Colleen McCullough - The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

Then Angus burst through the door, his face wet with tears, his arms out to enfold her in a hug. Much to her astonishment, Mary found this treatment exactly what she might have wanted had she dreamed of wanting it, which she had not.

“Oh, Mary, if you but knew the despair we have all felt these past weeks!” he said into her hair, which smelled of tallow and dust, and somewhere underneath, of Mary.

“Set me down, Angus,” she said, recollecting herself. “I am very glad to see you, but I cannot stand for long, even with a gentleman supporting me.”

Obedient to her every whim, he put her in the chair. “I can imagine that our despair is as nothing compared to yours,” he said, understanding she was not yet ready for declarations of love. “Where have you been?”

“In a cave, the prisoner of a mad little old man who calls himself Father Dominus.”

“So he is up to no good! Charlie, Owen and I met him with about thirty little boys, carrying his wares.”

“The Children of Jesus,” she said, nodding. “Where is Charlie, if he was with you today?”

“Gone home to fetch a carriage for you.” Remembering his manners, Angus turned to the Hawkins family and thanked them for their kindness to Miss Bennet. They would, of course, have the hundred-pounds reward. “No, no, Mr. Hawkins, I insist!”

Mary’s head was nodding. Angus moved behind her and let her head lie against him, as the chair back was low. She was still asleep when Charlie and the carriage arrived, so Angus carried her to it and bundled her in furs; she felt very cold. Mrs. Hawkins had peeled off her socks and washed and dressed her feet, but Angus and Charlie were anxious to get her home, where by the time they arrived Dr. Marshall would be waiting.

“Are you well enough to give us all your story, Mary?” Fitz asked a day later as the group assembled in the Rubens Room before dinner. Though she was too thin, it was clear that her basic health was unaffected by her ordeal; a hot bath, her hair washed by none other than Hoskins herself and the loan of one of Lizzie’s gowns made her look quite breathtaking, Angus decided. Too thin she might be, but the clean line of her flawless bones was better emphasized. Only heavily bandaged feet bore testimony to her sufferings.

If Mary had one virtue greater than others, it was her reluctance to complain coupled to her dislike of occupying the central position on a stage. So without self-pity or florid embroidery, Mary told her story. She had no idea that Ned Skinner had been taking her to Pemberley when Father Dominus struck; in fact, she remembered nothing between being evicted from the Friar Tuck and waking some days later in the cave, a prisoner. Both the ladies and gentlemen found it hard to credit that she had been stolen for no better reason than to act as a scribe for a book about his outlandish beliefs.

“Though originally he stole me to experiment upon me,” she qualified, resolving that nothing she said would paint him madder than he truly was. And what was madness anyway? “He told me that I had been dying from a swelling of the brain-apparently his skills as a physician were developed enough to diagnose this from my appearance as I lay on the bank where he found me. It seems he had concocted a remedy for swelling of the inner organs, but had no one upon whom to test it. So he stole me, fed me his concoction, and cured me. Then I became his scribe. At first his Cosmogenesis, as he calls it, fascinated me-a truly original concept wherein God is the darkness, and all light is evil. His term for the author of evil is not Satan or the Devil, but Lucifer. How much Cosmogenesis owes to his encroaching blindness I know not, but certainly it contributed. Though he never said so, I gathered that light was painful to him. Ignatius said once that whenever he set out to collect payment from apothecary shops, he wore spectacles with lenses darkened by smoke.”

“So the boys we encountered behaved as they did because they abhorred light,” said Charlie. “I put it down to fear of him.”

“Fear of him is something new as far as the children are concerned, and even so, it is the girls who fear him more. Events occurred that provoked him into calling them unclean.”

“What happened to you , Mary?” Fitz asked.

She looked wry. “My undisciplined tongue, of course. I had kept it under rigid control, understanding that to antagonise him might earn me a death sentence. But when he informed me that Jesus was the result of a cynical collaboration between God and Lucifer, I could not remain silent. I called him wicked and evil, and he ran away, cursing me. That was the last time I saw him. I was left to die-and would have, had the subsidence not occurred.”

“I think he decided to abandon you after he met us,” said a horrified Charlie. “I told him I was Charles Darcy of Pemberley and asked after you. He must have panicked.”

Mary’s interrogation at Fitz’s hand continued for several hours, yet neither he nor Angus felt that, at its end, they knew much about anything except Cosmogenesis. Surely she must have had some kind of contact with the children! But no, she maintained that she had not.

“Give it up, gentlemen!” she said at last, tired and a little angry. “I cannot embroider the facts. You have seen thirty little boys, I have seen only the two you saw pushing the hand cart. Believe the testimony of your own eyes, not my hearsay, for hearsay is all it is. I was kept in a barred cell, and moved no farther from it than a tunnel that led downward to an underground river. Wherever the children were kept gave them no excuse to see for themselves the woman of whom Therese and Ignatius talked. When I asked Father Dominus about the cell, he denied building it. Whoever did, he said, did so before his time. All I can tell you is that the poor children were shifted to some new location, and disliked it. Father’s reasons for the move are unknown to me, but they were not very recent. It seems an old plan of his.”

“Let us cease and desist,” Fitz said, eyes on Mary’s face. “You have had enough. You were right to think a subsidence occurred. Though the public caves were not affected, the movement was felt everywhere, and for the time being all inspections of the caves are cancelled. We must presume that within the area are many caves as yet undiscovered, and that somewhere in them are the Children of Jesus. The question is, did the subsidence occur where they are, or completely elsewhere? The old man’s dementia is apparently increasing, so we cannot know whether he has locked them up, or still lets them roam free. Provided, that is, that they are still alive.”

There was no point in shielding Mary from anything. Fitz told her-and, perforce, Elizabeth, Jane and Kitty-about the two dead bodies. This, coming hours after learning of Lydia’s death, almost overset Mary. To her own surprise, she held out her hand to Angus, and was given it. Such a comfort!

“The dead girl must be Sister Therese,” she said, blinking at tears. “I am sure of it. I never did believe there was a Mother Beata. I think that once the girls matured, they were to be killed. Yes, the girl’s body belongs to Sister Therese, and I insist that she be buried in decent circumstances. Mourners, a stone at her head, consecrated ground.”

“I’ll see to it,” said Angus. “Fitz has bigger things to do, Mary. How, I don’t know, but we have to find those poor children. If Father Dominus’s madness has progressed beyond human values, then he won’t care about the children.”

“Did he give you any reason why he has the children, Mary?” Elizabeth asked. “It seems he fed them well, clothed them-doesn’t that suggest he loved them, at least in the beginning? I know you say they’re terrorised, Charlie, but if he had always had that effect upon them, they would not have joined him. From what you say, Brother Ignatius loved him, Mary.”