The Unexpected Miss Bennet (31 page)

‘I do not mind,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind that I like to sit in the evenings and read. Perhaps we can do that together?’

‘Don’t like reading,’ he said, crestfallen. He soon brightened. ‘Oh! But you could read to me! I like a good story or a rousing bit of poetry. I might like to find out how that book ended, the one you read to me before. I can’t get it out of my head.’ He took her hand. ‘I could teach you to ride! It’s easy enough. You’ll like it!’

‘I would learn to ride,’ she said, after a taking a deep breath to steel herself. Horses were so . . . large.

‘Capital! It’s decided!’

He gave her a kiss and Mary felt a stirring of nerves such as she had never really felt before. When he pulled back he looked worried again. ‘Are you sure? I wouldn’t want you to marry me only because you feel sorry for a fellow who isn’t clever.’

‘I don’t feel sorry for you. I only worry that you feel sorry for me.’

He looked at her blankly and she plunged on. ‘I am not pretty, and I am not much in society, and I am afraid that I am not very accomplished.’

He laughed. ‘Listen to the pair of us. We’re both trying to find reasons why we shouldn’t love one another. I think that’s better than trying to find reasons why we should. I think you are quite pretty, even if other girls look prettier, and I don’t care about style. As for accomplished, I’ve heard you play the piano and you always have your nose in a book, and that is accomplished enough for me. You don’t laugh at me because I can’t tie a cravat or I wear the wrong jacket. I’m a plain fellow myself.’

He was not plain. He wasn’t as handsome as Bingley, whose good humour dressed him as becomingly as his best clothes, or as Darcy, whose air of consequence did the same, but he was a good, solid man none the less.

‘I think perhaps we set each other off well,’ Mary said. Her nerves set themselves dancing again. Was she really engaged?

‘A matched pair,’ he agreed. ‘May I kiss you again?’

She supposed she should say no, but she didn’t.

‘And now,’ he said, when they broke their kiss after she had lost all sense of time. ‘I suppose I should ask your father for your hand?’

‘Yes, I think that’s how it’s done.’ But she wanted him to wait so that she could savour the moment. She, Mary Bennet, was engaged to be married. Like Lizzy and Jane! And Lydia. The thought of Lydia cooled her excitement a little. She didn’t think she had been duped, but what if Mr Aikens were more like Mr Wickham, and less like her other brothers-in-law? Her awareness of the present moment came back, but this time it was tinged with a little uncertainty.

Perhaps some of her thoughts showed on her face, because Mr Aikens looked worried.

‘Maybe you should see the house first, before you decide. I haven’t done much with it. I am more likely to be out and about than indoors. It might be a bit cluttered. And perhaps not quite as neatly kept as you might be used to. I think there might be an old harness in the drawing room.’

Mary considered his words, not to keep in a state of anxiety, though that was its effect, but to answer him the best she knew how.

‘I don’t think,’ she said, in the face of worry, ‘that the state of your house is a matter for concern. Rather, it is this. I don’t know whether you remember some of the things Lady Catherine said that day?’

He shrugged. ‘I didn’t care for anything she said and it has all slipped right out of my mind.’

Mary took a deep breath. ‘She mentioned my youngest sister. Lydia.’ She told him of Lydia’s dreadful marriage and what it had brought down upon the family. ‘I should have told you before you proposed, so that you could take it into consideration before making your offer. I would understand if you chose to withdraw . . .’ She faltered a little.

He was quiet for a moment. ‘I can’t fathom it,’ he said at last. ‘What has it to do with you?
You
haven’t eloped with some rogue.’

‘You don’t mind?’ Mary said. What kind of man was she to marry, that he didn’t care about her fallen sister? She could see Mr Aikens greeting Mr Wickham and Lydia with his open-hearted acceptance and no hint of disgust and condescension. Would it not do the ne’er-do-wells good? She suddenly wanted to see it, more than anything.

‘I think, Mr Aikens, that you are a good man, though we don’t really know each other well enough to speak for our characters. For that, I think, our engagement should be quiet so that we might become better acquainted. And even if you don’t mind my sister and her bad husband, your mother might.’ Most mothers did mind such things.

He laughed and bent his head for another kiss but she evaded him sternly with a hand on his rumpled cravat. ‘My mother will be so happy that I have married that she would accept a hundred bad brothers-in-law. But if you wish for a long, quiet engagement, I can only agree.’ He spoke with a mixture of hope and disappointment. ‘You see, you are cleverer than I am. I think of something and there! I must have it. But you think about the consequences.’

‘Mr Aikens, you are trying to make me feel sorry for you,’ Mary said severely. He looked sheepish. ‘I do assure you, I quite like you. But I am by nature cautious and I cannot just take this leap as if I were Hyperion, sir.’

He laughed. ‘No, you have a quieter temperament. Much more peaceful a ri – Er, well, yes. We will have to practise going in harness together.’

‘So you will have to be patient, sir. And it may be that you find out something about me that you don’t like.’

‘I doubt it,’ he said, but he was cheerful again. ‘But I will give way in this. I have a feeling it won’t be the last time.’

Many a loving dictator has let power go to her head. Fordyce warned against it.
‘How unamiable, and how miserable, must we pronounce the passion for ungentle command, for petulant dominion, so shamefully indulged by some women as soon as they find a man in their power!’

Mary saw the danger from the start and vowed to avoid it. She had several marriages to study and would choose the best examples from each. Her father and mother; Lizzy and Darcy; Jane and Bingley; Charlotte and Mr Collins. Each one had strengths, even that of Charlotte and Mr Collins.

He took her hand again. ‘So. A quiet engagement. I will talk to your father and we will get to know each other.’

‘WELL, MRS BENNET,’ said Mr Bennet later, after his permission was asked for and given. ‘Congratulations are in order. I do not think there is a mother in all of England who has managed to marry off so many daughters in so short a space of time. Kitty had better watch out.’

‘Oh Mr Bennet, what foolery! For you know
I
had nothing to do with Mary! I cannot hope but that he is a suitable husband for her, for she has gone and done it herself. I do not understand her. First she stops playing the piano and then she visits Rosings and is thrown out of the house, and now she is engaged! Whatever will she do next? I don’t like the unexpected, and she has become quite unexpected.’

‘I imagine that she has become unexpected to herself as well,’ Mr Bennet said. ‘But what do you think of your newest future son-in-law? Where does he fall – somewhere lower than Darcy, I think. But is he above Bingley or below him? I can’t work it out. I expect I will have placed him once I get to know him better.’

‘It doesn’t matter what I think of him, for Mary has gone off and chosen him though we have only met him once. But he doesn’t seem very like Mary at all.’

‘He doesn’t read, or sermonize, if that’s what you mean. I think that is why they will do well together. She will read and he will listen and if they are both wise they will find a place where they can meet.’

Since such a thing had not happened for Mr and Mrs Bennet, he could be forgiven for letting a note of wistfulness enter his voice. Mrs Bennet did not notice, for she had the last word.

‘Mark my words, Mr Bennet, Mary will do something even more unexpected before the week is out. I only hope for my poor nerves’ sake that we can discover it beforehand.’

T
HE DAY KITTY came home, with extra trunks and hatboxes, and wearing a new bonnet and gown, Longbourn resounded with her mother’s joyful greetings and Kitty’s excited retelling of her adventures in London. Jane had implored her little sister not tell their mother about the tigers and hoped for the best. Kitty kept her promise at first, mostly because she was too full of her own tales to tell about her London trip. She and her mother had an animated reunion, and when Mary came in from walking with Mr Aikens and gave her sister a kiss, their mother said,

‘And what do you think, Kitty, but that Mary has some news? Tell her, Mary!’

Kitty looked up from her trunks, her eyes bright. It would be hard to say that she noticed something different in her sister, but since their mother had never before said anything about Mary in such a way, she was interested for a moment.

‘Well, Mary?’ she said. ‘Have you ever seen such a bonnet?’ She held it up. It was a ridiculous creation.

‘Never, and it’s astonishing that you bought such a thing. I’m engaged, Kitty.’

‘I didn’t buy it. Bingley did, and you should have seen Caroline’s face—’ Kitty stopped talking though her mouth stayed open. She looked from Mary to Mrs Bennet. Mrs Bennet had an eager smile on her face, mixed with encouragement and some remaining bewilderment.

‘Now, Kitty, you should give your sister a kiss! Aren’t you happy for her?’

‘Mary, engaged!’ Kitty said, instead of obeying her mother. ‘Engaged! What for?’

Mary glared at her sister.

‘Kitty!’ Their mother cried. ‘Don’t be a silly girl. She is engaged to be married. He is an unusual young man, rather energetic, I should think, but Mr Darcy thinks highly of him, and so your father thinks we all should.’

‘I do think highly of him, and my opinion is the only one that matters,’ Mary said. ‘No need to kiss me, Kitty. That’s an ugly bonnet, and you will look like a mushroom should you wear it.’

She left them to their astonishment. The last thing that she heard as she walked out was a gasp from Kitty and her mother’s irritable remark, ‘Oh Kitty! She’s right, it’s a ridiculous bonnet.’

The peacefulness at Longbourn with just Mary and her mother and father at home was now enlivened with Kitty’s presence and the house was almost as animated as when all five daughters had lived there. Kitty did not take long in telling their mother that Wickham had visited in London, and Mrs Bennet lost no time at all in telling Mr Bennet.

Mrs Bennet faltered when she saw the look on his face.

‘Mr Bennet,’ she said softly, ‘I know that Lydia has done much wrong, but can’t we forgive her – just for a little? It has not hurt our girls so very much after all, has it? Even Mary is engaged now, and soon all of these sons-in-law will outweigh the one bad one.’

‘Mrs Bennet, I have not your optimism. Mr Wickham is so very bad, it would take twice as many good sons to make up for him, and unfortunately our daughters are only allotted a husband apiece. He did not come to London just to leave his card at Bingley’s. He came to ask for more money. He thinks nothing of bleeding us dry, and for that we cannot forgive Lydia, no, not even just a little.’

His wife did not remonstrate. Instead, Mrs Bennet sat quietly in the chair across from her husband, and he could see how old and strained she was. When she spoke he could hardly hear her.

‘I miss her so,’ she said. ‘My youngest, my dearest, my Lydia.’

And for a moment so did Mr Bennet. He remembered her, his youngest. They had been so hopeful that she would be a boy, and save them all from the entail. And he had no doubt that they had doted so on her because of that disappointment. But she – such a fat, greedy, bossy little thing, even then! All her sisters had cosseted her, and it had done her no good at all. The house had never been peaceful, not since Lydia’s arrival.

‘Do not think about Lydia, Mrs Bennet,’ he said. ‘She is not your daughter any longer.’