Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart Page 11

  Eleanor shook her head. “See her if you must, Claire, but please remember that in a few days, you’ll be gone and I’ll be left here to console her.”

  “To console her?”

  “She’ll be devastated when you leave. She so rarely finds someone who will listen to her ravings.”

  You could listen to them. I pressed my lips together to keep from vocalizing the thought. Whatever stood between Harriet and Eleanor, it wasn’t something I could fix. Not in the space of a few days. Not when my own life was such a mess.

  “I’m sorry if she’ll be upset. I’ll do my best to help her understand.”

  “Hmmph.” Eleanor’s head lifted in a regal manner. “I can’t forbid you, obviously. But I would have thought you would respect my wishes.”

  I would have thought so too, but that was before I’d thrown my moral code to the wind and embarked on my current course of dishonesty and deviousness.

  “I’m sorry, Eleanor.”

  “Not sorry enough.” She glanced at her watch. “The others will be here in a moment. I want you to promise me that you won’t see my mother again.”

  I swallowed hard. “I can’t.” The words were almost a squeak. “I have to return something to her.”

  She shook her head. “You can give it to me. I’ll see that it’s returned to my mother.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t.”

  Eleanor’s jaw hardened, as did her eyes. “I must warn you—”

  Footsteps echoed on the staircase and in the hallway just outside the door. I said a silent prayer of thanksgiving for whoever had decided to show up early that morning.

  My gratitude didn’t last long. James appeared in the doorway, scowling at me. I bristled and sat up straighter. Why should he be scowling at me? He was the one who had spurned me the night before.

  Spurned. I really had been reading too much Jane Austen.

  “Good morning,” he said stiffly and went to sit close to Eleanor.

  “Morning.” I retrieved the folder containing Missy’s paper and buried my nose in it so I wouldn’t have to look at him.

  Eleanor’s head bobbed up, a pointer who scented tension as if it were her quarry. “Hello, James. You’re early as well.” Then her eyes narrowed, and she looked from me to James and then back again. “Is everything all right?”

  I would rather have been tortured than admit to Eleanor Gibbons that I was anything less than perfect.

  “Everything’s fine.” The words gushed out like water from a hydrant. “Perfect, in fact. Sheer bliss.”

  James gave me an odd look, and I thought I saw Eleanor rolling her eyes.

  “I’ll have you go first, then, Claire. Are you prepared?”

  Fear coalesced into a ball in my stomach. “Sure.” I shifted in my chair and took deep breaths. Lots and lots of deep breaths.

  “The Role of Sisterhood in Pride and Prejudice.” It had seemed rather straightforward up until now. Jane was Lizzie’s good sister. The other three were bad. Or at least highly problematic. Darcy’s sister Georgiana, who’d committed a youthful indiscretion, was a bit of a mixed bag. Nothing earth shattering.

  Why, then, did I feel so uneasy?

  I crumpled the folder between my fingers as the three of us waited in uncomfortable silence for the rest of the group to arrive. James glowered at the empty bookshelf across from him and gave no more notice of me than he would to a potted plant. Eleanor was reading something, probably a handbook on how to rid yourself of unwanted pests who wouldn’t leave your aging mother alone. Somewhere a clock ticked ominously and made me feel like a condemned prisoner.

  At last, though, the others arrived. Martin led them in like the grand marshal of a parade, Olga towering behind him and the New Zealand ladies laughing and smiling at his witticisms. The cardiologist looked slightly more relaxed now that he ’d gotten over the hurdle of presenting. I could only hope that I would feel the same in the very near future.

  “So, then, shall we begin?” Eleanor looked particularly severe in a black turtleneck and a sensible tweed skirt.

  I had no idea how she withstood all that wool. I was melting in my sleeveless dress and sandals. Still, I was the one with perspiration beading my brow, while she looked as cool as a cucumber. A very intimidating cucumber who also happened to be rather displeased with me.

  “Claire?” She smiled at me, only it wasn’t really a smile at all. “Why don’t you begin?”

  “Sure.” I straightened in my chair and opened the folder in my lap. Then I looked around the group and gave them a smile of my own, one even less authentic than Eleanor’s.

  “As some of you know, my sister couldn’t be here, so I’m presenting the paper on her behalf.”

  Martin nodded encouragingly and winked at me. The New Zealand ladies made slight cooing noises of encouragement, and Olga sat up straight, pen poised above her notepad. The cardiologist’s eyelids were drooping, so I decided to look at him while I was speaking.

  “Pride and Prejudice gives Austen the ideal vehicle to examine the gift, and the curse, of sisterhood,” I began, my voice wavering. I stopped, cleared my throat, and then forged ahead. “While the relationship between Jane and Elizabeth has long been thought to present the apex of the sisterly bond.” Apex of the sisterly bond? I wasn’t even sure what that meant. “… Elizabeth’s three younger sisters provide a substantial threat to the older pair achieving their dreams of marriage.” So far, so good. “And yet,” I read, “one must ask whether the well-intentioned Elizabeth in fact proves to be a significant obstacle in her own right to her sister Jane ’s happiness.”

  Huh? Now that I was reading Missy’s words aloud, they seemed different than when I’d read them on the plane.

  “Jane and Bingley do secure one another’s affections in the end, but Elizabeth’s attempts to ‘help’ her sister”—why was the word help in quotation marks?—“actually hinder Jane’s ability to craft her own happy ending.”

  Hinder? How was helping someone hindering them? And suddenly I realized that Missy wasn’t talking about Jane and Elizabeth Bennet at all. No, she was clearly talking about Missy and Claire Prescott, whether she realized it or not. The ball of fear in my stomach crawled up into my throat and lodged near my vocal chords. I sat in silence for several long moments and tried to remember to breathe. Deeply. Or, barring that, at all.

  After a long moment, I found my voice again. “While Elizabeth appears to be working for Jane ’s good, her actions undermine Jane’s best interests. For example, Elizabeth’s tromp through the fields to visit her sister when she is ill at Netherfield Park lowers Jane ’s standing in the eyes of Mr. Bingley’s sisters and his best friend, Mr. Darcy.”

  Undermine? Was she kidding with this?

  I continued to read, but I hardly paid attention anymore. Missy’s meaning was quite clear. While generations of readers might have thought Elizabeth Bennet a stellar sister who loved and supported Jane, Missy took exception to that interpretation. No, to Missy, Elizabeth Bennet was the cause of Jane ’s difficulties, not her solace in them. Her sister’s helpfulness was, in fact, the very evil that kept Jane from making her feelings known to Mr. Bingley and, thus, attaching him and securing her future as well as her family’s.

  “Elizabeth Bennet is hardly worthy of a hero like Mr. Darcy,” I read, heat rising in my cheeks.

  Was that how Missy felt about me? My hands trembled where they clutched the edges of the paper. Years of sacrifice and hard work, and for what? So that my sister could believe that I had, in fact, hindered her own quest for happiness? That I didn’t deserve any of my own?

  I tried to keep my voice from shaking as I approached the end of the paper, but I was only partially successful. Should I feel betrayed? Indignant? I didn’t know. All I did know was that I was devastated.

  “Jane Austen understood all too well from personal experience that sisterly devotion could easily cross into dependence, and while both Jane and Lizzie achieve their dream of a love match, the happy end
ing arrives in spite of, rather than due to, Elizabeth’s actions.”

  I finished the last page and set it in my lap with a carefully controlled motion. I glanced from one face to the next, but the others simply smiled or nodded in bland agreement.

  “An interesting notion,” Eleanor said. Her look was neither bland nor smiling. In fact, she looked pleased, in a rather cross sort of way. “Elizabeth as villainess. I’ve not heard that one before.”

  “Yes, well, my sister does tend to have a rather… unique take on things.” I closed the folder and crossed my hands on top of it, but it was like closing the lid to Pandora’s box long after its evils had escaped.

  “I’d never quite considered that before,” Rosie said in her soft New Zealand accent. “Still, I’m not sure I can accept that Elizabeth did more harm than good. She certainly intended the best for her sisters. All of them, not just Jane.”

  “You know what they say about the road to hell,” said the cardiologist with a chuckle.

  “So Elizabeth should have conformed more to the standards of her day?” Olga asked the group in general, her tone slightly indignant. “She should have succumbed to the demands of patriarchy and proved a compliant, mousy sister?” Her heavily plucked eyebrows formed arches that would have been at home in the Hall. She looked at me. “What do you think of your sister’s thesis?”

  Any words that I might have said couldn’t escape past the knot in my throat. What did I think of Missy’s point of view? The problem was that I could understand it all too well. I could say that since my arrival in England, I had begun to see my own behavior over the past decade in a different light. What I thought was that Missy might, in fact, have a point. And that thought, that admission, made me want to cry.

  But I wasn’t about to cry in front of these people, especially not in front of James or Eleanor.

  “I’m merely the messenger,” I said with the slightest of smiles. It was all I could manage to produce. I forced my voice not to tremble. “I learned long ago not to take responsibility for my sister.” It was the biggest lie I had told since I’d arrived on English soil. I’d spent the whole of my adult life taking responsibility for everything to do with Missy. And now I was being told, albeit indirectly and while I was an ocean away, that my efforts had not been appreciated. Not in the least.

  “So what do the rest of you think?” Eleanor waded into the silence that followed my disclaimer. “Was Elizabeth a good sister or a bad one?”

  I could have sworn she had a gleam in her eye, as if she perfectly understood the reason for my distress, but surely I was imagining it. She didn’t know anything about Missy or anything about me, other than that I was noncompliant when it came to her request that I leave her mother alone.

  Louise patted Rosie ’s knee next to her. “Sisters are rather more complicated than that, though, aren’t they? Austen understands that thoroughly. Look at those Bennet girls. They’re all unique, as are their relationships with one another. Really, I think the problem here is down to Mr. Bingley’s sisters. They do the most damage to his prospects for happiness. And Jane Bennet’s.” Louise smiled at me, an offering of consolation and support.

  Martin nodded. “An excellent point. And I, for one, think it’s a bit far-fetched to blame Elizabeth for Jane’s difficulties. Austen makes it clear that Jane guards her feelings too closely. If she had been more open toward Bingley, she would have attached him at the beginning.”

  “And thus spared all of us the next several hundred pages,” said James.

  I gaped at him, and a sudden wave of color washed his cheeks. Clearly he’d not meant to speak the words aloud.

  Olga scribbled something furiously in her notebook, the cardiologist looked amused, and Eleanor gave a harrumphing noise.

  “Yes, well, there are those of us who find the next several hundred pages quite fascinating.” She turned away from James and addressed a comment to Martin, but I didn’t hear what she said.

  From his seat several chairs away, James was looking at me, a glint of laughter in his eyes just as there had been on that first day when our gazes had met and I’d felt the connection from one end of my body to the other.

  Only it was too late now. James had made his feelings clear. I broke eye contact and turned my attention back to Eleanor. Well, not my attention exactly, but at least my gaze. The conversation had moved on into a more general discussion, and I made every effort to nod and look thoughtful in the right places.

  Martin, bless him, carried the conversational ball with aplomb, and sooner than I could have hoped, the discussion time for Missy’s paper ended. Eleanor declared a tea interval before the next presentation, and I practically leaped from my chair, brushing past the others to escape to the restroom.

  Airing my family’s dirty linen, even in such an oblique way, called for a strategic retreat and some significant nursing of my wounds.

  Since James wasn’t ready yet to present and Martin asked to be the last to share his paper, we spent the remainder of the morning debating some of the finer points of Pride and Prejudice, such as whether Wickham was inherently evil or whether the loss of his father had scarred him so much that he couldn’t behave properly. The men tended to take the first view, and the women the second.

  As soon as Eleanor dismissed us for lunch, I hurried from the seminar room before James could catch up with me. I wasn’t about to turn up at the Hall for the noon meal, not when his rejection the night before still stung so fiercely. And especially not when I’d just put myself through the emotional wringer while presenting what should have been a routine paper.

  I made it out Tom Gate and down the street before anyone could stop me. After the previous night’s break-in, I was eager to check on Harriet. To my relief, she answered the door almost as soon as I knocked.

  “More tea, of course,” she said as she led me into the sitting room. “You look as if you could do with the contents of the entire pot.”

  I simply nodded my agreement.

  While she stepped out to make the tea, I retrieved the manuscript from my bag and laid it on the table next to the sofa. I’d become accustomed to the slightly stale smell of old books, the troublesome broken springs in the cushion beneath me, and the warmth of the cottage, which comforted rather than stifled. My eyelids began to droop, and the next thing I knew, Harriet was sliding the tea tray on the low table in front of me.

  “Needed a bit of a sleep, did you? Well, I expect that’s the jet lag. And the stress, of course.”

  “Of course. Look, Harriet, about yesterday—”

  “You’ve read what I sent to you last evening?”

  I nodded and tried to look composed, but I was still ashamed. “Harriet, I’m very sorry, but I’ve broken your confidence. I know you asked me not to—”

  She froze. “You’ve shown the manuscript to someone else?”

  I took a sip of the steaming hot tea. “Only one page to Martin Blakely, and he’s sworn to secrecy. Nothing’s proven one way or the other, but Martin certainly thought it looked authentic.”

  Harriet looked troubled. “Of course it’s authentic.”

  “I just needed to be sure—”

  “Because you didn’t believe me.” Harriet’s shoulders drooped.

  “It’s not that I didn’t believe you.”

  “No. It’s just that I’m an old woman who’s going daft.”

  Her eyes darkened and grew moist, and I felt as if I’d kicked a puppy.

  “Harriet, have you found any more of the manuscript?” I asked gently.

  “Yes.” She took a deep breath and seemed to compose herself. “I found another bit when I was clearing out the linen cupboard at the top of the stairs.”

  The linen cupboard at the top of the stairs? Well, of course that’s where one would find precious bits of a lost Austen manuscript. I took another sip of tea so that I could hide my expression. Now I couldn’t even bring myself to tell her about the break-in.

  Harriet wasn’t paying attention
to me, though. She rose from her perch, disappeared into the hallway, and then returned in a mere moment with a fresh stack of pages—well, if one could call two-hundred-year-old paper fresh.

  “Here they are.” She put the pages in my lap, but she still looked distressed. “I’m lucky to find all these bits in order. Usually it’s willy-nilly.”

  “Thank you.” I laid a hand on her arm. “Thank you for sharing this with me.” I knew she was disappointed in me, but for whatever reason, she was still willing to trust me to read more of her treasure, and I was humbled by her trust.

  “I’ll just leave you to it, then.” Harriet rose from the sofa looking more like her usual self. “That cupboard won’t clean itself out.” She gave me a look that mingled disappointment and hope. “Let me know if you want more tea.” And once more she slipped from the room, leaving me alone with the precious pages.

  First Impressions

  Chapter Ten

  As it happened, Elizabeth was only too glad of Colonel Fitzwilliam’s company when the time came to visit Huntsford parsonage. Mr. Humphreys greeted the carriage at the gate and offered Miss de Bourgh his arm, an action that displeased Lady Catherine and left Elizabeth standing alone until Mr. Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam arrived on horseback a few moments later. Shortly thereafter Elizabeth found herself tête-à-tête with the colonel.

  All the members of the party, even Miss de Bourgh, were engaged to stroll about the garden and toward the stables, which though not covering a great distance, still gave Elizabeth a quarter hour to extract what information she could from the colonel about his cousin.

  “Do you often visit Rosings, Colonel?” she said as they walked behind the others. Mr. Humphreys was speaking with rapturous delight about the changes he had made to the kitchen garden, and while the space was ample and the plants well tended, Elizabeth could hear Lady Catherine’s imperious commands as to necessary, and indeed immediate, improvements.