Kitty Bennet's Diary (Pride and Prejudice Chronicles) (5 page)

“Is there something I might do for you instead?” I finished.

Mr. Dalton was watching me.  I could not tell whether it was with disapproval in his gaze or no.  Though I suppose it very likely was.  Perhaps as a clergyman he disapproves on principle of play acting—even with wooden animals?  Or perhaps he was merely chagrined at having to deal with me—the girl he ‘knows by reputation’—instead of my aunt.

At any rate—just as his study of me was beginning to make me feel thoroughly self-conscious, and thus irritated—he finally cleared his throat and said, “I called to give Mrs. Gardiner the approximate number of gift boxes that will be required for the children’s ward at London Hospital.  I volunteer my time there as chaplain.  And Mrs. Gardiner has very kindly offered to put together some small gifts of food and warm clothes for the children who were obliged to spend the Christmas holidays as hospital patients.”

I cannot decide which is the more annoying: Mr. Dalton’s disapproval or his continued undermining of my every excuse to be impolite.  I took firm hold on my temper, drew a breath, and said, “That is a very worthy cause, Mr.—”

And then before I could finish, the parlour door opened again, and Mark Chamberlayne came staggering into the room.

Have I mentioned Captain Chamberlayne before?  I suppose I have not.  He was a captain in the militia regiment stationed in Meryton two years ago.  And as such, part of all of Lydia’s and my madcap fun and schemes back then.  I suspect those days must seem as distant to him now as they do to me.

At any rate, he came reeling into the parlour this morning and crashed into a small table, upsetting a vase, a statue of a shepherdess, and a jar of potpourri onto the floor.  And I moved on from a wish that I could teach Rose the meaning of the phrase ‘at home’ to a momentary wish that I could boil her in oil.

Of course, Mark’s gait is never terribly steady—one of his legs having been replaced by a wooden peg—but in this case, the staggering was a result of his being extremely drunk.

Not that that was so very great a surprise; he is very nearly always drunk these days.  Yet I cannot bring myself to turn him away when he calls to see me—which is usually at least once a week.  Besides liking Mark for the sake of our old friendship, I always seem to see John at the sight of him—and wonder in what state John would have been if he had come back from Waterloo alive.

Mark has round brown eyes and a round face and a crest of very fair hair that stands up all over his head—rather like Susanna’s.  Or rather, he used to.  The fair hair is the same, but his eyes are now all but lost in pockets of flesh, and his face has the puffy, ravaged look of one who habitually drinks to excess.

He stared dazedly down at the wreckage of broken china and potpourri he had caused, shook his head as though trying to clear it—and then he lurched towards me and seized my hand, breathing gusts of gin into my face.

“Miss Bennet—you’ve got to help me—for old times’ sake, please.”

Well, actually what he said sounded more like:
Mish Bennet, you’vegotter ‘elpme.  Ferold timeshake, pleeesh.
  But trying to reproduce his drunken slurs in writing would be even worse than listening was.

I was afraid he would frighten Susanna, but she was evidently too absorbed with chewing on her pig to care over-much about Mark.  The only small mercy in the situation.  I shut my eyes in an effort
not
to look at Mr. Dalton.

I do not condemn Mark for drunkenness.  I cannot.  It is not just the pain of his war wounds—which must certainly be bad enough.  He drinks to shut out the memories, all the lost voices of Waterloo that he carries in his head. 

I understand; to be honest, I would be tempted to take to drink myself in an effort to forget.  If forgetting did not seem even more wrong. 

Still, it is one thing to deal with a drunken Mark myself, and another entirely to do so under Mr. Dalton’s gaze—imagining what sort of conclusions Mr. Dalton must be drawing about Mark and me.

Mark was looking as though he might cry.  Also not unusual; he had apparently reached the maudlin state of inebriation, which follows the angry and blustering one.  So I asked, “What is it, Mark?”

To be strictly proper, I should call him Captain Chamberlayne, of course.  But one of the first times he came to see me, he was drunk enough to be violently sick all over my shoes.  And when a man has cast up his accounts all over your best pair of nankeen boots, further formality seems absurd.

Mark drew himself up—or tried to—either the gin or his peg leg made him lurch and stumble again.  “Just a few pounds, if you can manage it?  Just enough to see me through to the end of the month.”

“Of course.”  Holding baby Susanna on my hip, I crossed to the side table where I had laid down my reticule and fished out what money I had there.  Only a few pounds; the rest of my allowances are deposited, at my uncle’s insistence, in the bank.  “Here.”

Mark took the money.  With his left hand—he left his right arm over in Brussels as well as his leg.   As he pocketed my few banknotes, he looked as though he would cry all over again—in gratitude, this time.  “Thank you, Miss Bennet.  You are an angel—a true angel.”  He sketched a drunken and weaving bow.  “You know that I will repay you, as soon as it is in my power.  On my honour, I promise you.”

I had a sudden memory of Mark, dressed up in one of my Aunt Phillips’s caps and gowns to play a prank on his fellow militia officers.  That had been Lydia’s idea, but Mark had been an enthusiastic participant.

I blinked away the stinging in my eyes and said, “Try to use some of it to buy food this time.  Promise me that?”

Mark blinked bleary, bloodshot eyes at me.  “Of course, Miss Bennet.  Of course I will.  Directly I leave here.”

He will not, of course.  All Mark’s money—any I give him, and the allowance he gets from his own family, besides—goes to paying for drink and gambling in various London gaming hells.

I was all at once furiously angry.  Not with Mark, but with Mr. Dalton, for witnessing this—and doubtless being censorious and disapproving.  And more than that, with myself, for being embarrassed at Mark’s appearance.

And even more than
that
, with the entire ugly, unfair
world
of politics and battles and war.  For gulping in perfectly nice young men like Mark Chamberlayne, chewing them up, and then spitting them out like so much rubbish.

Mark abruptly swayed and pitched forward, his eyes beginning to cross themselves.  He would have toppled into me—and thus Susanna—if Mr. Dalton had not been so quick.  He caught Mark around the shoulders, holding him upright.

“Steady there.”  Mr. Dalton did not
look
censorious or disapproving, I must grant him.  Though perhaps a clergyman must learn to conceal such feelings.  “I think we had better get you home—wherever that may be.  Miss Bennet”—he looked up at me—“can you tell me his address?”

Before I could answer, Mark turned, fixing his bleary gaze on Mr. Dalton.  “I don’t believe I’ve had the honour of making your acqu— acqua—”  Mark gave up the effort to force his tongue into forming the word and finished: “Don’t think I know you, sir.”  A frown of doubt crossed his face.  “Or do I?”

I suppose I ought at that point to have stepped forward to introduce them.  But I could not think of a way of saying,
Mr. Dalton may I present to you Captain Mark Chamberlayne
, that would not take the situation from the merely embarrassing to the grotesquely farcical.

Mr. Dalton shook his head.  “We’ve never met.  But I’d be delighted if you would do me the honour of walking with me a short distance.  If I’m not mistaken, you have served in the army.  You must have seen a great deal during your time on campaign.  I wonder if you can tell me—”

I have no idea what Mr. Dalton asked.  Something about the attitude of the Belgian peasantry towards the former Emperor, I think.  But I was too busy being horrified to more than half register the words.  If there was one thing Mark surely did
not
need at that moment, it was to be reminded of his time fighting on the Continent.

To my astonishment, however, Mark’s shoulders straightened, he sketched a brief bow, and then said—or slurred, rather—“I should be delighted to enlighten you, sir.  You may have heard that they were all hale and hearty supporters of old Boney.  But that’s not true.  Not true at all.”

I caught at Mr. Dalton’s arm, dragging him around to face me.  “What do you think you’re doing?” I hissed.

Mr. Dalton glanced back at Mark.  Who appeared lost in rapt contemplation of the dust motes dancing in the rays of sun beaming through the parlour windows.  An odd look of—what?  weariness?  or pain?—crossed Mr. Dalton’s face, and he said, his voice quiet, “I knew a … I knew someone else who had suffered through an experience similar to your friend’s here.  Everyone was constantly telling him to forget, to put the past behind him.  But I found, too late, that all he really wanted was to talk of it.  And have someone truly listen.”  He glanced at Mark again.  “I can give him that at the same time I see him safely back to his place of lodging.  If you can give me the address?”

Based on Mark’s response, he might well have been right.  But for that moment, I was angry all over again.  Angry at Mr. Dalton’s assumption of authority.  And angry that he seemed on two minutes’ acquaintance to know more about how to help Mark than I did.

Neither of which sentiments, now that I am looking at them written down, reflects very creditably on me.  This business of self-examination is positively exhausting at times.

At any rate, I said—

Well, if I am strictly honest, I more
snapped
the words than
said
them.  “You need not trouble yourself.  I am quite able to see Captain Chamberlayne back to his lodging house myself.”

“I would not dare to suggest otherwise, Miss Bennet.”  A twist of a smile touched the corners of Mr. Dalton’s mouth, then faded as his gaze refocused on Mark.  “But tomorrow morning, he will wake, sober, and remember this.  And I think he would wish to be spared the added humiliation of having forced you to play his nursemaid as well as his money lender.”

 There was still absolutely no censure or even judgement in Mr. Dalton’s voice or his gaze.   Only that same brief shadow of weariness.

I looked at Mark.  At his peg leg.  The empty right sleeve pinned up below the stump of what remained of his arm.  He has never shown it to me, but I know exactly what it must look like; I saw more amputations than I can even begin to count in the aftermath of the battle.

Mr. Dalton was right; Mark would wake and remember the details of his visit here.  And I knew from past experience that he would be penitent and filled with self-loathing—and that that would drive him into drink all over again.

I gave Mr. Dalton Mark’s address, or at least the most recent one I knew of for him; for the past year, Mark has been descending through an increasingly squalid series of lodging houses in the East End.  And Mr. Dalton took Mark’s arm and said, as though resuming their conversation, “Now that is most interesting, what you say.  Most interesting indeed.”

Mark appeared to have forgotten, if not Mr. Dalton’s presence altogether, at least the thread of what they had been saying.  “I don’t believe I’ve had the honour of making your—” he started to say again.

Mr. Dalton clapped him on the shoulder and smiled.  All trace of the look of pain, if pain it had been, was gone as though I had only imagined it.  “Lance Dalton, at your service.  And you are the man who is going to put me straight as to the attitudes of the Belgian peasantry.”

Mark still looked dazed, but he gave a dubious nod and Mr. Dalton bowed to me.  “Miss Bennet, I wish you good day.  And you as well, Miss Gardiner.”  And then he sketched another bow at Susanna, who waved her chubby fist at him and gurgled.

Mr. Dalton smiled—a real smile, this time.  It was only at that moment, when he took baby Susanna’s fist in his, that I realised how fully his earlier smile had been an assumed one—even if very convincing—put on for Mark’s sake.

He bowed over Susanna’s small hand and said, “And my apologies, Miss Gardiner, for having interrupted your private entertainment.”  He did not look at me, but I could see the amusement still in his gaze.  “I hope your Mr. Pig there enjoys his dinner appointment with his rather alarmingly Continental friend Duck.”

There are only four days now until Georgiana’s party, so this morning I dragged Mary into the morning room, rolled back the carpets, and forced her to attend to a lesson in dancing.

Being Mary, she of course protested that she knew perfectly well how to dance, that she had no need of my assistance, that in fact she had found a book of instruction written by a French dancing master, and moreover had read the book in the original language, which was more than I could do … 

I said—rather unkindly, I admit, but I was short on patience even before all her objections began—that unless she wanted to give an encore of her performance at Aunt Gardiner’s dinner party, she would be quiet and let me give her some practical instruction.