Pemberley (3 page)

‘The days are so short,' Mrs Bennet agreed, rising from her chair also.

‘Please, do not leave before we extend an invitation to you,' said Mr Collins, taking Mrs Bennet's hand and bowing deeply. ‘Both I and Charlotte have thought deeply of your position, alone and grieving, over Christmas at Meryton. We extend to you with the utmost cordiality an invitation to spend those days here at Longbourn.'

‘I go to Pemberley for Christmas,' said Mrs Bennet.

‘Some of your memories, on returning to your old home, may be painful,' said Mr Collins, who had not heard this. ‘But others will surely be joyful. Charity begins at home.' He laughed in an awkward way. ‘And in what was your home and is now ours we wish to invite you – '

‘Sir William awaits me,' said Lady Lucas hastily. ‘Will you come and dine with us?' she asked Mrs Bennet as she steered her friend to the door.

‘I have too much to do, preparing for my journey to Pemberley,' replied Mrs Bennet.

Mr Collins stared at her in amazement. ‘You go to Pemberley for Christmas? My dear Mrs Bennet, you will find yourself in the most exalted company. Lady Catherine de Bourgh communicated to me only yesterday in a letter that she will go to Pemberley for Christmas.'

Mrs Bennet stopped by the door.

‘I believe you had the honour of receiving Lady Catherine here at Longbourn,' said Mr Collins.

Mrs Bennet kept silent, recalling Lady Catherine's visit and her pronouncement on the very sitting-room in which they were all now assembled: that ‘this must be a most inconvenient sitting-room for the evening, in summer; the windows are full west.' Mrs
Bennet also heard her own reassurances to Lady Catherine that they never sat there after dinner; and her own reply to her visitor's remark that the park at Longbourn was very small: ‘I assure you it is much larger than Sir William Lucas's'; and to cover her embarrassment asked Charlotte if she would come over to Meryton Lodge before she and Mary left for Pemberley.

‘Charlotte has too much to do, preparing for our Nativity pageant,' Mr Collins said before his wife could reply. ‘It will not be on the scale of the festivities at Pemberley, I am sure, but we are satisfied with it.'

After further allusions to the nativity of both God and the expected junior Collins, Mrs Bennet was able to take her leave.

‘You will tell Lizzy I miss her ever so much,' cried poor Charlotte as Mrs Bennet put on her shawl in the hall, ‘and give my fondest regards to dear Jane also.'

‘You will be reunited with all your daughters save Lydia,' said Mr Collins. ‘But it costs far too dear to transport a family of such a size around England. I should not impart this to you, but I must …' And here Mr Collins stepped in front of his mother-in-law and spoke close to Mrs Bennet's ear. ‘It will come best from you, Madam, if you inform dear Lydia that we are not rich, here.'

‘What do you mean?' cried Mrs Bennet, alarmed.

‘Mrs Wickham approaches us for money,' said Mr Collins.

‘The estate left by Mr Bennet – excuse me – gives no more than two thousand a year. Your own portion, Madam, you took with you.'

‘I should think so,' replied Mrs Bennet, drawing herself up.

‘Charlotte has a kind heart. But she cannot take from the housekeeping and give to your daughter, Mrs Bennet. I pride myself on noticing the table we keep. We cannot lower our standard of living here at Longbourn in order to subsidise Mr and Mrs Wickham and their family.'

‘No, indeed,' said Mrs Bennet, who was too taken aback to say anything.

‘I wrote and directed Lydia to her sister Mrs Darcy,' said Mr Collins. ‘I do believe the housekeeping at Pemberley would hardly show the difference.'

Elizabeth received the news at Pemberley that Mrs Bennet had begged Jane and her family to join them for Christmas with extreme despondency. She loved Jane; Mr Bingley remained a very good friend of Mr Darcy; but the thought of bringing another household for which she felt herself almost entirely responsible under the roof at Pemberley threatened her with a repetition of those Christmases at Longbourn before the sisters had married and gone north. Mrs Bennet would talk at her daughters without cease; Kitty and Mary would be urged to find young men, which would alarm and annoy Mr Darcy, so Elizabeth could imagine, and the harmony of their days at Pemberley would be badly disrupted.

Perhaps also because Mr and Mrs Bennet had had so unsatisfactory a marriage, Elizabeth had no desire to re-create the family circle in a house which she admired but did not yet feel completely at home in. Mr Bennet's contempt for his wife, and sad neglect of all her sisters, if not herself, might make itself felt at Pemberley. Mr Darcy, whom she had set out to soften, was certainly more approachable, less harsh, and a good deal less proud than he had shown himself before they wed. But a protracted stay from Mrs Bennet, not to speak of the chattering Kitty and the intensity of Mary, might return him to those ways before they were banished for ever. To add Jane and Mr Bingley and their ménage would surely surround him too completely with her family.

There was another reason why Elizabeth was loath to mention the contents of Jane's letter to her husband. The Bingleys might have Mr Bingley's sister staying with them at Barlow; and she
would most certainly be included in the invitation, if it was forthcoming. Miss Bingley, as Elizabeth knew too well, had had designs on Mr Darcy, and had spoken very ill of Miss Bennet, in her determination to be mistress of Pemberley. Her presence would hardly be a soothing one; and her jokes at the expense of Mrs Bennet were audible to Elizabeth before they were even uttered. However, if the subject was not brought up by Elizabeth to Mr Darcy today, her mother would bring it up on arrival; and there would be consternation and disappointment at her daughter's refusal to bring all the family together at the time of Mrs Bennet's first Christmas since her bereavement.

Mr Darcy was walking across the bridge in front of the house when Elizabeth, seeing him from a window, ran out to meet him.

Even after nearly a year of marriage, she was surprised each time she saw Mr Darcy at the flutter it set up in her. He was handsome, certainly; but there was something in him which was more than that: a gravity which lightened only in a delightful way when he saw her; a presence which, however often she told herself was hers for all her life, seemed remote, mysterious and ever-alluring to her.

Elizabeth found she was living happily ever after, as in the old fairy-tales; and there was not enough she could do to show Darcy her appreciation of it. How fortunate, then, that her shy declaration of the contents of her sister Jane's letter brought a smile to Darcy's lips, and an avowal that he too had something he was in need of telling her.

‘You make me happy with your request, sweetest, loveliest Eliza,' said Mr Darcy, twinkling down at her as if the thought of a whole basket of Bennets came as nothing but a pleasant surprise to him. ‘I am happy to see Jane; I shall have a good few games of backgammon with Bingley; and, as for Miss Bingley, I think she cannot hold a candle to you, Lizzy.'

Elizabeth owned quietly to the fact that she found the size of Pemberley daunting still; that a large party could move in there
without the inconvenience this would have caused at Longbourn was still incredible to her.

‘You are the mistress of Pemberley, Elizabeth,' said Mr Darcy and, despite the park being a place where the public could, and did, walk, and despite the eyes of servants from the wide wall of windows in the house, he took her in his arms and kissed her tenderly. ‘You shall invite whomsoever you please,' he said.

The couple walked on, and down into the grotto, where the berries on the holly led Mr Darcy to remark that some should be brought into the house before Christmas.

‘And now I must confess to you,' he said, ‘for I too have received a letter. Lady Catherine de Bourgh, my aunt, was always accustomed to come to Pemberley for Christmas, with her daughter. You remember Lady Catherine, I have no doubt?'

‘I do,' said Elizabeth, but she repressed a shudder for the sake of Mr Darcy. The insolence Lady Catherine had shown her in the past should certainly never be repeated; and she had Darcy to protect her, now she was married.

‘I am happy to welcome Lady Catherine and her daughter to Pemberley,' said Elizabeth, and she banished thoughts of Mrs Bennet and Darcy's aunt together as quickly as they came to her.

Darcy and his wife crossed the stream again at its lowest point, in the water garden, and were met by the head gardener, with whom they engaged in a lively conversation as to the feasibility of training water to descend a part of the park in cascades.

‘I like the idea,' said Mr Darcy, who was in high good humour. ‘And we shall plant some young trees down there, where the deer can't get at them!'

Elizabeth took Darcy's arm and they strolled up through the park to the house. Whether the mention of young trees or the sight of windows of the unused west wing set her thoughts in train she would not afterwards be able to say; but Elizabeth now was to know a sense of stinging mortification never once suffered in all the time of her marriage to Mr Darcy. She remarked on the happy
time Jane's little daughter would have at Pemberley. ‘We could open up the old nurseries,' she said, pointing to the windows and clasping Darcy's arm closer to her side.

But Mr Darcy broke loose of her grasp and stroke up the hill in silence. For all the rest of the day, however much Elizabeth tried to extract the reason for his displeasure from him, he was as dark and quiet and proud as he had been when she first met him as a guest of Mr Bingley at Netherfield. Elizabeth was left to wonder at her own presumption in telling the master of Pemberley how the bedchambers should be allocated, and she spent the rest of the day in a solitary roaming of the house, for, as she owned to herself, there were rooms and landings she had never even entered.

It was in one of these, on a dark landing, where she stood fixed by the gaze of a Darcy ancestor in a long portrait on the wall, that Elizabeth felt a slight touch on her shoulder and turned to find the features of Mr Darcy smiling down at her.

‘My dearest Eliza,' Mr Darcy said, ‘you shall open up any part of the house. For it is all yours now, as you know, and my heart along with it.'

Elizabeth wept with relief as she went into his arms. Yet she knew that she must go carefully when it came to the ordering of Pemberley, and she resolved to keep the Christmas house party strictly to the timetable and the numbers agreed.

This, alas, was not to prove as easy as she had hoped.

Jane Bingley was as much distressed by Mrs Bennet's letter as was her sister Elizabeth, on receipt of the intelligence that their mother found nothing wrong in dictating her daughters' movements to them. A long day walking in the park of the house the Bingleys had bought at Barlow was needed for the sisters to assure each other of an enduring love and esteem; and for Jane to feel able to accept the invitation to Pemberley which Elizabeth pressed on her. And Elizabeth needed to know that Jane did not accept merely to alleviate the worst effects of Mrs Bennet. It was hard for her to tell the truth – to so charming, easy-going and complaisant a character as Jane, at least – that she did not yet feel fully mistress of Pemberley and that this was the reason for the absence of an invitation to the Bingleys, over the festive season. Only Jane, as Elizabeth acknowledged when her sister threw her arms round her neck and said she knew all this without the telling, could be counted on to understand and condone any action, however apparently heartless. Elizabeth had often in the past feared this trait in Jane: that she believed no bad of any living being, only good; now she was to be profoundly grateful for it. Her understanding of Jane's tolerance was to be tried to the extreme, however, when on her next visit to Barlow Jane produced another letter, just arrived.

‘I can scarcely believe it,' said Jane as she handed the letter to her sister. ‘Lydia comes north and takes a house at Rowsley. She pretends she will stay with aunt Gardiner, ‘if there are no houses to be taken'. Oh, Lizzy, could Mama have put her up to this?'

As Elizabeth read and re-read the letter, Emily Bingley, Jane's small daughter, ran in and out; and, for all the horror of receiving
Lydia's latest missive, Elizabeth was unable to refrain from smiling at the child, and showing the rise in spirits which Emily's presence inevitably brought about. It was one reason, though Elizabeth hardly acknowledged it to herself, for her frequent visits to Barlow (and one more reason for inviting her dear sister and her husband for Christmas): this perpetual, pattering delight in the rooms of the house her sister and Mr Bingley had found as a place to raise their family; a reason to come again and again, always expecting and receiving the sweet smiles and simple love of the child.

Elizabeth knew that Pemberley would be transformed one day, as her sister Jane and Mr Bingley's home had been, by the presence of children. But now it was dark and forbidding to her, a house that had been a bachelor's house too long, where even a loving wife – and an efficient housekeeper – could not keep at bay the sense of the end of a cycle, of the supremacy of the ghosts of the past over the living. The coming of little Emily Bingley to Pemberley at Christmas might be a painful reminder, to Elizabeth, of her own failure, so far, to become a mother; but a part of her thought, too, that the presence of her niece could encourage the conceiving of a child for herself and Darcy at Pemberley.

For the time, however, less welcome small Wickhams were due to appear any day; and Elizabeth found, as often before, that her assumptions and prejudices were kindly and gently rebutted by her sister Jane.

‘She simply wishes to come to Pemberley!' cried Elizabeth. ‘Lydia knows full well that aunt Gardiner has had no house at Rowsley for ten years at least. ‘Why, when I journeyed north with aunt and uncle Gardiner' – and here Elizabeth knew she blushed, for she recalled so clearly her first visit to Pemberley as a tourist, when it was thought the family was away; and how Mr Darcy had rounded a box hedge in the garden and how delightfully surprised they both had been, after the first embarrassment – ‘even then,'
Elizabeth continued, ‘we put up at lodgings. Lydia knows she has no aunt Gardiner to visit. And she knows Rowsley is but five miles from Pemberley. Why did she not write to me directly, if she wishes to come as a guest to the house?'