Chapter One
Dear reader,
I must destroy my reputation and credit as a heroine from the start.
My deadly dull disclosure is that I had a delightful childhood and a happy girlhood and until shortly after my twentieth birthday my life was entirely charmed and lacked any important vexations.
I understand. I truly understand.
A tale of strange occurrences and odd situations about a woman who did not suffer horribly in childhood is rather like a minced pie without the spices, or like taking coffee without any sugar. Such a consideration nearly convinces me to end this memoir before I begin.
However, it has been insisted to me by certain persons that this story may be of interest to some amongst a wider public, and as I am tickled by retelling every triviality of my life, I shall risk boring you with my story.
Alas, my childhood, happy as it was, shall not be retold now. I do wish I had something to say about it. I would have a great deal more to write if I had been an orphan, raised by my aunt by marriage who despised me and whose children tormented me. She would lock me up for imagined disobediences in a dark drab room where I was set to stew 'til I screamed and scared myself hoarse with tormenting images of phantoms.
I did on occasion, when the happiness of my girlhood became too dreary to bear, imagine myself in such a situation.
In this imagined life, I would be eventually sent from the miserable house of my great aunt to the even more miserable site of a charity school where the headmaster embezzled funds intended for food and made the girls to stand in their bare feet in the middle of coldest winter whilst he wore furs and sermonized upon the evils of fashion and beauty. He would particularly hate me, for my aunt had informed him that I was a liar, but I would be unbowed before the punishments he bestowed upon me, and that would win me a dear friend.
That dear friend shortly afterwards, this being a melancholy imagining, died of a fever in my arms.
That would be the proper beginning for the heroine of such a strange, and I dare say Gothic tale as mine. There will be moments in my story where I am shocked to the soul, where I am faced with more than passing strange circumstances, and when events nearly unheard of in our England in these modern days shall occur.
Lacking the upbringing of a proper heroine, I was as shocked as each one of you would be by these occurrences.
So as the tale would bore a saint to sleep, I shall ignore my childhood, only pausing to note that my father had scholarly tendencies, and he encouraged like tendencies in me. As a result I was well read, spoke French fluently, though a'la mode anglais, read Italian perfectly and spoke Italian with French pronunciations. I drew excellently, embroidered under duress, rode not at all, and played poorly — well enough that I did not blush too much to claim I could teach the instrument — and had a smattering of other accomplishments.
This served me in good stead when it became incumbent upon me to seek a position as a governess.
The tale of how that refuge became necessary to me is, alas, also unheroic.
My father. I loved him. I yet hold his memory close in my heart. A loving parent.
But an imprudent man.
Five daughters and an entailed estate, and Papa never made arrangements to ensure our care following his decease, and as the natural sequel we were not well cared for following that decease.
An exceedingly ordinary story, one of the sort of imprudence encountered a thousand times in your own daily life, and one entirely uninteresting and unworthy to provide the opening of a novel.
My mother despised me at the time of Papa's death, as I had refused recently the hand of his heir, a Mr. Collins. The anger of a parent is perhaps more interesting than anything else I have told as yet. In truth Mr. Collins is fascinating — I have never encountered from that day to this a more oddly mixed combination of pomposity and servility than his.
One of the last, rather unkind, delights of my girlhood was laughing at his manners with my father.
Perhaps that is what shall give the moral to this story — we were not nice, and then I was forced to become a governess. Which I did not suffer as a horrible fate, even though I had to work for a time for my bread. Which once more creates the bad moral, for us women of gentle birth are intended to despise employment above all else.
At the time of my father's departure unto the eternal future, my mother was yet committed to the practice of regularly shouting at me that she would never speak to me again due to my refusal to marry Mr. Collins. Papa's unexpected death occurred only a few days following that horrid event which put Mr. Collins forever beyond hope of my capture, his not notably happy marriage to my dear friend Miss Charlotte Lucas.
What little money we had left was settled upon my mother, and she swore to never give me so much as a shilling, or even a penny, so long as she lived, and she refused to abide with our relations, the Phillipses, if they allowed me to live under their roof as well.
I am sure that in time my mother would have relented. But I was young and proud — I am yet rather proud — and I found a refuge with Charlotte Collins, nee Lucas, who happily took me in and allowed me to remain as her friend and companion in my childhood home that now belonged to her.
Or to Mr. Collins.
Mr. Collins's chief virtue, to compensate for his deficits, was that he was easy to command, and in practice Charlotte commanded everything.
As an aside to any unmarried young ladies of marriageable age reading this, I would strongly recommend against marrying such an unmarriageable man as a Mr. Collins merely on the slight consideration that you may never marry if you do not.
My friend Charlotte was seven and twenty when she married him, and she was quite determined to secure for herself a situation — one of the great deficiencies of the present arrangement of things that young women must make such choices — and though on the whole she has been happy to have married Mr. Collins, even she admits that the vexations of marriage to a man of slow wit who she cares for not a whit often nearly outweigh the virtues of her situation and estate.
I do not repent in the slightest of my hesitation to marry him — though I fear as events shall prove, it is easy for me to look back with satisfaction upon my past. While I did suffer for a time, those sufferings were eventually repaid amply in a material sense, and I fear that many young women will not take seriously an admonition against marrying merely for a merely good estate from a woman who married into an extremely good estate.
Take my advice as you will. But I assure you, I did not marry my gentleman for his estate, as you shall see.
But I do like his estate very much.
Though Charlotte wished for me to remain with her, I found this situation of dependency in what had once been my own house irksome and vexing. So I determined, a little foolishly I think, to find a situation of worse dependency in a location I had never set foot before.
In a word: Employment as a governess.
A recent entrant into the neighborhood — a man who shall appear elsewhere in this tale — was a Mr. Bingley. This young man was a gentleman from a fine family in the north of England whose father had built a substantial fortune in trade. This fortune had come to Mr. Bingley when he was yet barely past his majority, and as he lacked the presence of any stable and wise friend to advise him, he married impetuously and foolishly shortly before settling at Netherfield.
Bingley was handsome, rich, kind. Delightful, yet not inane and stupid in conversation. Capable of making friends with a rock. The sort of gentleman who cried against the closing of balls before two a.m. at the earliest, and who would enter a room and be friends with every person in it within fifteen minutes. He never sat out a dance. No more needs be said to establish his character.
At least the females amongst my readers already know that they would like him very well if they ever should happen to meet Mr. Bingley.
Unfortunately his charm and abilities led to heartache and difficulties for those near and dear to me. You see, despite a marriage which it had not taken him six months to learn to regret, Mr. Bingley was smitten with my sister Jane — the most beautiful and sweetest creature in the entire world — smitten the instant he saw her standing a quarter turn around the room when he entered the first time the assembly rooms at Meryton. And Jane was likewise smitten with him by the end of the first dance performed together, again all of this in spite of Mr. Bingley's most unfortunate marriage.
Neither of them had the nature that would lead them to dwell amongst the company of that despised people known as adulterers, and as a result they merely talked to each other rather more than proper, and sighed longingly whenever they parted, and thought, both of them, that the mistake of Mr. Bingley in marrying had entirely blighted both their lives.
This too amiable Mr. Bingley, upon hearing of my search for employment, recommended me to a dear friend from university days. This gentleman had spent the lion's share of his time since he was widowed very young upon the continent. He was a Mr. Darcy of Pemberley, who sought for a governess for his daughter. This Mr. Darcy immediately wrote back to both me and Mr. Bingley with a promise to employ me upon the normal terms for a governess, and with the request that I set off immediately to his estate at Pemberley to begin my duties.
"A Mr. Darcy of Pemberley."
Did you note how casually I bring his name into this tale? That was well done was it not?
I assure you, it has been many, many years since he was merely "a Mr. Darcy" to me. For this tale, which I will now begin without any more nonsense about my unromantically happy childhood, or the unhappy, but in an ordinary mode, death of my father, is about Mr. Darcy and myself.
And also about Pemberley.
Pemberley, a name which evokes so many memories. Memories painful; memories bright, brilliant and beautiful. Memories of an old building: her colonnades and battlements, the endless galleries, the high roof, the tall tower.
Above all the tall tower, and that echoing laugh which would come down from the highest floor.
That memory, the sound of that laugh, it echoes now only in my mind. Though much time has passed, and I am warm and well slippered before my desk with a cup of chocolate to my side, and I have not heard that laugh for many a year, the memory of that laugh still makes me shiver, and the hairs on my arms rise.
I now fear that I run on ahead of myself, and digress. Taking the opposite tack of the writer who bores the reader by beginning at the beginning, I now confuse the reader by beginning in the middle.
And now I also realize that there shall be a little more of the beginning of this story before we reach the portion which you shall find most interesting: That part when I meet Mr. Darcy.
For you see, he was on the continent still, in his continual meandering ways, when the cart carried me up the track to Pemberley.
AN: This book is now posting. I expect to put out two chapters a week until it is complete. It also exists in E-book form, and can be bought from your preferred major ebook retailer - also, if you are interested in my other books, I just released Friendship and Forgiveness on the big A - it unfortunately is only there, but it also is in the unlimited program. If you search for that book, add my name (Timothy Underwood) to the search term to make it more likely for you to get good results.
Anyways, I hope you all enjoy this journey!
