by John Kessel
“It’s Mary.”
A pause. “Please come in.”
Mary entered. While in the rest of the house the mark of Mrs. Bennet’s taste was everywhere evident, the library was Mr. Bennet’s domain. He sat in his chair by the hearth, marking his place in the book on his lap with his finger. He gestured toward a chair. “Sit down, my dear.”
Mary sat. Her father’s character comprised so odd a mixture of quick intelligence, sarcastic humor, and caprice that one never knew what one might get from him. Uncomfortably aware of her own hands, Mary clasped them in her lap.
Though the weather was warm, a fire burned in the grate. Mr. Bennet wore a flannel waistcoat with a knit cap pulled over his head, unkempt white hair sticking out beneath it. He was fastidious about keeping his gold-rimmed spectacles polished, and a carefully folded cloth for that purpose rested beside him on a copy of The Quarterly Review. Warm slippers covered his feet. In his library, nothing changed other than the signs of his increasing frailty. He was sixty-one years old.
As a girl Mary had always stood in awe of the library. None of her sisters, with the exception of Lizzy, spent much time reading. True, as girls Lydia and Kitty had found themselves in love with Young Werther, and for a while openly complained that none of the eligible young men in the neighborhood spoke German, but that passion did not inspire in them a desire to read other books. Mary, however, had always loved books, and the collections of sermons that lined one of the shelves were a result of her long study of human morality. She had copied passages out of them and made lists of apothegms that she shared with anyone who might conceivably benefit from her wisdom.
When Mary began to take an interest in natural philosophy, Mr. Bennet encouraged her, although he suggested she read more broadly. They occasionally discussed something she had encountered, though Mr. Bennet’s own interests tended more toward Montaigne than Buffon. He warned her of the sad fate of the female bookworm: “Beware, Mary,” he said impishly. “Too much learning makes a woman monstrous.”
Yet he seemed to like the fact that she made herself available to be teased. Once, absent-mindedly, he had called her “Lizzy.” Mary held that moment, sweet and bitter, in her heart for a long time.
“Father, I need to beg a favor,” Mary said.
“Oh dear, this sounds serious,” he said, with a trace of amusement. “What is it, daughter?”
“I wish to go with Kitty to Pemberley.”
“Not Devon? I expected you to beg me to allow you to visit Mr. Woodleigh.”
“No. Pemberley.”
“Whatever for?”
“I wish to be with her.”
“You needn’t worry about Kitty; she will be well taken care of. And if you go, who will occupy your mother?”
She swallowed the anger that rose in her. Yet when she recalled how in conversation with Victor Frankenstein she had put aside what was expected in order to speak what she felt, her tongue was loosened.
“I do not wish to spend all of my days occupying Mother,” she said.
Mr. Bennet’s eyebrows rose. He began to speak, but checked himself. He placed his book onto the side table. He held up his hand to her, then pushed himself from his chair and crossed to a cupboard, from which he drew a cut glass decanter and two glasses. He set the glasses beside the book and asked her, “Port?”
This had never happened before. “Please,” Mary said.
He filled both glasses, handed one to her, then settled into his chair and sipped from his own.
“You are right, Mary. Occupying your mother is a task that should properly fall to me,” he said. “A task in which I have failed. Your mother is not an easy person to live with.”
The port was warm and sweet on Mary’s tongue. “I do not say that.”
“I’m sorry that I have left so much of her to you.”
“You have lived with her a long time.”
Mr. Bennet rested his hands on the arms of his chair and leaned back. His eyes got distant. “Your mother is yet a handsome woman. In the spring of 1777 she was the most beautiful I had ever seen. It was at a dance. She and her sister, your aunt Phillips, were visiting the Ayleworths, cousins of their father. Every squire in the county was smitten. Her laugh, her vivacity, her sense of fun. She was so innocent of the world, and so excited to be out in it. She was seventeen.”
Mary had heard this story from her mother, but never her father. She had wondered more than once how two people so contrary in temperament and sensibility had come to be married to each other.
“I suppose she was vain, but it was not a vanity that went very deep. I had been home from Cambridge a year and had not a notion in the world what I would do with my life. When I saw her across the room I said, I am going to spend it making that woman happy.”
He took up the glass of port and drained it. “In the event,” he said, “my actions have not done justice to my intentions.”
Mary would not have thought of asking a question that might be construed as criticism, but the extraordinary circumstances, and the port, led her to venture, “You must have seen her character clearly long before you married.”
“Ah, Mary,” her father said. “A young man—but why do I say that, the world is full of old fools, too—a man will forget everything in the pursuit of a woman. I’ve heard you speak of how, once lost, a woman’s virtue is irretrievable. A man, too, may lose himself. Even if he break no law or violate no stricture of polite society, he will discard all that he knows, every sensible thing, falling into a kind of delirium, at the wave of a lady’s fan, a certain light in her eyes . . . .”
Her father’s voice faded. Mary was embarrassed, and yet could not escape the thought that no man had ever seen her in this way—the way that Wickham had seen Lydia, that her father had apparently seen her mother.
Mr. Bennet regained himself. “Eventually the delirium clears. Your mother is in many ways an excellent woman. No one is more aware of what the world expects of her. No woman understands better how lack of property will make one miserable. To our marriage I brought with me Longbourn and its income, which has enabled her to indulge her fancies to a degree that has offered her some satisfaction. It has allowed me to spend my life here in the library rather than the marketplace, to which in truth I was not suited. So we live in our separate rooms. In this one I have had many hours to regret that I married a person whom I could not, finally, respect. I have done some few things to make your mother happy, but I have, in the end, deprived her of my person and my heart.”
These were terrible words. Mary was stunned to hear them from her father’s lips.
“Aren’t those the things that one gives in marriage?” she asked. “What more is there?”
“There should be more. The selection of a mate is perhaps the most important thing a person may do, yet mates are chosen for reasons as trivial, and with as little forethought, as a man may choose a new cravat.
“For a woman marriage serves two purposes. The first is to assure her comfort and security. The second is to propagate the race. But your comfort, Mary, is already assured, even after I am gone and Collins inherits Longbourn. The fact that your brothers by marriage are men of great fortune means you will never want for any material thing. As to the second, I do not know if you seek to have children, but you have never spoken of it.”
“I don’t.”
“Then I do not see why you should marry.”
“The things I would seek from marriage are not material.”
“Those things that are not material are the hardest to find, and even harder to keep. When I was young, I believed in them. I am not certain that they exist.”
“Mother thinks I should marry Charles Woodleigh.”
“Has he asked you?”
“No. But with encouragement, I believe that he may.”
Mr. Bennet sat silent for a moment. “And you are in some doubt as to whether you shall accept?”
“Do you think that it would be a good match?”
“I have not met the gentleman. Your uncle has written me of him. He seems to have friends of some standing. He would provide you a comfortable home. I gather he does not provide those immaterial gifts you seek. He’s a dull man, and a little cold, perhaps?”
“A little.”
“Well, consider this,” Mr. Bennet said. “No man held warmer affections toward his bride than I did on the day that I married. Yet here I sit in my library while your mother shops, two people as opposite, and separate, as the left and right hand.”
“So it doesn’t matter if he is cold? If he does not care that much for me now, what will he be like in ten years?”
“His distance does not mean that he does not feel. The dullness—his regard for fossils—” Mr. Bennet caught himself. “But no, for you that is no impediment; it’s rather an attraction.”
“He is not so dull if one cares about the things he likes.”
“Yet you seem not to have convinced yourself that he is the man for you.”
Mary could not get past Woodleigh’s treatment of Mary Anning. “He has not asked, so the point is moot.”
“I daresay Mr. Woodleigh will not take it as encouragement if you run off to Derbyshire.”
“I need to go, Father. I don’t know that anything will happen at Pemberley that could not happen here, but I am convinced that nothing will happen here. Will you let me go?”
Mr. Bennet poured himself another glass of port. “Yes,” he said. He took a sip.
She came out of her chair and embraced him. “Thank you, Father!”
Mary’s embrace almost caused him to spill his wine. He set it on the table. “You may not believe me, my dear, but I will miss you.”
So it was that in the third week of May, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet tearfully loaded their last unmarried daughters into a coach for the long drive to Derbyshire. Mrs. Bennet’s tears were shed because their absence would deprive Kitty and Mary of her attentions; Mr. Bennet’s were shed because their absence would direct Mrs. Bennet’s attentions toward him.
SIX
The town clerk of Matlock, a wizened man with a cast in one eye, told me, “We keep a record of property owners, but that is all. For births and deaths you’d be better served to speak with the Reverend Chatsworth at St. Giles Church. He knows more about the comings and goings in the parish than I do.”
I decided to invent knowledge I did not have on the chance of drawing him out. “Didn’t I hear about a recent decease? An unfortunate case?”
My arrow of speculation found a target. “Ah, you mean Nancy Brown. Dead two days now, drowned in the river not a mile from here.”
“How sad,” I said. “How old was she?”
“Just twenty,” the clerk said. He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Some say she perished by her own hand. The Browns call that a vile lie, but I think they fear the Church won’t let her be buried in hallowed ground.”
“It is understandable that they might seek to hide their shame. Poor girl.” I expressed my sympathies for the Browns and left.
In front of the town hall a crew of workmen was breaking up the cobblestone street, swinging pickaxes in the bright sun. Newly wedded couples leaned on one another’s arms, whispering secrets. The streets, hotels, and inns of Matlock bustled with travelers there to take the waters. I had told Henry I was going to visit the cabinets of natural curiosities in the Matlock museum and circulating library, while he sought out the old stone bridge over the Derwent to enjoy views of the river.
It had been Henry’s idea to visit Matlock. The village was proud of its setting and its long history, going back to Roman times, when it was a center for lead mining. The British seemed to believe that its scenery resembled Switzerland’s, though nothing like an alpine mountain existed anywhere in this overpraised island. Henry must have thought Matlock would offer me some consolation after being so far from home for so long. Instead, it recalled the memory of William and Justine and drove me further into gloom—and annoyance at Henry.
I had been looking over my shoulder every day since we had left Oxford, fearing to find the Creature peering back at me from every shadow. Jesus said that he must be about his father’s business. I was compelled to do the business of this misbegotten horror, my unnatural son.
Not ready to face Henry again so soon, I stopped in the library and museum. I was directed to a small, poorly lit room that contained several dusty glass-fronted cabinets displaying items unearthed in the mines. As I peered in the gloom at a fossil of a shell, a woman’s voice called, “Mr. Frankenstein!”
Startled, I turned to find a rather plain woman, accompanied by a fair-haired boy of ten or eleven. I was taken aback: to an astonishing degree the boy resembled my brother William. And the woman was Mary Bennet.
I regained my composure. “Ah—Miss Bennet?”
She smiled. “Yes. How wonderful to find you here.”
I made a slight bow. “It is good to see you as well. And this young man is . . . ?”
“This is my nephew William.”
Nonplussed, for a moment I was unable to reply.
“Are you not well?” Miss Bennet asked.
“Forgive me. My brother was named William.”
Miss Bennet’s face paled. “I am sorry to bring up painful associations,” she said.
In the awkward silence that followed, the boy asked if he might climb to the second floor to look down on the town square. “You may,” she said. “But don’t leave the building.”
The boy ran off. Mary turned to examine the contents of the neighboring cabinet, leaving me to collect myself. I was grateful for her tact: although she had not mentioned my disappearance from the ball in London, I was acutely aware of it. She forbore no doubt in compassion for my dead brother. I might have bid her good day and left, but the wary quality of her sympathy—a certain awkward watchfulness, unlike the assumption that Henry and my family made that they understood what I felt, when they understood nothing—made me wonder what she actually thought. She was essentially a stranger.
My desire to avoid Henry as long as possible might also have had something to do with it.
I leaned over the case beside her. Beneath the glass was a stone plate, unearthed from a local mine, on which the skeleton of a fish stood in relief. The lettered card beside it read: BONES, RESEMBLING THOSE OF A PIKE, MADE OF LIMESTONE.
“I believe that it is I who should apologize,” I said, not facing her. “I still owe you a dance.”
She turned to me, and I lifted my head to meet her gaze. “I believe that you no more intended to hurt me than I to hurt you by mentioning the name of your brother.” Her eyes were steady.
“You are very kind,” I said. “Then we shall proceed as friends. How is it that you come to Matlock?”
“My sister Elizabeth is married to Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley House. Kitty and I are visiting. Have you come to take the waters?”
“Clerval and I are on our way to Scotland. We stop here a week.”
Mary watched me, the same guarded expression on her face. She gestured at the cabinet. “I take an interest in fossils.”
“I suppose, given what you told me of your study of natural philosophy, I should not be surprised.”
“It is an enthusiasm of mine,” she said, her voice relaxing, “to fill the idle hours. Dr. Darwin has written of the source of such:
“Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs’d in ocean’s pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.”
Despite all that weighed upon me, I found this display charming. Her artlessness when she thought she was being artful was droll.
“Bravo, Miss Bennet,” I said. “You decla
im with authority. But I was recently informed, by an eminent man of science, that Darwin’s work is moonshine.”
“The moon shines on many things. Some say that finding the exuviae of such aquatic creatures hundreds of miles from the sea, in the midst of mountains, offers proof of the Great Flood—but the French naturalist Lamarck says it only proves the earth is immensely older than the five thousand years that Archbishop Ussher calculated. The faithful say the fact that none of these creatures exist any longer is further proof that God must have swept them away. Lamarck and Darwin argue their disappearance proves that they have changed into more modern forms. Which of these theories is moonshine?”
“I will take my stand with Monsieur Lamarck. The process that transforms bones to limestone must take eons. Anatomically, this creature here is more lizard than fish.”
“You have studied anatomy?” Miss Bennet asked.
I tapped my fingers upon the glass. “Three years ago it was one of my passions. I no longer pursue such matters.”
“And yet you still meet with men of science.”
“Only about moonshine. I am surprised that you remember our brief conversation, from more than two months ago.”
“I have a good memory.”
“As evidenced by your reciting Dr. Darwin by heart. Is science all you study?”
“Oh, you may rest assured that I have read my share of novels, Mr. Frankenstein. And even more, in my youth, of sermons. Kitty calls me a superior moralizer. ‘Evil is easy,’ I tell her, ‘and has infinite forms.’ ”
Was this dart aimed at me? “Would that science had no need of moralizers.”
“We spoke of this before. There is no evil in studying God’s handiwork.”
“A God-fearing Christian might take exception to Darwin’s assertion that life arose spontaneously, no matter how poetically stated. Can a living soul be created without the hand of God?”
“The hand of God is everywhere present.” Mary gestured toward the cabinet. “Even in the bones of this stony fish.”
