Chapter 1
THE MAKING OF CATHERINE BENNET
The music room at Pemberley faced east, and on clear mornings the light came through the tall windows in great slanting beams that turned the dust motes to gold.
Kitty had never paid particular attention to the dust motes at Longbourn.
Too much noise, too much happening, too many sisters talking over one another had occupied her attention.
But at Pemberley, and Hawthorn House, too, for that matter, she had learnt to notice such things. Small things. Quiet things.
She noticed them now as her fingers stumbled over a passage she had played correctly only yesterday. The notes came out muddled, and she stopped, flexed her hands, and began again.
“You are pressing too hard,” Georgiana observed from the table where she was copying out music for Kitty’s use. She did not look up. “The forte comes later. The phrase wants lightness.”
Kitty shook out her hands and tried once more.
This time the notes emerged as they ought, though not with Georgiana’s effortless grace.
Nothing Kitty did possessed effortless grace.
Everything required work, conscious and deliberate, the way a child learning to walk must think about each step, while other children simply ran.
She would turn nineteen in three days. She felt a great deal younger.
It was a peculiar sensation, this awareness of her own failures.
At Longbourn, she had thought herself quite grown up at sixteen, ready for anything, impatient with Mary’s moralising and her elder sisters’ caution.
How sophisticated she and Lydia had felt, knowing all the officers’ names, understanding the private jokes that made Mamma laugh and Papa retreat to his library.
They had played at womanhood like children, and no one had troubled to tell them so.
Or if they had, she had not listened.
The piece before her was a Mozart sonata, simplified for four hands.
Even simplified, it demanded more of her than anything she had attempted at Longbourn.
At home, she had not played at all. Other girls learned to play music, but Kitty had only wished to dance.
To play, she had to comprehend tempo and phrasing, to feel the structure of the composition, to recognise when a passage required delicacy and when it wanted strength.
It was exhausting. But because she improved every day, it was also wonderful.
Kitty repositioned her hands.
This time, she made it further before she faltered. The problem was always the same: in her anxiety to avoid mistakes she created them. Her fingers knew what to do when she let them, but the moment she began to worry, she was certain to stumble.
Georgiana finished her work and looked up. “Better,” she said, though Kitty had long since stopped playing. “You’re making excellent progress. Truly.”
“My improvement is not very quick.”
“All real improvement takes time.” Georgiana rose to fetch different music, moving with that self-possession that Kitty both envied and was determined to cultivate. “Shall we try the duet? You managed it well on Saturday.”
“If you think I’m ready.”
“Oh, I absolutely do.”
Georgiana Darcy was not yet eighteen, a full year younger than Kitty, and yet she was miles ahead in every accomplishment that signified.
She played beautifully, read French and Italian, drew with real skill, and could discuss books with an understanding that made Kitty feel her own education had taught her nothing at all.
She had read Richardson and Cowper, could quote from memory whole passages of Shakespeare, and once, when they had been examining maps in the library, had explained the principles of perspective in cartography. Kitty had felt utterly lost.
The extraordinary thing was that Georgiana did not parade her superiority.
She was shy in company, spoke little, and seemed perpetually anxious that she might offend.
It had taken Kitty weeks to understand that Georgiana’s reserve was not coldness but uncertainty, that her quietness concealed not disdain but genuine diffidence.
Georgiana, who could do everything well, seemed convinced she did nothing well enough.
Kitty understood her. Her own confidence had always made way for Lydia’s.
It was so easy to pretend that she wanted all the things her younger sister had.
But Lydia had given Kitty her best lesson of all by demonstrating where such behaviour could lead. Where it had led.
Georgiana was a much better woman to model herself after, though Kitty was determined to be herself from here on out. If only she knew who that was.
She glanced at Georgiana beside her at the instrument.
They were an odd pair. The shy heiress and the reformed flirt.
But Kitty had come to cherish their morning hours together, the music and Georgiana’s gentle corrections.
This room held no judgement, only patient instruction and the shared understanding that advancement was possible, that one need not remain forever what one had been.
She knew what the servants at Longbourn had said about her and Lydia: silly, wild, boy-mad, empty-headed.
She knew because she had overheard them, and remembered the accusations because they rang true.
At Longbourn, life had seemed amusing, like one long party, like the natural prerogative of youth.
At Pemberley, watching Georgiana apply herself to difficult music with quiet concentration, seeing Lizzy apply herself to managing a great household with both determination and grace, Kitty saw clearly what she herself had been.
A child in a woman’s form, filling her mind with nothing because no one had ever expected anything of her.
What hurt most was not the remembering but the knowing.
She had enjoyed it. She had liked being silly, had revelled in the shrieking and the gossip and the endless talk of officers and bonnets and nothing, nothing, nothing of any substance at all.
When she caught Lydia’s jokes she thought herself clever.
She had taken pride in her thoughtlessness because she mistook it for liveliness.
No one at Pemberley said she must change.
That was the remarkable part. Lizzy had welcomed her without condition, Mr Darcy treated her with distant courtesy, and Georgiana had offered friendship without reservation.
But Kitty felt the weight of their unspoken faith in her capacity for improvement, and she would not disappoint it.
She would not be silly again. She would not be thoughtless. She would learn what she ought to have learnt years ago, and if she must work harder than other young ladies because she was starting so late, then she would work harder.
The duet challenged them, requiring coordination and careful attention to tempo.
Kitty had to concentrate fully, counting beats, watching Georgiana’s hands for cues.
Her part was simpler than Georgiana’s, but she still had to maintain the rhythm while Georgiana managed the more complex melodic lines.
She supposed it was like learning to dance.
One must be aware of one’s partner, responsive to their movements, and willing to subordinate one’s own performance to the requirements of the whole.
She could do this. She was an excellent dancer.
When they finished, slightly ragged but essentially successful, Georgiana smiled. “You see? You can do it when you focus.”
“I must focus rather more intently than you do.”
“Perhaps. But you have only practised seriously since autumn. I have practised since I was six.” Georgiana began gathering the music, her movements neat and economical.
Everything Georgiana did was neat and economical; she never knocked things over or misplaced her belongings or forgot what she ought to be doing.
“Besides, you have improved more in four months than I should have thought possible. Mrs Annesley says you have remarkable resolve.”
Kitty felt an unfamiliar warmth in her chest. She had so rarely received praise before her elder sisters wed, and she came to live with them.
But this pride differed from what she had known before.
At Longbourn, any compliments had concerned her looks or her liveliness, and she had collected them carelessly, the way one might collect shells on a beach.
This was different. Mrs Annesley had noted her efforts and found them worthy of remark.
She had earned the compliment. That meant something.
“Mrs Annesley is very kind.”
“Mrs Annesley is very honest. She would not say it if she did not mean it.” Georgiana glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, a beautiful thing of gilt and enamel that kept perfect time.
Everything at Pemberley kept perfect time.
“Lizzy will be waiting for us. We are to review the menu for the week’s dinners, remember? ”
Kitty did remember. It was another new responsibility, another lesson in household management.
At Longbourn, Mamma had prided herself on a liberal table, whatever the season; her daughters needed only to appear becomingly dressed and sustain the conversation with agreeable trifles.
Hill and the maids bore the true labour, while Mamma anxiously calculated dishes and display, and Papa complained of the expense.
At Pemberley, Lizzy was teaching her how to run a proper household.
The planning, the coordination, the careful attention to detail that ensured everything appeared effortless.
Account books required review, menus needed approval, Kitty had to confirm arrangements with Mrs Reynolds, and she must maintain correspondence with other ladies.
Lizzy managed it all without strain, moving through her responsibilities with the same composed dignity and wit she brought to everything.