by Anne Morris
“I suppose on the brink of sixteen, being denied a ball would make her terribly unhappy,” agreed Charlotte.
“It is unfair, sometimes,” asserted Elizabeth, “for us to expect maturity from any creature so young. Is that being at opposite ends? Self-contradictory to ask maturity of the young?”
“And Mrs. Phillips shows no interest in taking her in-hand, once your period of mourning is over?” asked Charlotte.
“No,” answered Elizabeth. “And my Aunt Gardiner was confined in November. She has four little ones now underfoot. It is not possible for her to take Catherine in-hand. Though it is not as if any of us had any formal introduction to society. But it does require a matron’s touch—a married lady properly introducing Catherine. Jane and Mary and I, at least, had that! Even if there were no come-out balls or nothing more formal to announce to the world that Mamma was seeking husbands for us—even if we were not necessarily seeking husbands ourselves. It’s like her spirit is still with us. But we had Mamma fussing over our dresses, and your father introducing us in his stately and formal voice at the monthly Assembly. And one dinner each.”
“You are so silly sometimes, Elizabeth,” Charlotte replied as she sipped her tea. “I truly think you have no desire ever to marry.”
“I think that only the deepest love could ever induce me to marry,” replied Elizabeth.
“You have a very loving heart,” said Charlotte. “How could you not possibly find a man to love?”
“I have certainly not found anyone of value in Meryton. I have visited the Gardiners in London, and they have dutifully (but discreetly) introduced me to men there, so where am I to find such a man? Where in this world, Charlotte, shall I begin to look? What other world would you have me search in for a husband?” Elizabeth demanded, and they both laughed.
***
The sting of grief would hit them at unexpected times that summer as they found a new rhythm to their life. The expectations for the daughters remained the same: that they would make decent marriages. But the push, the almost daily or hourly discussion about that fact no longer occurred at Longbourn with Mrs. Bennet’s passing.
Once in a while, Mr. Bennet referred to it as if he felt some patriarchal obligation to remind them of their duty that they not remain his responsibility. They should all find husbands for themselves, husbands who would take the expense and bother of their care off of his hands once the wedding took place.
Beyond that, Mr. Bennet did not seem inclined to do anything else. He stuck to merely making those occasional pronouncements when they were all gathered together for a meal. Mr. Bennet did not visit. He now had a slight inclination towards exercise and was found making a twice-weekly foray out into the formal Longbourn gardens to walk among the hedges. Occasionally, he even went out to walk in the Hollybush Woods. It was as though Mrs. Bennet’s death had reminded him of his own mortality. But he did not seem to care about his daughters’ future, only his own.
But Mrs. Bennet’s admonishments and thoughts about marriage did linger in the Bennet’s daughters’ minds, stronger in some than in others.
***
Come the autumn, and in preparations for activities, there was an interesting change in the Bennet household. It seemed that Mr. Bennet had every intention of taking up shooting as soon as he left over mourning. He directed his staff that he should like to shoot at Longbourn as he did most years. Though he would, lest anyone talk, wait to begin until he had truly left off mourning in October. That was a sign that things were to return to normal.
Mr. Bennet also made an interesting inquiry on a crisp September morning. He asked if his daughters intended to attend the first October assembly. This received a lot of attention, chatter, and excitement (and some consternation as well) that it should be their father who was asking about the assembly ball. He usually never showed the slightest interest in whether or not they attended such things. They might not have had much interest otherwise.
“But you three cannot be at home forever, and are not assembly balls where you are to meet young gentlemen? Catherine is old enough to go. We need to consider whether she is ever to have her chance at securing some worthless gentleman as a husband,” he remarked.
“Papa!” objected Catherine.
“I think you need to think about it—which is why I am mentioning it. There is plenty of time to work through whichever ones out of you wish to attend,” he announced.
Catherine was eager to go. Jane could see the benefit of them, in a way, formally ending their mourning period to join society again, though Meryton society had not changed in the interim. They knew exactly who would attend, and it was not as if they would meet any new young men, so they did not quite see their father’s point. It was not as if John Lucas, Charlotte’s brother (and Sir William’s heir), would appear any less spotty and more interesting after a year’s absence.
Elizabeth was reluctant to go because she was not going to meet that great love; it was not as if the man of her dreams would suddenly be appearing because she was to attend. She was not interested in dancing, and the society of others could be had differently than by standing in a large room full of her Meryton neighbors. But Mary, like Catherine, was eager to go. Perhaps it was a chance for her to attend a public event without the critical eye of her mother suggesting that her face did not match the beauty of her four sisters.
Mrs. Bennet often complained about the plainness of Mary in comparison to the other four; their mother had been unduly critical of Mary. It had been one of the reasons why Mary had mastered the pianoforte and worked at other accomplishments because Mrs. Bennet assured her middle daughter that her face would never win her a husband. But this venue would be the first where Mary could carry a small modicum of self-worth which would not be crushed on the threshold by Mrs. Bennet.
There was still the subject of whether Catherine was to attend. If she was, Kitty needed to be presented by a married lady and which matron could do that office? Would Mrs. Phillips be up to it? Aunt Phillips shook her head and said she was not quite sure what she would need to do. Besides, Mrs. Phillips said she was not feeling well. Kitty’s sisters could not do the job. Lydia also objected to Catherine’s being allowed to be out if she was not.
The sisters talked together and wondered if they should wait for the next ball. There were two dances in October and attending the first one would be cutting their mourning short by three days (those who were observing a year and not six months of mourning). The older Bennet sisters wondered if they should wait to make a formal reappearance at the second one. Perhaps their aunt’s health might improve, and Mrs. Phillips might feel more inclined to formally present her niece. But Mr. Bennet seemed unhappy with that option, for apparently he had intended to go.
Catherine pleaded that Lady Lucas or some other matron should be applied to. But Mr. Bennet seemed more interested that the Bennet family be seen attending the assembly ball than he worried about Catherine Bennet going. Mr. Bennet wasn’t botheranyed about ensuring that Catherine be presented if it meant he had to go to too much trouble. Kitty was left at home with many complaints of ill-usage, and the three oldest Bennet daughters enjoyed their first dance in a twelvemonth. They danced with all of the same men whose arms they usually graced at assembly balls, and the evening went off pretty much as had been anticipated.
What was surprising was that Mr. Bennet did not sit in the cardroom, but was a sociable man that evening. He did not go so far as to dance. A gentleman of forty-five, or fifty, or whatever age he was, did not dance anymore. But Mr. Bennet did not retire to the cardroom to hide away as he used to. He moved about speaking to many people. Many Meryton neighbors wondered if the man who had just shed his mourning was not on the hunt for a new Mrs. Bennet. There was no particular lady he seemed to favor that evening. But did Mr. Bennet want a young one or a widow?
The Bennet family got through the winter of 1811; they got back to socializing, though there were no real prospects for the Bennet daughters. No families tha
t they did not already know except there was a widow, Mrs. Harrington, who moved into Meryton with her two daughters. Her presence and those of her daughters only made some families groan as here was additional competition for husbands. But there were few families with eligible young men for any of the Bennet sisters.
CHAPTER SIX
Though the topic of what Elizabeth had seen was not one which Elizabeth and Mary discussed daily, it still was one that they tackled on rainy days or when closeted together, just the two of them. Theirs was not a systematic approach. Elizabeth and Mary were not scientists, but two poorly trained and uneducated young women who went about seeking information in whatever texts they could find.
The lending library was a resource one would not think of as a scientific one, and yet there were novels which mentioned ghosts. They wondered if there could be any information that the author of such a work as a novel presented in his or her pages that might be authentic. Just because it was a novel did not mean the circumstances in it were not genuine. Love was certainly a reality in most people’s lives (or sorrow), and was not love portrayed in written form? People ate in novels, went to church in novels: all of these things were authentic occurrences. Who was to say that an author had not some experience of ghosts or death or the afterlife that they wove into a story?
“So many novels take place in castles,” declared Elizabeth, “and that is not the case here at all.”
“Yes,” agreed Mary.
“What about the common or average woman?” asserted Elizabeth. “We want to know the ordinary person’s experience!”
“Well,” said Mary. “Novels take ordinary things and form them into stories that are a little more extraordinary, don’t you think? Most of us live in houses, not castles. And most of us are not plagued by strange sounds in the night.”
“True,” agreed Elizabeth.
“But a number of the stories do mention ghosts,” she pronounced that word a little softer than the others. They did not want to reference their mother that way, for Mrs. Bennet had seemed so much more than the ghosts portrayed in stories. Mrs. Bennet had been almost corporeal when Elizabeth had spoken with her. She had been more substantial, so to dismiss her as a wisp of an entity seemed to dismiss Mrs. Bennet and the entire experience.
“Yes, but these spirits,” stated Elizabeth that word sounded a little better on her tongue, “always seemed to have some un-done task; they come back for a reason. There is something left unfinished in their lives. Do you suppose that is true for all spirits?”
“Perhaps,” remarked Mary. “But why should we be so knowledgeable about this, when it seems nobody else is?”
“I wonder if there are people who do not have to spend time in Purgatory, but go straight to Heaven?” speculated Elizabeth.
“I should like to think so,” said Mary. “That if we lead good and straight-forward lives, we do not need to linger. For the way that you describe it, cold and dark and without anything to do, or anyone else around, but to merely sit for years and wait seems such a penance. I don’t know what Grandmother Gardiner’s waiting was like, but I imagine it was interminable, just waiting to impart a single message to Mamma. And yet, there was some message that needed to be passed on, and it seems as though Mamma is to linger as well, that she has something left undone. Some wrong she needs to right.”
They did not merely consult novels, but their father had a host of books in his library, and they asked for his permission to read the texts. Mr. Bennet dismissed them with a wave of his hand, saying, “do not take anything off of my desk. But you are welcome to anything on my shelves.”
They agreed to start with books from their own faith. But Mr. Bennet was a well-read man and had texts from the classics, Greek and Roman writers, and even some about the Indian religion.
“We need to avoid any treatises or sermons,” Mary asserted as they stood looking at the rather extensive collection before them. “Those are interpretation.”
Elizabeth turned to stare at her sister then, for it had been Mary’s bread and butter to read that very thing in the past. “Well, what sort of books on Christian thought should we look for?” Elizabeth asked.
“We are looking for reference works,” Mary answered, “are we not? We should consult the Bible. But that is not the only document which forms the basis of our faith.”
A half-dozen books were pulled from the shelf, and they spent many days considering what their faith had to say about death and the afterlife.
They then moved on to whatever English language books her father had which discussed Greek or Roman thoughts on the afterlife. Neither of them read Greek or Latin, so they could not consult some books he owned. But there was a growing interest in Egypt which had taken hold of the nation, and Mr. Bennet had two books on Egyptology, new ones, which discussed that country’s belief about the world after death.
One of these sat on Mr. Bennet’s desk. The first book they borrowed on the subject had sparked their interest as a great deal of the Egyptian religion centered around the idea of an afterlife. The two sisters went in to make an appeal to their father to read the second book. It lay haphazardly in the pile on his desk. He was surprised and frowned at Elizabeth and Mary, though he did not quiz them as to their reasons for wanting to read it—they merely expressed how much they liked the first one. They assured Mr. Bennet they could finish the second in a short amount of time, so he had passed it over.
Not all their time was spent in being amateur scientists researching the subject of the afterlife and related supernatural phenomena. They still were not able to determine why that little footbridge had come into play as a portal between one world and the other. There seemed to be no basis for it as they read all those books and added to all of their ideas about the next world, the world after death. It was a sort of waiting world; they both firmly believed it was Purgatory.
But there was society to participate in. Catherine was anxious about being introduced and having her share of it. But Mr. Bennet made no more decisions about her coming out. There were birthdays to look forward to. Lydia turned from fourteen to fifteen, eager to have her turn soon. And Jane turned from twenty to one and twenty. Jane seemed to be of two minds. Content, in one way, to be mistress of Longbourn and having the running of it in her mother’s stead, yet she longed for a home of her own.
Elizabeth did not spend all of her time with Mary. She noted that Jane seemed a little isolated perhaps because she was the most romantic out of all of them. She had received the focus of Mrs. Bennet’s attentions (as far as their mother’s attempts to secure husbands for them), and perhaps Jane had taken those ideas to heart. She felt a little lost as though Jane might never marry despite her beautiful face. She seemed destined to remain an unmarried daughter who would run her father’s household.
Despite the lack of eligible gentlemen, Elizabeth and Mary did not feel as though it was an impossible thing to marry. Catherine and Lydia would probably take the first young man who kissed them. But Jane seemed to be floundering. It was as if she were old and ineligible already, though twenty-one was by no means an old maid. So when Mrs. House wrote to invite Jane to visit; Elizabeth encouraged her older sister to go.
Just around Easter, Jane Goulding who was (but who was now Mrs. House), invited Jane Bennet for an extended stay. Mrs. House had married three years previously and had always been a good friend to Jane Bennet. They were only a few months apart in age, of similar temperament, and had been close friends in years past. Jane was reluctant to leave, but her sisters (and even her father), encouraged her the visit. Here was an opportunity to perhaps meet new acquaintance and gentlemen outside of their usual circle. Off Jane Bennet went to Mrs. Jane House’s residence for a six-week visit.
Jane was guarded in her letters but did write that she had met many amiable young men, including the local schoolmaster, the Reverend Mr. Taylor, who was a tutor to a Mr. Le Clerc’s children (who lived on an estate). Consequently, there were subtle and short notes from their Ja
ne about visits from Mr. Taylor, and how he seemed to enjoy composing poetry, how his attentions seemed marked, and how the poems became more and more directed towards Jane.
Jane Bennet did not share much of an opinion about how she felt about this school teacher. It did not appear that his prospects were very good. Perhaps he was under some misapprehension as to the nature of Jane’s fortune. Through Mrs. House’s encouragement, Jane extended her stay another fortnight, but there seemed to be no further activity from Mr. Taylor. Jane Bennet returned from Essex an unmarried woman.
***
At the end of April, Elizabeth received a note from Aunt Gardiner inviting her for a two-month visit. Elizabeth accepted, knowing that the purpose of the visit was to introduce her to some of the Gardiners’ acquaintance. Among these acquaintance were men of business who might be in search of a wife. Mrs. Gardiner’s youngest child now moved about the house on toddling feet, and her aunt would be able to entertain, and might even be able to escort Elizabeth around as a chaperone. On the first day of May, her uncle’s carriage came to collect her, and Elizabeth made the half-day trip to London for an extended stay.
Her first se’ennight was a pleasant one. There was catching up to do; Mrs. Gardiner needed to be filled in on all the news about Jane’s trip, and on all of Mary’s accomplishments. Lydia concerned both niece and aunt as she had always been impetuous and wild, but after Mrs. Bennet’s death, Lydia seemed to be even more beyond control. She had never been one to listen to advice from her sisters, and Mr. Bennet had shown little interest in her. Though only fifteen, Lydia was anxious about her introduction to society. There was also news that a militia regiment was to settle in the area in the late summer which had Elizabeth worried that an influx of men in uniform would be a further distraction to this sister.
