Dancing With Mr. Darcy Page 2

  ‘Not so, dear.’ Lady Russell had risen. ‘For the fact is, your creations enjoy a more vigorous life than the sentiments they utter. We all admire Mr Knightley’s integrity, but actions speak louder than words. In preparing to come to court, I had to remind myself of what he says that day on Box Hill. My memory requires no such prompting to recall how my friend Mrs Norris refuses to let Fanny have a fire to warm that chill East Room. Further, I cannot set eyes on a green baize surface without recalling Mrs Norris’s effrontery in appropriating the curtain intended for the Mansfield theatricals. You may claim that respect is our due, but so often you show us forfeiting it by our conduct.’

  ‘Is this assertion true even of Mrs Jennings?’ Despite the deep breaths, her question came out in a gasp.

  ‘Mrs Jennings who pours heartbroken Marianne Dashwood a glass of Constantia wine because it helps soothe colicky gout? Now really, that is as much a blending of the good and the ridiculous as anything you achieve with Miss Bates. Mrs Jennings doesn’t help you at all.’ Lady Russell’s voice became stern. ‘When, in the future,’ she asserted, ‘Mr D. W. Harding of London University will come to join us here, he will seek to convince you that in your heart you hated – his word, dear, not mine – your society and that in order to make your life bearable, you regulated your hatred by turning it to ridicule. Now, none of us much cares to be made to look ridiculous. That is why we press our charge and ask the judges of the dead to punish you by consigning your books, your letters and all evidence of your writing to Lethe. When everything is forgotten, we shall consider ourselves vindicated.’

  Forgotten? When those works were so dear to her? Even if she could not refute the charge, surely she might frame some plea in her own mitigation? If she might only return to earth once more, she would create an elderly woman who combined such benevolence and sagacity that the whole world would love her and long to be as old and as clever and as kind as she. Jane opened her mouth to speak.

  ‘Silence,’ announced both the usher and the court clerk in the same second, and the judge at the left-hand end of the dais rose with upheld hand.

  ‘Before the bench pronounces judgement,’ he said, ‘it behoves us to consider our powers. To suppress these books through all eternity when they stand published by Mr John Murray in elegant demi-octavos and when some of them have attracted the favourable opinions of royalty, no less, is quite beyond our remit. The court’s learned advisers, Mesdames Clotho, Atropos and Lachesis, have already shown us future generations enjoying them. Sit down, please, Mrs Ferrars. Even the judges of the dead cannot fight fate.

  ‘But neither, prisoner in the dock, can we acquit you of the charge that Mrs Norris and her co-prosecutors bring. However we have, we believe, found a way forward. Your books, Miss Austen, shall be spared and read until the end of time.’

  She closed her eyes in relief.

  ‘But listen, young woman,’ the judicial voice went on, avuncular but resolute, ‘to our sentence. You have, throughout your life, maintained regular correspondence with your brother Vice-Admiral Sir Francis Austen, have you not?’

  Frank? An Admiral? How wonderful!

  But—

  ‘Yes, indeed, sir,’ was all she said.

  The judge nodded.

  ‘Francis Austen we know to be fond of you. Throughout his earthly life – which will prove long – he will cherish every letter you ever wrote him.’

  Every letter? There must be hundreds. She had kept no journal, but her writings to Frank served a journal’s purpose. They held her innermost thoughts.

  ‘He will often re-read them to catch in their sentences the cadence of a favourite sister’s voice.’

  At the thought of it, she wanted to laugh for pure pleasure.

  ‘He knows you opened your heart to him as you did to no other creature upon earth.’

  It was true. The novels were witty in their way, but all her happiest teases and shrewdest remarks lay in the letters to Frank.

  ‘Your confidences,’ the grave voice pronounced, ‘will delight him all his days and bring him a little consolation for your early death. Further, he will harbour the hope that in time your letters’ wisdom and shrewdness will reach and delight other readers too. But they never shall.’

  He paused.

  ‘Francis Austen’s daughter, Fanny, shall burn them in bundles on her father’s death. With them will vanish a fair part of yourself, Miss Austen – perhaps the pithiest, most compassionate part; the part that speaks through Mr Knightley rather than Mrs Norris. But your books shall remain. You may stand down.’

  At the time, the thought of all her exchanges with Frank passing into oblivion left her wretched. As she departed from the court, she had to steel herself not to cry. But in the fullness of eternity, she met her niece Fanny under the white cypresses surrounding the Elysian Fields. She recognised her at once.

  ‘What thought was in your mind,’ she asked, their greetings done, ‘when you destroyed my letters to your father?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Fanny, ‘did I really do that?’

  She frowned, as though scouring her thoughts. At last she sighed and shook her head.

  ‘When I arrived in this place,’ she said, ‘I was thirsty and they gave me water of Lethe to drink. It is extraordinary that I should even know who you are, Aunt Jane, for of my earthly life I can remember nothing.’

  My inspiration: Jane Austen is strong on rebarbative women. I wanted to show them turning the tables on her, and had a suspicion that Mrs Norris would take the lead.

  SECOND THOUGHTS

  Elsa A. Solender

  She had said yes. Yes, I will. She had felt his hand briefly touch her shoulder; his lips lightly graze her check. When she opened her eyes, he had turned away. Had he any notion that she had avoided his eyes?

  Now all was settled between them. Watching him leave the room, she could read his satisfaction – his relief – in the spring of his step. Were he to leap up and click his heels together, she would not be entirely surprised, for he must be pleased that he had brought it off so well, as truly he had.

  He was a stout young man turned twenty-one, just down from Oxford, wearing a striped silk waistcoat – a puce-and-purple striped waistcoat – poised to commence life as a gentleman of means, if not fashion. Was ‘poised’ the proper word? Was ‘poise’ indeed possible for Harris Bigg-Wither, a young man in a puce-and-purple striped silk waistcoat, and evidently in need of a wife, or persuaded that he was?

  And now promised a wife: yes, I will.

  Did he truly know what he was letting himself in for, she wondered, by offering for Miss Jane Austen? Had he no notion of the glint of irony lurking in her eye, the sharpness of the tongue disguised by the amiable, good-natured manners that she presented to the world? His sisters must have: they had known her forever. Alas, not even his sisters had seen the jottings that Cassandra – Cassandra alone – had read, the idle, wicked musings on the friends and neighbours whose antics she had observed with such shameful enjoyment and described with such relish to her sister. But he must know of the pages tucked into her writing slope which she sometimes read to friends, images of that other world that flashed in her restless brain, a world of handsome young men with clever conversation and fair young ladies who danced with them in The Dashing White Sergeant or the figures of another of the country dances that could so nicely set her free – briefly – of the conventions of her company.

  She tried to recall dancing with Harris Bigg-Wither and could not.

  It is done, she thought. No crying off.

  Her poverty – this new sense of poverty since Papa had ceded his livings to brother James, this humiliating dependency upon the generosity and the whims of others – the indignities – the little slights – the necessary economies – all those would cease when she was Mrs Bigg-Wither, mistress of Manydown Park, an estate comparable – almost – to Godmersham, brother Edward’s principal seat. No longer Miss Jane Austen, a dowerless spinster of twenty-six, but Mrs Bigg-Wither, wife t
o a gentleman of means – seven thousand pounds a year! A considerable man, however young, however shy, however blank his eyes at times, a friend, an old friend, comfortable, with no meanness in him that she knew. The five years between them would be as nothing – had not brother Henry and cousin Eliza, fully ten years his senior, dealt happily together?

  Had Harris attended to the passage she had read to the Manydown circle two nights before about the serious business of annuities? He had nodded, had he also smiled?

  No need for Mrs Bigg-Wither to mend or patch her ageing boots or pelisse as they became worn; she could replace or discard them on a whim if she wished. What pin money she would have! Her time would no longer be at the mercy of others – only his, of course. Yet husbands might be managed. Everyone said so. She would learn the way of it, just as Mama had managed, and dear, good Papa had allowed it, and indeed there was still abundant affection between them.

  What was it Papa had said of a marriage without affection?

  No more requests – demands – to mind a child or fetch a shawl; no one, save her husband, of course, to rule her time. She must find a place at Manydown to write, a snug, quiet spot such as eluded her in the rooms at Bath where she and Cassandra now lived with Mama and Papa. No more mending and darning; perhaps some pretty needlework, but only if she wished it. Music. Manydown had a fine pianoforte. Yet, there would be the duties of a chatelaine, of a wife, indeed of a mother.

  A mother.

  She had felt nothing when Harris’s hand touched her sleeve. His lips pressed dry against her cheek. She had no impulse to embrace or touch him.

  ‘A marriage without affection can hardly be an agreeable enterprise.’

  She would come to live among friends at Manydown, Elizabeth, Catherine, Alethea, the Bigg sisters, good girls, dear girls, if not clever; but they were friends, dear friends throughout the golden Steventon years. Good to her, wishing her only happiness. And Steventon, dear Steventon, so near, still home, always home, even with James and his brood occupying the parsonage.

  Where amongst this lively, noisy family of Biggs and Bigg-Withers could solitude be found, a place and time to retire, to reflect and, yes, record?

  Mrs Bigg-Wither of Manydown would be an instrument to relieve the trials of her parents and sister. She would be the heroine of her own bright tale. Cassie could live with them much of the time, just as she stayed often at Godmersham. And she, Jane, could advance the careers of the Austen sailors, Frank and Charles, and perhaps even poor, dear Henry whose enterprises – well, clever, charming Henry always found a way, did he not?

  She must feel a kind of affection for Harris Bigg-Wither. Surely she could learn such affection. She had made a sensible choice, a comfortable choice; a choice for comfort. Nothing could be said against the suitability of the match despite the five years longer she had lived than he. The most critical of friends or neighbours in Steventon or Bath or even those at Stoneleigh, from whom much was expected one day, could not but approve her choice. It was a wholly practical decision, a decision greatly to her advantage, indeed greatly to the advantage of the entire Austen family. Through this alliance, she would be elevated from genteel poverty as a retired, landless clergyman’s second daughter to a most enviable situation in society, comparable – almost – to that of sister Elizabeth Bridges, brother Ned’s Elizabeth, whose dowry had so nicely enhanced the stature and fortune of that already most fortunate of the Austen brothers. A fine match indeed.

  Why, therefore, with all the advantages of the match enumerated, does she suddenly feel a dull, heavy weight descending upon her shoulders? Why a throb of dry pain in her throat and a pressure behind her eyes? From whence come the tears stinging inconveniently behind her eyelids, threatening to flood the room? Why this sudden revulsion of feeling?

  Not fair! Not fair!

  Oh, Jane, you must embrace your fate, stifle your tears and hold your errant tongue. You must thank providence for your good fortune, come not a moment too soon, for at six and twenty, you are rescued and shall be elevated simply by speaking those few words: ‘Yes, yes I will.’

  She will bask in Mama’s approval, in Papa’s relief. Cassandra shall be made secure, James and Henry, even Ned, shall be relieved of her future care, and she shall be transferred from one dependency to – a kind of freedom. Perhaps.

  Children. There must needs be children, and not the children of her fancy – Susan, Lizzie, Elinor, Marianne – but children of solid flesh and blood, and tears.

  No time for regret, for here are the Bigg girls come into the library to embrace her as a sister and congratulate her, all smiles, on her good fortune. Cassandra, too, is here, holding back just a trifle, perhaps questioning without words, perhaps sensible of the turmoil in her mind and heart, yet not disapproving.

  All of them, sisters to bride and groom-to-be, had colluded in bringing about the encounter between Harris and herself, a private moment for which poor Harris had been primed, as had she. Against such a confederacy – a campaign so kindly intended – how could the principals, so beloved of the conspirators, venture resistance?

  ‘You will see how he has improved since he came down from Oxford,’ she had been told. ‘You will observe his gentlemanlike manners, the marked improvement in his address. So tall, so much slimmer now, so much neater in his person. The stammer – why, in your company, dear Jane, in the company of a friend with whom he is so comfortable, hardly a stammer at all. And with your good sense and fine taste, his improvement cannot but continue. Clever puss, you will change him, Jane, indeed you shall.’

  Even a much-beloved sister, a best friend, could be deceived by the cheerful demeanour she had adopted, stifling the pangs of doubt that had begun to tease her even before they lit their candles and retired for the night.

  For he is still stout. Improved, yet still raw. Callow. Nothing like some young men with whom she has danced or flirted in her time, in her youth. Nothing like the young men in that other world to which she sometimes withdraws, young men in whose quips and manners she has discerned a capacity for serious consideration of principles. Nothing like a certain gentleman at Sidmouth whose name may not be mentioned, whom she had met and perhaps loved, then mourned. Nothing like the clever, handsome, dashing brothers whose figures she has described and whose teachings and sayings she has recorded for use someday in as yet unwritten tales – and, yes, some she has written.

  Harris Bigg-Wither has nothing to teach her. Will he ever possess the capacity to make her laugh? Has she the talent to make him laugh? Could he abide a wife who yearns secretly but, yes, ardently, for publication and acclaim? Is ‘irony’ a word in the Bigg-Wither lexicon? Has she the capacity, or the will, to embrace him? Can she accommodate his embrace?

  Not fair! He is blameless in this affair. He is deserving of all her consideration, for his motives contain no hint of evil. Were he to be disappointed in his hopes after her assent, the fault must all be hers. The force of that argument does not elude her even as a new wave of self-reproach threatens to suffocate her.

  She must wake Cassie at once. She must flee this room and this house. She must remove to some dark hidden corner of the world to shut herself away from decent society in misery and guilt. For misery is the state in which she now finds herself, awake in the darkness of this chamber.

  Yes, she had said yes, and that simple word must be her undoing. All her musings on fortune, position and glory, all her ambitions must be forsaken; for she knows now that never – never in this life – can she become the wife of a man for whom she feels no strong regard, indeed no spark of true affection.

  She wishes him well. She wishes him a partner worthy of his good heart and his simple, cheerful nature, one who will overlook the spots that linger on his countenance, who will not rue the vacancy of his expression when one of the company ventures a sally on the curate’s sermon, nor count the endless moments before a pun is grasped or the beauty of a line of music or poetry apprehended. She wishes him a partner with no need to have her
nonsense grasped and esteemed – instantly.

  She must lie still and silent beside Cassandra through the rest of this dark night. She must listen in sleepless disquiet to the rhythm of her sister’s even breathing. A suffering heart need make no sound. She has no wish to do a grievous injury to a worthy, innocent young man, one not at all deserving of such treatment. She must calm herself. She – fancying herself mistress of the well-turned phrase – must search for a formula by which she may unsay what she has said in a fashion that gives the least injury. She must prepare to sink herself in the regard of her friends and family and, worse, in her own regard. Whether relief or undoing awaits her with the sunrise, she dares not predict.

  Upon waking, as the first glimmers of dawn sparkle through the draperies, Cassandra understands instantly. She comprehends the turmoil, the torture, the regret, all that she, Jane, had hidden before the punishment of the past night.

  It is Cassandra who rings for the girl, Cassandra who relays the request from Jane for a private interview with Harris Bigg-Wither, Cassandra who begs the use of the carriage directly, without delay, to transport them from this place of disgrace to Steventon from whence brother James may see them back to Bath.

  We should not suit, she tells him. I can proffer no other explanation, no other excuse. I apprehend that you have honoured me with your regard, but we should never suit. With all my soul, I wish you every happiness. You will surely find another, one day. I have every confidence that you will form an attachment with a woman more worthy, more deserving of your devotion and your goodness. I pray you will forgive my hasty assent, my thoughtless words; my stupid reply to so generous and respectable an offer, but we should not suit, truly we should not. I can only add, God bless you.

  She can invent no more felicitous phrases as he regards her in dumb—Why can she not resist that harsh word? In dumb silence.