The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

by Colleen McCullough

  “I don’t remember saying that,” Ned said, wrinkling his brow.

  “You didn’t use those words, but that was what you meant. I ought to listen to you! You’re usually right, Ned.”

  Ned laughed, a big sound. “It’s the poker up your arse, Fitz. Makes it a painful business to back down.”

  From another man, a mortal insult: from Ned, a loving truth. “Punctilious to a fault, eh? Pride in my ancestry was ever my besetting sin.”

  “And ambition.”

  “No, that’s a later besetter. Still, if I had waited on events I wouldn’t have asked you to watch Mary, and we would have lost her at Mansfield.”

  “I lost her anyway.”

  “Oh, cease and desist, Ned! Though if we do find her, she may write her wretched book with my blessing. I’ll even pay for its publication.”

  “The result will be the same, whether you pay or the publisher does. No one will read it.”

  “That was what you said!”

  THERE WERE ABOUT three tablespoons of water left in the bottom of her ewer, though thirst had not been the torment Mary had busily imagined. The cave was bitterly cold, especially at night; the screen may have been put there to conceal what lay outside her bars, but the canvas had excluded the wind that blew eternally, save for that ever-present moaning whine. Her only defence was to draw her heavy velvet curtain closed, but it was far from adequate. In winter she would not have survived a week. However, there could be no denying the fact that this chill did not provoke a consuming thirst. If she paced her cell, she grew warmer—but thirstier.

  She now wore every item of clothing they had left her, dirty as well as clean: four pairs of woolly socks, four flannel nightgowns, one flannel over-robe. No gloves, and her hands were very cold. The scrap of bread had been eaten already, before it grew too stale to gnaw. Easier to follow the passage of time now that she could see daylight. Her stomach must have shrunk, for she felt no hunger pangs.

  To her horror, rats came to feast on the loaf of bread Father Dominus had kicked aside on his last visit to her; when they had finished it they didn’t leave, just cruised the dark hours waiting for a far tastier meal—her own dead body. They did not look like the few rats she had seen before. They had been black and fierce, whereas these were small and grey, easily intimidated. Creatures of the moors, obviously.

  It was only now that time hung so heavily upon her that she realised how busy and occupied she had been during most of her incarceration. Producing a page of perfect copperplate devoid of any error was a vastly different task from ordinary writing, when one could cross out a word, or over-write it, or pop in a carat-mark and put a forgotten word above. Much and all though she had condemned Father Dominus’s ideas, setting them down error-free on a page had taxed her, as it would have taxed any but a professional scribe, one of those persons who copied out an aspiring author’s prose to render it fit for a publisher’s eye.

  Now it seemed as if all her woes had descended at once. She had nothing to occupy her time, and that fact loomed largest on her list. It was like being back caring for Mama, existing in a limbo of idleness, yet far worse; she had no music to console her, and no books she had not read at least a dozen times. Add to that inertia her lack of food, exercise and water, and—oh, dreadful!

  The days when she had found prayer a compensation had long gone, though now, with naught else to do, she prayed, but to pass the time rather than with any confidence that prayers were things God answered. Were I Mama, she thought, I would find release and comfort in sleep; Mama had always been able to do that. But I am not made in Mama’s mould, so I cannot sleep the hours away.

  So to keep her mind off the cold, she began to dissect her conduct since Mama’s death had liberated her, and came to the conclusion that all her efforts had been ludicrous. Not one thing had gone to plan, which hinted at one of two things: either Satan was conspiring against her, or else her aspirations, her ability to be practical, and her own person, were wanting. Since it hardly seemed likely that she was important enough to earn so much of Satan’s attention, the second alternative was obviously the correct one.

  I was obsessed with Argus, and I thought if I wrote a book confirming his theories and observations, I would impress him so profoundly that he would be eager to meet me. Well, I will never know now whether things might have fallen out that way. I do have a crusading spirit in respect of the poor and downtrodden, but who am I to think that anything I do can help them? I see now that my research was not thorough enough, even including the allocation of my financial resources. I should have corresponded with several publishers first of all, and learned how much exactly my book would have cost me to publish. And, since I had reconciled myself to living with Lizzie at Pemberley when my funds were all used up, why did I deny myself at least a few of the comforts a gentlewoman expects when she travels? Some of it was to appear no better off than those I wished to interview for my book, but I am ingenious, I could have devised a scheme whereby I travelled quite comfortably, yet seemed when divorced from the activity of travel to be, say, a penurious governess. Some of it lay in the sheer euphoria of being free at last to do as I pleased, but more of it lay in an abysmal ignorance of the world at large. There was never a need on my part to have so many guineas in my reticule, for I had my letter of credit and could have withdrawn two or three guineas at a time.

  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.<
br />
  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.

  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.