The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet Read online

  Charlie could understand a stranger’s desire to see peaks, tors, rocking stones, gorges, cliffs, tormented landscapes and caves, but, having grown up at Pemberley, never thought it worth a tour of its sights.

  The Welsh countryside was wilder than Derbyshire, at least in its north, so the Welshman took profound delight in the lush woods that lay between the palace—he could never think of it as a mere house—and the tenant farms that lay in the Darcy purlieu.

  What fascinated him were the English oaks, incredibly old and massive. His reading had led him to believe that none had survived the ship-building that started with the eighth Henry, or the huge increase in house and furniture construction, but clearly the oaks of Pemberley’s woods had never experienced the axes, saws and wedges of tree-fellers. Well, he thought, within the bounds of this mighty estate, the King’s word would not count for half as much as the word of a Darcy, especially were the King a pop-eyed German nobody.

  The situation among the Darcys fascinated him too, for he was as sensitive as educated, and could feel the tensions that tugged at civilities like a strong tide at an old jetty. It went without saying that he adored Mrs. Darcy, though closer and longer exposure to Mr. Darcy had softened his initial detestation. If one was a great man, he reflected, one probably knew it, and acted not the part but the essential truth of it. Angus said Mr. Darcy would be prime minister, possibly shortly, and that made him a demigod. However, he would not be easy to live with.

  The good thing was that Charlie and his father were building a rapport that certainly had not existed when Charlie first went to Oxford. Most of that was due to maturation, but some of it to the lad’s natural tendency to see all sides of a question—a quality that made his scholarship formidable. The year away had seen him move farther from his mother, and that too was a good thing. She was a reminder of a painful childhood that he was rapidly outgrowing.

  “Ho there!” said a young and very imperious voice.

  Startled, he looked around, but could see no one.

  “Up here, dolt!”

  Thus directed, his gaze found an oval face framed by a mop of disordered chestnut curls; two eyes of a colour he could not discern glared at him.

  “What happens now?” he asked, having three sisters of his own. For Charlie’s sister she certainly was, with that hair.

  “You get me down, dolt.”

  “Oh, are you stuck, scruff?”

  “If I were not, dolt, you wouldn’t know I was here.”

  “I see. You mean you would have pitched stones or nuts at me from your hiding place.”

  “Nuts at this time of year? You are a dolt!”

  “How are you stuck?” he asked, beginning to climb the oak.

  “My ankle is wedged in a crevice.”

  “That’s the first elegantly phrased thing you’ve said.”

  “A fig for elegant phrases!” she said scornfully.

  “Oh, dear. Definitely inelegant.” His face was now level with her feet, and he could see the wedged ankle. “Take hold of a stout branch with both your hands and give it all your weight. Once your legs aren’t bearing your weight, bend your knees. My, you have got it stuck!” When he lifted his head he realised that he was looking straight up her skirts, and gave a cough. “When you’re free, kindly gather up your skirts. Then I may help you down while preserving your modesty.”

  “A fig for modesty!” she said, starting to go limp at the knees.

  “Just do as you’re told, scruff.” He put his hands around her lower leg and eased the foot sideways until it came free.

  Instead of preserving her modesty by bunching her skirts around her closely, she gave a wriggle that perched her on his shoulders, then slid down his length and eventually reached the ground. There she waited until he stood beside her.

  “I must say, dolt, that you did that deedily.”

  “Whereas you, scruff, behaved with a complete lack of propriety.” He looked at her closely. “You’re not a scruffy schoolgirl, though you act like one. What are you, sixteen?”

  “Seventeen, dolt!” She stuck out a grubby hand, its nails bitten to the quick. “I’m Georgie Darcy, but I quite like being called a scruff,” she said, smiling.

  “And I’m Owen Griffiths, but I don’t like being called a dolt.” He shook her hand. Her eyes, he discovered now, were a light green, the colour of new leaves; he had never seen their like before. She was, of course, beautiful. No child of those parents could be ugly.

  “Charlie’s Oxford tutor! I’m glad to meet you, Owen.”

  “I think it should be Mr. Griffiths,” he said gravely.

  “I know it should be, but that makes no difference.”

  “Why do we guests never meet you?”

  “Because we are not yet out. Schoolroom misses with Mr. Darcy for father are sequestered.” She looked wicked. “Would you like to meet the Darcy girls?”

  “Very much.”

  “What time is it? I was stuck up that tree for ages.”

  “Tea time in a schoolroom.”

  “Then come and have tea with us.”

  “I think I should ask Mrs. Darcy first.”

  “Oh, pooh, nonsense! I’ll take the blame.”

  “I suspect you take the blame often, scruff.”

  “Well, I’m not a very satisfactory daughter,” she said, the curls bouncing as she engaged in a complicated skip down a flagged path. “I come out next year, when I am eighteen, but Mama despairs of my taking.”

  “Oh, I am sure you will take,” he said with a smile.

  “As if I care! They will lace me into stays that push up my bosoms, style my hair, smear lotion all over my face, make me use a parasol if I go into the sun, forbid me to ride astride, and generally make my life a misery. All to procure a husband! I can do that without a London season because I have ninety thousand pounds settled on me. Did you ever hear of a man who demanded to look at the teeth of a filly worth half that much?”

  “Er—no. Except that I don’t think the age of a filly is in much doubt, so he probably wouldn’t look anyway.”

  “Oh, you are the kind of man who throws cold water!”

  “Yes, I fear I am.”

  She gave another skip. “They will bully me into simpering and forbid me to say what I think. And it will all be wasted, Owen. I don’t intend to marry. When I’m of age, I’ll buy a farm and live on it, perhaps with Mary. They say,” she confided in a stage whisper, “that I’m very like her.”

  “I’ve never met Mary, Georgie, but you’re definitely like her. What would you do with your life, if you were free to choose?”

  “Be a farmer,” she said without hesitation. “I like the feel of the earth, causing things to grow, the smell of a well-kept barnyard, the sound of cows mooing—well, it doesn’t matter. I’ll never be allowed to be a farmer.”

  “No matter whom you marry, you could emulate Marie Antoinette and have a little farm to play in.”

  “Play? Pah! Besides, I like my head on my shoulders. She was a very silly woman.”

  “My father is a farmer in Wales, but I confess I couldn’t wait to leave the barnyard and the cows. They have to be milked, you know, at a dismally early hour.”

  “I know that, dolt!” She went suddenly misty-eyed. “Oh, I do love cows! And dirty hands.”

  “They have to be clean to milk,” Owen said prosaically. “Also warm. Cows dislike cold hands on their teats.”

  They entered the house by a back door Owen had not dreamed existed, and began to climb a chipped, battered staircase.

  “What could you possibly like better than a farm, Owen?”

  “Academia. I’m a scholar, and hope one day to be an Oxford don. My discipline is in the Classics.”

  She mock-retched. “Erk! How indescribably boring!”

  They had passed down several interminably long and musty halls, and now faced a door badly in need of paint. How extraordinary! The parts of Pemberley open to guests were magnificently kept up, but the unseen parts were ne
glected.

  “The schoolroom,” said Georgie, entering with a flourish. “Girls, this is Charlie’s tutor, Owen. Owen, these are my sisters. Susannah—Susie—is almost sixteen, Anne is thirteen, and Catherine—Cathy—is ten. This is our governess, Miss Fortescue. She’s very jolly, and we love her.”

  “Georgiana, you cannot invite gentlemen to tea!” said jolly Miss Fortescue, not because she was overly circumspect, Owen divined, but because she knew it meant trouble for Georgie if word reached her mama.

  “Of course I can. Sit down, Owen. Tea?”

  “Yes, please,” he said, unwilling to give up this wonderful chance to meet Charlie’s sisters. Besides which, the tea was just what he loved—three different kinds of cake, sugared buns, and not a slice of bread-and-butter anywhere.

  An hour with the female Darcys enchanted him.

  Georgie was a nonpareil; if she could be prevailed upon to wear a fashionable dress and speak on socially acceptable sorts of subjects she would take London by storm even without those ninety thousand pounds. With them, every bachelor would be after her, some of such looks and address that Owen didn’t think she would be able to resist their blandishments. Later on, he changed his mind about that. Solid steel, Georgie.

  Susie was blonder than the others, though she had escaped colourless brows and lashes; her eyes were light blue and her silky hair flaxen. Extremely proud of her talent, Miss Fortescue brought out her drawings and paintings, which Owen had to admit were far superior to the usual scribbles and daubs of schoolgirls. By nature she was quiet, even a little shy.

  Anne was the darkest in colouring, and the only one with brown eyes. A certain innate hauteur said she was Mr. Darcy’s child, but she also had Elizabeth’s charm, and was very well read. Her ambition, she said without false modesty, was to write three-volume novels in the vein of Mr. Scott. Adventure appealed to her more than romance, and she deemed damsels in castle dungeons silly.

  Cathy was another chestnut-haired child, but whereas her brother’s eyes were grey and Georgie’s green, hers were a dark blue in which flickered the naughtiness of an imp—no malice. She informed Owen that her father had slapped her for putting treacle in his bed. Of repentance she displayed none, despite the slap, which she regarded as a mark of distinction. Her sole ambition seemed to be to earn more slaps, which Owen read as Cathy’s way of demonstrating that she loved her father and was not afraid of him.

  It was clear that the four girls were starved for adult company; Owen found himself sorry for them. Their station was that of high princesses, and like all high princesses, they were locked in an ivory tower. None of them was a flirt, and none of them considered her life interesting enough to dominate the conversation; what they wanted were Owen’s opinions and experiences of that big outside world.

  The party broke up in consternation when Elizabeth walked in. Her brows rose at the sight of Mr. Griffiths, but Georgie leaped fearlessly into the fray.

  “Don’t blame Owen! It was me,” she said.

  “It was I,” her mother corrected automatically.

  “I know, I know! The verb ‘to be’ takes the same case after it as before it. He didn’t want to come, but I made him.”

  “He? Him?”

  “Oh, Owen! Honestly, Mama, you’re so busy correcting our grammar that you never get around to scolding us!”

  “Owen, you’re free to have tea in the schoolroom at any time,” said Elizabeth placidly. “There, Georgie, are you satisfied?”

  “Thank you, Mama, thank you!” cried Georgie.

  “Thank you, Mama!” the other three chorused.

  Holding the door, Owen allowed Elizabeth to precede him. She continued up the interminable corridor to a more imposing set of double doors, and once through them, he found himself in what the Darcys called the public parts of the house, apparently because they were open to inspection by strangers when the family was not home.

  “You are wondering why so much of Pemberley is not kept up,” she said, leading the way to the blue-and-white Dutch Room, full of Vermeers and Bruegels, with two Rembrandts in proudest place, and, hidden by a screen, a Bosch.

  “I—er—” He floundered, not knowing what to say.

  “It will be refurbished after Cathy comes out—eight more years. Though it doesn’t look very nice, structurally it’s perfectly sound. What’s lacking is a new coat of paint, and some replaced balusters and stair treads. A Darcy of generations ago decreed that the non-public parts of the house should be refurbished no more often than every thirty years, and that has become an unwritten law. When Cathy leaves it will be twenty-seven years since the last time, but Fitz says that will be long enough. I confess I’m looking forward to it, and won’t let the colour be brown. So dark!”

  “Does that include the servants’ rooms?” he asked.

  “Oh, dear me, no! The permanent servants live two floors up. Their rooms are done at ten-year intervals, like all the public parts of the house. They’re cheerful and well-appointed—I always feel that servants should be made very comfortable. The married ones live in cottages in a small village only a walk away. People like my own maid, Hoskins, and Mr. Darcy’s valet, Meade, have suites.”

  “You must consume a great deal of water, ma’am.”

  “Yes, but we’re lucky. Our stream is absolutely pure, having no settlements on it between here and its source. There is a huge reservoir in the roof—it stands on iron pilings. That gives our water the power to flow through pipes all over the house. Now that water closets have been invented, I’ve persuaded Fitz to install them adjacent to every bedroom, with some in the servants’ quarters too. And now that powerful pumps are available, I want a supply of hot water to the kitchen and to some new, proper bathrooms. This is an exciting age to live in, Owen.”

  “Indeed it is, Mrs. Darcy.” What he did not ask was where all this potential waste was to go, as he knew the answer: into the river below Pemberley, where the stream would not be pure anymore.

  “Your daughters are delightful,” he said, sitting down.

  “Yes, they are.”

  “Have they no exposure to the outside world?”

  “I am afraid not. But why do you ask?”

  “Because they’re so starved for news. Why aren’t they allowed to read newspapers and journals? They know more about Alexander the Great than about Napoleon Bonaparte. And it seems a pity that they’re not permitted to meet men like Angus Sinclair. He would surely do them no harm.” He stopped, horrified. “Oh, I do beg your pardon! I must sound critical of your arrangements, and I don’t mean to.”

  “You are absolutely right, sir. I agree with you wholeheartedly. Unfortunately Mr. Darcy does not. For which I have my own sisters to blame. My parents permitted us free rein from a very early age. It did Jane and me no harm, but Kitty and Lydia should have been curbed, and were not. They were more than hoydens, they were flirts, and in Lydia’s case, a tendency to associate unchaperoned with officers of a militia regiment led to shocking trouble. So when we had our own girls, Mr. Darcy decided that they would not be allowed to mix in the world until they officially came out at eighteen.”

  “I see.”

  “I hope that your heart is proof against the charms of, say, Georgie?” Elizabeth asked with a twinkle.

  He laughed. “Well, the man who would inspect a filly’s teeth did she have half as many as ninety thousand pounds does not exist.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “That was how Georgie put her situation to me.”

  “Oh, I despair of her! I cannot cure her indelicacy!”

  “Don’t try. The world will do it for you. Under that brave front lies a great deal of vulnerability—she thinks she’s like her Aunt Mary, but in truth she’s more like Charlie.”

  “And over-dowered. They all are, though Georgie is worst off in that respect. The others have a mere fifty thousand pounds each. It was not our doing, but Fitz’s father’s. The money was left in trust for any daughters Fitz might have. We fear fortu
ne-hunters, of course. Some are so charming, so irresistible!”

  “Well, I cannot see Georgie falling in love with a fortune-hunter—or Anne, for that matter. The most vulnerable is Susie. Cathy is more likely to dupe her seducer than run off with him.”

  “You cheer me immensely, Owen.” The purple eyes gleamed at him as mischievously as Cathy’s. “It is tea time. Can you eat a second tea?”

  “Easily,” he said.

  “You are twenty-five, I believe?”

  “Yes. Twenty-six in October.”

  “Then you’re safe for at least another five or six years. After that, your figure won’t run to second teas. Gentlemen set in their early thirties, finish growing from calves to bulls.” M more and more as time went on. Now that her life was regular, she could mark off each interval between the delivery of fresh food as one day, though she could not be sure it really was. If it was, then at the end of thirty pencilled strokes on her wall (including those first estimated seven), she began to despair. Wherever her prison lay, no one had found it, though she was sure people would be looking for her.

  Things had happened which caused a lump of terror to rise in her doughty breast; how much longer would Father Dominus bother to keep her alive? For all his talk about the Children of Jesus, she had seen no evidence of their existence beyond Brother Jerome, Brother Ignatius, and Sister Therese, all hovering on the brink of puberty, and though Ignatius and Therese spoke freely of their fellow Children, it seemed to Mary that there was an element of the unreal about what they said. Why, for instance, did no child attempt to run away, if they did indeed have the freedom to venture out of the caves? Human nature was adventurous, particularly in the young—what escapades she and Charlie used to get up to when he was a boy! Somewhere she thought that perhaps Martin Luther had said were he to be given a child until he turned seven, he would have the man. In which case, how young were the Children of Jesus when they were taken? Neither Ignatius nor Therese was prepared to confide in her fully; much of what she had pieced together came from what they refused to say. Yet the old man fed his disciples extremely well, clothed them, doctored them, allowed them considerable liberty. That they worked for him without being paid indicated that he exploited them, as did his neglect of their education.