Mary Bennet

I slept very little that night — so full of incident, of pain and pleasure both, had the day been, and so imperative the need to reflect upon it all. But the thought to which my tired mind kept returning — the regret that in the end swallowed up all else — was that I had not said goodbye to George and that I would now in all likelihood never see him again.

I blamed Elizabeth. Had she not thrown herself at Mr Coates I reasoned, Mrs Allardyce would never have engaged herself to Mr Purvis and George would not now be leaving Netherfield. I blamed her conduct — rash, deceitful and immodest — to my way of thinking, it merited punishment but I did not see why I should have to suffer by it.

I blamed Mr Coates too — although not near so much as did everybody else. Shortly before breakfast that morning, a letter had come from him to my father containing not merely an apology, but also (as I later learnt) a request for permission to pay his addresses to Elizabeth. He wrote that he was prepared to wait, to leave the country if necessary, assuring my father of the seriousness of his intentions and his undying love &c. It was all too late of course — or far too soon — and he must have known that his suit was hopeless. My childish understanding of his crime was necessarily partial and imperfect, but at no time did I think of Jasper Coates as a hypocrite, still less a libertine, and his installing two mistresses under his roof I now impute more to convenience — a lack of resolution and misplaced kindness — than to corrupt habits.

Elizabeth judged him however — almost as severely as she judged herself, and as she would later come to judge Lydia. For a while her fondness for jokes entirely deserted her: a silent censoriousness made itself felt, and even when her old playfulness returned, it was not the same. Her manner might mask it, but she made far fewer allowances for human frailty. Ultimately, this intolerance coupled with her implicit belief in her own powers of observation would lead to her undoing. She would come to approve Mr Wickham on sight and condemn Mr Darcy on the evidence of mere hearsay. (Had Darcy not resembled Mr Coates, I suspect it might have gone less hard with him.)

But once again I am running ahead of myself. Long before Mr Coates’ letter to my father arrived that morning, Elizabeth had left for London. I knew nothing of this until Lydia informed me in an aggrieved tone that Aunt and the two little Gardiner girls had left the house at a very early hour — and that Elizabeth and Jane had accompanied them.

“Nobody told us they were going,” said she. “We heard them creeping about and Gil getting out the boxes — and then we heard the carriage.”

“Nobody said goodbye to us,” said Kitty.

“Did you know of it, Mary?” said Lydia, sharp-eyed.

“No indeed, I promise you —”

“Mama has shut herself up in her room,” said Kitty. “And Gil says that on no account are we to bother her —”

“But I shall bother her,” declared Lydia. “I mean to find out why they have all run away.”

She did not find out however, for Papa, placing no dependence on his wife’s discretion, had arranged for both Kitty and Lydia to leave Longbourn, and later that same morning Uncle Philips came in his carriage to collect them. They were to go first to the Philipses and thence to Uncle’s widowed sister, a Mrs Jervis, who lived in a very retired way at King’s Langley. As for myself, Papa deemed it wisest that I remain at home, although until Mama had recovered from her present nervous prostration he had arranged for me to spend the chief part of every day at Lucas Lodge. “You will take your lessons with Maria Lucas,” said he. “Charlotte has kindly agreed to supervise your studies. Mr Knowles will doubtless welcome the opportunity of a holiday.”

I knew by his manner of speaking that it had all been settled and it would be useless for me to protest. But to be deprived of Mr Knowles at a time when I most needed his counsel, I felt to be most cruel. Papa had given me permission to write to him however, and after Lydia and Kitty had left, I spent the rest of the morning composing a letter, confiding a small part of my present suffering — I could not relate the whole without exposing Elizabeth — and asking that he point me towards such texts, either prose or verse, as might best offer solace.

He wrote back immediately — I still have the letter — quoting Mr William Cowper’s beautiful lines:

“I am certain the Almighty has bright designs for Mary Bennet,” the letter continued.

“And in the meantime, the challenge for her is to accept the loss of George’s companionship with a smiling face and to remember that there is one Friend who will never forsake her. — Mother joins me in praying for your happiness, dear Mary.”

And so began an interlude which, after the first pain of missing George subsided, was not unpleasant. In Charlotte Lucas, I was fortunate to find a teacher who was both intelligent and good humoured — a wise old head on young shoulders as the saying goes, for Charlotte at the age of one and twenty was burdened with many domestic cares quite apart from her teaching load. I soon began to know and respect her ways. I admired her patience in dealing with her family’s numerous claims. She was constantly being called away to superintend baking and jam-making or to settle some silly argument between her younger brothers and sisters. And her father’s fatuous remarks and oft repeated anecdotes must have tried her patience, but rarely did an impatient word escape her. (This early training in tolerating fools was undoubtedly put to good use when she became the wife of Mr Collins.)

My friendship with Maria Lucas dates from this time. I had always regarded Maria as something of a scatterbrain — I am sure that she for her part saw me as a boring little blue-stocking — but now, sharing our lessons as we did, we could not avoid knowing each other better and forming a fairer estimate of each other’s abilities. And without the distraction of my elder sisters’ company, for Jane and Elizabeth were objects of great awe to Maria, I found her to be sensible and sweet-natured. She was but six months younger than myself yet touchingly deferential and grateful for any help I could give, especially on matters musical. I soon became most sincerely attached to her.

In the meantime I kept up my correspondence with Mr Knowles and since both Mama and Papa were dilatory in such matters I also corresponded with my sisters. My letters must have made dull reading however. Life at both Longbourn and Lucas Lodge was very quiet, and apart from a severe snow-storm in the last week of November I had little to report. (Several roof tiles directly above my attic room were dislodged in the storm thus rendering my room uninhabitable, and as I did not wish my precious things — my pianoforte especially — to be stored in Lydia and Kitty’s apartment, I moved instead into Elizabeth’s room. I mention this now because the arrangement was later to place an intolerable strain on Elizabeth’s and my relationship.)

The one exciting piece of news — Mr Coates’ departure from Netherfield — I was forbidden to write about, as Papa had banned any mention of “that worthless fellow and his Italian comic opera”. It was Maria Lucas who told me that he had finally gone. He had written to Sir William saying that urgent business called him to London. I did wonder at the time whether he had gone to seek out Elizabeth, but on hearing that Nonna had accompanied him and that the two of them had taken a house in Half Moon Street, I concluded that Mr Coates — ever a slave to convenience — had given up all serious thought of my sister and that Nonna Renata was once more his mistress — if indeed she had ever ceased to be so.

A second, more surprising, instance of revived passion — of a return to lukewarm conjugal felicity at least — was that of my own parents. The absence of their daughters seemed to promote a better understanding between them, certainly on my father’s side. When I returned home after my lessons at Lucas Lodge I would frequently find them seated together on the drawing room sofa, my father reading a newspaper while my mother dozed or played with her bracelets. My father even condescended to share the odd piece of news with her, usually gossip about the royal family which he affected to scorn but which she delighted in. Prefacing his offering with a “this might interest you, my dear”, I once heard him inform her without the least hint of sarcasm that the Queen’s preferred luncheon was a simple dish of chicken broth — chicken broth being Mama’s favourite nerve restorative. But this too was something I could not write of to my sisters.

Their letters to me were equally dull. Kitty and Lydia wrote very short letters at very long intervals, and even though Jane and Elizabeth wrote regularly and at length, for the most part they detailed their activities without mentioning their thoughts or feelings. Elizabeth’s letters were especially dull; impersonal accounts of engagements, visits to the theatre or books she was presently reading — mere lists of titles for my father’s benefit, such as Mrs Piozzi’s Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson and Mr Boswell’s Life, for she had temporarily foresworn novels and poetry.

But Elizabeth also corresponded with Charlotte. And now once again I am obliged to confess something of which I am ashamed, for I actually copied a page of one such letter. Charlotte had accidentally dropped it when called away to settle some domestic dispute and on picking it up, I at once recognized Elizabeth’s hand. Maria was busy at the other end of the schoolroom putting together a map of the rivers of Europe, and almost before I knew what I was about, I began to read:

The page itself ended here, and on hearing Charlotte’s returning footsteps, I hurriedly concealed it inside my book, but upon her almost immediately being called away again, I once more took it out. A second reading did nothing to improve my feelings towards the writer. On an impulse I seized a sheet of paper and went to work immediately, copying it all out fair before replacing the original on Charlotte’s desk.

At the time I felt no shame. I wished to preserve some proof of Elizabeth’s folly, a tangible reminder that behind the screen of propriety there lurked a very different creature. And in one respect I am not sorry for what I did, for afterwards it was as if the entire episode had never happened. Papa’s ban on any reference to Mr Coates persisted long after all my sisters had returned home, and Mama — although regularly lamenting that Netherfield continued to stand empty — spoke only of the previous inhabitants as “that dreadful foreign family with whom Mary was wondrous thick”.