Colleen McCullough - The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

Hindsight, Mary Bennet! Experience has given you wisdom, but the vagaries of chance have put your life at peril. It seems you cannot even ride the public stage-coach without disaster, and what is that compared to your present predicament?

A sensible woman would have accepted Mr. Robert Wilde’s very sincere proposal of marriage, but what did you do, pray? Why, you looked at him as if he had grown another head, and then snapped it off! But you know the reason for that full well-you could see that it would have been an inappropriate union-he younger than you, wealthier, more appealing to the opposite sex. And face it, Mary, you were right to refuse him! He will find a more suitable wife, one whom he can love without being ridiculed, which would have been his fate had he married you.

From Robert Wilde her mind skipped to Angus Sinclair, who had said no word of love. He had offered friendship, and that she had felt able to accept. It was he whom she missed upon her travels: the kindred sense of belonging, the receptive ear turned her way to listen to whatever she said. Yes, she had missed him acutely, and known that were he with her, the adventures would have taken on new dimensions. Mr. Robert Wilde’s face she found hard to remember, but Mr. Angus Sinclair’s sprang immediately into her mind like a portrait done by a master.

She was missing dearest Lizzie too, though Jane not as much. Jane cried so, and tears accomplished nothing, changed nothing. The only tears Mary respected were those of the deepest, sharpest, most harrowing grief, and one could not compare those tears to the tears of Jane. No, Lizzie was the sensible and sensitive one-why was she so unhappy? When I get out of this, Mary resolved, I am going to discover the cause of Lizzie’s unhappiness.

At night, huddled in her chilly bed, a slightly angular ball trying to warm just one spot, she wondered about the origins of her prison cell. Seizing the opportunity during one of Father Dominus’s more approachable moods, she had asked why he had ever needed to construct such a thing, only to be rebuffed. Not by a refusal to enlighten her-that would have been more understandable. No, Father Dominus had denied ever building it! When she pressed him for an explanation, he had said he owned no theories about it at all, and changed the subject. So who had made a cage in a cave? A cave, what’s more, that lay far from any accessible chamber, if she could believe Ignatius and Therese. Who had built it, and why? Robbers? Refugees? Kidnappers? She would never know, it seemed. But to wonder liberated her mind a little, let it drift into sleep. And when she was free, she would try to find out.

When I get out of this, she kept saying to herself-never if I get out of this. Three tablespoons of water left, and she was still saying when, not if.

The new dawn was a sunny one, she saw when she tugged her curtain back for the morning look, then closed it to cut the wind. Cold, so cold! Her lips were dry, their skin crusted and flaking. Do I, or do I not?

“I do not count on Thee to provide, O Lord, except to give me strength and ingenuity,” she said, and drank the last of her water.

No sooner had she set the empty ewer down than there was a roar in the bowels below her, a huge shudder that threw her flat; dazed, she climbed to her feet and saw that the wooden seat of her commode had twisted, splintered. The hole beneath it was still there, but instead of the sound of running water came a column of dust that billowed about her.

Another noise followed, this one inside her cell-harsh and metallic. She ran to the curtain and pulled it back to reveal the bars. They had buckled! When she tried to open the big door, it swung inward on its hinges, squealing, its lock sheared where the mortise entered its socket. Mary ran through it-if more of this subsidence was to come, let her be outside the cell, not in it! Then, remembering how cold she was, she steeled herself to return to the cell and take her two blankets. More layers to warm herself.

“Thank you, dear Lord,” she said then, safely outside again.

There were two more openings in the left side wall of this foyer cavern, as well as the one she had used for exercise. She looked into each, and saw blackness. A stack of tallow candles of the cheapest sort lay beside the far tunnel, together with a tinder box well stuffed with dried mosses almost as fine as wool. But not for one moment did Mary contemplate either. She was no Ariadne with a ball of twine wending her way through the Labyrinth of the Minotaur, and after that upheaval in the depths, who knew what had happened in the tunnels?

No, she would enter the world directly, from the aperture, no matter how precipitous the terrain outside. She went to the edge of the opening. Not a cliff, thank God! A pile of rocks spread downward and, at the top of the cave, a massive boulder leaned; it must have helped the dark green canvas conceal the cave to anyone on the moor below. She was nothing like a thousand feet up, she saw now, but rather about three hundred feet. The wind buffeted and tore at her, but the landslide was dry, and she had some protection from the blankets once she managed to wrap them around her shoulders. The position of the sun told her that she was looking north across a desolation of moors, conical peaks and ragged rock formations; nowhere could she see a house or settlement of any kind. Therefore when she reached the bottom she must turn toward the south and, some instinct said, the west rather than the east. If habitation there were, it would lie that way. Oh, for her boots!

The rocks were difficult to negotiate, and bit into her hands when she had to cling for dear life with toes groping for a foothold below. Ten minutes into her descent saw her quite warm from the effort; off came one blanket, which she tossed downward as some protection against wearing her socks out. Her strength had dwindled alarmingly, but Miss Mary Bennet was not about to be defeated by her own bodily shortcomings. She kept scrambling down, occasionally falling, but always halted by a protruding boulder too soon to sustain injury.

It seemed to take forever, but at the end of about an hour Mary was standing on rank, strappy grass that only the hungriest sheep could fancy. Her socks had held up under the harsh treatment, but they wouldn’t last if her walk was one of many miles. This had to be the Peak District of Derbyshire, she thought, and wished she knew whereabouts Pemberley lay. But as she did not, she set her course around the base of the low hill in which her cave sat, and hoped that some sort of civilisation lay close at hand.

At first it did not look auspicious; the countryside seemed as wild and deserted as it had to the north, and Mary’s spirits sank. No road, no track, no path…But after she had tramped about five miles, wincing as the sharp-stoned ground cut into her feet, her sensitive nose scented the foetid commingling of barnyard aromas-pigs, cows, geese, horses. Yes, yes! This way did lead to habitation! To people!

Farmer William Hawkins saw a scarecrow coming down the lane, staggering and tottering. Tall, skinny, dressed in rags, with the hair of a fairground clown, reddish and sticking up, and a face like a fairground skellington, just the bones. Transfixed, he watched until the scarecrow came close enough to see it was a woman; then he realised who she had to be, and whooped so loudly that Young Will came bolting out of the barn.

“’Tis Miss Mary Bennet,” said Farmer Hawkins to his son. “Oh, look at her feet, poor soul! Arms up, Will, we’ll chair her to the house. Then you can climb on the pony and go find Mr. Charlie-he’s hereabouts, searching them caves.”

Mary was put into a wooden armchair by a kitchen fire, given water and then broth. By the time that Young Will found Charlie and Angus, Mary had regained sensation in her limbs, felt warm, cosseted, alive . The broth was skimmed off a true farm soup, always on the hob, added to with whatever came to hand that day, and it was delicious. Only a little of it had made her feel sated, but she knew that would pass; in a few days she would be eating huge meals to heal her body’s travails.