"Lady Eleanor, your eyes are as the sky on a midsummer's day — "
"Lady Eleanor, what an unexpected pleasure!"
"Tell me, Lady Eleanor, is your brother in town this season?"
"What a lovely bonnet, Lady Eleanor, where did you find it?"
"May I request the honour of the third set, Lady Eleanor?"
What fools they were. So stupid and so funny in their way. When I came out, I could hardly believe the absurdity. No wonder the entire family was grave and proud and proper in public, it was the only way to keep our faces straight. I was exactly the same. How could one take these people seriously, with their inane conversation and abysmally poor poetry, their vapid self-consequence and superficial deference? We none of us could manage it. There were some, there were sensible, well-bred people we associated with and even befriended; but even they were always they, others, not-one-of-us.
It was odd how insidious the sheer triviality of life was, though. When I danced with my seventeen-year-old cousin at my wedding, I remember saying something about the opera we had attended the week before, just making conversation as all people did, something about how lovely the hall was and how charming the performers —
"I thought the hall ostentatious, the performers mediocre, and the plot dull and fashionable," he said dismissively. "Ella, you will still come to Houghton this Christmas? Grandmother will be terribly disappointed, if you both stay away; I'm sure it will be very dull." He looked at me earnestly and I understood what could not be said.
"I will come," I promised, and thought of his acerbic response. He was not one to bow to conventionality, not when it did not suit him; there was no disguise or pretence in him, it disgusted him. I remembered being the same, long ago when I was still a girl and free to do what I liked. "Fitzwilliam," I said, "please, do not — always remember who you are — do not ever become one of these fashionable gentlemen, all manners without substance, do not change."
"Oh! there is little enough danger of that," he said, smiling, then added more gravely, "I shall always be myself, I promise."
I was afraid, that when I married, I would simply become another society matron. Why did I marry Richard? I liked him well enough, he was relatively handsome, neither stupid nor vicious; but mostly, because he was one of us, he was grandmother's great-nephew, and with him I need never exchange loyalties. Loyalty to his family was loyalty to mine, and he was not demanding, he did not wish to carve a piece out of my heart for his own, and he did not care that the affection I felt for him as husband was far eclipsed by the intense devotion to grandmother and father and brothers and cousins and aunts and uncles. I was afraid, though, even with him; that I would somehow become one-of-them, that there would somehow be a gulf between the us of my family and myself as Eleanor Leigh.
It was, oddly, Aunt Anne who gave me comfort. Everyone had always said how much I resembled her, that it was like seeing her again, and because I truly believed Aunt Anne was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, I had always been proud of it. I've seen her portrait, the one my uncle very nearly went mad over when she died, and whoever painted it was a good artist; I could see myself in her face. She had always laughed in private too. And when she married, she did not become a them; she named her son for us and if someone asked who she was, the response was always something to the effect of, "Oh, that tall proud woman? She's Lady Anne Fitzwil — Darcy, that is, she was married about five years ago." She had always been one of us, and her son as well — my cousin was more like my father's son than my own brothers. Later on, she had spent almost as much time with us as she had at Pemberley, she was very nearly another mother.
No, I was like Aunt Anne, as we had always said. I would not be estranged or absorbed, one of those dreadful nonentities floating on their husbands' arms. And now that I was married, I was free to be myself, and if I thought the opera dreadful, I would say so. If I liked, I could be another Aunt Catherine, offending wherever I went but too grand and powerful to be gainsaid. No, not Aunt Catherine; grandmother, who with her imperious well-bred ways, had terrified grown men into submission. But I would not pretend any more, I would be like I had been, like my cousin, like Aunt Anne, myself without disguise.
Richard could not understand why I insisted that my little cousin be made godfather to my children, when he was not even of age. Fitzwilliam could not understand; none of them ever did, except Elizabeth.