Page 14 of The Winter of Our Discontent (Pride and Prejudice Variations #1)
My husband’s reply took half a day to appear. Miss Darcy looked tenderly upon me when Harrison handed me a silver tray with what appeared to be a billet-doux . After excusing myself, I took this ‘love note’ into a sunlit alcove to read.
…artifice and disguise…must constitute the crown jewels of your talents…
I swallowed several times as I strove to overcome the wave of despair that threatened to send me to my room after reading this reply.
In an attempt to rally my courage, I asked for Mrs Reynolds. The housekeeper was still quite distant, but the ill will she initially harboured seemed to have been considerably blunted by both my overtures and my willingness to work.
We settled on the late Mrs Darcy’s study as my new headquarters.
I pulled out a sheaf of paper, and we began to review the workings of the house in great detail.
In addition, I set a routine for myself—something I had always resisted at home.
Now, however, a schedule struck me as a kind of anchor, and so I resolved I would take my exercise early, meet with Mrs Reynolds directly after breakfast for an hour, and the rest of my mornings would be spent in service to the estate, on my lessons in pianoforte, and in learning to ride.
I would spend an hour in the library with Mr Darcy before the announcement of tea, and thereafter I would make myself available to Miss Darcy and the inevitable social calls.
Dinner would be endured. Mr Darcy had finally made it generally known he was recovered from his cold, and he would sit down with us.
After dinner, Miss Darcy would play for us, and Mrs Annesley, who had a warm, soothing voice, would perhaps read aloud.
Mr Darcy, I had heard, did not like cards but enjoyed chess.
I would occasionally suggest a round, and if he ever lowered himself to accept, I would likely lose more often than win.
I would then take a quick turn about the garden—as was my habit every evening—then retire as soon as I could reasonably do so.
This was my plan, and thus, my first month of marriage began.
I dressed myself every morning in the shadows of the autumnal dawn in Derbyshire and fought the urge to run out of the front door.
I walked furiously during those days, less for exercise, and more for the purpose of relieving such stores of anger and resentment as built up from such slights and snubs I endured from my resentful husband.
What a relief it would be to rage at him, but nothing would come of such displays of weakness, and I would surely give him more cause to despise me.
Thus, I clung—sometimes with clenched teeth and a failing grip—to the advice of Marcus Aurelius: ‘the best revenge is not to be like your enemy’.
Pemberley, I was beginning to see, was a glorious and incomprehensibly beautiful estate.
Such had been my distress upon arrival, I had not been equal to looking around me and taking in anything but the threats that pressed in upon me.
This must have been for the best since I might have lost my courage had I seen the estate’s vastness, the carefully curated dance between the man-made and the natural, and the unprecedented refinement of the place.
I had never seen the like of it. I marvelled at the work of generations which, with great resolution, must have been taken up by one master after the next.
To be singled out to become mistress of all this would be the stuff of fairy tales.
A duke’s daughter would have been much at home here.
And there I was, striding through the woods, kicking up the smell of mouldering bark with my cloak rustling behind me like a sail—a country chit who had stolen her place here.
My husband was bitter and cold, and he had categorically refused from the beginning to allow me to tell him what my part had been in what happened.
With tears in my eyes upon his arrival at Longbourn to speak with my father I had begged him to allow me to explain.
Explain? he had snapped. He had been there, he had said bitterly. Yet, to my surprise, I found a corner of my heart could be spared to hold sympathy for Mr Darcy when I came to fully comprehend that our marriage had been a travesty for him.
The darkness of these musings was hard to shake off, and I plunged far into the equally dark woods that day, managing to keep my appointment with Mrs Reynolds only by putting off Wilson’s attempt to dress me for the morning and forgoing my breakfast.
“My apologies, Mrs Reynolds,” I said, breezing into my study two minutes past the hour in my plain olive dress and sturdy leather boots. “I was so seduced by the woodlands that I am afraid I had gone quite far before I realised the time. Oh dear, and now my stomach has given me away as well.”
I grasped my rumbling belly as if that would shush it, and when the housekeeper offered to have a tray brought in, I said, “That would be very agreeable, for I will need my wits well fed if we are to grapple with the stores for winter. How many decisions must be made! You must fall into bed every night in a state of complete exhaustion.”
Mrs Reynolds, I noticed, responded well to these expressions of admiration.
I was not, however, using flattery to improve her opinion of me, but I was, in fact, sincere.
The business of an estate that size was staggering compared to Longbourn.
The house alone seemed more like an arm of government than a place where people ate, slept, and passed the time.
I returned to my room when our meeting concluded and was surprised to find one of my new day dresses laid out for me.
After a wash, and feeling a trifle elegant dressed in a pale satin gown cut in severe lines that verily dripped of wealth and taste, I sat with the music master and later, shook off my nerves and went to the library for my appointment with my husband.
I was the first to arrive, so I went to a chair by a window, pulled out my new book, and began to read.
Mr Darcy came in a quarter of an hour later. He bowed as I stood and curtseyed.
“Good day, Mr Darcy.”
“Mrs Darcy,” he replied. He went to a table at the opposite end of the room and picked up a book laid there, and after selecting a chair by the farthest window from where I sat, he read uninterruptedly for the full hour.
As did I. I was so much moved by my Irish poet, I wished I had brought with me some of my writing things so I could make notes.
I could have read this little volume for a year and still not have had my fill.
When tea was called, Mr Darcy held open the door and followed me to the parlour where I was introduced to the first of my callers.
This visit was a severe trial for me. My only consolation was that at least I was dressed the part for once.
Miss Darcy did not help me. She was too tongue-tied and could not look up for longer than it took to shoot quick, fearful glances at her brother.
Mr Darcy stood behind my chair like a stone mountain.
Perhaps he resembled one of the famous Derbyshire peaks of which I had heard so much—cold, lofty and unreachable.
The entire conversation fell to me, and I laboured through that quarter of an hour as though walking up that same peak against a stiff wind.
“Well, Darcy?” Lady Swanson, an elderly neighbour from Delford Place, had come to call. “What made you fall in love with this pretty lady?”
“My dear Lady Swanson, you must not ask my husband to give me compliments while I am in the room. He cannot utter a word of praise in my hearing without giving me such a large head that I would be impossible to manage. Suffice it to say that we spent the last hour in Pemberley’s library.
He sat with his book on Greek history while I read poetry with nary a word said between us.
Now, if that is not the picture of marital felicity, I do not know what is.
Is it true your late husband was a great reader? ”
I had heard no such thing about the late Lord Swanson.
For all I knew, he was a vacuous, gouty lump, but I also knew whether I were right or wrong, the conversation would turn back upon my visitor.
I eyed the ormolu clock on the mantel as my guest began to speak of her departed husband, while the poor relation who served as her companion murmured her concurrence with all that was said about that man’s goodness.
“Are you well, Mrs Darcy?” Wilson asked later as I dressed for dinner.
“You ask me that question with great regularity. Do I not seem well?”
“I believe I am getting to know you a little, ma’am.”
“Do I so easily show my discomposure?”
“No, ma’am, but your satisfaction is my occupation, and I am attuned, if you will, to your…”
“My moods ? Gracious. Well, if you must know, I am only preoccupied in wondering how to deflect the worst kind of questions one is asked during a bride visit.”
“Yes, ma’am. Only, if I might suggest that if you do spill a drop of tea on one of your dresses, or even suspect you have done so, you have only to run upstairs immediately, and I can salvage the garment with no harm done.”
“Are you suggesting I have only to waver and imagine I have spilled a drop? What genius! Any lady visiting would understand my rush upstairs, and if they are so ill-mannered as to stay until I come back down, then the subject would naturally change to the treatment of stains.” This was pure folly, and I would never resort to it, but a little chuckle rallied my confidence enough that I could go to dinner and engage in all the usual pursuits thereafter with calmness restored.