KITTY BENNET’S
DIARY
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE Chronicles
Volume 3
ANNA ELLIOTT
with illustrations by Laura Masselos
a WILTON PRESS book
KITTY BENNET’S DIARY
Pride and Prejudice Chronicles
Volume 3
Text © 2013 Anna Elliott
Illus. © 2013 Laura Masselos
All rights reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s (or Jane Austen’s) imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For more information, please visit www.AnnaElliottBooks.com.
Anna Elliott can be contacted at ae@annaelliottbooks.com.
WILTON PRESS
v.130522012027
A story of hope and second chances in Regency London.
Kitty Bennet is finished with love and romance. She lost her one-time fiancé in the Battle of Waterloo, and in the battle’s aftermath saw more ugliness and suffering than she could bear. Staying with her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner in London for the winter, Kitty throws her energies into finding a husband for her hopelessly bookish sister Mary, and discovering whatever mysterious trouble is worrying her sister Jane. But then she meets Mr. Lancelot Dalton, a handsome clergyman with a shadowed past—and discovers that though she may be finished with love, love may not be at all finished with her.
Kitty Bennet’s Diary is Volume 3 of the Pride and Prejudice Chronicles. It can be read alone, but refers to events from Volumes 1 and 2.
In-law relationships during Jane Austen’s time were given more weight than they typically are today. Thus in the original Pride and Prejudice, Caroline Bingley taunts Mr. Darcy that if he should marry Elizabeth, Mr. and Mrs. Phillips will be his “uncle and aunt,” and Wickham, after his marriage to Lydia, refers to her Uncle and Aunt Gardiner as, “our uncle and aunt.” In referring to a brother-in-law or sister-in-law, the in-law was often dropped, and a sibling by marriage would have been referred to simply as sister or brother. For example, Elizabeth tells Wickham (with whom she surely did not actually wish a closer relationship), “Come, Mr. Wickham, we are brother and sister, you know. Do not let us quarrel about the past.” And Lady Catherine de Bourgh objects that Elizabeth marrying Darcy would make Wickham his brother as well.
I have included family trees in an appendix to clarify the relationships in Kitty Bennet’s Diary, although please note that the family trees include the relationships and names that I have invented in the first two books of the Pride and Prejudice Chronicles (e.g., Georgiana Darcy’s marriage to Colonel Fitzwilliam, whom I have named Edward), as well as Jane Austen’s originals. For anyone wishing to see a family tree based on Jane Austen’s text alone, there is an excellent one at pemberley.com.
Kitty Bennet’s Diary uses primarily British conventions for spelling and punctuation (e.g., travelling rather than the American traveling, realise rather than realize, jewellery rather than jewelry, practice and licence ending in -ce as nouns and -se as verbs, etc.). British convention also differs from American in terms of when it is appropriate to include punctuation within quotation marks, and the appropriate usage for single and double quotation marks. However, the earliest copies of Pride and Prejudice followed the current American convention for single/double quotes, so that is what I have used for Kitty’s diary.
Thank you for purchasing Kitty Bennet’s Diary. Happy reading!
Letter from Elizabeth Darcy to Georgiana Fitzwilliam:
Tuesday 21 November 1815
Dearest Georgiana,
I have heard from my mother that Kitty is to depart Longbourn and spend the winter in London with our Aunt and Uncle Gardiner. This arrangement may be for the best—from what my mother wrote, I do not think that she had any better success with Kitty than I did when Kitty returned last summer from her time in Brussels.
Not that that is any particular surprise. She is my mother, and I love her—but all the same, I cannot imagine confiding in her anything of a personal nature. And I have not recently returned from witnessing a war, as Kitty has.
That is really why I am writing this. You know I would never wish to stir up painful memories for you—but you were there with Kitty in Brussels during the battle at Waterloo. You are the only one of our family who truly knows what Kitty saw and experienced there.
She will not speak of it to me at all, though I know she has nightmares about it sometimes. While she was staying with us at Pemberley, I would hear her crying at night, but she always said in the morning that she could not remember what she had dreamt.
I feel dreadfully guilty, in a way. A year ago, I wished nothing more for Kitty than that she would grow out of behaving like such a giggling, flighty, flirtatious child—but now it seems she has gone to the opposite extreme. It is as though something is broken inside her. She never giggles any more—almost the only time I even saw her smile all the while she was staying with us was when she would play with baby James.
You wrote to me this past summer telling me the facts of what had happened at Waterloo: Kitty had broken off her engagement to Captain John Ayres—on account of her having become infatuated with Lord Henry Carmichael. But then she met Captain Ayres on the eve of battle, and he asked whether there was not yet a chance of matters being mended between them. Kitty told him yes—she could hardly say anything else, since he was about to go off to war. And the very next day, John Ayres was killed in the battle.
Not that Kitty has confided in me. You wrote to me, though—and I agree—that Kitty was kind to John Ayres, but she did not really love him. It is not that she is so very heartbroken over his death even now, but rather that she cannot forgive herself for the way she treated him.
And I do not know how to help her at all.
You and Edward will be in London this winter, as well. Can I ask that you try to talk with Kitty, to do what you can for her? Whatever her past mistakes, she does truly have a good heart—in addition to being my sister.
Thank you. I feel better just for having written all this out to you.
All my love to you and Edward both, and I remain,
Your loving sister,
Elizabeth Darcy
I am going to find my sister Mary a husband. I have decided: I will see Mary wedded to a nice, eligible, and if possible handsome young man within the next year if it kills me. Which to be honest, given Mary’s past history, seems entirely probable.
It is strange: I would never have thought Mary cared one way or the other about attracting male admirers, much less a husband. I did not think she cared very much for anything—except proving how very much cleverer and more accomplished she is than anyone else.
But tonight—
Well, I suppose I ought to recount it all from the beginning.
We attended Lady Dorwich’s ball tonight, so that we were very late in getting to bed. And then—I suppose it can only have been an hour or two after I had fallen asleep—I woke with my heart pounding from the nightmare that had come upon me.
It was the usual nightmare—the one of Waterloo—as horrible now as it was when the dreams first started up last summer. But all this is beside the point. What I really meant to write was that after I woke, I heard Mary crying in the bed next to mine. Since we are staying with my Aunt and Uncle Gardiner in their London home, we are obliged to share a room.
I sat up—certain I must be dreaming still, because I cannot recall ever having heard Mary cry since she was six years old and I was five, and she fell off the piano bench and cut her head on the coal scuttle.
She was crying tonight, though. She was huddled under the blankets, sobbing softly into her pillow.
I lay quiet, uncertain of what to do. It is not as though Mary and I have ever been especially close, despite the nearness of our ages. Sharing a room with her these last weeks has occasionally made me contemplate … well, not actual fratricide—or whatever the equivalent for sisters is; Latin has never exactly been my strong point. I have felt, however, that if I have to spend one more day listening to Mary make weird gargling sounds in her throat first thing at dawn every morning—she read somewhere or other that it strengthens a weak singing voice—I shall be tempted to catch several dozen live toads and put them in her bed.
Except that there are no live toads to be had in London in January.
The whole point, though, of my sharing a room with Mary is that it is a kind of penance. And the unpleasant truth that I have recently discovered about penances is that they are practically never the kind of act that comes easily. So I pushed back the covers and got out of bed—despite the cold floorboards and the fact that my feet were bare—and sat down on the edge of Mary’s mattress.
“Mary? Is something wrong?” I asked.
Mary did not answer, she only lay absolutely still, the covers pulled over her head. And after a second’s pause, she let out the most unconvincing snore I have ever heard—half snort, half suppressed sob.
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Mary, I know you’re not asleep,” I said. “You wouldn’t fool baby Susanna.” Baby Susanna is our youngest Gardiner cousin. “You may as well sit up and tell me what the trouble is.”
Mary lay a second more without moving—and then she sat up in an explosion of blankets and sheets and glowered at me from under the ruffles of the old-fashioned nightcap she always wears.
Mary is only twenty-two, a year older than I am, but even at night she dresses as though she were in constant rehearsal for the role of elderly maiden aunt.
Mary’s eyes were red and puffy, but she lifted her chin. “If you must know, I am crying because not one single gentleman asked me to dance tonight.”
I was taken aback. “I thought you said that, in your opinion, dancing was a frivolity suited only to small and meagre minds,” I said.
Which sounds as though I were being spiteful, but I have also discovered that it is extremely wearing to force myself to be sweet all of the time. And in the wake of the nightmare, I was not feeling especially sweet.
Besides which, it is also quite true that Mary said exactly that—she really does talk that way. Constantly.
Mary sniffed and looked balefully at me. “And so it is. But it would have been nice to at least be asked.” She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her nightdress. “I talked to one young man for at least a quarter of an hour during supper. Mr. Porter. He was eating a very large helping of the roast duck, and I told him that modern medical opinion holds that a diet of too many rich meats can lead to gout in later age. I even outlined for him what a scientific paper I read recently gave as a recipe for a healthful diet—brown bread … raw onions … a great many carrots. But he still did not ask me to dance afterwards.”
“Imagine that,” I said.
Mary wiped her nose again and glared at me. “I knew you would not understand, Kitty. You had men asking you for dances all night long. And you did not accept even one of them.”
That is also true. It is very ironic, really. Since I have sworn off men entirely, I am besieged by invitations at every ball or assembly we attend. Tonight I started telling overly persistent gentlemen that I had a mother in the madhouse, a father in prison, and felt myself coming down with a touch of bubonic plague. And they only thought I was being charmingly witty; I was still refusing invitations to dance throughout the entire evening.
Apparently the secret to attracting male attention is to cultivate an air of unattainability. If only I had known that a year ago.
Mary does not know the full story of why I have sworn off men and dancing, so I suppose her glare was in some way justified. But it did not last long. Her face crumpled after a moment, and she started to cry again.
“I am never going to have anyone fall in love with me.” She spoke between sobs. “No one will ever write poetry about me. Or try to kiss me. I shall never get married. I shall never have a house and a husband and babies of my own.”
I stared at her, thinking about how it is perfectly possible not to know your own sister at all. I admit the thought of anyone writing poetry about Mary strains even my imagination.
Actually, what strains my imagination still more is to picture Mary accepting a poem written in her honour—without being tempted to write up an answering critique of the metre and rhyme.
And Mary as a mother? The mind—or at least my mind—boggles.
Though I will admit that Mary is very good with baby Susanna. In Susanna’s company, Mary forgets to be serious-minded and full of conceit with her own cleverness. She will even make ridiculous faces to get Susanna to utter one of her fat, delicious baby chuckles. But I had never imagined before tonight that Mary might want a family of her own.
She is, however, my sister, and why should she not have a husband and children if she wants them?
The London society Season will not, of course, officially begin until after Easter—but there are still balls and parties aplenty. Since there is no purpose in attending them for myself, I might as well dedicate my energies to seeing that Mary takes some benefit from it all.
Mary fell asleep soon after that last outburst, but—since I would rather not fall back to sleep in any case—I have been lying awake, formulating plans and going over lists of possible young men in my mind and determining that getting Mary wedded will be my good deed for the New Year.
Do present good deeds make up for past wrong ones? It would be nice to be able to believe it, but I cannot imagine that life works that way.
There are five of us Bennet sisters—which fact always makes strangers sigh and comment about our poor mother, burdened with the task of getting five daughters married off, without even the benefit of decent dowries for us.
But while we were growing up, it always seemed to me that each of us had her assigned role in the family. Jane was the oldest, and the most beautiful. Then came Elizabeth—Lizzy—who was always the most charming and witty. And then Mary.
I suppose I cannot entirely blame Mary for turning herself into such an appalling blue-stocking, because she spent her entire childhood hearing what a shame it was that she was not as pretty as her older sisters. It is no wonder, really, that she started trying to distinguish herself as the most bookish and intelligent one of us.
I am next in age after Mary, and then Lydia comes two years after me, the youngest of us all. Lydia was always the most spirited and vivacious one. Which left me the only Bennet sister without any distinguishing characteristic. I could not be the prettiest or the wittiest or the cleverest or even the most bouncing and lively. I do like to draw—but only little comical sketches. I have no real artistic aspirations.
Which makes me … what? The boring sister? The one without any special talents—except possibly the ability to make terrible choices with her life?
This is turning into a very whinging and self-pitying entry. And another of my recent discoveries is that there is no fun whatsoever in feeling sorry for yourself when all you keep coming back to is that everything from start to finish has been your own fault.
Besides, what I really meant to do when I started out writing was to set down how Mary and I came to be the only two of the five Bennet sisters who are unmarried, still.
Jane and Elizabeth married extremely well, much to my mother’s delight. Jane is married to Mr. Charles Bingley, who is not only handsome and rich, but also agreeable and kind—and madly in love with Jane, even though they have been married now for nearly three years and have one daughter, Amelia, and another baby expected quite soon.
Lizzy married Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy—who is even richer than Charles. He always struck me as very proud and disagreeable, but Lizzy seems to actually love him. And he loves her, too. I have stayed with them at Pemberley, Mr. Darcy’s estate, and I have seen the way he looks at Lizzy. Mr. Darcy—he may be my brother-in-law, but I still cannot bring myself to call him Fitzwilliam—may be stiff and proud, but he would walk to the ends of the earth just to see Lizzy smile.
And Lydia—
Lydia was always the closest to me, all the time we were growing up. Lizzy and Jane were always perfectly nice to me. But I was so much younger that I was always a baby to them, and they had their own secrets and games that I was never a part of.
No one could possibly make a special confidante of Mary, which left me and Lydia to play together when we were small and then be confidantes when we grew up.
Even though Lydia was the younger, she was always the leader. I wanted to be just like her—fearless and bold, with scads of admirers to flirt with.
Strange. Thinking about myself then is like looking through the telescope the wrong way round; that Kitty Bennet seems so distant, now. But it is quite true. Even when Lydia created a scandal by running away with George Wickham, I admired her. At least she had done something instead of simply sitting on the sidelines of all the assemblies and balls like the rest of us, waiting for some gentleman to overlook our lack of fortune and save us from becoming old maids.
It is only in the last year that I have seen exactly where all Lydia’s vivaciousness has got her: married to a man who is a lout and a drunkard—and a coward, as well. They have to live in France because Wickham deserted from the army at the Battle of Waterloo and now cannot come home. The only time Lydia writes to any of us is to ask for money and to complain that French society is so very dull and stultifying compared to home—which really means that she and Wickham have not enough funds for her to cut any kind of a figure in the social scene.
At any rate, that is how Mary and I came to be the last sisters left at home. Our mother has more or less given up on seeing Mary married off, I think. But she has by no means abandoned hopes of seeing me wedded. To whom, she is not particular; her criteria for potential sons-in-law seem to be firstly a sizeable income, and secondly a beating pulse.
That is why I was so happy to accept our Aunt Gardiner’s invitation for Mary and me to spend the winter in London. Lizzy invited me, too. But I cannot possibly face her again, not after what happened last Christmas. And Aunt Gardiner is such a calm, restful person to be around. She never fusses or worries. Besides, though she is very kind, she is too busy with the children to be overly occupied with Mary or me.
And beyond the one time Mary informed me that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all—and I dumped an entire pot of tea over her head for it—Mary leaves me alone.
In my defence, at least the tea was (mostly) gone cold.
Today marks the first day of putting my plan into effect: I dragged Mary out to the shops to buy her some new clothes. I was expecting it to be a battle, preferable only when compared to a visit to the dentist. But it actually went much better than I would have thought.
And it got me away from the house during the hour when Mrs. Ayres typically makes her weekly effort to see me—and is forced to leave a card with my aunt’s parlourmaid, letting me know that she has called.
I will have to see her eventually, I know. But there are penances and then there are penances. And I still feel as though I would rather hurl myself under the wheels of a runaway carriage than have to sit with John’s mother and talk about her dead son.
Because if I see Mrs. Ayres, I will have to tell her the truth. Even I cannot seriously contemplate a bare-faced lie to a woman whose son was killed last summer at Waterloo. I suppose this will sound as though I am making excuses, trying to cast myself in a more favourable light. The former Emperor Napoleon probably wrote in his personal diary: I am humble and without the least conceit of myself.
But it really is true—it is honestly not for myself that I mind the thought of Mrs. Ayres knowing the whole ugly story of what happened between John and me last year. I would tell her the truth—even though it makes me appear a brainless, heartless flirt. What I am afraid of is that it would tarnish her memories of John, to know he was once blind enough to be in love with me.
So I took Mary shopping instead.
Mary has plenty of money—she has spent practically nothing of the allowance our father gave us, or the Christmas gifts from Lizzy and Jane. Until today, all she had bought were a few books, so I was able to bring her to the Conduit Street shop of Madame LeFarge, the very fashionable modiste who makes all of Jane’s dresses.
Mary balked a bit at the prices—well, at the whole process, really. But I asked her did she want to spend the rest of her time in London a confirmed wallflower, or did she wish to occasionally have a dance? And she actually submitted to Madame LeFarge’s measuring and clucking and draping her with various silks and gauzes and muslins.
Madame LeFarge was at least very enthusiastic. I think she saw Mary as a unique professional challenge. If she could manage to make Mary beautiful, she could succeed with anyone.
Though Mary is not so ill-favoured, really. Especially not now that her skin has cleared and her figure is no longer all awkward angles. She might even be pretty if she learned to arrange her hair properly, instead of simply scraping it straight back from her face. And if she left off wearing her spectacles.
She does not even actually need the spectacles—they are only plain glass set in silver frames that she bought with the goal of making herself look more intelligent.
At any rate, if left to herself, Mary would have chosen the plainest, dullest materials Madame LeFarge had. But Madame and I joined forces and overruled her, and in the end actually persuaded her into some pretty things. A rose satin that is to be made up with an overdress of cream-coloured spider-gauze and trimmed with pearl rosettes. And an evening gown of pale blue crepe, ruffled at the sleeves and hem.
Madame LeFarge tried to interest me in some new clothes, as well. I suppose there is no reason I should not have bought them. Since John and I were no longer actually engaged at the time of his death, I was not required to wear mourning. Thankfully. I should have felt an even greater hypocrite having to drape myself in black bombazine and sneeze into black-edged handkerchiefs.
But I still had no desire to let Madame LeFarge fit me for anything new.
In the end, we ordered three dresses for Mary—and Madame LeFarge promised me faithfully that she would have the blue crepe ready for the dinner party Aunt Gardiner is giving in two days’ time.
That gives me two days to coach Mary in proper etiquette and persuade her not on any account to bring up the subjects of gout, brown bread, or raw carrots to any of the young men she meets.
I will write down in this journal whether I am successful or no—and whether Mary and I both survive my efforts.
Though I have some hopes. After we had finished at Madame LeFarge’s, I made Mary come with me to Gunter’s famous pastry shop to eat ice cream. And she only mentioned once that the pastries and ices were shockingly over-priced and not at all healthful, and that she was afraid some of the other customers—she was staring at a pair of very elegantly dressed women with obviously rouged cheeks and varnished fingernails who were eating at the table next to ours—might possibly be less than respectable.
As it happens, I only need a single word to sum up the dinner party tonight: disastrous.
Oh, the evening began well enough. Madame LeFarge did manage to finish the blue crepe gown for Mary. It was delivered this afternoon. And it is lovely—Madame added rows of pointed lace to the sleeves and collar line and caught up the overskirt with rosettes of deeper blue satin.
I forced Mary into it. And managed to persuade her to stop tugging at the neckline, which was really not so very low cut—though certainly more revealing than the high-necked dresses she usually wears.
And then I sat Mary down in the chair in front of my dressing table—our room has two, one for each of us—and made her allow me to arrange her hair.
Mary’s hair is quite pretty, really: glossy dark brown, with a natural curl. It is just that she invariably wears it dragged straight back from her face and pinned in a knot at the nape of her neck that makes her look more like a prim, dowdy governess than any actual governess possibly could.
Tonight I gathered her hair into a loose knot on top of her head. Then I took my sewing scissors and—ignoring Mary’s squeaks of protest—ruthlessly snipped and clipped so that a few loose, curling tendrils framed her face.
The difference in her appearance was amazing. I took out a pot of rouge—I have it, still, though I have not opened it in months—and added just a light touch of colour to Mary’s lips and cheeks. And she looked lovely, she really did.
I turned her to look into the mirror, and her eyes went quite wide with astonishment. And then she reached for her spectacles, which she had left on the edge of my night table.
“Don’t even think it!” I slapped her hand away. “Do you want to undo all my efforts?”
“But—” Mary cast a longing look at the glasses.
I cut her off. “I don’t care how much more intelligent you think they make you look, you are not wearing them tonight.”
Mary looked up at me—then down at the floor. “It’s not that. I started wearing them when my face had so very many blemishes,” she muttered. “They seemed—it felt as though I could hide behind them, a little. And now I feel … naked, without them.”
I was taken aback. Because as a rule, Mary never admits to uncertainty or self-consciousness—or to anything, really, but absolute confidence in her own wisdom and opinions.
But then she added, “And they do make me look more intelligent.” Which sounded much more like the sister Mary I know.
“Gentlemen don’t want a woman who looks intelligent. They want a girl who looks like a charming and agreeable companion,” I said.
Another flicker of uncertainty crossed Mary’s face. “I … is that not like lying, then? Pretending to be something I am not, just for the sake of attracting what must surely be fickle male attention, if it is based on such untruths? As the poet Mr. Cowper says, true souls—”
I had not really anything to say to that. It is certainly not as though my own record in that regard has been so outstanding. But I still interrupted before Mary could start unleashing quotations from poetry.
“Let us just start with getting some agreeable gentleman to ask you to dance,” I said. “We can worry later about your baring your true souls to each other.”
I looked at the clock, then, and realised that I had barely a quarter of an hour until Aunt Gardiner’s guests were due to arrive, which meant that I had approximately ten minutes to dress myself.
I rummaged in the wardrobe and yanked on the first dress that I found: my ivory silk with silver embroidered acorns. And then I sat down at the dressing table to fix my own hair.
I had been playing knights and dragons all afternoon with Thomas and Jack—they are Aunt and Uncle Gardiner’s two boys—followed by dolls’ tea party with Anna and Charlotte, who are Thomas and Jack’s older sisters. And I had spent a good deal of the time holding baby Susanna on my shoulder, as well.
When I looked into the mirror, I discovered that I still had a smear of green paint on my neck from the dragon’s costume—the headdress the boys and I made together had not quite dried when I put it on—and that at some point during the tea party, baby Susanna had managed to deposit a sticky smear of what looked like grape jelly in my hair.
There was only time enough to hastily scrub the green paint off, though, with the cold wash water in the basin. I pulled my hair back into a tight knot that rivalled the severity of Mary’s usual hairstyles, and then covered the jelly with a silver lace bandeau.
After all, it was not as though it mattered especially what I looked like. And I am sure Mary could quote me some verse of the Bible that has something or other to say about the dangers of vanity over one’s looks.
“All right,” I said to Mary. “Let us go down. And for Heaven’s sake, do not forget what I told you. Do not quote poetry, do not criticise any of the gentlemen’s apparent vices, and above all, smile from time to time.”
Mary looked as though she were preparing to argue—probably thinking up some other quotation about wisdom being a kindly spirit. But I never gave her the chance, only took her by the arm and marched her downstairs to where Aunt Gardiner’s guests were beginning to arrive.
The dinner itself was also perfectly fine. I was seated next to a Mr. Frank Bertram, who talked mostly about—
Actually, I have no idea what he talked about. Horses, possibly? Or boating? My entire attention was occupied with trying to overhear what Mary was saying to her dinner companion. And wishing that I were seated near enough to stamp on her foot if she broke any of my rules and started lecturing or sermonising.
She seemed to do all right, though. She was seated next to Rhys Williams. He is a clerk in Uncle Phillips’s employ (Uncle Phillips being the husband of our mother’s sister; they live in Meryton, near our father’s estate at Longbourn), and has come to town to conduct some business for our uncle. Mr. Williams is somewhere about twenty-three or -four, and on the compact side—only a head or so taller than I am—but squarely built and sturdy-looking. His colouring is Welsh—black hair and dark eyes—and though he is not strictly speaking handsome, he is a pleasant young man.
Well, to be accurate, I suppose I should say that he appears to be a pleasant young man. He is so excessively shy that I have never actually managed to get him to say a word to me, though since he has been in town these last weeks, Aunt and Uncle Gardiner have often had him here to dine.
Tonight he appeared all through dinner to be listening to whatever Mary was saying. His eyes did not even appear to have glazed over with boredom, nor did I see him yawn. Though perhaps he was only grateful to have been blessed with a dinner companion who did not require him to talk.
After dinner ended and the gentlemen had joined us in the drawing room, Aunt Gardiner proposed that we have some dancing. I could see Mary poised to offer to play, but I stepped in before she could get the words out, and volunteered to accompany the dancing myself. I do not play nearly so well as Mary. Not even so well as Lizzy, really. But I can manage a few reels and a “Sir Roger de Coverley”.
The only drawback to that arrangement was that, though I had prevented Mary from playing, I could not both accompany the dancing and find a way to force Mary to actually dance. Or rather, force one of the gentlemen to ask her; she stood at the side of the space Aunt Gardiner had cleared for dancing. Moving her gloved fingers awkwardly in time to the music and looking hopeful. But not one of the young men there approached her.
Then at last Rhys Williams came to stand beside her. But not to ask her to dance. They only resumed their dinnertime conversation.
I could hear only part of what they said, but they seemed to be discussing the new gaslights that are being put up around London. It sounded stultifyingly boring to me, but I actually heard Mr. Williams utter a sentence or two, so he cannot have been entirely uninterested. And—perhaps it was the new dress and hairstyle—but Mary looked quite bright and interested, too. She even smiled.
Then Aunt Gardiner approached the pair of them—and I actually had some hopes, because she was intent on seeing Mary and Mr. Williams dance.
The other drawback of my sitting at the piano was that I was still not immune from invitations to dance myself. At least five gentlemen approached my bench and either offered to turn pages for me or said how hard it was that I could not dance, and surely my aunt or my sister could take a turn?
I kept having to break off playing in order to decline, since attempting to talk and play at the same time usually leads to disaster.
At any rate it was during one of these lulls—I was refusing Mr. Bertram, my companion from dinner—that Aunt Gardiner approached Mary and Mr. Williams, so I was able to hear the whole of the exchange.
Aunt Gardiner said, “Come, Rhys—Mary. I must have you dance. The two of you are the only couple here who have yet to take a turn on the floor.”
Rhys Williams’s face flushed beet-red to the roots of his hair, and he started to shake his head and stammer some sort of refusal. Something about Mr. Phillips requiring that he look over some accounts before tomorrow.
Mary, watching him and listening, looked mortified. After all, it is not especially pleasant to have the young man whom you have been speaking with for the past half hour look as though he would much prefer to run a mile in tight shoes rather than ask you to dance.
Aunt Gardiner saw Mary’s face, too. She is very perceptive, as well as kind. She turned to Mr. Williams and said, “Nonsense, Rhys. You work far too hard, as Mr. Phillips is well aware. He would not wish for you to cut short your enjoyment of the evening for a mere accounts book. I am sure whatever business it is can very well wait.”
There was no way Mr. Williams could refuse without crossing the line into outright rudeness. Still blushing furiously, he offered Mary his hand and bowed. And Mary took it and moved with him onto the dance floor.
That was when disaster struck. I could kick myself for not thinking of it, but in all my coaching Mary these last two days in how to attract a gentleman’s invitation to dance, it never occurred to me to question whether she can actually dance.
She cannot. At least, she cannot dance well. I remember her having dance lessons when we were young, with all the rest of us—and I cannot recall that she was so especially unskilled then. I suppose it has been years since she had the opportunity to practise, though, and I am not sure that she has ever danced in company with a young man.
Not that it was her fault entirely—once he was on the dance floor, I could understand Mr. Williams’s reluctance. He is, quite possibly, the worst dancer I have ever seen. He tripped and stumbled and stepped on the other dancers’ feet—and could not to save his own life keep to the beat of the music.
I could only see them out of the corner of my eye, since I was playing. But the combination of him and Mary together was like something from a Punch and Judy show. They reeled around, crashing into the other couples in the line. Then Mr. Williams stepped on the hem of Mary’s gown as she turned to move away from him during the allemande.
There was a sound of rending fabric. Mary lost her balance and was yanked backwards off her feet, her arms flailing wildly. She landed flat on her back in the centre of the dance floor.
For a moment of absolute, stunned silence, the entire room seemed to stare at her, collectively uncertain of what to do or say. And then Mary scrambled ungracefully up and bolted from the room, her hands covering her face.
I got up from the piano and ran after her. Mr. Williams was standing where Mary had left him, looking acutely horrified, and miserable as well. But I was much less concerned with him than with Mary.
I should have expected her to run upstairs to our room, but I suppose she was not thinking clearly and simply chose the nearest bolt-hole—which happened to be the cloakroom at the foot of the stairs.
As I came out of the drawing room and into the hall, I saw the door bang behind her, and heard the key turn in the lock.
“Mary?” I knocked on the door.
There was no response. Nothing but the sound of a muffled sob from inside. I felt truly dreadful, then. That is twice in three days that Mary the Complacent has been reduced to tears.
“Mary, please come out.” I knocked again. “Everyone knows it was just an accident. No one will laugh at you. Besides, it was my fault. I ought to have made sure that you weren’t a complete disaster on the dance floor before I sent you out there tonight.”
In hindsight, it was not the most tactful way I could have phrased it. But I was just feeling both guilty and irritated at the same time, and it simply slipped out.
Renewed sobs sounded from behind the locked cloakroom door.
I tried several more times, without any better results. And then finally I gave up, leaning against the panel, uncertain of what to do. Clearly I was making no headway with trying to apologise or reason with Mary. And yet I did not feel, either, as though I could simply go and rejoin the party and leave my sister weeping in a cloakroom.
I was debating whether to try knocking again, when I felt a touch on my elbow and turned to find a young man standing beside me. A very handsome young man—really, one of the handsomest men I have ever seen, with wheat-blond hair that fell across his brow, a lean, chiselled face, and eyes of a vivid blue.
He cleared his throat. “Miss Bennet, I wonder if you would—”
My temper abruptly snapped. I had been refusing offers from young men like him all night—and for weeks before this, too. Scores and scores of handsome young men incapable of absorbing through their thick skulls the meaning of the words ‘no, thank you’. Now this particular man had followed me out here to pester me while I was already feeling wretched about Mary.
I cut him off. “No. I would not care to dance. I would not care to have you turn pages for me at the piano. I would not like to step outside with you to see the moonrise.” I looked him up and down. “As you are no doubt already aware, sir, you have very pretty blue eyes. But then so does Lady Dorwich’s expensive new Persian cat. I pray you, go and turn your lovelorn attentions on some other girl than me, because there is no invitation you could issue, no request you could make that could lead me to say yes. Do you understand?”
The man took a step backwards at the vehemence of my tone. And then he said, one eyebrow raised, “Not even if I requested you to convey my regrets to your aunt that I must leave at once? I have just received an urgent message that I am needed by a sick friend—well, a parishioner of mine, really.”
He held up a scrap of folded paper in one hand—the message, presumably. And I noticed what I had overlooked before: that above his black evening jacket, he wore the white collar of a clergyman.
It was, I suppose, proof of whatever that quotation is about the mills of God and Divine Justice and all that sort of thing. It was my fault that Mary had been so mortified. And now the celestial mills had obligingly provided me with an opportunity to feel completely, toe-curlingly embarrassed, as well.
After what seemed an eternity, the young man said, “I do not believe we have been formally introduced. My name is Lancelot Dalton.”
I heard myself say, “Good Heaven. Lancelot? Surely not.”
Mr. Dalton’s eyebrows lifted again. And I felt my toes re-curling themselves.
Anyone would think, would they not, that I would by now have managed to govern the habit of speaking without pause for thought? But apparently not. It just seemed too much, that a man could look quite so much like the illustration of the noble knight in a book of fairy tales—and have a name like Lancelot, besides.
After another beat of silence, Mr. Dalton said, gravely, “My mother had an unfortunate fondness for the old medieval romances. I also have a sister called Gwenevere.”
I looked at him, uncertain of whether he was serious or joking. I thought there was a faint gleam of humour about his eyes, but I could not be sure.
I recollected myself enough to offer him my hand and say, “And I am Kitty—Catherine Bennet.”
“Yes, I know.” Mr. Dalton made me a bow. “I am acquainted with you by reputation, Miss Bennet.”
Which meant that I had definitely been wrong about the momentary look of humour in his gaze. One of the other advantages of coming to London this winter was that no one here does know my reputation. But if Mr. Dalton has heard anything of me, it is certain to have been nothing to my advantage.
I suppose I should have been mortified all over again, but strangely enough I found myself angry instead. I am not actually the girl I was a year ago. And yet this stiff, pompous prig of a clergyman had evidently decided to try and convict me on the evidence of hearsay alone.
I drew myself up and said, “Isn’t there a verse in the Bible about not fussing about the splinter in your neighbour’s eye when you have a great enormous beam in your own?”
Mr. Dalton looked taken aback all over again. And then once more I would have sworn there was a flicker of amusement in his blue gaze. Though in this case it only made me angrier still.
But then he said—still gravely—“Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.”
I might have known I would only garble the quote; Biblical references have never been my strong suit, either.
Mr. Dalton cleared his throat again and said, “All quotations from Scripture aside, Miss Bennet, I’m afraid that we seem to have somehow misunderstood each other, or—”
He got no further. A blonde-ringleted figure in rose-pink satin came bouncing out of the parlour at that moment and launched herself at him.
“Oh, Lance, you’re surely not leaving already?” She twined her arm possessively through his and pouted up at him. You promised to dance with me, and you’ve not yet kept your promise, you know.”
I recognised the girl as Miss Miranda Pettigrew. She is a young protégé of my sister-in-law Mrs. Hurst—a daughter of one of Mrs. Hurst’s school friends, I think. Miranda is plump and pink cheeked and blue eyed, dresses in more ruffles than even my sister Lydia, and wears her hair in a riot of bouncing blonde ringlets that must take her maid a small age to arrange every day with the curling tongs.
Mrs. Hurst has undertaken to launch her into London society this winter. And though I have met Miranda only a handful of times, I confess that I have already formed the opinion that I like her about as well as I do my sister-in-law.
Miranda wriggled like a new puppy and tugged at Mr. Dalton’s coat sleeve, alternately smiling, batting her lashes, and pouting as she reminded him of his promise to dance.
If I am strictly honest, I suspect that the real reason I dislike Miranda so much is that she reminds me of my own past behaviour. And really I ought at this point to quote my own Scriptural verse about beams and eyes back at myself.
Mr. Dalton showed remarkable patience in the face of Miranda’s assault. He only held up the message he had shown me and repeated that he had been called away by an old friend who was ill and had need of him.
And then he looked at me over the top of Miranda’s head and said, “If you wouldn’t mind conveying my message to your aunt? My friend was in dire straits when I left this evening to come here. And I’m afraid this message means that he must have taken a turn for the worse. I left your aunt’s address so that I might be summoned if there was any change.”
He raised his hand to push the hair back from his brow, looking weary—and truly grieved over his friend’s condition.
Which was extremely annoying of him, since it left me unable to continue in good conscience to be rude.
I said that of course I would give Aunt Gardiner his regrets. Mr. Dalton thanked me and took his leave of Miranda—who continued to pout. And then he bowed to me and said it had been a pleasure to meet me.
Thus proving that even clergymen must occasionally tell lies.
Rhys Williams sent a bouquet of pink baby roses and a note to Mary first thing this morning. Or rather, he sent them to Aunt Gardiner, with a request that they be given to Mary. Mr. Williams is far too much of a gentleman to do anything so improper as correspond with—or give gifts to—an unmarried girl whom he has only just met.
Aunt Gardiner gave them to me to take to Mary, since Mary was refusing to leave our room.
I half expected to find Mary in bed with the covers over her head again when I went up, but she was dressed—in the plainest, ugliest gown in her possession, with her hair pulled back in its old severe way—sitting in a chair before the bedroom fire. She was reading Fox’s Book of Martyrs, and her spine was so straight it made my own back ache just to look at her.
“Mary, Mr. Williams sent you these,” I began. “I think he wants you to know how sorry he is about last night.”
Mary glanced up from her book at the flowers—with the expression one of Fox’s martyrs might have shown in looking at Julius Caesar. Or is it Nero? At any rate, whichever emperor it was who was always feeding the early Christians to the lions.
“I suppose the generality of female minds might find a floral tribute an acceptable form of apology, but I should very much have preferred a book.”
“Oh, Mary, don’t say that,” I protested. I was not quite ready to give up on Mr. Williams yet. After all, before the dancing he had—apparently voluntarily—spent more time in Mary’s company last night than I have ever seen any young man spend before. “The two of you seemed to be getting on so well together. What were you talking about?”
Mary sniffed. “Nothing that you would be interested in. Or indeed be capable of comprehending,” she added with a pointed glance at me.
Ordinarily, that would be the kind of remark that would tempt me to pour tea over her head again, but in the harsh winter sunlight filtering through the bedroom window, I could see that Mary’s eyes looked as though she had been crying.
So I said, “You might at least read his note.” I offered her the folded paper, addressed with her name in a spiky, rather untidy man’s hand.
Mary snatched the paper from me and without opening or looking at it, tore it into two pieces, and then into two more. Her chin quivering, she threw the scraps of paper into the fire. “I am never as long as I live going to see or speak to Mr. Williams ever again!”
Which I suppose—unless I can think of a miraculous way of changing Mary’s mind—settles that.
I should have thought that the mills of God might have finished with me by this time. I may have caused Mary to dance with Mr. Williams and make a spectacle of herself, but she appears perfectly recovered now.
She even informed me this morning that although she prefers to spend her time in reading and study, she considers it no sacrifice to occasionally participate in gatherings of a social nature. This being the preface to her announcing that she would accompany me to the dance our sister-in-law Georgiana is hosting this Saturday evening.
That means that not only will I have to attend, I will—somehow—have to teach Mary to dance, as well, in the next five days.
Which, to be honest, I would have thought might be considered by any sort of Divine Justice to be punishment enough.
However. This morning I was playing in the drawing room with baby Susanna. The boys were having lessons with their tutor, and Anna and Charlotte were at a dancing lesson. Ordinarily, Aunt Gardiner would be with Susanna, but Susanna is six months old and teething, and kept my aunt up half the night last night with her crying.
Aunt Gardiner looked so exhausted this morning that I offered to play with the baby for a while so that my aunt could have a few hours’ uninterrupted rest. And really, it is no hardship to play with Susanna. She is such a dumpling.
I brought her downstairs with me so that my aunt would not hear her if she cried, and we sat on the drawing room floor, playing with a set of carved wooden animals that Susanna loves. Susanna loves it especially when I make the animals talk to each other and to her. Today she was a bit fussier than usual—the teeth still troubling her, I suppose—so I put on an especially zealous performance, complete with different voices for the animals.
The bear spoke in deep, growling tones with the accent of a London cab driver. The pig snorted between every word. The duck had an outrageously dreadful French accent …
I will not go on.
I will say that Susanna adored it all. She chuckled and clapped her dimpled little hands—a new skill for her—and uttered delighted, high-pitched baby shrieks.
I had just made the duck waddle over to the horse and quack out an invitation to a dîner gastronomique, when someone cleared his throat from the doorway.
It was Mr. Lancelot Dalton.
Of course it was.
Because Fate has apparently decreed that I will appear as great an idiot as possible every time I encounter the man.
I dropped the duck and scrambled up off the floor. Which made Susanna let out another shriek—an indignant one, this time—so that I had to scoop her up into my arms.
I had resolved the other night that if I ever did encounter Mr. Dalton again, I would be calm, and cool, and very, very dignified. Now, it is practically impossible to be dignified when one has just been discovered talking like a French-speaking duck. Or for that matter while an indignant baby shrieks and tangles her sticky little fingers in your hair.
Still, I (gently) detached Susanna’s fingers and said, as coolly as I could manage, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Dalton. I did not see you there.”
I would not have thought he could possibly be as handsome as I was remembering him from the other night. But he is. Even in a black clerical coat and white collar.
He bowed slightly and said, “I should be the one to apologise, Miss Bennet, for startling you. Your parlourmaid said that I would find Mrs. Gardiner here.”
Rose, Aunt Gardiner’s parlourmaid, is very sweet. But also rather simple. And incapable of understanding that in addition to answering the front door, she is supposed to make sure that my aunt is ‘at home’ to visitors before she shows the visitors in. And that a proper parlourmaid does not simply point the visitors in the right general direction and tell them to show themselves in.
Ordinarily, I could care less for such formalities. But just at that moment, I found myself wishing that Aunt Gardiner employed an elderly, supremely correct butler with a name like Worthington or Snell.
“My aunt is resting,” I said. “Is there something I might—” I had been bouncing Susanna on my hip, but she was still shrieking and angrily stretching out her hands to the wooden toys on the floor. Loud enough that it was growing hard to hear my own voice.
I gave up, stooped, and retrieved the wooden duck and the wooden pig, made the pig pretend to kiss her chubby little cheeks (I had already thoroughly embarrassed myself in front of Mr. Dalton, and decided that I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb) and then handed the animals to her.
Susanna’s shrieks changed to a gurgle of a laugh. And then she put the pig into her mouth and started to gnaw on it, an expression of fierce concentration on her chubby face.
“Is there something I might do for you instead?” I finished.
Mr. Dalton was watching me. I could not tell whether it was with disapproval in his gaze or no. Though I suppose it very likely was. Perhaps as a clergyman he disapproves on principle of play acting—even with wooden animals? Or perhaps he was merely chagrined at having to deal with me—the girl he ‘knows by reputation’—instead of my aunt.
At any rate—just as his study of me was beginning to make me feel thoroughly self-conscious, and thus irritated—he finally cleared his throat and said, “I called to give Mrs. Gardiner the approximate number of gift boxes that will be required for the children’s ward at London Hospital. I volunteer my time there as chaplain. And Mrs. Gardiner has very kindly offered to put together some small gifts of food and warm clothes for the children who were obliged to spend the Christmas holidays as hospital patients.”
I cannot decide which is the more annoying: Mr. Dalton’s disapproval or his continued undermining of my every excuse to be impolite. I took firm hold on my temper, drew a breath, and said, “That is a very worthy cause, Mr.—”
And then before I could finish, the parlour door opened again, and Mark Chamberlayne came staggering into the room.
Have I mentioned Captain Chamberlayne before? I suppose I have not. He was a captain in the militia regiment stationed in Meryton two years ago. And as such, part of all of Lydia’s and my madcap fun and schemes back then. I suspect those days must seem as distant to him now as they do to me.
At any rate, he came reeling into the parlour this morning and crashed into a small table, upsetting a vase, a statue of a shepherdess, and a jar of potpourri onto the floor. And I moved on from a wish that I could teach Rose the meaning of the phrase ‘at home’ to a momentary wish that I could boil her in oil.
Of course, Mark’s gait is never terribly steady—one of his legs having been replaced by a wooden peg—but in this case, the staggering was a result of his being extremely drunk.
Not that that was so very great a surprise; he is very nearly always drunk these days. Yet I cannot bring myself to turn him away when he calls to see me—which is usually at least once a week. Besides liking Mark for the sake of our old friendship, I always seem to see John at the sight of him—and wonder in what state John would have been if he had come back from Waterloo alive.
Mark has round brown eyes and a round face and a crest of very fair hair that stands up all over his head—rather like Susanna’s. Or rather, he used to. The fair hair is the same, but his eyes are now all but lost in pockets of flesh, and his face has the puffy, ravaged look of one who habitually drinks to excess.
He stared dazedly down at the wreckage of broken china and potpourri he had caused, shook his head as though trying to clear it—and then he lurched towards me and seized my hand, breathing gusts of gin into my face.
“Miss Bennet—you’ve got to help me—for old times’ sake, please.”
Well, actually what he said sounded more like: Mish Bennet, you’vegotter ‘elpme. Ferold timeshake, pleeesh. But trying to reproduce his drunken slurs in writing would be even worse than listening was.
I was afraid he would frighten Susanna, but she was evidently too absorbed with chewing on her pig to care over-much about Mark. The only small mercy in the situation. I shut my eyes in an effort not to look at Mr. Dalton.
I do not condemn Mark for drunkenness. I cannot. It is not just the pain of his war wounds—which must certainly be bad enough. He drinks to shut out the memories, all the lost voices of Waterloo that he carries in his head.
I understand; to be honest, I would be tempted to take to drink myself in an effort to forget. If forgetting did not seem even more wrong.
Still, it is one thing to deal with a drunken Mark myself, and another entirely to do so under Mr. Dalton’s gaze—imagining what sort of conclusions Mr. Dalton must be drawing about Mark and me.
Mark was looking as though he might cry. Also not unusual; he had apparently reached the maudlin state of inebriation, which follows the angry and blustering one. So I asked, “What is it, Mark?”
To be strictly proper, I should call him Captain Chamberlayne, of course. But one of the first times he came to see me, he was drunk enough to be violently sick all over my shoes. And when a man has cast up his accounts all over your best pair of nankeen boots, further formality seems absurd.
Mark drew himself up—or tried to—either the gin or his peg leg made him lurch and stumble again. “Just a few pounds, if you can manage it? Just enough to see me through to the end of the month.”
“Of course.” Holding baby Susanna on my hip, I crossed to the side table where I had laid down my reticule and fished out what money I had there. Only a few pounds; the rest of my allowances are deposited, at my uncle’s insistence, in the bank. “Here.”
Mark took the money. With his left hand—he left his right arm over in Brussels as well as his leg. As he pocketed my few banknotes, he looked as though he would cry all over again—in gratitude, this time. “Thank you, Miss Bennet. You are an angel—a true angel.” He sketched a drunken and weaving bow. “You know that I will repay you, as soon as it is in my power. On my honour, I promise you.”
I had a sudden memory of Mark, dressed up in one of my Aunt Phillips’s caps and gowns to play a prank on his fellow militia officers. That had been Lydia’s idea, but Mark had been an enthusiastic participant.
I blinked away the stinging in my eyes and said, “Try to use some of it to buy food this time. Promise me that?”
Mark blinked bleary, bloodshot eyes at me. “Of course, Miss Bennet. Of course I will. Directly I leave here.”
He will not, of course. All Mark’s money—any I give him, and the allowance he gets from his own family, besides—goes to paying for drink and gambling in various London gaming hells.
I was all at once furiously angry. Not with Mark, but with Mr. Dalton, for witnessing this—and doubtless being censorious and disapproving. And more than that, with myself, for being embarrassed at Mark’s appearance.
And even more than that, with the entire ugly, unfair world of politics and battles and war. For gulping in perfectly nice young men like Mark Chamberlayne, chewing them up, and then spitting them out like so much rubbish.
Mark abruptly swayed and pitched forward, his eyes beginning to cross themselves. He would have toppled into me—and thus Susanna—if Mr. Dalton had not been so quick. He caught Mark around the shoulders, holding him upright.
“Steady there.” Mr. Dalton did not look censorious or disapproving, I must grant him. Though perhaps a clergyman must learn to conceal such feelings. “I think we had better get you home—wherever that may be. Miss Bennet”—he looked up at me—“can you tell me his address?”
Before I could answer, Mark turned, fixing his bleary gaze on Mr. Dalton. “I don’t believe I’ve had the honour of making your acqu— acqua—” Mark gave up the effort to force his tongue into forming the word and finished: “Don’t think I know you, sir.” A frown of doubt crossed his face. “Or do I?”
I suppose I ought at that point to have stepped forward to introduce them. But I could not think of a way of saying, Mr. Dalton may I present to you Captain Mark Chamberlayne, that would not take the situation from the merely embarrassing to the grotesquely farcical.
Mr. Dalton shook his head. “We’ve never met. But I’d be delighted if you would do me the honour of walking with me a short distance. If I’m not mistaken, you have served in the army. You must have seen a great deal during your time on campaign. I wonder if you can tell me—”
I have no idea what Mr. Dalton asked. Something about the attitude of the Belgian peasantry towards the former Emperor, I think. But I was too busy being horrified to more than half register the words. If there was one thing Mark surely did not need at that moment, it was to be reminded of his time fighting on the Continent.
To my astonishment, however, Mark’s shoulders straightened, he sketched a brief bow, and then said—or slurred, rather—“I should be delighted to enlighten you, sir. You may have heard that they were all hale and hearty supporters of old Boney. But that’s not true. Not true at all.”
I caught at Mr. Dalton’s arm, dragging him around to face me. “What do you think you’re doing?” I hissed.
Mr. Dalton glanced back at Mark. Who appeared lost in rapt contemplation of the dust motes dancing in the rays of sun beaming through the parlour windows. An odd look of—what? weariness? or pain?—crossed Mr. Dalton’s face, and he said, his voice quiet, “I knew a … I knew someone else who had suffered through an experience similar to your friend’s here. Everyone was constantly telling him to forget, to put the past behind him. But I found, too late, that all he really wanted was to talk of it. And have someone truly listen.” He glanced at Mark again. “I can give him that at the same time I see him safely back to his place of lodging. If you can give me the address?”
Based on Mark’s response, he might well have been right. But for that moment, I was angry all over again. Angry at Mr. Dalton’s assumption of authority. And angry that he seemed on two minutes’ acquaintance to know more about how to help Mark than I did.
Neither of which sentiments, now that I am looking at them written down, reflects very creditably on me. This business of self-examination is positively exhausting at times.
At any rate, I said—
Well, if I am strictly honest, I more snapped the words than said them. “You need not trouble yourself. I am quite able to see Captain Chamberlayne back to his lodging house myself.”
“I would not dare to suggest otherwise, Miss Bennet.” A twist of a smile touched the corners of Mr. Dalton’s mouth, then faded as his gaze refocused on Mark. “But tomorrow morning, he will wake, sober, and remember this. And I think he would wish to be spared the added humiliation of having forced you to play his nursemaid as well as his money lender.”
There was still absolutely no censure or even judgement in Mr. Dalton’s voice or his gaze. Only that same brief shadow of weariness.
I looked at Mark. At his peg leg. The empty right sleeve pinned up below the stump of what remained of his arm. He has never shown it to me, but I know exactly what it must look like; I saw more amputations than I can even begin to count in the aftermath of the battle.
Mr. Dalton was right; Mark would wake and remember the details of his visit here. And I knew from past experience that he would be penitent and filled with self-loathing—and that that would drive him into drink all over again.
I gave Mr. Dalton Mark’s address, or at least the most recent one I knew of for him; for the past year, Mark has been descending through an increasingly squalid series of lodging houses in the East End. And Mr. Dalton took Mark’s arm and said, as though resuming their conversation, “Now that is most interesting, what you say. Most interesting indeed.”
Mark appeared to have forgotten, if not Mr. Dalton’s presence altogether, at least the thread of what they had been saying. “I don’t believe I’ve had the honour of making your—” he started to say again.
Mr. Dalton clapped him on the shoulder and smiled. All trace of the look of pain, if pain it had been, was gone as though I had only imagined it. “Lance Dalton, at your service. And you are the man who is going to put me straight as to the attitudes of the Belgian peasantry.”
Mark still looked dazed, but he gave a dubious nod and Mr. Dalton bowed to me. “Miss Bennet, I wish you good day. And you as well, Miss Gardiner.” And then he sketched another bow at Susanna, who waved her chubby fist at him and gurgled.
Mr. Dalton smiled—a real smile, this time. It was only at that moment, when he took baby Susanna’s fist in his, that I realised how fully his earlier smile had been an assumed one—even if very convincing—put on for Mark’s sake.
He bowed over Susanna’s small hand and said, “And my apologies, Miss Gardiner, for having interrupted your private entertainment.” He did not look at me, but I could see the amusement still in his gaze. “I hope your Mr. Pig there enjoys his dinner appointment with his rather alarmingly Continental friend Duck.”
There are only four days now until Georgiana’s party, so this morning I dragged Mary into the morning room, rolled back the carpets, and forced her to attend to a lesson in dancing.
Being Mary, she of course protested that she knew perfectly well how to dance, that she had no need of my assistance, that in fact she had found a book of instruction written by a French dancing master, and moreover had read the book in the original language, which was more than I could do …
I said—rather unkindly, I admit, but I was short on patience even before all her objections began—that unless she wanted to give an encore of her performance at Aunt Gardiner’s dinner party, she would be quiet and let me give her some practical instruction.
Mary did quite well, really. In that she only tripped over her own feet twice. And only interrupted me seven or eight times to say that she was sure I was teaching her the steps all wrong, and that she thought I ought to at least study a textbook or two before I could be declared competent to instruct anyone in the figures of the quadrille.
I was taking a short rest—to count slowly and silently to fifty so that I might with any luck avoid strangling my sister—when the morning room door opened. It was Rose—for once and of course when it did not matter in the least—actually remembering her duty of announcing callers.
She said, “Mrs. Bingley to see you, Miss Bennet and Miss Kitty.”
And Jane came into the room afterwards.
I would have been glad of any interruption just then—I might even have welcomed Mr. Dalton. But I really was glad to see Jane. It is not quite so hard to face her as it is Lizzy. And I have not seen her in months.
Jane hugged me tightly. And then turned to kiss Mary’s cheek. Mary does not do anything so undignified as embrace anyone, even a sister.
When all our greetings and exclamations of surprise had been exchanged, I said, “It is wonderful to see you. But what on earth are you doing travelling in your condition, Jane? I thought you would stay in Derbyshire until the baby’s birth.”
Jane and Charles have an estate not too far from Lizzy and Mr. Darcy’s place at Pemberley. And they seldom venture from it to London, since neither of them is especially fond of city life and society.
Mary gave me a censorious look—because of course it is not considered delicate to refer to the imminent birth of a child.
That particular rule has always struck me as rather silly, really. It is not as though anyone could not tell merely by looking at Jane that she is to be confined within the next two months—her stomach is a huge round ball beneath the high waist of her pelisse and travelling gown.
Jane moved her shoulders slightly. “I wanted a change of scene, and there was no danger in travelling. The baby is not due to arrive until February.”
I looked at Jane, surprised. Jane really is the loveliest of all of us—even still, with the birth of the child so near. She has curling golden-blonde hair and wide, long-lashed blue eyes and creamy porcelain skin. And moreover it is quite impossible to hate her for it, because she is unfailingly sweet and good and kind. Not the false kind of sweetness common in society, either. With Jane, nothing is ever an act; she genuinely is nice, right down to her very core.
Which means that Jane never tells lies, or gets impatient or out of temper, or snaps at anyone. Not even Mary—or me, for that matter.
Today, though, when I looked at her more closely I saw that there were slight purple shadows under her eyes, and a tightness about the line of her mouth. It was more than that, though. There was something in her voice … a hard edge that was completely unlike Jane’s usual speaking tones.
“And Charles did not object?” I asked.
Charles Bingley is Jane’s perfect match; he is as good-tempered and agreeable as Jane herself is. And despite being both rich and handsome, he is very modest, as well. When I have seen him and Jane together, he looks … wondering. As though he still cannot get over the miracle of having won Jane for his wife.
Jane shrugged again, not quite meeting my eyes. And when she spoke, the tightness in her voice was more pronounced. “Charles did not accompany me. I came alone. Or rather, just Amelia and I.”
I was more surprised than ever. And troubled, as well. But I said, “And we are being abominably rude by keeping you standing. Here. Sit down.” I led Jane to a side chair. “And have you seen Aunt Gardiner yet? She must be somewhere about.”
Jane sank down into the chair with a little sigh of weariness, resting her hand lightly on the swelling of the unborn child. She shook her head. “No, I have not yet seen our aunt. But I cannot stay long today. I left Amelia napping. She’ll be awake soon, and fretful if I am not there.”
“Where are you staying?” I asked.
“With Georgiana and Edward at Darcy House,” Jane said.
Darcy House of course is Mr. Darcy’s London property, but he gives it over to his sister Georgiana and her husband Edward Fitzwilliam whenever they have need to be in town. It is where the party this weekend will be held.
Jane asked how Mary and I were after that, and kept the conversation focused on Mary’s and my affairs for the rest of her visit.
Mary—naturally—offered to give Jane a demonstration of the dance steps she and I had been practising, which at least spared me the necessity of answering Jane’s questions about myself.
By some miracle, Mary must have absorbed some of my instructions after all, because she managed to get the whole way through an entire quadrille without tripping or losing the tempo.
Jane, sounding much more like her usual self, applauded and said that Mary had performed splendidly and would undoubtedly be a tremendous success at her next social engagement.
“I will look forward very much to seeing you dance again, Mary.” Jane smiled. “Since at the moment I am barred from the entertainment myself, I will take my pleasure through watching you.”
Jane meant it quite sincerely, too. That is what Jane is like.
She rose to take her leave soon after—telling us that we must call on her soon, and saying that she would of course see us at Saturday’s ball. The air of tension or strain was nearly gone from her tone as she kissed us both and departed.
But I felt a prick of something like uneasiness or worry, still.
Usually it is no good trying to speak with Mary about such things, but there was no one else for me to talk to. So I said, as the door closed behind Jane, “I hope nothing is amiss between her and Charles. It is strange that she should have come to London alone.”
Mary made a slight, dismissive gesture. “It is most unwise of her to travel. Everything I have read indicates that very great harm may be done to the child by excessive activity.” And then she picked up the written list I had given her of dancing steps: rigadon, fleuret, and so on. “Shall we try it again? I flatter myself that I was making significant progress when we were obliged to leave off.”
I cannot imagine why I was surprised. Mary, generally speaking, has no concern whatever for anyone’s affairs but her own.
Or perhaps that is not quite fair. Rather, she is supremely confident that no one would get into difficulties if only they could be more like she is herself. And therefore in her view, there is no use in worrying over others—not when their troubles are so clearly of their own making.
However, unlike Jane, I do occasionally lose my temper. Well, if I am continuing to be honest in this journal, I suppose it is more than just occasionally.
I snapped, “Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Mary, Jane is your sister as well as mine. Haven’t you any thought to spare for why she should have been willing to take the risk of travelling with the baby’s birth so near?”
Mary looked quite surprised—at least briefly. But then she frowned and said, “In my opinion, speculation is uniquely unprofitable. If you truly want to know the reasons for Jane’s behaviour, you ought simply to ask Jane herself to elucidate.”
I gave up. Attempting to argue with someone who actually uses the word ‘elucidate’ in casual conversation is clearly futile.