The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet Read online

  He began to plot. First of all, how to meet his Mary not only again, but many times? Secondly, how to impress her with his undeniable assets? Thirdly, how to make her fall in love with him? In love at last, he found to his horror that things like social imbecility did not matter. Once he had snared her, he would have to paint Mrs. Angus Sinclair as an eccentric. That is the best quality of the English, he thought: they have an affinity for eccentrics. In Scotland, not so. I am doomed to live out the rest of my days among the Sassenachs.

  Ten years ago he had made the journey south from his native West Lothian to London. The Glasgow coal and iron had been in his family for two generations but, to a Scot as puritanical and logical as his father, wealth was no excuse for idleness. Newly graduated from Edinburgh University, Angus was bidden do something for a living. He had chosen journalism; he liked the idea of being paid to play, for he loved to write and he loved to pry into the affairs of other people. Within a year he was master of the innuendo and the allegation; so steeped was he in his profession that few, even among his closest friends, had any idea who and what he was. It had been exactly the right training for an Argus, for his work had taken him everywhere: a series of murders in a factory; fraud in government and municipal circles; robberies, riots and mayhem. In all walks of life, not least among the poor, the unemployed, and the unemployable. Sometimes he penetrated south of the Border into the haunts of the northern Sassenachs, and that had taught him that, no matter whereabouts in Britain he might be, ultimately everything stemmed from London.

  When his father died eleven years ago, his chance had come. Leaving his younger brother, Alastair, to run the family businesses, Angus emigrated, reinforced with the huge inheritance of an elder son, and in the knowledge that income from the businesses would keep his pockets lined with gold. He had bought a house in Grosvenor Square and set out to cultivate the Mighty. Though he made no secret of the source of his money, he discovered that it mattered little because that source was, so to speak, in a foreign country. But he could not quite give up the journalism. Learning that no newspaper existed devoted entirely to the activities of the Houses of Parliament, he had founded the Westminster Chronicle and filled the gap. Given Parliament’s lethargy and reluctance to meet any more frequently than necessary, a weekly journal sufficed. Make it a daily event, and soon much of its contents would be prolix and spurious. His spies had infiltrated every government department, from Home to Foreign, and the Army and the Navy were guaranteed to provide plenty of fodder for his paper’s voracious maw. Naturally he employed half a dozen journalists, but nothing they wrote escaped his personal attention. Which still left him with time on his hands. Hence, a year ago, the genesis of Argus.

  Oh, there had been a number of love affairs over the years, but none that had dented his heart. With the daughters of the Mighty it could be flirtation only, but his native shrewdness and considerable social skill had kept him out of the serious clutches of the many high-born young women who succumbed to his charms—and his money. The easiest way to rid himself of his more basic urges was to set up a mistress, though he took great care to avoid married society ladies for that role; he preferred opera-dancers. None of these activities had imbued him with much respect for the female sex; women, Angus Sinclair was convinced, were predatory, shallow, poorly educated and, after a few months at most, hideously boring.

  Only Elizabeth Darcy had captivated him, but at a distance. For one, she was incapable of seeing any farther than Fitz, and for another, beneath her attractions lay the temperament of a warm, maternal kind of creature. Whatever a man’s scars, she would want to kiss them better, and Angus didn’t think such a woman could keep him interested through half a lifetime of marriage.

  Now to find that the woman of his heart was fixated upon his own creation was a blow both ironic and frustrating. No fool, Angus saw at once that, were he to confess his identity, she would scorn him as a dilettante. He did not practise what he preached, and had no intention of doing so, even for this new and painful emotion, love. Imbued with ardour, Mary took Argus at face value. Thus face value it would have to be.

  Still, better to cross some bridges as he came to them; the first order of business was to get to know his Mary, make her like and trust him. What a hypocrite you are, Angus/Argus!

  The next morning she was the recipient of a note from him asking her to walk with him. An activity, he was convinced, that could not offend her sensibilities. A gentleman escorting a lady through Hertford’s public streets was irreproachable.

  Mary read his letter and came to the same conclusion. Her plans for her mission of book-writing investigation were made as firmly as possible and the winter had long since begun to drag, despite the efforts of such determined individuals as Mr. Robert Wilde, Lady Appleby, Mrs. McLeod, Miss Botolph and Mrs. Markham. How, she asked herself, could any person exist in such a pointless way? Concerts, parties, balls, receptions, weddings, christenings, walks, funerals, drives, picnics, visits to the shops, playing the pianoforte and reading; they were designed purely to fill in the huge vacancies in a female’s life. Mr. Wilde had his law practice, the married ladies had their husbands, children and domestic crises, but she, like Miss Botolph, existed in that fashionable new word, a vacuum. One short winter had been enough to teach her that the purpose she yearned for was vital to her well-being.

  So, upon receipt of Angus’s note, she met him in the high street eager to discover more about him, if not about Argus. After all, he did publish Argus! He was very personable, eminently respectable, and not to be sneezed at as a companion for the walk she would have taken anyway. His hair, she decided as they exchanged bows, was like a cat’s pelt, sleek and glittery, and something in his features drew her. Nor was it disappointing to find that, in spite of her own height, he was much taller. If any fault were to be found in Mr. Wilde, it was that he and she were on the same level. Miss Bennet liked the sensation of being towered over, a disturbing facet of basic femininity that Miss Bennet promptly buried.

  “In what direction would you like to go?” he asked as he held out his arm for her to lean upon.

  She spurned it with a sniff. “I am not decrepit, sir!” she said, striding out. “We will proceed up this way because it is but a short step into the countryside.”

  “You like the countryside?” he asked, keeping up.

  “Yes, I do. The beauties of Nature are not obliterated by humanity’s tasteless urban huddle.”

  “Ah, indeed.”

  Her idea of a short step, he learned, was more than a mile; beneath that awful dress two powerful legs must lurk. But at the end of the short step fields began to open up before them, and her pace slowed as she gazed about with delight.

  “I suppose that Mr. Wilde has informed you of my plans?” she asked, hopping nimbly over a stile.

  “Plans?”

  “To investigate the ills of England. I commence at the beginning of May. How extraordinary that Mr. Wilde did not mention it!”

  “It sounds an unusual aspiration. Tell me more.”

  And, liking the set of his far-sighted blue eyes, Mary told him what she intended to do. He listened without evidence of disapproval; rather, she thought, gratified, he took what she said seriously. And certainly, once she had finished, he made no attempt to dissuade her.

  “Where do you intend to start?” he asked.

  “In Manchester.”

  “Why not Birmingham or Liverpool?”

  “Birmingham will be no different from Manchester. Liverpool is a seaport, and I do not think it wise to associate with sailors.”

  “As to sailors, you are right,” he said gravely. “However, I still wonder at your choice of Manchester.”

  “So do I, sometimes,” she said honestly. “I think it must be because I am curious about my brother-in-law Charles Bingley, who is said to have ‘interests’ in Manchester, as well as huge sugar plantations in Jamaica. My sister Jane is the dearest creature, and very devoted to Mr. Bingley.” She stopped, frowning,
and said nothing more.

  They had reached the perimeter of an apple orchard, beginning to foam with white blossoms; after such a cold winter, spring had come early and warm, and living things had awakened. The stone wall bordering the fluffy trees was low and dry; Angus spread his handkerchief on its top and indicated that she should sit.

  Surprised at her own docility, Mary sat. Instead of joining her, he stood a small distance away from her, his eyes intent upon her face.

  “I know what you will not say, Miss Bennet. That you are worried about your sister Jane. That if her husband is exploiting women and children especially, she will suffer a disillusion like to kill her love.”

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, gasping. “How perceptive of you!”

  “I do read Argus’s letters, you know.”

  Suddenly he stepped over the wall into the orchard, and snapped a branch off the nearest tree. “It is in full flower already,” he said, presenting it to her with a smile that made her feel a little breathless.

  “Thank you,” she said taking it, “but you have deprived the poor tree of some of its fruit.”

  The next moment she was on her feet and walking swiftly in the direction of Hertford. “It is growing late, sir. My maid will be anxious if I do not return at the expected time.”

  He did not argue, merely ranged himself alongside her, and let her walk in silence. I am learning, he was thinking; do not dare court her, Angus! She is willing to be friends, but the slightest hint of wooing, and she closes with a nastier snap than a poacher’s trap. Well, if a friend is what she wants, a friend I will be.

  That was the first of enough excursions to cause flutters of hopeful expectation in the bosoms of Mary’s female cronies, as well as gloom in the heart of Mr. Wilde. What a catch! Angus’s valet had triggered a chain of servant’s gossip that, naturally, whizzed above stairs; Mr. Sinclair had been going into East Anglia, had never intended spending over a week in Hertford. Yet here he was, dangling after Mary Bennet! Lady Appleby scrambled to give a dinner party at Shelby Manor to which Mr. Wilde was not invited, and Mrs. Markham aired Miss Bennet’s proficiency upon the pianoforte during a cosy evening in her drawing room. To his astonishment, Angus discovered that Mary’s talent on the instrument was considerable; she played with unerring touch and true expression, though she was not fond enough of the soft pedal.

  On Mary’s side, try as she would, she could not resist her suitor’s blandishments. Not that he ever said a word she could construe as romantic, or let his hand linger when it brushed hers, or gave her the kind of looks Mr. Wilde did. His attitude was that of the brother she had never known; something like, she assumed, an older version of Charlie. For these reasons her sense of fairness said that she could not show him the cold shoulder, though, had she suspected what people were saying, Mr. Sinclair would certainly have been dismissed forthwith.

  And he, fearing for her, bit his tongue. After nine days he knew every minute aspect of her plans, and gained a better idea of why Fitz had spoken of her sneeringly. She was exactly the kind of female he most despised, for she lacked innate propriety and was too strong-willed to take discipline. Not from any moral failing; simply that she did not see herself, an aging spinster, as needing the full gamut of the proprieties. Young ladies were hedged around because they must go virgins to the marriage bed, whereas a thirty-eight-year-old spinster stood in little danger from masculine lusts or attentions. In that, of course, she was completely mistaken. Men looked at the sleepy-lidded eyes, lush mouth and spectacular colouring, and cared not a rush for her years or her appalling clothes.

  Given her age and the years still to come, her means were not adequate for the kind of life she was entitled to; her house cost her fifty pounds to rent, her servants a hundred pounds in wages alone, to which had to be added their upkeep; Angus suspected that the married couple Mr. Wilde had found cheated her, as did the cook. Her income did not permit of a riding horse or any kind of conveyance. If Angus understood anything about her, he did understand why she shrank from employing a lady’s companion. Those females were uniformly dreary, ill-educated and stifling for such a one as Mary Bennet, whose vitality conquered the clothes and the life society decreed she must lead. What he could not know was what kind of person she had been until very recently, how successfully she had suppressed her aspirations. All in the name of duty.

  The withdrawal of her nine thousand, five hundred pounds from the Funds was insanity—why? Her excuse to the ferreting Angus was that she might need it for her journalistic investigation, an arrant nonsense.

  “I take it you will travel by post?” he asked her.

  She looked scandalised. “Post? I should think not! Why, that would cost me three or four guineas a day, even for a single horse and a smelly chaise! Not to mention the half a crown I would have to pay the postilion. Oh, dear me, no. I shall travel on the stage-coach.”

  “The Mail, surely,” he said, still thrown off balance. “There is a Manchester Mail every day from London, and while it may not pass through Hertford, it certainly does through St. Albans. You would reach your destination the following night.”

  “After a night spent sitting bolt upright in a swaying coach! I shall travel north from Hertford on the stage-coach to Grantham, breaking my journey every evening to put up at an inn,” said Mary.

  “There is that to be said for it,” said Angus with a nod. “A posting house will afford you overnight comfort as well as good food.”

  “Posting house?” Mary snorted. “I can assure you, sir, that I cannot afford to put up at a posting house! I will avail myself of cheaper accommodation.”

  He debated whether to argue, and decided against it. “Grantham is surely too far east,” he said instead.

  “I am aware of that, but as it is on the Great North Road, I will have several stage-coaches to choose from,” she said. “At Grantham I will go west to Nottingham, thence to Derby, and so to Manchester.”

  Just how straitened were her circumstances? he wondered. Her nine thousand, five hundred pounds would not keep her into her old age, that was true, so perhaps her pride forbade her telling him that she knew she would have nothing more from Fitz, in which case, it made sense that she should scrimp on her mission of investigation. Yet why withdraw her money from the Funds?

  Then one reason why occurred to him: because once it was deposited in a bank in her name she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was there. To a Mary Bennet, investment in the four-percents was evanescent; her money might vanish in a puff of smoke, victim of another South Sea Bubble. Then a more sinister reason occurred to him: she was afraid that if she left it invested, Fitz might somehow deprive her of it. On their many walks she had talked of him freely, with scant respect and no love. She did not fear him, but she feared his power.

  Angus did not fear Fitz or Fitz’s power, but he did fear for Mary. Her indifference to clothes meant that she did not look what she was: a gentlewoman of some substance. Those who travelled on the stage-coach with her, Angus’s racing mind went on, would take her for the most lowly sort of governess, or even a superior abigail. Oh, Mary, Mary! You and your wretched book! Would that I had never dreamed of a nonexistent man named Argus!

  What did not occur to him, as she never once mentioned it, was that she expected to pay at least nine thousand pounds to a publisher to put her book into print. So in one way he had been right: the withdrawal of her money from the Funds was done because she feared the power of Fitzwilliam Darcy.

  On the tenth day of his sojourn in Hertford, he decided that he could take no more. Better to stew about her fate in London sight unseen than continue to feast his eyes upon her while April’s blossoms fell to the ground. Yet he could not say goodbye, did not dare face her again in case his resolution broke down and he made a declaration of love he knew was not returned. Apostrophising himself as a coward and a curmudgeon, he ordered his chaise for straight after breakfast and drove out of Hertford without telling his love that he was going, or leaving her a no
te.

  The word of his departure flew faster than a bird from the landlord of the Blue Boar to Mr. Wilde’s under-clerk and Miss Botolph’s manservant, and thence, equally swiftly, to Mr. Wilde and Miss Botolph. Who were on Miss Bennet’s doorstep before the uncomfortably High vicar of St. Mark’s sounded the Angelus.

  Mary heard their news impassively, though under her composure she was conscious of the sadness she always felt when Charlie’s visits were over. She dealt with Mr. Wilde’s overt jubilation in the most dampening way, and assured the pair of them that she had been expecting Mr. Sincair’s departure for some time. When Miss Botolph hinted heavily about disappointed hopes, she was ignored; the rest of Hertford’s upper stratum might have been anticipating a joyous Announcement, but Mary had not. To her, Angus was simply a good friend whom she would miss.

  “Perhaps he will return,” said Mrs. McLeod toward the end of April.

  “If he intends to, Sophia, he had better be quick,” said Miss Botolph. “Mary is off on her travels very soon, though I do wish she was less secretive about them. And what is Mr. Darcy about, to let her ride in the common stage?”