Mary B

by Katherine J. Chen

  “You mustn’t be too angry with me, Mary,” Lizzy said, as though it had all been just a joke, and she tossed the page across the blanket in my direction. I watched, my right temple throbbing, as everyone turned back to their plum pudding and sponge cake, their pigeon pie and bread. The entertainment was over.

  * * *

  —

  AN HOUR LATER, most of the food had been depleted. Lizzy, Mrs. Hurst, the colonel, and Miss Bingley, their bellies filled to brimming, occupied themselves with playing a game of quadrille. Mr. Hurst had fallen asleep, and Darcy had left with his steward, a giant bearded man named Burns, on some matter of a diseased tree which the latter wished to remove.

  “I’m going to take a walk,” I said to no one in particular, which was just as well, as no one responded.

  Perhaps it was all those trips in the colonel’s company, which made the route so familiar, but before long and without meaning to go there at all, I realized that I’d reached the stables. There was then only one stable boy in attendance, a mousy child with stringy arms and legs, and he was napping in a chair with a cap over his face.

  I found Marmalade in her usual enclosure. Though all was by then ended between her master and myself, she still stuck her head out to sniff both my hands.

  “I haven’t got an apple for you today,” I said sadly, and she neighed in sympathy as I unlatched the gate.

  It was foolish what I did, for I knew I had no more claims to her. But I rode Marmalade out to the paddock, and when we’d completed a few wandering circles within the enclosure, I took her into the surrounding fields. Looking out, I wondered how so much land could come to feel as suffocating as Longbourn’s airless drawing room. Was this the extent of the world’s offerings? I asked myself. Was this to be my limited scope of the vast universe?

  I dug my heel into Marmalade’s flanks, and she began to canter.

  “Faster,” I whispered into her ear, and she obeyed.

  The fields soon melted into wind and the sound of my own breathing. From a distance, I saw Pemberley’s blue lake.

  Marmalade had begun to bluster, and I turned her in the direction of the house. I hesitated only a moment before I made her run as she’d never run before, so fast I could no longer feel the ground beneath me. It was the closest I’d ever known to flight and to freedom.

  I saw, several yards away, a low fence which separated the fields from the lawns surrounding the house and also the lake. I remembered that the fence was in view of the picnic. They—the colonel, Miss Bingley, my sister, Mr. and Mrs. Hurst—were sure to be watching, I thought. How glorious it would be to jump it! To make all their mouths drop from the shock of my small feat!

  I goaded Marmalade onwards, though I sensed she was growing tired.

  My decision proved our undoing. Though she cleared the fence, her legs folded beneath her weight upon landing, and she fell. The air soon filled with screams—both animal and woman. I tumbled off her arched back, and my ribs crashed against hard ground.

  For a while, I lay stunned, unable to move. Then I heard my name being called from afar and looked up into the faces of Darcy and his steward.

  “Can you stand?” I made out, though I didn’t know whether it was Darcy or Burns who spoke.

  “I…I think so,” I stammered, still so shaken, I felt hardly any pain.

  “No broken bones as far as I can see,” Burns said as he and Darcy helped me to my feet, and looking up, he added, “though I can’t say the same about the horse.”

  I heard Darcy whisper a few words to his steward, and that man nodded before sprinting back to the house.

  “Oh, Marmalade…” I faltered through my tears, catching sight of the beast, which remained quivering on her side.

  “The front legs are shattered,” Darcy said quietly to me. I felt his hand steady my arm as I wavered. “Damn it, I hope Burns is quick about it,” he muttered.

  By then, the rest of the party had also caught up with us. The colonel proved inconsolable. He fell to his knees and beat the ground with his fists. He wept openly, his fingers stroking the mane of his beloved animal. Had I not known the performance to be genuine, I’d never have believed him capable of such grief, suited, as it was, to some Grecian tragedy rather than a scene in the English countryside. When he’d caught his breath, he turned on me.

  “You bitch!” he roared. “You damn bitch!” This show of anger shocked the others. Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst jumped into each other’s arms, cowering, and even Lizzy stepped discreetly behind Mr. Hurst, who looked as terrified as any one of the women.

  “That’s enough, Fitzwilliam,” Darcy cautioned, still holding on to my arm.

  “She did it on purpose, that bitch!” the colonel bellowed. “Jealous…bitter…” he choked out.

  My incoherent apologies fell on deaf ears. Burns had returned. He was holding a pistol.

  “Shall I do it, sir?”

  “No, I will,” Darcy replied, releasing my arm. The pistol passed hands. “Can you escort the women back to the house?” But Mr. Hurst had already taken his cue to leave and was then shepherding his wife, Lizzy, and Miss Bingley away.

  The colonel’s eyes widened when he saw the gun. “No, Darcy,” he said, still on his knees. I thought he might try to shield her with his own body. “There are other ways.”

  “Go back with the others, Fitzwilliam. You know every minute that passes is agony for her.”

  “No, you don’t understand!” the colonel shrieked. “I’ve read about this. There are slings we can install in her stable for this form of injury.”

  Darcy shook his head. “Go back to the house,” he repeated.

  In the end, Burns was forced to drag the colonel from Marmalade’s side. It made a wretched picture for any onlooker, and though I despised the man, I could not check my own tears.

  When they were far enough away that no intervention could be possible, Darcy knelt beside the horse. He positioned the pistol against a precise spot of her skull, which he measured with his fingers. Then he fired. The body jerked once before going limp. The sound of the shot sent birds into the sky. I gripped my torso, shocks of pain tremoring up and down my spine.

  “It’s done,” he said, standing and weighing the pistol in his hand. His face was damp with perspiration, and he breathed heavily. “You’d better take some brandy when you return.” He didn’t look at me, though I was unable to take my eyes off him.

  “Darcy…” I whispered.

  “Please say nothing of our exchange from yesterday. We needn’t go over it again.” He brushed coldly past me. “I’ll need Burns and a few other men to dispose of the body.”

  I pressed my hand against his arm, momentarily forgetting my own pain. The fall had emboldened me, freed me of my former delusions and misgivings. From the terror and the ensuing chaos, a clear voice had emerged, and it would speak.

  “You asked me yesterday if I loved only Pemberley,” I said quietly. “But I’ve realized since that it is impossible to love only Pemberley. Pemberley is a house. A grand house but only a house. It would be as any other estate in the country, if there were not something that could make me love it, not as a structure of stone and wood, but as though it were flesh and blood. I realize now it is your spirit which makes Pemberley what it is. Your goodness which lends to the grounds its unaffected beauty and noble character. So, I do not love only Pemberley. You see, I couldn’t without also—”

  I stopped at the touch of his hand, which had folded itself over my own. The moment necessitated no more words, and we returned to the house in silence.

  The next day, Colonel Fitzwilliam quietly set off for his family’s estate in a bordering county, accompanied by Miss Bingley, her sister, and Mr. Hurst. His spirits were not long dampened by the loss of his favorite horse, for Darcy gifted him one of his finest geldings. And along with many other things he had won and lost a
t Pemberley, Marmalade was nearly forgotten by the time of his departure.

  Despite being mistress of a great estate, my sister had not entirely given up the industriousness of her youth, and when I met her in the garden a few hours after the colonel had gone, she was expertly felling flowers with a sharp pair of shears.

  “The roses are no good this year,” she declared when she noticed I’d come. “The whole lot has been eaten away by some pest. Look at them.”

  She held one out to me, a shriveled, stunted thing. Though the sight was not unique in its sadness, I shivered.

  I’d just begun to remark on the loveliness of the day when her hands stopped working. She smiled at an unseen object past my shoulder, and I lost the sequence of my thoughts, for the sun had then illuminated the whole of her smooth forehead. It infused her face with warmth and merriment, and for the most fleeting moment, I imagined we were again in the small garden at Longbourn, cutting flowers side by side with the rest of our sisters.

  “Mary,” she said, still gazing past me with cheerful benevolence, “do you remember the game we used to play on the bridge to Meryton?”

  I assured her I did. The game was not really a game, for there were no winners or losers. It involved five very silly girls throwing stones into a shallow stream and making wishes. We were never permitted to tell each other what we had asked for, as to do so would ensure that the wish never come true for as long as we lived.

  I recalled our laughter during those evening walks. Girls’ laughter is a thing of power. It can sound cruel unless you are a part of it. If we ever met someone on the lane, which was itself a rare occurrence, whoever we passed would always smile awkwardly at us, as though he had stumbled unwittingly into the feminine exchange of secrets. But when the game was done, when all five wishes had been made, and Lydia had got over her giggling, we’d lean against the parapet and look out quietly at the sunset over Longbourn. We never laughed on the way back; our hearts were too full of wanting to make room for laughter.

  I remembered wishing for marriage. And later, when wishing only for marriage became too simple and a bore, I wished for a home and a room to sit in where I could play the piano for as long or as short as I wanted to in peace. Also a garden and a small library. Perhaps one day a child.

  Then I realized Lizzy had started talking again. She had picked up the basket and her pair of shears, and she was looking at me in a strange, pitying way, as if I were another one of her roses.

  “Things aren’t so simple now as they were then, are they, Mary?” she asked sadly. “And every wish,” she continued, nearly whispering, “seems to come at a terrible price. I have everything I ever wished for on that bridge, yet I think I shall never be happy again.”

  “Please don’t say such things, Lizzy,” I entreated, attempting to comfort her.

  “Ah, our dear Mary’s platitudes…” The ends of her mouth twitched. “Darcy’s love, too, comes at a terrible price, and I am, regrettably, unwilling to pay for the attainment of it. I have made the decision to live and enjoy my comforts, though they bring me no real happiness, rather than to die loved by my husband in childbirth. Mary, I have come to believe there is nothing more valuable in the world than one’s independence. What I would give to be the Lizzy I once was—the girl who walked miles across muddy fields in her best frock and coat. I had such spirit.”

  “You still do, Lizzy.”

  She shook her head. “Marriage changes everything. Here, I am watched, if not by Mrs. Reynolds, then by some other servant. I cannot hum to myself in a corridor without report of the song reaching the ears of Henderson or the cook. I am expected to receive guests, even guests I care nothing about, and spend hours talking with them about the changing fashions of sleeves and where the best table service can be procured for entertaining. I have to know the right sort of people and address them properly when we meet in society, or else be ridiculed behind my back. There is no one I can be my genuine self with—not even Darcy. I am given jewels and furs of unspeakable worth, not to mention enough money every month to feed five or six large families. The meals I enjoy at Pemberley are virtual banquets. Yet I know now it is all to serve one purpose and one purpose alone—so that I may do my duty and bear my husband as many children as I possibly can. What a stupid woman I must have been to think, to believe, that anyone’s love could be truly unconditional. It is not only Darcy who possesses such expectations of me; it is also his sister, his aunts and uncles, his cousins, and Pemberley’s staff, from the steward to the lowliest kitchen maid. I have decided I am either too weak to go along with it or too intelligent for my own good. I shall admit I’m a poor wife because I am unwilling to give myself to my husband, to lie with him any longer, and this because I choose to live and to exercise whatever autonomy I have left over mindless duty and obedience. If the honor of womanhood demands that I value my existence and my well-being no more than a dumb sow, then I shall be happy to reject its terms.”

  With the toe of my slipper, I pushed away a decapitated rose.

  “I didn’t realize how hard it was for you,” I said softly. There was much I wished to tell my sister—that I sympathized, that I finally understood. I, too, had flagrantly broken the rules, and I knew well the sensation of being confined in both body and spirit, of having nowhere to go. She was not alone in this; nor did she have to live her life thinking no one of her acquaintance comprehended her feelings.

  But before I could speak, my sister had recommenced her execution of the flowers. “What a pity the roses are ruined this year,” she said over the snipping of the shears. “I wanted so to have a large bouquet of them on the table in the front hall. That would have made such a lovely sight.”

  I didn’t know how to reply, and perhaps she did not need my answer, for she went on: “Perhaps it is time….” I heard her say, as I stared at the shriveled roses at my feet. “I think, Mary…don’t you think it is time you went back to Longbourn? That it is time for you to go?”

  * * *

  —

  FOR FOUR MONTHS, I’d been a guest at Pemberley. On my last evening in that great house, I stood with Darcy in our usual spot in the library. With less skill than tenderness his hands had covered the “monstrous thing,” my novel, in layers of brown paper and string. The book was now a parcel, and we its grim spectators.

  Earlier, I had told him I was leaving, and he’d listened calmly to my every word. An onlooker might have said he appeared detached from the conversation, even indifferent. But they would have missed the change in his face, so subtle it almost went unseen. In that moment, the reflection of the light grew larger in his eyes, until their watery surface filled entirely with the motion of the rippling flames he stared into. I blinked, and when I saw him again, all trace of the emotion I’d witnessed had gone. His expression had been restored to its practiced respectability.

  “Well,” he’d said, clearing his throat. “You’ll just have to come back.” Then, he’d smoothed the roll of brown paper, which he had brought to wrap the book, and cut a length of it in one stroke.

  But now the packing of the novel was finished, and there remained nothing left with which to busy ourselves. For a while, we lingered in the purgatory of our thoughts. Then, to lighten the mood, I proposed that I should write a sequel titled Leonora’s Adventures: Chronicles of a Tragic and Deeply Unhappy Wife, detailing the tumultuous domestic adventures of Leonora, Wilhelm, and their several offspring.

  “It is, to me, quite logical that neither of them would be able to bear the peace and tranquility for long,” I said, “given how thrilling their lives were before.”

  “You may very well be right,” Darcy replied, laughing.

  Those unacquainted with Darcy might have found it difficult to imagine that such a gentleman could laugh, so serious and poised was his manner, even when undertaking the most ordinary tasks. He seemed born to sit at the head of a table. His handwriting, each cu
rlicue and dot a picture of excellence, could have emblazoned the signs of London’s best stores. But when he laughed, he had a way of tipping his head backwards, as though the angle of the mouth and throat must be positioned precisely for the creation of mirth. It was his laughter I thought of and which moved me—an unpretentious sound, which gave itself, like a hard-won reward, to its listener. I hoped never to forget its music.

  The next morning, I left Pemberley. I left its hills and pleasant walks, its blue lake, its abandoned rooms of ghostly furniture. I left this place, where I had lived and loved fully, knowing in my heart I would never return to it again.

  One might say that tragedy followed me from Pemberley to Longbourn, that it sat, a malevolent and invisible stranger, beside me in the dark carriage and slipped like a wisp of cold wind through the door of my home right before Mrs. Hill was able to shut it out. Once it was inside, it began to work its mischief, diffusing like a toxic fragrance into the air of our rooms and seeping into the grain of our walls, settling as an unseen mist over our furniture and curling into our beds. It gathered strength in undusted corners until it had power enough to seize our home and to uproot it.

  Less than two weeks after my return, Papa died. A swift, violent stroke carried him away, though this last blow had been preceded by several episodes of numbness in his limbs. He remained to the very end the stalwart and cheerful intellectual. When he was too weak to sit downstairs in the library, he remained in bed, and Kitty and I took turns bringing him a few offerings on obscure and only modestly important subjects, from which he’d select a volume for us to read. And we’d read to him for as many hours as he liked before he grew tired of our voices or fell asleep.

  The day before my father died, he complained of a sharp pain in his right leg. This was already the third day he had been bedridden, and as I read to him, he unexpectedly touched my arm and stopped me.

  “Mary,” he said. The corners of his mouth involuntarily trembled as he spoke. “Mary, be a good girl, and put aside that awful poetry for a moment. I’d like to speak to you about a letter your mother and I received a few days ago from Lizzy.”