Lady Catherine dressed daily in lavender, and could not sit still. She had decided today upon a stroll through her gilded library as the golden sun streamed in through her 768 French windows but her mind was in full chaos - thoughts running amok, turning on her like revolting peasants. What was to be done in such a situation?
She looked unseeingly at the grandeur that surrounded her and considered things had gone her way for so long after Lord De Bourgh had finally died. All this pomp and wealth, windows and chimney breasts, were hers, all hers!
It had been necessary to drive to that tiny abode, Longbourne, with that terrible little shrubbery - far beneath her dignity. There in the early morning light she had accosted her now mortal enemy, Elizabeth Bennet. She had pleaded this Eliza (who once, at the Rosings dining table, had given her opinion very decidedly for so young a person) never to enter into an arrangement with her wealthy, reserved nephew. From birth he had been bequeathed to her sickly daughter. No other match was to be born and for the shades of Pemberly to be thus polluted was humiliating beyond what the constraints of her fine breeding could bear.
The wedding had simply gone ahead. She, Lady Catherine, had soured silently in her seventeenth century gilded chair at home in Rosings Park next to the piano she could not play. Anne, who was perpetually still, sick, and yellow, said nothing.
Sleepless nights, despondent days. At 4am, she rang the bell for a hot saffron and lavender cordial. At 5am, she was time-travelling in her own eminent head wishing this and wishing that. She remembered days when she had had enough energy in her gentrified feet to flit around elegantly in the manicured lawns of Rosings park like a Shakespearian sprite. Even then she would give orders to the UnderButler about the lighting or the state of the lawns or that a swan had escaped from the lake. She loved to exert her control. To control things and people was the very thing that Lady Catherine was born to do.
Long winter nights. The fire glowed red and the rain pattered senselessly. And as Lady Catherine lay awake this time she thought of solutions. The Renaissance angels still flapped around the room refusing to be still. In weak winter mornings, she was still at a loss. It was then she began drifting towards the library (naturally after Phipps had been in) like a regal ghost, with puffy, matronly un-slept eyes and a vicious temperament. It was here she picked up her once favourite play, Macbeth, by William Shakespeare and thrummed through its pages once again.
'Come, you spirits/ That tend on mortal thoughts' she read the words of the bard aloud, reverently, solemnly.
'Unsex me here/ And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full/ Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood; /Stop up the access and passage to remorse,/That no compunctious visitings of nature/ Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between/ The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,/ And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,/ Wherever in your sightless substances/You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,/And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,/That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,/Nor heaven peep throug the blanket of the dark,Come thick night and pall me in the dunnest smoke of Hell'.
She uttered the words with some conviction. She couldn't help but confess, they made her feel ever so slightly better. She admitted she had admiration for Lady Macbeth. She did. And Macbeth, even though he became a murdering tyrant. That was not entirely his fault. \
She lifted her copy from the marble shelf once again one Sunday afternoon. On this occasion she reached as far as the scene where Macbeth hires a couple of murderers to do away with Banquo.
Lady Catherine shuffled forward slightly in her lavender dress, the armchair creaking. She adjusted her spectacles at this and a flutter of renewed interest in the Macbeths' ambition and bravery in following through with their plan awakened in her breast. She could never condone the murder of a King but still, it made her think. Desperate times did call for desperate measures.
She wondered briefly if she could find a murderer in Lampton. It would have to be a respectable murderer of noble rank and high birth. Or Darbyshire. Perhaps it would need to be the whole of Darbyshire. Or better yet. London.
London was the ticket.
She sat up straight with a shudder having come back to herself. Goodness, she thought. For a moment she had given way to extremity, and any sort of reactive emotional extremity is surely a product of ill-breeding.
Yet something had to be done. Something more than visiting a shrubbery and confronting an obstinate headstrong ill- bred (who was her mother?) sharp tongued GEL.
The flash of inspiration was sudden and all consuming. Connections were everything and Lady Catherine had some of those. Yes she did. (people who had something of a revolutionary bent. Liked to show a face at the odd regicide event!) And she had an idea. A brilliant one. and these connections would carry it out. Her plan for revenge.
YOU ARE READING
Tales of Disturbance
Science FictionA young teenage girl, haunted by the memories of her father's execution, attempts to escape a cruel regime by night. A solitary woman, abandoned by her husband, inadvertently plays into the cruel hands of 'the state'. In another totalitarian regime...
