Dancing With Mr. Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen and Chawton House Library Read Free Page B

Bigg-Wither, a young man in a puce-and-purple striped silk waistcoat, and evidently in need of a wife, or persuaded that he was?
    And now promised a wife: yes, I will.
    Did he truly know what he was letting himself in for, she wondered, by offering for Miss Jane Austen? Had he no notion of the glint of irony lurking in her eye, the sharpness of the tongue disguised by the amiable, good-natured manners that she presented to the world? His sisters must have: they had known her forever. Alas, not even his sisters had seen the jottings that Cassandra – Cassandra alone – had read, the idle, wicked musings on the friends and neighbours whose antics she had observed with such shameful enjoyment and described with such relish to her sister. But he must know of the pages tucked into her writing slope which she sometimes read to friends, images of that other world that flashed in her restless brain, a world of handsome young men with clever conversation and fair young ladies who danced with them in The Dashing White Sergeant or the figures of another of the country dances that could so nicely set her free – briefly – of the conventions of her company.
    She tried to recall dancing with Harris Bigg-Wither and could not.
    It is done, she thought. No crying off.
    Her poverty – this new sense of poverty since Papa had ceded his livings to brother James, this humiliating dependency upon the generosity and the whims of others – the indignities – the little slights – the necessary economies – all those would cease when she was Mrs Bigg-Wither, mistress of Manydown Park, an estate comparable – almost – to Godmersham, brother Edward’s principal seat. No longer Miss Jane Austen, a dowerless spinster of twenty-six, but Mrs Bigg-Wither, wife to a gentleman of means – seven thousand pounds a year! A considerable man, however young, however shy, however blank his eyes at times, a friend, an old friend, comfortable, with no meanness in him that she knew. The five years between them would be as nothing – had not brother Henry and cousin Eliza, fully ten years his senior, dealt happily together?
    Had Harris attended to the passage she had read to the Manydown circle two nights before about the serious business of annuities? He had nodded, had he also smiled?
    No need for Mrs Bigg-Wither to mend or patch her ageing boots or pelisse as they became worn; she could replace or discard them on a whim if she wished. What pin money she would have! Her time would no longer be at the mercy of others – only his, of course. Yet husbands might be managed. Everyone said so. She would learn the way of it, just as Mama had managed, and dear, good Papa had allowed it, and indeed there was still abundant affection between them.
    What was it Papa had said of a marriage without affection?
    No more requests – demands – to mind a child or fetch a shawl; no one, save her husband, of course, to rule her time. She must find a place at Manydown to write, a snug, quiet spot such as eluded her in the rooms at Bath where she and Cassandra now lived with Mama and Papa. No more mending and darning; perhaps some pretty needlework, but only if she wished it. Music. Manydown had a fine pianoforte. Yet, there would be the duties of a chatelaine, of a wife, indeed of a mother.
    A mother.
    She had felt nothing when Harris’s hand touched her sleeve. His lips pressed dry against her cheek. She had no impulse to embrace or touch him.
    ‘A marriage without affection can hardly be an agreeable enterprise.’
    She would come to live among friends at Manydown, Elizabeth, Catherine, Alethea, the Bigg sisters, good girls, dear girls, if not clever; but they were friends, dear friends throughout the golden Steventon years. Good to her, wishing her only happiness. And Steventon, dear Steventon, so near, still home, always home, even with James and his brood occupying the parsonage.
    Where amongst this lively, noisy family of Biggs and Bigg-Withers could solitude be