The Second Mrs Darcy (25 page)

Octavia wrenched her thoughts back to the present moment. If she lived each minute as it came, if she concentrated her attention on what was in front of her, then there was no room in her mind for anything else. As to the silent watches of the night, when the fire in her room burned low, and fears and worries came weaselling out of the darkness, she could light a candle and lose herself in a book; no good could come of lying there and brooding and frightening herself with apprehension about the future.

She offered her services to Mr. Dance. “I'm not wanted at present at the other end, and I like to be busy.”

“Can you paint?” he asked. “Here are the sketches of the scenery, but as you see they are only drawn in line. They must be coloured, so that the paints can be mixed to the right shades.”

“You are very trusting,” she said. “I may have little skill in that direction.”

Mr. Dance at Netherfield, purposeful about his work on the scenery, was not the urbanely courteous gentleman he was when paying calls in London; here he was the professional, a man with more edge to him, competent and authoritative.

“I can soon be the judge of that. Have you your sketchbook with you?”

She had. She had brought several of her sketchbooks from India with her, for Lady Sophronia had asked to see them. “I shall fetch it directly,” she said.

She crossed to the main door which led to the hall and the staircase, walking on silent feet so as not to disturb the actors. Orsino's words sounded in her ears:

Lord Rutherford's attention faltered for a moment. “Damn it, all these sibilants.”

Octavia came back downstairs in a few minutes, but she took care this time to walk through to the other doors at the far end of the ballroom, where her return would be unmarked by the actors. She handed her sketchbooks to Mr. Dance. He flicked through the pages, raising his eyebrows, and pausing on some of them. “I was quite right, your eye for colour is extremely good. I may say these are remarkable, you paint a vivid and vital picture of India. I have never been there, but I should like to look through your books at my leisure, if you will permit it, for I feel that will be as good as making the journey there myself.”

Octavia coloured slightly at the compliment, produced the paint box she had brought down with her, and sat herself at one of the trestles to colour at Mr. Dance's designs. She painted quickly and deftly, following Mr. Dance's instructions not to strive for too natural an appearance, but to be mindful that this was theatre, there would be lights shining on the scenery, and the whole nature of the stage was to present an illusion, not a sense of reality.

She enjoyed herself, and added some touches of her own, suitable for the season: a pair of partridges in one of the trees, garlands of evergreen entwined with red and gold ribbons, and, in one wintry outdoors scene, a snowman in a gentleman's tall hat. These additions made Mr. Dance laugh when he saw them.

“They may be omitted, if you wish,” she said, swirling her brush in the tub of water.

“I would not dream of it, they are charming, and quite in keeping with the setting of the play.”

“Are these the drawings of the sets?” said a voice behind them, and Octavia looked up, startled, straight into Lord Rutherford's enigmatic blue eyes. “You are making the devil of a noise up here, with your laughter,” he said, holding up one of the drawings and looking at it at arm's length.

“Rather fanciful,” was his comment, and Mr. Dance looked surprised at the coldness of his lordship's voice. “I hope all this does not take you away from your work on Chauntry, Mr. Dance.”

“Indeed it does not, I am well ahead with my plans, as you know.”

“I think your new house will be a model of its kind, Lord Rutherford,” said Octavia, made uneasy by the tension in the air.

Lord Rutherford bowed. “I am glad it meets with your approval, ma'am,” he said, and turned abruptly away. “Ah, Jenkins, you are doing a good job there with that staircase, but we do not need to rebuild Chauntry entirely in this ballroom.”

Mr. Jenkins gave a guffaw. “No, my lord, I'll make sure of that.”

Lord Rutherford was on such easy terms with his estate workers, and yet so stiff with Mr. Dance. Odd, thought Octavia, as she bent her head over her painting once more.

The next few days passed in a whirl of activity. The actors, all of them brought up from childhood to memorise verse, had no trouble learning their parts and they were all soon word perfect, needing only occasional reminders from Octavia. And even Charlotte was managing, with some careful coaching from Lady Susan, to put some expression into her lines.

She was brought over to Netherfield every day by her mama, and Lady Goulding sat in on all the rehearsals. Octavia had been slightly wary of her at first, fearing that she would cold-shoulder her, as so many matrons in London had done when Warren's attack became public, but Lady Goulding went out of her way to condole with Octavia on the unfortunate situation she had found herself in.

“You should be sanguine about the outcome,” she told her comfortably. “I find these things so often turn out to be a storm in a teacup. Sir Joseph is very indignant on your behalf, he says he would
not trust George Warren further than he could see him, and he holds that in the end, justice will be done, and something will happen to show the world that it is just Warren up to his tricks again. Of course, Mr. Warren has the ear of the King, and he presumes rather on that; however, the King's influence is not near so great as he thinks it is, so Sir Joseph says.”

Octavia wasn't sure whether to be consoled or alarmed by these words, but she decided just to be grateful that Lady Goulding wasn't inclined to shun her company. In fact, after a while she began to feel it might almost be preferable if she had kept her distance, as Lady Goulding sat beside her, keeping up a gentle flow of conversation which made it hard for Octavia to attend to the actors, who, however, needed little help from her.

The main topic of Lady Goulding's prattle was her hopes for her daughter, her growing confidence that Lord Rutherford was going to make her an offer, and Octavia found herself obscurely annoyed by this. At first, she dismissed it as a mama's fancy, but then Lady Sophronia said, in a casual aside when the ladies were in the drawing room after dinner, that her brother had formed the intention of ending his single status, and had Miss Goulding in mind.

Octavia had so far forgotten herself as to let out an exclamation of disbelief, which she had hastily retracted, saying that it was merely that Miss Goulding was very young, not yet out, and that Lord Rutherford—

“Is … ?” said Lady Sophronia, looking at Octavia expectantly, but Octavia shook her head. “It is only that he can be a formidable person, and Charlotte has no character,” Lady Sophronia finished calmly. “It is not the match I would have chosen for him, far from it, but one thing I have learned in thirty-five years, Mrs. Darcy, is that one has to leave other people to fall into the pits they have dug for themselves. If my brother thinks he needs to marry, is feeling oppressed by Kitty Langton, and now sees a cloud on the horizon in the shapely form of Eliza Effingham—ah, I see Susan has told you about her—then he may make the mistake of turning to the insipid peace of a Charlotte Goulding. Of course, if he does any such thing,
then when the inconveniences of a Kitty Langton and Mrs. Effingham have passed into memory, he will be left shackled to a ninny,” she went on.

“She is a beautiful girl, she will make somebody a good wife,” said Octavia.

“She is not in love with Sholto and never will be.”

No, thought Octavia, but she is falling in love with Mr. Dance; however, she kept her thoughts to herself. If the others hadn't noticed the warmth with which Charlotte looked at Mr. Dance, and the careful way he refrained from looking at her when they were in company together, then she wasn't going to say anything about it. It was an impossible match, at least in the eyes of Lady Goulding; the prospects for Charlotte in that direction were worse than Penelope and Poyntz.

If no one had noticed Charlotte's interest in Mr. Dance, Lord Rutherford had noticed how much attention Mr. Dance was paying to Octavia, and how much she seemed to enjoy his company.

“A fine thing for a woman in her position to flirt with a Mr. Dance,” he said irritably to his sister and Susan. They were in the breakfast parlour, first down; Sophronia because she was naturally an early riser, Susan because a cockerel had chosen for some unknown reason to perch itself in the lower branches of a tree directly outside her room and set up a joyful crowing at the first hint of a frosty dawn, and Lord Rutherford because he made a point of being up to welcome such of his guests as chose to come down to breakfast.

“Flirt?” Sophronia was scornful. “Mrs. Darcy does not flirt with Mr. Dance, and if she did, what is wrong with that? She is a widow, true, but out of mourning; is she supposed not to take any pleasure in male company, as though she had taken the veil?”

“Mr. Dance—he is a good architect, I grant you, and a man I like; however, he is hardly of the same world as Mrs. Darcy.”

“He is a gentleman, she is a gentleman's daughter,” said Susan. “Pour me some more coffee, if you will be so good, Sholto, and stop talking fustian. Mr. Dance is not of your world, no, and you could say not of the world of the Threlfords, either, but where does that leave me, a runaway, an actress? Why, I am amazed you let me into your
house. Besides, Mrs. Darcy may be the daughter of a baronet, but he allied himself with the daughter of a grocer. She could do worse than Mr. Dance, who will obviously make a great name for himself; on the other hand, she has no interest in Mr. Dance in that way, none at all.”

“How do you know? You women are so absolute in your judgements, so sure that you see everything with greater insight and clarity than anyone else.”

“And your judgement, any judgement that begins ‘You women,' is clouded by your feelings,” said Sophronia calmly. “Susan, you have ate up all the plum jam, I shall have to ring for some more. Ah, I hear voices, yes, Mr. Poyntz is joining us, and Pagoda. Good morning to you both, you have arrived in the nick of time to prevent poor Sholto being quite overrun by us mere women.”

“What was all that about?” said Susan, when she was alone with Sophronia for a moment before the rehearsal began.

“Sholto's feathers are ruffled. His rational mind tells him he should marry Charlotte Goulding, with whom he has nothing in common, and who will bore him into fits within six months; his heart is inclined towards Octavia, but his dignity tells him it is not a suitable match, and his rational response, as is so often the case with a man where the emotions are involved, is to bury his head in the sand and take no action.”

Susan laughed. “Sholto is the most active and decisive man I know. He never had any trouble in shedding a mistress nor taking on a new one, why should acquiring a wife cause him such anguish? I agree he had better not marry Charlotte Goulding, but surely he will come to his senses as far as that is concerned.”

“He must take care. Lady Goulding is beginning to count on the match, and a mama can force a man, even a man like Sholto, into a position from which he will find it very difficult to escape.”

“Octavia is the very wife for him, I have thought so for many weeks now.”

“He is afraid she does not care for him.”

“He has made no effort to woo her. She has a good deal of reserve, she is wary, which is not surprising, given the blows which she has endured. She felt she was entering upon a period of happiness, and now it seems that the independence she values is about to be snatched away. And while this whole Warren business hangs over her, she won't give way to her feelings for any man.”

“Is she in love with Sholto?”

Susan shrugged her elegant shoulders. “Who knows? We do not talk about it; if she is, she may not even admit it to herself. Well, they are a fine pair. They will be thrown much into one another's company between now and
Twelfth Night
, so perhaps that will bring them to an understanding.”

Unaware of her friends' interest in the state of her heart, Octavia busied herself with her role as prompter, and, as it turned out, a kind of stage manager, noting down what Lady Sophronia and the actors decided as to entrances and exits and where they were to stand on the stage. They were rehearsing on stage now, and several times in every rehearsal, Octavia would find herself appealed to.

“You have come on from the left, Sholto,” said Lady Sophronia, “and last time you entered from the right. Mrs. Darcy, what say you?”

“No, Charlotte, you stand behind Olivia here, so that you may make your exit there.”

“Poyntz, consider what you are about, you should not be walking across there.”

“Excuse me, Lady Susan, this is exactly where I should be.”

And Octavia would hastily look at the scribbles she had made on the side of her copy of the play, and tell Lady Sophronia that Sholto's entrance was from the left, that Charlotte was indeed in the wrong place—too busy looking around to see if Mr. Dance was come into the room, in Octavia's view—and that Lady Susan was, in this rare instance, in the wrong.

With such a lively bunch of people, and with all the high spirits that naturally went with the putting on of the play, the atmosphere
was full of gaiety and pleasure. Only Lord Rutherford could sometimes be seen with a frown on his face, chiefly when he saw Octavia, yet again, enjoying a joke or a discussion with Mr. Dance. He had taken to avoiding Lady Goulding as much as he could; he knew quite as well as Susan how determined mothers could be, and he had not outmanoeuvred them for years without getting the trick of it. He felt obscurely ashamed of himself for the way he was behaving, but he had the comfort, if comfort it was, of knowing that Charlotte, who had taken to shying like a frightened horse whenever he came near her, had no warm feelings at all for him.

A voice rang in his ears, a whining voice that warned him not to have any high expectations of matrimony, reminding him that the lovely bride of today could turn into a hibernating ladyship of tomorrow, or that even, should he become engaged a second time, this bride-to-be might treat him as had Eliza Hawtrey. A siren voice, the implication of its words being that it might not really much matter which woman he became engaged to, since any marriage was doomed to disappointment.

Women were not to be trusted. The only woman he had any faith in was Sophronia, who never behaved out of character or deceitfully. She was not a flirt, she didn't spend hours in the library with plans and maps; what a pretence. Who would be taken in by this supposed passion for house building and architecture? No, it was the architect that caught Mrs. Darcy's fancy, not drainage systems and the type of beam necessary for a roof of a certain pitch.

In fact, as Octavia's apparent interest in the house grew, his own liking for the new Chauntry diminished. It had been a mistake to employ Mr. Dance. Sophronia had erred, inviting him to be among their number over Christmas—on this, he conveniently forgot that he had requested that Sophronia invite the architect, so that they could look over the plans and site together. Did he really want to build a house here in Hertfordshire? The owners of Netherfield House would willingly grant him a long lease, it was a good-enough house, why go to the trouble and expense of rebuilding? It was not as though he planned to spend much time in Hertfordshire.

Sophronia laughed at him for his new attitude, and laughed at him in company, on more than one occasion, for being so dull.

“Why should I not be dull if I want to be? Not that I am at all dull, it is just a fancy of yours to say so.”

Their company was soon further enlivened by the arrival at Ackworth Manor of Penelope Cartland; the very next day after her journey, she persuaded her cousins to drive her over for a visit to Netherfield. “You will want to wish them the compliments of the season,” she told them. “And Mrs. Darcy is there, you have told me how much you enjoyed her company when she was at Ackworth.”

Since the cold weather, frost turning to sleety rain which then froze again at night, precluded Mr. Ackworth's hunting or shooting or doing anything useful about the farm, he agreed to have the horses put to so that they could drive over to Netherfield House.

“She has a motive, the hussy,” he grumbled to his wife as he finished his breakfast.

“Of course she has, she is in love with Henry Poyntz, had you not noticed when she was here last winter?”

“I thought it a passing fancy.”

“Well, it is clearly not so, if it has endured for a year.”

“Theodosia will have none of it.”

“I suppose the couple may take matters into their own hands.”

“Elope?” Mr. Ackworth shook his head. “You are out there, my dear, it would never do for a man in Poyntz's position, a clergyman cannot be seen to make a runaway marriage. Nor can they anticipate the married state, which might frighten Theodosia into agreeing to a wedding; again, it will not do for a clergyman.”

“Clergymen have much the same in their breeches as other men,” said Mrs. Ackworth robustly.

“Not if they're Dr. Rawleigh,” said Mr. Ackworth. “You are very coarse, I find, you will offend the young people if you do not mind your tongue.”

“Dr. Rawleigh suffers more than usual from the rheumatism this year,” said Mrs. Ackworth thoughtfully. “If he could be encouraged to retire …”

“I do not think that Shropshire will be of benefit to aching joints.”

“No, but when he no longer has a parish to take care of, he will not have to be out and about in all weathers.”

“Out and about in all weathers? Since when was old Rawleigh out and about in any weather, unless it is to be visiting his henges in distant parts of the country? Besides, even if he retired tomorrow, and Mr. Poyntz stepped into his shoes, it will still not be the grand match Theodosia is longing for.”

Mrs. Ackworth rose from her chair. “I shall write to her, and express my concern that Penelope is not improving in looks, and asking how Eleanor is. I shall say how hard it will be for Penelope to be seen alongside her ravishing sister—perhaps something along those lines will give Theodosia pause for thought.”

“Well, I leave all this cunning and contrivance to you, my dear. We men concern ourselves with greater issues.”

“Yes, such as the roof flying off the pigsty.”

“And have you considered,” said Mr. Ackworth, ignoring the unkind thrust about the pigsty, for he was in fact more of a gossip than his wife had ever been, “that Penelope may have formed a lasting attachment to Henry Poyntz, but he may not care for her anymore?”

“That is why we shall go over with her to Netherfield. I shall know in an instant how things stand between them.”

The Ackworths' doubts were set at rest by their visit to Netherfield; the attachment between the couple was evident, however carefully they still tried to hide it. Although here, among friends, they could be more open about spending welcome time in one another's company than was possible in London.

“They had better be married,” said Pagoda Portal in his expansive way. “My dear Mrs. Darcy, cannot you convince your sister to give her permission? Indeed, has Mr. Poyntz approached Miss Cartland's parents and asked for her hand?”

“No,” said Octavia. “Penelope will not let him do so, she feels that he would be met with a flat no, and she would thereafter be kept under such rigorous supervision that they could never meet.”

“What is she hoping for? A miracle? Your sister will not change her spots. Miss Cartland had much better try the tactics young women employ in such cases: tears, sulks, not eating, going about with a miserable face, making her parents' life a misery until they give in.”

“Theodosia would take not the slightest notice, she cares very little for how happy or not Penelope is, nor indeed if she is pining away. She is so ambitious for Penelope's that her life would truly be unbearable, and Mr. Poyntz is well aware of how things stand there.”

Mr. Portal looked at her with some amusement. “You represent your sister as something of an ogre.”

“My family do rather resemble something out of a fairy tale, Mr. Portal, but I fear that this fairy tale does not have a happy ending. Not a one that is brought about by any direct means, at least. But we have a scheme. I have been thinking hard how it may be brought to a happy conclusion for the couple, and I now discover Mrs. Ackworth has much the same idea in mind as I have.”

Mrs. Ackworth sat down that very evening to write to Theodosia. It was a difficult letter, one that was scratched out and rewritten several times, with Mr. Ackworth adding not altogether helpful advice as to its tone and wording.

The gist of it was that they were shocked to find Penelope out of sorts and out of looks. Perhaps she had not recovered from her spell of illness the previous winter, but it would be hard for Theodosia to turn her off, looking the way she was. “For she is a pretty child,” Mrs. Ackworth cunningly wrote, “although not the equal of Louisa in looks. She tells me that Eleanor outshines Louisa by a long chalk; would it not be possible to make some match, any match for Penelope, so that the way may be clear for her sister to contract the kind of marriage that her beauty, fortune, and position would achieve for her? Penelope is not cut out to be a great London hostess, a leader of fashion, as you would like to see a daughter, but is there not someone among the ranks of her admirers and well-wishers—a country squire, a clergyman, a soldier—with whom she might be happy enough, and you could feel that she had made a respectable if not a brilliant match?”

Weasel words, each one planted to make its mark; Mrs. Ackworth could only sigh at her own duplicity, as she signed the letter, folded the paper, and sealed it with a wafer. “I shall take it over to Netherfield tomorrow. Penelope is eager to go there again, and I can ask Lord Rutherford to frank it for me.”