The oak lived deep in Rosings’s woods, where the shadows were thickest. I imagined it might have been there for hundreds of years, patiently edging its way up through the canopy to reach the sun, sucking like a greedy child at the light until at last it spread so tall and wide that little except moss and mushrooms could grow close around it. The tree should not have been beautiful, lumpy and misshapen as it was, its trunk a mass of tough knots, its branches stretching up and up like the muscled arms of strongmen. But when I found it, I loved it instantly. I reached out to cup my hands over one of its great whorled knots and felt a prayer beneath my palms.
I had braved Rosings’s woods at last in the earliest days of my return to Kent. Before Mamma and Mrs. Jenkinson removed to the dower house, when they were united in their disapproval of my insurrection and even a house the size of Rosings felt too small to contain us all, I sometimes needed, quite desperately, a place to disappear for a time—even just an hour. A reprieve from the oppressive atmosphere of the house and, yes, from my new responsibilities, from columns of numbers and the newfound sense of visibility, which was by turns exhilarating and disconcerting. All my life I had seen other people—my cousin John, for instance, or Mrs. Collins, when she lived in the parsonage—slipping away for walks in our woods; it took desperation for me to follow their example, but oh, how glad I was that I finally did.
Today it was autumn, that quivering period when some leaves have turned to fire and others still cling to summer green. My footsteps were muffled by last year’s leaves, and I wore no bonnet, my skin shielded from the sun by the forest canopy. I’d spent the morning sequestered with Mrs. Barrister, going over the details of this year’s harvest ball, and I relished, now, each lungful of chill-edged air. I followed the narrow deer trails to my oak; leaned against its friendly bark and listened for a time to the chattering of squirrels and scolding of birds before turning at last, reluctantly, for home. My fingers brushed the mossy trunks and low slender branches of trees as I passed them, my mind still full of all the particulars that are so necessary for a proper party, but that invariably left my head aching.
There was still much to do today. But I paused before stepping out from the trees and onto the lane, as I always did, though with increasing brevity as the years passed. My feet pressed against the earth; my ears would have pricked like a fox’s if they could, listening for something—a greeting, a cry, anything at all to show me that Rosings Park lived, still; that its sentience matched my own; that it was glad I had returned. But, as ever since I stopped taking my drops, there was no response, even as I sent my own whispered greeting into the air.
Out on the lane, I passed the dower house, where Mamma was no doubt enjoying her afternoon nap, and waved to the rector in his garden at the parsonage. There was a figure a little distant, standing before the gates to Rosings; I shaded my eyes with my hand to better make it out. A woman, wearing a blue pelisse and a spectacular bonnet, her head tilted sharply, as if she sought a face at one of the upper-story windows.
A little closer now, something tickled at the nape of my neck; there was a discordant familiarity to her, to the span of her shoulders and the way she held her hands together at her waist. I thought, No, even as my pace increased without my conscious intention, and my quickened footfalls on the lane reached her ear. She turned her head, and even from so far away I could read the leaping, colliding hope and terror in her expression as easily as if she were one of her own letters.
“Anne,” she said as soon as I was near enough to hear her, and then she was in my arms and I was squeezing, squeezing, squeezing, as if she might disappear if I let go.
“My trunks are still in the village in the carriage. I thought there would be an inn,” she said hours later, laughing into my hair. And then, sobering, “I should have written before coming—I just—I could not. I could not take the risk that you might turn me away before I even had a chance to see you again.”
“I would not have turned you away.”
“You might have. I did not know—”
I looked at her, so very close—our brows touching, our toes tucked together. Four years added a few freckles to her nose, a new solemnity to her eyes, though her smile, when it appeared, curled wickedly as ever.
“I would not have,” I said again; and when she opened her mouth to say more, I closed it with kisses.
“What happened?”
It was almost the first question I asked her, but she refused to answer then, and I allowed her to demure. If this was but a passing fancy for her—if she had not come to stay, as I immediately thought she must have when I recognized her in the lane—I did not want to know until I had to. But now it was morning, and the world insisted upon intruding; already, Spinner disturbed us, startled, when she brought my usual morning cup of chocolate, to discover that I was not alone. She said nothing, however, except to ask in a voice that sounded half-strangled whether Mrs. Andrews would also like a cup.
We meant for Eliza to return to the guest quarters, but sleep claimed us both before she could. I wondered what her maid would think when she saw the undisturbed sheets on her bed; and then I had the unwelcome thought that perhaps her maid was used to such things; perhaps, after I left London, even after her marriage, Eliza enjoyed the company of other women. The thought cut, even as I tried to dismiss it, even as I wondered about my other servants and how they might react to seeing my friend leaving my chamber so early. But I knew almost nothing about her married life, and so I rolled until I was pressed against her side and said again, “What happened?”
“You keep such ungodly hours in the country,” she said; but then she saw my face and scrubbed her own with both palms, leaving it blotched with red. “Charles—Mr. Andrews—died a fortnight ago. At a card party, of all places—just—slumped over and died.” She pushed herself upright and spoke to the blanket over her legs. “It was dreadful, as I suppose you can imagine.”
“I—”
“Do not say you are sorry,” she said, and gave an odd little smile. “Because the terrible, terrible truth is that I—am not. He was—a good enough man, in his way. He was not a bad man. But I . . . regretted my choice almost from the first day of our union, and now he has . . . freed me. You will think me the worst sort of person, but when he died I thought, Thank God . And then I prayed God would forgive me, for Charles did not hurt me, he did not—but I could not speak—I could not speak when I was in our house, I could not . . . It was the strangest thing—”
She scrubbed her face again, and then her hair, which already lay loose and tangled around her shoulders, but which stood up in a frizz under her hands’ abuse. Her words came faster and faster, all the things I imagined she wanted to say in her letters, but that were stoppered inside her as if she were a bottle.
“He loved my playing—he loved to show it off to his friends—I don’t think I ever hated the pianoforte more. They talked and they talked about business and politics, and we wives sat, and I was the only one who knew how to play, so he trotted me out like a trick horse, and then I sat down again and exchanged pleasantries with the women and served coffee and . . .” She looked around at me, eyes full. “It sounds so—petty, saying it now. To hate a life like that? It’s the same life most other women live—fortunate women—I was fortunate compared to so many women, and I wanted to—to scream.” She gulped a laugh that sounded more like a sob. “And I missed you so very much, Anne—all I could think, once the funeral was over, was that now I could come to you.”
She reached out for me, but let her hand drop back to the coverlet before she touched me.
“He wanted children so badly,” she said; and now she took her hands and ran them over her own body, over the gentle, empty slope of her belly. “He never said he blamed me for their lack. But when he—when we—” Her fingers tightened into fists. “When he touched me, it was . . . my body recoiled. I cannot imagine he did not feel it.”
She was wretched, hideous with tears; and I wanted nothing more than to kiss her. That other women endured lives of such smallness—that other women were less fortunate, still—did not mean that Eliza ought to have resigned herself to a similarly frustrated existence. I knew this, I knew it, and though I could not quite find words eloquent enough to express it fully, I hoped, when I took her hand, that at least some of what I felt transferred to her through our fingers.
To the rest of the world, we must have seemed quite the pair of eccentrics.
Eliza was a widow now; respectable and rich and able to do as she liked. I was at once glad and ashamed of that gladness; hurt that it took his death to bring her to me, and grateful, with a beautiful, uncomplicated gratitude, that she came with such immediacy once she had absorbed the first shock of her husband’s passing. And she came to me free now, unencumbered by dependency or fear; the jointure her husband settled upon her was more than generous.
I did not introduce her, as I once imagined I might, as my companion. Instead, I called her my friend Mrs. Andrews, a truth that even Mamma accepted easily enough, though Eliza’s quick tongue and propensity toward over-loud laughter and the discussion of novels proved more difficult for her to accept. But Eliza slipped into Hunsford society with an easiness that I rather envied. And so when, after several weeks, I finally mentioned to the rector’s wife that my friend decided to move into Rosings Park permanently, she looked startled for a moment and then said, “How lovely! We do all need companionship, do we not? Even someone so independent as you, Miss de Bourgh.”
Eliza did endear herself to my mother at least a little with her effusive compliments on the village school, for which Mamma did indeed furnish a woman from somewhere within her web of acquaintances who instructs the children of Hunsford parish from the back parlor of her house. Here, Eliza found a purpose in village life, though she was careful to be discreet in her augmentation of the school’s books and supplies; I wondered how long it would take for Mamma to realize the narrow course of study she urged upon Mrs. Lynch was being expanded upon, inch by patient inch.
When we grew restless, we traveled. To London, often, to visit Eliza’s family, and to Surrey to see John and Harriet and their children: a boy and a girl who grew, tangled tight together, and surprised everyone with their double birth after so many years of barrenness. And to the Continent, all the places whose exotic names—Venice, Geneva, Paris, Lisbon— I used to trace on my geography puzzle. But always we came gladly home again to Rosings Park.
I grew accustomed to this new life of purpose and parity, though it was impossibly far from anything I imagined could exist between husbands and wives. In the evenings, I looked at Eliza across the dining table. Sometimes we were joined by neighbors, but more often, it was only the two of us, and as she smiled at me over our mutton or fish, occasionally I felt myself falling backward, the jolting fall of a dreamer about to wake. As if I had slipped, somehow, into a dream world, and that someday, inevitably, I would wake to the real one. I licked my lips for traces of bittersweetness, but found none; and on nights when these thoughts intruded, Eliza held me close and murmured reassurances. “Does this feel real?” she whispered. “And this?” I felt the weight of her upon me, the reassuring way the mattress dipped when she moved; dug my fingers into her skin and reveled in the sourness of her evening cup of coffee on her breath.
Yet the sense that I must be dreaming, that this life was all unreal, persisted in coming back; and would, I feared, until my dying day.