Mary B

by Katherine J. Chen

  Even the most disciplined of souls will bend when there is enough wretchedness before them, and in this, Mr. Darcy proved no exception. His expression grew stilted and embarrassed. Fresh tears that had grown too heavy for my eyes wetted my face, and he silently passed me his own handkerchief.

  “Perhaps I was too harsh….” he suggested politely.

  “No, Mr. Darcy,” I replied. “The fault is my own, and I must acknowledge it. I have behaved…” I could not finish the sentence. “Will you please convey my apologies to Mr. Bingley and his sisters….I admit I haven’t the courage for such an endeavor….”

  “Unless my friend should broach the matter first, you have my assurance I won’t bring up the incident again,” he said quietly, folding the handkerchief I’d returned to him.

  I thanked him, expecting that he would take his leave. Instead, he paused, and I thought he even smiled a little at what he was about to tell me.

  “I thought you’d like to know, Miss Bennet, that I took your advice. To make amends for the offense I’d caused, I asked Miss Elizabeth to dance with me.”

  I had just strength enough to venture a light chuckle. “Oh, did you, Mr. Darcy? I am glad of it.”

  With more restraint than the comment warranted, he added, “Your sister is a fine dancer.”

  “She is,” I conceded, and nodding to me, with the handkerchief still in his hands, he left.

  How charming my sister is, I thought, my tears renewing their supply. Excepting Mr. Bingley, who was assuredly Jane’s, how all the men of the world seemed to throw themselves at Lizzy’s feet.

  As soon as he had gone, I heard someone clear his throat above me, and I turned to regard the servant.

  Rubbing his hand over his red nose, he said, “Ya goo ahn a’ead, miss. Daan’t worry neemore abaht the carriage. I’ll clean oop the mess.”

  “You’re very kind,” I said, wiping away the last of my tears. The servant nodded, and I went back up the thirty or so steps to the front entrance, through to the hall, and into the drawing room, where I resumed my seat at my family’s table in time to catch the last minute of Caroline Bingley’s tarantella before the audience exploded with cheers and applause.

  Sometime during the carriage ride back to Longbourn, I must have fallen asleep, as I had a dream, and this dream was more vivid and lifelike than anything I could recall in recent memory. In it, I’m sitting alone beside Mr. Collins, and the carriage lurches and sways even more awfully than my wine-filled stomach. He’s just finished covering his legs with a blanket, and he says, without looking at me, “Tomorrow, Mary, I’m going to do it. I’m sorry, but I have to.” And I know at once what he’s talking about. I feel my whole face shrivel into a tight, concentrated circle as I struggle not to cry. I begin to plead with him. “You have a choice,” I say. “You can choose, Mr. Collins, to be happy. You can choose me.” But the horses have stopped, and the carriage has rolled to a halt in front of the door. He pulls the blanket off his legs and turns away. “I’m afraid you don’t understand,” he says in a voice that grows increasingly distant from where I’m sitting, “and I certainly wouldn’t expect you to. I’ve thought a lot about it, and I have to go through with it tomorrow. I’m sorry, Mary.”

  Lizzy later told me that when Papa lifted my sleeping body from the carriage, my face was streaked with tears. “You were crying, Mary,” she said to me a few days later, after a great many other things had occurred. “You were probably asleep, if you can’t remember. But you were crying all the same, as though something terrible were happening to you. And for all the shaking we did, none of us could get you to wake up, until Papa told us to leave you be. You couldn’t stop.”

  I awoke late the next morning with a headache the likes of which I’d never encountered before and discovered myself still dressed in the gown I’d worn the previous evening, complete with the feather stuck lopsided in my hair. This I plucked out wearily before changing into a clean frock and stumbling uneasily downstairs, gripping the banister with white knuckles. On the landing, I ran into Sarah, who was on her way up to our rooms with a large pile of clean laundry. I expected to receive from her a summons to attend Papa at once in his study, but she only informed me I’d missed breakfast and that if I went to the kitchen, there were some cold rolls and dry toast to be had, as well as leftover coffee and chocolate, which Mrs. Hill could heat up for me. I was grateful to Sarah for telling me this, though I couldn’t make out why she did so in a voice that would have easily filled up an amphitheater.

  “Mind you go straight to the kitchen and not into the breakfast room, Miss Mary,” she said, and I thought I detected the beginnings of a smile tugging the upturned ends of her mouth. Another quarter of an inch, and she’d be in danger of laughing.

  “Why shouldn’t I go into the breakfast room?” I asked.

  The smile stretched but did not break. “You might go and see for yourself,” she answered cryptically. “But stay outside the door, mind, or Mrs. Bennet will have a fit.”

  We parted on the landing, and I continued downstairs. The door of the breakfast room was shut, and I drifted towards it until my right ear settled comfortably over the wood. The speaker was Mr. Collins.

  “My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances—like myself—to set the example of matrimony in his parish….”

  For one crazed moment, I considered breaking into the room and stopping the proceedings. “No, sir,” I might say, pointing an accusatory finger at our houseguest. “You love me, and I have the tokens with which to prove your affection!” Yes, it was true: I still possessed his letter and the sheets of music he had copied, though these alone evidenced nothing. He had admitted to feeling a kinship with me, but goodwill is a species very different from love. And how much more of a fool could I really suffer myself to appear?

  As his overtures to Lizzy continued, I crept away. I wanted to get out of the house, to leave Longbourn behind and run eternally towards that horizon I’d always envisioned. But even this proved difficult; thoughts materialized like ghosts and lashed my brain. You kissed him. He didn’t kiss you; you kissed him. You pursued him. Shameless. Disgraceful. Degrading. No better than your younger sisters.

  On my way, I passed Mama strolling up and down the length of the vestibule. She was in brilliant spirits and stopped me in order to divulge the pleasant and excited state of her nerves.

  “Mary, my dear, come and sit by me,” she said distractedly, guiding me towards a pair of chairs. “These are undoubtedly happy times for our family but no less trying for someone whose health is as frail as mine. I hope you didn’t venture into the breakfast room on your way down? You must still be exhausted from all your singing and playing last night.”

  I shook my head, and Mama covered my folded hands with her own. She released a short, rather unconvincing sigh and added, “It is always an unhappy thing for a mother to be separated from her daughters when the time comes for them to be married, but we mustn’t allow such gloomy thoughts to overtake an otherwise most fortunate event. We must all of us be grateful for this stroke of good luck, so that the Lord may see fit to bestow our family with additional blessings, for there are still the rest of you to be dealt with after Lizzy goes away.”

  Feigning ignorance, I turned to Mama and asked, “Where is Lizzy going?”

  “Why, don’t you know,” Mama cried, “at this very moment, Mr. Collins is in the breakfast room making an offer of marriage to your sister! And she’ll accept him, of course.”

  “You seem very confident of that, Mama.”

  “I would never speak to Lizzy again if she didn’t,” Mama said with passionate intensity, squeezing my hands. “And that goes for you, too, Mary, if you were ever to refuse a perfectly respectable offer of marriage that was in your best interest to accept.”

  As I couldn’t think how to reply, I leaned in t
o peck my mother’s cheek, generating a surprised but satisfied “Oh!” Her skin was warm and a little moist with sweat from all the fretting she’d done while waiting for the young lovers to emerge. The natural light which filled the hall caught the ends of the tiny hairs that had materialized, seemingly overnight, over Mama’s upper lip and around her chin. She looked older when she was quiet. Each of her eyes cast the shadow of a half-moon, and I told her she must try to sleep more now that the excitement leading up to the Netherfield ball was finally over.

  “There won’t be any rest for me,” Mama sighed wearily, “not until every one of my girls is married, which I daresay includes even you, Mary. Something to keep in mind the next time we go to a ball and I’ve arranged an introduction….”

  “Poor Mama,” I replied in earnest and stroked the back of her hand as she absentmindedly murmured her assent.

  Somewhere in the house, a door was flung open, and Mama jumped to her feet.

  “That may be Lizzy or Mr. Collins,” she shrieked, running off in the direction of the breakfast room, and I quickly left the house before all descended into chaos, as I knew it would.

  When I returned to Longbourn an hour later, the house was eerily quiet. While the servants remained discreetly belowstairs, the members of my family had folded themselves behind closed doors, like black-feathered birds that sleep in the hidden depths of barns and attics. Lilting sobs haunted their way down the hall from Mama’s room, where my younger sisters took turns comforting our inconsolable mother. I looked in on Jane as I passed and spotted her and Lizzy sitting together on the bed, making, between their drooping brows and folded hands, a very pretty picture of impoverished maidenhood. Will no one pick these elegant flowers, though they grow in coarse and untidy fields?

  All was still, as the house and its occupants considered the tiny drama which had unfolded that morning; the high-spirited comedy with its many strange and diverting characters had turned decidedly tragic, and not tragic in the way which is glorious and cathartic, with poisoned goblets, stilettos, and heroes lying soaked in their own blood. No, the tragedy that had visited Longbourn this morning was quiet and inglorious. My own embarrassing display at the Netherfield ball might never have occurred, for how trivial it now seemed. A decision had been made, and our childhood home, our estate of several generations, our crumbling but endearing little shelter with its peeling wallpaper and soiled carpets and furniture ruined by undrawn curtains and excessive sunshine—all of these things felt suddenly lost to us, as though we’d realized for the first time that the world we had always lived in was perched on a bank of sand, its erosion concurrent with the remaining years of my father’s life.

  “Mary, if you will stand outside the door like that, you may as well come in,” Jane called out.

  The first thing I did when I went in was touch Lizzy’s shoulder. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you,” I said. I might have added, “I don’t blame you, Lizzy. Nobody could ever blame you for refusing Mr. Collins,” with appropriate sisterly ferocity, or “We kissed, you know, that day I went to go fetch the shoe-roses. In the rain, while kneeling together in the mud.” How might I have summoned the courage to divulge the latter? But I remained silent, and Lizzy, her own eyes puffy and waterlogged, only patted my wrist to show she appreciated my gesture.

  “It’s fine, Mary,” she said. “I did dread it happening, but one just doesn’t take it seriously until it does. And even now, it seems a very big joke—laughable really, though I know it’s unkind to say so, especially to you. I know you liked him. He was your friend, and you seemed rather devoted to him in your funny way.”

  “No, not really,” I said, and the reply, which had been uttered hastily, rang hollow to all our ears. Flushing, I looked out Jane’s window. The sky was bright enough to blind one’s eyes, and I stared and stared until my vision penetrated the clouds and all the colors mixed and thawed into a brilliant white that stretched before me like a passage between this world and the next. My face burned. I couldn’t remember a time when I had felt more ashamed.

  I have heard Papa say that unrequited love, far from being a necessary evil, can actually do a man good. In recounting his youthful pursuits, he’d remarked that occasional rejection could work wonders in building out a man’s character. “I thought of it as medicine,” he cheerfully told us one evening after dinner. “To a gentleman who wishes to marry, it takes little more than a pretty face saying ‘No’ for him to conjure all the strength and means within his power in order to win her.” But a woman could not do the same. For a woman to chase a man was considered an insult to her character. A woman must be silent until she is approached. She can never be too guarded with her feelings. No wonder unrequited love is so hard on our sex, I thought, for it cannot empower or embolden us, and she who is rejected must alone suffer the humiliation for having indulged in dreams which were never her right to entertain.

  Two uncomfortable days later, on Mr. Collins’s last evening at Longbourn, I discovered a letter propped up by a stack of books on my writing table. Recognizing the effeminate hand as belonging to my cousin, I tore it open and read the following note:

  Dearest Cousin Mary,

  As the time draws near for my departure (on this visit at least), I found that I could not leave for Hunsford without thanking you personally for your friendship and hospitality during my stay. (We will say nothing of why my visit has only been generally pleasant and not exhaustively so.) I have faithfully promised your mother that the subject of the unhappy and disappointing events which occurred on Wednesday will never broach my lips again so long as I live, though I allude to them now only to tell you, knowing your charitable nature will share in my triumph, that things are far from being as hopeless as they seem. My trials, in fact, have borne fruit, and this fruit, as I shall momentarily reveal to you, is sweeter for having been realized by a circuitous route. You will pardon me for being unusually candid in this matter, but it is a serious one—on top of which, I do not believe in bestowing gratitude and credit where none are due. Therefore, I will refrain from expressing any thanks to your sister for my present condition of felicity, as I am confident that she deserves none and may yet regret the decision she has made. But we shall say no more on this awkward subject out of respect for your good parents and yourself. Suffice it to say that I am a happier man for the acceptance I have received from quite another—and, I daresay, equally deserving and elegant—hand.

  I must entreat you to keep both the news of my engagement and the identity of the lady to yourself for the present time, though it won’t be long that you shall have to bear the burden of this secrecy. I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that Sir William Lucas will pay a visit to Longbourn tomorrow to deliver the news—yes, Sir William Lucas, and your intelligence will not, I hope, fail you now in determining by this vital clue the name of my bride-to-be. I am, by her parents’ enthusiastic consent, engaged to Miss Charlotte Lucas, and I have every faith that Lady Catherine and Miss Anne de Bourgh will welcome her with open arms into our small but distinguished community at Hunsford. Even now, I am astonished by the blessing of finding so much beauty and grace in a single woman; I cannot think it fair that I am the sole recipient of all the joy to be had in the world. And as a close friend to my dear Charlotte, you would undoubtedly be the first to agree that she is in every way possible perfectly suited for the role which awaits her and will run my modest household admirably well, making, as Lady Catherine tastefully put it to me in the days before I set off for Longbourn, “a small income go a good way.”

  Destiny would prevent us being brother and sister by marriage, though you can be certain in your heart that you are no less dear to me as a friend than if you were my younger sister by blood. I hope therefore that you may be as happy for me in my choice of marriage as I am for myself. Trust that I shall always remember the many kindnesses you paid me during my visit to Longbourn—these are memories that Time itself is powe
rless to efface—and that I speak in earnest when I wish you equal joy in finding a partner as worthy of your innumerable virtues and talents as I have done.

  Respectfully yours,

  Mr. William Collins

  Sometimes the pattern of life is circular, and one ends up exactly where one has started. The sky was still dark when Mr. Collins set off in a noisy curricle for Hunsford. In the drawing room, a great fire blazed in the hearth and melted the last fragments of “The Last Rose of Summer” in its many rippling tongues. Soon the sound of the horses gave way to the sound of my thoughts. I thought of shoe-roses and mud. I remembered two bodies drenched in rain, water tingling down their necks like the wandering trace of a lover’s finger. I remembered a kiss impetuously stolen, and I promised the ghostly reflection which stared solemnly at me from the other side of the window that I would never fall in love again.

  Within the space of a year, three of my sisters married. First, Lydia eloped with Mr. George Wickham. They’d been living for some time in London, in cramped and not very hygienic conditions, when my uncle Gardiner at last discovered them. Lydia insisted that she did not mind the squalor of their lodgings, for even hardships became the sweetest comforts in the presence of her beloved, and the bed was fortunately of prodigious dimensions.

  Jane, also, I’m happy to say, won her prize in the end. Under the influence of his pernicious sisters, Mr. Bingley had cowardly absconded to London, leaving poor Jane to assume, for a torturous period of time, his disinterest. But finding no reward in the city greater than her love, he eventually returned to Netherfield Park and proposed to Jane during a nondescript evening of supper and cards at Longbourn. His offer of marriage, comprising in equal parts steadfast affection and five thousand pounds per annum, was speedily accepted amid cries directed heavenward that we’d been saved—thank you, O sweet and merciful Lord.