Chapter Twenty Four

Reader, I married him.

It was a quiet wedding, only three days later, with just the parson, his clerk and Georgiana present as witnesses. Yet it was the happiest day of my life, and one filled with only happy sensations and good omens, entirely the opposite of that first day which had been intended to be my wedding day.

I immediately wrote letters to all of my family announcing the good news.

For another month of a sweet honeymoon we stayed together, in complete happiness and contentment in the deep woods. But following that we travelled to visit and pick up Cathy, who was ecstatically happy to see me once more, however she also had come to love her friends and companions in the school, and desired to remain enrolled rather than returning to live with us permanently.

During the first years of our marriage, aiding Mr. Darcy took up a great deal of my time, as I served as his eyes, leading him from place to place, writing his correspondence for him, and describing the sights around him. We were together from morning to evening and were happy the whole time. I read to him, and he sat next to me, his face happily smiling and his arm wrapped around me.

That autumn we travelled south again, and we were hosted at Netherfield by my sister and Mr. Bingley, and I think despite Darcy's injuries and losses, there has never been a happier party of people than we made during those months.

My other sisters were delighted to see me, and the general community was impressed with my good fortune, as Mr. Darcy was still very rich, even if at present he was without a proper manor.

That was a lovely year, and we spent that autumn at Netherfield, and then remained in London for the season when I was presented to Mr. Darcy's high relations, who never liked me, nor I them. We determined, first as a casual matter of conversation and then as a serious plan to rebuild Pemberley, but upon a different and more modern style — and with as an absolute demand no old tower in the center to draw the eye.

The orders went out at last, more than a year after the estate had been burned down. And that spring workers crowded the estate, earning Mr. Darcy's liberally splashed money, carefully tearing down the remaining blackened and unstable walls, hauling away the charcoaled wood, and clearing the foundation till it was flat again.

It was summer when we came north again to visit the works. I cried, and Georgiana as well, to see the land nearly empty. There was merely as a reminder that Pemberley had ever existed, a sad pile of blackened rocks placed to the side, as a memorial. We kept that pile, but the grasses and weeds have grown up among the cracks, as they will, and the gardeners planted flowering plants amongst them, and the melancholy look is gone.

I watched just this morning two of my grandchildren clambering up and down the large pile of stones that is all that remains of what was once the most beautiful home in central England.

Of course the estate we have built in its place is a worthy replacement, made principally of stone and brick, with snug modern construction, stoves everywhere to keep each room warm in the heavy snows, and endless corridors and halls and rooms, a library which is in fact larger than the original, and crammed once more with all of the books that any bibliophile's heart could desire.

It took five years for the new house to be built, and we spent that time either in the south, renting an estate near Jane and Bingley, travelling or in London. Two years after my marriage Georgiana fell in love with the son of one of our Derbyshire neighbors, which delighted both me and Darcy as she would stay close to us.

As for Mr. Darcy, while one of his eyes had been entirely ruined and destroyed, the other had been principally damaged by the infection, and he had always been able to dimly perceive through it whether the world around was dark or light, or if there was a fire present in the grate, but little else. However over the two years following our marriage, he began to fancy that the sight through it had become clearer.

We consulted with an eminent physician in London, and following his advice, Mr. Darcy partially recovered sight in his right eye. He cannot see very distinctly, even with spectacles, and it is hard for him to write, and impossible for him to read unless the text is very large. But he can see the sky once more, and he can lead himself again. He was able to see our new Pemberley, and admire it from that ridge which looked over the house and the park.

And he was able to see the eyes, just like his own, of his first son when the boy was placed in his arms.

It has now been thirty years since we married, and the time has been kind to both of us. We are still both in excellent health, and we have had very little vexation or frustration in this time, as though the Lord saw fit to balance our tumultuous and often painful early years with a happy and pleasant life.

And what is more, those who I love, Jane, Georgiana, Charlotte, Cathy, and all of my children have been happy with us. And that is the true mark of a good life: To be happy, and to be loved, and to be surrounded by those who you love and who are happy themselves.

Afterword

Now is the proper place and time for a heretical confession.

I actually like Jane Eyre even more than Pride and Prejudice (which I love!)

I was fourteen or fifteen when I first read it. That day we made a long car trip from Riverside County, where I grew up, to a museum in Los Angeles, or maybe at Balboa Park in San Diego. At least that is my best guess, since I don't remember that as being a day when we travelled to the Zoo or Wild Animal Park.

At the time I still could read in the car without feeling sick.

That wonderful ability had unfortunately abandoned me by the time I was twenty.

My copy of Jane Eyre was in a thick hardcover volume that had all four of Charlotte Bronte's novels and Wuthering Heights — this incidentally is why I've never read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. My tendency to read great literary works from the nineteenth century was exhausted in my teens and early twenties and replaced, I'm afraid, by a tendency to read large piles of fanfiction.

I read and read as the car drove on, rushing through the delightfully weird scene with Mr. Rochester pretending to be an old gypsy woman telling fortunes — a scene which you will notice I have dropped from this novel. I could not imagine creating a Mr. Darcy, not even the Mr. Darcy in this novel, who would do that.

Though it was a very Rochester-like thing to do.

I don't remember how far I got while reading in the car. I don't think Rochester had actually asked Jane to marry him the first time when we returned home, though I do vaguely remember reading the section with the house party and the description of Blanche Ingram in the car — Blanche's plotline also disappeared from my novel. Clearly what I wrote is not only a retelling of Jane Eyre, but also an abridgement.

In a similar way I removed the story of Jane starving on the moors, even though that forced me to change what I thought was a wonderful line of foreshadowing near the start of the novel.

And similarly the entire quarter of the novel where Jane and Rochester were apart and she met her cousins.

I do clearly remember though that I stayed up that night after we returned home, and I kept reading Jane Eyre all night. Hour after hour, going from the shocking revelation of Mr. Rochester's living wife, to Jane's harrowing experience of nearly dying on the moors, and following that her odd courtship by St. John, and finally that supernaturally ringing voice calling her back to Mr. Rochester's side: "Jane, Jane, Jane!"

The last two chapters of Jane Eyre along with the final section of Les Miserables, when all is revealed — but alas too late — are probably my favorite passages in literature. I certainly have read them more often than any other scenes, and two years ago I broke the translation of the last chapter of Jane Eyre into fragments which I made flashcards with while I studied Hungarian.

Unfortunately, I don't think Jane Eyre has quite the level of popularity that Pride and Prejudice has — I say unfortunately, because I am a Janeite, and I want everyone to enjoy both great 'Jane' works.

So if you haven't read it, go pick up a copy of Jane Eyre, and read it.

I should, having given that recommendation, make a few warnings.

Jane is an odd character.

Far, far weirder than Elizabeth. I think many people can read about Elizabeth or Darcy, and identify with them easily. Far fewer, at least once they are adults who are able to tell just how strange these people are, will identify with Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre. There is something a little eyebrow raising in the way that Jane constantly refers to Mr. Rochester as her dear master.

She is very, very insistent upon him being her master — I'm pretty sure that is not how most early Victorian women talked about their husbands.

The language is more flowery, more obscure and laced with far more elaborate metaphors than Jane Austen's easier and more elegant prose. Jane Eyre is strangely structured. Mr. Rochester only appears after a quarter of the book and 43,000 words. By the time you have read that many words in Pride and Prejudice, the disastrous Netherfield Ball has happened, and Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley have already left Netherfield.

At the end of the novel, there is another 45,000 words between when Jane flees after learning of Mr. Rochester's life, and when she sees him again in the second to last chapter.

I want to be clear: This is really bizarre. Pride and Prejudice is about 120,000 words long. Jane Eyre is a romance novel that spends three fourths of the length of Pride and Prejudice with the hero nowhere in sight, and the heroine mainly thinking about religion and early nineteenth century proto-feminist ideas.

Yet somehow it works.

Charlotte Bronte definitely had the nineteenth century tendency to create an overwritten descriptive word painting before entering into the actual meat of each scene.

And yet, somehow it works.

Jane Eyre is a beautiful, brilliant novel, with more emotional power than almost anything else ever written.

So read it if you haven't, and reread it if you have.

I do have another Pride and Prejudice novel that will come out soon. It is three fourths written right now. The central idea is that Netherfield burns down during the ball, and Elizabeth is caught in the fire and nearly dies while she is saving the life of a servant with a broken leg who had grown up on the Longbourn estate. I will probably publish that novel in the autumn of 2020.

Beyond that I'm not sure what my next project will be, I have a half dozen good outlines that I created in March or February but I haven't looked at them since then, though one of them involves Mr. Darcy being turned into a really big dog who guards Elizabeth and barks at Mr. Wickham when he tries to flirt with her, and while it is another magical P&P story, it probably is on the top of my list of ideas I want to turn into a novel. I have a full outline and the first scene of the book already written, but there is no guarantee that I won't end up working on different projects.

I recently talked with my wife about donating money to help people in poor countries. And she mentioned something that I think is really important, that a lot of the time attempts to get people to donate try to make people feel really guilty, until they donate.

But a lot of the time this just makes someone feel sucky, and doesn't lead to them doing anything.

And I hold the unusual and controversial opinion that feeling bad is generally bad, and that most of us should stop doing it so often. So I want to come at this from a different angle: It is possible to make other people happier, to make them healthier, and to make their lives safer and better. It is possible to use a little bit of money and someone else is much better off.

I always have liked to think of it as sort of buying fun and goodness at much cheaper than I can buy it for myself, since I already have everything that is really important. Food, rent, health insurance and books. Someone really poor will get way more value out of the money than I ever could. The only downside of spending money on other people is that they will enjoy it instead of me.

But that's also okay, because I like other people.

Of course I'm not perfectly altruistic. I only donate a little compared to what I have. But I am really happy about donating that little.

So yeah. I'm saying donate some money to helping people who haven't been lucky in the ways we have — maybe just donate a few dollars a month — whatever you can afford and whatever seems comfortable. I donate to Doctors Without Borders, because they mainly operate in countries that are much poorer than the US, or where all of the infrastructure has fallen apart because of war. And also they are a transparent organization where I'm confident that most of the money actually goes to programs that actually help people.

So join me. Pick Doctors Without Borders, or pick some other group. But if you haven't yet started donating regularly anywhere, try it and see if you might actually have fun donating.

Timothy Underwood

Budapest, July 2020