Pemberley to Waterloo: Georgiana Darcy's Diary, Volume 2 (2 page)

Or,
Mr. Osborne tried to kiss me under the mistletoe last night, wasn't it
shocking
? But he is
such
a beau that I gave him my hand to kiss to show we were still friends.

Or any of the other several dozen uses of the term I have heard from Kitty this morning alone.

Kitty of course is Kitty Bennet, Elizabeth's younger sister, who has come to stay with us here at Pemberley for the Christmas holiday.

This year our Christmas celebrations will be very quiet, since Elizabeth is so close to her confinement and naturally cannot travel or go out very much. But our neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Herron have their granddaughter Maria here on a visit. The Herrons are an older couple, Mrs. Herron plump and comfortable, Mr. Herron devoted to sport and still wearing an old-fashioned powdered wig. But they are both very kind and love to have young faces about them. This last fortnight, they have been organising almost nightly supper parties and dances for Miss Maria's amusement--and Kitty has been to them all.

And I am probably being unkind writing of her this way. As well as Kitty, we also have Thomas and Jack Gardiner here for the holiday. They are Elizabeth's nephews, the children of her aunt and uncle Gardiner. Thomas is five and Jack is nearly seven. And they've come to Pemberley because Mr. Gardiner's mother has been very ill, and has come to stay with the Gardiners for a time. She is, it seems, in need of complete quiet and rest. And, as Mrs. Gardiner wrote Elizabeth, 'complete quiet,' is more or less an impossible dream with four children under the age of ten in the house.

Thomas and Jack also have two older sisters, Anna and Charlotte; they've gone to stay with Elizabeth's sister Jane.

Part of the reason Kitty came here was to help with looking after the boys, because Elizabeth
is
so near her time. She thinks the baby will be born by the end of the month, so just two weeks at the most, and really it could be any day now at all. And of course Thomas and Jack scarcely know me. They've only come to Pemberley with their parents once, and I was on a duty-visit then to stay with Aunt de Bourgh.

Elizabeth thought a familiar face would help--and Kitty is very, very good with them. Poor boys, they were so homesick right at first for their mother and father, and wishing they could be in their own home for Christmas. Kitty plays spillikins and hide-the-slipper with them all day long, and she's been working tirelessly on Christmas preparations for them: cutting up paper stars and angels for decorations, speaking to Mrs. Reynolds our housekeeper about having bullet pudding and snapdragons and all the other traditional children's Christmas games. Of course I have helped, but it has all been Kitty's ideas first and foremost.

It's just that for all her endless talk of 'beaux' and dancing and parties, Kitty is already engaged to a perfectly nice young man of her own. Her betrothed, John Ayres, is a captain in Edward's regiment. I've never met Captain Ayres, but Edward speaks of him as a good soldier and a good man, sober and responsible and kind-hearted, as well. And Elizabeth has met him once and says that she liked him very much indeed.

Elizabeth is worried about Kitty. Or rather, what she said to me this morning was, "I'm not entirely sure whether to hope Captain Ayres never hears of Kitty's behaviour--or to hope he does."

No fewer than seven notes had just arrived for Kitty by the first post, and she'd read them all one after the other, giggled, made a show of putting them away in her reticule ... looked hopefully at me and Elizabeth as though wishing we would ask her what was in them ... and then left, still giggling, to take Thomas and Jack outside to play.

Elizabeth and I were left alone in the morning room. I was painting a rendition of a pirate ship's flag that I'd promised to Jack for one of their games, and Elizabeth was lying on the couch looking cross. Or rather, as cross as its possible for Elizabeth to look, which is not very.

Elizabeth is so active and vivacious that she's not used to having to be quiet so much of the time, having to lie on the sofa and rest in the afternoons or stop to catch her breath climbing stairs. The other day I asked how she was feeling--and she made a face at me and said, "Like an over-stuffed goose in a
much
too small oven." But then she smiled and put her hand over the swelling mound of her stomach, and I saw the fabric of her dress move as the baby kicked hard in response.

We both laughed, then, and Elizabeth said that the baby must be as anxious to be born as she was to have it
be
born.

This morning, though, she was frowning as she looked through the window to where we could see Kitty and the two boys playing chase up and down the paths in the winter-frozen garden. Kitty has dark hair like Elizabeth's, but where Elizabeth's hair curls, Kitty's is perfectly straight--unless she tortures it into ringlets with the curling iron--and her eyes are hazel instead of Elizabeth's brown. But I can see the resemblance between them; their faces are the same shape, and they both have the same creamy-pale skin. Kitty isn't as lovely as Elizabeth, perhaps, but she's very pretty even still, and so high-spirited and ready to laugh that I can see why the young men flock round her so.

I watched her make a jump at Jack from behind a mulberry bush, sending him shrieking with laughter off down another path, then said to Elizabeth, "Do you mean you hope that Captain Ayres may break off the engagement if he hears of Kitty flirting with other men?"

Elizabeth sighed and shifted and rubbed her lower back as though it ached. "It is a horrible thing to say about my own sister, isn't it? But maybe I do, a little. It's just that Captain Ayres is ... good. Good and earnest and a little shy. When I met him, I thought he was an unlikely choice for Kitty to have made--I would never have expected her to find him anything but dull, much less accept a proposal from him. But I thought it showed that perhaps she had more good sense than--" Elizabeth stopped, her mouth twisting into a small, wry smile. "More good sense than I'd given her credit for, though that is more or less a horrible thing to say about my own sister, too. But I thought Captain Ayres might ... might be a steadying influence on her. That maybe his earnest good-sense was exactly what she needed." Elizabeth looked out into the garden and sighed again. "And maybe it still is. The trouble is that Kitty doesn't seem to think it so. If Captain Ayres hears of how Kitty has been behaving, he'll be hurt--maybe heartbroken. He truly does love her, I think. But even still, that might be better than if he actually marries her, and finds he has absolutely nothing in common with his wife."

Elizabeth's eyes went distant and pensive, and I knew she was thinking of her and Kitty's own parents. I have met them, of course, and Elizabeth has spoken of them enough to me that I know theirs has not been the happiest of marriages. Mr. Bennet is a rather reserved, scholarly man, with a dry sense of humour and a sometimes sarcastic tongue. And Mrs. Bennet is ... well, when she was young, she may well have been very much like Kitty. Though from what Elizabeth has said, I think without Kitty's genuinely affectionate heart.

"Have you tried speaking to Kitty about it?" I asked.

Elizabeth nodded, her eyes on the garden. "All she does is roll her eyes at me and say that she's engaged, not dead and buried. And that she means to keep on enjoying herself as much as she possibly can for as long as she can, before she has to resign herself to all the dull duties of being someone's wife." Elizabeth let out her breath. "And if I scold her too much--or refuse to let her go out to the Herrons' parties--she's likely to leave Pemberley altogether. She'll either go back to our parents, or she'll go to Lydia, which will be even worse." Elizabeth rubbed her back again. "Every time I debate the question with myself, I come to the conclusion that letting her stay is the only way of preventing her from getting into even worse trouble than she's likely to get into here. If only it weren't for--" she stopped abruptly.

However she feels, Elizabeth looks just as lovely as ever. Her face fairly glows. And her dark eyes have always been bright with laughter, but all these last months there has been a kind of deep, quiet happiness to them, as well, even when the baby has made her uncomfortable or ill.

This morning she was wearing a morning dress of peach- and white-striped percale, with a lace cap perched on her dark curls. But she looked tired, I realised all at once, with faint bruise-like shadows under her eyes. And when she fell silent, she looked, not back at Kitty and the boys out in the garden, but down at her own two hands, resting in her lap.

I hesitated another moment--and added a few more streaks of white paint to the skull-and-crossbones design I was painting onto the black background of the boys' flag--then asked her, "Elizabeth, is there something ... something wrong? Besides Kitty, I mean?"

I thought perhaps that she'd be worrying about the birth. Because women do die in child-bed.

I hate writing that--I hate even thinking that. But that is how my own mother died. And the baby--the baby that would have been my younger brother--died, as well.

I can't imagine Pemberley without Elizabeth here, for all she has only been married to my brother these two years.

I thought Elizabeth might have been about to say something--to ask me something, perhaps--because she looked over at me and drew in her breath. But then she seemed to change her mind. She shook her head and said, instead, "Nothing--except perhaps that I'm beginning to feel as though this child has decided never to be born at all." She smiled. There was just a faint edge of strain in the smile, I thought. And then she said, "I had a letter from Darcy this morning. I know he's to arrive this afternoon with Edward--but he must have posted the letter when he was still in town. He wrote that he happened to run across Caroline while in London. And since she was at a loose end for the holiday season, he's invited her here."

"Caroline? Caroline
Bingley
?" I looked at Elizabeth in disbelief. Because after what happened last spring, I should have thought Pemberley the last place on earth Caroline would wish to be.

Elizabeth got awkwardly to her feet, and seemed very focused on rearranging a vase of flowers as she nodded. "Yes. She's not coming with Darcy and Edward. Apparently she had some engagements in town. But Darcy says she'll be here in a few days' time."

And then she came over to the table I was working on and hugged me and said, "And you are now officially released from listening to my moaning--you can go and sit by the window and watch the approach to the house for signs of Edward's arrival--as I know you must have been longing to do all morning long."

Later ...

I only have a moment to write this; the gong for dinner will be rung soon, and then I'll have to go downstairs. But Edward has finally arrived. And everything is all right, it really is.

I hadn't even realised I was going to write that until I saw the words forming on the page; it doesn't at first glance seem to make any sense. But as silly as it sounds, I was nervous of meeting Edward again.

I've known Edward all my life, of course. But somehow now that we are engaged to be married, it seems as though he is someone else entirely to me. Which in a way he is, really: a lover, not just a friend.

I should be grateful, I know, that Napoleon was defeated last year and exiled to the Isle of Elba--which means that the seemingly endless war between our two nations is finally, finally at an end.

But Edward is still a colonel in the army, and his regiment has been posted to Ireland these last months. Which I should be grateful for, too--grateful that Edward is with the cavalry and not the infantry. Because so many regiments of the infantry have now been sent off to fight the war against the American colonies.

Still, Edward being posted to Ireland makes his travelling to Pemberley almost as difficult as it would be from France--and that in turn is why I've only seen him twice before this in the last half year.

We've written letters, of course--at least it is permissible for us to correspond, now that we are betrothed. But it's not the same as being with him. And each time we've been apart and it turns into weeks and then months since I have last seen him, I have started to feel as though ... as though I must surely have just imagined his falling in love with me.

Edward is ten years older than I am, which makes him nine-and-twenty this year. And I've been in love with him since I was six years old. Hopelessly in love, I always thought--because it seemed to me I stood a greater chance of being struck by lightning than ever hearing Edward say that he loved me in return.

And then, too, it occurred to me that our whole relationship has changed. And to worry that perhaps I wouldn't have anything to say to Edward-the-lover. I scarcely ever have my old childhood attacks of freezing shyness anymore. But waiting for Edward's arrival this morning, thinking about seeing him again at last, I could feel one coming on. I kept thinking how awful it would be if he came and we were stiff and awkward with each other, instead of easy and friendly as we've always been.

I kept playing horrible scenarios over and over in my mind in which we talked to each other like over-polite strangers at a dinner table.

Terribly cold weather we're having, isn't it?

Yes, but if it stays so, we may have a white Christmas after all.

But everything is all right. Better than all right.

Edward rode up to the house just before dinner time. My brother was with him. I suppose I should have explained before that Edward wrote a few weeks ago to say that he had business in London, and then would travel from there on to Pemberley for Christmas. And since Fitzwilliam also had business to conduct in regards our family's London property, he rode out a week ago with the plan of meeting Edward in town, settling their business, and then travelling back together.

When they arrived, Elizabeth had finished her conversation with Mrs. Reynolds and come to sit with me, so we went out to meet them together. It was then I realised fully how nervous I was of seeing Edward, because my heart was pounding, and I didn't even mind keeping to Elizabeth's slower pace as we walked out to the drive, where some of the stablehands had come out to take Edward's and Fitzwilliam's horses.