Colleen McCullough - The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

“Hear, hear!” Elizabeth cried, clapping derisively. “I am so pleased you think me excellent in my place. Of late I have come to realise that you are every bit as proud and conceited as I thought you when first you came into Hertfordshire!”

“It’s true that I had no basis for self-satisfaction in those days,” he said stiffly, “but the situation has changed. I knew well that I was marrying beneath me-oh, the follies of youth! Were I to have it to do all over again,” he said deliberately, “I would not marry you. I would have married Anne de Bourgh, and fallen heir to the Rosings estate. I do not grudge it to Hugh Fitzwilliam, but by rights it was mine.”

White-faced, she swayed, but righted herself without the help he probably would not have given her. “I thank you for that frank explanation,” she said with a stiffness quite the equal of his. “Would you prefer that I removed myself from Pemberley and your life? One of your minor estates would suit me very well.”

“Don’t be a fool!” he snapped. “I am simply trying to deal with the damnable nuisance your family represents. Lydia will go to Hemmings tomorrow, and very willingly. Not a difficulty, my dear. Ned will dangle a bottle of some lethal liquor under her nose, and she, donkey that she is, will follow it into the carriage.”

“I see.”

“However, I have another embarrassment looming. Namely, your sister Mary. She’s disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Oh, what other shocks would he produce?

“Yes. Somewhere between Chesterfield and here.”

“What are you doing about it?”

“If you had paused in your ministrations to Lydia, Elizabeth, you might have learned much from our son. Yes, we’ve all been worried about her, but he and Angus-and Ned, independently of them-have established beyond a doubt that she’s been abducted. Charlie can tell you the story.”

“He has grown in all sorts of ways, Fitz,” she said, sidetracked.

“I am not blind! I’m very pleased at what Oxford and young Griffiths have done for him.”

“I suspect Angus has had some influence too.”

Fitz laughed. “That is an alliance of mutual affection, my dear Elizabeth. Angus hopes to be your brother-in-law. Were it to come about, the last threat your family represents would be no threat at all, and I would have the Westminster Chronicle in my pocket.”

“As to the union of Angus and Mary, I rejoice, but if you think that would put his newspaper at your political disposal, then you very much mistake your man. As well as my sister.”

Elizabeth quit the library and left her husband to his dreams of grandeur. Leopards don’t change their spots, she thought. Oh, but you fooled me, Fitz! I genuinely thought I had cured you of your pride and conceit. And when you began to assume the leopard’s hide again, I blamed it on my inability to give you the sons you wanted. But it was never that, I see now. The leopard has stayed the leopard throughout our twenty years together. While I, if I may believe Lydia, have turned into a mouse. A bought mouse. S passed, but Mary had no idea how many, for the lump on her brow seemed to have provoked a series of faints or comas from which she recovered slowly. Sheer exhaustion had entered into it too, and being deprived of daylight, she had no way of knowing how regularly she woke to drink, eat, use the commode.

The velvet curtain was drawn back to reveal a gap in the iron bars that confined her, formed when a section was let down to make a shelf. Stacked on this she would find fresh food, small beer, a jug of water for her ablutions, and a tin with a pouring spout containing an oily liquid. The last, she soon discovered, was to replenish the reservoirs of her lamps. Terror of being plunged into utter darkness stimulated her dazed mind into deducing this, after which she learned how to do the filling: take off the glass chimney, unscrew the metal centre holding the wick, and pour new oil on top of what remained in the glass reservoir. The little lamp burned for longer than the big ones, and she found to her relief that, when she held its weak flame to the wick of a big lamp, it kindled readily.

Twice she had found clean nightgowns and socks on the shelf, once a clean robe, but never outer wear of any kind. She was warm enough, as the chamber never seemed to grow freezingly cold any more than it grew very hot. About the temperature of a cool spring day, she concluded.

If only she had some way to gauge the passage of time! The highwayman must have taken her fob watch; they were expensive and not easily come by. Hers had been a gift from Elizabeth, greatly appreciated. No external elements penetrated her prison apart from that tiny, moaning whine, which she no longer consciously heard. If it reminded her of anything, it was of a window left carelessly open a crack in a high wind, but if there was a window behind that gigantic screen, she could not see it-and doubted its existence besides. Windows meant light, and she had none.

Rummaging among the books on the second table brought steel pens into view, as well as several pencils; there was a standish containing black ink and red ink, and a shaker full of sand for blotting. Also several hundred sheets of paper, hot-pressed and with the ragged edges that spoke of a pure linen-cotton mixture. The titles of the books were interesting yet uninformative: Dr. Johnson on the poets of his time, Oliver Goldsmith, Sheridan, Trollope, Richardson, Marlowe, Spenser, Donne, Milton; also works on chemistry, mathematics, astronomy and anatomy. Nothing popular, nothing religious. Nothing that her swimming brain could compass. Time, it was evident, was best expended in curative sleep.

Finally there came an awakening that saw her mind alert, her bruises faint, and the swelling on her brow vanished. Having eaten, drunk, and used her peculiar commode, she took up a pencil and made a series of seven strokes upon the smooth wall at the back of her cell, adjacent to what looked like iron hinges set into it. Since no one had left her clean sheets as yet, she decided that no more than a week had gone by since she had been put here, for whoever had put her here apparently believed in cleanliness, and that meant clean sheets would be forthcoming.

Though the oil that fuelled them had an elusive aroma, the burning wicks of her lamps gave off no smoke of any kind, nor made it hard to breathe. She took the chimney off her little lamp and toured the cell to see if a stray puff of air caused its flame to wobble, but none did. Even when held over her commode hole, it remained steady. What was down there? No cesspit, certainly, for no odour of human wastes floated out of it. When she thrust the flame down into the hole, it revealed something unexpected: not a narrow vent, but a broad round vertical tunnel, like a well. Her light had not the power to illuminate its bottom, but as she bent close above the wooden seat she heard what sounded like swiftly running water. So that was why the privy did not smell! The matter she voided tumbled free to be borne away on a stream.

A river? She remembered dearest Charlie talking about the caves and underground rivers of the Peak District, and suddenly knew where she was. Imprisoned in the caves of the Peak District of Derbyshire, which meant not very far from Pemberley. But why? Instinct said that her virtue was not threatened, and Captain Thunder had stolen everything she possessed, so it was not money either. Unless she had been kidnapped and was being held for ransom? Ridiculous! replied common sense. Nothing on her person gave away more than her name, which was not Darcy, and her condition would have told her captor soon enough that she was a nobody, most likely a governess. Who could know of her connection to Darcy of Pemberley? The answer was no one. So whatever her captor’s reason for this abduction, it was not ransom.