5. A New Wife Explores
CHAPTER FIVE
A NEW WIFE EXPLORES
Not being one to lie down with vapors or nerves, having neither the constitution for the first nor the patience for the second, Elizabeth explored as much of the mistress’s chambers as interested her, which proved, upon honest consideration, encompassed nearly every corner.
A wife was entitled to know the rooms she had been given, and so, she did not trouble to ask whether the late Lady Anne Darcy would have agreed to having her newly-purchased daughter-in-law rummage her dressing-table drawers.
A regiment of cut-glass perfume bottles stood on the surface.
Elizabeth, unstopping one, was met with a breath of lily-of-the-valley so sudden and alive that the woman herself seemed to stand at her shoulder.
Nearby sat a small enameled snuff jar, its contents long since dried to dust, yet unmistakable in its purpose.
Elizabeth found herself rather warming to the memory of Lady Anne upon this discovery—a grand lady of Derbyshire who enjoyed her private pinches while allowing the rest of the county to believe whatever pleased them.
It was the first thing she had encountered at Pemberley that felt less like a monument and more like a person.
Above the dressing-table stood a shelf lined with books, most of them practical volumes befitting the mistress of such an establishment: a receipt book written in a careful, capable hand that detailed the preparation of black-currant cordial and offered remedies for common ailments like chilblains, alongside stern instructions to the housekeeper regarding the proper airing of the principal bedchambers; a detailed household account book; and a commonplace book filled with copied-out verses and religious sermons that Elizabeth judged, perhaps uncharitably, to have been kept for show.
Set apart from these practical works was a row of leather-bound volumes, their spines and edges worn with age and handling, and yet, none of them locked.
Strange how Darcy had seen fit to gift her a lock on the writing desk, yet Lady Anne had locked nothing.
These journals were private history, perhaps filled with intimate thoughts.
Her fingers reached for one volume, then fell back to her side.
The idea of an unknown daughter-in-law bent on prying was perhaps repugnant.
However, she was also lost in the vast and orderly wilderness of Pemberley with no guide other than an exuberant sixteen-year-old, and she was expected to be a mother to a grieving boy.
And so, with a mixture of trepidation and determination, Elizabeth removed the first three journals from their shelf, deciding she might as well seek the advice of one who had navigated these waters before her.
After all, the only instruction she had of motherhood was Mrs. Bennet’s loud and noisy urging of her daughters to stand up straight, smile at gentlemen, and measure their wealth.
Mrs. Bennet had no sons, and since men were an altogether different kind of challenge, Elizabeth would require instruction on raising the reserved and scowling boys from a woman who had obviously noted Darcy’s earliest moments.
She would reserve her qualms for a more convenient hour. For now, she opened what seemed the earliest volume, tracing a finger over the neat script, doubting whether her own mother had ever written anything longer than her name on a calling card.
Elizabeth turned to a page midway through the volume, cast a furtive glance over her shoulder, and let her greedy eyes return to the business of spying on her husband’s infancy.
The volume fell open to a hand both elegant and amused, as though Lady Anne had never set down a sentence without expecting some agreeable person to read it one day, and Elizabeth was very willing to be that person.
Fitzwilliam frowns at the world. She laughed as she read the first lines, as though it had presented him with an account he did not order.
The world, plainly, had never persuaded him to revise the opinion. She turned the page, greedy now, and the laughter did not last.
He is but two years old and already possessed of a will forged over a hot anvil.
When he is crossed, he does not weep as other children weep, for a minute and a sweetmeat; he grieves, for hours together, with his whole small body, and will be comforted by no one.
He cried the better part of last night and would take nothing from me, and came down to breakfast this morning as grave as a bishop, with no recollection of the storm at all.
I cannot tell whether I have been given a son or a small and beautiful tyrant.
I love him to distraction, and I am very tired this morning.
So the composed and unreadable gentleman who governed half of Derbyshire without raising his voice had once screamed for hours in this very wing.
He was stubborn, then, to the marrow, and always had been—a thing she had suspected on rather less authority and was pleased to find confirmed by his own mother under his own roof.
A few pages on, the tempests had become a campaign. Darcy, at four, was already a force to be reckoned with.
The wooden horse is called Captain, though it has but one ear and no tail to speak of, and Fitzwilliam will suffer no improving remark upon either deficiency.
He bore it down to dinner again last night and set it by his plate, and when his father observed, mildly, that Captain might prefer the nursery, my son fixed him with a look I can only call magisterial and said that Captain preferred to remain.
There the matter ended. I have seen grown men argue a point at Mr. Darcy’s table and come off worse than that horse did.
This morning, Captain has been to church. Mr. Darcy was for forbidding it; I was for keeping my Sunday peace. The reader may judge which of us prevailed from the circumstance that, all through the sermon, a one-eared horse sat in the Darcy pew and attended rather better than its master.
Elizabeth found herself smiling in genuine amusement at the picture painted before her.
She liked Lady Anne enormously, and she liked the grave little tyrant with his one-eared horse better than she had yet contrived to like his grown self in person, which was an unsettling discovery, so she went looking for its beginning, turning back through the leaves to the very first pages.
These pages were happier, brighter, and full of a woman waiting.
I am grown so vast that Mr. Darcy steers me through the doorways like a bargeman working a lock, and is too kind to laugh, which provokes me a good deal more than if he did. I confess myself impatient to meet the small person who has made so free with my comfort these many months.
And then the lively hand stopped with a gap in dates. When the writing resumed much later, it was fainter and smaller.
I am told that I was three days absent from my own life, and that the household had nearly given me up.
I shall not set down what little I recall of it, for it is not a thing I mean to keep.
It is enough that the child does very well, and that I am here to be vexed by him, which I intend to be for a great many years.
Elizabeth did not need the particulars; the three days said it all. Lady Anne had come within a candle’s breadth of never knowing the solemn baby at all. Likely in this very bedchamber.
The air seemed thinner, or perhaps it was only her breath that faltered.
She closed the journal and returned the volumes to their place, and her hands pressed hard against her skirts as she gathered herself.
She had come to Pemberley to mother Darcy’s nephew, and here she was, an interloper, prying into a history she could never truly claim.
Thoroughly ashamed, Elizabeth shook out her skirts and was entirely herself again, or near enough to pass. She would never again walk by Lady Anne’s portrait without the thought that Darcy himself could very well have been in Little Tom’s shoes.
Needing to escape both the room and the private thoughts she had trespassed upon, Elizabeth slipped into the passage. She was meant to be resting for dinner, but her heart had other ideas.
She looked both ways along the corridor.
The door to Darcy’s chamber lay toward the end of the hallway, so she turned in the opposite direction, wondering if the nursery would be closer to Lady Anne’s portion.
Fortunately, a housemaid passed by with a load of linens, and Elizabeth was able to ask for directions.
Following the guidance given, she climbed the winding stairs to the upper floors to the domain of nursemaids and governesses.
Darcy’s upbringing was likely solitary and cheerless; the children kept to the upper floors where the air was lighter and less damp.
Longbourn lacked a fourth floor, and hence Elizabeth and her sisters had been raised within earshot of their parents, although she had to admit her mother and Lydia were the loudest, with Jane and Kitty barely heard from.
Here, the halls were hushed, save for a housemaid scurrying on tiptoe.
A motherless boy, with a father vanished to India, could only feel the loneliness pressing in upon him in such sedate surroundings.
As Elizabeth turned onto the final landing and came around the bend in the corridor, she found herself face to face with her husband, wearing his habitual expression of disapproval.
“Mrs. Darcy. You were to rest before dinner.”
“Mr. Darcy.” She curtsied automatically. “I have rested quite sufficiently, and thought to acquaint myself with Little Tom. Georgiana told me so much about him that I could not wait.”
Darcy’s frown deepened, if that was at all possible. “The boy woke from his nap not a quarter hour since. I had given orders for his nurse to bring him to the family parlor before dinner, as we agreed. There is no occasion for you to go up to the nursery.”