I wake to the sound of weeping.
For a moment, I cannot remember why I ache so in all my bones; why it feels as if someone has set a thick book upon my chest. The weeper cries as if her throat is being torn open; as if her heart bleeds. I hover between concern for myself, my own heartbeat ponderously slow, my breaths shallow and rattling, and for her, whomever she is.
My eyelids are heavy as stones; there is a vague memory, scratching at the edges of my mind, about stones on the eyes and why I should be afraid of them. But I bat it away, actually managing to raise one shaking hand before it falls once more to the coverlet.
When I wake again, it is to my maid’s familiar arm under my neck, and her voice urging me to drink. Cool glass against my lips; bittersweet liquid on my tongue. A shock of recognition, though it has been more than forty years since I last tasted it. A feeble attempt at protestation, though I have already swallowed.
I float along a placid river, my body, unnaturally heavy, undulating with the currents, my thoughts scattered like autumn leaves along the water’s surface. A part of me knows that my true body lies still and alone in my high soft bed. But this body—the floating body—is so much freer than the other, which is tucked into the bedclothes like a child, and the eyes belonging to this body can open, can enjoy the way the sunlight flickers through the remaining leaves of the willow trees along the river’s banks.
I pass my father, fishing; he is hatless and coatless, his sleeves rolled up so his pale forearms are exposed to the sun. I think at first that he does not recognize me, with my hair silver as shillings and my skin crinkled from years. But he turns his head at the last moment and watches as I drift past him. “Anne!” he calls, and grins when I wave.
If I had the power to stop my forward momentum, I would pause before him and stand with him awhile in the shallows, the minnows dashing about near our ankles. I would ask him whether he watched at all, these many years, as I took hold of my birthright at last and refused to let go; and, too, I would ask whether the taking hold pleased him, or if, like my mother, he could never quite believe me strong enough.
But I cannot stop, and so I watch as his figure grows smaller and smaller, until at last the current carries me around a bend and I lose sight of him altogether.
This river meanders through my favorite parts of the estate, and for all that I know no such body of water truly exists on Rosings’s many acres, I am content merely to enjoy the journey. I pass the cows grazing in their pasture on the home farm and the pasture containing Mr. Montgomery’s herd of heavy-wooled sheep, where I turned my ankle once in the early days of my return to Kent. His wife, who refused to let me return to the great house without a good rest by the fire and an herby poultice, became the first of my tenants with whom I was on truly friendly terms. I glide through the rose garden, which blooms more prolifically now even than it did in my father’s day, the roses twining lovingly around the arms and throats of the sculptures he had placed there.
The river skims along the edge of the lake I ordered dug when George was still a small boy; and here I find Darcy, looking younger and more hale than he was when he died by a good twenty years. He is laughing, one hand shading his eyes as he watches someone paddling in the shallow reedy waters near the lakeshore. It must be George himself, though his figure is hazy, as if he does not quite belong in this netherworld with the rest of us. I suspect, watching as I pass, the river’s current mercifully slow here, that I can only see him at all because this particular part of his life is over; he will never again be a small boy swimming in a lake.
I must make some sound, or perhaps he only feels the pressure of my eyes, for Darcy turns. When he sees me, his handsome face is so glad, so easy, it is hard to recall a time when he was stiff and uncomfortable in my presence. It only took a journey to Derbyshire and an offer of adopting George, removing all the uncertainty that is necessarily attendant upon a second son. Darcy brought George here often when the boy was old enough; he and I stood together in this very spot and watched him test his swimmer’s strength in the calm water of the lake. As husband and wife we could never have been happy, but in our odd arrangement as far-flung guardians of this sweet, sturdy soul, we found a peculiar form of contentment together.
George must come here soon, I think—the real here, with my bed-bound body from which I am so grateful for this brief escape. He has been in London with his brother, but my steward will have summoned him by now. He will be riding through the night to reach Kent quickly. I think of his dear face, framed on either side by ears like pitcher handles, for which he was teased mercilessly at school but which now, in his middle years, look like nothing so much as parentheses drawing attention to the gentleness of his countenance. He was not always so dear to me, of course; indeed, he remained a sort of curiosity to me for years, until he grew old enough to come to Kent for extended visits. But time and familiarity can indeed breed love, it seems.
The river continues on its illogical, wandering way, through meadows I once trod in fair weather and foul; beside the lane where I used to drive my ponies. I think of their warm, happy greetings upon my return, their breath moistening my palms, the way they nudged their noses against my belly. They were the first residents of Rosings who seemed truly glad of my return.
Beside Hunsford’s church, in a shaded, snaking curve of riverbank, Nurse squats beside the water, dress and petticoat hitched up around her knees, bare toes wiggling in the mud. She sees me and smiles. “It’s good to get my feet out of those boots,” she says, and I see her boots and striped stockings where they lie abandoned a little distance away among the tough snarled willow roots that form a trailing shelf over the water.
I pass Miss Bennet—Mrs. Darcy—who pays me no notice, her attention on the blue of the sky and the satisfying briskness of her walking pace. I pass Aunt and Uncle Darcy, who walk with arms linked and look after me with mild surprise, and Uncle Fitzwilliam, who is so intent upon the novel over whose pages he is chuckling that he only waves at me absentmindedly, without any true recognition. I pass others, walking, riding, picnicking on the river’s shady banks. Some I remember clearly—Mr. Collins, the previous Hunsford rector, and his wife, an infant lying on the blanket between them, fat legs kicking at its long white dress; Mr. Colt, who stands beside a stone wall, conversing with a cluster of farmers—and some are like wisps of recollection from dreams, their faces nearly familiar but still unplaceable. One, a stooped old woman whose long fingers curl around the knob of her walking stick, startles at the sight of me, squinting with eyes that are the only familiar thing about her. I thrash a little in the water, turning my head to see her more clearly, to place those eyes; and it is only when she is nearly out of sight that I think, Oh, it is Miss Hall! with the faint pleasure that comes of seeing an old friend.
John waits around a bend near the woods, hands behind his back and back still straight despite the whiteness of his few remaining hairs. He passed this way only a few years ago; not a month past, I received a letter from his widow, with whom I still correspond regularly. John says nothing, but he does not need to. He nods in welcome, affection in his eyes; and it is enough.
At the entrance to the woods themselves, the water flows more quickly, as if eager to speed me on my way to some unknown place. It steers me with unnerving splashes and jolts around sudden rocks, leaves and sticks rushing along before me. Then a swift, frightening turn around a gnarled tree, and a drop of several inches down a miniature waterfall and at last into a slower spot, where I swirl in the cool and struggle to catch my breath.
There are two figures on the shore ahead of me, and they I would know anywhere. Mrs. Jenkinson smiles in her bland and dutiful way, but Mamma, her hair magnificently white, her eyes dark with displeasure and hurt feelings, begins shouting the moment she spies me. In a fit of instinctive cowardice, I nearly block my ears, like a child being told to return to her nursery.
We lived uneasily together until her death, every day a battle still, the war never won by either of us. I do not know what winning would have looked like to her; Rosings Park back under her control, I suppose, and myself with it. But there were moments—scarce as they were, tender, and easy to overlook as early spring ferns—when she praised some choice I had made, be it a new carpet for the breakfast room or a settled dispute among my tenants, and her face flashed with pride for me. These make me uncertain of the size and form her victory would have taken, and make me all the more embarrassed for my display when I returned from London, like a child asserting its independence.
For myself, who veered wildly between shutting out the noise of her and seeking her counsel like a supplicant before a saint, I think perhaps victory would have been the sort of sinew-deep understanding of my mother that is impossible between humans except in those rare, shining moments of connection that occur only once or twice in a lifetime.
Now there is only one face I seek among the breezes and the shadows, and I know where I shall find her. Sensitive as a well-trained horse to its mistress’s bidding, the river turns gently and deposits me among the thick spreading roots of the ancient oak tree at the heart of Rosings’s woods. I am able to stand here, and shake off the clinging gold-brown willow leaves, and clamber onto the woodland floor, which smells of vegetable decay and the secrets of birds and voles and beetles.
I can see the edge of her wide skirt around the trunk, and I can hear the soft swish of a turning page. I round the bend and stop, drinking in the sight of her, which quenches me as if I had been wandering a desert land and not floating in a river. She looks just as I remember her, the orange of her hair dulled by time, her lips ridged with vertical lines and her hands spotted not just with freckles, but with age. She wears her favorite gown, gray silk with a narrow stripe of sapphire blue running through the fabric, the pale under-sleeves covered in delicate whitework. Her shoulders curve with the years, years that ought not allow her to kneel with such apparent ease among the wide lumps of the oak’s roots, the layers of her crinoline, petticoats, and the skirt of her gown spread around her like a silken puddle.
Indeed, before her death, it had already been several years since we had sat here together; our knees and backs could no longer manage.
This was our tree; our place. An irony, for until I returned to Kent, these woods held nothing but the nameless, formless terrors of children’s stories for me; and then there was Eliza, whose distaste for the wildness of the true outdoors—rather than the carefully cultivated outdoors of parks and gardens—she had not exaggerated.
But she indulged me in my relish for untamed growing things once she came to Kent; and, too, we needed a place to escape together. For no matter how discreet the servants nor how stout the locks on our chamber doors, there was something delicious about making space for ourselves, for the shape and heft of us, in the greater world, even if only we, and local fauna, knew we had done so.
She sets aside her book when I clear my throat, marking her place with a scrap of blue ribbon. Her face, when she looks into mine, is unsurprised, her smile broad and calmly glad. It transforms her web of wrinkles into a wreath of welcome. Patting the hump of tree root that we used to lovingly call the tree’s settee, she says, “Sit awhile, love.”
I arrange myself as best I can, given the width and breadth of my skirt and petticoats. I told her almost daily during our life together how I loved her softness, and she pulls me against it now. We listen to the hum of forest insects, the calling conversations of chaffinches and nuthatches, the branches of the oak rubbing against the intersecting branches of a nearby ash in creaking affection. We listen to each other’s breathing, hers calm and even as it was before her illness, mine rattling in my chest like dice in a cup. Eliza does not remark on the alarming sound of it, only tightens her arm around my shoulders.
I should ask her whether the preachers in their tall pulpits are right about the nature of heaven; but I do not. Cowardice, once again. I never did manage to achieve anything like true feeling for the God of the prayer books, only ever finding something like a union with the Divine in the music and words of my fellow humans, and in the quiet lives of my other fellow creatures, both those whose roots run through the earth and those who scamper across it or wing their way through the sky. But I fear such a union is merely the product of my own imagination.
In my imagination, heaven looks like home. Eliza got there first, and so this time it is I who will make the long walk up the lane toward the great house, a little afraid, a little tired. And it is she who shall meet me there in the lane, surprised in her daily routine to find me standing there, looking up at the house’s highest window; she who will run to me and enfold me in her arms; she who will murmur words of welcome and weep hot glad tears, as I once did when it was she who followed me.
The river has crept up between the tree roots, filling in the bark’s deep crevices. It dampens the hem of my gown, tugging like a child’s hands, insistent that I come along with it. I am slipping away before I know it is happening, my cheek falling from Eliza’s shoulder. “Oh, Frank,” she says, and grasps my hand until she can hold on no longer; and then she releases me.
I wake now to two people speaking together. Their words are all but meaningless, but I know both their voices—my Welsh maid’s musical, George’s deep and boggy. I listen to them for a time, their whispers rising and falling.
Eliza had not been jesting about not being fond of children; nor had she been wrong about loving her own anyway. And George was as much Eliza’s as mine, as Darcy’s and Elizabeth’s. I do not know whether George suspected the true depth of our affection for one another, but he loved us both as almost-mothers. Knowing that he is here now, as he was here when she died, I feel a small snap, as of a frayed rope mooring a boat to its dock. Like the freed boat, I bob and drift, unhurried but still moving steadily away.
Slowly, over the whispers of their human voices, I become aware of another voice, ragged and choking. It is the same weeping voice I heard before, but it is coming, I realize now, from the walls, the windows. Saltwater eddies under the wallpaper, pools on the floor. My eyes open, blink against the firelight; but the room remains blurred, as if I am looking at it through a windowpane that runs with rain. My lips, dry as bones, crack as I smile. Rosings Park has been silent for me for forty years, though I never lost the habit of listening for it. I lift my fingertips from the bed and hope it understands the gesture as I mean it—that if I could, I would run my hands over every inch of wall and floor, in greeting and farewell.
“Quiet for decades,” I say, still smiling, though my voice is dry and cracked as my lips, “and now all you can do is weep?”