Page 42 of The Winter of Our Discontent
How like my sisters these letters were. Kitty was stranded between making the most of her situation by taking her lessons and feelings of gross injustice. Lydia thought only of running away to fill her stomach. I could not help but smile over her letter, and I forgave her a little because, really, a forest creature is more self-aware than our Lydia.
I shook my head and locked those letters away in my desk. Come quarter day, I would send them two crowns apiece and perhaps tins of biscuits, though I doubted Mrs Dolby would allow them in her school.
Later, on the plush velveteen sofa in our cosy music room, Georgiana’s arm stole around my waist. She rested her silken blonde curls on my dark ones. I saw us in the grand mirror behind the pianoforte, where Miss Stiles played a melancholy air. We made a pretty picture on the outside, but on the inside, I was forlorn, and Georgiana seemed to sense it. She looked worried and confused for me and saddened by something else I did not understand. Perhaps she felt the loss of her parents still, so many years later.
Mrs Annesley looked fondly at us and then bent back over her sewing. I had bought two bolts of flannel, and we were making shirts, shifts, and smocks for Mrs Travers’s children. I announced this to be our mission a week ago when working on a lace handkerchief and suddenly jolted by a sober realisation.
“These trifles are absurd!” I exclaimed aloud, tossing aside my handkerchief in disgust. I proceeded to explain myself with such passion that my companions blushed with mortification. There were children on the estate dressed in rags, I had cried, and there we sat hunched over tiny scraps of linen! Our lace and fine knotwork had then been set aside, and though I should not have been so dictatorial, I did not retract my objections to them.
Even our musical group had been recruited. I bought the fabrics, yarn, thread, and buttons with the economy of simpler meals during my husband’s absence. My conscripted troops sewed up things from a list I made. Upon my orders, Mr Hodge’s poor box was filling up. The cottagers’ children had warm underthings. I became relentless in providing for the disenfranchised, since I could not provide for my sisters. If one child was warmer at night, then Mary was warmer at night. If one child had a shawl for comfort, then Kitty wascomforted, and if one child’s belly was full, then Lydia was fed. I knew I must act or be eaten alive by powerlessness.
Georgiana must have sensed my tension. “Elizabeth?”
“All is well, dearest. I am not built for winter, that is all that is amiss with me.”
She subsided but found me later at my desk going over every inch of the household accounts, scouring for an extra shilling here and there to spend on poor relief. She looked at me with her great blue eyes.
“What troubles you?” I asked tenderly, putting away my ledger.
“Are things so very bad on the estate, Elizabeth?”
“What do you mean?”
“My brother is away in Manchester doing I know not what, when this time of year he is usually sitting comfortably by the fire and riding out now and then. And you are almost frantic in caring for the tenants and the poor.”
I sat back in dismay. “Oh dearest, forgive me. I suppose I thought you knew all along what is afoot. No, we are not struggling. Would your brother allow it? I hardly think so, for if anything, he is meticulous in his management. The case is that there is a sickness on the estate, and he is gone to get men to help with readying the fields for planting, while I am fretting relentlessly over the children whose parents are ailing. There is no mystery, no disastrous difficulty, I assure you.”
She looked anything but reassured.
“Do you doubt me, Georgiana?”
She coloured and her eyes fell to the ground, appearing to search for words.
Where before I spoke bracingly, now my tone fell to itssoftest. “Pray, say whatever has you so distressed. I am your sister now, and you can trust me with your heart.”
“The rumour below stairs is that you will be sent to Scotland.” Georgiana’s voice was reduced to a stricken whisper by these words.
“Scotland?” I refrained from laughing aloud. I had not been so amused in weeks and weeks. Mrs Radcliffe would be very happy to hear of my banishment and write a new Gothic novel with me as her heroine.
“We have an estate there.”
“Do you? I did not know. What is it like?”
“I went there once when I was nine. It is a draughty old vault as I recall, close to the sea and cold even in summer.”
I shuddered theatrically and asked what they produced there. She spoke vaguely about a woolly cow, referring to Highland cattle, I think, and to sheep. “I am picturing nothing but windswept moors.”
“Oh Elizabeth, it is dreadful! I cannot think of you locked away there.”
Shades of Mrs Radcliffe indeed. Now was the time for briskness of speech again. “Georgiana, you really must cease minding servants’ gossip.”
“But will he? Will he send you away?”
“My dear girl, Mr Darcy is my husband. He can do almost anything he wants to me and be within the law. If he sends me to Scotland, I will be mother to a great many hairy cows and beg you to bring warm socks when you visit me. You will visit me, will you not?”
At last, the little smile I knew so well peeked out. “Oh, if you are banished to Scotland, I will pack up and leave with you. We will eat porridge morning, noon, and night and tend our lambs.”
“And you will marry a poor crofter and clean fish for the market. What a merry party we will be! Are we agreed, then, my dear? Now, promise me you will only laugh at the gossip.”
