The Unexpected Miss Bennet (10 page)

The letter went on with the usual discussion of the little news and doings of Pemberley, but concluded with Lizzy sending her love to Jane and Bingley, her attentions to Bingley’s sister Caroline, and a last postscript:

Lizzy looked down at her letter, frowning over what she had written. All of it was simple enough. Mary had danced at a ball. She no longer played the piano. She had met a young man.

‘There is a puzzle here,’ she said out loud, as she folded the letter and addressed the outer sheet in her careful hand. ‘But I cannot make it out.’

UNAWARE THAT SHE posed such a puzzle to her sister, that same morning Mary went out and about on a ramble over the grounds of Pemberley,
The Mysteries of Udolpho
in her hand for when she found the right place to stop and read. The day was fine and clear, but a light breeze made her glad of her little spencer jacket and her bonnet. She had grown used to walking about the park by herself, and two of the hunting dogs that lived in the stables attached themselves to her for the adventure. Pemberley had a fine expanse of parkland overlooking a rather small lake, from which drained a pretty little stream. Mary liked to walk along the lake, across the stone footbridge, and watch the swans and the ducks. Accordingly, she took herself that way, the dogs coursing in front of her with their noses to the dewy grass.

The sound of hoofbeats made her turn. Behind her galloped a horseman on a black horse. Mary’s heartbeats quickened. It was Mr Aikens on Hyperion. He saw Mary and changed direction, coming towards her. The dogs all frisked and gambolled, for they knew that a horseman meant a fine ramble. When they got close enough, Hyperion half-reared at their antics. Mr Aikens simply sat in the saddle as if the horse stood still.

‘Miss Bennet! How do you do?’

‘Quite well,’ she called back. ‘But I fear that the dogs are too alarming for Hyperion’s taste. And I don’t know how to draw them off.’

‘Nonsense. Hyperion is only being dramatic. He enjoys dogs, likes them as if they were brothers.’

With that, Mr Aikens jumped from the saddle, threw the reins over Hyperion’s head and led the horse towards them. The dogs settled in behind.

Mary smiled, trying to control her nerves. ‘How do you do, Mr Aikens?’

‘Never better! I enjoy a fast ride over good ground. Darcy has some of the best turf in the country. Have to watch out for rabbit holes but I daresay he wouldn’t allow a rabbit on his land. Hyperion jumped straight across country, not missing his stride.’

As he talked, he kept up a fast pace. The horse steamed wet at his side. Mary was hard put to keep up with him. She managed to look at him as they swept across the lawn towards the little bridge.

Mr Aikens wore an ill-fitting coat, and his face was ruddy from his exercise. His hair curled up around his ears, and he had not shaved that morning. He glanced down at the book in her hand.

‘Oh! Do you like reading?’

The old Mary would have expounded at length on the virtues of a good book, one in which the liveliest plot was married to the most virtuous of morals. However, this book was one of Georgiana’s novels. There was little about it that was virtuous, though it was lively. So she blushed and said only, ‘Yes. I find it an amusing pastime.’

‘Do you?’ he said, as if thunderstruck. ‘Do you? Why, that is the most unusual thing. I cannot sit still long enough, but must always be up and about. Can’t read a book on the back of a horse.’

‘No, I could not imagine doing so,’ Mary agreed.

‘Extraordinary, that some people like books so much they read them anywhere.’

Mary’s embarrassment began to turn towards irritation. What on earth was so remarkable about a liking for books?

‘I do like to read, Mr Aikens. I find it exercises the mind and can even enrich the soul, if it’s the right book.’ She thought of Fordyce’s
Sermons
and how often she took comfort in the familiarity of its passages, the way it informed and reinforced her most decided opinions. He nodded at the book in her hand.

‘So what is that one about?’

Oh dear. He had to ask. ‘Oh,’ she said, stumbling over the narrative. ‘This one is rather more exciting than uplifting.’ He waited with a keen expression, so she began to narrate the plot as best she could.

‘It is about a girl who is beset on many sides by terrors both real and imagined. She is orphaned and sent to live with a relative who treats her with disdain and forces her to give up her inheritance. She has many adventures,’ she concluded lamely.

‘By Jove! How does she fare?’

‘Oh, Mr Aikens, it’s just a pretty little fiction. Emily St. Aubert doesn’t exist at all.’

He looked thunderstruck. Mary was mortified. Had her correction insulted him? She was so unused to men!

She looked at him from the corner of her eye. He did not look angry, but pensive.

‘So it is like a play,’ he said at last. ‘I like the theatre better than books, I own. Some actors are just splendid fellows and I like the plays with plenty of good swordfights, though you can tell that if those fellows really fought like that, well, they would be dead in a minute. Have you ever seen the play
Hamlet
?’ At her quiet headshake, he went on, ‘Lots of thee-ing and thou-ing and I can’t always understand it. But it ends with a capital sword-fight, and that makes up for the rest.’

While Mary was made envious by his having seen one of the great tragedies, Mr Aikens went on in a more thoughtful tone. ‘I sometimes try to read,’ he admitted. ‘But I must always be up and about. If I could just get past the first five minutes, I always think I will like the story, but the letters jump around so.’

‘Perhaps I could read to you,’ Mary suggested. She almost clapped her hand over her mouth. What was she thinking? Had she proposed reading from a romantic novel to a strange man?

Mr Aikens beamed. ‘Read to me! Read to me! Why, who would have thought of such an idea! Capital idea! But first I must finish walking Hyperion out so that he’s dry, you know. Can’t leave him standing.’

When Mr Aikens had deemed that Hyperion was safe to let stand, after checking the horse’s chest, they settled into a small shady spot under a tree at the edge of the field. Mr Aikens took off his coat to let her sit on it, and the dogs settled down, panting and smiling, waiting for the fun. Mr Aikens sat down with a most intent expression on his face so that Mary was a little alarmed. Since Mr Aikens had not read the book before, she started from the beginning.

She read with all the expressiveness she could muster, falling into the story with great anticipation. She almost felt as if they sat on the bank of the French river in Mrs Radcliffe’s book, and Mary was very conscious of the young man sitting next to her on his coat. They were so close that their shoulders brushed against one another and she was highly sensible of his presence, sometimes so that she lost her place.

He managed to sit still for a page and a half before jumping to his feet, startling the dogs.

‘There! That is all I am capable of, Miss Bennet! There were so many words, I just couldn’t keep track of ’em. They jump about in my head just as much as they do on the page, and there you go, I must be off.’

Startled by his sudden action, Mary stared up at him. His expression showed distress, and he went on. ‘Now I’ve disgusted you, just as I have my tutors and teachers.’

Mary endeavoured to assure him that she was not disgusted, but he shook his head. She remembered that she sat on his coat and got to her feet with haste. She picked it up and handed it to him. Dampness from the grass had penetrated through it to the skirt back of her gown though she had not felt it. She felt uneasy about walking home with a damp skirt, and hoped it would dry by the time she returned to the house.

Mr Aikens still looked downcast.

‘I think it is a matter of practice,’ she told him. For a moment both held on to the coat. ‘Oh, do not put your coat back on, Mr Aikens, it’s still quite damp. But I think that you cannot be expected to sit still all at once, just as I could not be expected to ride a horse without first being led about on a fat pony.’

Heedless of her warning about his coat, he shrugged into it anyway. ‘But everyone else can learn to read and sit and listen,’ said he. ‘Why not I?’

Mary cast about through all of her learning but could not come up with an answer for him. ‘I think,’ she said at last, ‘that we are what we are meant to be. And so long as we are good and kind to others, we should not allow our shortcomings in some areas to poison our enjoyment of others. I have often wished . . .’ She stopped, for she had come dangerously close to telling him what had been her heart’s desire.

He looked at her, having forgotten his own frustration now that she had started telling him of hers.

‘What?’ he said with keen interest.

Mary blushed, and shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she told him. And though he teased her about it, she refused to say, and she even enjoyed the battle between them, because it wasn’t often that a young man paid her so much attention that he would care about something she said, let alone did not say.

He gave up after a while, or perhaps grew tired of the game. Mary felt a pang. Had she proved too hard a challenge? And on the heels of that thought came another: had she been
flirting
?

Mr Aikens did not seem upset, just distracted, as he often was when he talked of many topics all in the same breath.

‘Well, well, I see you will not tell me,’ he said at last. ‘You stand firm, Miss Bennet, you do indeed. I could not do it. I have no sense of constancy, except toward my beasts.’ He gave her a look then, as if considering her in a new light. ‘I hope you get your wish,’ he said at last. ‘You deserve it.’

They walked back to the house in silence then. He shook her hand when they arrived at the drive, and Mary curtsied and watched him mount up and ride off. The dogs set up barking and Hyperion shied sideways, but kept on going.

‘Oh hush,’ she told them crossly, and they wagged their tails apologetically. She sighed and went into the house.

It was good of Mr Aikens, but she would never get her wish, to be known as the accomplished, scholarly Miss Bennet. It would no more happen than it would that Mr Aikens could sit still. She would have to take her own advice: We are what we are meant to be, and if we are kind and good, then we should not let our shortcomings poison our accomplishments.

W
HILE THE DARCYS spent a quiet summer at Pemberley, it was not to be supposed that they were to be left in peace. For there was one person who had a particular interest in Pemberley and Longbourn, and a connection to both: Lady Catherine de Bourgh. An aunt of Darcy’s, she had been used to having him at her beck and call. As the patroness of Mr Collins, she also took a great interest in the Bennets, and she was not sanguine about how one Bennet in particular had thwarted her hopes for her own daughter, Anne, who from birth had been destined for Pemberley. To Lady Catherine, Elizabeth Bennet had stolen Darcy from his rightful wife.

With Mr Collins as her go-between, she kept abreast of all the doings of the Bennets and the Darcys and even of the Bing-leys, though that household meant little to her except in relation to her own sense of importance. She did not scruple to continue to demand Darcy’s presence, sending letters by post and by the hand of her own footman in her own livery.