“My apologies, Lady Catherine. I lost track of time. I encountered Mrs. Collins in the forest, and she needed some assistance carrying a basket, owing to her condition.”
I held my breath, hoping my aunt was at least tolerably fond enough of Charlotte to deem such an excursion worthwhile. My aunt had been as absent from our conversations in the parsonage as the topic of Wickham had been. There was a long silence before I got a reply.
“Why had you ventured into the woods in the first place?” Lady Catherine asked.
“I took a wrong turn,” I explained, well aware it made mesound entirely foolish to not have realised I was wandering from manicured gardens to freely growing woodland. Better foolish than insolent, if I wanted my time at Rosings to be bearable. “It has been so long since I visited, and I thought I remembered the pathways far better than I really do.”
Lady Catherine studied me for longer than I could comfortably stand still, and I fought the urge to fidget under her scrupulous gaze. When she finally spoke, it was a relief to my tense muscles.
“Your poor timekeeping has kept Lord Salter waiting,” she said, gesturing to the man who stepped forwards to look down at me.
He had to be twenty years my senior, grey wisps dappling his sideburns and his hair, before he covered it with the top hat he’d been holding. There was something snide in his features as he straightened his jacket and then addressed me like I was lucky to have his attention.
“Indeed it has,” he said, shaping the words as insults. Then he turned back to my aunt. “She needs work. More than you led me to believe.”
“She has been poorly raised, my lord, but now that she is in my care, we will soon see improvement.”
I was speechless, trying to make sense of the conversation in a way that didn’t revolt me. Before I had time to say anything, Lord Salter tipped his hat to Lady Catherine.
“See to it. I can give you one month; then I will look for someone more suitable elsewhere,” he said, before striding towards his carriage.
Rather than offer me any explanation, my aunt continued with her chastising.
“Poor timekeeping is unacceptable for a woman running a household. How can you expect punctuality from your staff if you are not there to enforce it?”
“Who was that?” I asked, finally finding my tongue again.
“The Viscount Salter,” she said, as if I should already have known. “His family owns a large amount of land that will one day pass to him. They are influential and well-bred and are exactly the kind of connection you need to make to redeem your family name after the ill-conceived and woeful match your brother doomed you with. You ought to count yourself lucky that I have managed to convince him you will make a suitable wife. Although after today’s poor judgement on your behalf, it will be a much more difficult task.”
I wanted to protest her defamation of Darcy and Elizabeth, but her mentions of marriage shocked the fight out of me.
“But I do not know him,” I said weakly.I do not love him, I held back. Love was not a prerequisite for a marriage, but to be promised to a total stranger was another matter.
I could not be married in England without my brother’s consent, and I doubted Lord Salter would be expecting elopement at Gretna Green, but if Lady Catherine arranged the match and had it announced publicly, it would be as good as sealed. I could not get out of it without blackening the Darcy name.
“Why should it matter whether you know him?” Lady Catherine asked. “It is a sensible match. We have work to do.”
Her words felt like the signing of a death warrant, but as far as she knew my only crime was being born a woman. Even without knowing anything of the shape of my heart or of Kitty, she would still subject me to a future of her choosing. Perhaps she had forgotten how it felt to be a powerless young woman all but sold to the highest bidder, or maybe she remembered perfectly and felt it had earned her the right to force me into the same fate.
I was not in control of this chess game; I was a pawn at the mercy of the player, and that meant I had only one option. Pawns could be promoted if they lasted in the game long enough to make it to the far side of the board, gaining the same status as the queen, who could move as she chose. It was a game of endurance, but perhaps it was still one I could play to win. All I had to do was survive.
It was difficult to say whether my first week at Rosings would have been more tolerable had I not disappeared for so much of that first morning. Lady Catherine tested me on every possible facet of my being that she saw any potential need to be honed to please Lord Salter. In the more studious aspects, I passed with flying colours. My French was impeccable, and my Italian almost as faultless. My piano was as practised as any governess could hope for, and my imperfections on the harp likely only discernible to a trained ear. The things I enjoyed, I excelled at.
The same could not be said for that which I found lessto my taste. I had never been one for embroidery, and my attempt at a sprig of bluebells came out entirely unrecognisable. My drawing was adequate but lacking any real refinement, and it turned out I could remember dance steps only with Kitty to lead me across the floor.
I was, as a sum total of my parts, a disappointment. Lady Catherine kept ruthless notes on the aspects of me that most displeased her, creating a list of things to address. Not only was I expected to practise my skills in the things I most disliked, but I also had to endure an endless tirade of small corrections to every one of my mannerisms to which she took offence. I spoke incorrectly; I sat incorrectly; I held my fork incorrectly. I couldn’t help but feel that any man who judged his potential wife on how she ate peas wasn’t the kind of man anyone should be marrying.
Kitty did not give a damn how I spoke or sat or handled cutlery. She liked that I could be so absorbed in a book that I forgot the world around me. She did not care how well I could embellish a handkerchief with flowers. I could impress her just as easily with Latin or Greek as I could with a lopsided drawing of a vase. Those were the thoughts I relied on every night when I slumped against my pillows, exhausted from hours of deportment training that saw me walking up and down the portrait gallery with my chin parallel to the floor. The people who mattered most cared least about what was “proper.”
There had been no more talk of Lord Salter, but I knew what I was being trained for now. I was being shaped to pleasehim, and it made me feel sick to my stomach. The idea that Darcy might approve of the match was too upsetting to dwell on, but it nevertheless lurked at the back of my thoughts. I could only hope he came to Rosings to collect me before the one-month deadline was met, and that he valued my happiness more than my reputation.
Chapter Nineteen
Mornings were nothing to look forward to. I would spend a largely sleepless night trying to fight the urge to seek out the library, knowing it was not even the library I truly wanted to visit, and then spend a painfully formal breakfast trying not to fall asleep in my food while I conducted cordial conversations about the weather with my cousin. Then the lessons of the day would begin.
Lady Catherine had me sewing a sampler to improve my abilities with a needle. It was the sort of exercise usually carried out by children a decade younger, having them follow faintly pencilled lines to stitch out the alphabet and several decorative borders. It was slow work that, even with the use of a thimble, left my fingers pitted and sore. I hated the fact thatthe practise was helping. MyMwas far more orderly than myAhad been.
While I sewed, my aunt kept close watch over me. She seemed concerned I might disappear again if she took her eyes off me, and it would be a lie to say the thought had not crossed my mind. I found myself using more force than necessary to stab through the cheap canvas she’d supplied me with in time with the scratch of her pen against paper as she wrote out a letter.
