Kitty Bennet's Diary (Pride and Prejudice Chronicles) (2 page)

“Mary?  Is something wrong?” I asked.

Mary did not answer, she only lay absolutely still, the covers pulled over her head.  And after a second’s pause, she let out the most unconvincing snore I have ever heard—half snort, half suppressed sob.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Mary, I know you’re not asleep,” I said.  “You wouldn’t fool baby Susanna.”  Baby Susanna is our youngest Gardiner cousin.  “You may as well sit up and tell me what the trouble is.”

Mary lay a second more without moving—and then she sat up in an explosion of blankets and sheets and glowered at me from under the ruffles of the old-fashioned nightcap she always wears.

Mary is only twenty-two, a year older than I am, but even at night she dresses as though she were in constant rehearsal for the role of elderly maiden aunt.

Mary’s eyes were red and puffy, but she lifted her chin.  “If you must know, I am crying because not one single gentleman asked me to dance tonight.”

I was taken aback.  “I thought you said that, in your opinion, dancing was a frivolity suited only to small and meagre minds,” I said.

Which sounds as though I were being spiteful, but I have also discovered that it is extremely wearing to force myself to be sweet all of the time.  And in the wake of the nightmare, I was not feeling especially sweet.

Besides which, it is also quite true that Mary said exactly that—she really does talk that way.  Constantly.

Mary sniffed and looked balefully at me.  “And so it is.  But it would have been nice to at least be
asked
.”  She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her nightdress.  “I talked to one young man for at least a quarter of an hour during supper.  Mr. Porter.  He was eating a very large helping of the roast duck, and I told him that modern medical opinion holds that a diet of too many rich meats can lead to gout in later age.  I even outlined for him what a scientific paper I read recently gave as a recipe for a healthful diet—brown bread … raw onions … a great many carrots.  But he
still
did not ask me to dance afterwards.”

“Imagine that,” I said.

Mary wiped her nose again and glared at me.  “I knew you would not understand, Kitty. 
You
had men asking you for dances all night long.  And you did not accept even one of them.”

That is also true.  It is very ironic, really.  Since I have sworn off men entirely, I am besieged by invitations at every ball or assembly we attend.  Tonight I started telling overly persistent gentlemen that I had a mother in the madhouse, a father in prison, and felt myself coming down with a touch of bubonic plague.  And they only thought I was being charmingly witty; I was still refusing invitations to dance throughout the entire evening.

Apparently the secret to attracting male attention is to cultivate an air of unattainability.  If only I had known that a year ago.

Mary does not know the full story of why I have sworn off men and dancing, so I suppose her glare was in some way justified.  But it did not last long.  Her face crumpled after a moment, and she started to cry again.

“I am never going to have anyone fall in love with me.”  She spoke between sobs.  “No one will ever write poetry about me.  Or try to kiss me.  I shall never get married.  I shall never have a house and a husband and babies of my own.”

I stared at her, thinking about how it is perfectly possible not to know your own sister at all.  I admit the thought of anyone writing poetry about Mary strains even my imagination.

Actually, what strains my imagination still more is to picture Mary
accepting
a poem written in her honour—without being tempted to write up an answering critique of the metre and rhyme.

And Mary as a mother?  The mind—or at least
my
mind—boggles.

Though I will admit that Mary is very good with baby Susanna.  In Susanna’s company, Mary forgets to be serious-minded and full of conceit with her own cleverness.  She will even make ridiculous faces to get Susanna to utter one of her fat, delicious baby chuckles.  But I had never imagined before tonight that Mary might want a family of her own.

She is, however, my sister, and why should she not have a husband and children if she wants them?

The London society Season will not, of course, officially begin until after Easter—but there are still balls and parties aplenty.  Since there is no purpose in attending them for myself, I might as well dedicate my energies to seeing that Mary takes some benefit from it all.

Mary fell asleep soon after that last outburst, but—since I would rather not fall back to sleep in any case—I have been lying awake, formulating plans and going over lists of possible young men in my mind and determining that getting Mary wedded will be my good deed for the New Year.

Do present good deeds make up for past wrong ones?  It would be nice to be able to believe it, but I cannot imagine that life works that way.

There are five of us Bennet sisters—which fact always makes strangers sigh and comment about our poor mother,  burdened with the task of getting five daughters married off, without even the benefit of decent dowries for us.

But while we were growing up, it always seemed to me that each of us had her assigned role in the family.  Jane was the oldest, and the most beautiful.  Then came Elizabeth—Lizzy—who was always the most charming and witty.  And then Mary.

I suppose I cannot entirely blame Mary for turning herself into such an appalling blue-stocking, because she spent her entire childhood hearing what a shame it was that she was not as pretty as her older sisters.  It is no wonder, really, that she started trying to distinguish herself as the most bookish and intelligent one of us.

I am next in age after Mary, and then Lydia comes two years after me, the youngest of us all. Lydia was always the most spirited and vivacious one.  Which left me the only Bennet sister
without
any distinguishing characteristic.  I could not be the prettiest or the wittiest or the cleverest or even the most bouncing and lively.  I do like to draw—but only little comical sketches.  I have no real artistic aspirations.

Which makes me … what?  The boring sister?  The one without any special talents—except possibly the ability to make terrible choices with her life?

This is turning into a very whinging and self-pitying entry.  And another of my recent discoveries is that there is no fun whatsoever in feeling sorry for yourself when all you keep coming back to is that everything from start to finish has been your own fault.

Besides, what I really meant to do when I started out writing was to set down how Mary and I came to be the only two of the five Bennet sisters who are unmarried, still.

Jane and Elizabeth married extremely well, much to my mother’s delight.  Jane is married to Mr. Charles Bingley, who is not only handsome and rich, but also agreeable and kind—and madly in love with Jane, even though they have been married now for nearly three years and have one daughter, Amelia, and another baby expected quite soon.

Lizzy married Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy—who is even richer than Charles.  He always struck me as very proud and disagreeable, but Lizzy seems to actually love him.  And he loves her, too.  I have stayed with them at Pemberley, Mr. Darcy’s estate, and I have seen the way he looks at Lizzy.  Mr. Darcy—he may be my brother-in-law, but I still cannot bring myself to call him Fitzwilliam—may be stiff and proud, but he would walk to the ends of the earth just to see Lizzy smile.

And Lydia—

Lydia was always the closest to me, all the time we were growing up.  Lizzy and Jane were always perfectly nice to me.  But I was so much younger that I was always a baby to them, and they had their own secrets and games that I was never a part of.

No one could possibly make a special confidante of Mary, which left me and Lydia to play together when we were small and then be confidantes when we grew up.

Even though Lydia was the younger, she was always the leader.  I wanted to be just like her—fearless and bold, with scads of admirers to flirt with.

Strange.  Thinking about myself then is like looking through the telescope the wrong way round; that Kitty Bennet seems so distant, now.  But it is quite true.  Even when Lydia created a scandal by running away with George Wickham, I admired her.  At least she had
done
something instead of simply sitting on the sidelines of all the assemblies and balls like the rest of us, waiting for some gentleman to overlook our lack of fortune and save us from becoming old maids.

It is only in the last year that I have seen exactly where all Lydia’s vivaciousness has got her: married to a man who is a lout and a drunkard—and a coward, as well.  They have to live in France because Wickham deserted from the army at the Battle of Waterloo and now cannot come home.  The only time Lydia writes to any of us is to ask for money and to complain that French society is so very dull and stultifying compared to home—which really means that she and Wickham have not enough funds for her to cut any kind of a figure in the social scene.

At any rate, that is how Mary and I came to be the last sisters left at home.  Our mother has more or less given up on seeing Mary married off, I think.  But she has by no means abandoned hopes of seeing me wedded.  To whom, she is not particular; her criteria for potential sons-in-law seem to be firstly a sizeable income, and secondly a beating pulse.

That is why I was so happy to accept our Aunt Gardiner’s invitation for Mary and me to spend the winter in London. Lizzy invited me, too.  But I cannot possibly face her again, not after what happened last Christmas.  And Aunt Gardiner is such a calm, restful person to be around.  She never fusses or worries.  Besides, though she is very kind, she is too busy with the children to be overly occupied with Mary or me.

And beyond the one time Mary informed me that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all—and I dumped an entire pot of tea over her head for it—Mary leaves me alone.

In my defence, at least the tea was (mostly) gone cold.

Today marks the first day of putting my plan into effect: I dragged Mary out to the shops to buy her some new clothes.  I was expecting it to be a battle, preferable only when compared to a visit to the dentist.  But it actually went much better than I would have thought.

And it got me away from the house during the hour when Mrs. Ayres typically makes her weekly effort to see me—and is forced to leave a card with my aunt’s parlourmaid, letting me know that she has called.

I will have to see her eventually, I know.  But there are penances and then there are penances.  And I still feel as though I would rather hurl myself under the wheels of a runaway carriage than have to sit with John’s mother and talk about her dead son.

Because if I see Mrs. Ayres, I will have to tell her the truth.  Even I cannot seriously contemplate a bare-faced lie to a woman whose son was killed last summer at Waterloo.  I suppose this will sound as though I am making excuses, trying to cast myself in a more favourable light.  The former Emperor Napoleon probably wrote in his personal diary:
I am humble and without the least conceit of myself.

But it really is true—it is honestly not for myself that I mind the thought of Mrs. Ayres knowing the whole ugly story of what happened between John and me last year.  I
would
tell her the truth—even though it makes me appear a brainless, heartless flirt.   What I am afraid of is that it would tarnish her memories of John, to know he was once blind enough to be in love with me.

So I took Mary shopping instead.

Mary has plenty of money—she has spent practically nothing of the allowance our father gave us, or the Christmas gifts from Lizzy and Jane.  Until today, all she had bought were a few books, so I was able to bring her to the Conduit Street shop of Madame LeFarge, the very fashionable modiste who makes all of Jane’s dresses.

Mary balked a bit at the prices—well, at the whole process, really.  But I asked her did she want to spend the rest of her time in London a confirmed wallflower, or did she wish to occasionally have a dance?  And she actually submitted to Madame LeFarge’s measuring and clucking and draping her with various silks and gauzes and muslins.

Madame LeFarge was at least very enthusiastic.  I think she saw Mary as a unique professional challenge.  If she could manage to make Mary beautiful, she could succeed with anyone.

Though Mary is not so ill-favoured, really.  Especially not now that her skin has cleared and her figure is no longer all awkward angles.  She might even be pretty if she learned to arrange her hair properly, instead of simply scraping it straight back from her face.  And if she left off wearing her spectacles.

She does not even actually need the spectacles—they are only plain glass set in silver frames that she bought with the goal of making herself look more intelligent.

At any rate, if left to herself, Mary would have chosen the plainest, dullest materials Madame LeFarge had.  But Madame and I joined forces and overruled her, and in the end actually persuaded her into some pretty things.  A rose satin that is to be made up with an overdress of cream-coloured spider-gauze and trimmed with pearl rosettes.  And an evening gown of pale blue crepe, ruffled at the sleeves and hem.

Madame LeFarge tried to interest me in some new clothes, as well.  I suppose there is no reason I should not have bought them.  Since John and I were no longer actually engaged at the time of his death, I was not required to wear mourning.  Thankfully.  I should have felt an even greater hypocrite having to drape myself in black bombazine and sneeze into black-edged handkerchiefs.

But I still had no desire to let Madame LeFarge fit me for anything new.

In the end, we ordered three dresses for Mary—and Madame LeFarge promised me faithfully that she would have the blue crepe ready for the dinner party Aunt Gardiner is giving in two days’ time.

That gives me two days to coach Mary in proper etiquette and persuade her not on any account to bring up the subjects of gout, brown bread, or raw carrots to any of the young men she meets.