P. James - Death Comes to Pemberley

One advantage to the parish was that the food at the vicarage notably improved. Mrs Bennet had brought up her daughters to appreciate the importance of a good table in promoting domestic harmony and attracting male guests. Congregations hoped that the vicar’s wish to return promptly to conjugal felicity might shorten the services, but although his girth increased, the length of his sermons remained the same. The two settled down in perfect accord, except initially for Mary’s demand that she should have a book room of her own in which she could read in peace. This was acquired by converting the one good spare bedroom for her sole use, with the advantage of promoting domestic amity while making it impossible for them to invite their relations to stay.

By the autumn of 1803, in which year Mrs Bingley and Mrs Darcy were celebrating six years of happy marriage, Mrs Bennet had only one daughter, Kitty, for whom no husband had been found. Neither Mrs Bennet nor Kitty was much concerned at the matrimonial failure. Kitty enjoyed the prestige and indulgence of being the only daughter at home, and with her regular visits to Jane, where she was a great favourite with the children, was enjoying a life that had never before been so satisfactory. The visits of Wickham and Lydia were hardly an advertisement for matrimony. They would arrive in boisterous good humour to be welcomed effusively by Mrs Bennet, who always rejoiced to see her favourite daughter. But this initial goodwill soon degenerated into quarrels, recriminations and peevish complaints on the part of the visitors about their poverty and the stinginess of Elizabeth’s and Jane’s financial support, so that Mrs Bennet was as glad to see them leave as she was to welcome them back on their next visit. But she needed a daughter at home and Kitty, much improved in amiability and usefulness since Lydia’s departure, did very well. By 1803, therefore, Mrs Bennet could be regarded as a happy woman so far as her nature allowed and had even been known to sit through a four-course dinner in the presence of Sir William and Lady Lucas without once referring to the iniquity of the entail.

At eleven in the morning of Friday 14th October 1803 Elizabeth Darcy sat at the table in her sitting room on the first floor of Pemberley House. The room was not large but the proportions were particularly pleasing and the two windows gave a view of the river. This was the room Elizabeth had chosen for her own use, to be fitted out entirely as she wished, furniture, curtains, carpets and pictures selected from the riches of Pemberley and disposed as she desired. Darcy himself had supervised the work and the pleasure in her husband’s face when Elizabeth had taken possession, and the care taken by everyone to comply with her wishes, had made her realise, more even than had the more ostentatious glories of the house, the privileges that adhered to Mrs Darcy of Pemberley.

The room which gave her almost as much delight as the sitting room was Pemberley’s splendid library. It was the work of generations and now her husband had the interest and joy of adding to its riches. The library at Longbourn was Mr Bennet’s domain and even Elizabeth, his favourite child, entered it only by invitation. The library at Pemberley was as freely open to her as it was to Darcy, and with his tactful and loving encouragement she had read more widely and with greater enjoyment and comprehension in the last six years than in all the past fifteen, augmenting an education which, she now understood, had never been other than rudimentary. Dinner parties at Pemberley could not be more different from those she had sat through at Meryton when the same group of people spread the same gossip and exchanged the same views, enlivened only when Sir William Lucas recalled at length yet another fascinating detail of his investiture at the Court of St James. Now it was always with regret that she would catch the eyes of the ladies and leave the gentlemen to their masculine affairs. It had been a revelation to Elizabeth that there were men who valued intelligence in a woman.

It was the day before Lady Anne’s ball. For the last hour she and the housekeeper, Mrs Reynolds, had been checking that the preparations so far were in order and that everything was going ahead smoothly, and now Elizabeth was alone. The first ball had taken place when Darcy was a year old. It was held to celebrate the birthday of his mother and, except for the period of mourning when her husband died, the ball had taken place every year until Lady Anne’s own death. Held on the first Saturday after the October full moon, it usually fell due within days of Darcy’s and Elizabeth’s wedding anniversary, but this they always planned to spend quietly with the Bingleys, who had married on the same day, feeling that the occasion was too intimate and precious to be celebrated with public revelry and, at Elizabeth’s wish, the autumn ball was still named for Lady Anne. It was regarded by the county as the most important social event of the year. Mr Darcy had voiced his concern that it might not be a propitious year in which to hold the ball, with the expected war with France already declared and the growing fear in the south of the country where invasion by Bonaparte was daily expected. The harvest too had been poor, with all that meant to country life. A number of gentlemen, raising worried eyes from their account books, were inclined to agree that there should be no ball this year, but were met with such outrage from their wives and the certainty of at least two months of domestic discomfort that they finally agreed that nothing was more conducive to good morale than a little harmless entertainment, and that Paris would rejoice exceedingly and take new heart were that benighted city to learn that the Pemberley ball had been cancelled.

The entertainment and seasonal diversions of country living are neither as numerous nor enticing as to make the social obligations of a great house a matter of indifference to those neighbours qualified to benefit from them, and Mr Darcy’s marriage, once the wonder of his choice had worn off, at least promised that he would be more frequently at home than formerly and encouraged the hope that this new wife would recognise her responsibilities. On Elizabeth and Darcy’s return from their wedding journey, which had taken them as far as Italy, there were the customary formal visits to be sat through and the usual congratulations and small talk to be endured with as much grace as they could manage. Darcy, aware from childhood that Pemberley could always bestow more benefits than it could receive, endured these meetings with creditable equanimity and Elizabeth found in them a secret source of entertainment as her neighbours strove to satisfy curiosity while maintaining their reputation for good breeding. The visitors had a double pleasure: to enjoy their prescribed half-hour in the grace and comfort of Mrs Darcy’s drawing room before later engaging with their neighbours in reaching a verdict on the dress, agreeableness and suitability of the bride and the couple’s chance of domestic felicity. Within a month a consensus had been reached: the gentlemen were impressed by Elizabeth’s beauty and wit, and their wives by her elegance, amiability and the quality of the refreshments. It was agreed that Pemberley, despite the unfortunate antecedents of its new mistress, now had every promise of taking its rightful place in the social life of the county as it had done in the days of Lady Anne Darcy.

Elizabeth was too much of a realist not to know that these antecedents had not been forgotten and that no new families could move into the district without being regaled with the wonder of Mr Darcy’s choice of bride. He was known as a proud man for whom family tradition and reputation were of the first importance and whose own father had increased the family’s social standing by marrying the daughter of an earl. It had seemed that no woman was good enough to become Mrs Fitzwilliam Darcy, yet he had chosen the second daughter of a gentleman whose estate, encumbered with an entail which would cut out his children, was little bigger than the Pemberley pleasure gardens, a young woman whose personal fortune was rumoured to be only five hundred pounds, with two sisters unmarried and a mother of such loud-mouthed vulgarity that she was unfit for respectable society. Worse still, one of the younger girls had married George Wickham, the disgraced son of old Mr Darcy’s steward, under circumstances which decency dictated could only be spoken of in whispers, and had thus saddled Mr Darcy and his family with a man he so despised that the name Wickham was never mentioned at Pemberley and the couple were excluded entirely from the house. Admittedly Elizabeth was herself respectable and it was finally accepted even by the doubters that she was pretty enough and had fine eyes, but the marriage was still a wonder and one that was particularly resented by a number of young ladies who, on their mothers’ advice, had refused several reasonable offers to keep themselves available for the glittering prize and were even now nearing the dangerous age of thirty with no prospect in sight. In all this Elizabeth was able to comfort herself by recalling the response she had given to Lady Catherine de Bourgh when that outraged sister of Lady Anne had pointed out the disadvantages which would accrue to Elizabeth if she were presumptuous enough to become Mrs Darcy. “These are heavy misfortunes, but the wife of Mr Darcy must have such extraordinary sources of happiness necessarily attached to her situation that she could, upon the whole, have no cause to repine.”