The butler showed Miss Amherst into the drawing room, then bowed and left us. She was smiling when she greeted me, and wearing her new bonnet. It suited her very well, with a wide brim lined in embroidered net lace, which complemented the roundness of her face, and a spray of charming blue silk flowers. She looked like Rosings’s woods in bluebell season, the carpet of flowers rolling right out to the edges of the trees, where I could see it when I drove my ponies down the lane.
“I thought you might like to see how well it matches my blue dress, as I said it would,” Miss Amherst said; but there was a question in her voice, and her head tipped sideways. I folded my lips and curled my fingers into my palms, caught looking too long.
“Yes,” I said, my voice catching like a snagged skirt. She smiled a little hesitantly, taking the bonnet off and setting it on a little round table.
“I—told Mrs. Fitzwilliam I would join them at Lady Clive’s ball,” I said in a rush.
“Oh!” Miss Amherst smiled more fully. “How wonderful—and all the more reason for you to learn now.” She looked around the room, as if deciding how to make space for us, but then pressed her lips together and straightened her shoulders, as if preparing for some unpleasant thing.
“Miss de Bourgh,” she said slowly, turning back to me. “I . . . I am terribly afraid that I am going to offend you very badly, but I just—please, do not take my words amiss.”
I looked back at her, baffled.
“It is only—I find I like you very much, Miss de Bourgh; and I would like to offer you any help it is within my power to give. I fear you’ll find me very presumptuous but . . . may I take you shopping?”
My mouth opened and shut and opened again, without a single intelligible sound coming out of it.
Miss Amherst ducked her head. “I apologize. I don’t mean any offense—your gowns are . . . very beautifully tailored.” She stopped, biting the corner of her mouth.
I felt strangely calm, suddenly, in the face of her clear uncertainty. “But?” I said.
Her eyes darted over my form, and then to my face. She smiled, just a little. “But . . . this yellow—it simply . . . well, it does not flatter you as it ought. And the style—”
But here she stopped again.
Yellow was one of Mamma’s favorite colors; yellow and red. Many of my gowns were one color or the other. I turned, just a little, so I was facing the large, silver-framed looking glass on the wall behind the pianoforte.
All my clothes were fine—the finest that could be bought in Hunsford, certainly—and Mamma always had the seamstresses do everything they could to disguise my smallness. I was swathed in ruffles—buried in them. Instead of disguising the narrowness of my frame, they overwhelmed it. And now, suddenly, I could see what I never quite did before—they made me absurd.
“No!” Miss Amherst said when I said this; but yet again, she stopped herself. Standing behind me, she met my eyes in the glass and put her hands on my shoulders. Very slowly, as if I were a horse that might startle, she moved her hands down the length of my arms from shoulder to wrist, and I shivered; and then she took my wrists loosely in each of her hands, drawing my arms up and away from my body. In the glass, she looked over my form with a critical eye.
“You have such a neat figure,” she said at last. “It seems a shame to hide it with so many frills. Something simpler, I think, would suit you well.”
“Yes,” I said, a little strangled, my own eyes on her gown of blue sprigged cotton. “Please—I would like that very much. Your help, I mean.”
Her breath came out in a gust of relief. “Ah. Good.” She grinned at me once more, then, dropping my arms, said, “All right—if we go to the draper’s tomorrow, we should have time enough to choose fabric and have a gown made up for you before Lady Clive’s ball. But for now . . .” A tilt of her head; a raised brow. “Shall we begin?”
“One-two-three, very quickly—right foot to left to right,” Miss Amherst said, and then, laughing, “lightly, Miss de Bourgh! On the toes, like so.”
I could not achieve lightness, for all my smallness of figure. We had pushed the sofa and chairs away from the center of the room; they sat at tipsy angles, like watchful wallflowers. I stepped back to watch Miss Amherst demonstrate the step again. She was not a small woman, but her body was not the encumbrance to her that mine was to me. Her back was straight, head lifted, a graceful line from crown to heel. Her feet in their thin slippers arched just so as she hopped onto her right foot, shifted her weight onto her left, and then, so quickly it looked like one light, fluid movement, onto her right once more. She hopped to her left foot and then shifted to right, and back again. Like everything else she tried to teach me, the step looked very simple when she performed it, but when she gestured to me to try again, I felt like a grasshopper trying to hop to an unnatural rhythm, all awkward angles.
“Poise and ease, Miss de Bourgh, poise and ease, ” Miss Amherst said in an affected, deep voice, then laughed explosively at her own words. “That is what our dancing master always shouted at us,” she said.
“I do not think I am capable of either one,” I said, and tried to smile away my disappointment. “I suppose I am too old to learn properly; it was a silly whim.”
“Nonsense! If nothing else, if you master a few simple steps and figures you will be able to dance at small parties, even if you do not feel equal to standing up at a public assembly. I think a small private dance among friends is more enjoyable anyway. All those prim rules at larger balls sometimes eliminate any sense of fun.”
My mouth twisted, and she reached over, taking my hands. Hers were very soft and warm.
“Here—sometimes it is better to try the steps in a proper figure. Let us try this one together.”
I mastered the promenade, at least, my hands clasped in Miss Amherst’s, our arms crossed before us like woven threads. I was aware of every part of us that touched: palms, forearms, fingertips. Our hips bumped occasionally together. With the movement of her body beside mine, the unaccustomed heat of her skin where it pressed against my own, it was somehow easier to find the rhythm of the steps, to achieve the lightness that was lacking before.
All the figures we tried together seemed simpler, in fact; the steps that felt so unnatural when I performed them alone in the center of the room coming with greater ease the more we practiced them together. Though I would not call myself proficient—not in the least—I could at least manage a passable chassé, and when Miss Amherst murmured each coming step in the figure, I was able to follow her instructions without getting too muddled.
We were hot and laughing when she said, “If only we had someone to play for us—you cannot truly get the feel for the steps without music.”
“Perhaps you could play, Miss Amherst,” came a voice at the doorway, “and I could lead Miss de Bourgh through the figures.”
I turned, dropping one of Miss Amherst’s hands in my haste, to find Mr. Watters standing there, smiling. He leaned against the doorframe, ankles crossed; I had a dreadful feeling that he had been there for some time, watching us.
Miss Amherst’s fingers tightened around mine, a little spasm. I glanced at her; her face was flushed from our exertions. Then she released my other hand and stepped back. “Of course, sir, if Miss de Bourgh does not object.”
But I was stepping back, too, taking space only for myself, though I nearly reached out to pull Miss Amherst back with me. My palms, empty now, prickled. “Perhaps another time,” I said. “I am not accustomed to so much exercise; I think I will . . . sit for a little.”
Mr. Watters bowed. “But of course. Perhaps this evening? We could make a merry little party of it with Harriet and Fitzwilliam. I think we have no engagements tonight, and you can hardly expect to fully understand the figures if there is only one couple dancing.”
“Yes,” I said, and wished he would go away. His eyes pressed like thumbs. “Of course.”
He smiled, bowed to Miss Amherst, and obliged my unspoken wish a moment later.
John and his wife were happy enough to indulge Mr. Watters when he suggested dancing after dinner, and to my consternation he was right, the figures made more sense with another couple to form a too-small set. The housekeeper, to my astonishment, played for us, and they were all very patient with my fumbling, for without Miss Amherst murmuring the steps to me I had trouble remembering them. I was stiffer, too, with Mr. Watters as my partner, my feet inflexible as stone. When our hands clasped, my fingers were quite limp.
He seemed not to mind; he said what a treat it is to see a woman like me at last able to take part in something so essential, so enjoyable as dancing. “For you were ill a long time, I understand,” he said, holding one hand out to me, another to his sister. John took my other hand, and we circled in time to the song. “There is nothing better than dancing for invigoration, or to smooth the way to better acquaintance.”
I caught John’s eye; he looked between Mr. Watters and myself with something like amusement. Then I stumbled, having missed a cue in the music, and tucked my lips together, flushed not with pleasure and exercise, as I had been this afternoon, but with embarrassment.
John took me aside before I retired. “Have you written to Lady Catherine at all?” he said.
I had not. I shook my head; thoughts of my mother made me burn, sometimes with shame for my conduct, sometimes with anger for hers. “I know not what to say to her.”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “That is understandable. But you know—she will not be the one to bend.”
I knew that very well. Mamma’s iron will had been one of the essential truths of my life. But then, so was my own illness, and that truth turned out to be so much nonsense.
“I received a letter from my father yesterday. He and Edward and my mother arrive in Town soon, and he is . . . eager for any rifts in the family to be mended. He wishes to invite my aunt to stay with them for a little while.”
I closed my eyes.
“I asked him to wait until Mrs. Darcy is churched after she has her baby,” John said. “Forgive me for saying so, but I know Darcy would not thank me if our aunt were to call while Elizabeth is confined.”
At this, my eyes opened. “The Darcys are in London?” Then I remembered, distantly, that Mrs. Fitzwilliam mentioned this on the day of my arrival; but I was too full of other concerns to admit another just then.
“Yes—the doctors here are more knowledgeable than those in Derbyshire, or so Darcy says. I suppose this time has not been so easy.”
A sudden flash of little Georgiana, mewling and bloody in my bed. Of Aunt Darcy’s plaited hair, the only bit left of her. I winced.
“So Mamma does not come yet?”
“No,” John said. “But things would be easier when she does come, if she does come, if relations are repaired between you.”
I sat that night in the center of my bed, very still, though my nerves jangled like discordant bells. This was not true life; it was a golden season, pinched from time’s hoop and pocketed all for myself. But soon enough, I would have to step back into the turning hoop with everyone else and face my responsibilities.
Mamma’s tender feelings, I told myself fiercely, were not my responsibility; but Rosings Park was. And the estate must be managed. I could do it myself, or I could trust Mr. Colt to do the job properly; but that would be a betrayal of Papa and my younger self, the wisps of us that I still recalled standing before the painting of the old house, speaking of the new house’s future.
I could also marry—and here, the jangling bells rang out all the louder. I could marry, and the estate would pass to my husband, all my responsibility for it neatly abdicated with a few solemn vows and a church ledger signed. Except, of course, for the production of an heir; which would be a problem, no matter what I chose to do.
I knew almost nothing of physical affection. Only my nurse ever discussed such things with me, and in such odd terms that I hardly knew what to think. Men plant a seed in a hole inside their wives, with a special . . . appendage God gave them for this purpose, she said, when we received news of one of Aunt Darcy’s pregnancies. If the seed takes, it becomes a baby.
I imagined babies like saplings inside their mothers, with leaf fingers and rooted toes, their features picked out in the patterns of their bark. But breeding women looked less, I thought, like they grew trees inside their bellies than fruit—grotesque, bulbous fruits.
I rather suspected that my mother and father no longer indulged in anything amorous after I was born, for Mamma said more than once in my hearing that she was grateful that Rosings could pass to a daughter so that, with my birth, her wifely duty was complete. She would, presumably, have enlightened me before my marriage as to what those duties entailed; but of course, the marriage never occurred.
I bent over until my brow touched the tops of my knees. Marriage made me think of Mr. Watters, and thoughts of him were utterly confounding. Mrs. Fitzwilliam made it perfectly clear that she approved of her brother’s attentions to me; but his intentions felt less clear. Though he made it obvious, in the language of admiration that he always used, that he very much esteemed this new version of Anne de Bourgh, who stood up to her mother and learned to dance, there was something glass-like about him, as if his warmth was real enough but contained behind a window. I could see it, but I could not feel it; I slid off of him like raindrops.
And, too, his attentions felt all wrong. They chafed like rough fabric, and there was a wriggling sensation, like earthworms in my palms, when he took my hand this evening to lead me through the dance. And I could not account for it, for he was, as ever, everything solicitous and complimentary; so very different to my cousin Darcy’s lifelong indifference to me.
Everything about him ought to be appealing. He had pale hair and summer-blue eyes, smooth cheeks and full lips. His manners were exquisite, his mind sharp. He pressed my hand, adjusted my chair nearer the fire. He escorted me everywhere. But I was unmoved by all these things; I could not get past his glass veneer, and was not sure whether I even wanted to. If I did, and I liked what I found there, should I encourage his courtship? For that was surely what it was, subtly and carefully though he was going about it. That was what people did, was it not? I’d been spared the pressure of standing at auction, both by my illness and by the assumption that Fitzwilliam and I would someday come together, but now . . .
Tension crept upward from my shoulder blades, crawling across my shoulders, climbing my neck to nudge, bruisingly, at the back of my skull. I had a duty to the estate, to care for it, and ensure its continued health after I was gone. But I had not even written to Mr. Colt yet, and Mamma, as far as I knew, was still taking charge of everything. Inside my head, I saw my motherless newborn cousin again, and Miss Hall whispered, Even Lady Catherine cannot live forever.
All these things clamored and crashed inside of me, and I lay down flat upon the mattress and clenched the pillow in both my fists. “What should I do?” I said aloud; but this time there was no answer.