Elizabeth Aston - The Second Mrs Darcy

Since her brothers were Octavia’s legal guardians, they could impose their will on their despised half sister. Lady Melbury would have taken Octavia with her to Ireland, but she accepted the family’s ruling without argument and set off to her new life in Dublin as wife to Dr. Gregory without Octavia. After all, she told her stepdaughter, she was a great girl now, fifteen was nearly grown up. She would do better to keep up her connections with her father’s family than languish in Dublin.

Octavia fought the decision, but Arthur was absolute, and so she stayed on in Dorset, in the company of a woman who wasn’t well educated enough to be called a governess, a woman of indeterminate age who drifted around the house in a cloud of melancholy and with a perpetual sniff that drove Octavia to leave the house and saddle her horse and gallop the fidgets out of herself on long solitary rides.

When her brother Arthur found out about the rides, he put a stop to them by the simple expedient of selling her horse and leaving her with one old pony who could be used in the trap to take them to and from the nearby village when required.

“One is expected to marry, of course,” said Octavia, watching a mynah bird with its comical yellow eye hopping about on the sparse grass in search of insects. “It’s considered the natural state for any young woman. And yet, do I want to marry again? I am not so sure that I do.”

Lady Brierley pursed her lips. “You are still grieving for your husband, of course it is too soon to be making any plans of that sort, any definite plans, that is. However, one must look ahead, you will come out of your blacks, and you know, once a woman has been married, she is accustomed to the state. Even women with husbands a great deal less amiable than poor Captain Darcy find themselves wishing to marry again.”

“Only I am tall, you know, and that does limit the possibilities.”

Lady Brierley looked sharply at Octavia; was there a hint of laughter in her voice?

“Nonsense, height has nothing to do with it. You are graceful, you carry your inches with style, and there are shorter men who prefer—”

“Oh, I think I could only like a man I could look up to,” said Octavia gravely.

At eighteen, Octavia had been summoned to London from Dorset, whisked away from one day to the next by an impatient Arthur, to be inspected and made ready for marriage by her sisters.

One look at her, and they despaired. “She’s taller than most men, which is a grave handicap,” complained Augusta.

“Built like a cart horse,” said Theodosia.

“You’ll have to do your best to make something of her,” said Arthur with a shrug. “She is as ill bred as her mother, and you must break her of this habit she has of speaking her mind; that will never do.”

And they tried, in their ruthless way. Muslined and crimped and scolded and directed as to just how to behave, Octavia must be meek, men didn’t like any forwardness in a woman, particularly not in one who resembled a bean pole. She must laugh, but softly, nothing merry or uproarious, at whatever jokes or pleasantries her partner might make; she must listen; she must hold her tongue and keep her thoughts to herself, no one was interested in her except as a wife of more or less suitable breeding and the possible mother of future sons.

“At least she looks healthy enough,” said her brother disparagingly. “Perhaps some country fellow in town for the season might take a fancy to her, some man who is not averse to an Amazon for a wife.”

Privately, her half sisters laughed at her prospects. “If she had a fortune … but even then, she is so very rustic .”

Neither of them had had any great fortune, but they had been so beautiful as girls that each of them had swept more than one eligible man off his feet the moment she had come out, and had married, in turn, the richest and most influential of her suitors.

At first, Octavia felt sorry for their husbands, at least for Theodosia’s husband. Augusta’s spouse, Lord Adderley, was a dark, brooding, unpleasant man, who looked at Octavia as though she were an insect; he and Augusta deserved each other, she soon decided. But Henry Cartland, Theodosia’s husband, was a kinder man, who seemed to have a gleam of sympathy in his eye when he heard her being harangued by one or other of her family. However, he made no attempt to intervene or stand up for her; he had been married to Theodosia for long enough to know that it would be a wasted effort.

The season had passed in a whirl of dances and parties, with Octavia hating every moment of it, making no friends, and certainly attracting no parti, eligible or otherwise.

“Perhaps we should have sent her to Dublin after all,” said Theodosia, in irritated tones. “Perhaps she would be better off in Ireland.”

“In that company, in the house of a mere physician? She is our half sister, and is known to be so. No, no,” said Augusta. “I shall get Adderley to see about a passage to India, where let us hope she may snare a Company man or an army officer.”

“Augusta is right, it’s the only thing to do with her,” Arthur had said. “The girl’s a liability. She’ll never get herself a husband here in England, unless some curate can be persuaded to take her on, to help in the parish. She may have an honourable name, but everyone knows her mother was a nobody; she can’t expect a good match, no looks, no fortune, nothing to recommend her to any man. And she makes no effort to attract, she is a hopeless case.”

“And there is one great advantage to this plan,” Octavia overheard Theodosia say, “at the very least she will be gone two years, for the voyage takes many months, and we shall oblige her to spend at least a year there, to give herself a chance of finding a husband.”

“The voyage may be dangerous, severe weather, you know, many ships are lost at sea in bad weather.”

“And there are pirates, I believe, in some parts of foreign oceans.”

“Yes, although it is not so hazardous a journey as it was during the war.”

The sisters thought with regret of the years when enemy frigates bearing down on the East Indiaman, guns firing, passengers taken away and never seen again, were a common occurrence.

It had indeed been a long and often stormy crossing, the voyage out, but the ship had suffered neither shipwreck nor attacks by pirates, and the time at sea had brought Octavia a kind of happiness. The routine of the ship suited her; it allowed her to grow back into her own skin after her disastrous season in London. She made one or two friends among some of the girls in the fishing fleet, as they were uncharitably known, although her frank ways earned disapproval from others, and from most of the mamas who were accompanying their daughters.

One of the girls had become engaged on board, to a ship’s officer, and had indeed been married by a disapproving captain. As they had anticipated the wedded state, it was uncertain whether the fruit of their love would arrive before the vessel sailed into harbour in Bombay, a topic that kept all the female passengers agog with interest, and among the men, led to a book being opened as to the chances of the baby being born on board or ashore—despite the often expressed disapprobation of a clerical gentleman on his way to convert the heathen of Bengal.

Octavia had gone overland to Calcutta, where a distant cousin had agreed to look after her and launch her into such society as existed in that crowded, noisy, lively city. He and his wife had turned out to be pleasant enough people, and, to Octavia’s joy, Harriet Thurloe was a keen horsewoman, with whom she could go out riding every morning on the Maidan, before the scorching heat made any outdoor activity impossible.

And then a Royal Navy frigate had called at Calcutta, on an unscheduled visit for urgent repairs: spars broken, a mast sprung in a gale. A dance had swiftly been arranged for the naval officers, and Octavia had found herself partnered in the quadrille by a handsome man in his early forties, a Captain Darcy, who wasn’t in command of the Wentworth moored at Howrah, but on his way out to his own commission.