Page 45 of Return to Pemberley

Chapter eighteen

The Mistress's Reflection

I t was an hour before breakfast, and the gardens of Pemberley, still tender with the tremors of earliest spring, presented a prospect so nearly innocent of artifice that Elizabeth, descending the broad stone stair from the upper terrace, could scarcely recall her own hand in its arrangement.

The air was clear but not cold, and the river—released at last from its winter reticence—traced a silver course through the low meadows, reflecting the bright, deliberate progress of a pair of swans.

Overhead, the sky performed its gradual overture from grey to blue, with only the palest blush of rose to remind one that not all beauty is bested by anticipation.

Elizabeth moved with a deliberation foreign to her former self, pausing at intervals to draw in the scent of earth newly turned or to observe the manner in which the sun, emboldened by its audience of morning dew, set the crocuses alight in the half-wild borders.

Her footsteps, though not so silent as Mrs. Reynolds’s, managed to elicit no more than a drowsy complaint from the gravel, as if even the pathways recognized the futility of protest against a mistress so determined to be pleased.

She had reached the lower balustrade—the very spot, she noted, from which she had first surveyed Pemberley, as a guest, a trespasser, and, if she were honest, an avowed sceptic of its supposed perfection—when the force of memory arrested her.

The stone, worn to a velvet smoothness by generations of hands more deserving than hers, was cool against her palm.

She traced its length, recalling the precise moment, some eighteen months previous, when she had stood on this self-same walk and thought, "What happiness must belong to the mistress who could call such a place as this her own!

" It had not, at the time, occurred to her that such fortune might ever befall her, nor that the trappings of wealth and dignity would someday answer to her name.

The scene before her was unaltered in its grandeur—there was the sweep of lawn, the symmetry of the house, the discreet but pointed evidence of taste and economy in every planted border and pruned avenue.

Yet the observer was changed; she could not stand in this place, now, without feeling the weight of responsibility layered over every view, as though the grounds themselves depended on her notice for their continued existence.

Elizabeth leaned upon the balustrade, her eyes narrowing to take in the details that had once escaped her: the gleam of a copper watering can, left carelessly in the herb parterre by a gardener not yet alert to the expectations of the day; a flash of blue, not from the sky, but from the ribboned cap of the youngest kitchen maid, who, believing herself unobserved, lingered to watch the swans from the margin of the water.

It was not the sort of disorder to merit correction—indeed, it pleased her to know that the house could contain so much life and still remain, in essence, itself.

Her reverie was interrupted—not by footfall, for none in the house would think to disturb her at this hour—but by the more persistent intrusion of recollection.

The years at Longbourn, compressed now into a handful of images: Jane’s gentle smile, her mother’s imperious summons from the breakfast parlour, her father’s dry, ever-present commentary from behind a screen of correspondence.

She missed them all, not with the violence of regret, but with a sort of reverent amusement, as one might miss the characters in a much-loved book.

She remembered, too, her first arrival at Pemberley as its mistress—how the servants’ eyes had lingered on her with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity, how the housekeeper’s pronouncements had trailed, at every turn, the shadow of Lady Anne, the late Mrs. Darcy, whose virtues (if one believed Mrs. Reynolds) had bordered on the supernatural.

Elizabeth, whose appetite for comparison had never been robust, had at first found this history suffocating; every room seemed to echo with the standards of a predecessor she could never hope to match.

But time, and the intervention of several hundred small, unremarked kindnesses, had worked their change.

The servants had learned, by degrees, to measure her not against the legend of Lady Anne but by the more reliable currency of fairness and good temper; the neighbours, after an initial campaign of scrutiny and speculation, had resigned themselves to her presence, and—what was more remarkable—to the steady improvement of their own fortunes as a consequence of Pemberley’s renewed prosperity.

Even Mrs. Reynolds had, in the last quarter, taken to quoting the present mistress with an affection barely concealed by her habitual severity.

Elizabeth, surveying the estate, could not help but recall the affair of the Shepherd’s Lot—how the discovery of old letters and promises unredeemed had threatened, for a season, to cast her in the role of interloper, or worse, usurper.

Yet that very episode had revealed, in its resolution, the substance of her claim—not to the lands or the income, which were Mr. Darcy’s by right, but to the stewardship of a community and a heritage that depended, ultimately, on the judgment and the will of those entrusted with its care.

She looked for signs of change. The flower borders along the north walk, once the exclusive domain of the late Lady Anne’s taste for white and silver, now sported, at Elizabeth’s direction, a scandalous border of poppies and bluebells—so startling a contrast that several visiting matrons from Lambton had judged it a species of rebellion.

The south-facing terrace, formerly neglected save for the annual sweep before summer guests, had been restored, at Georgiana’s urging, as a promenade for morning and evening walks; the younger Miss Darcy, whose diffidence had melted in the warmth of her sister’s company, now took an active interest in the progress of the peonies, and had even been observed, on occasion, instructing the under-gardeners with a confidence that would have astonished her brother.

Most telling of all, perhaps, was the subtle but unmistakable shift in the behaviour of the groundsmen and labourers who, in Elizabeth’s first months at Pemberley, had regarded her with a mixture of gallantry and reserve, uncertain whether to greet her as lady of the house or as a passing phenomenon soon to be corrected by time or tragedy.

Now, their doffed caps and murmured “Good morning, ma’am” were not merely acts of ceremony, but an acknowledgment of shared purpose.

She liked to think they respected her not for her name, but for her willingness to see and remember their work.

Elizabeth’s musings were interrupted by the sound of a gate swinging open at the far end of the rose walk—a sound which, once so foreign to her ears, now signalled only the approach of another day’s affairs.

She turned, shading her eyes against the glare, and saw the head gardener, Mr. Woods, striding toward her with the air of a man who brings both news and the certainty of its importance.

“Good morning, Mrs. Darcy,” said Mr. Woods, pausing at a respectful distance. “I hope you are well?”

Elizabeth smiled. “Very well, thank you, Mr. Woods. Is there anything in particular this morning?”

He hesitated, a man of tact as well as trade, then replied, “Only to say that the lads have finished with the east orchard, and if you have the time, Mrs. Darcy, they would be pleased to have you see the improvements.”

Elizabeth did not hesitate. “Of course. I shall be there directly. And thank you for bringing it to my notice.”

Mr. Woods, gratified, bowed and took his leave, his boots leaving a line of dark prints across the path. Elizabeth lingered only a moment longer, her hand still resting on the cool stone, her gaze sweeping once more over the lawns and the river and the great, imperturbable house.

It occurred to her, in that instant, how much of her life had been spent in the contemplation of prospects—not only the visible kind, with their trees and water and promise of summer, but the more elusive prospects of happiness and belonging.

It was, she thought, a habit she had acquired at Longbourn, and one she would likely never shed.

Even now, mistress of all she surveyed, she could not resist the temptation to imagine how the scene might appear to another—perhaps to Jane, whose letters arrived each week without fail, and whose advice was always more shrewd than it appeared.

“Jane would laugh at me,” thought Elizabeth, “for standing out here in the cold, when all the world expects its mistress to be inside, issuing orders from the comfort of a morning room.” But the thought did not trouble her; if anything, it seemed a vindication.

She had never aspired to the role of grand lady, but only to that of herself, improved by love and tempered by experience.

She wondered, as she walked toward the orchard, whether her father would recognize her now—the same Elizabeth, but altered by the circumstances of place and power.

She suspected that he would, and that he would enjoy, in his own way, the spectacle of his most opinionated daughter presiding over a domain so much larger than the one she had once ruled by wit alone.

As she approached the orchard, Elizabeth saw that the workmen had gathered by the gate, their faces bright with anticipation.

The trees, newly pruned and staked, stood in orderly rows, their branches promising a bounty yet to come.

She complimented the men, listening carefully to their plans for future improvements, and noted, with pleasure, the way Georgiana had arranged for the planting of lavender amongst the rows—“for the bees, and for the memory,” her sister had said.