1.Composition- Georgiana
“Oh! it is of no consequence. I shall see her in January. But do you always write such charming long letters to her, Mr Darcy?”
“They are generally long; but whether always charming it is not for me to determine.”
“It is a rule with me, that a person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.”
“That will not do for a compliment to Darcy, Caroline,” cried her brother, “because he does not write with ease.He studies too much for words of four syllables. Do not you, Darcy?”
“My style of writing is very different from yours.”
“Oh!” cried Miss Bingley, “Charles writes in the most careless way imaginable. He leaves out half his words, and blots the rest.”
P&P Chapter 10
15 July 1811
In the end, it was a single word that changed the story of my life.
It was a word offour syllables—no more, no less. It was a worthy word, an upstanding word, an important word (a pretentious word if I am honest), but I doubt it often had so much effect.
Perhaps I should start at the beginning, which I will place on oneparticularmorning in the sitting room of my leasedestablishmentin Ramsgate. Before Ielucidate, I suppose I should introduce myself.
My name is MissGeorgianaDarcy, and I was fifteen years old at the time. My brother, Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley,was my guardian, along with my cousin, Colonel Richard Fitzwilliam of the Horse Guards. Both my parents were dead—my mother when I was a toddler, and my father before my tenth summer. My brother was a good guardian as far as guardians go; but being twelve years my senior, he was in an odd position, somewhere in theintersectionbetween brother and father. We shared a cordialrelationship, but I would not call itespeciallyaffectionate.
I was in my sitting room, fully dressed and preparing to meet my beau, Mr George Wickham, who was possibly the handsomest and mostamiableman I had ever met. He proposed marriage, an idea I viewed with somesatisfaction; but he alsoadvocatedelopement, a scheme I was far lesscomfortablewith. I put off the final decision for weeks and thought to happilyprocrastinateforever; or simply decline and demand he court me properly with my brother’s consent.
While I had not mentioned my proposedmatrimonyto my brotherexplicitly, Ihadmentioned I met the old family friend and spentsignificanttime with him. The gentleman was my father’s godson, so I supposed that made him nearly family. My companion, Mrs Younge, asserted such with quietauthority. Since she was my protector, chosen by my brother himself, I was inclined to believe her.
I awaited Mr Wickham for a walk on the beach, whiling away the time looking to see if my brother’s latest letter contained anything useful I hadpreviously disregarded. Whilerevisitingparticularcorrespondence, my eye stopped abruptly on a single word:facilitate. There it was, sittinginnocentlyin the middle of a paragraph, taunting me for lack ofconcentration. In fact, the presence of the word in aninnocuoussentence brought to mind anentirelydifferentfour-syllableword:consternation.
My brother’s good friend and confidant, Mr Bingley, loved to tease him, saying he wrote slowly because he studied too muchfor words of four syllables. The gentleman usually said similar things when his sister praised his straight lines or even hand, both of which made my brother want to shudder or throw his ink bottle at her. (I expected the former but hoped for the latter).
I took up the tease one Sunday evening when my brother was bored because he had nothing to do. In retaliation, he started including such words in every letter and demanded adefinitionfor each such word in my returncorrespondence, along with a validapplication, via ademonstrationof its properexecution, and anillustrationof how it could be used inconversation.(See how that works—not to mention how pretentious my brother can be).
In thatparticularletter, received the evening before, the word ‘facilitate’ was usedincorrectly. Not only was it usedincorrectly, but even moresuspiciously, it was in a part of a sentence that did not even make sense. Fitzwilliam Darcy did not use wordsincorrectly. No matter how busy, distracted, angry, (orinfrequentlyinebriated) he was; the Master of Pemberley never put pen to paper before he knew exactly how tocommunicateaccurately.
Unlike Mr Bingley, my brother wanted hiscorrespondentsto knowexactlywhat he said in precise detail. If a four-syllable word wasappropriate, he used one. With the amount my brother travelled or stayed in town, one could easily advance thehypothesisthat he was aprofessionalcorrespondentsincesubstantiallymore Pemberley business happened in writing than with directconversations. He never wanted his readers to suffer fromdisappointmentoruncertainty.
The word nagged at my mind, making me wonder about theimplicationsof mydiscovery.Ultimately, myanalysisforced me to reread the entire letter. That exercise raised morereservations. Indulging my suspicions left me trembling intrepidation.
Isubsequentlyreread allcorrespondencereceived during the month Mr Wickham had been courting me, and the results made me want to curse (in four-syllable curse words if there was any such thing). After that, it made me want toregurgitatemy luncheon into the chamber pot.
The lettersappearedcorrect, and theyseemedto respond to my own. However, they wereobviouslywritten by someone who knew Fitzwilliam well—but not by him.There were odd little references I missed on the first read, where Fitzwilliam was responding as if he had forgotten the previous three years. There were two other four-syllable words used incorrectly:obligationandproposition.
I concluded my brother had either fallen in love and was too smitten to write correctly (a possibility whoselikelihoodroughly matched being struck by lightning—twice in a row), or the letters wereinauthentic. In the end, I favoured the forgeryhypothesisand decided to test it with anexperiment.
I sat for an hour considering my newintelligence(orspeculation). I was to meet my beau shortly and thought about thecoincidenceof his appearing in Ramsgate right when I arrived with no apparentoccupation. I knew he was not flush, as we needed my pin money to purchase anything. I knew my father gave him a gentleman’seducationand a legacy in his will. I knew any man of his age could usually handle a few minorexpendituresif he was ready for marriage. I was six years from mymajority, and I knew my brother did not expect me to be anywhere near the state ofmatrimonyas I was not even out for another two years. I knew—
With a start and a shudder, the obvious conclusion struck me, and I proceeded to itsimplications.He knew Mrs Younge, and he was in some sort of scheme with my companion! What other possibleexplanationcould there be for my companion—the woman my brother hired to teach meproprietyandaccomplishments—to allow me to spend time with a man alone—the worst possibleviolation.
It mattered not that he was an ‘old family friend’. It would be one thing if he was a fifty-year-old clergyman with a formidable wife and a dozen children like the vicar in Kympton. That sort of family friend was safe as kittens. But a handsome, young,solitary,unoccupiedman without two farthings to rub together half a decade after finishing school (which my father paid for), who was pushing merelentlesslytowards an elopement—thatwas an entirely differentsituation.
I quickly came to a startling anddisconcertingrealisation. I felt tremendousuncertaintyabout themoralityandproprietyof mypreparationsfor marriage, not to mention its practicality. I owed long-standingobligationsto my brother. This could ruin both of ourreputations. Ruining my own would be bad enough, but hurting my brother was intolerable. It would be the worst possibleviolationof his trust.
This had to stop!
Resolutionformed, I decided to take my life and fate into my own hands. Assuming Mrs Younge was complicit,who could I trust?Several servants came and went during my stay, and my companion had the final say on all hires. Who was to say I was not being watchedregularly, if notconsistently? I mostly lived a life ofisolationlike a fish in a bowl. Oneunderhandedservant could easily observe me and report the results. Who could I trust?Nobody!I could not trust a single,solitaryperson in myestablishment.
