The Forgotten Sister: Mary Bennet's Pride and Prejudice

by Jennifer Paynter

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2012, 2014 Jennifer Paynter

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  First Published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2012

  Published by Lake Union, 2014

  www.apub.com

  ISBN-13: 9781477848883

  ISBN-10: 1477848886

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013910957

  For Caro

  Contents

  Part One

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  Part Two

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  Part Three

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  Part Four

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  Part Five

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1.

  For the best part of nine years—from the age of four until just before I turned thirteen—I prayed for a brother every night. My two elder sisters also prayed. They felt the want of a brother equally keenly, for our father’s estate was entailed upon a male heir and (as our mother never ceased to remind us) without a brother to provide for us or a rich husband to rescue us, we would all be destitute.

  But if my Aunt Philips is to be believed, our parents in the early years of their marriage scarcely gave the entail a thought. When my eldest sister was born my father was philosophical. As Aunt Philips tells it, Jane was the most beautiful baby with an angelic disposition and Papa was prodigiously proud of her.

  He was disappointed when my second sister was born, however. But then according to our neighbor Lady Lucas (or Mrs. Lucas as she then was), Elizabeth was such a charming child that Papa was very soon reconciled to her existence—more than reconciled, he rapidly came to dote on her. Her favorite trick was to creep into his library with her linen blanket and make a nest for herself beneath his kneehole desk. Whilst ever he was reading she would be quiet as a mouse but as soon as he closed his book she would call to him in shrill imitation of our mother. Apparently this so amused my father he began to close his book more often. He would go down upon his hands and knees to play with her and the two of them would then romp for half the morning.

  Later, he taught her to read, and so delighted was he at her progress that if there was company present he would call on her to display her precocious talent. Mama’s old friend Mrs. Long remembers Elizabeth chalking words on a slate and lisping “Sally in Our Alley” when she was but two years old. She also recalls the infant prodigy performing a sailor’s hornpipe while my father beat time on the arm of his chair and cheered her on. (I believe at one stage he even considered teaching Elizabeth Latin but nothing ever came of it.)

  My mother not unreasonably took exception to all this. “You will turn the child’s head, Mr. Bennet. She will be so puffed up that soon there’ll be no teaching her anything.” My father would laugh and return to his book. In those days he did not expose his wife to ridicule. That came a little later, after I was born.

  Mama’s joy at the prospect of a third child was known to most of the good people of Meryton, and so certain was she this time that the Bennets were to be blessed with a son that she arranged for his initials to be embroidered on a fresh supply of baby linen and for rosettes of satin ribbons to be affixed to the left-hand side of all his caps. Papa too looked forward to the birth, anticipating the cutting off of the entail and the disappointment of his cousins, the Collinses.

  “And how will you like having a little brother, Lizzy?” he would say, whereupon Elizabeth would clap her hands. “But it may be you’ll have to make do with another sister.” At which Elizabeth would frown and shake her head. I am told this caused my father much amusement.

  He was not amused, however, to hear of my own arrival—telling my aunt when she tried to sympathize: “Mrs. Bennet will bear me a son eventually, depend upon it. And if she does not I can always divorce her, like King Henry the Eighth.”

  I am told Papa made these sorts of remarks more often after I was born. He had always enjoyed teasing Mama but hitherto his jokes had been good-humored. Mama of course was incapable of laughing at herself even at the best of times—a failing my father believes I have inherited—and soon tears and hysterics became the rule at Longbourn, my father spent more time than ever in his library, and the Bennets could no longer pass for a happy couple.

  When I was about a month old my father’s old friends, Mama’s nerves, took a hand in my fate. Out of consideration for them, I was farmed out to a wet-nurse, one Mrs. Bushell, whose husband was gamekeeper at the Great House of Stoke. After I was weaned I still remained with Mrs. Bushell, and when at last I returned home to live, Mama was once more in an interesting condition.

  I have no memory of Kitty’s birth but Lady Lucas recalls both Mama and Papa greeting the arrival of a fourth daughter with amazing fortitude. In the months before the birth Papa forbad any embroidering of new baby linen but at the same time he was more patient with Mama, taking care not to provoke her. He even made her the present of a brooch of two gold doves set in a circlet of seed-pearls.

  Kitty was a sickly, fretful baby, however, and soon Mama’s nerves were being chafed by her constant crying. Once again Mrs. Bushell’s services were called on, only this time Mama decided that her infant daughter should not be living quite apart from the rest of the family. Arrangements were made for Mrs. Bushell and her two children to be installed in Collins Cottage, a little house on the Longbourn estate that had once been the home of Papa’s poor relations.

  And now I come to something I remember clearly though I was not three years old. I remember accompanying Kitty to Collins Cottage with
the nurserymaid, and young Peter Bushell opening the door to us without any shoes on. I remember Mrs. Bushell’s husband shouting at us to shut the door—he was cutting up wadding for his gun—and I remember at sight of him finding it impossible to draw breath.

  Afterwards, the nurserymaid told me that I had held my breath till I was blue in the face and that God would surely punish me if I ever did it again.

  Eventually of course it all came out—how Mrs. Bushell’s husband had been dismissed from the employ of Sir John Stoke and was now living permanently at Collins Cottage, doing nothing all day but drink and (as I would later discover) turning his hand to poaching by night. Mrs. Bushell was no longer able to check her husband’s drunken outbreaks—on one occasion when Kitty would not stop crying he had actually picked her up and shaken her, and it had been six-year-old Peter who had persuaded him to stop. Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Bushell had confessed the whole to my father, and what he felt and how he acted may well be imagined. Certainly, I saw no more of the Bushell family, although Mrs. Bushell’s husband visited me frequently in dreams.

  Everyone then had been amazingly kind to me, especially Papa. He would take down a picture book and sit me on his knee and I would perch there, stiff and shy, until the ordeal was over. He saw that I was afraid of him, I suppose, but then at that time I was afraid of all men.

  I was also frightened of raised voices and sudden movements, and it was now that my eldest sister Jane (dear Jane!) saw that music calmed me. She herself was only eight years old but already acutely aware of the feelings of others. She would have me sit on a little stool beside the pianoforte while she practiced, and wonderfully soothing I found it to watch her sweet face frowning over the keys and to listen to music, however imperfectly executed. (Elizabeth would also let me sit by her, but would hush me if I hummed a bar in accompaniment.)

  It was at this time too that I learned to read, although here my progress was disappointingly slow because of my poor eyesight. Mama spoke the literal truth when she said of me that I always had my nose in a book. (I did not begin wearing spectacles until I was eight.)

  But I have not yet mentioned Lydia. She was born just two years after Kitty on the first day of June—the fourth anniversary of the Glorious First of June, the day of Admiral Lord Howe’s victory over the French, as my father jokingly reminded the London accoucheur in the hours before her birth. (This time, for a wonder, it was Papa who was confident of having a son.) It was my Uncle Philips who announced her safe arrival. Jane, Elizabeth, and I were summoned to the dining room, where he was finishing his dinner, and I remember him luridly lit by the setting sun (the windows of the Longbourn dining room face full west), pulling sugarplums from his pockets and pretending to be cheerful.

  None of us were taken in, and my uncle did not try to maintain the charade. He left, muttering something about having to wet the baby’s head, and shortly afterwards I descried Papa through the window walking across the lawn towards the little wilderness.

  As he passed, I had a clear view of his face—lines running deeply from nose to mouth, set and despondent. The shock of seeing him made me cry out and Elizabeth ran to the window saying: “Oh! I must go to him.” And although Jane tried to prevent her, she unfastened the window and sped out onto the terrace.

  I saw her chase after him and catch at his coat. I saw him turn his head and for a moment I was terrified—I thought that he might strike her—but then his face softened and I saw him take her hand.

  2.

  About a week after Lydia’s birth, my Uncle Gardiner visited Longbourn. If he had expected to find his sister weeping and hysterical as had been the case after my own birth, he must have been pleasantly surprised. Although Mama spoke of disappointment, her face whilst nursing Lydia belied her words. She was very angry with my father, however. “I vow I have no patience with Mr. Bennet, Brother. Does he imagine he is alone in his disappointment?”

  My uncle then endeavored, not for the first time, to explain to her the nature of the entail.

  “He has not been near this child in two days. Is she to be held responsible for the entail, pray? Why does he not do something about the entail?”

  Again my uncle attempted to explain but Mama cut him short: “And in the meantime this innocent child is blamed. Only look at her. Is she not the most beautiful child you ever beheld? Mrs. Long says she has never seen such a beautiful child, not even excepting Jane. But Mr. Bennet will have it that she is nothing very extraordinary.”

  I confess I resented Lydia from the first. Mama made such a ridiculous fuss of her, and the new nurserymaid, a Kentish girl, Nan Pender, also favored her, and altogether she grew to be such an obstreperous child that I soon wished to have as little to do with her as possible.

  Shortly after my sixth birthday, that wish was granted. I contracted measles and was removed from the nursery I shared with Kitty and Lydia to an attic room that, as soon as I was recovered enough to take cognizance of my surroundings, suited me very well. It was a long, south-facing room with a sloping ceiling and dear little diamond-paned windows, and during a protracted convalescence all my books and belongings were brought up and arranged to my great satisfaction.

  And one memorable day Mama said I might have the room for my very own: “To my way of thinking it will be pleasanter for you to remain up here, Mary. No little people running about disturbing your studies and breaking your precious things. And Lydia and Kitty have quite grown used to having the nursery to themselves now.” Mama also promised that a pianoforte would be placed in my new room: “Only you must not always be playing your scales up and down.”

  Jane was the only one to question the arrangement. “But will you not be lonely up here, Mary, all by yourself?”

  I told her I preferred being alone so that I could read and work in peace. “And besides, Mama has promised me a pianoforte to have for my very own. And nobody will be allowed to touch it unless I say they may. Lydia will certainly not be allowed to touch it.”

  “But when you have put away your books, you must come and play with Lizzy and me. You must not shut yourself away from us, Mary dear.”

  Elizabeth walked in on us then—she could never bear to let Jane out of her sight for long—but when I told her of the pianoforte she merely raised her dark little eyebrows in the superior way I so disliked and reminded Jane that they had yet to write to Uncle Gardiner.

  Jane patted my hand. “You are old enough to keep a secret, Mary, are you not?”

  I saw Elizabeth looking doubtful and I said (very indignantly) that indeed I was.

  “Uncle is to announce his engagement, dear. He is to marry a Miss Bellamy who comes from a very respectable family in the north of England.”

  “Miss Bellamy used to live in the village of Lambton,” said Elizabeth with insufferable self-importance. “In Derbyshire.”

  “It is to be a London wedding, however, and I expect we will all be invited.”

  But we were not all invited. Kitty, Lydia, and I were not invited. And in the months before the marriage little else was talked of at Longbourn other than Miss Bellamy’s wedding clothes and whether she would choose to live in Uncle Gardiner’s house in Cheapside or in a more fashionable part of London, as she was so very fashionable herself—but at the same time immensely clever and charming—and how she had made Uncle Gardiner the happiest of men.

  My first feelings of envy and disappointment were acute but I comforted myself by committing to memory Alexander Pope’s “The Quiet Life.” Unhappily, Lydia had no such resources, and on learning that the wedding was to take place on the Glorious First of June, the date of her fourth birthday, she had been inconsolable. She waited, however, until the afternoon they were all set to return from London before avenging herself—going first to Mama’s dressing room and taking down Grandmother Gardiner’s box of pomatum and hair-powder. After plastering the looking-glass with pomatum and scattering powder everywhere, she locked herself away in Papa’s library to wreak further havoc—something, alas
, we did not discover until too late.

  I shall not easily forget my father’s face as he stood amidst the ruins of his sanctum sanctorum—still wearing his caped traveling coat and holding a branch of lighted candles. The room looked as if a storm had blown through it—books strewn about with the pages torn out, the ink from the standish on his desk splattered on his favorite wing chair, and over everything a coating of powder. In the middle of it all lay Lydia, curled up in Elizabeth’s old nesting place under his desk, fast asleep.

  3.

  This childish escapade of Lydia’s was to have most serious consequences. My parents in their response to it were no longer able to maintain even a semblance of conjugal unity. There was a very public disagreement after Papa ordered Nan Pender to take Lydia upstairs and put her to bed without supper. Mama had become hysterical, attempting to snatch the still sleeping Lydia from Nan’s arms: “I am not about to let my child starve, sir! Whatever you may have to say about it.”

  Papa was gathering up the torn pages of his books—his favorite novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman was amongst the fallen—but now he turned to her with a dreadful, fierce coldness: “Madam, I would speak with you in private.”

  He then ordered the rest of us out of the room and shut the door. Neither of them joined us afterwards for supper, and later when Mama was up in her dressing room I saw that she had been crying.

  Once the hollowness of their marriage was exposed, perhaps my father felt compelled to act accordingly. I was too young to understand the significance of his removing to a smaller bedchamber quite separate from Mama’s apartment, but I saw—we all saw—his attitude towards her becoming increasingly disrespectful. (Of course we could not know then that there would be no more children, no son to join in cutting off the entail and ensuring Longbourn would not fall into the grasping hands of the Collinses.)

  A further consequence, though not an unpleasant one, was that we saw a great deal of the Gardiners. Mama may have hoped that their presence would deter Papa from making sarcastic remarks: He was always more agreeable when the Gardiners were at Longbourn. We all were.

  Elizabeth was particularly taken with Mrs. Gardiner, or Aunt Gardiner as we now called her. And when it became known that Aunt was with child, she became an even greater object of interest, and not merely to Elizabeth.