Chapter Twenty-three
Mary
The bedpost was mahogany. This was the first thing Mary had established in the dark, running her free hand over the carved surface because the curtains were drawn, no candle left, and her other senses had compensated accordingly.
The cord around her right wrist was linen, tied with a proficiency that communicated a necessary detail about James: that he had tied people up before, and did not expect her restraint to require adjustment.
She had called out at intervals, in a steady, audible and polite voice that went unanswered.
Then she began screaming instead, with as much force as she could muster until her throat burned and her eyes watered.
The footsteps on the stairs had come quickly. Alice walked in and said very pleasantly that the neighbours would be alarmed, and that if Mary continued to make that noise, something would have to be done about it.
Mary had continued until James appeared, this time with a piece of cloth he tied around her mouth. After that, the night had gone more quietly.
The gag was dry against her tongue by the time the morning light seeped through the curtains. Her wrist ached where the cord met her skin. She had not slept a wink and had spent time with the only occupation that remained available: thought.
She was in this situation because her biological mother spent so much time manipulating her in spite of the long distance between them. And then once they were both in London, she had lured Mary to this house.
Whilst she was thrilled to have made a new friend, Alice had become familiar with her innermost thoughts for the purpose of learning about Mary’s nature and her connection to the Bennets.
Would she ever be free from this situation? Mary wondered. She had not informed anyone of her destination before leaving the previous day. Her family had no way of knowing where she had gone or how to find her.
Would she ever see them again?
She thought about her family with a painful pang in her heart.
Jane, whose sweetness she had sometimes taken for granted because it was constant.
Elizabeth, whose sharpness she had always admired and occasionally envied.
Kitty and Lydia, whose noise she had spent years trying to escape and would, she thought now, have given a great deal to hear in the present silence.
Her father, whose love of books and ideological theories she shared.
And her mother…
She wondered several times whether the woman she had spent her entire life understanding as her mother was still deserving of that title in the only sense that had ever mattered, and she had turned this question over many times only to arrive each time at the same answer, which was: yes.
Mrs Bennet was the one who wanted her. Who had chosen to keep her, when doing so was necessary.
And Mr Thwaite…her beloved. She longed to lay her eyes on him again, to have him speak and smile at her in the manner he often did…
Yet would she ever get that change again? Even if she could walk along the streets freely once more, that didn't resolve the matter of Miss Bingley endearing herself to Mr Thwaite. It would hurt Mary to see him getting married to someone else. It would shatter her completely.
At that moment, she had an epiphany. Caroline Bingley could acquire all the Buxtehude editions in London. She could appear at every park and soirée, and position herself in Mr Thwaite's vicinity accurately. What she could not do was be the person he had been reading Cowper alongside.
Mary had not understood this before, when Elizabeth had asked whether he seemed to enjoy Miss Bingley's company, and her answer to that had not improved her feelings.
She understood it differently now as reassurance about Caroline Bingley. No matter the attempts she made, the relationship between Mary and Mr Thwaite was so unique that it could not be replicated.
She was still thinking about this when she heard the door.
Alice entered with James behind her, carrying a tray. The curtains were pulled back without ceremony, admitting the full flat light of the morning. The tray held bread, a cup of steaming tea and a small porridge dish. It was a grotesque kind of domesticity.
Mary’s gag was removed by James.
"You should eat," Alice said.
"I am not hungry."
"That was not a request."
Mary did not reach for the bread. What followed was swift and unhesitating — Alice's hand in her hair and a sharp pull of it that brought her forward.
The force was not enough to do lasting damage but was efficient enough to demonstrate that damage was an available option.
The bread was pressed to her mouth. She ate because the alternative was worse, and because she required energy to face the next challenges that were bound to come her way.
She looked at the wall above the tray and ate, and did not weep, because she had decided in the small hours of the morning that weeping was a resource she was not going to give Alice access to.
James was leaning against the wall and he produced a sound close to a laugh.
"You are a stupid girl," Alice said, settling into the chair.
She nodded as she spoke, like it was a statement she had arrived at independently and considered accurate.
"A foolish, simple girl. I cannot imagine what I expected, but you exceeded even my worst estimate.
Several months of letters about boring Handel and you never once asked yourself why a stranger would be so very interested in your foolish devotional opinions. "
Mary braced against the onslaught of harsh words directed her way. The sweet friend named Elena was gone, replaced by the image of cruelty before her.
"And your suitor." Alice continued, her features rearranging into satisfaction as she doled out statements maliciously formed to produce pain.
"Did you truly believe a man of Mr Thwaite's estimate would remain interested in you, once Miss Bingley provided an alternative?
You are plain, too serious, and without the ease that men of his standing actually require.
By now he will have understood this. As we speak, he will very likely have made other arrangements. "
Mary's eyes became wet, against her intention. She turned her face away to conceal it. But Alice had already noticed the gesture, releasing cackling laughter in the air.
"Why," Mary began, and her tone was steady despite the blur at the edges of her vision, "are you doing this? Why?"
"You want a complete account."
"I want to understand what I have been brought here for, beyond the obvious."
"It's fairly obvious. There's a trust I need released and for that to occur, I require your signature."
"You spent so long corresponding with me. You could have found any number of other methods to obtain my signature on a document. You chose this one. I want to know why."
Alice shrugged. "You were never going to come to me willingly; the method required some ingenuity. What other reason do you presume I'd have to do this?"
"Why now, is what I mean. You had plenty of time to scheme and attempt to have access to me before I grew into an adult."
"You're an irritatingly nosy lass."
Mary glanced down at the leftover bread on the tray, which she had eaten without tasting, then returned her attention to Alice's face, which reminded her disconcertingly of her own.
In the timeframe of a day, she had discovered the truth about her true identical mother, closely followed by learning that the same mother was someone who wished her harm.
"Tell me the rest," she insisted. "If there's a missing piece in this narrative, I'd like to know it. If you are going to keep me here, you might at least be honest now."
Alice regarded her with a type of attention that had once, in letters, seemed like true interest, and now read differently.
"I was not yet twenty when you were born.
Your natural father left when I told him.
My family did not know. My maid helped conceal it, which she later regretted sufficiently to confess to my father and that was the source of a great many subsequent difficulties.
I was relieved when Mrs Bennet took you.
I want you to understand that plainly. I was thrilled, in fact. "
"And then?"
"I married some years after you were born.
A titled man. A baronet. A respectable connection on paper, if not a wealthy one.
I had expected the title to open certain doors, but it turned out to come with little else.
He was in debt when I married him, a fact he had not disclosed, and his estate was in worse condition than the exterior suggested.
James was in service with the household before I came into it.
We developed an understanding that our lives would be much better without my husband in it. "
"You had your husband killed?"
"I arranged for circumstances to resolve themselves in the direction I wanted, yes.
" She seemed to have no trouble with the moral dimension of the event and had retained only its practical significance.
"My life with him was insufficient. But soon after, I learned that his estate could not be made to produce what I required, even without the encumbrance of my husband.
And my father…" She paused and something in her face altered slightly, the first crack in the surface of her equanimity.
"My father learned about you. The maid who helped me conceal the pregnancy was overtaken by conscience at some point in her later years and told him.
He placed my rightful inheritance in a trust that cannot be released unless you, his granddaughter, sign it.
He framed it as an incentive to find you and make amends.
He was sentimental about it. He believed the gesture would produce a reunion of some genuine kind. "
"Perhaps he believed you capable of remorse and wanted this to be an opportunity for atonement," Mary said.
"He was mistaken about that. But he was not wrong about the compulsion. The money is mine by right. It has always been. The fact that it sits behind a document requiring your signature does not change what it is."
"So you searched for me."
"I had done so years earlier, when you're much younger.
That was after I married my husband. I told him about you and he wished to have you brought into the household.
He was earnest about it. He wrote to Mrs Bennet himself, in fact, in addition to my own letter.
He considered it a matter of moral obligation.
Mrs Bennet refused us both. She said you were settled and happy and she would not have you disturbed.
My husband intended to pursue the matter, but the years passed and then he died. "
"You mean he was murdered."
Alice shrugged. "If you insist on using that term."
"Could it also be because you didn't want him taking me in?"
"Perhaps. In any case, the second time I attempted to find you, I hired a private investigator to understand your interests. I wrote only to the Meryton parish, not to several, because I had been informed you were there. The correspondence was tedious."
"You ruined your own life. You gave birth to me, regretted it, and your family learned of it, but none of it had anything to do with me. I was an infant. All you've done so far is just so that you could bring me here and tie me to a bed and tell me to sign papers."
"An accurate summary."
"And after I signed," Mary finished, "you would have had no use for me."
"I would have had no further need of you. You might be returned to your family. I have two sons. I have a life. I have no interest in acquiring a grown daughter I do not know and have no particular affection for."
The tears that Mary had been keeping at bay arrived without asking permission.
Not the weeping of distress, exactly, but the hurt that came from being told she was of no unique value.
That dug at old hurts, past insecurities, but at the end of it all, Mary felt free.
She knew what she wanted and whom she wished to have in her life.
She understood those who mattered most to her.
"I want to go home," she said steadily.
Alice turned up her nose in contempt.
"Home, per my research, is a borrowed townhouse belonging to a man who may or may not still want you, a family that raised you without telling you the truth, a mother who has known since the beginning that you were not hers.
Sign the papers, Mary. Sign them, and it will all be over.
You can return to whatever you wish to return to, and I will never contact you again. That is all I am asking."
She retrieved papers from a nearby table. A quilt and ink pot followed, placed beside them with a deliberateness that made it clear the patience was finite.
Alice was staring at Mary with the confidence of a woman who expected, eventually, to get what she wanted. James stood impatiently by the door, waiting for the entire affair to conclude.
Mary did not know what her family was doing at this moment. She did not know whether the note to Elena's address had led anyone to Jermyn Street, if anyone knew she was here, or whether the morning would bring anything beyond more of Alice's frayed patience and the linen cord around her wrist.
She did not reach for the pen.
Alice's expression hardened into an emotion that held no bit of patience any more. She stood and tossed the papers in Mary’s lap. "Sign them," she demanded. Her tone was different now, stripped of the earlier calm, revealing the desperation underneath.
James stepped briefly into the corridor before reappearing in the doorway.
"There are callers at the door," he murmured.
The surprised look on Alice’s face belied the rapid, recalculation occurring in her mind. She looked at the papers, and then at Mary, and at James.
"I will return," she said to Mary. To James: "Come."
They left, the door shutting harshly behind them as Mary prayed silently to be rescued.