Mrs. Fitzwilliam insisted we must purchase a present for the newest member of the Darcy family. “We can choose it together,” she said. “But it must be today; I expect we will have word that Mrs. Darcy is ready to receive family before the week is out.”
“Miss Amherst said she would call this afternoon,” I said.
Mrs. Fitzwilliam clucked her tongue. “We can send her a note. She may join us, if she wishes. Julia, too, if she is at home. I want to hear more about her Mr. King, in any case.” She did not really look at me, instead smoothing and resmoothing her fine embroidered shawl over her arms.
And so I found myself trailing after my cousin’s wife as she entered shop after shop, fingering the wares and, again and again, declaring none of them suitable. She was a woman seized by some undeniable urge, and though her face remained tucked away behind her useful courteous mask, there was something frantic about her eyes as we exited our third warehouse, still with nothing for little George.
Miss Julia seemed as interested in the hunt as Mrs. Fitzwilliam, but Miss Amherst and I dragged a little behind. We had seen infant caps trimmed with flowers in colored silk thread; infant gowns decorated in exquisite holly point lace. We felt blankets impossibly soft and warm, and we tested the high tinkling bells inside silver rattles. I was beginning to think we were on a quest for something that did not exist.
“Harriet lured us out with a promise of sweets,” Miss Amherst said in an undertone, watching as Mrs. Fitzwilliam examined a pair of miniature shoes. “But I doubt we shall have time to stop at Gunter’s at this slow pace.”
I stepped a little closer to her under the pretext of inspecting a blanket of wool spun so fine it felt like cobwebs. “And here,” I said, “I thought it was the promise of my company that lured you out.” But the words did not sound as playful once spoken as they did inside my head; I had the unnerving feeling that I just unwittingly made my first attempt at flirtation, and that the attempt was a poor one.
I thought of Miss Hall, and the thought stopped my heart for an instant. But Miss Amherst merely looked sideways at me and smiled, and I stumbled into a display of sweet lace caps. The excuse of righting myself and catching a cap that tumbled toward the floor gave me a moment to collect my likewise tumbling thoughts. It was entirely possible that Miss Amherst did not hear anything awkward in my words; or perhaps she was better at politely not noticing than I thought she was. I took more time than necessary setting the cap back in its place.
There was a little patch of damp on the back of my chemise after the ball. I felt it—an odd tensing of my lower belly at the circling of Miss Amherst’s thumb, and then a rushing forth of something, secret as tree sap, but slick as water over river rocks. It was still there when Spinner undressed me, though I did not think she noticed. After she left me to sleep, I reached down and discovered that same disconcerting slickness between my legs.
In the days since, I thought about it often—how so innocuous a touch could cause so torrential a reaction from my body. And I had been so much more aware, each time Mr. Watters caught my elbow to help me to the carriage, or kissed my hand when I retired for the night, that my body had quite the opposite response that it had to Miss Amherst’s handclasp. It shrunk into itself; not visibly, or so I hoped, but I could feel it, my muscles going tense instead of soft, my skin almost contracting, if skin can be said to do such a thing.
The vague stirrings I occasionally felt in the past had been strange things, made stranger, perhaps, by my drops. Was it normal, I wondered now, to see another person and feel pulled to touch the tender underside of her wrist? To be moved by clever fingers as they flew over ivory keys? To think of those same fingers doing other things—things my lack of experience ensured I could not entirely imagine, blurred pictures in my mind that elicited cascading physical reactions despite their formlessness.
Whenever I set foot in some public space here in Town, my eyes still swept over the throngs of people, searching for a familiar turn of head or slope of shoulder. I wished this odd impulse would pass, but it never did. But how familiar would Miss Hall even be to me now, after the passing of nearly ten years? How might her face have changed, her figure, the color of her hair? She might be married; she might have a pack of small children. That was the benefit of time and distance, I supposed; that she would always be young in my mind, all the rough edges of our time together smoothed over so that what I recalled most vividly was the quiet rush of pleasure her attention afforded me, and not the painful awkwardness of our parting.
Mrs. Fitzwilliam settled at last on a silver rattle, cunningly shaped like a horn with small bells attached. It was perfectly sized and contoured for tiny fingers, but she looked on with an expression of dissatisfaction as the clerk wrapped it.
But then she turned to the rest of us and said brightly enough, “Shall we take some refreshment?”
Gunter’s tea shop was crowded with groups of ladies and with couples leaning toward one another across its little tables. We were fortunate to find a place to sit, and put in an order for tea and cake. Mrs. Fitzwilliam immediately set herself to the task of interrogating Miss Julia about Mr. King, and Miss Julia was only too happy to talk about how often he called on her and what they spoke of and how handsome he was.
I glanced at Miss Amherst, to find her gazing at her sister with an empty expression, as if she had already heard all this many times. Then she looked at me and life returned to her eyes.
“I am very happy for your cousin,” she said. “A sweet little boy. You must tell me all about him when you meet him.”
“Of course,” I said, and she drew back a little, looking me over, a peculiar half-smile lifting one side of her mouth.
“Do you not care for children?” she said.
“I—”
“I don’t,” she said, and took a bite of orange cake. She chewed for a moment, patted her lips with exaggerated delicacy, and said, “I have shocked you.”
“Well.” I looked at our companions, but they were reminiscing about Mrs. Fitzwilliam’s wedding cake, which was, it seems, created at this very establishment.
“I mean.” Miss Amherst leaned toward me, in unselfconscious mimicry of the courting couples surrounding us. “I have nothing against children. In theory, they are darling creatures. But I have no idea what to do with them. Julia”—with a glance at her sister—“is eager to have a large family; I suppose when I am an aunt I shall have to learn to converse with her offspring.”
“You do not want children of your own?”
“Have I any choice in the matter?” she said. “If I marry, it is a natural assumption that children will follow. I hope I shall understand my own better than I do other people’s.”
I paused. “What do you think Mary Wollstonecraft would have to say on the subject?”
She leaned forward. “You read it?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“I am very ashamed.”
“Oh, no,” she said, and reached out, though her fingers stopped a hand’s breadth from my own. “That was never my intention in lending it out! Why should you feel so?”
I looked down at the space between our hands. “I am—I have been—one of those women of whom she speaks so . . . so eloquently.”
She tilted her head like an inquisitive bird. “You mean . . . devoted to appearance, above all else? Thinking of nothing but . . . pleasing men?”
“No,” I said, and then, less vehemently, “No. But . . . I have been made small—have allowed myself to be made small—for the entirety of my life.”
And if my own circumstances were perhaps a little out of the ordinary, I had not seen very much to make me think that Mary Wollstonecraft was mistaken in her opinion that my sex in general had been held firmly back from the fullness of our potential through a lack of education and an insistence on focusing our energies on the most frivolous of pursuits. But though these thoughts were clear and definite inside my head, I feared they would spill from my mouth in an incoherent patter, like pebbles from the pockets of a child. To the child, each pebble was lovely and valuable as an emerald; to the grown persons to whom she showed them, they were merely rocks.
Miss Amherst said, “I believe Mary Wollstonecraft had children; though I suppose that is not proof of whatever feelings she might have had on the subject.”
“I do not know whether I like children,” I said. “I’ve little experience of them. Mr. and Mrs. Darcy brought their firstborn to visit us once in Kent, but he remained with his nurse most of the time.”
She looked down at her cake, but made no move to take another bite. Then she looked back at me. “Forgive me for my impertinence,” she said, lowering her voice, “but Harriet once mentioned that you were expected to marry Mr. Darcy.”
I felt myself flush, and glanced at Mrs. Fitzwilliam. I wondered what else she had told her friends about her husband’s odd, sickly cousin. “It is true,” I said. “Or my mother thought it was, which made it an irrefutable truth in my mind. I do not know that Mr. Darcy ever saw it so, though, even before he met Mrs. Darcy.”
“Your mother sounds formidable.”
“Oh, she is,” I said. “Though not formidable enough to make my cousin marry me. Which was a hard blow for her; she is unaccustomed to having less than perfect control.”
“Ah.” We both ate some cake, so sweet it filmed my tongue and teeth. Then Miss Amherst said, “My mother hopes your friendship will prove advantageous to my prospects.” Her smile was wry. “She says she rather wishes I were in the company of a young man as often as I am in your company; but that a wealthy young woman who is niece to an earl must be the next best thing.”
There was a strange fullness in my throat, which I had to swallow down before I could speak. “I fear I do not know many young men, eligible or no,” I said. “But if my company widens your prospects, then I am . . . happy to offer it, even more often.”
“I shall hold you to that,” she said, and speared her last bite of cake.
She called the next day, with the excuse that she thought we could improve my dancing.
“If you choose to attend more balls this season, you should be comfortable dancing more than a single set,” she said.
I was reading when she arrived, and Miss Amherst grinned when she saw the volume of poetry in my hands, then asked whether I had been practicing my steps.
I followed Miss Amherst’s nimble feet. Occasionally she paused to correct my posture or to remind me to smile. (“For no man,” she intoned, mimicking her own dancing master’s deep voice, “wants a partner who shows her true feelings if they are anything less than happiness.”) We pretended there were other couples forming the set, laughing as we held out our hands to invisible dancers to either side of us. Miss Amherst led me down the center of the imaginary lines, holding my hand aloft in a courtly gesture.
At last, however, we stopped, breathless, and rang for tea, settling into chairs near the window.
“I quite like your new gown,” she said. “The lace on those sleeves! It’s perfection. But next time, you must make some choices yourself. What happens if you need a new gown and I am not there to direct you?”
“I would not know where to begin,” I said.
“Oh?” Miss Amherst smiled. “Who on earth chose your gowns before you came to London?”
“My mother,” I said; and even to my own ears, my voice was stone-hard. “I had no say in the matter.”
Her cheeks puffed. “Whyever not?”
I turned to the window. Without my noticing, it had begun raining at some point as we danced, and the street ran now with water. A carriage made great splashes as it passed. “I was ill,” I said. “I was not . . . expected to make decisions for myself.”
“But you are better now,” she said.
“Yes.” I thought of the sucking feeling, but it seemed far away. “I am better now.”
She watched me as attentively as Mr. Watters sometimes did; but her gaze felt less like a pressing weight than a hand stroking just lightly over my brow. I returned my own eyes to the window. And I did not mean to speak, but somehow, suddenly, I was anyway, my words faltering and unsure but unstoppable as the falling rain. I described for her the haze in which I existed for all of my life until just recently; how the clear mornings gave way to the tender fog of afternoon and early evening. The terrible clutching in my lungs when I did something too strenuous, my breath disappearing.
“Only one person ever intimated that my troubles might be the result of Dr. Grant’s cure rather than some natural weakness.” I kept my eyes focused outside the window, my neck stiff as stays, unwilling to turn and know what Miss Amherst’s expression might be.
“My father tried to help me, but he . . . I know he cared, he took me to Brighton to bathe in the sea . . . but he was overcome by Mamma’s . . . by Mamma’s . . .” But I could not think of the right word, something inside of me turned hot and seething—boiling. I clenched my fingers into fists tight enough that my bones ached all the way down to my wrists, and my nails cut half-moons into the flesh of my palms.
“I do not know why my mother preferred me”—I searched for the word, and remembered Miss Hall’s voice, the bite to it, the anger—“stupefied.”
Miss Amherst was very quiet. Her eyes dropped to my hands; her own hands reached, darting like hummingbirds before she aborted the movement and pulled them back. I wondered whether she meant to take my hands in hers, uncurl my fingers, knot her fingers with mine in a gesture of sympathy. The thought made me swallow.
“I cannot speak to your mother’s feelings with any . . . true understanding,” she said slowly. “But what you said about how unsettled you were as an infant—I can imagine that would be frightening to a new mother, to think her child was in distress and to be unable to help her. And if a doctor offered relief—well, it would seem a prayer answered, would it not? And you have spoken of her as someone who feels best when she is in control of all the particulars of her life. If she believed she could not control your illness except by means of laudanum—”
I shook my head, violently enough that she startled back. My hands came up to cover my face.
After a pause, Miss Amherst said, “I apologize. I have never met your mother. I’ve no idea what she might have been thinking.”
I did not answer, and we sat silently for a moment. I breathed openmouthed into my palms; I could feel my breath, warm and moist, and smell it, faintly sour with fear. The only sound in the room was the rain on the windows, an infernal, endless drumming that put me in mind of Mamma’s fingers on the arm of her chair when she was irritated.
My eyes opened, lashes fluttering like moth wings against my hands. Through the narrow gaps between my fingers, I could see Miss Amherst sitting still, her elbow propped on the back of her chair and her chin settled on her fist. I waited, but to my surprise she did not say anything about leaving.
“I used to see things,” I said into my palms; and found that it was surprisingly easy to say with my face mostly hidden.
Miss Amherst turned her head away from the window to look at me. There was no wariness in her voice when she said, “What sorts of things?”
“People, mostly. They came to me at night, sometimes. Once or twice my father, after he died; he wore a lady’s turban.” She smiled a little at this, her teeth showing white. “There was a woman who sometimes stroked my hair.”
She shifted closer to me, close enough that I could make out the faintly floral scent she wore on her skin. “Do you miss them?” she asked, very softly.
My response sounded like nothing so much as an exhaled breath. “Sometimes.”
Very slowly, Miss Amherst raised her hand. Her fingers touched my hair, the top smooth and pinned close to my scalp. They trailed toward the back of my head, just firmly enough that I closed my eyes unintentionally in pleasure, my own hands hanging forgotten before my face. Then her fingers lifted, just for a moment, before coming to rest on the curls at my temple. She touched them with the greatest of care.
We both startled at the sound of the front door banging open. Miss Amherst jumped in her chair, her hand falling away from my hair, and my own hands dropped as I twisted in my seat to look over my shoulder at the doorway. Mrs. Fitzwilliam’s voice, high and agitated, echoed eerily off the entranceway’s ceiling, her every movement overly loud as a servant hurried to take her outer garments and exclaimed over the state of her umbrella.
She entered the drawing room, calling over her shoulder for tea. The hem of her gown was shockingly wet, and her hair, always so carefully arranged, straggled against the nape of her neck, as if the rain were blowing sideways under her umbrella’s wide awning. Her face was very pale, and she came into the room without seeing Miss Amherst or myself, patting at her hair, her neck, her sides in a distracted manner. It was Miss Amherst who stood, and I who belatedly followed; Mrs. Fitzwilliam’s entire body jerked as we moved, and she let out a yelp.
“Good gracious,” she said. “Whatever are you doing here in the dark? Why are the candles not lit?”