Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart (15 page)

“Claire, I’m glad you’re here early,” Eleanor said.

I still didn’t look up until I heard her rise from her chair and move toward me. I had a brief mental image of frying pans and fires, with me leaping back and forth between them, before Eleanor settled stiffly into the chair next to me.

“Yes?” I decided to play innocent.

“I meant it, Claire, when I asked you to leave my mother alone.”

“I’m not doing anything to hurt her,” I said, but I couldn’t help the defensive tone in my voice. “She’s a very nice lady.”

“You’ll only agitate her by listening to all her mad theories,” Eleanor snapped.

“You don’t believe her, then?” I wondered that her own daughter hadn’t bothered to do as much as I had, asking Martin Blakely or someone like him to pass judgment on at least a portion of the manuscript. Besides, Eleanor’s attitude didn’t mesh with what Harriet had told me about her daughter’s desire to get her hands on the manuscript.

Eleanor’s face tightened and then drooped into lines of
dismay. “She ought to give up the cottage and move to a facility where she can receive proper care. But no, she won’t budge. She has to be near the college.”

I studied Eleanor’s face, trying to figure out whether she was lying.

“Maybe she just wants to be near you?” I barely spoke the words above a whisper, but they sounded loud in my own ears.

Eleanor’s head snapped up, and her spine straightened. “My relationship with my mother is none of your affair.”

“I know. You’re right.” After all, who was I to be giving her, or anyone, advice about how to conduct herself when it came to family dynamics? “It’s only that, well, she seems more lonely than demen…” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word.

“She has dementia,” Eleanor protested. “The doctors confirmed it.”

“Maybe she does. But she ’s as lucid as most people I’ve ever met. Most of the time, anyway.” Having lost my mother at such an early age, I couldn’t understand Eleanor’s attitude. I would have given anything to have my mother living in a picturesque cottage up the road. Or a hovel, for that matter. The living part, not the quality of the house, was the key factor. “What if you’re wrong about her theories?”

Eleanor shook her head. “See her if you must, Claire, but please remember that in a few days, you’ll be gone and I’ll be left here to console her.”

“To console her?”

“She’ll be devastated when you leave. She so rarely finds someone who will listen to her ravings.”

You could listen to them
. I pressed my lips together to keep from vocalizing the thought. Whatever stood between Harriet and Eleanor, it wasn’t something I could fix. Not in the space of a few days. Not when my own life was such a mess.

“I’m sorry if she’ll be upset. I’ll do my best to help her understand.”

“Hmmph.”
Eleanor’s head lifted in a regal manner. “I can’t forbid you, obviously. But I would have thought you would respect my wishes.”

I would have thought so too, but that was before I’d thrown my moral code to the wind and embarked on my current course of dishonesty and deviousness.

“I’m sorry, Eleanor.”

“Not sorry enough.” She glanced at her watch. “The others will be here in a moment. I want you to promise me that you won’t see my mother again.”

I swallowed hard. “I can’t.” The words were almost a squeak. “I have to return something to her.”

She shook her head. “You can give it to me. I’ll see that it’s returned to my mother.”

I shook my head. “I can’t.”

Eleanor’s jaw hardened, as did her eyes. “I must warn you—”

Footsteps echoed on the staircase and in the hallway just
outside the door. I said a silent prayer of thanksgiving for whoever had decided to show up early that morning.

My gratitude didn’t last long. James appeared in the doorway, scowling at me. I bristled and sat up straighter. Why should he be scowling at me? He was the one who had spurned me the night before.

Spurned. I really had been reading too much Jane Austen.

“Good morning,” he said stiffly and went to sit close to Eleanor.

“Morning.” I retrieved the folder containing Missy’s paper and buried my nose in it so I wouldn’t have to look at him.

Eleanor’s head bobbed up, a pointer who scented tension as if it were her quarry. “Hello, James. You’re early as well.” Then her eyes narrowed, and she looked from me to James and then back again. “Is everything all right?”

I would rather have been tortured than admit to Eleanor Gibbons that I was anything less than perfect.

“Everything’s fine.” The words gushed out like water from a hydrant. “Perfect, in fact. Sheer bliss.”

James gave me an odd look, and I thought I saw Eleanor rolling her eyes.

“I’ll have you go first, then, Claire. Are you prepared?”

Fear coalesced into a ball in my stomach. “Sure.” I shifted in my chair and took deep breaths. Lots and lots of deep breaths.

“The Role of Sisterhood in
Pride and Prejudice.”
It had seemed rather straightforward up until now. Jane was Lizzie’s good sister. The other three were bad. Or at least highly
problematic. Darcy’s sister Georgiana, who’d committed a youthful indiscretion, was a bit of a mixed bag. Nothing earth shattering.

Why, then, did I feel so uneasy?

I crumpled the folder between my fingers as the three of us waited in uncomfortable silence for the rest of the group to arrive. James glowered at the empty bookshelf across from him and gave no more notice of me than he would to a potted plant. Eleanor was reading something, probably a handbook on how to rid yourself of unwanted pests who wouldn’t leave your aging mother alone. Somewhere a clock ticked ominously and made me feel like a condemned prisoner.

At last, though, the others arrived. Martin led them in like the grand marshal of a parade, Olga towering behind him and the New Zealand ladies laughing and smiling at his witticisms. The cardiologist looked slightly more relaxed now that he ’d gotten over the hurdle of presenting. I could only hope that I would feel the same in the very near future.

“So, then, shall we begin?” Eleanor looked particularly severe in a black turtleneck and a sensible tweed skirt.

I had no idea how she withstood all that wool. I was melting in my sleeveless dress and sandals. Still, I was the one with perspiration beading my brow, while she looked as cool as a cucumber. A very intimidating cucumber who also happened to be rather displeased with me.

“Claire?” She smiled at me, only it wasn’t really a smile at all. “Why don’t you begin?”

“Sure.” I straightened in my chair and opened the folder in my lap. Then I looked around the group and gave them a smile of my own, one even less authentic than Eleanor’s.

“As some of you know, my sister couldn’t be here, so I’m presenting the paper on her behalf.”

Martin nodded encouragingly and winked at me. The New Zealand ladies made slight cooing noises of encouragement, and Olga sat up straight, pen poised above her notepad. The cardiologist’s eyelids were drooping, so I decided to look at him while I was speaking.

“Pride and Prejudice
gives Austen the ideal vehicle to examine the gift, and the curse, of sisterhood,” I began, my voice wavering. I stopped, cleared my throat, and then forged ahead. “While the relationship between Jane and Elizabeth has long been thought to present the apex of the sisterly bond.”
Apex of the sisterly bond?
I wasn’t even sure what that meant. “… Elizabeth’s three younger sisters provide a substantial threat to the older pair achieving their dreams of marriage.” So far, so good. “And yet,” I read, “one must ask whether the well-intentioned Elizabeth in fact proves to be a significant obstacle in her own right to her sister Jane ’s happiness.”

Huh? Now that I was reading Missy’s words aloud, they seemed different than when I’d read them on the plane.

“Jane and Bingley do secure one another’s affections in the end, but Elizabeth’s attempts to ‘help’ her sister”—why was the word
help
in quotation marks?—“actually hinder Jane’s ability to craft her own happy ending.”

Hinder?
How was helping someone hindering them? And suddenly I realized that Missy wasn’t talking about Jane and Elizabeth Bennet at all. No, she was clearly talking about Missy and Claire Prescott, whether she realized it or not. The ball of fear in my stomach crawled up into my throat and lodged near my vocal chords. I sat in silence for several long moments and tried to remember to breathe. Deeply. Or, barring that, at all.

After a long moment, I found my voice again. “While Elizabeth appears to be working for Jane ’s good, her actions undermine Jane’s best interests. For example, Elizabeth’s tromp through the fields to visit her sister when she is ill at Netherfield Park lowers Jane ’s standing in the eyes of Mr. Bingley’s sisters and his best friend, Mr. Darcy.”

Undermine?
Was she kidding with this?

I continued to read, but I hardly paid attention anymore. Missy’s meaning was quite clear. While generations of readers might have thought Elizabeth Bennet a stellar sister who loved and supported Jane, Missy took exception to that interpretation. No, to Missy, Elizabeth Bennet was the cause of Jane ’s difficulties, not her solace in them. Her sister’s helpfulness was, in fact, the very evil that kept Jane from making her feelings known to Mr. Bingley and, thus, attaching him and securing her future as well as her family’s.

“Elizabeth Bennet is hardly worthy of a hero like Mr. Darcy,” I read, heat rising in my cheeks.

Was that how Missy felt about me? My hands trembled where they clutched the edges of the paper. Years of sacrifice
and hard work, and for what? So that my sister could believe that I had, in fact, hindered her own quest for happiness? That I didn’t deserve any of my own?

I tried to keep my voice from shaking as I approached the end of the paper, but I was only partially successful. Should I feel betrayed? Indignant? I didn’t know. All I did know was that I was devastated.

“Jane Austen understood all too well from personal experience that sisterly devotion could easily cross into dependence, and while both Jane and Lizzie achieve their dream of a love match, the happy ending arrives in spite of, rather than due to, Elizabeth’s actions.”

I finished the last page and set it in my lap with a carefully controlled motion. I glanced from one face to the next, but the others simply smiled or nodded in bland agreement.

“An interesting notion,” Eleanor said. Her look was neither bland nor smiling. In fact, she looked pleased, in a rather cross sort of way. “Elizabeth as villainess. I’ve not heard that one before.”

“Yes, well, my sister does tend to have a rather… unique take on things.” I closed the folder and crossed my hands on top of it, but it was like closing the lid to Pandora’s box long after its evils had escaped.

“I’d never quite considered that before,” Rosie said in her soft New Zealand accent. “Still, I’m not sure I can accept that Elizabeth did more harm than good. She certainly intended the best for her sisters. All of them, not just Jane.”

“You know what they say about the road to hell,” said the cardiologist with a chuckle.

“So Elizabeth should have conformed more to the standards of her day?” Olga asked the group in general, her tone slightly indignant. “She should have succumbed to the demands of patriarchy and proved a compliant, mousy sister?” Her heavily plucked eyebrows formed arches that would have been at home in the Hall. She looked at me. “What do you think of your sister’s thesis?”

Any words that I might have said couldn’t escape past the knot in my throat. What did I think of Missy’s point of view? The problem was that I could understand it all too well. I could say that since my arrival in England, I had begun to see my own behavior over the past decade in a different light. What I thought was that Missy might, in fact, have a point. And that thought, that admission, made me want to cry.

But I wasn’t about to cry in front of these people, especially not in front of James or Eleanor.

“I’m merely the messenger,” I said with the slightest of smiles. It was all I could manage to produce. I forced my voice not to tremble. “I learned long ago not to take responsibility for my sister.” It was the biggest lie I had told since I’d arrived on English soil. I’d spent the whole of my adult life taking responsibility for everything to do with Missy. And now I was being told, albeit indirectly and while I was an ocean away, that my efforts had not been appreciated. Not in the least.

“So what do the rest of you think?” Eleanor waded into
the silence that followed my disclaimer. “Was Elizabeth a good sister or a bad one?”

I could have sworn she had a gleam in her eye, as if she perfectly understood the reason for my distress, but surely I was imagining it. She didn’t know anything about Missy or anything about me, other than that I was noncompliant when it came to her request that I leave her mother alone.

Louise patted Rosie ’s knee next to her. “Sisters are rather more complicated than that, though, aren’t they? Austen understands that thoroughly. Look at those Bennet girls. They’re all unique, as are their relationships with one another. Really, I think the problem here is down to Mr. Bingley’s sisters. They do the most damage to his prospects for happiness. And Jane Bennet’s.” Louise smiled at me, an offering of consolation and support.

Martin nodded. “An excellent point. And I, for one, think it’s a bit far-fetched to blame Elizabeth for Jane’s difficulties. Austen makes it clear that Jane guards her feelings too closely. If she had been more open toward Bingley, she would have attached him at the beginning.”

“And thus spared all of us the next several hundred pages,” said James.

I gaped at him, and a sudden wave of color washed his cheeks. Clearly he’d not meant to speak the words aloud.

Olga scribbled something furiously in her notebook, the cardiologist looked amused, and Eleanor gave a harrumphing noise.

“Yes, well, there are those of us who find the next several hundred pages quite fascinating.” She turned away from James and addressed a comment to Martin, but I didn’t hear what she said.