Chapter Thirteen
Mary
The house was not entirely dark when Mary came downstairs hours later. She noticed a faint line of candlelight beneath the sitting room door, steady and yellow against the floorboards.
She had not left her room with any fixed intention.
Sleep had proven unavailable, and she had concluded, eventually, that lying in the dark turning the evening over in her mind was not the best use of her time.
She had left her room, reasoning that a book and a different room might accomplish what her pillow had not.
Now she ventured ahead, despite the light.
Mrs Bennet was on the sofa with her feet tucked beneath her and a cup of warm milk in her hands. Without her cap, in her nightwear, she looked smaller than she did in the day. The word that came to Mary, unbidden, was tired.
"You could not sleep either," Mrs Bennet said.
"No."
"Come and sit, then. There is no point in standing in the doorway."
Mary did so without further encouragement. The room was comfortable, the shadows close and flickering. Neither of them spoke for a moment. This was unusual between them; silence with her mother had always had an element of incompletion, always wanted filling.
Tonight, Mary let it be.
Then, because she was exhausted, and the evening had already depleted whatever reserve of caution she normally maintained, she said: "May I tell you something?"
Mrs Bennet looked at her over the rim of her cup. "You may tell me anything. I am your mother."
"I did not have the opportunity to tell what I thought in detail," she began, raising a hand to halt any interruptions. "I should like to do so now."
She spoke about visiting Mr Thwaite several days ago and how Mr Bingley and his sister had dropped by in the middle of her visit.
She explained the way Caroline Bingley had drawn Mr Thwaite into conversation multiple times, intent on dominating his attention.
Then she went on to explain how she, Mr Thwaite and Lady Hamilton went on a walk when Mrs Bingley and Miss Bingley appeared, fixating on the gentleman.
"I believe Mrs Bingley has been working to direct Mr Thwaite's attention towards Caroline. The occasions are too consistent to be accidental."
"That can happen to anyone," Mrs Bennet objected. "Paths align, spontaneous visits happen and discussions often descend into their own arrangement."
"I am not finished. Caroline spoke to Mr Thwaite about topics that interested him, as if she were trying to gain his favour.
She spoke with confidence and fluency, mimicking the sort of Mr Thwaite and I generally have.
It was not a chance instance. It was a directed one.
And the museum visit is the third occasion on which she has appeared in proximity to him.
The consistency is not a coincidence and I believe her mother is at the heart of this behaviour. "
Her mother’s expression, which had been attentive throughout, shifted now into something firmer. "No."
"Mama —"
"Lavinia Bingley is my friend. She has been a true friend to me this season, in a way one cannot falsify.
She told me about her husband's death. She did not have to do that.
It was not required by the social occasion and not useful to her by any means, yet she did it because she was in the company of a woman she had come to trust." Her mother's voice had the steeliness it took on when she was speaking from conviction.
"She told me it had been very hard. In the first year, she had not known how to continue.
Charles had been a comfort, but a son is not the same as a husband, and the loneliness of it was not something she had to contend with.
A woman who shares that kind of grief does not then direct her daughter to steal another woman's suitor. She is not that sort of person."
"I am not saying she is unkind. I am saying she is a mother who wants the best for her daughter, which can result in all kinds of scheming. There is a good chance she is aware of what Caroline is doing and not discouraging it."
"Caroline Bingley is a grown woman with her own mind and her own prerogatives.
If she has developed an attachment to Mr Thwaite, that is her own doing.
One cannot blame a woman for pursuing an eligible connection.
And if anything, Mary, the question you ought to be asking is not why Caroline is doing what she is doing, but why you are not doing more yourself. "
Mary steeled herself for the coming statement.
"You have had every occasion," her mother continued.
"He comes to see you. He has made his interest plain in every way available and here we are, with half the season gone, and Caroline Bingley has now met his mother while you are still discussing books.
" The flatness in her voice had taken on an edge that was not unkind but was also not careful.
"You ought to be making yourself more present in his social circle, not less, and cultivating the connections that matter to him.
That is what any young woman of sense would do in your position. "
"I am doing what he needs me to do," Mary said. "Which is to be exactly who I am, without performance. He has told me as much."
"Caroline Bingley has three full seasons behind her.
She knows how to present herself. She knows how to speak to a man's relations, how to enter a room and produce an impression.
She is more practised than you and more at ease than you have ever been.
Your sisters have that natural capacity.
But you have always been so different. More inward.
Less motivated, perhaps, to do what is required of you in society. "
Mary said nothing.
"I do not say it to wound you. I say it because you need to know what you are competing against."
"I understand perfectly well what I am competing against. No one needs to tell me twice."
Her mother blinked in surprise, as if she had expected accommodation and did not expect to receive a reply with an edge to it.
Mary rose. "Good night, Mama."
The conversation had run its course, and she was prepared to move on from it.
She returned to her room, where it was cold and the fire had long since reduced to ash.
She did not rebuild it; the cold was, at present, less uncomfortable than the effort of doing something practical. She sat at the writing desk in her wrapper and stared at its surface for a long moment.
She was thinking about the discussion with her mother. She had known she was different, had made what accommodations were required, and built a life within the loudness that surrounded her without excessive bitterness.
What she had not fully understood, until tonight, was the difference between knowing a thing privately and having it stated in a candle-lit room by someone who loved you, in the matter-of-fact tone.
That the tone contained no malice did not make it easier to receive.
It made it, in some ways, harder, because malice could be argued against, or set aside, or attributed to some deficiency in the speaker.
The flat honesty of her mother's voice had contained none of these affordances. It had simply been true, stated by someone who had noticed how things played out.
She had always been different. She had always been less easy in company. She had always been less motivated, in her mother's estimation, to do what was required.
And she had spent all the years of her life in a family that loved her, yet could never quite be what they needed her to be.
She had thought she managed this disappointment without high cost, but sitting at her writing desk in the cold she concluded that she might have slightly underestimated the effect.
She fetched blank sheets, opened the inkwell, and sat for a moment with the pen held above the page, not from any want of words but from the opposite difficulty.
She wrote quickly, which was not her habit.
Elena,
I have just had the worst conversation of a season that has produced several candidates for the distinction.
I will not give it to you in its full length; I am not sure I could bear to review it so completely.
Suffice to say that I went downstairs hoping for quiet, found my mother, and attempted, on a foolish impulse, to confide in her.
She did not believe me about Mrs Bingley's scheme.
Admittedly I expected this, and went ahead regardless, which tells me something about the quality of my own judgement at half past eleven at night.
But it was not the disbelief that remained with me when I found myself back upstairs. It was what came after.
She maintained that Lavinia Bingley is her friend, who has shared real grief with her.
And while she may be right that the information offered to her was real, I think Mrs Bingley is a more careful woman than my mother perceives her to be.
It is possible that the information shared was both real and intended, but my mother is not the best at holding two things at once. This is not her fault.
She said that Caroline Bingley has three full seasons of polish that I do not have and that my sisters have always been more goal-oriented.
I know my own limitations and I have always known them. I do not expect to enter a room and produce the effect that Jane, Elizabeth, or Caroline Bingley produces with what appears to be almost no effort. I made my peace with that a long time ago.
Or I thought I had.
But to hear it said by my own mother and to have my inadequacies pointed out so bluntly, holds a different weight.
I am writing to you because you are the only person I can think of who has ever seemed to understand what it is to be me.
You do not just feel sorry, constantly suggest improvements, or offer empty sympathy that contains within it an expectation that I will eventually make a drastic change.
You know me, plainly and without condition.
A woman I have never met. Whose face I do not know.
I have thought, more than once, that this is a very strange thing. And I have concluded that I do not care that it is strange, because the bond is real. At present, it is what I most need, and I am grateful for it.
Your friend, Mary.