An express came from London at breakfast. I was looking down at my buttered toast, trying to muster some enthusiasm for it when my belly still felt too knotted and heavy from last night’s dinner, and Mamma was talking, with the peculiar talent she had for believing every word she had to say must be of interest to her audience, about our relations’ upcoming visit to Rosings Park.
“You, of course, must have new gowns. It wouldn’t do for Fitzwilliam to see you in the same gowns you wore last year.” Mamma took a bite of cake, chewed, then added, “I fear he does not want to formalize the engagement until you have both reached your majority, but it still cannot hurt for him to see you—and Rosings itself—at your very best. To remind him”—with a smile—“of what his future holds.”
My cousin was widely considered handsome, I knew, and I supposed he was; but as he reached manhood I could not seem to stop my eyes lingering, with a sort of unwholesome fascination, on his side whiskers and the hair on the backs of his hands. I had petted only a few dogs in my life, but I wondered, still, whether the hair on Fitzwilliam’s hands and face, so much thicker and more coarse than the hair on my own body, would feel similar to a dog’s, if petted. It was an odd and not altogether pleasant thought.
But I could not say any of this to Mamma.
I was saved the trouble of forming any sort of response by a pounding at the front doors. Mamma stopped talking midsentence, a forkful of cake held aloft, and both she and I listened as Peters spoke to whomever had arrived. Our butler’s heavy footsteps came toward us down the corridor.
“Ma’am,” Peters said, bowing low before my mother and holding a letter out to her. Mamma set her fork down with a strange deliberateness—as if she, too, felt the same illogical disquiet that I suddenly did—and read the letter quickly. It was, I could see, but a few brief lines. And then Mamma said, “Dear Lord,” in an odd voice that was utterly devoid of inflection. “Fetch Mrs. Barrister,” she said to Peters. “And have my writing things fetched here. I must write to my brother.”
Peters bowed, his eyes moving minutely toward the paper she still held, though he knew his place well enough that he asked nothing. Mamma set the letter down on the edge of the table when he had gone, too far away for me to read it. I took a bite of toast, but it filled my mouth, tasteless and dry, and I had to work hard to swallow it down. Mamma returned her fork to her hand but had yet to take a bite of cake, the fork poised over her plate and her eyes staring, brows gathered together over her nose, at the opposite wall.
“What is it, Mamma?” I said when I could no longer bear the silence.
Mamma gave her head a little shake and put her fork very carefully back down. “Your father has been killed,” she said, still in that strange, calm voice.
It was because of this calmness—because I watched my mother lose her composure when Aunt Darcy died, heard the terrible keening sounds she was capable of making—that I did not immediately understand Mamma’s words. I whispered them over to myself like lines of poetry, puzzling out their meaning. It took several goings-over before I made sense of them; and then something crashed over me—I was back in Brighton, the waves bursting against my back, Mamma remote and distant on the beach. And it was Papa who put me there among the waves, Papa’s choice, Papa’s fault. But Papa was gone, gone off to his friends and his pleasure, leaving me with only Mamma, who was safe on the sand, while I sputtered and gasped in the cold, cold water.
Dr. Grant came to see me as usual after Papa’s death. In mourning black, I was paler even than usual, and my appetite, never strong, was gone entirely. The doctor expressed alarm at the change in me—“Though it is natural, of course,” he assured Mamma. “A shock of this sort can fell even the sturdiest of characters. And Miss de Bourgh has never been sturdy.” He prescribed a few extra drops of medicine to calm my nerves and help me sleep; I drank them down without complaint, welcoming the added protection against the world.
Mamma read out letters from Aunt Fitzwilliam and Uncle Darcy, their condolences and promises that they would visit in a few weeks as they had already planned. Miss Hall sometimes read from books of prayers. Occasionally we had callers—Mr. and Mrs. Applewhite, who came from just down the lane at the parsonage; our neighbors, the Cliftons; Mamma’s friend Lady Mary, who broke her journey at Rosings on her way to visit her son in London. None of them troubled me; I was sometimes aware of their pitying glances, their murmured questions about the future of the estate, put forth timidly lest their impertinence seem too marked. Mamma always answered in the same way, confident and strong-voiced, assuring our visitors that she had taken on the responsibilities of managing Rosings Park until I came of age and married her nephew Mr. Darcy.
My twentieth birthday came and went unremarked.
I had visitors of my own, beginning soon after Dr. Grant increased my dose, but Mamma and Miss Hall knew nothing about them. They were a secret I guarded closely. At night, they appeared inside my room—I never saw how they crept in, and though I asked sometimes whether they used the door or climbed the walls like soldiers with grappling hooks to reach my window, they never answered, only smiled at me gently. Their smiles made my skin prickle, and not pleasantly. I held myself tight as a harp string until tension crept up from my shoulder blades, spread across my shoulders, and set my neck to aching. It was a feat to hold myself so, for my drops urged my muscles to slacken, dragged at my eyelids, tried to tip me over to lie upon my pillow. But I forced myself to stay tense and still until my drops’ pull became too strong to resist.
But this reaction, this instinctive fear, shamed me, for my visitors clearly wanted to spend time in my company. Sometimes they petted my hair, their long, clawlike nails tangling in the strands and pulling locks free of their plait; other times they crouched like gargoyles on the end of my bed, imitating my stillness, just watching me in a manner that felt at once predatory and protective.
One, in particular, came more often than the others, a very fat woman in a white gown who liked to urge me to rest against her comfortable bosom. I always longed to do so—the woman seemed very kind, and it would be so novel to be cuddled—but then sometimes when she smiled the woman’s teeth looked very sharp and pointed, like the tines of a fork; and so I remained wary of her.
My father came once as well, wearing his nightshirt and a lady’s elegant turban. His plumpness gone, he looked ill, as delicate as I did, myself, as if some mysterious fever burned away everything but his bones. He did not stay long, and I could only be glad that he did not come to me wearing the true cause of his death, smashed and bloody after falling from his horse onto the unforgiving London cobblestones.
When Rosings Park itself began to communicate with me, I was not sure I could trust the evidence of my own senses. No one else appeared to notice the whispers in the walls or feel the caress in the way the floor rose up, just a little, to press against the soles of the feet treading upon it. The whispers were just low enough that I had to strain to hear them, a constant murmur like that of a brook, from which I could at first only occasionally decipher a distinct word. Crumble. Fallow. Find. And, more than once, Anne.
At night, the house breathed, and it was this that made me realize I had been hearing and feeling Rosings Park for most of my life. I remembered, when I was a child, imagining that the walls of the house were moving in and out around me, just as my own rib cage expanded and subsided with each of my breaths. It had, I knew now, been breathing the whole time; I simply had not recognized its respiration for what it was.
Night was the only time now that Rosings Park was quiet. During the day, it never stopped talking, never ceased worrying over its every stone, both those that made up the building itself—there was damp running down some of the inner walls, apparently, and slick green things taking advantage, clinging to the stones’ rough texture—and those that lay in the fields outside, silent, chuckling to themselves, just waiting to make the plough horses stumble. I wondered sometimes whether it used to nudge Papa as it nudged me, now I had inherited its cares and worries. I thought of it sometimes like a cat that twined about its mistress’s legs, butted its small head against its mistress’s hand, intent on getting the attention it needed.
At night, though, I could relax back into the mattress, breathing in time with the house. Only sometimes was my rest disturbed, when the house muttered something or cried out weakly, like a kitten. Rosings Park, it seemed, sometimes had bad dreams, too.
The day the Darcys and Fitzwilliams were expected to arrive, Mamma ordered the drawing room curtains closed and told Miss Hall to keep me company while I rested. Dr. Grant had warned, on his most recent visit, that too much excitement in the wake of such great tragedy could prove permanently detrimental to my fragile health.
In the dimly lit room, I lay bored upon the settee. Miss Hall dragged her chair near the window and, despite Mamma’s injunction, twitched one of the curtains just a little aside, bending over her sewing in the resulting thin light. I watched her, her stitches so quick, so fine, Miss Hall’s concentration so complete, brows nearly touching over her nose.
The drawing room doors were firmly shut, muffling the sounds, but I concentrated very hard, as hard as Miss Hall was concentrating on her work, and there, there were footsteps, rushing; and there a door banging open. One maid called to another. All of it conducted at a much more frantic pace than usual. I tried to imagine what was going on, but could not; I had watched the servants at their work all my life, had lain quietly as they dusted and polished, arranged furniture and lit fires, working around me as if I were a stick of furniture, myself. But I had little concept of what they might be doing now to cause this unaccustomed bustle.
“Why are the servants so harried, do you think?” I said.
Miss Hall gave me an odd look. “They have visitors to prepare for.”
“Yes, but.” I looked up at the ceiling, and lost the rest of my thought to the shadows in the corners.
Miss Hall sighed and made another few stitches. But she said, “Belowstairs, they will have been preparing tonight’s dinner for the last several days. Acres of food, I believe. They will all want to show off the house to its best advantage, and Lady Catherine, and the future mistress of Rosings.”
The future mistress of Rosings. I watched as the words appeared before me in Miss Hall’s soft, sloping hand, trailing off in curls.
“Mrs. Barrister has been in a froth over the flowers; I think the gardeners are quite frightened of her.” Miss Hall smiled a little at her work. She was not wearing black, as I and Mamma were, but a subdued gray, with a black armband. She had taken recently to wearing the ruffled caps of matrons or spinsters, which hid most of her hair and made her look older than her six-and-twenty years. I found, strangely, that I missed the sight of her hair, the wings of it curving over either side of her high brow—like the wings of a ladybird poised to fly. I had the urge to remove her cap, to feel for myself whether those wings were as smooth as they appeared, to follow their trajectory around her skull and upward to the heavy plaited knot of hair just a little back from the crown of her head. And then down again; my fingertips, with their whorled lines like a tree’s secret patterns buried under the bark, tingled as I imagined running them over the round of her cheek, the flexible shell of her ear. I wondered what her earlobe would feel like, that soft curving bit of flesh, if I were to hold it between my thumb and forefinger, and something tightened in the very lowest part of my belly, like a most delicious cramp.
“And of course,” Miss Hall continued, “the guest rooms needed airing. And everything needs polishing. There’s the china and silver to be cleaned. The candles to be trimmed and lighted.” She sewed in silence for a while as my wandering eyes moved across her familiar features, dropping naturally to her throat, her sloping shoulders, the shelf of her bosom within her stays. And farther still, over the spread of her hips and lap, reminding me of Papa’s garden sculptures, under her skirt. Then she said, “You really ought to know these things. You should have been training with Lady Catherine and Mrs. Barrister already for years.”
The criticism might have made me glare and blush, were I not feeling so wonderfully indifferent. “Dr. Grant has said too much responsibility is bad for me. As you know.”
“Dr. Grant . . .” But Miss Hall stopped speaking, her lips pressed together like a sealed letter, and I without the strength of will to break the wax. We had not spoken of my drops since that one time in the rose garden. I watched the flash of my governess’s needle in the dimness.
“What are you making?”
A little of the ill humor left Miss Hall’s face. “A baby’s gown. My sister is expecting her first child very soon.”
More quiet. My thoughts drifted from Miss Hall’s clever hands to her unflattering cap; distantly, I wondered whether my governess had entirely given up on the idea of marriage and children of her own. Even after so many years, I still knew only scraps of information about her life, much of it gleaned by peppering my letters to her with questions—some of which she answered, some of which, particularly the more bold and deep-delving, she pointedly ignored.
From Mamma, I knew that Miss Hall’s father had, like so many other gentlemen, lost his money at the gaming tables; but Miss Hall herself never spoke of this, and even I knew better than to probe that particular wound. She had one sister, two years her junior, who also went to work as a governess right out of school, but who wed a London merchant with a thriving business a year or so ago. Miss Hall, however, was always with me here in Kent where the pool of eligible men could more honestly be called a puddle; at our annual harvest ball, while I, forbidden by Dr. Grant’s injunction to dance, sat with my parents watching our neighbors and tenants form set after set, Miss Hall was asked to dance often—twice, one year, by the draper’s son. She looked happy then, merry, smiling widely, a gleam of perspiration on her collarbones. But none of the men who asked her to dance had, as far as I knew, asked for her hand in any more serious way.
I said, “I will marry you.”
It was a stray remark, as idle as “I wish the rain would stop,” or “I might go into the village this morning”; it felt as natural as either of those remarks would, too. But all at once, the silence in the room was so complete that I realized I had been hearing the soft drawing of thread through fabric; the subtle whisper of cotton as Miss Hall turned it as she worked.
Even my own and Miss Hall’s breaths had now ceased, as completely as if we both died quite abruptly, and for a moment I felt panic rush up past the dampening blanket of my drops; I drew in a gulp of air with theatrical loudness, felt my ribs expand as far as they could within the cage of my stays to accommodate my breath, and expelled it again on a sigh.
Miss Hall stared down at the needle in her one hand, at the white of the fabric in the other. I could not understand her expression; I saw no arrow, was certain I heard no gunfire. So why did Miss Hall look so exactly as I always imagined someone might look after being shot: perfectly still, stunned by the improbability of the blooming bloodstain?
“That was a wicked thing to say,” Miss Hall said, very quietly. “Even in jest, as I assume you meant it.” She gathered up her work with exceptional haste and said, “I shall leave you to rest.” She was gone from the room between one eye-blink and the next, and I was left with a sensation of endless falling.
The visit was all hushed whispers and gently pressed palms. Uncles Fitzwilliam and Darcy insisted on closeting themselves with Rosings’s steward, Mr. Colt, to satisfy themselves that Mamma and the estate were in capable hands. My mother sniffed when they admitted that it seemed she knew what she was about, and said to Uncle Fitzwilliam, “And who was it, Robert, who kept Father’s estate running after his death? I was not away at Cambridge; nor was I yet married, as Anne was. It all fell to me, as it has fallen to me now. But I have risen to the challenge; I always do.”
Every evening, when we went in to dinner, Mr. Darcy led Mamma through, and though the honor of taking me in ought really to have gone to Edward, somehow it was always Fitzwilliam on whose arm I found myself; Fitzwilliam who was seated beside me at the table. Mamma smiled out over us all, the jet bugles on her gown glinting in the light from the silver candlesticks, and led the conversation—was the conversation, rarely needing the participation of anyone else. But her expression changed, little by little, over the course of each evening; even as she spoke without ceasing, her eyes lingered on me and Fitzwilliam, and I could feel her waiting, waiting for some sign of true attachment between her daughter and her beloved sister’s son. And, too, I felt her disappointment—a puckered, peevish thing—and, increasingly, her worry, which was pale and papery as a pressed flower, as delicate as I was, myself.
One afternoon, Mamma turned to poor Georgiana, at nine years old my youngest cousin by far, whose birth caused Aunt Darcy’s death. Georgiana was a tall, silent wisp of a girl, who positively wilted when my mother turned the full force of her attention upon her.
“Play for us, Niece,” Mamma said. “Your father has nothing but good to report of your talents, but I should like to hear for myself what your music master has accomplished.”
I thought Georgiana might cry, but she whispered, “Yes, Aunt de Bourgh,” and sat at the pianoforte.
Miss Hall, who had been spending most of her time embroidering the baby’s gown, stood immediately and offered to turn the pages of the music, smiling with more warmth than she had shown me in days. I watched, something terrible swelling in my belly like bread dough.
I did not notice at first when my cousin John took the seat beside me. But he smiled at me, and asked after my health, and his manner was so easy, so amiable, that I found myself thinking wistfully that if I must marry any man, I would rather it be John than Fitzwilliam, for all that John was by far the plainer of the two and had no fortune of his own. He sat beside me as Georgiana played, and I did my best to answer him when he spoke, trying not to feel, as I always used to with Papa, that I had nothing to say that could possibly interest him. I pressed my slippered toes against the carpet, hard enough to hurt, a strangling frustration creeping over me like the vines of ivy whose progress over the churchyard poplar I still marked each Sunday. John and Edward and Fitzwilliam moved in the world with an easiness I would never be allowed, even if I were not ill—Edward and Fitzwilliam busy with their estates and education, John with his recent promotion in the army. They lived lives I could not entirely imagine. And because I was ill, nothing ever changed in my life from year to year, and so I had nothing to talk about.
None of this should matter at all, really, or so I told myself; my dullness was not my fault, and it was silly to become overwrought about it. It would be nice, though, to have something worth talking about.
Yet despite my dullness, John stayed with me for an hour or so, even when Edward and Fitzwilliam, using the excuse of looking out over the estate, escaped the dreariness of the drawing room for the outdoors.
“Anne is your cousin. Talk to her. She deserves civility from you, at least.”
My eyes opened. I must have dozed off at some point, for long enough that my cousins returned from their excursion; Edward stood across the room with his father, both nursing glasses of port that glowed like twin sunsets, and beside the fireplace, a few feet from the settee upon which I lay, were John and Fitzwilliam.
Both glanced at me, and I let my lids drop a little. When he spoke, Fitzwilliam’s voice was quieter even than John’s, but still I understood him clearly.
“I do not mean to be rude,” he said. “But how exactly does one converse with a doll?”