This was only the first, however, of two major victories for our family, for never let it be said that Lizzy will suffer to be outdone by her older sister. Not content with marrying the equivalent of one Mr. Bingley, she married two—that is, she married Mr. Own-Half-of-Derbyshire Darcy of sprawling estate (Pemberley), ten thousand pounds per annum, noble and historic stock, and Hamletesque brow.
As for myself, I spent the year learning to keep my own company. I read voraciously. One week: Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. Another week: Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman and Charles Brockden Brown’s Clara Howard. I read with such monastic zeal that even Papa came up to me one day and, observing my furrowed brow absorbing a page of Jane Porter’s four-volume novel Thaddeus of Warsaw, commented whether I meant to overtake him in the speed of my consumption. I created, too, a daily schedule, which regulated my waking hours. My mornings began with rising at least an hour before any of my sisters did in order to take exercise on the estate’s grounds or, if the weather did not permit a brisk walk, to read what I hadn’t finished the evening before. This was always followed by a light breakfast and at least three hours of uninterrupted study, then one hour of musical practice preceding lunchtime.
How grateful I was for my books. In the first throes of my pain, their pages had caught my tears when no comforting hand would. And when I grew stronger, what an anchor they were in my life, a constant dearer to me than any friend, which guarded my spirit against morbidity and despair. It was by their distraction alone that I was able to witness my sisters’ betrothals with equanimity and avoid falling prey, as Kitty did, to infantile fits of jealousy at the good fortune which visited Jane and Lizzy in rapid succession.
When Mr. Collins married Charlotte Lucas, I expected my disappointment to last for a much longer period of time than it did. I admit I surprised myself with my own strength. Awaking one morning soon after, I felt an unprecedented freedom. I realized I could do as I pleased. I could sing and play without having to wonder if my voice and fingering met with that gentleman’s approval. I could read without my mind conjuring even once the image of his face. If no one would speak to me, then I had no cause to speak to them, and my time remained my own. I discovered, too, that because my opinion was valued so little by my family, I could say almost whatever I liked without fear of reprobation. So I practiced this and told Kitty that her bonnets looked just as facile as she was, that the pork at dinner was too tough, and when Mr. Wickham returned to Longbourn with Lydia as his wife, I said to my brother-in-law in a voice audible to everyone, “This isn’t really the outcome you were hoping for, was it?” Fortunately, I received little reproof for my sharp tongue. What with Jane’s and Lizzy’s impending nuptials, Papa saw less reason than ever to involve himself in the concerns of his daughters, and my mother and sisters were far too busy with the writing of invitations in florid script and the choosing of gowns to seriously acknowledge any change in my behavior.
It was around this time that I also began to keep a journal. At first, I used it just for rambling musings of how I had passed each day, but growing bored with this exercise, I began putting to paper observations of my sisters. I offer a few examples below:
Rosy Cheeks is visiting the shops this afternoon to purchase lace for her wedding dress, and Squalling Baby looked very petulant and unhappy indeed that no one among her acquaintances will yet propose to her. We have even less to say to each other these days than we used to.
Queenie has become like Father Christmas and continues to sweep about granting favors to everyone. She has already promised two new dresses to Squalling Baby and a visit to Versailles to Mrs. Church’s younger sister, the Virgin Mary. How good fortune will change some people—and seemingly overnight! I cannot be too harsh on Queenie, though—the fault, I concede, is not entirely hers, for she has been puffed up by so many congratulations and good wishes as would turn anyone’s head. I will admit she looks excessively pretty these days; whether that is the effect of love or the expectation of becoming rich, however, I cannot in all honesty discern.
In the weeks leading up to their wedding, Mr. Darcy visited Longbourn frequently, and on every occasion, brought gifts intended to endear him to a family that had previously thought ill of him. It was during such a visit that he and I found ourselves alone, and though I was occupied with writing in my journal, he came over to engage me in conversation. The awkwardness which characterized our meeting at Netherfield Park had since been forgotten, and I’d succeeded in restoring myself to his original impression of me, as “a very rational young woman.”
“There are some books waiting for you in the other room,” he began. “I thought you might enjoy them.”
Brightening, I asked what titles he had brought for me this time.
“An epistolary novel called The Wild Irish Girl, a work by Plutarch, and one I know you’ll relish as much as I did—Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, which is about a boy who creates all kinds of mischief by impersonating the voices of others.”
I admitted this sounded delightful and thanked him for his trouble. Then I returned to my journal writing, but it wasn’t long before he asked me what I was working on.
“Oh, I’m keeping a diary,” I admitted.
“Georgiana has kept a journal for the last three years,” Mr. Darcy said, brotherly pride getting the better of him.
When I didn’t offer an opinion, not being acquainted with his sister, he continued: “I’m very curious what you have to write, Miss Bennet. Will you not read aloud even a small glimpse of your daily reflections while your sisters happen to be out of the room?”
Handsomeness in a man can certainly be as persuasive as beauty in a woman. I found myself turning the pages of my journal, looking for the most innocuous entry I could find. But before I was able to locate one, Lizzy returned, and when she saw Mr. Darcy sitting with me, her generous nature bubbled to the surface.
“Mary, I think I shall hold you to the obligation of visiting me at least two times each year at Pemberley,” she said, beaming. “Mr. Darcy wouldn’t mind. Would you, Mr. Darcy?”
The gentleman insisted that it would be a pleasure. “Then it is settled!” Lizzy shouted, for she did everything in the days leading up to the wedding with exuberance. “You shall come and stay with us at Pemberley, Mary. I promise I will write to you and send a carriage when we are ready.”
Mr. Darcy’s visit that day prompted the following entry in my journal, which I wrote outdoors in the company of Papa’s ancient and drooling sheepdog:
Louis XIV has brought me more books. I have counted his gifts since his engagement to Queenie and calculated that he is responsible for at least a third of the new titles I’ve read since ghastly Mr. Church went off with his new bride.
Rosy Cheeks called Queenie away on some errand, and I was left alone again with le Roi Soleil. He repeated his earlier request, which was to hear an excerpt from my journal, and I chose a selection I’d written on Squalling Baby and how I’d discovered her one night in her room embracing her looking glass and kissing it. It did not take Louis XIV long to figure out who Squalling Baby was, and once he did, we laughed so much that Mother Hen, Rosy Cheeks, and Queenie all came downstairs to see what the matter was. Neither of us would give anything away, however, and I confess it a rather delicious feeling to share an inside joke with one as respectable as the Sun King.
He has promised to bring me Eliza Parsons’s The Castle of Wolfenbach on his next visit, and we are to make an intellectual exercise of counting how many times the words “faint” and “weep” appear over the course of two volumes. We are both agreed that the surfeit of sentimentality found in Gothic novels is deserving of the cruelest ridicule possible, though they remain the most amusing of books to digest.
* * *
—
THE DAY OF the wedding did not disappoint. Jane and Lizzy had decided to get married
together, and all was as it should be on such a happy occasion. The weather was fine; the guests were splendidly attired; the grooms looked as handsome as they ever did, if not a little smug. In our small and placid community, the air felt rife with miracle. Perhaps it was my imagination which endowed the brides with an almost unearthly loveliness, but they seemed less human than nymphs. The sight of them rendered me a bit tearful, and I had to borrow Kitty’s handkerchief. I confess I surprised myself with my weeping, which was as much inspired by the triumph of seeing my two sisters in their fine marriages as it was by the desire which filled my own heart upon witnessing their great happiness. Their audience may well have been invisible; for the rest of the day’s revelry, the young lovers noticed only themselves, and when the hour came to leave, they had hardly time for waving goodbye to us, bound already in each other’s arms.
Lizzy and Mr. Darcy were not married half a year before her promised invitation arrived, and I embarked on a journey to that estate, which had come to occupy in my mind a near legendary status: Pemberley.
It is hard, I think, not to envy the life which is lived in an attitude of leisure. Just as pigs will cover themselves in mud and the rooster will herald the first light of day with his cry, the idle rich will loll instinctively. In the library at Pemberley, on a wrinkly velvet green sofa, I lolled with my copy of Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake under a ceiling constellation of griffins and cherubs and fruit-bearing vines. One had only to walk a few feet before a divan offered its supine comforts or a window seat begged to be sat on. Desks featured every instrument requisite to the composition and sending of letters except the writer himself, and ornate ottomans settled here and there like bright, exotic birds with tasseled wings.
In the whole of the library, there was, however, only one place ideal for lolling, and that was the wrinkly velvet green sofa with its infinite, swaddling depths and mossy expanse of softness. While lolling, the mind is prone to wander, and my own began to drift further and further away from the pages in front of me, as I dreamily contemplated all that had occurred since I’d arrived at my sister’s new home two months ago.
It was at Pemberley that I began my first novel in earnest. The choice was not entirely voluntary. Georgiana, Darcy’s younger sister by nearly ten years, had a reputation for sweetness but proved selective in who should benefit by it. She was a tall, slender girl of nineteen with hair so fine and fair that in the sunlight, it looked like ten thousand threads of uncultivated silk. Her wide forehead suggested innocence. Her dainty nose, purity. She expelled beautiful music from her lungs as well as from her fingers, painted serene watercolors of wildernesses she would never enter, and embroidered birds of paradise with a leisurely masterliness that would put even the most proficient seamstress to shame.
Every goddess must have a temple, and Georgiana had two. The first was the “large,” or “main,” music room of Pemberley; the second, endearingly named the “small” music room, existed in a remote corner of another wing and contained only a card table, a few chairs, and a square Clementi piano. On the third day of my arrival, I had entered the “large” music room alone and, finding no one in it, uncovered that magnificent instrument, a birthday gift from her doting brother. It was during the second movement of a lively sonatina that I sensed someone watching me, and looking up, I came face-to-face with the goddess herself. She glanced with contempt at my hands, which were still postured on the keyboard as if to play, and said, in a superior voice of thinly veiled anger, “Thank you, Miss Bennet. I am familiar with the piece you just performed, having learned it when I was seven or eight years old. But I will take it from here.” Then she brought the piano cover down so swiftly that I’d barely time to snatch my wrists away. Even after Georgiana left Pemberley to spend her summer months in Bath, I never set foot in either the “large” or “small” music rooms again, though I cannot deny the relief I felt upon witnessing her departure.
Fortunately, I had other loves besides music. The idea that I might start a novel came to me one lazy afternoon not long after my unfortunate encounter with Georgiana. I’d been lolling on the sofa with another of Frances Burney’s sentimental creations—Cecilia or Camilla or Evelina, I can’t remember. But by dinnertime that day, the characters had assembled like obedient schoolchildren into a tidy compartment of my brain. I had named them, visualized them, and determined their fates with, I confess, callously little regard for their personal happiness or physical well-being. It was just as well, I thought, that I possessed neither fortune nor influence in real life.
A single page soon grew into two, and these seeds mushroomed into a prolific vine of fifteen-odd chapters within the course of days. Buoyed by an inexhaustible supply of fine-quality paper, quill pens, and ink, my story grew long and rich in its telling. Deaths proliferated, as did romances, forming the account of a rather remarkable queen who emerges from the rubble of a kingdom perpetually at war with powerful enemies and traitorous allies.
Despite being unfinished, the novel already boasted one illustrious reader, the last person I would have expected to take an interest in my work, and this was the master of Pemberley himself, Mr. Own-Half-of-Derbyshire Darcy. As I lolled undisturbed across the wrinkly velvet green sofa, I recalled one of my first meetings with that gentleman. Sitting at my usual desk in the library, I’d been working on an early chapter of my book when a door had burst open.
“No, no, please don’t get up on my account,” Darcy had mumbled, making swiftly for a small bureau and checking the contents of all the drawers. I pretended to busy myself; my pen made a few meaningless scratches in the margins, and I drew a wavy flower with curling leaves over the heading of an empty page that would mark the beginning of the second chapter of Leonora. I became so engrossed with my flower-making that I didn’t notice until too late the figure standing in front of me, staring curiously at the two piles of paper at either side of my arms. When I did notice, my reaction was to jump in my seat and cry, “Mr. Darcy!” in the alarmed way of females who believe themselves to have been taken disadvantageously by surprise. He gestured with a courteous flourish at the pile to my left and inquired if they were unused. I shyly nodded.
“I’ve run out of paper in my study,” he explained. “Could I…” His hand hovered expectantly over the pile.
“Oh, of course. I’m sorry.” Though I didn’t know what I was apologizing for.
“A few sheets will suffice. Thank you.” He counted them, one-two-three-four. There, all done. Now he could go, and I waited for him to leave the room as briskly as he had entered. But instead he lingered and spread a large hand over the pile on my right. My face instantly warmed. I hadn’t intended to tell anyone I was working on a novel, much less have its contents read by a third party. He lifted a page, turned it over, read the matter on the other side, and smiled, though I’d rather he didn’t, for I thought he smiled in a condescending way. To a man who owned an entire library of ancient and spectacular beauty, my creation would surely seem among the paltriest of offerings to the eternal Muses. But he kept reading, and my shame increased with every page he exposed. After a while, he asked if this was how I’d been occupying myself during my visit. Prior to this, we had been in each other’s company only at meals, and on such occasions, his mind had always been engaged by matters of business. A troublesome tenant had taken him away from Pemberley for several days, and he’d returned earlier that morning. Glancing at him, I noticed how tired he looked, while guiltily acknowledging to myself that his exhaustion did nothing to diminish his handsomeness.
“It would probably do me greater service to deny any authorship of the work,” I said, trying to appear less mortified, “but I’m afraid I cannot. It is mine.”
“ ‘By the time she turned sixteen, Princess Leonora’s beauty had already devastated a sizable fraction of her male admirers, driving five to suicide, at least ten to madness, and dozens more to perpetual and incurable heartache,’ ” he read. “
‘She was so beautiful that when other women saw her, they instantly began to despair of their own reflections and would rather cover their mirrors than ever look upon themselves again.’ ” Darcy raised the page and inspected it. “Can beauty really have such a terrifying effect, Mary?”
“I couldn’t make her unattractive, sir,” I replied. “That would never do.”
“You may call me just Darcy, if you like.” He turned another page. “This novel takes place in Denmark.”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever been to Denmark?” he teased.
“No.”
“Or lived in a castle?”
“No.”
“Or worn a ‘dazzling gown encrusted with precious stones of a hundred brilliant facets each’?”
“I think you know I have not, Mr. Darcy.”
“Then how can you presume, as you do on this page here, to describe the Danish kingdom during a ‘fine spring morning in early May’?”
“I have had much time for thinking and for imagining since I’ve come to Pemberley.”
“Queen Leonora: A Tale of Love and Woe by Mary Bennet,” he read, returning to the title page. “Now, I knew before I married Lizzy that you loved books, but I didn’t have you marked for a writer.”
“I would not call myself a writer,” I replied. “I have no ambitions in that regard.”
“Then why have you started a novel?” he asked.
“Because I got sick of reading the novels of others, which, owing to my level of consumption, have all become wearily predictable.”
My answer seemed to amuse him, for as his hands restored order to the pages he’d disturbed, he chuckled. Then he said, “What would you say if I told you that Lizzy had warned me that you were the odd one of the family?”
Mary B Page 14
