Kitty Bennet's Diary (Pride and Prejudice Chronicles)

by Elliott, Anna

  KITTY BENNET’S

  DIARY

  PRIDE AND PREJUDICE Chronicles

  Volume 3

  ANNA ELLIOTT

  with illustrations by Laura Masselos

  a WILTON PRESS book

  KITTY BENNET’S DIARY

  Pride and Prejudice Chronicles

  Volume 3

  Text © 2013 Anna Elliott

  Illus. © 2013 Laura Masselos

  All rights reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s (or Jane Austen’s) imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, please visit www.AnnaElliottBooks.com.

  Anna Elliott can be contacted at ae@annaelliottbooks.com.

  WILTON PRESS

  v.130522012027

  About

  A story of hope and second chances in Regency London.

  Kitty Bennet is finished with love and romance. She lost her one-time fiancé in the Battle of Waterloo, and in the battle’s aftermath saw more ugliness and suffering than she could bear. Staying with her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner in London for the winter, Kitty throws her energies into finding a husband for her hopelessly bookish sister Mary, and discovering whatever mysterious trouble is worrying her sister Jane. But then she meets Mr. Lancelot Dalton, a handsome clergyman with a shadowed past—and discovers that though she may be finished with love, love may not be at all finished with her.

  Kitty Bennet’s Diary is Volume 3 of the Pride and Prejudice Chronicles. It can be read alone, but refers to events from Volumes 1 and 2.

  A Note on 19th-Century Language and Customs

  In-law relationships during Jane Austen’s time were given more weight than they typically are today. Thus in the original Pride and Prejudice, Caroline Bingley taunts Mr. Darcy that if he should marry Elizabeth, Mr. and Mrs. Phillips will be his “uncle and aunt,” and Wickham, after his marriage to Lydia, refers to her Uncle and Aunt Gardiner as, “our uncle and aunt.” In referring to a brother-in-law or sister-in-law, the in-law was often dropped, and a sibling by marriage would have been referred to simply as sister or brother. For example, Elizabeth tells Wickham (with whom she surely did not actually wish a closer relationship), “Come, Mr. Wickham, we are brother and sister, you know. Do not let us quarrel about the past.” And Lady Catherine de Bourgh objects that Elizabeth marrying Darcy would make Wickham his brother as well.

  I have included family trees in an appendix to clarify the relationships in Kitty Bennet’s Diary, although please note that the family trees include the relationships and names that I have invented in the first two books of the Pride and Prejudice Chronicles (e.g., Georgiana Darcy’s marriage to Colonel Fitzwilliam, whom I have named Edward), as well as Jane Austen’s originals. For anyone wishing to see a family tree based on Jane Austen’s text alone, there is an excellent one at pemberley.com.

  Kitty Bennet’s Diary uses primarily British conventions for spelling and punctuation (e.g., travelling rather than the American traveling, realise rather than realize, jewellery rather than jewelry, practice and licence ending in -ce as nouns and -se as verbs, etc.). British convention also differs from American in terms of when it is appropriate to include punctuation within quotation marks, and the appropriate usage for single and double quotation marks. However, the earliest copies of Pride and Prejudice followed the current American convention for single/double quotes, so that is what I have used for Kitty’s diary.

  Thank you for purchasing Kitty Bennet’s Diary. Happy reading!

  Prologue

  Letter from Elizabeth Darcy to Georgiana Fitzwilliam:

  Tuesday 21 November 1815

  Dearest Georgiana,

  I have heard from my mother that Kitty is to depart Longbourn and spend the winter in London with our Aunt and Uncle Gardiner. This arrangement may be for the best—from what my mother wrote, I do not think that she had any better success with Kitty than I did when Kitty returned last summer from her time in Brussels.

  Not that that is any particular surprise. She is my mother, and I love her—but all the same, I cannot imagine confiding in her anything of a personal nature. And I have not recently returned from witnessing a war, as Kitty has.

  That is really why I am writing this. You know I would never wish to stir up painful memories for you—but you were there with Kitty in Brussels during the battle at Waterloo. You are the only one of our family who truly knows what Kitty saw and experienced there.

  She will not speak of it to me at all, though I know she has nightmares about it sometimes. While she was staying with us at Pemberley, I would hear her crying at night, but she always said in the morning that she could not remember what she had dreamt.

  I feel dreadfully guilty, in a way. A year ago, I wished nothing more for Kitty than that she would grow out of behaving like such a giggling, flighty, flirtatious child—but now it seems she has gone to the opposite extreme. It is as though something is broken inside her. She never giggles any more—almost the only time I even saw her smile all the while she was staying with us was when she would play with baby James.

  You wrote to me this past summer telling me the facts of what had happened at Waterloo: Kitty had broken off her engagement to Captain John Ayres—on account of her having become infatuated with Lord Henry Carmichael. But then she met Captain Ayres on the eve of battle, and he asked whether there was not yet a chance of matters being mended between them. Kitty told him yes—she could hardly say anything else, since he was about to go off to war. And the very next day, John Ayres was killed in the battle.

  Not that Kitty has confided in me. You wrote to me, though—and I agree—that Kitty was kind to John Ayres, but she did not really love him. It is not that she is so very heartbroken over his death even now, but rather that she cannot forgive herself for the way she treated him.

  And I do not know how to help her at all.

  You and Edward will be in London this winter, as well. Can I ask that you try to talk with Kitty, to do what you can for her? Whatever her past mistakes, she does truly have a good heart—in addition to being my sister.

  Thank you. I feel better just for having written all this out to you.

  All my love to you and Edward both, and I remain,

  Your loving sister,

  Elizabeth Darcy

  Wednesday 20 December 1815

  I am going to find my sister Mary a husband. I have decided: I will see Mary wedded to a nice, eligible, and if possible handsome young man within the next year if it kills me. Which to be honest, given Mary’s past history, seems entirely probable.

  It is strange: I would never have thought Mary cared one way or the other about attracting male admirers, much less a husband. I did not think she cared very much for anything—except proving how very much cleverer and more accomplished she is than anyone else.

  But tonight—

  Well, I suppose I ought to recount it all from the beginning.

  We attended Lady Dorwich’s ball tonight, so that we were very late in getting to bed. And then—I suppose it can only have been an hour or two after I had fallen asleep—I woke with my heart pounding from the nightmare that had come upon me.

  It was the usual nightmare—the one of Waterloo—as horrible now as it was when the dreams first started up last summer. But all this is beside the point. What I really meant to write was that after I woke, I heard Mary crying in the bed next to mine. Since we are staying with my Aunt and Uncle Gardiner in their London home, we a
re obliged to share a room.

  I sat up—certain I must be dreaming still, because I cannot recall ever having heard Mary cry since she was six years old and I was five, and she fell off the piano bench and cut her head on the coal scuttle.

  She was crying tonight, though. She was huddled under the blankets, sobbing softly into her pillow.

  I lay quiet, uncertain of what to do. It is not as though Mary and I have ever been especially close, despite the nearness of our ages. Sharing a room with her these last weeks has occasionally made me contemplate … well, not actual fratricide—or whatever the equivalent for sisters is; Latin has never exactly been my strong point. I have felt, however, that if I have to spend one more day listening to Mary make weird gargling sounds in her throat first thing at dawn every morning—she read somewhere or other that it strengthens a weak singing voice—I shall be tempted to catch several dozen live toads and put them in her bed.

  Except that there are no live toads to be had in London in January.

  The whole point, though, of my sharing a room with Mary is that it is a kind of penance. And the unpleasant truth that I have recently discovered about penances is that they are practically never the kind of act that comes easily. So I pushed back the covers and got out of bed—despite the cold floorboards and the fact that my feet were bare—and sat down on the edge of Mary’s mattress.

  “Mary? Is something wrong?” I asked.

  Mary did not answer, she only lay absolutely still, the covers pulled over her head. And after a second’s pause, she let out the most unconvincing snore I have ever heard—half snort, half suppressed sob.

  “Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Mary, I know you’re not asleep,” I said. “You wouldn’t fool baby Susanna.” Baby Susanna is our youngest Gardiner cousin. “You may as well sit up and tell me what the trouble is.”

  Mary lay a second more without moving—and then she sat up in an explosion of blankets and sheets and glowered at me from under the ruffles of the old-fashioned nightcap she always wears.

  Mary is only twenty-two, a year older than I am, but even at night she dresses as though she were in constant rehearsal for the role of elderly maiden aunt.

  Mary’s eyes were red and puffy, but she lifted her chin. “If you must know, I am crying because not one single gentleman asked me to dance tonight.”

  I was taken aback. “I thought you said that, in your opinion, dancing was a frivolity suited only to small and meagre minds,” I said.

  Which sounds as though I were being spiteful, but I have also discovered that it is extremely wearing to force myself to be sweet all of the time. And in the wake of the nightmare, I was not feeling especially sweet.

  Besides which, it is also quite true that Mary said exactly that—she really does talk that way. Constantly.

  Mary sniffed and looked balefully at me. “And so it is. But it would have been nice to at least be asked.” She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her nightdress. “I talked to one young man for at least a quarter of an hour during supper. Mr. Porter. He was eating a very large helping of the roast duck, and I told him that modern medical opinion holds that a diet of too many rich meats can lead to gout in later age. I even outlined for him what a scientific paper I read recently gave as a recipe for a healthful diet—brown bread … raw onions … a great many carrots. But he still did not ask me to dance afterwards.”

  “Imagine that,” I said.

  Mary wiped her nose again and glared at me. “I knew you would not understand, Kitty. You had men asking you for dances all night long. And you did not accept even one of them.”

  That is also true. It is very ironic, really. Since I have sworn off men entirely, I am besieged by invitations at every ball or assembly we attend. Tonight I started telling overly persistent gentlemen that I had a mother in the madhouse, a father in prison, and felt myself coming down with a touch of bubonic plague. And they only thought I was being charmingly witty; I was still refusing invitations to dance throughout the entire evening.

  Apparently the secret to attracting male attention is to cultivate an air of unattainability. If only I had known that a year ago.

  Mary does not know the full story of why I have sworn off men and dancing, so I suppose her glare was in some way justified. But it did not last long. Her face crumpled after a moment, and she started to cry again.

  “I am never going to have anyone fall in love with me.” She spoke between sobs. “No one will ever write poetry about me. Or try to kiss me. I shall never get married. I shall never have a house and a husband and babies of my own.”

  I stared at her, thinking about how it is perfectly possible not to know your own sister at all. I admit the thought of anyone writing poetry about Mary strains even my imagination.

  Actually, what strains my imagination still more is to picture Mary accepting a poem written in her honour—without being tempted to write up an answering critique of the metre and rhyme.

  And Mary as a mother? The mind—or at least my mind—boggles.

  Though I will admit that Mary is very good with baby Susanna. In Susanna’s company, Mary forgets to be serious-minded and full of conceit with her own cleverness. She will even make ridiculous faces to get Susanna to utter one of her fat, delicious baby chuckles. But I had never imagined before tonight that Mary might want a family of her own.

  She is, however, my sister, and why should she not have a husband and children if she wants them?

  The London society Season will not, of course, officially begin until after Easter—but there are still balls and parties aplenty. Since there is no purpose in attending them for myself, I might as well dedicate my energies to seeing that Mary takes some benefit from it all.

  Mary fell asleep soon after that last outburst, but—since I would rather not fall back to sleep in any case—I have been lying awake, formulating plans and going over lists of possible young men in my mind and determining that getting Mary wedded will be my good deed for the New Year.

  Do present good deeds make up for past wrong ones? It would be nice to be able to believe it, but I cannot imagine that life works that way.

  Tuesday 2 January 1816

  There are five of us Bennet sisters—which fact always makes strangers sigh and comment about our poor mother, burdened with the task of getting five daughters married off, without even the benefit of decent dowries for us.

  But while we were growing up, it always seemed to me that each of us had her assigned role in the family. Jane was the oldest, and the most beautiful. Then came Elizabeth—Lizzy—who was always the most charming and witty. And then Mary.

  I suppose I cannot entirely blame Mary for turning herself into such an appalling blue-stocking, because she spent her entire childhood hearing what a shame it was that she was not as pretty as her older sisters. It is no wonder, really, that she started trying to distinguish herself as the most bookish and intelligent one of us.

  I am next in age after Mary, and then Lydia comes two years after me, the youngest of us all. Lydia was always the most spirited and vivacious one. Which left me the only Bennet sister without any distinguishing characteristic. I could not be the prettiest or the wittiest or the cleverest or even the most bouncing and lively. I do like to draw—but only little comical sketches. I have no real artistic aspirations.

  Which makes me … what? The boring sister? The one without any special talents—except possibly the ability to make terrible choices with her life?

  This is turning into a very whinging and self-pitying entry. And another of my recent discoveries is that there is no fun whatsoever in feeling sorry for yourself when all you keep coming back to is that everything from start to finish has been your own fault.

  Besides, what I really meant to do when I started out writing was to set down how Mary and I came to be the only two of the five Bennet sisters who are unmarried, still.

  Jane and Elizabeth married extremely well, much to my mother’s delight. Jane is married to Mr. Charles Bingley, who is no
t only handsome and rich, but also agreeable and kind—and madly in love with Jane, even though they have been married now for nearly three years and have one daughter, Amelia, and another baby expected quite soon.

  Lizzy married Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy—who is even richer than Charles. He always struck me as very proud and disagreeable, but Lizzy seems to actually love him. And he loves her, too. I have stayed with them at Pemberley, Mr. Darcy’s estate, and I have seen the way he looks at Lizzy. Mr. Darcy—he may be my brother-in-law, but I still cannot bring myself to call him Fitzwilliam—may be stiff and proud, but he would walk to the ends of the earth just to see Lizzy smile.

  And Lydia—

  Lydia was always the closest to me, all the time we were growing up. Lizzy and Jane were always perfectly nice to me. But I was so much younger that I was always a baby to them, and they had their own secrets and games that I was never a part of.

  No one could possibly make a special confidante of Mary, which left me and Lydia to play together when we were small and then be confidantes when we grew up.

  Even though Lydia was the younger, she was always the leader. I wanted to be just like her—fearless and bold, with scads of admirers to flirt with.

  Strange. Thinking about myself then is like looking through the telescope the wrong way round; that Kitty Bennet seems so distant, now. But it is quite true. Even when Lydia created a scandal by running away with George Wickham, I admired her. At least she had done something instead of simply sitting on the sidelines of all the assemblies and balls like the rest of us, waiting for some gentleman to overlook our lack of fortune and save us from becoming old maids.

  It is only in the last year that I have seen exactly where all Lydia’s vivaciousness has got her: married to a man who is a lout and a drunkard—and a coward, as well. They have to live in France because Wickham deserted from the army at the Battle of Waterloo and now cannot come home. The only time Lydia writes to any of us is to ask for money and to complain that French society is so very dull and stultifying compared to home—which really means that she and Wickham have not enough funds for her to cut any kind of a figure in the social scene.