Colleen McCullough - The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

“Well, I cannot see Georgie falling in love with a fortune-hunter-or Anne, for that matter. The most vulnerable is Susie. Cathy is more likely to dupe her seducer than run off with him.”

“You cheer me immensely, Owen.” The purple eyes gleamed at him as mischievously as Cathy’s. “It is tea time. Can you eat a second tea?”

“Easily,” he said.

“You are twenty-five, I believe?”

“Yes. Twenty-six in October.”

“Then you’re safe for at least another five or six years. After that, your figure won’t run to second teas. Gentlemen set in their early thirties, finish growing from calves to bulls.” M more and more as time went on. Now that her life was regular, she could mark off each interval between the delivery of fresh food as one day, though she could not be sure it really was. If it was, then at the end of thirty pencilled strokes on her wall (including those first estimated seven), she began to despair. Wherever her prison lay, no one had found it, though she was sure people would be looking for her.

Things had happened which caused a lump of terror to rise in her doughty breast; how much longer would Father Dominus bother to keep her alive? For all his talk about the Children of Jesus, she had seen no evidence of their existence beyond Brother Jerome, Brother Ignatius, and Sister Therese, all hovering on the brink of puberty, and though Ignatius and Therese spoke freely of their fellow Children, it seemed to Mary that there was an element of the unreal about what they said. Why, for instance, did no child attempt to run away, if they did indeed have the freedom to venture out of the caves? Human nature was adventurous, particularly in the young-what escapades she and Charlie used to get up to when he was a boy! Somewhere she thought that perhaps Martin Luther had said were he to be given a child until he turned seven, he would have the man. In which case, how young were the Children of Jesus when they were taken? Neither Ignatius nor Therese was prepared to confide in her fully; much of what she had pieced together came from what they refused to say. Yet the old man fed his disciples extremely well, clothed them, doctored them, allowed them considerable liberty. That they worked for him without being paid indicated that he exploited them, as did his neglect of their education.

At first she had hoped that the book he was dictating to her would answer some of these questions, but after thirteen sessions he was still absorbed with the conundrum of God and the evil of light. A pattern was emerging: of a circular progress through his riddles akin to what was said of people hopelessly lost-that they walked in circles and always wound up where they started. And so it was with Father Dominus’s book. He didn’t seem to know how to get off the track he wandered and go in a straighter line.

He had also curbed her contact with Ignatius and Therese. Now she walked to the underground river on her own, while Ignatius stood guard at the beginning of the tunnel and returned her to her cell when she emerged. Their communication dwindled to greetings and farewells; clearly he had been told not to say anything to her beyond those civilities. Removal of Therese was stranger. In her talks with Father Dominus not related to dictation Mary had realised that he despised the female sex, mature or immature. Affection would show in his face when he spoke of the boys, but the moment Mary introduced the girls into their conversation he would stiffen, the expression he wore would change to contempt, and he would brush her aside as if she were some noxious insect.

Then Mary’s courses began to flow, and she was obliged to ask Therese for rags, as well as come to some arrangement about soaking and boiling them after use. It seemed Therese had to request the fabric for these rags from Father Dominus, who beat her with a stick and called her unclean. The rags were forthcoming, handed over by a tearful Therese together with the story of the old man’s reaction, but that was to be her last contact with Therese. After it, Camille brought her daily necessities, and would not succumb to Mary’s blandishments, though the frightened blue eyes held yearning.

That tipped the scales in Mary’s attitude toward him. Until then her sense of self-preservation had prompted her to go softly, never to antagonise him, but such control was alien to Mary’s frank nature, and the bonds that tied her tongue were frail. When next he appeared to give dictation, she flew at him verbally, since the bars on her cage did not permit of any other opposition.

“What do you mean, you awful old man,” said Mary, snapping the words, “by calling an innocent child unclean? Do you doubt your power over a little girl’s mind, that you would whip her with a rod? Disgraceful! That child manages a kitchen capable of producing good food for fifty stomachs, and how do you thank her? You pay her no wages, but that is no surprise, since you pay no wages to any Child of Jesus! But to beat her! To beat her because she asked for rags for my courses? To call her unclean? Sir, you are a bigot and a disgrace to your calling!”

He had reared up in outrage, eyes rolling in his head, but when Mary mentioned rags and courses, he flung his arms about his head, hands blocking his ears, and rocked in his chair.

For perhaps a minute she surveyed him angrily, then she sat down on her chair and sighed. “Father, you are a fraud,” she said. “You think yourself a son of God, and you keep these children to worship and adore you. I acquit you of being greedy for profits from your nostrums, for I believe that you spend them on good food and other comforts for your followers. Your expenses must be considerable, even including fodder for your donkey train and coal for the fires I presume you need in your laboratory as well as in your kitchen. Nothing you have dictated to me thus far has told me why you are here, or how long you have been here, or what you intend to achieve. But you disappoint me bitterly, to take out your spleen on an innocent like Therese-and for no better reason than her sex. The female sex is God’s creation in equal measure to the male sex, and how He has designed our bodily functions is His business, not yours, for you are not God. Do you hear me? You are not God!”

His hands had dropped from his ears, though the look on his face said he didn’t like either Mary’s subject matter or the tone of her voice. But he didn’t get up and run; instead, he swung to face her, thin lips peeled back from perfect teeth.

“I am God,” he said, fairly calmly, and smiled. “All members of the male sex are God. Females are the creation of Lucifer, put on earth to tempt, seduce, corrupt.”

She snorted derisively. “Rubbish! Men are not God, any more than women are. Males and females both are God’s creation. And did it ever occur to you that it is not women who tempt and seduce, but men who are weak and unworthy? If there is a devil in humankind, it is in men, who strive to corrupt women, then blame women. I have had some experience of the devil in men, sir, and I assure you that it needs no lures thrown out by women. It is already inborn.”

“This conversation is pointless!” he snapped. “Kindly pick up your pencil, madam.”

“I will do that, Father Dominus, if you give me a new subject. Thus far I have given you nigh on two hundred pages of text, and only the first fifty are fresh and original. After that, you merely go over the same ground. Move on, Father! I am very interested in the genesis of Cosmogenesis. It is time you told your readers what happened after you entered the Seat of God in your thirty-fifth year. Why, for instance, did you enter it?”

She had caught him; he stared at her in amazement, almost as if he had received another visitation. Mary breathed a silent sigh of relief. It was in his power to kill her, and perhaps for a few moments when she had castigated him so bitingly he had contemplated having Brother Jerome pitch her down her privy well to certain death, but, all-unknowing, she had saved her life by showing him where he was going wrong. The brain that once must have been as formidable as any in the whole country was softening, a gradual process of which perhaps he had some awareness, yet knew not how to remedy it. Would he, back in his heyday, have whipped poor little Therese? Or thought the female sex unclean? Mary didn’t know, but wanted to. Now, with any luck, she might find out, for he was grateful enough at her criticism to come to the conclusion that her life was worth sparing. He wanted to write this book, but he didn’t know how. A mind that could invent lamps and cure-alls apparently did not have the ability to plan a verbal construction. As long as she guided him in his literary work, he would keep her alive.