Colleen McCullough - The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

“Not a very generous jointure at that,” she countered, eyes flashing. “As I know for a fact that brother Charles contributed a full half of it, Mary has cost you less per year than you spend on stabling your carefully matched curricle horses! And I do not mean the bays plus the greys, I mean one team only! Two hundred and fifty pounds a year! You pay your valet that much, and your horse master more! When it comes to yourself, Fitz, you spend. But not on my poor-literally as well as metaphorically-sister!”

“I am not made of money,” he said stiffly. “Mary is your sister, not mine.”

“If you are not made of money, why do you spend it on fripperies like emeralds? I have no lust for jewels, but Mary needs more security than you have given her. Sell these emeralds and give the money to Mary. After seventeen years, she will have no more than nine and a half thousand pounds all told. If she chooses to live on her own, she can afford no conveyance, or do more than rent. Do you expect her to pay for the lady’s companion? Obviously! You are shabby !”

To have his conduct called shabby roused him to a rare anger; his lips drew back to bare his teeth. “I can take no notice of you, Elizabeth, because you speak in ignorance. Your idiotic sister has withdrawn her money from the four-percents, thus will have no income. Had I dowered her better, she would simply have more money to waste. Your sister, madam, is crazed.”

Gasping, Elizabeth fought for control; if she lost it, he would dismiss her rage as worth less than it was. “Oh, Fitz, why have you no compassion?” she cried. “Mary is the most harmless creature ever born! What can it matter if she-if she goes off in some peculiar way? If she refuses to be chaperoned? It was your determination to be rid of our mother that made Mary whatever she has become. And how could you predict what she would do, with Mama dead? You predicted nothing, simply assumed that she would go on being what she had been as a girl, and cheated her of an old age comfortable enough to live as you made sure our mother would. Why did you do that for our mother, then? Because untrammelled she was too dangerous-she might turn up at some important political reception and make you a laughing-stock with her silliness, her loud and thoughtless remarks. Now you visit Mama’s conduct upon poor Mary’s head! It is unforgivable!”

“I see that I was right not to tell you what transpired.”

“Not to tell me was unconscionable bad form!”

“Good night,” he said, bowing.

And off down the shadowed hall he strode, his figure as straight and well-proportioned as it had been twenty years ago.

“And don’t bother to write me one of your self-excusing and self-pitying letters!” she shouted after him. “I will burn it un-read!”

Trembling, she entered her suite of rooms, profoundly glad that she had told Hoskins not to wait up. How dared he! Oh, how dared he!

They never quarrelled; he was too high in the instep, she too desirous of peace at any price. Tonight had been the first time they had exchanged bitter words in years. Perhaps, she thought, teeth chattering, we would be happier if we did quarrel. Yet even as angry as he had been tonight, he would not demean himself beyond what he deemed the conduct of a gentleman. No shouting, though she had shouted; no hands bunched into fists, though hers had been. His faзade was unbreakable, for all that it had nearly broken her. Did his marriage satisfy his ideas of marriage? On her side, who could have dreamed the nightmare marriage would be?

What she harkened back to in her memories was the period of her engagement. Oh, the way he had looked at her then! His cold eyes lit from within, his hand finding any excuse to touch hers, his kisses soft on her lips, the conviction he gave her that she was more precious to him than all of Pemberley. They would always exist in a haze of perfect bliss: or so she had believed.

A belief shattered on her wedding night, a humiliation she endured only because so had God ordained procreation. Had Jane felt the same? She had no idea, could not ask. These intimacies of the bed chamber were too private for confidences, even with a most beloved sister.

Breathless with the anticipation of hours spent tenderly kissing and fondling, she had found instead an animal act of teeth and nails, hurtful hands, grunts and sweat; he had torn her nightgown away to pinch and bite her breasts, held her down with one hand while the other poked, pried, fumbled at the core of her. And the act itself was degrading, unloving-so horrible!

The next day he had apologised, explaining that he had waited too long for her, could not help himself, so eager was he to make her his. A shamefaced Fitz, but not, she realised, on her behalf. It was his own loss of dignity concerned him. A man had needs, he had said, but in time she would understand. Well, she never had. That first encounter set the pattern of the following nine years; even the thought that he might come to her in the night was enough to make her feel sick. But after the fourth girl in a row, his visits stopped. Poor Charlie would have to assume the burden of a position his very nature found repugnant, and her girls-such dear, sweet souls!-were as afraid of their father as they were of Ned Skinner.

The emeralds would not part company at the back of her neck. Elizabeth tore at them, heedless of how she pulled out tendrils of hair by the root. Oh, wretched things! More prized than the welfare of a sister. There. Free at last. But if only she were free! Did Mary realise that no husband meant at least a modicum of independence? To Elizabeth, dependence was galling.

Perhaps, she thought, crawling into the vast confines of her bed, I never loved Fitz enough. Or else there was not enough Lydia in me to respond to him the way a Lydia would. For I have grown sufficiently to realise that not all women are created the same: that some, like Lydia, actually welcome the grunts, the sweat, the stickiness; while some, like me, loathe them. Why can there not be a middle path? I have so much love to give, but it is not the kind of love Fitz wants. During our engagement I thought it was, but once I was his at law, I became a possession. The principal ornament of Pemberley. I wonder who his mistress is. No one in London knows, otherwise Lady Jersey or Caroline Lamb would have tattled it. She must be from a lower situation, grateful for the crumbs he throws her. Oh, Fitz, Fitz!

She cried herself to sleep.

Mr. Angus Sinclair walked home to spend another hour in his library, but not in writing incendiary prose under the nom de plume of Argus. Angus-Argus. What a difference one wee letter made! He plucked a fat folder of papers from under a number of others on his desk, and settled to studying its contents afresh. It was made up of the reports of several of his agents on the activities of men he had christened the “nabobs of the north”-the ultimate owners of factories, foundries, workshops, mills and mines in Yorkshire and Lancashire.

Prominent among them was Mr. Charles Bingley of Bingley Hall, Cheshire. Boon companion of Fitzwilliam Darcy. Yet the more Angus thought about it, the more curious that friendship became.

What did the colossal snob and the captain of Trade and Industry have in common? On the surface, a friendship that should not exist. His enquiries had revealed that they had met at Cambridge, and had been grafted to each other ever since. A youthful thing like an inappropriate crush on one side and a lofty condescension on the other? A wee Socratic fling, bums up? No, definitely not! Bingley and Darcy were nothing more nor less than firm friends. What they had in common must be less obvious… Bingley’s grandfather had been a Liverpool dock worker; it was his father had carved out an empire of chimneys spouting dense black smoke into the Manchester air. While Darcy’s grandfather had contemptuously refused a dukedom because, so rumour had it, he could not be the Duke of Darcy. Shires only for dukes.