Kitty Bennet's Diary (Pride and Prejudice Chronicles)

K
ITTY
B
ENNET’S
D
IARY

P
RIDE AND
P
REJUDICE
Chronicles
Volume 3

ANNA ELLIOTT

with illustrations by Laura Masselos

a W
ILTON
P
RESS
book

K
ITTY
B
ENNET’S
D
IARY

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
[email protected]
.

  W
ILTON
P
RESS

v.130522012027

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
.

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!

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

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 are 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.