Dancing With Mr. Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen and Chawton House Library (11 page)

‘Loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable….’

I smiled sweetly, and delivered one of Uncle Simeon’s favourite gestures.

My inspiration: Pride and Prejudice
and
Mansfield Park
inspired this tale of an artless seventeen-year-old girl’s ‘watershed’ week. Her known world is the confined society of the Leicester suburbs. She awaits her A level results, convinced of failure. Her world view is changed by an unexpected, unsought and initially unwanted week in London, staying with unfamiliar relatives. A second-hand copy of
Pride and Prejudice,
secured for ‘one and thruppence’, sustains her. Her wilful mother and kindly father owe something to the Bennets. However, it is the reckless Uncle Simeon who is the catalyst for her transformation.

SOMEWHERE

Kelly Brendel

I must remember to be back in time for Dr Grant’s dinner. The excitement of the young people for putting on a play is hard to resist, the thrill of it all so contagious; but if I am not there while it is prepared cook will surely end up shouting and snapping at the new scullery maid. Poor Lizzy, only fifteen but clumsy and, as cook claims, always underfoot; not a day seems to pass that there isn’t an explosion of curses and crying from the kitchen that I must rush to calm and soothe.

Today, however, our cast rather seems to have dispersed and I’ve found myself wandering the house aimlessly. Mrs Norris has been curiously absent from the afternoon’s events, for normally she loves to be in the thick of a bustle caused largely by herself, or else haranguing poor Miss Price. While the morning passed in an animated flurry of scene changes, forgotten lines and eager chatter the afternoon has been quiet… so quiet that I begin to feel something creep up on me.

Mr Bertram and his ‘intimate friend’ Mr Yates have been bickering in the newly converted billiards room this past hour about the play. For Bertram everybody spoke too slow, for Yates too quick, they were playing it with too much pathos, nay not enough for Yates and it was only when Mr Rushworth stepped up to ask how he might help that they were silent. Julia has passed by now and again to glower upon the general theatrical proceedings, although always leaving promptly when she catches Yates’s eager eye. Hopefully she has gone to seek out Henry, for I have not seen him since lunch.

I can’t help but smile at my matchmaking plans for Mary and Henry. That first evening Dr Grant and I were invited to dine with all those at the great house (a note urging our presence had been issued by Mrs Norris on behalf of her sister Lady Bertram that brooked no refusal) I had looked around the assembled faces and with an eye that strayed to the eldest Bertram son thought of Mary. Marriage to Dr Grant had not blinded me to Mr Bertram’s good looks, rather the contrast of them sitting to supper across the same table threw his looks into sharper focus. Heir to a great estate and in possession of a kind of laughing good humour, he would well suit Mary’s vivacity and wit. I accepted Mary’s later proposal of a visit with alacrity and who can blame me if my thoughts strayed to matrimony for her? Henry, too, I thought could find his happiness at Mansfield, for Miss Julia Bertram was a fine, good-humoured girl who would suit him, I was sure.

My guesses went slightly awry when Mary began to care for the younger Bertram son, Edmund; his admiration touching and inciting hers. Yet I am not so proud as to resent the collapse of my prediction. She glows with the flush of romance and I look upon it with a joy of my own. As for Henry, he, I’m sure, likes Miss Julia, though when I mention this to Mary she only smirks and looks archly towards the eldest Miss Bertram.

Yes, these love intrigues do make me wonder. What shall become of them all? My own time of intrigue does not offer such a charming show. We met at one of his sermons; my seat in the fourth row, squeezed between my mother and old Mrs Dandridge, whose foggy breath rasped wheezily in the cold November church, was not a conducive setting for romance, nor was his sermon itself made of the stuff to set hearts beating or my own thoughts stirring. But his gentle attentions caused a flutter of pride and satisfaction, my mother was gently approving and my plain self had never experienced or expected to experience a man’s admiration. But I was married to him three months later.

That first night, trembling in my bridal blush, I swear I saw him balk and shudder, daintily picking at my clothes like the morsels of last night’s dinner in the flickering light. Dr Grant took to his marital duties with little zeal and that night I shuddered too and started away from him before growing still.

Yet I was fairly happy. There were pleasures in having a house of my own. All I had to do to keep Dr Grant contented was ply him with a selection of choice dishes, the best of which he would commend with a hearty burp. There was much to occupy me in furnishing the house, visiting the surrounding families, making friends for myself in the village and cultivating my garden. There I can lose myself amongst the flowers that burst and reveal themselves in a flourish of colour – searing their sights upon my dazzled eyes. Mary and Henry’s coming was a welcome distraction however, just as I was beginning to feel something stirring unbidden in me – yes, their arrival was very welcome.

In all my wandering I seem to have reached the upper landing and I hear the soft murmurs of a scene taking place. I creep towards the door, partly cracked open, through which light and voices are spilling. Mary and Edmund are standing rather close together, only two feet between them, facing each other. They are rehearsing a scene from
Lovers Vows,
their eyes and burning cheeks bent to the pieces of paper in their hands. I know the scene. It is their scene. Edmund spoke his line then:

‘When two sympathetic hearts meet in the marriage state, matrimony may be called a happy life. When such a wedded pair finds thorns in their path, each will be eager, for the sake of the other, to tear them from the root. Patience and love will accompany them in their journey, while melancholy and discord they leave far behind—Hand in hand they pass on from morning till evening, through their summer’s day, till the night of age draws on, and the sleep of death overtakes the one. The other, weeping and mourning, yet looks forward to the bright region where he shall meet his still-surviving partner, among trees and flowers which themselves have planted, in fields of eternal verdure.’

There followed a moment of silence in which Mary did not seem able to speak. I could not wonder at this. The fervent, almost reverent tone in which Edmund spoke before his passion spent itself and sank his voice into a tremulous whisper had moved even me, the offstage observer peeping through a crack in the door. Mary managed to answer but her voice was strange to me when she spoke.

‘You may tell my father… I’ll marry.’

Their eyes, as if by some communion moved up from the paper and to each other.

‘This picture is pleasing; but I must beg you not to forget that there is another on the same subject. When convenience and fair appearance, joined to folly and ill humour, forge the fetters of matrimony, they gall with their weight the married pair. Discontented with each other – at variance in opinions – their mutual aversion increases with the years they live together. They contend most where they should most unite; torment, where they should most soothe. In this rugged way, choked with the weeds of suspicion, jealousy, anger, and hatred, they take their daily journey, till one of these
also
sleep in death. The other then lifts up his dejected head, and calls out in acclamations of joy – oh, liberty! Dear liberty!’

I started and moved away from them. I had stayed too long after all, it was rude to watch, and suppose Mary or Edmund happened to look up and see me spying through the door, how would that look? But why should I feel my cheeks burn, throbbing with some strange and violent heat, and why that tight clenching in my stomach? Why — it’s as if I had just been caught in the act of something shameful. Nothing had been said, they were only the worthless lines from a play; they were invented, unreal, and had no reason to make me press against the wall and gasp for breath. Dr Grant and I were not unhappy after all, he was not a bad husband or unkind. Really we rubbed along quite well together. He has his bursts of temper to be sure and at such moments I can sense, rather than see, Mary and Henry’s exchanged looks. Yet they do not take into account the whole picture. He has sense and is considerate for my comfort; when not disturbed by some culinary mishap he can be very pleasant company. There were times in the beginning when my gnawing miseries consumed me utterly… but they were all in the past. Now I have things to occupy me, to make me — no, not happy perhaps but content and, if not always content, if there are occasions when I still yearn for more, when long hours are spent awake burning and bristling in the night, I am always comfortable.

I wasn’t quite quick enough in moving away to miss a murmured ‘“I am in love”’ from Mary. Her character or her words? For I rather think poor Mary is in love, for all her fashionable airs that laughingly disclaim anything like affection she is as caught as Edmund. Hardly a night passes that she doesn’t burst into my room before we all settle down for bed; to talk over the day’s events, to spear the follies of those at the house upon her wit, but most of all to speak of Edmund. And when she doesn’t speak of him she speaks around him, as if all she thinks and says is framed around that sacred spot he occupies. She laughs and chatters and dazzles, pacing about my room in an almost manic frenzy of joy. She is alive and exulted with love. Her talk is all for Edmund and when we visit the house daily now her eyes are all for Edmund too.

Yet I have more to look forward to, real joys that quicken and breed with each passing day. To have a child of my own. I have only recently coerced Dr Grant to try for a baby and though there has been no joy yet, I feel a powerful certainty that tells me it shall be soon. For now there is a little girl in the village named Catherine, or Kitty as I call her. I go to her every few days and sit with her for a couple of hours, and when I hold her I think of the child I haven’t yet had. There is a pang in this. There must always be a pang. But there is delight too. Even the storms and rages of her tantrums become a pleasure as, in the moments after, while I soothe her on my knee, she clings to me with such passionate desperation. Could a lover do such, all fickle caresses and empty words? Can a few enchanted hours, hazy with love, eclipse this?

I’ve moved downstairs and can hear the voices of the others now, they have come. For a moment I imagine them as my avid audience watching my entrance, eager to see my great performance. But when I brush through the doorway they are clustered about in a circle only looking at each other. Still I move towards them gratefully, almost greedily, eager for their bright, light talk and the warmth of their company. A flicker of my eye spies Miss Price by the window, half obscured by the careful draping of the curtain. Mr Rushworth is with her, stuttering and stumbling over his lines. Yet for once Miss Price is not carefully attending to him; tirelessly listening, nodding and correcting his lines without a flicker of impatience as is her wont. Instead her gaze is absently contemplating something in the distance, replaying some scene of the past or of her own imagination. There is something stricken and almost fierce in her gaze that both calls to and answers me. For a moment we lock eyes and share a long, measured look. Yes there it is, there I am – but before I falter I turn away.

Mr Bertram’s voice swells over the other’s chatter briefly and I catch his words: ‘Come now, Yates, we all have our parts to play and you must play yours. No more of your sly evasions and—’

His words fall then and become lost among the general din; yet they continue to reverberate within me. Yes, Mr Bertram, we do all have our parts to play. For Mary, my Mary, there will be nothing but the centre stage, the sun of Edmund’s love upon her, she will burst and bask and revel in its glorious rays. I can feel its reflections even offstage. I imagine how it must feel and for a moment, imagining, can almost feel it too.

For me in the wings awaits a wilting darkness, but the mask will never slip. I will take my cue and not miss a line, no matter if no one is attending. Yet I will not shroud myself in misery, I may blaze with my own joys too. In the darkness I will search out my happiness for myself, uproot it before I wither. One must find their comforts and I will find mine. Somewhere. Everywhere. But now I really must be home in time for Dr Grant’s dinner.

My inspiration:
I was inspired by the following passage in
Mansfield Park,
spoken by Mrs Grant: ‘There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much; but then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere.’