She appeared in the doorway to the book room—my book room—without any warning whatsoever. If I were less engrossed in my book—An Exposition of English Insects, which I discovered among Papa’s collection, and which was teaching me the names of some of the beautiful flitting, scuttling creatures I had observed in ignorance for so long—I would have heard the front door being answered, and perhaps even Peters’s request for Mamma to wait for him to announce her. But then again, until just the week before he was her butler, and he, and the other poor servants, were all having to accustom themselves to this strange new world, wherein Lady Catherine was a guest, and not the mistress, in this house. I stared at her now, losing my place as my book dropped to my lap, and wondered whether Peters hovered just out of sight in the hallway.
“Close your mouth, you are not a simpleton,” she said, and swept into the room to sit across from me without invitation. My jaw obeyed her reflexively, my teeth clicking together.
“You spoke falsely when you returned to Rosings,” she said with no further preamble. “I am here to fix the record.”
I could think of nothing to say but, “Very well.”
The muscles of her face relaxed at my words, and she looked down, just briefly, at her lap. “Men,” she said, looking up at me again, “haven’t the faintest notion what it means to be a mother. They do not feel what their children feel as mothers do. Your father was very proud of the seed he planted in me, but it was my body that tended it, increasing to give it space to grow. I brought you into the world. That is not something that can be—cut away, not even once the birth is completed. I felt you on the inside, and I thought, once you were outside my body, that I would no longer be able to feel you so intimately; but that was not so. I felt your every cry—every scream tugged at me as if the navel-string still tethered us and your cries pulled on it.”
I flinched. She saw it, and nodded.
“Yes. You screamed without ceasing, and I felt every second of it in pulls and scrapes, like nails over my skin, and your father just—slept on.” A flick of her fingers. “He never heard you in the night, and he was out of the house all day. He never felt your distress as I did.”
“He tried to help me,” I whispered. “At Brighton—”
“Do not speak to me of Brighton,” she said, and there was a wildness to her that I could never have imagined. She turned her face from me and spoke to the bookshelves lining the wall. “Your father and I had the most spectacular argument after Brighton. You were perfectly well, perfectly contented, and he insisted we go to that—that place. I endured your screams as they pulled you into the sea once; I refused to do it again, not even if it turned out to be the cure Sir Lewis believed it to be. It was all very well for him, away from it all; he did not have to stand in the bitter cold and listen to his child suffer. And then you became so violently ill, as I knew you would—!” The fingers of one hand rubbed a circle around the rounded edges of her brooch with its plait of dark hair. “Well, when he said we should try Bath next, I refused. Dr. Grant said it was a city of charlatans, and I believed him. My judgment was always sounder than your father’s. A mother,” she said, looking up at me, “cannot be wrong, not when she is acting for the good of her child.”
I held on to the edge of the desk. My fingernails bit into the wood like teeth.
“I know not by what methods my nephew’s physician tended you, nor how he managed what Dr. Grant could not. Whatever his methods, they have proved incendiary; I never thought my daughter could treat me with such disrespect as you have.”
I thought of how I felt when I returned to Kent and confronted her; but now she was the walker, and I the runaway cart, forcing her from the road she knew and onto another, unfamiliar one. Like a thief, I had stolen her life from her, and for all the hurt and anger I carried inside me like a brazier, and for all that it was mine to take, my shoulders hunched now in shame.
“Mamma,” I said, but she talked over me in the old familiar way.
“You shall never understand what I mean, I suppose,” she said, “since you are being so bullheaded about marriage.”
“I do not want Rosings Park to belong to my husband,” I said. “Depending upon his temperament, I might have no hand in its running at all—”
Mamma squinted at me the way she always did when she thought I said something stupid. “Rosings Park,” she said, “is yours now and forever. Just as my father’s estate will always be mine, even if my brother is the official master there. Our ancestral lands are in our bodies, our blood; we are part of England in a way that lesser citizens can never understand.”
She stood. “Even so,” she said, “I am glad to see some stubbornness in you; it is a necessary attribute in a woman.” She looked at me down the sharp curved length of her nose. “You get it from me, of course; your father melted like wax in the face of adversity.”
And then she departed, and I was left with a mad desire to laugh, for it turned out Lady Catherine de Bourgh—like her daughter!—was something of a poet.
Though it was evening, I had to walk once she was gone. I went out on the grounds, where darkness crept across the lawn, the sun no more than a faint red light at the horizon. I looked out at the edge of the woods, where the trees crowded together, and was almost tempted to slip between them. The air carried the faintest nighttime chill under its warmth, and I walked faster and faster until I was running, running, my skirts bunched in my hands, my poor slippers thumping against the grass. My breath came sharp and fast, but it came, and as I passed one of the benches on the lawn, I imagined my younger self sitting there, watching me pass.
There was a peculiar buzzing in my ears, as if I had stumbled into a hive of bees, and my eyes smarted as if from bee stings. I staggered the last steps to the wood, as the stinging resolved itself into blinding tears. Catching myself on a tree—palm scraping against the rough bark—I clung to it. For just a moment, I half-expected the droning in my ears to become intelligible murmurs, my heart tight with missing. Almost, I called Rosings’s name.
But then: “Mamma,” I said instead, choked and helpless, sorry and glad at once for the way the word felt upon my tongue. It was so like her, that when at last she said exactly what I always needed to hear, it should be in such self-righteous terms.
When at last the torrent passed, I opened my eyes. The woods were water-blurred; I had only soft impressions of trees and undergrowth, made softer still by the gathering dark. It was, I thought, the way a newborn babe must experience the world, and almost, I smiled. I was made fresh again.