I said, “I think you know I visited your Isabella.”
“London,” he grumbled. “Always a sickly season.”
“It was an adventure of your daughters’ making.”
No curiosity; no request for elaboration. “How are the children?” he asked.
I was accustomed to his conversational detours. “All in excellent health,” I said. “I think Henry resembles his namesake.”
Mr. Woodhouse was now attentive. “Me?”
“He’s a very handsome lad,” I said, then found myself prattling, once again the Miss Bates of old that I’d been trying to contain. On and on, the eternal talker… about Isabella’s furniture, their garden, their cook, a roasted goose, a kidney pie, a lemon sponge. When I finally managed to hold my tongue, I held out my empty cordial glass.
He refilled his own glass, too. I let my shawl drop a hand’s width from my shoulders. Was there color on his usually pale cheeks? I offered an explanation. “It’s warm in front of the fire,” I said, fanning my face, blotting my forehead. What did he understand? Had Mrs. Woodhouse died before the change of life? I smoothed my hair, smiling as if I took pride in it. “Your daughters thought I could do better with less. It was heavy and unwieldy. They encouraged me to… start over.”
Mr. Woodhouse glanced up, but quickly returned to the cards splayed in his hands. I heard myself say—and where on earth didthis come from?—“Mr. Woodhouse! Please! I’ve just shared the extremely personal news that I had my hair cut off in London, in the East End; in fact, at your daughters’ behest… with some wishful thinking behind it.”
He did not ask what their wishful thinking was. He did not acknowledge there was a new Miss Bates across the table. I heard not a compliment or an adjective. I stood up, causing my shawl to fall to the floor. “If it isn’t too late for Jim to drive me home, I choose to do that,” I declared.
“Miss Bates!” he exclaimed. “Did I say something to offend you? You sound cross, most uncharacteristically! Please sit down!”
Though stung, I kept my spleen. “It’s fine. I understand that you’re not susceptible.”
“To what?” he asked.
To what? To shoulders and necklines and overtures—but hardly what a lady said aloud. Instead, I whispered, “I’ve grown quite fond of you.”
“As I am of you, Miss Bates. You and your mother were always—”
“This is not the time to talk of me and Mrs. Bates in the same context!”
I then heard a word that startled me, nearly a term of endearment that signaled a breakthrough: He addressed me as “Hetty.”
I sat down. I leaned across the table—a convexity above my decolletage could not be helped—and placed my hand on his.
Where did this courage come from? Was it my visit to Petticoat Street, its Old Testament flavour? Was I Samson in reverse, whose strengths were nullified by the cutting of his hair?
When my touch evoked a smile and a slow, meaningful nod, it meant we were betrothed.
Mr. Woodhouse was fearful that his daughters would be crestfallen to hear of a marriage.
“I think quite the opposite,” I said.
He’d tell them in writing, yes?
The brave new me asked, “Can’t you just say to all the Knightleys, perhaps with a raised glass, ‘Miss Bates has agreed to be my wife’?”
He did exactly that, with me at his side. Emma hugged both her father and me at once, in such a way, and perhaps not accidentally, that I was pressed against his body.
“When?” everyone wanted to know.
“As soon as possible,” I said.
I was oddly unafraid of what a man’s marital privileges would mean. Though sheltered by my parents, I grew up in the country where the procreational impulses of dogs and horses were for all to see.
We were married at my father’s church by Mr. Elton. Emma and Isabella and their husbands sat in the front pew, beaming. My beloved niece, now Mrs. Frank Churchill, came from Yorkshire to play the church’s first organ, gifted by the gratefully liberated Knightley brothers.
I quite took to married life. Mr. Woodhouse, who for so long fancied himself neglected, was restored to a youthful vigor that shortened our hours at the card table.
