Mary B

by Katherine J. Chen

  “You act as though I’ve been gone a year, when I’ve been away only two and a half weeks,” I replied more harshly than I’d intended. I didn’t want this kind of suffocating attachment after we were married; if we were always in each other’s company, it would be impossible to get anything done, and Wilhelm had now been stuck for over a month praying at the same altar for Leonora’s recovery. “You’re being selfish, Fitzwilliam. My sister is dead, and you’re being unforgivably selfish.”

  To this, he sulked like a boy who had just been told to stand in a corner and think about what he’d done wrong. I began to play with his gold signet ring, which I twisted up to the top of his pinkie before coaxing it back down again.

  “Are you not done moping yet?” I asked after a suitable interval and tried the ring on my own finger, where it hung loose and unconvincing. Another mysterious breeze made us both shiver, and we clung to each other, falling back against the strange-smelling wood once more. When we’d finished, we fell asleep, and I dreamed that all the ghosts we’d ever created had come out of the walls and out of the insides of drawers and cabinets and cupboards to stand around us and watch over our bodies, still wet and alive with the fresh imprint of each other’s touch.

  But that was earlier in the day. Now I was standing with my obligatory cup of punch quite alone on the fringes of a party that had no use for my presence. Every face I met was unknown to me, and I found myself half-hoping that Maria Lucas would materialize out of thin air to rescue me from my isolation. In the center of the room, drifting just beside the decorative fronds, the lush purple feather dipped and nodded, its movement reminding me of a flaccid cock. I smiled and considered, in my boredom, what objects in my surroundings I could count to pass the time, while eagerly restocking my plate with grapes.

  A familiar voice interrupted my reverie—it was Darcy’s, and he was tapping his glass rapidly with the end of a spoon. “Could I have everyone’s attention, please?” he said, and heads obediently turned; they always turned for Darcy. “Could I have everyone’s attention, please?” he repeated. Lizzy hovered near his arm, though she did not look at him, and I sensed that very little had changed between them since I’d left.

  “I’m so pleased,” Darcy continued, “to be able to use this small party of ours to make an announcement, one which I know will bring much happiness to the several friends who are here with us today and who have for many years been closely acquainted with the persons whom this announcement concerns. I’ve known both Colonel Fitzwilliam and Miss Caroline Bingley separately for a very long time, and you can imagine how genuinely delighted I was when they informed me, no less than a week ago, of their engagement. A couple more in love and more suited to traversing together the long and fruitful road of marriage I’m sure you could not find in the whole of England. As such, please join me, my friends, in raising your glass to this man and this woman—to Colonel Fitzwilliam and Miss Bingley!”

  The room transformed into a floating pond of punch glasses. “To Colonel Fitzwilliam and Miss Bingley!” the guests cheered, and the happy couple mouthed their thanks. I gazed at my lover, who eagerly downed his drink before taking another from a passing server, while the tall feather waved cheerfully at the crowd. Then shoulders, arms, and bodies in glistening finery joined together and barricaded my view of conjugal joy and romantic triumph.

  * * *

  —

  THE MORNING I’D left with the Gardiners for London, I was still awake when the sky had begun to turn bluish black. In one of the abandoned rooms, we’d stood together touching shoulders, peering into the obscurity from which the golden ball of the sun must astoundingly rise, an anchor raised from the depths of a murky lake. It was so dark we couldn’t make out the shape of the hedges or the silhouettes of the trees, though we stood in front of a window. When neither of us had said anything for a while, he’d pulled out an apple and fed me a slice on the flat of his pocket knife.

  “I wish you wouldn’t go,” he’d said a little theatrically.

  “I think I have to,” I replied more sensibly than I perhaps should have, but I wanted to compensate for his overdoing his part.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself while you’re gone. What am I going to do with myself?”

  I smiled mischievously. “Oh, I can think of a lot of things you could do with yourself while I’m gone.”

  “Do be serious, Mary.”

  “Just don’t terrorize the scullery maids. And don’t start bringing them here, into our rooms.”

  “What do you take me for?”

  “My sweet Marmalade, of course!” Even in the total absence of light, I could reach out and cup his chin perfectly in my hand. I gave it a small, tender shake.

  “I wish we could live in these rooms!” he cried. “I wish we could spend the whole day just riding Marmalade and sitting under the trees and fishing fat trout in Darcy’s lake. Imagine—a whole wing of Pemberley to ourselves!”

  “My dear Fitzwilliam, I would give you exactly a week before you started to hate it.”

  “I say I wouldn’t. I’d have you, and that would mean I’d have everything.”

  I felt his face turn in my direction, burning with earnest desire. I was glad he couldn’t see me blush.

  “No,” I replied with conviction. “I’m quite sure you would hate it. No society. No horses to race. No cards on which to stake more money than you can afford. I know for my sake, you pretend to dislike your relatives and to hate your friends, but it’s no good; I can see right through you. You move in a glittering and frivolous world that’s all niceties and miniature dramas and beef sirloin.”

  “Beef sirloin, Mary?”

  “Yes!” I said, growing excited. “Beef sirloin! And pheasant shooting! And the London season! And…and conversations that culminate in nothing with women who take classes in coquetry and wit.” Here, to my own surprise, I began to cry hysterically, for we were the tragic lovers after all—me, penniless and plain; he, dependent and a spendthrift.

  “But I love you,” he said calmly, and now it was his turn to be sensible. Another slice of apple floated at the end of the knife to the surface of my mouth, and its sweetness mingled with the salt of my tears. “I promise that I love you much more than any amount of beef sirloin money can buy, even if I had a thousand pounds,” which was the most he could manage but which perhaps was enough. For a few hours more, we stayed together, not returning to our proper rooms until, like a Grecian myth, the rising of the sun whisked me away in a carriage, and I left him, the poor boy, to face the temptations of this glittering and frivolous world alone.

  For days afterwards, I could not leave my room. Most hours I slept, and the trays of food which Bess and Mrs. Reynolds brought up to me were just as heavy for them to carry downstairs again. What little time I was conscious, I spent sitting up in bed, repeating to myself over and over, “Mary Bennet, you are a fool. Mary Bennet, you are an idiot. Mary Bennet, a more superior dupe than you never lived and breathed in this whole world. I hate you, Mary Bennet.” Engrossed as I was in passionate self-loathing, I shed astonishingly few tears. My brain was too occupied with rebuilding a precise sequence of events, with sorting through every detail of our numerous exchanges. What had been real, I asked myself, ruminating upon each dog and horse story he had ever told me. What had been deceit? And what had been merely delusion?

  Believing I was ill, Lizzy’s visits were frequent. She often found me asleep, but on one occasion, I stirred at the sound of someone entering.

  “How are you feeling?” I heard her ask from the foot of the bed.

  “A headache,” I offered.

  “I see you haven’t touched your food,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Be that as it may, I shall stay and keep you company, whether you like it or not. I have just come up from sitting with Caroline Bingley, Mrs. Hurst, and the colonel.”


  When I made no reply, she continued: “They are both tiresome women, but I am proved right in one thing at least. We’d been talking of which rooms in Pemberley want refurbishing when Miss Bingley suddenly asked, ‘Well, why is not Mary here with us? I haven’t seen her for days. Where could she have disappeared to?’ Mrs. Hurst remarked that she didn’t know, but the colonel replied, in a very cavalier way, ‘Have you checked the library? And if she is still nowhere to be found, it is entirely possible she has turned into a book.’ And this sent Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst roaring with laughter.”

  “ ‘Turned into a book’?” I repeated.

  “Yes, ‘turned into a book,’ he said. Well, I am glad he is engaged to Caroline Bingley.”

  I detected no cruelty or triumph in Lizzy’s voice, only the nagging good intention pervasive among mothers, aunts, and sisters.

  I sat up. “ ‘Turned into a book,’ ” I whispered incredulously, weighing the words on my tongue.

  “You have to admit, though—it’s an amusing notion, even if it is ungallant of him,” Lizzy giggled.

  That evening, I ate my whole dinner of roasted gammon and potatoes, while Bess bore wide-eyed witness to my hunger.

  “Is there dessert tonight?” I asked.

  “Yes, miss, but I didn’t think you’d want any.”

  I wiped my mouth. “Nonsense, Bess. What is the dessert?”

  “Cook’s specialty, miss—caraway cake.”

  “I’m very fond of seed cake. Will you bring me some?”

  We each had one large slice in my room, which we ate with our hands, and I listened as she chattered about the other servants.

  “Annie and Emily have raised such a fuss about the cleaning,” she said through mouthfuls of cake. “They feel they’re being taken advantage of—you know, overworked.”

  “And are they?”

  Bess began to count off the rooms on her fingers: “Yours, Mr. and Mrs. Hurst’s, Miss Bingley’s, the colonel’s, Darcy’s, Lizzy’s—”

  I stopped her. “Darcy’s and Lizzy’s?” I asked. “Still?”

  Bess nodded. “Oh yes, meals have become so awkward now, according to Henderson. ‘Stilted,’ that was the word he used. And he even said thank goodness for Miss Bingley and the colonel being here, as otherwise there might not be any conversation to be had at all during dinner.”

  Poor Lizzy, I thought, taking a bite of cake. Poor Darcy, too, I considered, finishing the rest of my slice, and we sat in silence for a moment before Bess launched into her next bit of news. When she’d finished her gossip and gone, I went downstairs to the library. There, sitting at my usual desk and chair, I cut a new pen and began to write.

  When Leonora awoke from her month-long coma, she was aware of a change. She could feel it in the air and in the things she touched and in her own movement, and it was an extraordinary sensation. She had lived for so long in fear and in pain, and there hadn’t yet existed a chapter in the long and frightfully unhappy course of her adventures whereby at least one part of her body hadn’t been made to endure some inconceivable agony that she was at first suspicious of her feelings and checked all the usual places where evil was in the habit of lurking, which was behind the curtains, underneath the bed, and inside her spectacular wardrobe (she was, we should remember, a queen of a moderately desirable kingdom).

  Finding nothing in her private chamber, she crept to the window and unlatched it, first just enough to see a sliver of sky and a few shrubs, but then a providential wind blew the shutters to the ends of their hinges, and the entire nation opened up to her like a panoramic landscape. As she gazed over the pastures and the woodlands, the tidy villages with their stone churches, the fluffy white flowers that seemed to dot the hills and that were actually great herds of sheep milling about in the grass, she remembered her father, Albert the Good King, and what he had told her when she was only a young and rather spoiled princess, which was that nothing can ever be so wrong or terrible that someday it will not change for the better and also that nothing can ever stay so wonderful that something will not one day spoil it. She realized, too, that her infancy had been the happiest time of her young life, for the very reason that she remembered nothing about it. What she did remember, and clearly, were the periods of starvation in fetid cells, the procession of kidnappings, the sticky taste of rat’s blood trickling down her parched throat, which no amount of water or wine could ever wash away. Every member of her family to whom she had once turned to for affection had betrayed her; the grand duke had admitted to poisoning her father, and her half sister, Agnes, shortly before her death, had confessed to amassing a secret following of several hundred traitors who’d hoped to secure for her, by any means necessary, the Danish throne.

  But today something was different. Today, she felt strangely, peculiarly in control of herself, and even the heavens seemed to corroborate this feeling. It was glorious weather in Denmark, and whatever birds they have in that part of the world were singing in the hollows of trees and hedges. A bath was prepared for her, but the water did not scald her skin, and the soap was just that: soap. The dress which fitted snugly around her tiny waist did not poison her; her shoes no longer pinched her feet. A great something had been lifted from her person, and she was wary of it.

  When she fell asleep that night, after a warm and perfectly ordinary meal of chicken broth and fish, she considered that this day of peace and relative quiet might be to prepare her for something of truly horrific and ghastly proportions in the immediate future. But the next day passed equally quietly. And the following day, when she’d risen late and consumed an adequate breakfast in bed, she even had the urge to complain to one of her handmaids that her toast was dry. It was also on this day that she felt well enough to finally meet Wilhelm, who, for over a month, had remained diligently on his knees in silent prayer. Their union was a most pathetic one, with many “tearful cries” and “loving whispers” and rendered more heartbreaking for the fact that Wilhelm had temporarily lost the use of his legs from prolonged kneeling and so was forced to crawl with only his exceptionally strong arms to Leonora’s feet in order to ascertain if she was real or an illusion sent by the Devil to haunt him. At her feet, he begged for her hand in marriage, and she gave it with great joy.

  Though she continued to look behind doors and in dark corners for assassins and traitors who wished to ransom her weight in gold, her days of peace pleasantly and surprisingly persisted, and she married Wilhelm as soon as he could walk again, in a lavish but tasteful ceremony which joined their two kingdoms together as eternal and powerful allies. She also had children—three healthy, rosy-cheeked babes—and the royal family lived in comfort and relative harmony until the very end of their prosperous reign.

  * * *

  —

  “THIS IS EXCELLENT,” Darcy said, laying the final page aside.

  “I’m glad you like it. You see, I gave her the happy ending you wanted.”

  “And which I hope you wanted for her, too,” he added gently.

  I shrugged. “I must admit to being glad it’s over. Sixty-seven chapters! What a monstrous thing. Look at how enormous it is sitting there looking at us, and us looking at it.”

  “I’m going to be sending that monstrous thing, as you put it, to Egerton’s in London,” Darcy said.

  “Oh, he’s not going to publish my work!” I cried, terrified at the thought. “Please don’t send it out of mere politeness.”

  “But I think it deserves to have a chance, and I think people will find Leonora exciting. Can’t you picture someone like Mrs. Reynolds or, better yet, one of her maids picking up this book and becoming so riveted, she loses a whole night’s sleep just wondering what’s going to happen next to our unlucky Danish heroine?”

  “Provided the maid can read, yes.”

  “Then it’s settled! This week I’ll send the manuscript, and if we don’t hear from Egerton
in, say, three weeks’ time, I’ll visit him personally in London and knock down his door! We’re friends, you know, so I’m permitted to behave as outrageously as I like.”

  At the thought of Darcy having to resort to violence, I made a face. “Wait, please,” I said, and Darcy, too, made a face, as if to say, Well, what is it? What more could you ask for? “I know you’re being very kind doing all this for me when you don’t have to, but I have just the one stipulation, if you do send my book to your friend.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “My name—I don’t want to use my full name, if that’s all right.”

  “You mean you’d prefer to be anonymous?”

  “No, not that—just I’d rather no one knew I wrote it. Perhaps an abbreviation of my name instead. Something simple. Something that won’t attract attention away from the book and make whoever’s reading it say what a bored and unimaginative fool I am, while rolling their eyes and preparing a bad review. I don’t want people cursing me when I can’t hear them.”

  “Ah, you mean a pen name. If it’s privacy you desire, you can do nothing better than to give up being a woman and pretend to be a man instead,” Darcy said, laughing and looking several years younger.

  “No, that’s silly. You’re not taking this very seriously, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, I once knew a Miss Cassandra Knight who wrote poetry and later a Miss Abigail Breckenridge who sang and played the harp even better than Georgiana,” Darcy mused. “Her grandmother was a Lady Susanna Hobbes, and their housekeeper, I remember, was named Mrs. Marianne Price. Perhaps we could take one of their names and switch them around to make something original like Mrs. Cassandra Breckenridge or Lady Marianne Knight. That sounds very elegant. What do you think?”

  When I didn’t answer, he suggested a few more “elegant” names, which I disregarded. “No, no…Oh! I have it—Mary B!” I cried, and the name instantly dispelled all the others. “Yes, it is modest and obscure enough that no one will ever be able to figure it out.”