The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

“Pater?” Charlie asked.

“Yes?”

“May I travel in Uncle Charles’s coach with Aunt Lydia? Mama would be more comfortable with Aunt Jane for company.”

“Yes,” Darcy said brusquely. “Charles, we must go.”

“Is Ned Skinner to ride with us?” Charles Bingley asked.

“No, he has other business. You and I, Charles, will be able to avail ourselves of an occasional gallop. The party will put up at the Three Feathers in Derby, but you and I will have no trouble reaching my hunting box. We can rejoin the ladies in Leicester tomorrow night.”

Bingley turned to look at Jane, his face betraying his anxiety, but he was too used to following Fitz’s lead to raise any objections to leaving Jane in Elizabeth’s hands. There was no denying that griefstricken ladies in need of succour were better served by sisters than husbands. Then he cheered up; Fitz’s Leicestershire hunting box was just the ticket to break the monotony of a two-hundred-mile journey to Shelby Manor.

Only her sisters and their husbands could be accommodated at Shelby Manor; the rest of the extended family would be at the Blue Boar and Hertford’s other good inns, Mary knew. Not that she had any say in such matters. Fitz would, as always, be arranging everything, just as he communicated with the various persons who saw to the running of Shelby Manor and even such minor things as the payment of her own pin-money. Fitzwilliam Darcy, the centre of every web he encountered.

It had been Fitz who had ensured that his mother-in-law would be extremely comfortably isolated far from all her daughters save Mary, the sacrificial goat; somehow people did not care to earn his displeasure even when, like Kitty, they had little to do with him. Poor Mama used to pine to see Lydia, but never had so much as once, and Kitty’s very cursory visits ceased long ago. Only Elizabeth and Jane had continued to come during the last ten years, but Jane’s constant delicate condition usually forbade her going so far. Be that as it may, in June Elizabeth always descended on Shelby Manor to take her mother to Bath for a holiday. A holiday, Mary was well aware, designed chiefly to give her, Mary, a holiday from Mama. And oh, what a holiday it always was! For Lizzie brought Charlie with her and left him to keep Mary company. No one dreamed the mischief she and Charlie got into: the games they played, the places they went, the things they did. Definitely not the sort of things commonly associated with maiden aunts shepherding nephews!

Coming from London, Kitty arrived the day after Mama’s death, tearful but fairly composed. She had done most of her weeping en route, soothed and commiserated by Miss Almeria Finchley, her indispensable lady’s companion, who would have to have a truckle-bed in Kitty’s room, Mary decided.

“Kitty will not like it, but she will have to lump it,” said Mary to Mrs Jenkins.

To Kitty’s face Mary tried to be more tactful. “I declare, Kitty, you are more elegant than ever,” she said over tea.

Knowing this to be the truth, Lady Menadew preened. “It is mostly a knack,” she confided. “Dear Menadew was top-of-the-trees himself, and enjoyed my taking the way I did. Mind you, Mary my love, it was a great help to have stayed at Pemberley with Lizzie for two years before Louisa Hurst brought me out. Lord, that fusty girl of hers!” Kitty giggled. “The chagrin when it was I made the excellent marriage!”

“Wasn’t Menadew considered past it?” Mary asked, her blunt speech unimproved by seventeen years of caring for Mama.

“Well, yes, in years perhaps, but not in any other respect. I took his eye, he said, because I was clay just crying out to be a diamond of the first water. A delightful man, Menadew! Exactly the right kind of husband.”

“So I imagine.”

“Though,” Kitty said, pursuing this theme, “he expired at precisely the proper moment. I was turned out in the first stare and he was beginning to be bored.”

“Didn’t love enter into it?” Mary asked, never before having been in her sister’s company alone for long enough to satisfy her curiosity.

“Lord, no! The wedded state was very pleasant, but Menadew was my master. I obeyed his every command. Or whim. Whereas life as a widow has been unadulterated bliss. No commands or whims. Almeria Finchley doesn’t plague me, and I have the entrée to all the best houses as well as a large income.” She extended one slender arm to display the cunning knots of jet beads ruching its long sleeve. “Madame Belléme was able to send this around before I left Curzon Street, together with three other equally delectable mourning gowns. Warm, but in the height of fashion.” Her blue eyes, still moist from her last bout of tears, lit up. “I fear only Georgiana as a rival. Lizzie and Jane are quite frumpish, you know.”

“Jane I will grant you, Kitty, but Lizzie? One hears she is quite the jewel of Westminster.”

Kitty sniffed. “Westminster! And not even the Lords, to boot! The Commons — pah!’ Tis no great thing to queen it over a bundle of dreary MPs, I assure you. Fitz likes her weighed down with diamonds and rubies, brocades and velvets. They have a certain magnificence, but they are not fashionable.” Kitty eyed Mary speculatively. “Now that Lizzie’s amazing apothecary has cured your suppurating spots and her dentist has dealt with your tooth, Mary, you have a distinct look of Elizabeth. A pity the improvements came too late to find you your own Lord Menadew.”

“The prospect of lifelong spinsterhood has never dismayed me, and a face is a face,” said Mary, unimpressed. “To be free of my aches and ailments is a blessing, but the rest is nothing.”

“My dear Mary,” said Kitty, looking shocked, “it is a good thing that your looks have improved so, now that Mama is dead. You may not wish for marriage, but it is far more comfortable than the alternative. Unless you wish to exist at the beck and call of other people, which is what will happen if you move to Pemberley or Bingley Hall. No doubt Fitz will make some sort of provision for you, but I doubt it will extend to luxuries like a lady’s companion and a smart carriage. Fitz is a cold man.”

“Interesting,” said Mary, offering the cake. “Your reading of his character is much the same as mine. He dispenses his fortune according to necessity. Charity is a word in a lexicon to him, nothing more. Most of the stupefying amount he has spent upon us Bennets is to alleviate his own embarrassments, from George Wickham to Mama. Now that Mama is gone I doubt he will be as generous to me. Especially,” she added, the thought popping into her unruly mind, “if my face no longer brands me an appropriate maiden aunt.”

“I know Sir Peter Cameron is hanging out for a wife,” said Kitty, “and I do think he would suit you — in no need of a fat dowry, bookish and kind.”

“Do not even entertain the idea! Though I cannot say I am looking forward to Pemberley or Bingley Hall. Lizzie cries a lot, Charlie tells me — she and Fitz see little of each other since he went on the front benches, and when they are together, he is cold to her.”

“Dear Charlie!” Kitty exclaimed.

“I echo that.”

“Fitz does not care for him,” Kitty said with rare insight. “He is too soft.”

“I would rather say that Fitz is too hard!” snapped Mary. “A kinder, more thoughtful young man than Charlie does not exist.”

“Yes, sister, I agree, but gentlemen are peculiar about their sons. Much and all as they deplore over-indulgence in wine, dice, cards and loose women, at heart they think of such pursuits as wild oats, sure to pass. Besides which, that rat of a female Caroline Bingley slanders Charlie, who she early divined was Fitz’s Achilles heel.”

Time to change the subject, thought Mary. It did not do to mingle her sense of loss with a far more important grief, her love for Charlie. “We may expect the Collinses tomorrow.”

“Oh, Lord!” Kitty groaned, then chuckled. “Do you remember how you mooned over that dreadful man? You really were a pathetic creature in those days, Mary. What happened to change you? Or are you still sighing for Mr Collins?”

“Not I! Time and too little to do cured me. There are only so many years one can fritter away on inappropriate desires, and after Charlie came to stay that first time, I began to see the error of my ways. Or at least,” Mary admitted honestly, “Charlie showed me. All he did was ask me why I had no thoughts of my own, and wonder at it. Ten years old! He made me promise to give up reading Christian books, as he called them, in favour of great thoughts. The kind of thoughts, he said, that would prick my mind into working. Even then he was quite godless, you know. When Mr and Mrs Collins came to call, he pitied them. Mr Collins for his crassness and stupidity, Charlotte for her determination to make Mr Collins seem more tolerable.” Lizzie’s smile lit Mary’s face — warm, loving, amused. “Yes, Kitty, you have Charlie to thank for what you see today, even to the spots and the tooth. It was he who asked his Mama what could be done about them.”

“Then I wish I knew him better than I do.” Kitty looked mischievous. “Did he perhaps remark on your singing?”

That provoked an outright laugh. “He did. But the thing about Charlie is that he never leaves one bereft. Having told me that I did not sing, I screeched, and advised me to leave song to nightingales, he spent a full day assuring me that I played pianoforte as splendidly as Herr Beethoven.”

“Who is that?” asked Kitty, wrinkling her brow.

“A German man. Charlie heard him in Vienna when Fitz was there trying to restrain Bonaparte. I will play you some of his simpler pieces. Charlie never fails to send me a parcel of new music for my birthday.”

“Charlie, Charlie, Charlie! You love him very much.”

“To distraction,” Mary said. “You see, Kitty, he has been so kind to me over the years. His visits lit up my life.”

“When you speak in that tone, I confess I am a trifle envious. Dearest Mary, you have changed.”

“Not in all respects, sister. I still tend to say what I am thinking. Especially to Mr Collins.” She huffed. “When I thought him looking for a beautiful wife I was able to excuse his choosing inappropriate females like Jane and Lizzie, but when he asked for Charlotte Lucas, the scales began to fall from mine eyes. As plain and unappetising as week-old pound cake is Charlotte. I began to see that he was not a worthy recipient of my affections.”

“I do not pretend to have your depth of intellect, Mary,” said Kitty in a musing voice, “but I have often wondered at God’s goodness to some of His less inspiring creations. By rights Mr Collins ought to have barely scraped along, a penurious clergyman, yet he always prospers through no merit of his own.”

“Oh, it was not easy for him between Lizzie’s marriage to Fitz and Papa’s death, when he inherited Longbourn. Lady Catherine de Bourgh never forgave him — quite what for, I do not know.”

“I do. Had he been to Lizzie’s liking, she would have wed him instead of stealing Fitz from Anne de Bourgh,” said Kitty.

“Well, her ladyship’s long dead, and her daughter with her,” said Mary on a sigh.

“And that is more evidence of God’s mysteriousness!”

“What are you wittering about, Kitty?”

“The attack of influenza that carried off both de Bourghs so quickly after Colonel Fitzwilliam’s marriage to Anne! Or should I say, General Fitzwilliam? He fell heir to Rosings and that huge fortune in time to be respectably widowed before someone else took dear Georgiana’s fancy.”

“Huh!” Mary emitted a snort of amusement. “Georgiana had no intention of settling for anyone except the Colonel — or the General, if you prefer. Though I cannot approve of unions between first cousins. Their eldest girl is so stigmatised that they have had to shut her away,” said Mary.