Colleen McCullough - The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

“Fitz, you exaggerate! Why should her book have anything to do with the Darcys? She’s after information about the plight of the poor. Honestly, it’s a storm in a teacup.”

“Some teacups can enlarge to hold an ocean.” Fitz poured himself and Ned more wine. “Experience has taught me that the Bennet family is a perpetual catastrophe waiting to happen. I am not a prophet of doom, but whenever my wife’s relatives rear their ugly Hydra heads, I cringe. They have a habit of destroying my luck.”

“If they were men, they would be easier to deal with, I can see that.” The dark face grew even darker. “The silence of men may be procured one way or another. But women are cursed difficult.”

“I have never asked for murder.”

“I know, and am grateful. However, Fitz, should it ever prove necessary, I am yours to command.”

Fitz drew back in horror. “No, Ned, no! I can see the need to have some stubborn fool beaten within an inch of his life, but never the removal of that life! I forbid it.”

“Of course you do. Think no more of it.” Ned smiled. “Think instead of being prime minister, and of how proud I will be.”

Angus Sinclair was the first of the guests to arrive, so eager was he to settle quickly into this staggering palace. His rooms were a suite decorated in the Sinclair tartan, a conceit Fitz had thought of when Angus had first visited nine years ago. A way of saying that he was welcome at any time, for however long. His man Stubbs was equally satisfied with his airless cubicle adjacent to the dressing room. One of the worst features of house parties in Stubbs’s view was servant accommodation, usually a wearying walk involving many stairs away from the master’s domain, and no top-of-the-trees valet cared to associate with a swarm of underlings. Well, such was not his lot at Pemberley, where, to his intense gratification, he knew that the top-of-the-trees valets and ladies’ dressers even had their own dining room.

Leaving an unusually sanguine Stubbs to unpack, Angus went to the library, which always took his breath away. Lord, what would a member of the Royal Society say were he to see it? That none had, he could be sure, for Fitz did not mix in circles dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and science. Entranced, he wandered about peering at the spines of the many thousands of volumes, and yearned to have the organisation of its treasures. For it was clear that no one with an abiding love of books had ever put Apuleius with Apicius or Sophocles with Euripedes and Aeschylus, let alone assembled all the voyages of discovery together half the room away from treatises on phrenology or the phlogiston theory.

In one alcove he found the Darcy papers, a big collection of poorly bound or even unbound screeds on land grants and acquisitions, tenants, properties elsewhere than Pemberley, citations from kings, codicils to wills, and many autobiographies of Darcy Royalists, Yorkists, Catholics, Jacobites, Normans, Saxons and Danes.

“Ah!” cried a voice.

Its owner skipped nimbly between the chesterfields, a very young man with Elizabeth’s beauty, a head of chestnut curls, and his own character, which Angus soon read as a combination of purpose and curiosity. This had to be the disappointing son, Charlie.

“Found the family skeletons, eh?” he asked, grinning.

“Years ago. But ’tis not bones annoy me. This place is a regular mess. It needs sorting, cataloguing and collating, and the family papers should be in a muniment room.”

A rueful look appeared; Charlie nodded emphatically. “So I keep telling Pater, but he tells me I’m over-fussy. A great man, my father, but not bookish. When I’m older, I’ll try again.”

Angus touched the papers. “The Darcys have followed the true line, it looks like-York, not Lancaster.”

“Oh, yes. Added to which, Owen ap Tudor was an upstart, and his son Henry a usurper to the Darcys. And how the Darcys of that particular time hated Elector George!”

“I’m surprised the Darcys are not Catholic.”

“The throne has always meant more than religion.”

“I beg your pardon!” Angus exclaimed, remembering his manners. “My name is Angus Sinclair.”

“Charlie Darcy, heir to this daunting pile. The only bit of it I love is this room, though I’d take it apart, then put it together again more logically. Pater turned a much smaller room into his parliamentary library-his Hansards and Laws-and works there.”

“Let me know when the day comes that you attack this room. I will gladly volunteer to help. Though what it most needs is its own wee sun to light it.”

“An insoluble problem, Mr. Sinclair.”

“Angus, at least when we’re not in lofty company.”

“Angus it is. How odd! I never imagined the owner of the Westminster Chronicle as a man like you.”

“What kind of man did you envision?” Angus asked, eyes twinkling.

“Oh, an immense paunch, a careless shave, soup stains on the cravat, dandruff, and possibly a corset.”

“No, no, you can’t have soup stains and dandruff in the same man as a corset! The first indicates indifference to appearance, whereas the corset indicates shocking vanity.”

“Well, I doubt you’ll ever have the dandruff or need the corset. How do you maintain your figure in a place like London?”

“I fence rather than box, and walk rather than ride.”

They settled down on two chesterfields in close but opposite proximity and proceeded to lay down the foundations of a strong friendship.

I wish, thought Charlie wistfully, that Angus had been my father! His character is exactly what a father’s should be-understanding, forgiving, unshakable, humourous, intelligent, unhampered by shibboleths. Angus would have taken me for what I am, and not belittled me as unworthy. Nor deemed me effeminate on no better grounds than my face. I cannot help my face!

While Angus thought Fitz’s heir a far cry from the weedy and womanish weakling he had been led to expect. Though this was his ninth visit to Pemberley, he had never met Charlie any more than he had met the four girls; Fitz kept children, even those of seventeen, in the schoolroom. Now, looking at Fitz’s heir for the first time, he grieved for the boy. No, Charlie didn’t have the constitution of an ox or a sporting bone in his body, but his mind was powerful and his emotions admirable. Nor was he effeminate. If he set his heart on something, he would shift mountains to get it, yet never in a ruthless way, never riding roughshod over others. Were he my son, thought Angus, I would be very proud. People do not love Fitz, but they will love Charlie.

It was not long before Charlie confessed why he had invaded Pemberley during a stuffy house party.

“I have to rescue my aunt,” he said.

“Miss Mary Bennet, you mean?”

Charlie gasped. “How-how did you know that?”

“I am acquainted with her a wee bit.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I spent a few days in Hertford in April.”

“But do you know she’s taken the bit between her teeth?”

“Elegantly put, Charlie. Yes, I do. She confided in me.”

“Who is this wretched Argus fellow?”

“I don’t know. His letters come in the post.”

At which point Owen entered the library, gaping at it with an awe he didn’t feel for the Bodleian. As soon as he could be persuaded to abandon his explorations and join them, Charlie and Angus went back to the subject of Mary.

“Do you have to do things like promenade with Derbyshire and the Bishop of London?” Charlie demanded of Angus.

“Occasionally, yes, but by no means every day. I am familiar with the Peaks and quite enjoy the precipices and rocking stones, but my weakness is the caves. I am very fond of caves.”