Colleen McCullough - The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

Elizabeth took the opportunity. “Do you happen to know the identity of Fitz’s mistress, Jane?”

“Lizzie! Not Fitz! He’s far too proud. What’s given you this idea? It isn’t true.”

“I think it must be. My resolution is crumbling-I don’t know how much longer I can keep up this charade,” Elizabeth said, her throat aching. “Very recently he informed me that he desperately regretted marrying me.”

“No! I don’t believe that! He was so passionately in love with you, Lizzie. Oh, not like Charles and me. We were cosy and comfy-passion was secondary to love. With Fitz, it was the very opposite. I mean that he had great passion, an overriding and unquiet passion. What have you done to disappoint him? If he said that to you, then you have disappointed him, and dreadfully so. Come, you must have some idea!”

Eyes closed, Elizabeth got to her feet and made a huge show of putting on her tight kid gloves, one finger at a time. When she opened the eyes, they were dark and stormy. Jane shrank away, terrified.

“The one person I have always been able to count on, Jane, was you. Yes, I use the past tense, for I see that I was mistaken. My husband treats me disgracefully! And I have done nothing to disappoint him! On the contrary. It is he who disappoints me. Last night I offered to leave him, but he won’t even let me do that! Why? Because he would have to answer questions about the wife who left him! What an obsequious crawler of a wife you must be, Jane! No wonder you can excuse little peccadilloes like mistresses.”

She peered through the window, ignoring Jane’s fresh bout of tears. “I see my carriage has come. No, don’t bother getting up, finish your snivelling in peace. I can find my own way.”

And out she stalked, outraged, quivering, to weep all the way home to Pemberley. There she went straight to her rooms and told Hoskins to draw the curtains.

“Convey a message to Mr. Darcy that I am laid low with the migraine, and will not be able to say farewell to Mrs. Hurst, Miss Bingley, and Miss Hurst.”

“I don’t wish to pry, Elizabeth, but are you quite well?” Angus asked the next morning when he found his hostess walking her favourite path through the woods behind Pemberley’s river.

She indicated the dell in which they were standing with one hand. “It’s difficult to be down in spirits, Angus, when there is such beauty within half a mile of the house,” she said, trying to deflect him. “It’s too late for flowers, but this spot is perfect at all times of year. The little brook, the dragonflies, the maidenhair ferns-delicate beyond imagination! Our gardener says that such tiny, lacelike leaves and fronds are peculiarities of the maidenhair that grows in this dell only. I know people who go into ecstasies over peacock feathers, but I would rather a frond of this exquisite fern.”

But Angus was not to be deflected. “We live in an age when the personal is exceeding private, and no one is more aware than I that ladies don’t confide in gentlemen apart from their husbands. However, I claim the privileges of one who would enter your family. I’m in love with Mary, and hope to marry her.”

“Angus!” Elizabeth smiled at him in absolute delight. “Oh, that is good news! Does she know you love her?”

“No. I did not declare my suit when I stayed in Hertford for ten days because I could see that she wasn’t ready for proposals of marriage.” His eyes twinkled. “The local solicitor tried his luck, and was turned down most emphatically, though he is young, affluent and handsome. I took my cue from him, and presented myself to Mary as naught save a good friend. It was the right ploy, in that she held nothing back from me about her ambitions and her ardent devotion to Argus the letter writer. In one way, girlish dreams, yet in another, valid aspirations. I listened, offered what advice I thought she would take, and mostly held my tongue.”

Elizabeth found a mossy boulder and sat on it. “I would be so happy to welcome you into my family, Angus. If you did not declare your suit, I’m sure your instincts were right. Mary has never had a high opinion of men, but how could she resist a man as personable and intelligent as you?”

“I hope not forever,” he said, a little wistfully. “I have gained her trust, and hope to gain her love.” Which was all he could say; the identity of Argus had to remain his secret.

“Why did you choose her to love?” Elizabeth asked.

His brows flew up. “Choose? That’s a strange word to couple with love! I don’t believe there’s much if any choice about it. I’m rich, I’m not decrepit, and my face is generally thought to be appealing to women. I say these things only to reinforce what is said about me in Society-that I can have my pick of eligible females. So why Mary, who is far from eligible? If it had a visible beginning, I suppose that was her beauty, which not even her dreadful clothes can disguise. But after I scraped an acquaintance with her, I found a prickly, misanthropic, fiercely independent soul who burns with the desire to make her mark on English thought. One cannot call her a philosopher; she hasn’t been grounded in its disciplines or educated in its theories or steeped in its evolution. But I could see that the seventeen years she cared for her mother had allowed her an unparalleled exposure to books normally kept away from women, and had imbued her with an almost frantic desire to be freed from customary female restraints. Ignorance is the best friend and ally of custom, particularly those customs foisted on lesser beings like women and blackamoors. Well, Mary lost her ignorance, she became educated . And had sufficient sense to understand that without experience, her education was still lacking. It is all of this, I believe, that led her to embark upon her project. When she settles down, I think she will espouse not the cause of alleviating poverty, but the cause of universal education.”

“But why travel on the stage-coach, why stay at inferior inns?”

“I don’t quite know, but I suspect it may have been in order to appear an impoverished governess. People don’t talk to their betters, Elizabeth, therefore Mary resolved not to seem a better.”

“How remarkably well you know this Mary! You tried to tell me that I didn’t know her at all, and I reproved you. But I was the ignorant one, not you,” Elizabeth said, sighing.

Angus pulled a face. “There’s one factor I failed utterly to take into account,” he said, “and that is her natural attraction for disaster. For that, I can find no logical explanation. The very poorest of governesses travel by public coach and stay at mean inns, but they aren’t set upon or abducted. Even the wee bit we know of her journey from Grantham to Nottingham confirms this tendency-she was harassed by five yokels, who pitched her into the mire of a coach yard and laughed at her plight. Her adventures are appalling! What caused them to be so? Her beauty? The guineas in her purse? That prickly misanthropy? Or simply a combination of everything?”

Elizabeth frowned. “She never got into trouble as a girl, though my father despised her. He persisted in lumping her with Lydia and Kitty as one of the three silliest girls in England. Which wasn’t really fair. She persisted in singing atrociously at functions, but while everyone, including Papa, complained about it behind her back, no one ever told her to her face. Which indicates that her mind heard the notes as true, rather than demonstrates stupidity. Mary wasn’t the kind of girl who excited admiration, but she wasn’t silly. She was earnest, hardworking and scholarly. Qualities that made her dull, though Lydia would have said, boring.”

She got up and began to walk, as if suddenly very uncomfortable. “In fact,” she went on, “the worst one could say of Mary then was that she had an inappropriate and unreciprocated passion for our cousin, the Reverend Mr. Collins. The most frightful man I have ever met. But Mary mooned and moped in his presence so obviously that I, for one, decided that our cousin wanted a beautiful wife. Mary’s face was covered in suppurating spots, and her teeth were crooked.” She laughed. “He didn’t get a beautiful wife. He married Charlotte Lucas-a very plain but eminently sensible woman. And when he did, Mary very quickly got over him.”