for it.
Such thoughts always made her melancholy.
She longed for the halcyon days of old when she still esteemed her family.
She wondered if time would soften her anger enough to one day form a rapprochement and really had no idea.
In the first place, it seemed unlikely Mr Darcy would ever venture into Hertfordshire or meet with them himself.
She supposed he could send her alone, which would be an improvement, but then she tried to picture returning to Meryton without her husband.
In the end, it would be as humiliating as the marriage itself had been—and that was saying nothing of how her family and neighbours had treated her in December.
People who had known her all her life were quick to assume the worst, just because it made a more entertaining story.
In the end, Elizabeth suspected she would just leave her family behind along with the rest of her childish things.
Even writing seemed like more trouble than it was worth.
Mary’s demands had just been Mary being Mary, but Jane’s had felt like a betrayal.
She had some sympathy for Jane’s loss of Mr Bingley, but since she had never shown the man unambiguously how she felt anyway, Elizabeth thought Jane was doing the opposite of the old proverb.
She was not reaping what she had not sown.
Early March brought rains that washed away all lingering traces of snow, and most of the locals thought that would be the end of winter for certain. Molly was progressing nicely, and one day, Elizabeth left her in the library with strict instructions to practise.
An hour later, she found herself back in her suite and decided to see how her charge was progressing.
Molly had, over the course of the previous two months, learned how to fix Elizabeth’s hair well enough, though with a mobcap, ‘well enough’ was not a high standard.
She reckoned that if she ever was introduced as a proper society woman she might need better, but then again, if she ever learned to fly, she would need wings. Both seemed equally unlikely.
Elizabeth took the shortcut that Mr Bates showed her on New Year’s Day, mostly because it was faster and easier, and she would not meet any distractions along the way.
She had learned the names and basic biographies of the entire staff (not much of a challenge), but she did not feel particularly close to any except Molly.
She was the mistress, yet not really. The state of Limbo left her uncomfortable, and the household staff even more confused, so Mrs Darcy avoided them whenever she could.
She thought it could just as easily be kindness or cowardice.
Entering the library, she was surprised to see Noah sitting beside Molly.
Since he had been the first footman Elizabeth met, entirely by chance on the day she met the hated Mr Knight, she always had a soft spot for the young man.
He was sitting at a mostly proper distance from the young maid, taking turns reading from a novel.
Noah read about as well as Elizabeth had at ten, and Molly about the same.
Elizabeth never put too much thought into how courtships happened or did not in the servant classes, nor did she think it was an area she needed to investigate or form an opinion on.
Noah was obviously improving himself along with Molly, and that was good enough.
She did however, start thinking about ways for the young man to spend more time in her near vicinity.
She had still never called for a carriage or horse even once, opting instead to walk the five miles (ninety-seven minutes) to Lambton a few times per week.
Molly thought nothing of the excursion, and Elizabeth thought to drag Noah along occasionally and see what happened.
Satisfied that all was well, Elizabeth returned to her suite and an excellent book on law that she had found on one of the non-black shelves.
She was not particularly interested in the subject, but she had picked it as the one book on the non-forbidden shelf that her husband was most likely to disapprove of.
It was a small act of defiance, until she got to the part about marriage law, which she found infinitely fascinating—horrifying and barbaric—but fascinating.