Page 40 of The Winter of Our Discontent (Pride and Prejudice Variations #1)

Dear Lizzy,

I thank you for your letter and for your gift.

We will be allowed to go to the shops at the end of the month, and I will buy a warm nightgown and woollen slippers.

Mrs Dolby does not sanction heat in our rooms, and we are not allowed to go to them except to sleep, wash, and dress.

She says that comfort encourages sloth. For once in my life, I long to be housed in the same room as my sisters.

We would at least warm each other in bed.

We are kept apart because Mrs Dolby says that reliance on one another is a false comfort, that it can be corrupting, and such attachments should be given up with childhood. She prepares us to move away from each other and says to be alone in the world is rational and realistic.

I no longer read doctrine, Lizzy, as I get my fill of it here.

In the evenings when we are sitting over needlework, I try to recollect the few novels we read aloud as girls, resurrecting stories in my mind.

Alas, when I had the comfort and joy of family, I scorned them in favour of cold philosophy, and now they are lost to me.

I look forward to nothing. My prospects for marriage are poor.

Mrs Dolby says the Bennet sisters would be better off seeking positions as companions and governesses than aspiring to motherhood.

She regularly expresses her disgust of us, to prepare us, she says, for the disdain of the world when we enter it.

We are disgraced and never allowed to forget the fact, and I begin to wonder why I was even born.

Forgive me, Lizzy, for pouring out my heart in this pitiful way. I know you have the worst trial of all of us. Forgive me, too, for I have not loved you as I should.

Your sister,

Mary

P.S. Kitty and Lydia have asked to enclose notes with my letter.

I really should not have reread this letter. I wept for more than one reason when I did. I wept for my sisters’ misery, their bewilderment, the harshness of their punishment. They were still very close to being children. Oh Papa! Could you not take your anger out on me alone?

I wept, too, because I only sought to help Mary by bringing her to Pemberley, and that impulse of protection had been the source of such acute pain for me.

Mr Darcy came yesterday, bringing half a dozen hands to work the farms of those unable.

He took dinner in his study with Mr Johnson and never once looked at me before leaving again at first light.

I wiped my tears and read the two notes still sitting on my lap.

Dear Lizzy,

I thank you for your gift. If we are ever allowed to go anywhere, I will spend all my money on a shawl or perhaps warm boots.

You would be very proud of me. I am learning French, and drawing, and sums, and my back aches from sitting straight the whole day through.

They will not let me sit with Lydia or even Mary here, and Mama has not once written to me.

How long does Papa mean to punish us? Could you not write to him and ask him to relent?

Your loving sister,

Kitty

And last I read:

Dear Lizzy,

I thank you for your gift. If I find a way to run away, I will go straight to the bakery and buy a basket of cakes. I am starving! Could you not send some more money right away? I heard Mr Darcy is very rich.

Lydia

How like my sisters these letters were. Kitty was stranded between making the most of her situation by taking her lessons and feelings of gross injustice.

Lydia thought only of running away to fill her stomach.

I could not help but smile over her letter, and I forgave her a little because, really, a forest creature is more self-aware than our Lydia.

I shook my head and locked those letters away in my desk. Come quarter day, I would send them two crowns apiece and perhaps tins of biscuits, though I doubted Mrs Dolby would allow them in her school .

Later, on the plush velveteen sofa in our cosy music room, Georgiana’s arm stole around my waist. She rested her silken blonde curls on my dark ones.

I saw us in the grand mirror behind the pianoforte, where Miss Stiles played a melancholy air.

We made a pretty picture on the outside, but on the inside, I was forlorn, and Georgiana seemed to sense it.

She looked worried and confused for me and saddened by something else I did not understand.

Perhaps she felt the loss of her parents still, so many years later.

Mrs Annesley looked fondly at us and then bent back over her sewing.

I had bought two bolts of flannel, and we were making shirts, shifts, and smocks for Mrs Travers’s children.

I announced this to be our mission a week ago when working on a lace handkerchief and suddenly jolted by a sober realisation.

“These trifles are absurd!” I exclaimed aloud, tossing aside my handkerchief in disgust. I proceeded to explain myself with such passion that my companions blushed with mortification.

There were children on the estate dressed in rags, I had cried, and there we sat hunched over tiny scraps of linen!

Our lace and fine knotwork had then been set aside, and though I should not have been so dictatorial, I did not retract my objections to them.

Even our musical group had been recruited.

I bought the fabrics, yarn, thread, and buttons with the economy of simpler meals during my husband’s absence.

My conscripted troops sewed up things from a list I made.

Upon my orders, Mr Hodge’s poor box was filling up.

The cottagers’ children had warm underthings.

I became relentless in providing for the disenfranchised, since I could not provide for my sisters.

If one child was warmer at night, then Mary was warmer at night.

If one child had a shawl for comfort, then Kitty was comforted, and if one child’s belly was full, then Lydia was fed.

I knew I must act or be eaten alive by powerlessness.

Georgiana must have sensed my tension. “Elizabeth?”

“All is well, dearest. I am not built for winter, that is all that is amiss with me.”

She subsided but found me later at my desk going over every inch of the household accounts, scouring for an extra shilling here and there to spend on poor relief. She looked at me with her great blue eyes.

“What troubles you?” I asked tenderly, putting away my ledger.

“Are things so very bad on the estate, Elizabeth?”

“What do you mean?”

“My brother is away in Manchester doing I know not what, when this time of year he is usually sitting comfortably by the fire and riding out now and then. And you are almost frantic in caring for the tenants and the poor.”

I sat back in dismay. “Oh dearest, forgive me. I suppose I thought you knew all along what is afoot. No, we are not struggling. Would your brother allow it? I hardly think so, for if anything, he is meticulous in his management. The case is that there is a sickness on the estate, and he is gone to get men to help with readying the fields for planting, while I am fretting relentlessly over the children whose parents are ailing. There is no mystery, no disastrous difficulty, I assure you.”

She looked anything but reassured.

“Do you doubt me, Georgiana?”

She coloured and her eyes fell to the ground, appearing to search for words.

Where before I spoke bracingly, now my tone fell to its softest. “Pray, say whatever has you so distressed. I am your sister now, and you can trust me with your heart.”

“The rumour below stairs is that you will be sent to Scotland.” Georgiana’s voice was reduced to a stricken whisper by these words.

“Scotland?” I refrained from laughing aloud. I had not been so amused in weeks and weeks. Mrs Radcliffe would be very happy to hear of my banishment and write a new Gothic novel with me as her heroine.

“We have an estate there.”

“Do you? I did not know. What is it like?”

“I went there once when I was nine. It is a draughty old vault as I recall, close to the sea and cold even in summer.”

I shuddered theatrically and asked what they produced there. She spoke vaguely about a woolly cow, referring to Highland cattle, I think, and to sheep. “I am picturing nothing but windswept moors.”

“Oh Elizabeth, it is dreadful! I cannot think of you locked away there.”

Shades of Mrs Radcliffe indeed. Now was the time for briskness of speech again. “Georgiana, you really must cease minding servants’ gossip.”

“But will he? Will he send you away?”

“My dear girl, Mr Darcy is my husband. He can do almost anything he wants to me and be within the law. If he sends me to Scotland, I will be mother to a great many hairy cows and beg you to bring warm socks when you visit me. You will visit me, will you not?”

At last, the little smile I knew so well peeked out. “Oh, if you are banished to Scotland, I will pack up and leave with you. We will eat porridge morning, noon, and night and tend our lambs. ”

“And you will marry a poor crofter and clean fish for the market. What a merry party we will be! Are we agreed, then, my dear? Now, promise me you will only laugh at the gossip.”

She earnestly did so and left with a lighter step, and I went back to my ledger with even more to think about.

I knew instantly the rumour was indeed circulating, having heard Mr Darcy’s steward mention Scotland obliquely in conversation twice that week.

He had done so with his bluff and hardy guffaw, pausing to look at me to see if I caught his joke.

Of course, I did not know he was being provoking because I did not know Mr Darcy had an estate in Scotland, nor was I privy to the prevailing speculation that the master would not return home until he was rid of me—hence notions of my ultimate dismissal from Pemberley.

I was thus able, through ignorance, to withstand his jibes with laudable aplomb.

I hoped I would not burst out laughing if he had the temerity to continue to tease me, for Scotland, I reasoned, could well prove to be an improvement.