“What have you been doing?” asked Dr. Galt. “Running up and down stairs? I told you, my girl, you can live a normal life, but within reason. Whatever you’ve been doing, you must not do it again.” I lay sick in bed all that week, and Miss Jenkinson brought me interminable cups of beef tea. But I had found friends.
We have tried to understand the rules by which the door operates.
It appears and disappears unexpectedly. When we step through it, we do not know where we will be, or how long we will be there. When it comes back for us, it usually takes us home. But not always.
At first, only Mary could see it—and, presumably, Pug. Now we can all see it—as a sort of shiver in the air, as though the brick wall, or hedge, or whatever is behind it, were behind a waterfall.
It does not like to be ignored. If we do not step through it, the door sulks. Sometimes it does not come back for days.
Sometimes, when we call for it to appear, it comes. At other times it will not come, no matter how we call. Sometimes, it will take us where we ask. At other times, it will not. “Door, could you please take us to Pemberley?” has worked in the past, as has “Open, Sesame!” As has “Here, door, door, door!”
The door appears to have limits. We have never traveled earlier than the King’s reign, nor later than the defeat of Napoleon. (Imagine our relief to learn of Waterloo.) We have never traveled outside England, although Eliza has asked, again and again, to go to Italy.
Wherever we go, we are ghosts. We walk unnoticed. And when we return, we have not been missed. Life seems to flow around us, as though we were pebbles in a stream, eternally still in the midst of motion. Once, Eliza said, “Is it the door, or is it just us? I can go to Highbury for hours, and when I return Mother says that she thought I was home all the time, in the garden or with the cows. Perhaps we are just like that, going through life unnoticed.”
We call it a door, but is it a door at all? We say that it opens, but can what it does be called opening? What happens when it appears? What determines where it will take us? We do not know.
“I think,” I said to Mary and Eliza, “that we should begin attempting to summon the door. I believe it has a purpose, and that we must fulfill it.”
“What sort of purpose?” asked Mary.
“I believe that we should find others like ourselves. They must exist, and I think the door will take us to them.”
We were in Bath, walking along the Crescent. The sun was bright and Mary’s nose was beginning to freckle. The door does not wait for one to fetch a parasol.
“You don’t know how lonely I was until I met Pug. And if there are others like me, who are also lonely, I want to find them.”
I said it with steady conviction, although I was not sure, myself, that the door was not simply a Devil, an impish device that had decided to play with us for a while. But there is something I have wondered since the days of Dr. Templeton and Dr. Bransby, while being lowered into a cold bath or drinking beef tea. Is there a force in the universe that understands us, as we long to be understood? And if so, is this force compassionate? Does it, even as it metes out ill, long for our good? If so, it is the force that will give Fitz the girl he wants, the happy ending he deserves. But what about those of us for whom there can be no happy endings? Perhaps it gives us something else, a secret. A companionship that even Fitz would not understand.
So far, we have only found two others like ourselves, apart from the unfriendly Mrs. Churchill. Mrs. Smith of Allenham Hall, in Derbyshire, is a widow with a heart condition like mine, who cannot travel much. But we go visit her, when the door allows. Mr. Wentworth is a vicar in Shropshire. I said to him once, “It seems, Mr. Wentworth, that you disprove Mary’s conjecture. You have a profession. You are married and have children. Surely you are not one of those to whom nothing happens.”
“It is true, Miss de Bourgh, that I have more to occupy myself than you do, which precludes me from joining you as often as I would like. But consider, my brother is an admiral in His Majesty’s navy. I, too, once longed to become a sailor, but my father destined me for the church. Compared to his, my life is dull indeed.”
“Perhaps,” said Eliza later, when the three of us were alone, except for Pug, “that is the difference between men and women. Mr. Wentworth’s life would be considered full, for a woman. And yet he considers it dull.”
“I feel for him,” I said. “But I confess, I feel more for Mrs. Smith, lying on her sofa all day long.”
The first time we walked through the door into her room, kept as dark as mine in the days of Dr. Bransby, she said, “Good dog! You’ve brought some friends. Sit down, girls, sit down. Stay and talk with me for a while.”
This is what Miss Jenkinson tells the tourists as they walk through Rosings. I have heard it so often I could almost recite it myself: Roman foundations, a Saxon fort, given to Sir George de Bourgh by William the Conqueror.
“In the days of Sir Roger de Bourgh, the cellars contained so much port it was said you could sail on it to China. The requirements of the present Lady de Bourgh are considerably more modest.” Laughter.
“Under Lady Anne de Bourgh, a portion of the house burned and had to be rebuilt. As we walk through the house, I will point out the various architectural styles. This hall, as you see, is Elizabethan, although after the fire it required extensive restoration. Only one of the walls is original. It was said that Lady Anne set the fire herself after her lover, William d’Arcy, rejected her for the Virgin Queen. At present, Rosings has forty-two bedrooms, a number considered propitious by Sir Roger de Bourgh, who was believed by some to be a mathematician, and by others to be an alchemist. His wife, Arabella d’Arcy, was accused of assisting in his alchemical experiments. Her grandmother, Isabel d’Arcy, who was the mistress of Henry VI, was afterward tried as a witch. There are twelve bathrooms, of which eight have modern plumbing, put in at a cost of over a thousand pounds.” Gasps.
“The de Bourghs hold extensive lands in Kent, including this manor and of course the village of Hunsford. In his capacity as magistrate, the late Sir George de Bourgh was responsible for hanging fourteen poachers in one year. Madam, if you could stop your child from kicking that chair. It was presented to Lady Catherine by Queen Charlotte herself. Observe the painting of Sir Edward de Bourgh as a child, which was saved during the Civil War by being buried under a local pigsty.”
“Tell us about the Wicked Lord!”
“Edward de Bourgh, the Wicked Lord, as he was called at court, was beheaded for his unwanted attentions to King Charles’ mistress, Nell Gwyn…”
Pug and I escape to the garden. When we were children, Fitz was made to learn this tale of folly and bloodshed. No wonder he reads German philosophy. The de Bourghs and the d’Arcys: alchemists, rapists, thieves. Let him have his happy ending.
In the garden, I sit on the edge of the fountain, feeding the fish. These are the living fish, imported from China: orange and white, with an exquisite beauty that their stone cousins cannot match. They rise to nibble the bread that I drop for them. Pug puts his front paws on the edge of the fountain, looks at them, and barks.