“And I hope that soup is edible, Mrs. Smith. Your mistress seems weak today, and if she becomes too ill to sit at the table, she will only need broth, which Penny can make, and you can find employment at the house next door.”
With that stern admonishment, I walked to Pemberley.
I took a gravel track just behind Mrs. Jennings’s house that went through a fallow plot of ground and intersected with the church road heading east of Lambton through a cut in the hills. I had worn one of my better dresses, hitched up to keep the hems dry. Bundled up to my chin to protect my coat collar from the wet, sporting a velvet calash and matching reticule, and wielding a large umbrella, I was armed for my errand.
For once, it was not raining, though it might do so at any minute. But, for the moment, I appreciated the reprieve and took in the scenery I passed, imagining what the village might look like in summer when the scrub forest that dotted the hills turned green. In sunlight, perhaps the limestone of the buildings would not seem so dingy, even less so if the flower boxes were kept full of pansies and violets. In all likelihood, Lambton was a pretty place to visit if one could arrive in the spring and be acknowledged as a visiting gentleman’s daughter.
I had expected such treatment; I had felt entitled to the respect and interest, in fact.
And if Mrs. Jennings had been in her right mind, if she enjoyed visitors and went to church on Sundays as I had assumed, she would have introduced me properly.Everyone would have known my station in life immediately, and I would have been treated accordingly.
Even my aunt and uncle did not anticipate—they could not have imagined—that Mrs. Jennings had no friends or visitors, and she would not remember them if they came. Her forgetfulness left her isolated and ignored in the house farthest up the road, and in consequence, I was classed as the nobody come to take Mrs. Burke’s place.
I could hardly go about claiming to be a gentleman’s daughter from an estate in Hertfordshire. This sort of self-promotion would have the exact opposite effect than intended and earn heaps of disgust by persons of every walk of life. And while I had not gone to that extreme, I had comported myself as I always did at home, thus earning the general dislike of the entire neighborhood for the sin of putting on airs.
That, compounded with my youth and inexperience, made me the butt of everyone’s joke in the village. And while I normally would have done something to rectify my standing, I hardly had time even to consider it. From the first moment of my arrival, I had been overwhelmed.
Every step I took toward a rich man’s estate reminded me of the facts of my life, and I pondered my situation. I may have been a gentleman’s daughter, but our family clung to the very last rung on the ladder of respectability. Our relations were uninteresting. Mr. Collins, Aunt and Uncle Philips, and even, unfortunately, Uncle Gardiner’s profession dragged at our feet as we dangled precariously over a fall into a different class altogether. My association with Mrs. Jennings had shown me this in dramatic fashion, for if my aunt and uncle had been landed relations, things would have been vastly different for Aunt Gardiner’s widowed aunt.
Unconsciously perhaps, I had considered all this before. I flaunted rules and restrictions as a way of despising the system of power that threatened to undo us. After all, we could not be hurt by a classification of status if we refused to bow and laughed at it instead. I claimed to care nothing at all about who was who, even rubbing the nose of the likes of Mr. Darcy in his own snobbery.
Yet Lambton had educated me a little on the reason Caroline Bingley spent every waking moment grasping at whatever shreds of superiority she could invent. This life, the one in which I had been unceremoniously dunked, was but a foretaste of the spinsterhood my mother so dreaded for us. Perhaps the reality of our precarious future had also caused my father to resort to caustic humor as a means of denial and self-protection.
I reached the church road and walked the hump between muddy ruts, searching the side of the lane for anything beautiful to look at and finding nothing save dead grasses, bent and crushed into mud, and the bare, thorny branches of nearby brambles. I looked up and searched the gray December clouds for some brightness, some happy thought at the end of my somber contemplations.
All that came to me was a sort of resolution.
I would despise, always and forever, a system of hierarchy that relegates a sweet, old lady such as Mrs. Jennings to a life of solitary neglect. It brought out the inherent meanness in chandlers, butchers, and shopkeepers and sanctioned the small cuts that even the lowliest kitchen maid must perpetually suffer from her so-called betters. I had been treated to all these slights in Lambton, and as such, I would never in future, out of pride and perversity, resort to any version of this behavior if I could help it.
***
Pemberley was not precisely “just up the church road” as I had been told at Stevenson’s sundries shop.
I arrived at last, and from the aching of my feet, gauged the distance to be farther than Netherfield Park was from Longbourn. Nevertheless, I persevered, for I had nothing better to do than to sit in Mrs. Jennings’s smelly house and read about the wonders of carbolic.
The manor, which stood majestically in a vast, exquisite park, was visible for nearly half a mile as I walked down the long hill, past the lake and over a bridged fall of water. I admit to being startled by its grandeur and shocked at the apparent wealth of its owner. And while I was slightly overborn by the place, I strove for dignity as I went to the front door.
Before I could sound the knocker, the great doors opened, and I was greeted by an underbutler, I surmised, since the man was fairly young. The expression on his face was a perfectly schooled combination of welcome and dismissal. He was prepared to do either, depending upon the terms of my application.
“I would like to see Mrs. Reynolds if she is available,” I said.
“Very good, Miss…”
I handed him my card. “Miss Elizabeth Bennet.”
Thankfully, I was not asked to wait outside on the grand portico, but I was hardly brought fully into the house either. I was directed to a bench set off to the side against the wall by the entrance—no doubt a place where every unknown was sent to await his or her fate upon entering such a house. The underbutler, Mr. Brown as I overheard him addressed, spoke to a footman who went down the hall. At no time was I to be left alone, it seemed.
Some minutes of waiting ensued, but I was eventually escorted to Mrs. Reynolds’s office.
I curtseyed. “Forgive this intrusion, Mrs. Reynolds, but I have no other sources, and I have come to ask for your advice.”
“Yes, Miss Bennet?” she said, glancing over my person and taking my measure, no doubt.
“I am visiting Lambton from Hertfordshire, come to assist Mrs. Jennings.”
“I do not believe I know Mrs. Jennings.”
“She is a widow who inherited the Frye house. Her housekeeper, Mrs. Burke, upon whom she relies for all manner of assistance and support, was called away. My aunt, who lives in town, is Mrs. Jennings’s niece, and she herself could not come. She has four young children and a busy life there.”
