Confessions & Correspondence: Georgiana Darcy writes to Lady Matlock

Welcome to our epistolary retelling of Pride & Prejudice! Jane Austen’s original version of the story, First Impression, was told entirely in letters, so it seemed like a great group project. We’ll be posting a new letter every Wednesday. 

Georgiana Darcy writes to Lady Matlock

May 13, 1812

Dear Aunt Eleanor,

I am writing to you from the music room, which will perhaps seem odd when you learn the purpose of this letter, as the music room is not twenty feet from where Fitzwilliam is presently sitting in the drawing room, and I might very well simply go to him and say what I mean to say to you. I have been intending to go to him for the better part of a fortnight now. I find, each time I approach the drawing room door with every intention of doing so, that my feet carry me back here instead. I am not entirely certain this reflects well on my character, but I think by the time you have read to the end of this letter you may understand it a little, if you do not already.

I am not quite sure how to begin. I have never written this sort of letter before. I mean the sort where one is confiding something one does not really understand oneself, and is not sure one ought to say at all, but cannot continue without saying to someone. You are the someone I have chosen, Aunt Eleanor, because you have always been very kind to me and because you are cleverer than I am about people and because I trust that you will tell me if I am being foolish. Please do tell me if I am being foolish. I should find it very comforting to be told I am foolish, for then I may stop worrying.

It is about Fitzwilliam.

He came home from Rosings on the twenty-seventh of April and I was very glad to see him, for his visits to Lady Catherine always run longer than intended and this one had been no different, and I had been in London alone above a fortnight. When he walked in, Mrs Annesley and I were both in the hall, and I embraced him and thought he seemed rather tired from the journey, but otherwise quite himself, and I remember thinking I should tell him about the new piece I had been working on and ask whether he had endured a great deal of our aunt’s opinions on the orangery.

But then I looked at his face more carefully.

I do not know quite how to describe it. It was not that anything was wrong with his expression, for his expression was perfectly ordinary, and if you had passed him on the street you would have seen only that he looked somewhat tired. But I know my brother’s face very well. I have been studying it since I was four years old in order to know what he was thinking, since he so rarely says. There was something in it that I did not recognise, and that frightened me a little, though I could not have said why.

I asked if he had a pleasant journey. He said it was adequate. I asked if Lady Catherine was well. He said she was unchanged. He asked whether I had been practising, and I said yes, and he said that was good, and then he went upstairs, and I stood in the hall for rather longer than necessary before going back to the music room.

I told myself it was only tiredness. He had been away a month, and the roads are not kind in April, and he is not at his most communicative at the best of times. By morning, I thought, he would be reading his correspondence at breakfast and asking about the pianoforte and everything would be as it was.

In the morning, he did not come down to breakfast.

I am not going to detail for you the entire fortnight, because I do not wish this letter to become longer than it already threatens to be, and because I am not sure I can put the whole of it in order without losing my thread. I will say only this: for the first several days, it was his temper. That is the word I have been avoiding, because I am not sure it is quite right, and because it seems unfair to him, since he was never once rude to me or to any of the servants, not by word or deed. He was perfectly civil. He said please and thank you. He asked after Mrs Annesley’s headache. He is, at his very worst, a gentleman.

But I saw it in other ways.

The way he handled his letter opener when the post came, slicing the poor letters as though sharpening his sword, setting that little weapon down more carefully than usual, the kind of control that means its opposite. The way he sat at his desk for very long stretches of time and then, when I passed the study door, was simply still, looking at nothing at all, with papers in front of him that had not been moved. He wanted no company; I offered to read aloud to him one evening and he declined with perfect courtesy, and then sat for two hours staring at the fireplace, which is not reading but at least it is a chair, so perhaps it is something. He went out walking a great deal. He came home from those walks no better than he left.

After perhaps five or six days, the temper went away. I am not sure this is an improvement.

What replaced it was a desperate sort of quietness. He has always been quiet, you know, that is not new, but there is a kind of quiet that is simply a man’s nature and then there is a kind of quiet that is something swelling within a person from the inside until they have not the energy for noise. This is the second kind. He eats, though not with much interest. He reads, or he holds a book; I am not always certain they are the same thing. He joins me in the evenings sometimes, and sits in the chair he always sits in, and I play for him, and he listens, or seems to, and occasionally he asks me to play something again, which is not unusual.

Except that it is, because it is always the same song.

Do you remember that old Scottish air, the one about the lass by the burn? Miss Broadhurst’s governess taught it to me years ago and I had more or less abandoned it because Fitzwilliam always said it was a silly, sentimental piece and he had little patience for sentiment in music. He said it once and I never played it for him again. I am not sure I have thought of it in two years.

But the evening after he came home from Rosings, I was casting about for something to play. I did not want to attempt the Beethoven, as it wants more steadiness of feeling than I had that evening. I picked up and played the Scottish air without quite thinking about it, and he looked up from his book, and I thought he was about to say something, and then he did not, and I kept playing. When I finished, he asked me to play it again.

He has asked me to play it every evening since. Sometimes twice. He never says anything when I play it. He just listens, and once or twice I have glanced up quickly when I thought he was not watching, and he has been…

I am not sure of the word. Somewhere else.

The other thing (and I am setting this down because I said I would be honest with you and I mean to be, though I feel very much as though I am reporting on him, which is not a comfortable sensation) the other thing is a ribbon. It is a very small thing, a bit of narrow ribbon, pale blue or perhaps lilac, I have not been able to see it closely enough to be certain. He does not take it out, precisely, it is more that sometimes, when he is sitting quietly while I play, I catch him doing something with his fingers in his coat pocket, and once when he shifted in the chair, I saw just the end of it before he settled it away again. He does not know I have seen it. I should never embarrass him by telling him so.

I have been turning all of this over in my mind for two weeks, Aunt Eleanor, and I have arrived at no satisfactory conclusion. He went to Rosings in perfect health and ordinary spirits. He came home like a clock that has been wound too tight, and then, when it finally ran down, like a clock that nobody is quite sure they ought to wind again.

I am sure he would be very vexed if he knew I was writing this. He would tell me he is perfectly well, and that I am not to fuss, and that he merely had a fatiguing journey, and I should practice the Beethoven. He would be entirely convincing about it, which is the problem, for he is always entirely convincing about being perfectly well even when he is not. He is a very good brother. He is not, I think, a very good patient when what is wrong with him is not the sort of thing a doctor can see.

I do not know what has happened to him. That is the plainest way I can say it. I do not know what could have happened at Rosings that might have changed him like this. Lady Catherine was her usual self, I presume. Cousin Anne is always the same. Cousin Richard was there, and he is always good for Fitzwilliam. He said there is a new parson, Mr Collins, whom he describes as absurd, but absurdity never put him out of temper before. Besides, he said there is also a Mrs Collins, who was sensible enough, but who cannot have done anything to cause this.

And Mrs Collins had guests, I believe. A Sir William Lucas and his daughter, and a Miss Bennet, a Miss Elizabeth Bennet, who I recall he mentioned dancing with last autumn. She was a neighbour of Mr Bingley’s and is apparently a friend to Mrs Collins and went walking a great deal in the park. So Fitzwilliam says.

I do not suppose that is of any relevance. I am only setting down what I know.

I am aware, as I write this, that there is a shape to what I am describing that I recognise. Not from the outside, as I am observing Fitzwilliam, but from the inside, from myself, last summer, when I was fifteen and very stupid and fancied someone who could never think of me. I quail to even mention it, for it was a passing thing, quite harmless, I assure you, and my good brother set me right before I could go very much wrong. But it did not seem harmless at the time. I remember the numbness and then anger and then numbness again. I remember finding it impossible to explain why I could not simply eat dinner as a normal person. I remember a song that I kept returning to, not because it gave me comfort, but because it was associated with a time when I had been happy, and it was both terrible and necessary to hear it.

I recognise all of it, is what I am saying.

Only that is impossible. Is it not?

Fitzwilliam is not fifteen and he is not me and nobody would ever dare. He is Fitzwilliam! Nobody has ever… well, I need not put it down. I cannot conceive of any circumstance in which someone would have the means or the desire to…

I do not know how to finish that sentence in a way that does not sound absurd, so I will not finish it.

I will only say that I do not know what to do, and that I cannot ask him, because I am his younger sister and it is not my place and he would only say he was perfectly well, and I cannot watch him hold that ribbon in his coat pocket and play the Scottish air every evening indefinitely without saying something to someone or going quite mad. So I am saying it to you.

I hope you will tell me what to do, because I have been very brave about writing this letter and I find I have completely exhausted my supply of courage in the doing of it, and have none left for anything further.

Please do not tell Fitzwilliam I wrote to you. Please do not tell him I told you about the ribbon. Please, if you think fit to speak to him, be very careful, for he is proud in the way that means he would rather be in pieces than let someone see him put back together.

I am sorry this letter is so long. I have been very alone with this.

Your affectionate niece,

Georgiana

P.S.  I have just remembered that I was going to ask whether you still want me at Matlock House for the Thursday evening next week. Please do let me know, for I should not like to leave him just now if he particularly wanted company, even though he will say he does not.

P.P.S. The ribbon, when I saw it, I think it may have been lavender. I am not certain. It is probably nothing.

Read all the letters from Confessions & Correspondence here!