Page 18 of Till Death Us Do Part: Book 2
Now, that was a useful phrase for wooing your wife if she ever heard one.
January gradually passed as they usually do. The snow mostly melted or at least became manageable, and she walked into Lambton with Molly to reacquaint herself with Mr Bartlet. He was just as congenial as he had seemed, and she spent several hours in his shop every time she visited the village, which gradually became several times per week.
Mrs Reynolds, out of pity or self-preservation, explicitly instructed Molly that she was to be at Elizabeth’s beck and call, even though the mistress did not actually need much of anything except some footmen to carry bathwater periodically, her meals, and some company. Of course, she supposed the servants were probably grateful that Elizabeth’s decision to forego formal dining reduced their work but not their number.
Overall, January was occasionally pleasant, occasionally vexing, but mostly dull and dreary, aside from her time withMolly. Being with a sixteen-year-old who was neither vicious like Lydia nor complacent like Kitty was a pleasure.
Elizabeth was satisfied with Molly’s reading progress thus far, but if she wanted any hope of convincing her husband to make the young woman her official lady’s maid, she had better be up to the task. She spent quite a lot of her copious leisure time tutoring the young woman through January, and they often sat in the library with Molly practising and asking help for difficult words.
In mid-February, Elizabeth stumbled into the music room. She still had not asked Mrs Reynolds for a tour, and to be frank, was a little afraid to do so, though she had no idea what exactly she feared. Would she find she hated the house that was to be her home for the rest of her life, or would she love it and feel trapped in a gilded cage? Perhaps she would come to love it, and Mr Darcy would shuffle her off to the dower house or some remote estate in Scotland; or even annul their marriage and throw her out to starve in the hedgerows.
The hateful thing about her situation was that she had almost no control over her destiny. Just as before the wedding, her choices were to take what he chose to dish out, or to make her escape—only this time at the expense of breaking a vow. She was educated enough to know that she would not be the first or last married person to break a vow, and she thought she could make an excellent case that her husband already had—but still, it rankled to be so powerless and far worse to be soignored.That was by far the worst of it.Would it have killed him to write one note? Just one tiny little note. A line or two would do!
Discovering the pianoforte gave her yet another dilemma to ruminate on. Should she practise? Should she engage a master? A master was out of the question, since she had to pay out ofher pittance money. Any master worth his salt would cost an awful lot, and she was not about to waste half her allowance doing something to attract a husband when she already had one too many. Aside from that, Miss Darcy was supposed to be ever soaccomplished, and Elizabeth was unlikely to compete anyway, so she eventually concluded that a master was out of the question.
Shedidhowever, decide some modest practice would not kill anybody. Pemberley was so big that anyone who did not like her playing could avoid it readily enough. Practising would allow her to improve the ever so silly accomplishments that were supposed to be so useful, and it had the added benefit of chewing up several hours for a few days each week, not to mention the sheer pleasure of sitting at an instrument without fighting Mary for it.
Such thoughts always made her melancholy. She longed for the halcyon days of old when she still esteemed her family. She wondered if time would soften her anger enough to one day form a rapprochement and really had no idea. In the first place, it seemed unlikely Mr Darcy would ever venture into Hertfordshire or meet with them himself. She supposed he could send her alone, which would be an improvement, but then she tried to picture returning to Meryton without her husband. In the end, it would be as humiliating as the marriage itself had been—and that was saying nothing of how her family and neighbours had treated her in December. People who had known her all her life were quick to assume the worst, just because it made a more entertaining story.
In the end, Elizabeth suspected she would just leave her family behind along with the rest of her childish things. Even writing seemed like more trouble than it was worth. Mary’s demands had just been Mary being Mary, but Jane’s had felt like a betrayal. She hadsomesympathy for Jane’s loss of Mr Bingley,but since she had never shown the man unambiguously how she felt anyway, Elizabeth thought Jane was doing the opposite of the old proverb. She was not reaping what she had not sown.
Early March brought rains that washed away all lingering traces of snow, and most of the locals thought that would be the end of winter for certain. Molly was progressing nicely, and one day, Elizabeth left her in the library with strict instructions to practise.
An hour later, she found herself back in her suite and decided to see how her charge was progressing. Molly had, over the course of the previous two months, learned how to fix Elizabeth’s hair well enough, though with a mobcap, ‘well enough’ was not a high standard. She reckoned that if she ever was introduced as a proper society woman she might need better, but then again, if she ever learned to fly, she would need wings. Both seemed equally unlikely.
Elizabeth took the shortcut that Mr Bates showed her on New Year’s Day, mostly because it was faster and easier, and she would not meet any distractions along the way. She had learned the names and basic biographies of the entire staff (not much of a challenge), but she did not feel particularly close to any except Molly. She was the mistress, yet notreally. The state of Limbo left her uncomfortable, and the household staff even more confused, so Mrs Darcy avoided them whenever she could. She thought it could just as easily be kindness or cowardice.
Entering the library, she was surprised to see Noah sitting beside Molly. Since he had been the first footman Elizabeth met, entirely by chance on the day she met the hated Mr Knight, she always had a soft spot for the young man. He was sitting at a mostly proper distance from the young maid, taking turnsreading from a novel. Noah read about as well as Elizabeth had at ten, and Molly about the same.
Elizabeth never put too much thought into how courtships happened or did not in the servant classes, nor did she think it was an area she needed to investigate or form an opinion on. Noah was obviously improving himself along with Molly, and that was good enough. She did however, start thinking about ways for the young man to spend more time in her near vicinity. She had still never called for a carriage or horse even once, opting instead to walk the five miles (ninety-seven minutes) to Lambton a few times per week. Molly thought nothing of the excursion, and Elizabeth thought to drag Noah along occasionally and see what happened.
Satisfied that all was well, Elizabeth returned to her suite and an excellent book on law that she had found on one of the non-black shelves. She was not particularly interested in the subject, but she had picked it as the one book on the non-forbidden shelf that her husband was most likely to disapprove of.
It was a small act of defiance, until she got to the part about marriage law, which she found infinitely fascinating—horrifying and barbaric—but fascinating.
8.Ides of March
After reading the text on marriage law, Elizabeth spent several days ruminating on what she had learned. Marriage was almost alwaystill death us do part, but the key word wasalmost. It turned out that there were several difficult and expensive ways for amanto get out of a marriage, and several far easier and less expensive ways for a man toactas if he were not married, without the expense and bother of breaking the legal bond. All were obviously dishonourable, but well within Pemberley and the Darcy family’s capabilities.
To date, nothing she knew about her husband and his family proved eternal optimism justified. To be fair, she had no proof that her husband was dishonourable, and the fact that he had offered for her suggested he had some concern for his reputation and legacy; but his behaviour had thus far not been auspicious.
She had even learned that passing the estate to his first-born male child was not cast in stone as she had always assumed. Pemberley had no entail, so her husband could pass it to whomever he pleased. If he wanted to pass it to a nephew, natural child, or cousin, the law would not blink an eye.Societymight just barely blink, but the law would not. He even had one cousin, an army colonel, who was reportedly closer than a brother; so, the idea of making him or his son the heir was not out of the question. There was no indication that he planned to dishonour his vows, but frightfully little evidence he planned to honour them either.
Of course, in those matters, the wife hadnoneof those options. She was legally thepropertyof her husband and had no say whatsoever. She could not even defend herself, should he take a case to the Ecclesiastical Courts for an annulment, to take one extreme example. Her husband had complete control over her future, whether for good or ill. It turned out thatin‘good times and bad’was a matter of honour and character for the husband, but alegal requirementfor the wife. She ended up feeling sick at the end.
Elizabeth had also spoken with several people, including Mr Bartlet on one of her increasingly frequent walks to Lambton, about exactly how thetonworked. What she learned made her question why any sane person would join such a disreputable group voluntarily. Gambling, infidelity, and dishonesty were rampant, from the Prince Regent down to the lowest member of the so-calledupper ten thousand. Playing with reputations was just another sport to them, and they would happily make her entire life miserable just to gain some small social advantage or to win a wager at White’s. Scandals inconvenienced husbands but absolutely ruined wives, especially if they did not have the iron-clad support of the husband’s family.
All this left Elizabeth alternating between hopelessness, depression, and burning anger on an almost hourly basis. She wondered exactly how she couldbestuse this interval, but could not decide, so she just let a fair number of days slip by with no resolution, vacillating between industry and indolence, as February gradually turned to March, and winter gradually turned to spring.
Elizabeth could not resist reading a play on the fifteenth of March, and she gathered a bit of an audience, more by accident than design. It all began by reading aloud with Molly, and then, without any real plan, Noah joined. His reading voice was slow but adequate, while his need to get up and vastly overact the scene was amusing. Elizabeth thought it was quite the performance. He often left her with unladylike bouts of laughter, though he was as likely to do so with a tragedy as a comedy.
On that sunny day, heralding the Ides of March, she left the library doors open by accident. When other maids and footmen stopped by to listen for a few minutes, she invited them in and suggested they rest and enjoy the performance for a few minutes. She had no idea if she would have a reckoning with Mrs Reynolds over it, but she could not imagine a half-hour of leisure could cause the house to fall down around their ears. In fact, she was not even certain the house falling down around her ears would be bad, or at least, in her more facetious moods she thought that.
Sometimes she would wake up in the middle of the night seething, thinking,‘One letter! Would it kill the bloody man to write one blastedletter?’Apparently, her husband either had been shipped off somewhere without mail (an absurd notion if there ever was one), or maybe he was lying abed dying in some sickroom somewhere (still without access to mail). It was all so ludicrous. If he were a soldier, or going off to France to negotiate with Napoleon, then she might have understood it—but agentleman?The most dangerous thing gentlemen ever did was ride in fox hunts and dance with unsuitable country girls.
She had been meeting with Mrs Reynolds weekly from the beginning and had finally taken a tour of most of the house (except for the hidden stairs, which the housekeeper failed to mention) at the beginning of March, so she had a reasonable idea of how things were done. If two thirds of the servants did absolutely nothing for a fortnight, nobody would even notice, and a month would not cause undue hardship. A lot of their time was spent cleaning and polishing things that were already perfectly adequate in the first place.
She had just stood up to ask some of the others if they might like to take part, when the butler entered. He looked around at the assembled footmen, and Elizabeth was astonished to see that he could say, ‘Have you no duties to perform?’ withas much effect as her mother yelling, ‘Hill! Hill!’ at the top of her lungs. Her audience vanished as if they had never existed, leaving Elizabeth alone with the butler, since Molly had left with everyone else.
