Page 40 of Mr Collins in Love
“How long then, between you asking the first and asking the second?”
“Er…” It seemed such an extraneous detail, but it must be important to Jem or he would not ask.I attempted to calculate and found I was too nervous to do so properly.“A few days.Two or three.Does it matter?”
He smiled, and hope leapt within me, warm and alive.
“No,” he said.“Just…just…” He shook his head, still smiling.“You are a wonder, sometimes.How you manage things.Don’t reckon there’s many men as could do what you just done.”He sat down, rather suddenly, and to my surprise, in one of the chairs in front of the fire.“So, you told her true, this Miss Lucas.Well, if that don’t beat all!”
“Is it all right for you to sit there?”I seated myself in the chair opposite.“What if Mrs Fowke comes back in?”
“She comes back, I’ll get up.”He was still shaking his head.“Blimey, Blackbird, did you really do it?Well, I always did think as how you were honest to a fault usually.When’s the wedding?”
He had called me Blackbird and something tense and taut in me eased.All would be well, now, surely?“As soon as possible.Early January.”
He sat back in his chair, staring into the fire.“So, you told her.All fair and square.”
I sat back myself, suddenly so weary I cared not if Mrs Fowke came in and saw us sitting there together like friends.In fact, if she came, I would suggest we all had a glass of madeira wine to celebrate my upcoming nuptials.We had some, for I had got in several bottles for Mr Chambers and other such callers.But Mrs Fowke did not come and I let my gaze linger upon Jem.
How strange was life that it could be so relentlessly harsh and bewildering, and yet it could also give one moments like this.My Jem, safe and warm and well-fed and clothed, sitting by the fire with me while the east wind blew icy outside, and he was smiling at me with something like admiration and there was no spot nor stain of disharmony between us.My chest ached with such tender feeling that I longed to give back to him some little part of the contentment he gave me.
“You see, Jem, everything will be all right,” I kept my voice down, for I still expected Mrs Fowke at any moment.“I am not free to live as I please, but I will always find a way to look after you, no matter what happens.I’ll always be your…your…” But I did not know what to call myself in relation to him.I was his friend, certainly, but somehow that did not feel warm enough.Eventually, I said, simply.“I’ll always be yours.Always.”
“Aye, I see that now.In it together, ain’t we?Forever.”He wiped his eye with his knuckle and sniffed.“Luckiest day of my life, I reckon, the day I met you behind those raspberry canes.”
“The luckiest of mine, too,” I said.
He made my heart swell, sitting there with the firelight illuminating his face and playing over his brown velvet waistcoat.Everything about him was marvellous, every feature so beloved that I wished the moment could last forever.
“I wish we could sit together like this every evening.”I said.“It is too cold, nowadays, to linger out of doors or to go down to the wilderness.”
“Spring’ll come again.Then summer.”
He was right, but I had to make sure that this meant what I guessed it meant.“So, we’ll go down to the brook together again one day?We’ll bathe?And afterwards, if you want to, you’ll let me watch?”
“’Course.All those things.First warm day.”
“Perhaps we may get a warm enough day in March or April?”
He grinned, likely at my wishful thinking, for April was generally far too cold for bathing or lingering out of doors.“We may.”
“I wish there was somewhere we could go in winter.”
He shook his head.“Thought on that plenty myself.”
“You couldn’t think of anywhere?”
“Stables, maybe.But George is in and out, unless he’s laid up.And it ain’t just him.Remember the time Mr Hay came calling and put his mare in the stable hisself because he knew George had been bad and the mare had had a cough?”
I nodded.That was the problem with anywhere around the rectory.People came and went: Boys with messages that I was wanted somewhere, the churchwarden on parish business, the clerk, the sexton, women wanting churching, men wanting charity, Mr Butler’s Tess with a brace of woodcock or a trout, not to mention Mr Chambers, who seemed to stop in every week for a glass of something on his way home from whatever ghastly sport with which he had seen fit to entertain himself.
Jem and I could, perhaps, find a moment to ourselves in the barn, or the woodshed, or concealed behind the gig in the tack room, but it would always be risky, and inside the house would be even more perilous.Mrs Fowke and Milly generally knocked and waited for my call before entering the study if they knew I was in there, but there had been times when they had thought I had gone out and had simply tapped and entered immediately.
In any case, that they knew everything that went on in the house I had no doubt.Servants generally did.It would take but a moment’s inattention, a forgotten duster, a sudden decision to wash a particular window and Jem and I would be discovered, and then what might happen I did not dare to think.Perhaps they would tell no one, do nothing, but what if that were not the case?It did not bear thinking about.
In any case, the very idea of creeping around at night and furtive meetings and hastily buttoned breeches made me almost ill from tension.I expect there are men who can put their fear of discovery aside for long enough to take their pleasure, but I am not of that type.What I wanted was to lie at my ease with Jem in the ferns, for us to speak of whatever we wished without fear of being overheard, and to be certain that none could observe us.
“I would invite you to my chamber at night,” I said.“But I do not dare.There would be no pleasure in it, for I would always be awaiting discovery.”
“I know.”He nodded.“Ain’t worth the risk.”
