Mary B

by Katherine J. Chen

  “No, because you would be mocking me, sir.”

  For a moment, he gazed thoughtfully at me, offering no reply. “Well, do you think you’re an ‘ugly little thing,’ Miss Bennet? Answer me.”

  My temper would not keep. I lashed out at him. “I wonder how you can ask something so impertinent!” I cried.

  “Which means you do. Well, Miss Bennet, I cannot say honestly that you are either a beauteous maiden or the brightest light of this sceptered isle.”

  Any more of this, I thought, and I’d be in danger of bursting into tears.

  “But I can tell you,” he continued, “that I’ve never kissed an ugly woman in my life, nor do I intend to start now. I have quite a reputation, you know. I may only be the younger son of an earl, but most ladies, even those in the very best circles, consider me a catch. And because they flatter me with their fragranced letters and meaningful smiles, I have always been exceedingly discriminatory with my kisses and loving embraces, which is why I shall deign to kiss you again.”

  And he did, though I struggled my utmost not to kiss him back, as he was clearly a self-conceited, womanizing imbecile. I thought of all the other women he had kissed—the preening, rich daughters of the landed gentry, with their delicate, rose-petal mouths—and something prompted me to kiss him harder and more recklessly than before. When he released me, I looked shyly away, a little ashamed at my own passion. How ridiculous, I thought, rebuking myself, that I should consider his kisses the equivalent of compliments—and yet I did and craved many more such “compliments” besides.

  “Now then,” the colonel said. “May I call you my ‘ugly little thing’ or not?”

  “What a truly awful term of endearment. If you can call me that, then it’s only fair that I should call you something equally monstrous in return.”

  “Oh, feel free. I am quite open to anything insulting.”

  “ ‘Uncouth barbarian’?”

  “That’s much too forgiving, I think. Can’t your writer’s brain conjure anything worse?”

  I scrunched up my face in thought. “How about ‘idiot drunkard’?”

  “All real men drink, Mary.”

  “ ‘Handsome rake’?”

  “I thought we were doing insults, not compliments.”

  “I’ve got it,” I announced. “ ‘Womanizing, caper-witted coxcomb’! Or would you prefer ‘blackguard’?”

  “Now, that is excellent. I shall be your ‘womanizing, caper-witted coxcomb or blackguard,’ and you shall be my ‘ugly little thing,’ ” he concluded.

  “That’s rather long, though, isn’t it?” I counted the syllables on my fingers. “That’s thirteen syllables total for you, whereas I have only five.”

  “Then what would you call me, if not Fitzwilliam?”

  “I will call you Marmalade and content myself with three.”

  We entered the house laughing and charitably insulting each other. It was then that I saw them—the two housemaids crouched at the bottom of the stairs crying into their sooty handkerchiefs. Grief had not dulled their sense of propriety or weakened the servant’s nose for scandal. The girls peered from my unkempt hair to my rumpled skirts, and considered that both my face and the colonel’s appeared flushed with the radiance which is unique to men and women who have just finished doing what perhaps they should not have begun in the first place. They neatly totaled up these things in their heads, as though it were all a case of simple arithmetic and the resulting sum either that of marriage, for which they’d benefit by a cup of punch and a slice of wedding cake, or non-marriage, for which there’d be many evenings’ worth of discussion around the kitchen table in the treasured minutes before bedtime.

  “What’s the matter, Bess?” I addressed the one servant whose name I knew.

  “It’s your sister, miss,” she sobbed. “Mrs. Darcy, I mean. The baby…the baby’s just died.”

  * * *

  —

  HOW CAN A mountain spring from a tree without also killing it? On my way to Lizzy’s room, the child passed me, a formless mass of bright red which stained the cloth that covered it. Looking down, I beheld the speckled trail of blood which oozed like dark spots of ink on the carpet. No one had changed the bedding, and Lizzy had soiled herself, causing the air to smell putrid. Her opalescent face, damp where Mrs. Reynolds had wiped her skin, shone like a cold moon over the scene of massacre that ravaged the rest of her body. Between her legs, fresh blood saturated the mattress, the last remnants of a life expelled into sheets that would an hour or two from now be taken from my sister’s bed and burned. I lifted Lizzy’s skeletal white hand and kissed it. Her fingers quivered awake over my lips, but she didn’t open her eyes. Then the doctor entered, a middle-aged man with an enormous head and pillowy cheeks.

  “Where is Darcy?” I asked him harshly, as though the fault were his. “Darcy should be here.”

  “He’s in the next room, resting,” he explained patiently. A handkerchief fluttered out from inside a bulging pocket and dusted his egg-shaped forehead. I resisted the urge to strike him—how dare he tend to his own disgusting body, when my sister lay so weak a few feet away. “I’ve given him a sedative,” he added in whispered, sympathetic tones that only came across as affected and impersonal. “If it’s worked, he should be asleep by now.”

  “And my sister?”

  “She’s been given a sedative, too.” More pretense to compassion.

  I asked him to tell me what had happened, and he shrugged. Oh, that he could! “A terrible, most unfortunate affair,” he said in the same tones, which I suppose he had learned somewhere was a pitch suitable for the communication of tragedy. “The child was stillborn. A boy. She initially thought he was alive, but it was clear to the rest of us….” He shook his head and wiped his spectacles. A very worthy performance, I thought to myself. And he might be able to spare a few tears as well, if we paid him another consultation fee for the trouble.

  At the suggestion that he should take some nourishment in the kitchen, the doctor relented and agreed to leave me alone with my sister. Then my tears flowed free and unreserved, and when Lizzy awoke, several hours later, and asked me where I’d been, I found I could not answer her.

  “Oh, Mary,” she muttered vaguely, as her own body began to shake with sobs. “I’m afraid I’ve let everyone down.”

  In the days since the incident, for that is how it had been named, people moved quietly in and out of rooms, doing what they had to do before the grateful hour in which they could once more enfold their warm bodies within the safety of their beds. Mrs. Reynolds continued to fuss over the untidiness of the housemaids and bemoan the carelessness of the laundry maids, but her rancor gave way to pity much quicker than was her custom. In fact, pity, which materializes ghostlike in the wake of tragedy, prevailed at Pemberley. A heavily pregnant Jane left the side of her Bingley to console Lizzy. Her presence rendered mine excessive; they preferred each other’s company and spent all their waking hours behind closed doors, speaking a language of intimacy I’d never learned.

  And so, in the days following the incident, people worked silently but diligently, with the vague sense that a great something had been lost. This something was what we had all taken turns imagining at one time or another, the scullery maid and Lizzy alike envisaging the shape and features of the unborn child who would tumble like a comet into this dusty world, tripping the footmen and eating sweeties from the sticky fingers of the maids. Everyone had devised his or her own little story of the boy who would one day inherit Pemberley or the girl who would have her pick of a hundred eligible suitors, and each story had grown more substantial, more palpable, with the steady expansion of Lizzy’s girth. Henderson, the butler, only hoped the child wouldn’t be cruel to animals, according to Bess, who kept me apprised of goings-on belowstairs while she dusted the library. “He who is cruel to animals when he is young,” Henderson had pos
tulated to his underlings around the servants’ dinner table, “will be cruel to humans when he’s grown, mark my words.” The gamekeeper, however, wished for exactly the opposite and planned to teach the boy (it had never been imagined among the male staff of Pemberley that Lizzy could give birth to anything other than a boy) many subjects more interesting than the “stuff and nonsense” of philosophizing books. Bess herself had hoped for a girl who would be “as bonny as a dolly.” Together, these hopes seemed more real to me than the corpse of the child I’d passed in the hall and which nightly haunted my dreams.

  For days afterwards, I refused to see the colonel and hid away in my room, pretending illness. I felt such guilt. How liberally I had enjoyed myself while my sister lay suffering, her body racked with pain. No wonder Lizzy did not ask for me. She’d come to realize that I was undependable, selfish; at my most panicked, I imagined Mrs. Reynolds had found out somehow that I’d been in the stables with the colonel and had told Lizzy, who now judged me no better than foolish Lydia. When she needed me, I’d been absent from her side; why, then, should she turn to me for comfort now?

  On the fifth night, I emerged from my room and, thinking the whole household asleep, crept outside to wander the garden. But I should have known better than to return to the place where the colonel and I had frequently walked, for I found him there, seated on a bench, as though he’d been waiting all this time for me to appear. It was too late to turn back; he had seen me. And, in truth, I did not want to go.

  I expected him to ask how I was, but he only leaned forward and, staring impassively at me, said, “Finally come out of hiding, then?”

  “What?”

  “It was nice of you to read my letters, even if you didn’t respond to them.”

  For the last few days, he had sent several short notes via Bess, asking me to meet him, though I’d honored none of his invitations.

  “I’m in no humor this evening to listen to you whine,” I replied coldly, making as if to leave.

  “It must be very hard to live as you do,” the colonel said. “Exhausting, in fact. I would not wish it on anyone.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “To take everything so seriously. Anyone would have thought you, and not your sister, had lost a child.”

  I nearly choked on my anger. “You have no idea how I’ve felt these last few days, have you—how I’ve tortured myself for not being at Lizzy’s side. I should have been there. It’s the least I could have done—to hold her hand through it, even if it changed nothing.” I started to cry. I could not rein back my emotion; too much haunted me: the dead child, the cold damp of my sister’s skin as I’d kissed her hand, Jane’s arrival, which had quietly signified my own failure as a sibling.

  But he continued to look at me, unmoved. “How well you put it, Miss Bennet, when you say you have tortured yourself these last few days. You seem very talented at that—holding on to things, taking them to heart, feeling offended. What good does any of that do, I ask you.”

  “Better to grieve,” I replied, “than to make light of tragedy, as you do.”

  The colonel’s face darkened, and as he stepped towards me, I was fearful that he would be violent. He took one of my wrists and pulled me close to him, though he didn’t kiss me. Instead, he spoke softly into my face: “You think, because I am a man, that I don’t know anything about how childbirth can turn to tragedy. But you would be wrong. My mother gave birth to me when she was twenty-five years old. By then, she’d already had two children and four miscarriages to show for her troubles. I remember lining up behind my siblings at my mother’s bed and saying goodbye to her after she’d had my brother. We all thought she was going to die. I was six years old; I looked into her face and burst into tears, and my father took me aside and knocked me into the wall with his fist. So I take it very hard, Miss Bennet, that you should think I make light of this tragedy, considering I would have been the child’s godfather.”

  I stopped crying and, with my free hand, dried my cheeks.

  “Then what would you have me do, if not grieve? Should I ignore the fact that Lizzy won’t see me? That she spends all her waking hours with Jane and never asks for me?”

  He shook his head. His eyes flickered in the dark like twin flames.

  “I would have you live, Miss Bennet,” he whispered, as his grip around my wrist grew tighter. Then he took my face in his hands and kissed me.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I RETURNED to the house, it was nearly midnight, and passing Darcy’s study, I noticed the light was still on. I’d seen almost nothing of my host since the incident. Like Lizzy, he no longer took his meals downstairs, preferring the seclusion of his private rooms. But now seemed an opportune moment to speak to him, and I knocked on the door.

  A voice from within bid me enter, and I found Darcy bent over a large ledger, his pen scratching elegant figures across the page.

  “Darcy, shouldn’t you be in bed?” I asked. The sight of him, his ink-stained hands and hunched shoulders, strangely moved me. I felt creeping into the corners of my eyes the familiar strain which is a harbinger of tears.

  “I could say the same for you,” he answered without looking up, though he laid down his pen. I watched him massage his right palm. “What a long day it’s been,” he sighed, leaning into his chair.

  “How is Lizzy?”

  “Jane and Mrs. Reynolds are looking after her” was the insufficient reply. “She…” He hesitated, unable to finish the thought, and proceeded to rub his face. The ink on his hands added faint streaks of gray to his sickly paleness.

  “I think she blames me for what happened,” he finally said. The effort of speaking seemed to exhaust him.

  “That isn’t possible,” I replied defensively. “What happened isn’t anyone’s fault.”

  “I assure you it is possible. I forget what a way my wife has with words. ‘Darcy,’ she said to me, when we were alone, ‘will you have your heir and a spare at the cost of my life? Which would you choose?’ ”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I told her she was tired and to take some rest.”

  “Oh, Darcy…”

  “I know, but I was angry with her for asking such a question.” He shut the ledger and exhaled.

  “She’s in the throes of grief—poor Lizzy. I’m sure she doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

  “She seemed perfectly lucid to me.”

  An argument would have been pointless, so I let the subject rest and seated myself in a nearby chair.

  “But on to happier subjects…” he said at last. “Have you been able to make any progress with our good friend Leonora?”

  “Only a single chapter, I’m afraid,” I replied, and then added, to whet his appetite, “but a vital one, nonetheless, which will change the whole course of the book.”

  He smiled. “Then you better tell me what happens.”

  “Ah, but the hour is late,” I said, glancing at the clock.

  “It matters little to me, Mary. I have not slept more than three hours these last few days.”

  At this, I looked down at my hands. “I wish you’d take better care of yourself,” I said quietly. “So much of everyone’s happiness depends on you. Lizzy’s, of course, and Georgiana’s, Mrs. Reynolds’s, and that of the rest of Pemberley’s staff. And all your tenants and their families. They rely on you to stay strong.”

  I was still tracing the lines of my right palm when he spoke. “And yours?” he asked. I looked up.

  “What?” I knew what he meant, but some part of me wished to feign ignorance.

  “What about your happiness, Mary?” he asked. “Do I contribute to that, too?”

  At the question, my eyes grew heavy. A prickling soreness entered into them. For some moments, it was as though the colonel had never entered the house and my spirit lived
in Pemberley’s library. I wished I could tell him how much it meant to have someone to talk to about books. My own father, though we read the same novels, would rather keep his opinions to himself than share them with his weak-minded and pedantic middle daughter. And as for Mama and Kitty, they would laugh me out of Longbourn if I regaled them with tales of Denmark’s ill-fated queen and her German prince. How could I describe to Darcy the fear which had gripped my soul when he’d first discovered my novel, and the wonder and gratitude which had replaced that fear when I’d realized his interest was in earnest? How could I tell him that in his person I had discovered an unexpected and most treasured friend, possibly the first to treat me as an equal? There wasn’t a chapter of Leonora which hadn’t passed under his scrutiny, no line of this voluminous work which he hadn’t read and examined with both care and thought.

  My tears preceded my speech.

  “What brings this about?” Darcy asked, studying me. He must have thought me a hysterical fool.

  “I love Pemberley,” I said at last.

  This answer, however feeble I considered it, seemed to satisfy him, for he smiled again.

  “Tell me what happens in the chapter,” he repeated.

  “It’s pretty horrid,” I warned.

  “I’m fond of horrid, as you well know,” he replied.

  So I told him about Leonora and the masked assassin who’d sworn to avenge the grand duke’s death—this assassin being, of course, none other than the one person Leonora loved and trusted most in the whole world, her half sister, Agnes. Seconds before the jeweled dagger fell, Wilhelm had burst into the throne room and decapitated with one swift cut of his sword that backstabbing villainess. But he’d come too late—Leonora was mortally wounded, her blood saturating the throne room’s stone floor.

  “Well?” Darcy cried, as soon as I’d stopped. “Does she live or not? Mary, you can’t possibly kill her off! I won’t stand for it.”