Chapters 19-21 The Blessing of Marriage

A small phaeton rolled at a quick clip with the new master of Rosings at the reins and his young wife squealing in delight as one arm gripped his own and the other held fast to her bonnet. Two chestnut ponies, cousins in breeding as well, carried the happy couple through the winding lanes of Rosings towards the thick woods on the south side of the property. On days of fine weather, the Fitzwilliams enjoyed the small modicum of privacy the sylvan expedition offered away from the prying eyes and irksome commands of Anne’s mother, Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

“I believe we ought to start the renovations on the dowager house if we wish to have any peace by winter,” Richard reasoned as he slowed the ponies down for the trail became less smooth in this part of the estate.

“Mother will never remove herself to the dowager house voluntarily. I’m afraid it would be a waste of funds to invest in any improvements.”

“I care not if she volunteers or we drag her there ourselves. You must admit, for as large as the great house is, there seems to be no escaping her company. You may have years of practice in enduring and ignoring her advisements and insistences.” Anne giggled softly as her husband made gruesome faces to mimic her mother’s own expressions when she began speaking of her daughter’s health. “But I find my militaristic background precludes me from taking orders from anyone I do not consider my superior.”

Anne released the arm of her husband to fixed the pins that had come loosened by their thrilling jaunt across the estate nearly as fast as the ponies could manage. “I believe if you consulted my mother she would correct you of your misapprehension of her inferiority.”

A baritone chortled laugh escaped from the former Colonel in His Majesty’s Army as he pulled the ponies to a complete stop. Offering his hand to his wife, as Anne began to descend from the gig, Richard could not help but assist her with his hands wrapping and slightly squeezing around her small midsection. A male youth hopped from his precarious position standing on the back support of the small equippage and shakily took the reins from the hands of his master. Richard pulled a picnic from the straps on the back and began walking his wife to their favorite private copse of trees about a three minutes’ walk into the woods.

“I find you to be adoringly sarcastic, sharper than during our courtship of letter writing, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. You shall always be putting me in my place with your verbal wit, I may have to study as a schoolboy to keep up.”

“One finds an abundance of time for reading and careful reflection when confined to a bed for weeks at a time.” Anne Fitzwilliam jutted her chin slightly taller as a familiar tickle began at the back of her throat. Dedicating her focus on breathing through her nose, she pressed her lips together to stifle a cough.

“I suppose.” Richard ducked his head to avoid a low hanging branch, one of the many that secured the view of their private natural parlor from the road. “My years of the battlefield or the barracks lent little time for reading though I found my favorite materials so captivating I read them until the creases began to crack holes in the parchment.” Richard glanced at his wife with a smile on his face at his allusion to their courtship by correspondence, only for the smile to slide off his face as his wife’s expression slackened and her skin tone was very pale indeed.

“Anne?”

Unable to hold her lungs’ needs at bay any longer, Anne Fitzwilliam began to cough in such a violent manner that she had to stop walking and leaned on her husband’s arm for support. Utterly helpless, Richard stood stoically next to his wife as the fit crescendoed and then slowed to a repeating gasp for breath.

“I am a beast to bring you out of doors for my own comforts away from your mother. We shall return at once.”

“No,” Anne managed weekly, “please… it shall pass. I am getting stronger.”

The phrase made Richard sigh. His gentle, sickly wife wished for nothing more in this world than a babe of her own. She had confessed this to him many times in her letters, but there was no hope of her frail body carrying a child to term and her surviving as well. The topic had become a rift between them as apart from the wedding night, Richard had abstained from his wife’s bed so as not to jeopardize her health. Anne, having found her first night as a wife to be utterly delightful, had made it her mission to strengthen her lungs through regular exercise in hopes to convince her husband she was not so weak and frail as her mother had described her all these years, but merely asthmatic attacks of her lungs.

“I shall set the picnic. You will hold the tree here?” Richard looked at his wife for compliance and she nodded and obediently walked two steps towards the nearest tree trunk. “I shall be right back so you might rest and then we shall have our afternoon, yes?”

Anne nodded earnestly and smiled giving her husband enough reassurance to walk ahead and prepare their luncheon. As soon as Richard was out of sight, Anne Fitzwilliam leaned around the tree and spat out the small amount of blood and mucus that had come up with her last cough. Seeing the boldfaced evidence of her condition, Anne scowled and pushed herself away from the tree trunk with both hands.

She was stronger, she was certain of it! The only way to break her husband of treating her like a frail, fragile porcelain doll was to show him.

Anne Fitzwilliam marched after her husband and arrived at the picnic area not long after him, interrupting him from removing the plates and food in the basket. Graciously lowering herself to the thick woolen boundary for their seated comfort, her hands reached in to assist him.

“Are you always this obstinate, Mrs. Fitzwilliam?” Richard attempted to keep a serious face, but in his heart, he felt cheered to see his wife’s determination to fortify her body by sheer willpower alone.

“How long must a lady wait for the offering of refreshment?” she asked as she held the bottle of wine in her hands extended out for him to open. Richard complied while Anne leaned back with her hands behind her to look up at the sky and the tree canopy above. Birds twittered in the branches as a gentle breeze rustled the newly grown leaves of late spring that had begun as nothing more than buds a few weeks ago. Spying a full glass of red wine in Richard’s hand, she pushed up from her reclined position to accept the beverage. After taking a sip, she waited until he poured his own and begun his own thirst quenching.

“So what is to be my test to conquer before you shall return to war in my bed?”

Sauciness had the desired result of forcing Richard to choke on his wine. Giggling at her husband’s folly, Anne Fitzwilliam helped herself to a healthy gulp of wine as he caught his breath.

“And what is to say I may only seek your attentions in the bedroom, Madam? Are you not afraid to stir your husband’s yearnings in such a wild place?”

“I should only be rewarded if such yearnings were to overcome you. But for all your pretty talk, I fear you are much powder with no shot and I’m quite safe in my current situation.”

Richard growled as he leaned over the picnic tableau and captured his saucy wife’s lips with his own. The kiss deepened between the couple until Richard pulled away, left feeling empty.

“A kiss is not nearly warmth enough and your coldness cuts deep.” Anne looked away from her right hand sporting an exquisite ring to the dark ruby bracelet that was a gift from her father when she turned fourteen.

“You are not kind, either, with that tongue of yours. You think it easy for a man to love his wife and then deny himself the comforts she may provide? Be assured the pain you feel in your heart runs just as deep through my own but one of us must be practical. If I was to get you with child –”

“You could send mother packing as far away as you pleased.”

Richard stuttered for a moment as his wife’s response made no sense. Quickly licking his lips as his mind tried to make any sort of connections as to follow her logic, he found he could find none. “What on earth does your mother going to the dowager house have to do with our marriage bed?”

Anne twisted her lips left and right as she again stared deep into the ruby on her wrist. Small voices in the back of her mind reminded her their wedding was consummated and concrete, there was no harm in explaining to Richard the peculiar nature of her inheritance. With a sigh, Anne handed her wine glass to her husband, placed all of her weight on her left hand so she might hold up her right to display the bracelet. Richard recognized the antique jewels and old-fashioned setting as a de Bourgh family heirloom Anne often wore.

“In my father’s final days he was quite mad. Mother thinks I do not recall, but I do. One night, he had wandered into my room in nothing but his nightshirt, his eyes wide as he searched the room for others which quite frightened me. He was not well.”

This intelligence was not new for Richard as even he knew Uncle Lewis had died of a disease of his own making. But he nodded to allow Anne to continue.

“Blood was all he kept muttering as he came closer to my bedside. Blood, he said, would never die.”

“He was ill as you said, many people have cryptic confessions when they face death. I’ve seen it myself.” Richard refused to allow his mind freedom to recall the many young recruits and officers he had seen die on the battlefields of Europe. That life was, and had to remain, in his past as his future lied with Anne.

“No, it was not just the ramblings of a crazed man. I learned, years later as his words never left me, that my father’s will only allows me to inherit Rosings if I marry and produce a child.” Anne reached forward and took the wineglass from her husband’s hand with the same hand burdened by her father’s jewel and emptied the contents of the glass.

Richard sat stunned at such a revelation, a mixture of thoughts and emotions racing through his heart and mind. How could this be? The estate was Anne’s upon her marriage, Lady Catherine had been most empathic about that with Darcy every year they came to visit. With the provision of Anne birthing a child she would never have, why was Aunt Catherine always arguing against such a progeny from occurring? She had made it quite clear that should Darcy marry Anne that he would never be denied his dalliances on the side, a prospect entirely unpalatable to the steadfast Fitzwilliam Darcy. Unless, Lady Catherine never intended to have Anne birth a child . . . Richard shook his head at his own racing thoughts. Even that, the idea of stealing someone else’s child, was too far even for his aunt.

“So is this the only reason you taunt me and tease me to entice me to your bed? I suppose enough time has passed to confirm our first encounter as husband-and-wife was not fruitful?”

Anne nodded her head and then shook her head most violently.

“Please be clear, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, I am finding the afternoon to be very unpleasant.” Richard’s mouth felt dry but he held no desire to drink his own wine.

“I love you, Richard. I have loved you for six years and waited for you to come clear of the Army.” Anne searched for a break in his staunchly defensive demeanor. Finding none, she relied upon shock and awe. “If I merely wanted a child, I’d have seduced a footman like Mother and told Darcy I was willing to marry him six years ago.”

Richard’s mouth involuntarily dropped open as he was not prepared for his small, loving wife and dutiful cousin to discuss relations between men and women in such a crass manner.

“Richard, I am six and twenty, not some young debutante in a ballroom in London.” Richard squinted his eyes shut in a hard blink as he tried to muddle through the shocking revelation of his wife’s inheritance. Once a level-headed, collected member of His Majesty’s Finest and well experienced in the art of interrogation, Richard was finding the personal nature of news could very easily thwart such years of practice cold. Finding himself overly agitated, Richard Fitzwilliam tossed the contents of his wine glass to the ground beside them and left the glass behind as he stood to pace small area of clearing available to him. Anne watched her husband rise from the picnic and felt an unpleasant churn begin her stomach.

“Why did you not tell me any of this before the wedding?” Richard opened with his first volley.

“Would it have made a difference?”

Richard halted in his tracks, slowly turning to gaze his wife up and down. She sat there, prim and proper in a deep orchard velvet Spencer over a spotted muslin gown. A woman he always knew to be intelligent and kind, but never crafty. Still, he needed to know where it was he stood with her, once and for all. There was a very great danger the daughter was more deadly than the mother.

“You know it would not have, but it angers me you would keep such an important piece of information from me. I have given up my commission, we have very little income aside from the interest from our grandfather’s gift. Did you not wish for me to keep my position?”

“Of course not, it one thing to conduct a courtship through correspondence, but I had no intention of performing our marriage through one!”

“So you lie to me by omission to manipulate me into your own schemes with your mother?”

Anne’s voice raised as she pushed herself up from the picnic blanket to face her husband. The Fitzwilliam temper did not only strike the men in the family.

“You’re too narrow-minded to see the fallacy of your own logic. You will not lay with me as a husband should to preserve my life and yet you are angry with me for protecting yours? Yes, we are the tragic couple indeed that we incite hate in one another in the name of preservation.” Anne clenched her fists at her side and turned around to begin walking towards the gig. She cared not what Richard decided to do about the picnic or the information she gave him concerning the particulars of her father’s will. T’was not her fault such conditions were placed upon her and she had long ago resolved herself to living a full, but short life. Why no one in her family could support her in her plans, Anne did not understand. She had thought Richard to be different but he was no better than the rest.

Her anger clouded her vision and perceptions so much, Anne Fitzwilliam scarcely screamed out when a pair strong hands snatched her from behind and pulled her backward deeper into the woods. Swiftly she was turned around and her senses immediately recognized the scent before her eyes opened. In fact, as her husband claimed her mouth and lifted her in the air she never even opened them until long after she found herself laid down on the woolen blanket and victor of the argument.