The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

by Colleen McCullough

  “I tell you, I will be prime minister of these Isles!”

  “Seriously, Fitz, let the woman write her book. No one will read it.”

  “How can you be sure? Beautiful women are noticed, Ned! What if Angus Sinclair should get wind of her book? A man of clout, a political creature with friends everywhere. Also the man who first started this brouhaha by making Argus famous.”

  “Fitz, you exaggerate! Why should her book have anything to do with the Darcys? She’s after information about the plight of the poor. Honestly, it’s a storm in a teacup.”

  “Some teacups can enlarge to hold an ocean.” Fitz poured himself and Ned more wine. “Experience has taught me that the Bennet family is a perpetual catastrophe waiting to happen. I am not a prophet of doom, but whenever my wife’s relatives rear their ugly Hydra heads, I cringe. They have a habit of destroying my luck.”

  “If they were men, they would be easier to deal with, I can see that.” The dark face grew even darker. “The silence of men may be procured one way or another. But women are cursed difficult.”

  “I have never asked for murder.”

  “I know, and am grateful. However, Fitz, should it ever prove necessary, I am yours to command.”

  Fitz drew back in horror. “No, Ned, no! I can see the need to have some stubborn fool beaten within an inch of his life, but never the removal of that life! I forbid it.”

  “Of course you do. Think no more of it.” Ned smiled. “Think instead of being prime minister, and of how proud I will be.”

  Angus Sinclair was the first of the guests to arrive, so eager was he to settle quickly into this staggering palace. His rooms were a suite decorated in the Sinclair tartan, a conceit Fitz had thought of when Angus had first visited nine years ago. A way of saying that he was welcome at any time, for however long. His man Stubbs was equally satisfied with his airless cubicle adjacent to the dressing room. One of the worst features of house parties in Stubbs’s view was servant accommodation, usually a wearying walk involving many stairs away from the master’s domain, and no top-of-the-trees valet cared to associate with a swarm of underlings. Well, such was not his lot at Pemberley, where, to his intense gratification, he knew that the top-of-the-trees valets and ladies’ dressers even had their own dining room.

  Leaving an unusually sanguine Stubbs to unpack, Angus went to the library, which always took his breath away. Lord, what would a member of the Royal Society say were he to see it? That none had, he could be sure, for Fitz did not mix in circles dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and science. Entranced, he wandered about peering at the spines of the many thousands of volumes, and yearned to have the organisation of its treasures. For it was clear that no one with an abiding love of books had ever put Apuleius with Apicius or Sophocles with Euripedes and Aeschylus, let alone assembled all the voyages of discovery together half the room away from treatises on phrenology or the phlogiston theory.

  In one alcove he found the Darcy papers, a big collection of poorly bound or even unbound screeds on land grants and acquisitions, tenants, properties elsewhere than Pemberley, citations from kings, codicils to wills, and many autobiographies of Darcy Royalists, Yorkists, Catholics, Jacobites, Normans, Saxons and Danes.

  “Ah!” cried a voice.

  Its owner skipped nimbly between the chesterfields, a very young man with Elizabeth’s beauty, a head of chestnut curls, and his own character, which Angus soon read as a combination of purpose and curiosity. This had to be the disappointing son, Charlie.

  “Found the family skeletons, eh?” he asked, grinning.

  “Years ago. But ’tis not bones annoy me. This place is a regular mess. It needs sorting, cataloguing and collating, and the family papers should be in a muniment room.”

  A rueful look appeared; Charlie nodded emphatically. “So I keep telling Pater, but he tells me I’m over-fussy. A great man, my father, but not bookish. When I’m older, I’ll try again.”

  Angus touched the papers. “The Darcys have followed the true line, it looks like—York, not Lancaster.”

  “Oh, yes. Added to which, Owen ap Tudor was an upstart, and his son Henry a usurper to the Darcys. And how the Darcys of that particular time hated Elector George!”

  “I’m surprised the Darcys are not Catholic.”

  “The throne has always meant more than religion.”

  “I beg your pardon!” Angus exclaimed, remembering his manners. “My name is Angus Sinclair.”

  “Charlie Darcy, heir to this daunting pile. The only bit of it I love is this room, though I’d take it apart, then put it together again more logically. Pater turned a much smaller room into his parliamentary library—his Hansards and Laws—and works there.”

  “Let me know when the day comes that you attack this room. I will gladly volunteer to help. Though what it most needs is its own wee sun to light it.”

  “An insoluble problem, Mr. Sinclair.”

  “Angus, at least when we’re not in lofty company.”

  “Angus it is. How odd! I never imagined the owner of the Westminster Chronicle as a man like you.”

  “What kind of man did you envision?” Angus asked, eyes twinkling.

  “Oh, an immense paunch, a careless shave, soup stains on the cravat, dandruff, and possibly a corset.”

  “No, no, you can’t have soup stains and dandruff in the same man as a corset! The first indicates indifference to appearance, whereas the corset indicates shocking vanity.”

  “Well, I doubt you’ll ever have the dandruff or need the corset. How do you maintain your figure in a place like London?”

  “I fence rather than box, and walk rather than ride.”

  They settled down on two chesterfields in close but opposite proximity and proceeded to lay down the foundations of a strong friendship.

  I wish, thought Charlie wistfully, that Angus had been my father! His character is exactly what a father’s should be—understanding, forgiving, unshakable, humourous, intelligent, unhampered by shibboleths. Angus would have taken me for what I am, and not belittled me as unworthy. Nor deemed me effeminate on no better grounds than my face. I cannot help my face!

  While Angus thought Fitz’s heir a far cry from the weedy and womanish weakling he had been led to expect. Though this was his ninth visit to Pemberley, he had never met Charlie any more than he had met the four girls; Fitz kept children, even those of seventeen, in the schoolroom. Now, looking at Fitz’s heir for the first time, he grieved for the boy. No, Charlie didn’t have the constitution of an ox or a sporting bone in his body, but his mind was powerful and his emotions admirable. Nor was he effeminate. If he set his heart on something, he would shift mountains to get it, yet never in a ruthless way, never riding roughshod over others. Were he my son, thought Angus, I would be very proud. People do not love Fitz, but they will love Charlie.

  It was not long before Charlie confessed why he had invaded Pemberley during a stuffy house party.

  “I have to rescue my aunt,” he said.

  “Miss Mary Bennet, you mean?”

  Charlie gasped. “How—how did you know that?”

  “I am acquainted with her a wee bit.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I spent a few days in Hertford in April.”

  “But do you know she’s taken the bit between her teeth?”

  “Elegantly put, Charlie. Yes, I do. She confided in me.”

  “Who is this wretched Argus fellow?”

  “I don’t know. His letters come in the post.”

  At which point Owen entered the library, gaping at it with an awe he didn’t feel for the Bodleian. As soon as he could be persuaded to abandon his explorations and join them, Charlie and Angus went back to the subject of Mary.

  “Do you have to do things like promenade with Derbyshire and the Bishop of London?” Charlie demanded of Angus.

  “Occasionally, yes, but by no means every day. I am familiar with the Peaks and quite enjoy the precipices and rocking stones, but my weakness
is the caves. I am very fond of caves.”

  “Then you’re the sort of fellow prefers getting wet through and covered in slime than getting overheated and covered in rubble. I do have an alternative occupation—you could ride with Owen and me in search of Mary.”

  “A far better idea! Count me in.”

  Charlie remembered that Angus had said he liked to walk rather than ride, and looked anxious. “Er—you are comfortable on a horse, I take it?” he asked.

  “Quite comfortable, even atop your father’s aristocratic prads.”

  “Capital! Owen and I are off to Buxton in the morning. The Plough and Stars in Macclesfield is famous for its luncheons and is the post house, so we intend to do Macclesfield as well. Coming?”

  “I fear not,” said Angus with regret. “I think tomorrow I must be on hand to welcome Derbyshire and the Speaker.” H have a coach terminus; the public conveyances that passed through it stopped to change horses at the Blue Boar—which was therefore a post house—at around about noon. Having two choices, either to go to London and there take a more direct route, or proceed north until she could find a vehicle going west, Mary had elected to go north, as she had told Angus. It did not seem logical to have to go south in order to achieve the opposite point of the compass.

  Every aspect had been thought out, she could tell herself with satisfaction. The bulk of her belongings had gone via Pickford’s carriers to Elizabeth at Pemberley for safe keeping, while what she took with her had been shaved down to as little as possible. Understanding that she might have to walk some distance carrying what she had with her, at least from time to time, she had shopped carefully for luggage. Boxes, which were actually small metal-bound trunks, were clearly out of the question, as were true portmanteaux, which could be carried, but were large and heavy. In the end she settled for two handbags made of stout tapestry; their bottoms held little metal sprigs that kept the fabric clear of water. One, larger than the other, had a false bottom in which she could put her dirty laundry until she could wash it. Apart from these two handbags, she had a black drawstring reticule in which she put twenty gold guineas (a guinea was worth slightly more than a pound, having twenty-one shillings to it rather than twenty), a phial of vinaigrette, her five favourite Argus letters, a coin purse for change, and a handkerchief.

  In the handbags, carefully folded, went two black dresses shorn of frills and furbelows, camisoles, plain petticoats, nightgowns, under-drawers, one spare black cap, two spare pairs of thick woollen stockings, garters, handkerchiefs, rags for her menstrual courses, a spare pair of black gloves, and a mending kit. Each garment was as sparing in volume as she could make it. After some thought, she put a pair of bedroom slippers enclosed in a bag on top of her nightgowns in case the floor of her room should be cold or dirty. For reading she carried the works of William Shakespeare and the Book of Common Prayer. Her letter of credit was tucked in a pocket she had attached to each of her three dresses, so was always on her person.

  She wore her third black dress, over which she was supposed to wear a cloak, but, despising cloaks as clumsy and inefficient, she had made herself a greatcoat like a man’s. It buttoned down the front, came up to her neck, and down to her knees and wrists. Her bonnet was home-made too; even Hertford’s milliners displayed nothing half so hideous in their windows. It had a small front peak that would not get in her or anybody else’s way, and a spacious crown under which both cap and hair would fit comfortably. Firmly tied beneath her chin with stout ribbons, it would never blow off. On her feet she wore her only footwear, a pair of laced ankle boots with flat heels and no style whatsoever.

  The reticule, she discovered as she waited at the Blue Boar for the northbound coach to arrive, was very heavy—who would ever have believed that nineteen gold guineas could weigh so much? She had drawn twenty from the bank yesterday, but tendered the twentieth at the stage-coach agency for a ticket in stages as far as Grantham. It indicated that she would break her journey at Biggleswade, Huntingdon, Stamford and, finally, Grantham. There she would have to buy another ticket, as she intended to leave the Great North Road.

  The huge conveyance lumbered up at noon, its four light draught horses steaming, its cheap seats on the box and roof so full that the coachman refused to take more outside passengers. While the team was being changed Mary tendered her ticket to Biggleswade, only to be roundly sworn at; she was not on his passenger list.

  “You go only as far as Stevenage,” he growled angrily when she insisted that he honour her reservation. “There be a race meeting at Doncaster.”

  What this had to do with coaches to Grantham Mary did not know (or indeed, why gentlemen would wish to travel so far just to see horses race), but she resigned herself to alighting in Stevenage. In her youth she vaguely remembered that her elder sisters had occasionally travelled by stage or Mail coach, but such had never been her own lot. Nor, she knew from that time, did Jane or Elizabeth take a maid, though sometimes Uncle Gardiner gave them a manservant to guard them while they were on the Mail. Therefore she could see no impropriety in her own unaccompanied journey; she was, after all, quite an elderly spinster, not a beautiful young girl like Jane or Elizabeth at that time.

  When she climbed into the coach cabin she discovered that the coachman had jammed four people on either seat, and that the two elderly gentlemen who flanked her were not chivalrous. They glared at her and refused to make room, but in Mary Bennet they mistook their mark. Neither timid nor afraid, she gave a determined thrust with her bottom that succeeded in driving a wedge between them. Braced as if in a very tight gibbet, she sat bolt upright and stared into the faces of the four passengers opposite. Unfortunately she was facing backward, which made her feel slightly sick, and it was only after some frantic searching that her eyes found a focus—a row of nails on the ceiling. How awful to be crammed cheek by jowl with seven strangers! Especially since not one of them bore a friendly expression or was given to talk. I shall die before I get as far as Stevenage! she thought, then stuck out her chin and settled to the business. I can do anything, anything at all!

  Though the windows were let down, nothing short of a gale would dispel the sour stench of unwashed bodies and dirty clothes. In her fantasies she had gazed with delight out of the windows at the passing countryside, greedy to devour its beauties; now she found that impossible, between the swelling corporations of the gentlemen on either side of her, a huge box on the lap of the dame in the right opposite window, and an equally large parcel on the lap of the youth in the left opposite window. When someone did speak, it was to demand that the windows be shut—no, no, no! After a heated wrangle, the dame demanded a vote on the issue, and windows open won.

  Three hours after leaving the Blue Boar, the coach pulled up in Stevenage. Not anything like as large as Hertford! Knees weak, head aching, Mary was liberated outside the best inn, but upon enquiry was directed to a smaller, meaner establishment half a mile away. A bag in either hand, she commenced to walk before she realised that she should first have ascertained the time of tomorrow’s north-bound coach. The sun was still well up; best turn around and do that now.

  Finally she put her bags down on the floor of a little room in the Pig and Whistle; only then could she avail herself of something that had lurked in her mind for half the journey. Oh, thank God! There was a chamber pot underneath her bed. No need to traipse to an outhouse. Like all women, Mary knew better than to drink copious beverages while she travelled. Even so, iron control was necessary.

  Not perhaps the most auspicious start, she reflected as she poked at greasy stew in a secluded corner of the taproom; the inn had no coffee room and no trays were available. Only her most forbidding expression had kept several tipsy drinkers at bay; not really very hungry, she ate what she could and went to her room, there to find that the Pig and Whistle did not close its taproom doors until well into the early hours. What a day to commence a journey! A Saturday.

  The stage-coach she boarded at seven in the morning took her as far as Big
gleswade, where a party with influence at the coach company in London had booked all its seats onward. The coachman kept his cabin passengers to three on either seat and the noon stop was an hour, time to drink a cup of scalding coffee, use the stinking outhouse, and stretch the legs. The woman in the left opposite corner talked incessantly, which Mary could have borne better had she not found herself the object of remorseless questions—who was she, where was she going, who had died to plunge her into mourning, what a lot of nonsense, to be investigating the plight of the poor! The only way Mary could stem the tide was to pretend to have a fit consisting of jerks and yammers. After that, she sat in peace. The Biggleswade inn was more bearable too, though she had to be up at five to board the stage to Huntingdon, then waited over an hour for it.

  She was miles east of where she wanted to be, but knew that she would have to get to Grantham and a coach depot before she could turn west. Her first two days she had spent in the middle of the backward facing seat, but to her joy she was now luckier; she got a window seat facing forward. To be able to gaze out at the countryside was wonderful. The landscape was lovely, flat fields green with crops, coppices, snatches of forest that the coach trundled through in merciful shade; for May the weather was very warm, every day thus far a fine one. As they passed through an occasional village the children spilled out cheering and waving, apparently never tired of seeing the monstrous vehicle and its labouring horses. Labour the horses did; jammed with passengers, local mail and parcels, freight and luggage, the coach was immensely heavy.

  The roads were shocking, but no one travelling them ever expected any other state. A coachman tried to avoid the worst of the potholes, but grinding along in the ruts was inevitable. Twice they passed carriages tipped into the ditch, and once some fellow in a many-caped greatcoat almost sent them into the ditch as he thundered past in a curricle drawn by four matched greys, grazing the wheel hubs and setting the coachman to cursing. Local carts, wagons and gigs were a nuisance until their drivers realised that if they did not get off the road in a hurry, they would be turned into kindling.