Kitty Bennet's Diary (Pride and Prejudice Chronicles) (17 page)

“I had wanted to have a fortune-telling booth, as well,” Miss Dalton said with a sigh.  “You know—have someone dress up in a gypsy’s costume and offer to read tea leaves and tell people’s futures if they crossed her palm with silver.  It would be a perfect scheme for raising extra money, I think.  But I cannot find anyone to play the part of the gypsy.”

It is odd—for the last days, ever since encountering Mrs. Hurst at Vauxhall, I have been wracking my brains in an effort to think of some way of forcing her to give Jane’s necklace back to her.  And I have come up with absolutely nothing in the way of feasible ideas.  But as soon as Miss Dalton uttered those words, an entire plan sprung into my mind.  Complete in every detail.

Almost before I knew the words had left my mouth, I heard myself say,  “I will do it.”

Miss Dalton blinked at me in surprise.  “That is very obliging of you, Miss Bennet.”  She looked at me curiously.  “But may I ask why—”

I wavered momentarily.  But it seemed as though my scheme might be more likely to succeed if I committed as few sins as possible in the planning of it.  Besides, I truly did not wish to lie to Miss Dalton; I liked her too much for that.

I drew in a breath.  Telling myself that the worst Miss Dalton could do was be shocked and refuse my offer.

I said—

No, on second thought, I will not write down my entire scheme for the undoing of Louisa Hurst.  If it succeeds, I will write down a full account.  But in case it is a spectacular failure, I will at least spare myself the necessity of ripping these pages out of the diary and burning them.

Speaking quickly, I related to Miss Dalton the whole history of Jane’s necklace and the wager made over the card game.  And then I moved on to outline the plan that had just come into my head.

I was fully prepared for Miss Dalton to in fact
be
utterly shocked and refuse to let me come anywhere near the fete.  But when I had done, she clapped her hands, her dark eyes crinkled up at the corners with mirth.  “Oh, famous!”  She put her hand to her mouth, trying to suppress a laugh—but one escaped anyway.  “You will be doing me—and the children’s hospital—a very kind service, Miss Bennet.  But I confess that I would have let you take the role of gypsy for the sake of this scheme alone.”  Then she stopped laughing and said,  “I
knew
I should like you, from everything Lance has told me.” 

That made me stop short.  But before I had time—or for that matter the nerve—to ask what precisely her brother had said about me, we were interrupted.  Aunt Gardiner and Mr. Dalton had evidently finished their conversation, and Mr. Dalton had stood up to take his leave.

Miss Dalton squeezed my hand as she bid me good-bye and said, still looking as though she wanted to laugh, “I shall look forward to seeing you Wednesday, then, Miss Bennet.  It was a great pleasure to meet you.”

My aunt, in bidding Mr. Dalton good-bye, said, “Do give my regards to your mother, Lance.  And apologise to her that I have not yet gone to see her since she has been in town.”

The words seemed—to my ears, at least, and I assume Aunt Gardiner’s as well—harmless enough.  But both Mr. Dalton and his sister went still.

And then Miss Dalton rushed to fill the moment of strained silence that had descended, saying swiftly, “Of course I will tell Mama.  She … she goes out very seldom these days.  But if you were to call at the house she might—”  She gave her brother a quick, anxious-looking glance before returning her gaze to Aunt Gardiner.  “That is, I am sure she would be delighted to see you, if she is at home.”

Aunt Gardiner was too polite to mention the contradiction—that if their mother seldom went out, then calling at her residence could hardly fail to find her at home.  She only repeated her good wishes, and the Daltons took their leave.

I asked Aunt Gardiner when they had gone whether she knew what the trouble had been about, but she only shook her head and frowned.  “No, I’ve no idea.  I had heard that their mother took Percival’s death very hard indeed.  He was always the favourite son, I remember, when he was a boy.  I suppose perhaps she is still too much taken by her grief to pay or receive calls.”

Rose came up to find me this morning—wide eyed and fairly breathless with awe at having so august a personage in the house—to say that Lord Henry Carmichael was downstairs in the drawing room and asking to speak with me.

I went down at once, fuming—a fresh volley of threats and imprecations and general insults ready on my tongue.  Because I assumed that he had asked to see Miss Bennet—meaning Mary—and that Rose had made a mistake in thinking he had asked for me.

As well as needing practice in how to answer the door, she also sometimes forgets the distinction between ‘Miss Bennet’ and ‘Miss Kitty Bennet’. 

But I had entered the drawing room and got no further than saying, in an icy tone, “Lord Henry, my sister is not at home—” when he held up a hand to stop me.

“I
know
your cursed sister is not at home!  I’ve been waiting on the cursed street outside in my carriage for nearly two cursed hours waiting for her to leave, so that I might come in and speak with you!”

My eyes widened in surprise—and I looked at him more closely.  Noticing for the first time that he seemed to be in an advanced state of vexation.  He was sober, for once.  Or mostly so.  But his face was flushed and his fair hair was rumpled, as though he had been tugging his hands through it.

I raised my eyebrows, keeping well back from him.  He seemed, from his lack of consciousness, to recall the basics of our conversation, but to have no memory of his drunken attempts at softening my opinion of him.  But neither did I wish to come within his grasp again.

“I was under the impression that I had made my position perfectly clear.  I wish you to stop seeing my sister.  If you do not—”

“I am
trying
to stop seeing your sister!” Lord Henry burst out.  He let out an explosive breath of air, running both hands through his hair again.  “Miss Bennet, I have done exactly as you asked.  I have called off the bet.  I have made no efforts whatever to contact your sister.  The trouble is that she has no wish to stop seeing
me
.  She comes jumping out at me from behind trees when I go riding in the park.  She darts out at me from doorways when I am walking to my club.  I declare that it is getting so that I would not be at all surprised to find her nestling in the soap dish the next time I take a bath!”

He sounded so thoroughly exasperated that I very nearly laughed.  But in truth, it was no laughing matter—not at all.  No respectable lady ventures to walk down St. James’s Street—which I assume is where Lord Henry’s club is located; most fashionable gentlemen’s clubs are.  But—or so I have heard—a great number of less-than-respectable ladies do frequently walk there.

If Mary persisted in her doggedly determined pursuit, she might very easily come to harm at the hands of a man who mistook her for one of those latter kind.  And it would be entirely Lord Henry’s fault.

All at once I was angry—boilingly so.  “Well, and did it never occur to you before you made your disgusting little wager that it might have less-than-desirable consequences?”  I clenched my hands.  “You cannot simply go through life toying with … with other people’s affections.  Treating other people’s lives as though they were mere playing pieces in a game designed solely for your own private amusement!”

Lord Henry looked at me.  And then abruptly, he frowned.  “Wait a moment.  I know you, do I not?”

I forced myself to draw a ragged breath.  “We have had this conversation before.  I told you.  We met in Ostend last summer.”

Lord Henry frowned, shaking his head in apparent puzzlement.  “No, that’s not it.”  He looked at me again, brow still furrowed in an effort of recollection.  “I should have sworn—”

Of course this was the very last path down which I wanted his memory to wander.  Besides which, my throat was feeling uncomfortably tight, and I knew that I should never, ever forgive myself if I were to burst into tears in front of Lord Henry, of all men.

“Just get out,” I snapped.  “I will deal with my sister. 
You
keep away from her.  Because if you do not, my original … warning still stands.  I will go to your aunt, and you will abruptly find yourself in possession of a slighted and abandoned wife and a dead baby son.”

That was an hour ago.  My hands have finally stopped shaking enough to allow me to write all this down, but I still have no idea exactly how I am to go about persuading Mary into giving up Lord Henry.  And yet at the same time sparing her a humiliation from which she might never recover.

Mary must, I think, have been born under a lucky star.  She has been continuing to sneak about and see Lord Henry—I know she has, however much she makes up glib stories of having been invited to go shopping or out to take tea with Mrs. Hurst and Miranda Pettigrew.  But she has so far managed entirely to avoid arousing the suspicions of our aunt and uncle.

In large part, of course, that is because this is a busy time of year for my uncle, and he leaves for his warehouse early in the morning and often does not return until quite late in the evening.  And poor Aunt Gardiner has taken a feverish cold in the last days and has been sick in bed—which leaves Mary entirely free to generally dog Lord Henry’s every footstep.

I have been debating with myself about what to do.  Whether to tell my aunt and uncle, I mean.  So far I have not.  I hate to cause Aunt and Uncle Gardiner worry, when they have been so kind to both Mary and to me.  But besides that, if I
did
tell them, what would they do?  Very likely send Mary home to our parents—or try to.  I am not at all sure that Mary would not simply run away if she were threatened with being banished from London and Lord Henry’s vicinity. 

Knowing Mary as I have for our twenty years of being sisters, that sounds almost comical.  But it is not comical at all to think of what could happen to Mary—with her combination of arrogance, pigheadedness, and current complete lack of common sense—if she were turned loose in the city without protection.

At any rate, I determined to try to do what I might on my own before I resorted to alerting my uncle and aunt to Mary’s danger.   Yesterday I decided that I would simply not let Mary out of my sight.  So when she announced her intention of meeting Mrs. Hurst and Miranda for a walk, I said that a walk in the park sounded delightful, and that I would join her, if I might.

Short of admitting that she was in fact lying in her teeth about her actual plans, Mary could hardly say no.  I brought Susanna along, thoroughly bundled up and tucked into her little wicker carriage, and off we went.  We must have walked five miles up and down the paths in the park while she pretended to look for Miranda and Mrs. Hurst and made unconvincing noises of displeasure, wondering where they might be and how they could have been so rude as not to meet us after all.

Finally, Mary sank down on a bench, pleading that she had a blister on her heel.  She asked me to go and buy a newspaper from one of the paperboys in the park, so that she might use one of the sheets to fold up for a pad to put into her shoe.  I cannot believe I was so naive as to fall for the ruse.  In my defence, my feet were feeling thoroughly blistered, as well—and Susanna was beginning to fuss—and I had been listening to Mary pontificate about everything from operatic musical theory to the new experiments in electricity for over an hour.

In any case, though I would swear I was not gone for more than three minutes, by the time I had bought a paper and pushed Susanna’s carriage back to the bench, Mary was not only gone, but completely out of sight on any of the surrounding paths—as though she had vanished into thin air.

I would almost admire her skill at dissembling and evading pursuit, if her success were not so thoroughly vexing.

She came tripping blithely into our bedroom yesterday evening, just before suppertime, and widened her eyes and asked,
Whatever do you mean?
when I demanded to know where she had gone.

Since I could not strangle her or push her into the clothes press and lock her inside, I determined that I needed a new plan.  Mary’s trickery aside, I cannot play the part of her determined and unwelcome shadow every day.  With Aunt Gardiner ill, I am needed to look after Susanna, and I can scarcely drag her all over London in pursuit of my infatuated sister.  Besides which, I have Jane and her dilemma to worry over as well.

It was actually the thought of Jane that put the idea for my new and revised scheme into my head, and I decided that I had better implement it at once.  Last night, I sent an urgent message to Jane and Georgiana, by way of my uncle’s manservant, and this morning one of Georgiana and Edward’s servants brought the hoped-for reply: a letter from Georgiana, saying how very worried about Jane she had become, how Jane was not eating and scarcely sleeping, and seemed to grow more ill and pale every day.  And that as much as Georgiana wished to help and look after Jane all she could, her time was very much occupied just now in making all the necessary preparations for her and Edward’s coming departure overseas.

We were at the breakfast table when the letter arrived.  Mary and I were alone, since my aunt was still abed and my uncle had already left.  I skimmed through the note—silently approving of Georgiana’s skill at crafting a convincing portrait of Jane’s illness and her own fear.  And then I made a small sound of annoyance and cast the letter carelessly aside, letting it drop to the table midway between my plate and Mary’s.

Mary had been lost in some happy daydream—presumably of Lord Henry.  For a moment, I thought I was going to have to retrieve the letter and drop it again with another, louder exclamation of annoyance if I wanted to attract her notice.  But then she blinked and asked, “Is something wrong?”

This, of course, was the difficult part of the scheme.

I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Oh, nothing very much.  It seems Jane is being a bit tiresome, that is all, and Georgiana has got herself into a fuss about it.”