The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet. Colleen McCullough

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      “The attack of influenza that carried off both de Bourghs so quickly after Colonel Fitzwilliam’s marriage to Anne! Or should I say, General Fitzwilliam? He fell heir to Rosings and that huge fortune in time to be respectably widowed before someone else took dear Georgiana’s fancy.”

      “Huh!” Mary emitted a snort of amusement. “Georgiana had no intention of settling for anyone except the Colonel — or the General, if you prefer. Though I cannot approve of unions between first cousins. Their eldest girl is so stigmatised that they have had to shut her away,” said Mary.

      “The Bladon blood, dear. Lady Catherine, Lady Anne, and Lady Maria. Sisters all.”

      “They married very rich men,” said Mary.

      “And rightly so! They were the daughters of a duke,” Kitty protested. “Their papa was very high in the instep — the merest whiff of Trade was enough to kill the old gentleman. That was the General’s father — turned out to have made his fortune in cotton and slaves.”

      “How ridiculous you are, Kitty! Is your life nought but gossip and gallivanting?”

      “Probably.” The fire was dying; Kitty pulled the bell cord for Jenkins. “Do you really expect the Collinses to travel twelve miles to condole?”

      “It is inevitable. Mr Collins can scent a tragedy or a scandal a hundred miles away, so what are twelve? Lady Lucas will come with them, and we can expect to have Aunt Phillips here constantly. Only an attack of her lumbago prevented her coming today, but a good cry will cure it.”

      “By the way, Mary, must Almeria sleep in my room? She has a tendency to snore, and I know there is a nice bedroom at one end of the attic. She is a lady, not an abigail.”

      “I am keeping the attic room for Charlie.”

      “Oh! Will he come?”

      “Undoubtedly,” said Mary.

      It was not custom for women to attend funerals, either in the church or at the graveside, but Fitzwilliam Darcy had decreed that this social rule should be ignored on the occasion of Mrs Bennet’s obsequies. With no sons among her offspring and five daughters, attendance would be far too thin unless the rule were relaxed. So notification had gone out to the extended family that the ladies would be in attendance at church and graveside, despite the objections of persons like the Reverend Mr Collins, whose nose was rather out of joint because he would not be officiating. Thus Jane’s sisters-in-law, Mrs Louisa Hurst and Miss Caroline Bingley, came down from London to be present, while Mrs Bennet’s cronies, her sister Mrs Phillips, and her friends Lady Lucas and Mrs Long, made the shorter journey from Meryton to attend.

      And there they are together at last, the five Bennet girls, thought Caroline Bingley after the funeral service was over and before the procession to the grave began.

      Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty and Lydia … Twenty years of living in limbo, thanks to them and their fabled beauty. Of course it had faded, dimmed — but so had her own considerable good looks. Jane and Elizabeth had embarked upon the stormy seas of their forties; but then she, Caroline, had already survived those tempests and looked now at her fearsome fifties. As did Fitz; they were much the same age.

      Jane looked as if God had grafted the head of a twenty-three-year-old upon the body of a forty-three-year-old. Her face, with its tranquil honey-coloured eyes, rich unlined skin, exquisitely delicate features, was surrounded by a mass of honey-gold hair. Alas, twelve pregnancies had taken their toll of her sylphlike figure, though she had not grown fat; merely thickened in the waist and dropped in the bosom. In her, the Bennet type was decided; all five of them were some shade of fair, no surprise considering their fair parents.

      Elizabeth and Mary had the best Bennet hair, thick, waving, as much red as gold, though it could be called neither; to herself, Miss Bingley called it ginger. Their skins inclined to ivory and their large, slightly sleepy eyes were a grey that could turn to purple. Of course Elizabeth’s features were not as perfect as Jane’s — her mouth was too wide, too full in the lips — but for some reason that still eluded Miss Bingley, men found her more alluring. Her excellent figure was swathed in black fox, whereas Mary wore dismally plain black serge, a shocking bonnet and even worse pelisse. Caroline was fascinated by her, for she had not seen Mary in seventeen years, an interval of time that had transformed Mary into Elizabeth’s equal. Or she would have been, had her naturally generous mouth not retained its prim severity: it alone proclaimed the spinster. Did she still have that ugly overlapping tooth?

      Kitty she knew very well. Lady Menadew of the wheaten hair and cornflower-blue eyes, so elegant and fashionable that she enjoyed a sublime widowhood. As good natured as she was frivolous, Kitty looked twenty-six, not thirty-six. Ah, how brother Charles had gulled them! Curse Desmond Hurst! When his port bill had outrun his pocket, he had applied to Charles for assistance. Charles had agreed to pay, on one condition: that Louisa gave Kitty Bennet a London season. After all, Charles had said reasonably, Louisa was bringing out her own daughter, so why not two? Caught, Desmond Hurst had traded the port bill (and many other bills) for Kitty’s London season. But whoever would have believed that the minx would walk off with Lord Menadew? Not one of the Marriage Mart’s biggest prizes, but extremely eligible despite his advanced years. While dearest Posy (as Letitia was called) did not catch a husband at all, and went into a long decline — fainting fits, vapours, starvation.

      Lydia was another matter. It was she who looked well into her forties, not Jane. What age was she? Thirty-four. Caroline could well imagine the shifts her family must have resorted to in order to stop Mrs Wickham drowning herself in a bottle. Had they not endured the same with Mr Hurst? Who had succumbed to an apoplexy eight years ago, enabling Caroline to quit Charles’s houses in favour of the Hurst residence in Brook Street, there to dwell with Louisa and Posy, and indulge more freely in her favourite pastime — pulling Elizabeth Darcy and her son to pieces.

      She swallowed the lump in her throat as Fitz and Charles emerged from the church, their mother-in-law’s small coffin balanced on their shoulders, with the diminutive Mr Collins and Henry Lucas on its back end; it gave the polished rosewood box an interesting but not precarious tilt. Oh, Fitz, Fitz! Why did you fall in love with her, marry her? I would have given you real sons, not a sole specimen as ludicrous as Charlie. A devoté of Socratic love, everyone is convinced of it. Why? Because the breathtaking degree of his beauty makes him look the sort, and I spread the calumny as a truth my intimacy with that family makes eminently believable. To brand the son with an affliction so far from his father’s heart is a way of punishing Fitz for not marrying me. You would think Fitz would see through the ploy, always starting, as it does, with something I have said. But no. Fitz believes me, not Charlie.

      Her long nose twitched, for it had picked up nuances of trouble on this unwelcome trip to bury the empty-headed old besom. All had not been well in the Darcy ménage for a while, but the mood was increasing — markedly so. Fitz’s air of aloof hauteur had grown back; during the early years of his marriage it had all but disappeared, though some instinct told her he was not the blissful man he had been at the altar. Hopeful, perhaps. Still aspiring to conquer — what? Caroline Bingley did not know, beyond her conviction that Fitz’s passion for Elizabeth had not resulted in true happiness.

      Down through the graveyard now, the black-clad mourners threading between the haphazard monuments, old as the Crusades, new as still-sinking soil. Miss Bingley and Mrs Hurst walked with Georgiana and General Hugh Fitzwilliam, not in the forefront of the congregation, but somewhere at its middle. Goodbye, Mrs Bennet! The silliest woman ever born.

      Standing well back, Caroline let her gaze roam until it encountered Mary’s; there it stopped, startled. The violet orbs of the maiden sister СКАЧАТЬ