Chapter Three
Mary
The letter had arrived only the previous day and yet, Mary had read it several times.
This was not, she told herself, excessive.
Elena's letters rewarded close reading. They were not the kind of letters one absorbed in a single sitting and set aside; they accrued meaning on return visits, the way a piece of music revealed its structure only after the ear had grown familiar with the rhythms.
She smoothed the pages against the writing desk and read the relevant passage again.
I have been thinking further on what you wrote of the Messiah's second act: that the music does not ornament the ideology but enacts it.
You are correct, and I believe most commentators miss this entirely because they listen as a cohesive audience.
What matters is to listen as unique participants.
The distinction matters. Worship that positions the congregation as mere audiences is, at its root, a misapprehension of what prayer is for.
We attend to the divine as a practice. The recitative passages are not decoration between the great choruses.
They are the breath of the entire program.
Mary had written, in her previous reply, what she had considered a fairly modest observation about what separated sacred music from simply solemn ones.
She had cited Handel’s work, which she was largely familiar with, as an example.
The recitative sections of the Messiah often functioned as a form of intense contemplation.
She had not anticipated that Elena would extend the idea even further, so succinctly that Mary agreed with it entirely.
This was what made the correspondence remarkable from the beginning.
It had begun months before, shortly after Mary had returned from visiting the Gardiners.
Mary had been at the Meryton parish library on that afternoon, returning a volume on church music that she had borrowed, when the curate handed her a letter.
He had explained that it had been sent by a woman seeking a correspondent with devotional interests.
The woman had written, apparently, to a number of parishes, to no avail, but when the missive arrived in Meryton, the curate had thought immediately of Mary Bennet.
Mary had, of course, been delighted that the curate considered her a notable spiritual figure.
She had read the letter in the carriage on the way home, learning that Elena was a widow of some years, lived north of the countryside, and was seeking intellectual and devotional companionship.
She also valued music and was often in the habit of questioning the structure and meaning behind lyrics.
Mary had spent the next day debating whether or not to respond, and on the second day of contemplation, she made the decision to write back.
That had ushered in the start of a correspondence that was now three months old.
Multiple letters had been passed back and forth and in that time she had learned the following: Elena was seven-and-thirty, though she explained that people often mistook her for a younger woman.
She had been married to a man of scholarly inclinations, with whom long conversations had been a primary pleasure of the union.
Upon his death, she was swamped with such intense loneliness that it compelled her to seek companionship.
She had a daughter and two sons, none of whom she described at length.
And finally, she wrote about matters of theology with a clarity of mind that suggested that she’d been engaging with these subjects for decades and had long passed the stage of needing to perform for others.
Mary did not know what to make of her good fortune.
She had Mr Thwaite, who engaged her seriously on subjects of interest, which she was grateful for.
Then there was Elena, who posed as both an intellectual correspondent and a friend.
Despite being far older, Elena did not attempt to impose her views on Mary, nor did she encourage Mary to put on a false performance in their interactions.
They simply proceeded naturally, as if distance had been resolved and the most important matter was the subject at hand.
Mary’s attention went to the middle of Elena’s most recent missive, where she was discussing the dynamics of music.
The great error, I think, is to treat the chorus as the point and the solo passages as preceding elements.
The 'Hallelujah' is magnificent and everyone knows that.
But the tenor recitative before it, which almost no one discusses, is where the theology actually does its work.
It asks a question that the chorus then answers.
Without the query, the answer is only noise, however glorious.
Prayer works the same way. We have become, in many of our churches, very accomplished at the answer. We are considerably less practised at the query.
Mary had read this part multiple times with sustained attention, thinking through opposing arguments. She could not easily debate this one.
Elena's opinions were not the opinions one encountered in general society, where subjects were often treated without depth.
She did not speak of musical composition as uplifting, or as an ornament to worship, or as evidence of the divine in human art, all of which were positions Mary had encountered frequently.
These were, on close examination, less about the music than about the speaker's desire to appear appropriately moved by it.
Elena spoke of music as a form of reasoning, conducted in sound rather than in language. This was a position Mary had arrived at herself, years ago, upon years of practice at Longbourn’s pianoforte, and had not previously had anyone to share it with.
The library at Portman Square was, at this hour of the morning, at her complete disposal.
And the time before her mother was properly awake or Lydia required an audience for her various schemes, belonged to her.
Mr Thwaite’s book collection ranged from theology, philosophy and music history in proportions that satisfied her considerably more than Longbourn’s shelves did.
Back at home, the library contained Mr Bennet's historical interests, the remains of Mrs Bennet's girlhood novel collection, and a small number of devotional works that had been there since before Mary could read and showed no sign of having been much consulted since.
Here she had several works on music history, volumes of theological commentary, a German text on counterpoint that she could read imperfectly, and a collection of essays on the relationship between liturgy and musical form that she had been working through since the day of arrival.
She picked up the paper again, reading the final parts of the letter.
You speak of your sisters with such affection. I’m certain you love them very well.
I should like to know more about your home life, if you are willing.
I hope you know enough by now not to assume I’m asking out of idle curiosity.
I believe you can understand a person more fully when you know the household that formed them.
Given that you’ve said very little of your place within your family, I suspect you are modest on the subject.
As Mary pondered how to respond, she glanced out the window. The square below was quiet at this hour. There was a footman crossing on some errand and bare trees stood in patient rows. She had grown unexpectedly fond of this view.
Her place within her family. She turned the phrase over in her mind, unsure of how to answer.
It was not that her relations were unkind.
That was far from the truth. Jane was the sweetest creature alive and Elizabeth could be counted on for undiluted honesty.
Her father paid closer attention to her than he often did anything other than his books, and her mother, although she did not know what to do with a daughter who preferred Fordyce to fashion plates, was supportive.
Lydia and Kitty had their own world, loud and self-sufficient, and Mray moved around its edges without much requirement.
She had always existed separately from the entire dynamic.
This was likely due to her position in the household as the middle daughter.
She had qualifying traits of her own, like playing the pianoforte with great diligence and reading theology books no one else asked about.
But a long time ago, she had come to terms with the fact that she wasn’t that impactful, compared to her sisters.
People often forgot her name. No one had ever organised an idea with her at its head.
Mr Thwaite, to his considerable credit, did not appear to fall in line with this assessment. She had not yet decided what to make of his interest; it still surprised her, at intervals, that he was intrigued by her alone.
Mary had previously mentioned that she had a suitor to Elena, and with time, she hoped to tell the older woman more about her relationship with Mr Thwaite, which was blossoming splendidly.
She retrieved a fresh sheet of paper and dipped the pen.
Dearest Elena,
Thank you for your treatise in the earlier paragraphs. I will try to answer your question honestly, as you have always answered mine.
Jane is the eldest of us and the best. I mean that without irony.
She sees goodness in people with such clarity that it has always seemed to me a kind of vision.
She perceives things that the rest of us miss, because we are not looking in the right way.
Elizabeth is sharp and kind, a combination that is quite rare to see; most people with her quality of mind use it to keep the world at a distance.
Elizabeth uses it to pay attention, which I have always admired.
Kitty and Lydia are the youngest and the loudest. Lydia especially. I am fond of them both, even if I do not always understand them.
As for myself, I am the middle child, as I suspect you may have already inferred.
Not unhappily so. But the middle has a level of invisibility that I have never quite known how to address, and have largely stopped trying to.
I find I prefer the company of books and music to the company of most drawing rooms, and these concepts, thankfully, return the preference.
She paused, reading back over what she had written, and considered whether she had said too much. Should she revise it? No, she thought. Elena’s question had been straightforward and she had answered it directly. This was, she suspected, why their correspondence worked as well as it did.
I ought to mention, since I have been somewhat dilatory on the subject, that the family has come to London for the season.
We are in a very handsome townhouse in Portman Square.
The library is excellent, and I have been making full use of it.
A few days into our arrival, we attended a subscription ball that excited the rest of the household.
Yet I found it bewildering in the way I find most such assemblies unusual: a great deal of motion and very little substance, even as I understand I may be a partial judge.
Kitty and Lydia found it magnificent. Elizabeth, I think, found it merely interesting, whereas Jane danced with an amiable young gentleman and has been pleased about it ever since.
I played the Broadwood Grand in the music room the previous night for several hours. That, I did not find bewildering at all.
As to your analogy on preceding elements, I find myself wanting to provide a different perspective, but I am not yet certain I have the terms for the disagreement.
My objection is something like this: The practice of prayer achieves its effect upon the practitioner.
The technique, therefore, cannot be separated from the interior condition of the person practising it.
I’ll expand further on this idea once I have the correct wording.
She set the pen down and flexed her fingers. The clock on the mantelpiece drew her attention with its ticking sound. She had only a couple of seconds before the distinct noises of her mother and sisters took over the early morning quiet.
She folded the correspondence she had been rereading and placed it with the others in the small lacquered box she kept secured in the upper drawer of the writing desk. The box was growing full in a satisfying manner, just as accumulated objects had meaning beyond their quantity.
She had not told anyone about the correspondence.
This fact did not trouble her. She was accustomed to keeping the interior portions of her life away from the household's common knowledge; it was the natural consequence of years of being the sister no one thought to ask.
But if she was being accurate about it, there was a distinction between habitual privacy and deliberate concealment, and she was aware that this particular case resided closer to the latter.
The justifications were available, and she pondered about them.
Her mother would be immediately full of enquiries, and the queries would be the wrong ones, focusing on the minutiae. If Mary responded that she did not know the answers, her mother would find this insufficient and communicate that relentlessly.
Mrs Bennet could furthermore form the view that corresponding with a stranger of unknown family and position was below what might be expected of a Bennet girl with a suitor, and would possibly be disapproving on grounds of impropriety. The prospect was exhausting to contemplate.
Lydia meanwhile, would find the subject of devotional exchanges too absurd for anything other than playful mockery.
Kitty would agree with Lydia and Jane would be mercifully neutral.
Elizabeth would have a genuine interest, but she was also a curious person, and Mary did not want the details of her life being subjected to analysis.
It was simpler then, to say nothing.