Colleen McCullough - The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

Then back he went to his dissertation upon Lucifer, a jumble of hatred for the ordinary phenomenon of light that served to convince her that, in losing his sight, Father Dominus’s profound experience in the cave during his thirty-fifth year had translated into a rejection of the world he could no longer see save poorly. There were people throughout the globe who revered caves, even thought of them as the home of their god, but few had gone on from that concept to loathe and fear God’s most thrilling creation, light. All the near-infinite shades of grey had bled out of Father Dominus’s philosophy, leaving him with the black of God and the white of Satan, whom he called Lucifer because of its Latin meaning-Bearer of Light. The pitiless creed of a fanatic, and every religion had those. But not extreme enough for Father Dominus, whose mind besides was an original one.

What must he have been like in his thirty-fifth year, hale and hearty and brimful of genius? Those lamps! His nostrums and elixirs, his energies and enthusiasms. Once, she was sure, a truly extraordinary man. But now, a mad one. Old, near-blind, relying upon the adulation of a small group of children to plump out a juiceless heart. Even the adulation was second-rate; he wanted no developed mind among his worshippers, so had deprived them of letters and numbers, taught them an apothecary’s cant without ever explaining what the words meant, set himself up as being far above them-and left his minion, Brother Jerome, to apply the more unpleasant aspects of discipline, thus deflecting fear and loathing onto Jerome as if it had no origins in him.

Jerome…The odd one out, the foreigner brought in from Sheffield at, Mary presumed, a more advanced age than any of the other children. Therese and Ignatius insisted that they remembered no previous master, good or bad, and said flatly that none of the children did. A potion that obliterated memory in them? That was possible, of course. Or did he never steal them from bad masters?

These caves! In other places those who lived in them were called troglodytes, but they were entire communities from the very old to newborn babes, not an artificial group like the Children of Jesus. From Therese she had learned that her own prison cell was quite close to the kitchen in which Therese and her little helpers made bread, stews, roast beef, tarts, soups, puddings. No Child of Jesus grew ill, or wasted away from consumption; provided they did their work in the laboratory (one of the big words he had taught them without explaining what it meant) if they were boys or the packing room if they were girls, they were free to roam from the Southern to the Northern Caves, and even outside if they chose.

“Brother Jerome’s too busy to take notice,” said Ignatius. “We go where we want.”

“Then why hasn’t anybody ever seen you?” Mary asked

“It be the dark of God,” said Ignatius simply.

“You mean the nighttime?”

“Dark, yes.”

“But don’t you love the day?”

Brother Ignatius shuddered. “No, daytime’s awful ! Hurts our eyes, Sister Mary, like red-hot pokers.”

“Yes, of course it would. I had not stopped to think about that,” Mary said slowly. “I daresay that my eyes would hurt too, after so many days immured in lamplight. If you do go outside in the dark of God, where do you go? What do you do?”

“Run around, play chasings. Skip with a rope.”

“And no one sees you?”

“Ain’t no one to see,” he said, deeming her dense. “Them’s the moors outside the Northern Caves. We don’t go outside the Southern.” He looked conspirational, leaned closer and spoke in a whisper. “We ain’t staying in the Southern Caves, moving everything to the others. Father says there be too many busy-bodies in the south-cottages going up everywhere.”

“How do you get your supplies, Ignatius? The food? Coal for fires? Substances for the laboratory? The tins, boxes and bottles?”

“Dunno, exactly. Brother Jerome does it, not Father. We got a cave full of donkeys. Sometimes Brother Jerome goes off with all the donkeys and comes back loaded up. The boys unpack the donkeys-coal, all sorts of stuff.”

“And Father Dominus stays with you all the time?”

“No, he goes out a lot, but while Lucifer is in the sky. He takes the orders and collects the money. If Lucifer is there, he walks, but if he goes out in the dark, Brother Jerome drives him in the donkey trap.”

“What is money, Ignatius?”

He rubbed his tonsure, where the scalp was quite glossy from much rubbing. “Dunno, Sister Mary.” A Owen returned to Pemberley on Tuesday after dark, too late for dinner. Accepting Parmenter’s offer of food for a little later, they sought Fitz out in the small library.

Fitz listened in something of a quandary, not sure how much of Ned’s story he should tell them.

His mood was bitter, mostly because of Elizabeth, who he knew was a tender creature, yet, yet…Something about her brought out the worst in him, made him say things to her that no wife would relish hearing, least of all Elizabeth. It was not her fault that her relatives were such a ramshackle lot. In fact, what puzzled him more and more as time went on was how Mr. and Mrs. Bennet had ever produced five such disparate offspring. Two absolute ladies in Jane and Elizabeth; a nonentity in Mary; and two blatant trollops in Kitty and Lydia. The miracle lay in Jane and Elizabeth, who simply did not belong in the Bennet litter basket. From whom had they got their refinement, their propriety? Not from their mother, or from their father. Nor from Mrs. Phillips, their aunt who lived in Meryton. The Gardiners had only visited once in each year, so could have had no real influence. It was as if a Gypsy had put Jane and Elizabeth in place of two trollop-babies. Changelings, not Bennets.

Yet marriage to one meant marriage to the whole family. That, he had not fully understood, thinking to spirit his wife away to Derbyshire and make sure she never saw her family again. But she hadn’t seen it that way. She wanted to remain in contact with them!

With a huge effort he dragged his thoughts away from his wife and listened to Charlie, whom Angus was letting speak for them; he spoke well too, neither illogically nor emotionally.

“I do not believe that Mary ever entered the Green Man,” he was saying, “though she definitely encountered Captain Thunder. Here.” He laid out the reticule. “Empty. We found it on the road, and one of her handbags in the ditch nearby. The cur who claimed to be the landlord of the Green Man says that Captain Thunder has a house in the woods, but no one knows whereabouts. There is a reward on his head, and he cannot be sure that one of his fellow villains will not betray him. In the end we decided it was best to seek your advice and help before doing anything else.”

“Thank you, Charlie,” said his father, very pleased at how the young man had handled things. Of course Angus would have been a steadying influence, but only if Charlie did not resent him. Clearly he and Angus had got along together very well, and it had not escaped him that Angus had consented to let Charlie enter the Green Man alone.

He got up to pour Chambertin. “They say this is Bonaparte’s favourite wine,” he said, handing glasses around. “Now that the French are desperate for foreign currency, we are seeing some very good wines again, and I think I shall move in the House to lighten the import duty on cognac.” He sat down and crossed his legs. “You have done well, the three of you,” he said, with a special smile for Owen. “Knowing that by the time you would be able to set out, the trail would be cold, I put Ned Skinner on the problem too. In many ways he’s more skilled at this sort of thing than you, but his investigations haven’t advanced us much beyond yours-no mean feat on your parts.”