The Second Mrs Darcy (11 page)

Octavia slept late, and woke to find the day well advanced. “Mrs. Ackworth is in the breakfast parlour,” said the maid who came in with the water.

“Good heavens,” said Octavia, jumping out of bed. “What time is it?”

“Past ten o'clock.”

A mere quarter of an hour later, Octavia was downstairs. Jane was sitting at the breakfast table, reading a letter.

“How long have you been up?” Octavia asked her.

“Oh, I rose at my usual time; despite all the excitement of last night, my duties are still to be done.”

“You should have sent a servant to wake me.”

“Not at all. For I merely had a late night, and some excitement, whereas you had an exhausting one, being in the thick of it. I am afraid your dress is ruined, quite beyond any mending or cleaning.”

“I thought it would be so,” said Octavia, longing for the coffee she could smell.

“They have made a fresh pot for you,” said Mrs. Ackworth.

“And Mr. Ackworth is also up, I am sure.”

“He does not need a great deal of sleep. He rode over to Chauntry first thing to see if there was anything he can do to help. Some of Rutherford's horses are to come here until he can make arrangements
for them. I am thankful to say that they were all got out safely, horses panic most dreadfully in the face of fire, you know, and it can be impossible to get them to safety, but Rutherford's grooms all know what they are about.”

“Lady Sophronia said she was glad to be going to London.”

“I expect she is. She loves London, and it is only her sense of duty that has kept her at Chauntry, to take care of her mama. Although I am not sure that she needs to. Lady Rutherford is a great deal more capable than she appears, and I believe she would hardly notice if her daughter were not there. I cannot imagine what Rutherford will do with Lady Rutherford, send her to Yorkshire, perhaps, if she will consent to go, for it will be impossible for her to stay in London. They cannot live under the same roof, they will do nothing but argue. She irritates him intensely, and I believe she takes a delight in doing so.”

Octavia thought about this as she ate her toast. They seemed an extraordinary family, but then, were not all families extraordinary? She was no judge; never having had what she could call a normal family life, she was in no position to ascertain if Lord Rutherford and his sister and mother were quite in the usual run of family relationships, just one of many patterns which worked more or less, but which were only comprehensible to those within the family circle.

“I cannot really say what is what, even within my own family,” she said to her cousin. “For as you know, they are only half my family, as it were, and I grew up apart with them. I stay with them as a guest, or as a poor relation, and I may guess how things are, but that is all it is, guesswork.”

“It is a shame you never knew your mother, no, nor your father, him dying when you were still a child.”

Sir Clement Melbury had been Mrs. Ackworth's first cousin. “I knew him well,” she said. “My father was the younger son of old Sir Arthur Melbury, your grandfather, and he was Vicar of Melbury. So we were close neighbours, and although Clement was much older than me—he was at Cambridge when I was learning my letters—I counted myself his friend. As I grew older, he would pull my pigtails and tell me terrible stories, and then, when I went to London, he
looked out for me in a most brotherly fashion; I had no brothers of my own, we were a family of five girls.”

Her voice grew quieter, and Octavia could see that she was looking back into the past.

“I was in love with him,” she said in a matter-of-fact way. “Despite the disparity in our ages; of course that counts for little in affairs of the heart, and I always preferred men who were older than me.”

“Was he in love with you?” Octavia ventured to ask.

“It would never have done,” Mrs. Ackworth went on, still in the same reflective voice. “Not that it came to that. I believe he was growing fond of me, but I was never a beauty, you know. I had my admirers, but I was never anything out of the ordinary. And then Clement met Miss Valeria Smith, and that was that.”

“He married her, and had all those children, my brothers, half brothers, I should say, and half sisters.”

“They call you sister, and you are very insistent on these
halves
. But they have not treated you well. I dare say that you blame your father, thinking that they are his children, that he was as cold and heartless as they often appear to be—”

“What they have done for me, they did from duty, not affection.”

“It is easy enough to neglect duty, although I admit the lack of affection. It was Valeria who made them the way they are, since by some freak of nature, they all turned out to take after her, and not your father. Although there are traces of Clement in Sir James, for your father was at heart a country man. He loved Melbury Hall, and hunting and shooting and looking after the land, he was never happier than when he was on the back of one of his rangy hunters, for he rode nearly eighteen stone, you know.”

“Yes, I remember him as a big man.”

“Valeria, on the other hand, was a townee through and through. She loved London, and detested the country. She didn't pine or mope when she had to be at Melbury, for Valeria wasn't ever one to do anything so weak, but she complained, and made life unpleasant for herself, and even before she died, she and your father were spending much of the year apart. She caught a cold, you know, which I always
hold was entirely her fault, going out in April on a bitterly cold night—the weather was unusually harsh that year—clad in a light gown, with no proper warmth about her. She was fashionable, you see, and would not dream of being seen in anything so unmodish as a wrap or a pelisse, not in April. The cold went to her lungs and a week later, she was gone.”

“Poor woman,” said Octavia. “Leaving such a brood.”

“Indeed, but the girls had an excellent governess, and by that time the boys were away at school, in Arthur's case, and James was sowing his wild oats—a lot of wild oats—in Oxford.”

“Then a few years later, my father met my mother—”

“Another lovely woman, and fell in love all over again,” Mrs. Ackworth finished for her. “Of course her dying when you were born was another tragedy for Sir Clement; I am pleased he found some degree of happiness, however, with the third Lady Melbury. She was kind to you, was she not? She brought you up with never a murmur, although of course there was no real obligation upon her to do so.”

“She was one of those women who didn't ever seem to be entirely present,” said Octavia dispassionately. “Nothing made her angry or happy, she seemed to mind about nothing very much.”

“Oh, what a happy disposition,” said Mrs. Ackworth, getting up from the table.

“Did you ever meet my mother?” Octavia asked, as she followed her cousin out of the room.

“I did, on the occasion of her marriage. For your papa asked me to be there; none of his children would attend, and he said, a little wistfully, I remember, that he would like to have at least one member of his family present. So I went for the ceremony, and saw them off at the church door, and very happy and pleased he looked, but I never saw her again. Within the year you were born and she was gone.”

Mrs. Ackworth was walking briskly towards the herb room, where, in keeping with an earlier age, she dried and preserved the many fragrant products of her garden. “Does it distress you, to talk of your mother?”

“Not in the least. Since I never knew her, I am curious, but I can
have no feeling for her.” Octavia sniffed the aromatic air appreciatively, as her cousin opened the door to the herb room.

“It is old-fashioned of me to keep up the herb garden, I know, but I was brought up to do it,” said Mrs. Ackworth. “My mother's herb garden was famous throughout Somerset, and I like to keep up the tradition, for all you can buy everything now in a shop.”

Octavia sank her fingers into a pile of rose petals that Mrs. Ackworth had tipped on to the well-scrubbed table which ran down the centre of the room. Above their heads bunches of herbs and dried flowers hung from metal rails.

“I need to make pot-pourri, the bowl in the drawing room has quite lost its scent, and although I can refresh it, I will put that upstairs and put a new bowl in there.”

Octavia let the dried petals slip through her fingers, admiring the shades of pink and blush white and deepest red.

“I know next to nothing about my mother's family. I was brought to realise that recently, when—when I met someone who had known my grandfather.”

“There was no one to tell you about them, of course. Your grandparents were long gone, your mother an only child. It is a shame you have no connections on that side of your family.”

“Not a shame as far as Augusta and Arthur and Theodosia are concerned!” said Octavia. “They see me tarnished by my low origin. When I first went to London, Arthur informed me, in the most serious tones, that my grandfather was a grocer. Even then it made me want to laugh, to hear him talking as though my grandpapa had been in the pay of Satan, as though there was no more terrible thing to be than a shopkeeper. I have no objection to grocers, where would we be without them?”

“Yes, your grandfather was indeed a grocer, Clement told me. He was in a good line of business, more than a humble shopkeeper. It was in Leeds or York, or one of those northern towns. But he speculated, on one thing and another, and I believe he lost most of his fortune on the stock exchange during the first French war, when everything was so uncertain. He certainly lost a good deal more than he could afford,
and the business began to suffer. Your mother said that he died a poor man, a disappointed man.”

She took out a little glass vial and removed the stopper, releasing a rich scent. “This is the essence of rose, an oil that I put in the potpourri,” she told Octavia, adding two drops. “Stir it in with your hands for me.”

Octavia did as she was bid, swirling the petals into an aromatic cloud.

“Now I need to add orris root, lavender, some orange peel and cinnamon bark,” said Mrs. Ackworth, suiting the action to the words. “I am proud of my pot-pourri, I make it to a mixture handed down from my great-grandmother. Who was your great-great-grandmother, of course. I shall give you the receipt.”

“I should like that,” said Octavia. She raised a handful to her nose and took a deep, appreciative sniff. “Although I don't think I am likely ever to have a herb garden, I fear I do not take after my father in that. Like Valeria, I prefer town life.”

“So you think, but I assure you a busy life in the country is the happiest one for most women. When—that is, should you marry again, you may well find yourself with a house and a garden and poultry yard, and then you will gather your own rosebuds and make your own pot-pourri.”

For a moment Octavia's fancy was caught by this picture, an image of tranquillity and restfulness.

“Only I do not think I am a very restful person,” she said. “I think I would startle the hens and alarm the pigs and send all the bees buzzing away, and the milk would curdle, and everything would be ahoo.”

“How ridiculous you are,” said Mrs. Ackworth, laughing. And she added, without a hint of reproof but with a world of warning in her words, “Of course if you do go to your sister in Yorkshire, she will keep you so busy in the house and with the children that I dare say you would never set foot out of doors.”

Octavia's conscience attacked her again. Here was Mrs. Ackworth, and Mr. Ackworth, so concerned for her future, and she still
could not bring herself to tell them that she had other plans, and plans that were perfectly possible, indeed which were certain to be fulfilled. Why was she so intent on reticence, why did she have this urge to keep it all secret? The Ackworths were not like the Melburys, who would at once leap in and interfere. Nevertheless, she was not going to confide in them. Once the news was out, her life would be so much more complicated. For the moment, she would simply cherish the peace of being in this manor house, and let the future see to the revelations and reactions that must come.

“You are a good creature,” said Mrs. Ackworth. “I will say that for you, if you will take the compliment. I know that you grieve for Mr. Darcy, and you face a very uncertain future, but you keep always in a good humour, and it is remarkable that you are able to laugh at your brothers and sisters, not merely condemn them, which, were I in your shoes, I would certainly be tempted to do.”

“It is not because I have a sweet nature, I assure you,” said Octavia, taking the great silver bowl from Mrs. Ackworth, now filled with pot-pourri.

“Let me take that,” said Mrs. Ackworth, as Octavia gave an involuntary wince. “You hurt your arm last night, I knew it, I saw you in the carriage, holding it, for all you denied that it gave you pain.”

“It does hurt a little,” admitted Octavia, relinquishing the bowl. “It is bruised, or a slight sprain. No kind of burn, merely that some of the books were very heavy.”

“And did you get any thanks for your efforts from Lord Rutherford? I saw him talking to you when you were standing with Sophronia.”

“On the contrary,” said Octavia, laughing. “He was extremely rude and not at all grateful. He disapproves of females acting in such an unseemly way, and no doubt would rather have lost a quarter of his library than have my assistance. Men are so foolish.”

“Lord Rutherford is not one to mince his words, although he can be as gallant and charming as any man when he chooses. It is only that he does not choose very often.”

“Last night was a trial to test any man's temper,” said Octavia.
“For all he said the fire had saved him a deal of trouble, I imagine he must have been greatly alarmed and shocked.”

“I wonder if he will build new,” said Mrs. Ackworth. “It is all the rage, these days, building houses, so perhaps he will. If only to provide a house for his mother, in which he does not have to live himself.”