Chapter 29 Mary Bennet
MARY BENNET
MARY
After eight creeping days, our coaches near Pemberley. The earth, frozen in this darkest season, is further chilled by war, but Georgiana, a being of music, hums and sketches. She sits opposite me, undisturbed by the clunks and slips of our wheels upon rutted snow.
While her sable lashes are lowered, I stare, entranced, and dream. We coast on the sunlit ocean’s surface, dare the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis with hands clasped, conquer dangerous tempests to leave behind this hostile land of Britain and settle mythically, a saved pair of lovers—
“What are you writing?” Emma asked me. She sat beside Georgiana. Harriet was beside me, while Lizzy and Mr. Darcy rode in another carriage with Lord Wellington. We had been stopped on the road for ten minutes.
I lifted my pen, feeling the shape of that last word, lovers.
“A draft of a letter,” I muttered. “A ruined one.” That word must not be set in ink.
My writing desk was balanced in my lap. I used the quill knife to cut the page from my journal, then a few strokes with an over-wet nib soaked the last passage to soggy black. I folded the page and tore it in halves, quarters, eighths.
Emma turned her bold eyes and blonde curls to Georgiana. “What are you doing?”
“Drawing,” Georgiana answered, melodious even in that single word. Her slim fingers, their oval nails brusquely short for the keyboard, held a pencil. A sheet of artist’s paper rested on her drawing board.
“May I see?” Emma asked.
Georgiana held up the paper, angled so Harriet and I could see as well. It was I—no, it was some romanticized alternate of me, blurred and contemplative, stilled and tense. Seduced. Seductive.
Emma looked between the sketch and me, then beamed at Georgiana. “You are accomplished at everything! It is quite unfair.”
An angry twinge tightened my scalp. Beautiful, broken, gifted Emma, who dotes on Georgiana, and when she tires of that, fascinates my sister’s husband, and when that grows dull, winds my friend Mr. Knightley tighter around her little finger.
“It looks just like Mary!” Harriet cried; then to me: “I mean, it is just how you seem, with your hair down that way you like. But it is a strange drawing. Is it modern?”
Harriet had changed. It was subtle yet sure. The balance between her and Emma had leveled.
Georgiana answered, “Fitz studied the Pemberley paintings for days to choose my drawing tutor. He picked Mr. John Martin, who insists I ‘free my hand’ from classical style, so I suppose it is modern. Mary does the same thing with her music. I think it suits her.” Her sapphire gaze studied me.
“I am to paint as well as draw. Shall I make this into a painting?”
Georgiana’s paintings burst with color and passion. The thought heated my cheeks. “What would you do with a painting of me?” Georgiana’s lips crooked, and the heat spread to my shoulders.
Emma wrinkled her nose. “You must have used up your entire pencil to draw all that black.”
There was not a thread of black on Emma. Today, she wore one of her yellow and gold gowns, although it was hidden by a khaki wool coat—one borrowed from Lizzy. Some unfathomable whim of fashion.
Georgiana resumed humming. F major. Telemann. I flipped through his scores in my mind’s eye. Fantasia No. 5.
Outside, men’s voices called out. Harriet sat up excitedly. “Are we near Pemberley?”
“Not yet,” Georgiana said. She cleared a spot on the steamed window. “There is another hill before the house. A mile to go.” Matter-of-factly, she added, “We have been within the estate for some time.”
Outside, I spotted a stout, frowning man wrapped in layers of wool. He gestured angrily at the row of stopped coaches. I leaned and saw an officer and Mr. Darcy listening. “The court protocol man wants the coaches to arrive in a different order. Even though we are disguised and indistinguishable.”
“I suppose the Prince must be first,” Emma said. “Or should it be the King, even though he is mad? Or is it reversed, and the royal family comes at the end?”
“I imagine that is the debate,” I said dryly.
Our caravan was ten coaches, twenty soldiers, and three wagons. A blind spy would guess this was the royal family fleeing London. But Yuánchi had overflown Pemberley’s woods for months without a rumor. Pemberley had no spies. It was Camelot-like, as if honor were extant, not a fable.
But our flight to Pemberley was driven by fear, not honor.
Only Yuánchi could turn Fènnù aside, and Yuánchi was at Pemberley, so to Pemberley we ran.
And fear was justified. Brighton Pavilion, the prince’s favored home, had been leveled and four royal cousins killed.
Half of Westminster Palace was rubble, and thirty members of Parliament dead.
Even a wing of Windsor Castle, that edifice of stone, had been razed, mere minutes after Lord Wellington’s men hustled the mad king and his keepers to safety.
And though only Yuánchi could turn Fènnù aside, even Yuánchi was overmatched.
The dragons’ battle over London had been a clash of gods.
Whole stands of buildings were crushed, the worst London disaster in a hundred and fifty years.
In the end, the black dragon turned to other targets, but Yuánchi had fled, wounded, to shelter at Pemberley.
Now the royal court scurried north while the remade French invasion force, l’armée des c?tes de l’océan, landed with American slavers on the shores of south England.
“Will you draw me?” Emma asked Georgiana.
To avoid hearing her answer, I pushed open the carriage door and stepped onto the road.
The hills spread, sunlit and spottily snowed.
I walked a few paces from the coach. The turf gave little squishes and creaks under my boots: thawed.
The great freeze had been worse in London than the north, but when Fènnù left the Thames, the cold spell broke.
The freeze followed the black dragon, winter made a weapon.
Emma stepped down next. “I will check on Nessy.” She headed to Nessy’s coach, her steps effortlessly balanced on a grassy fringe to avoid the mud. I scowled at her back. Beautiful, goodhearted Emma, gifted with healing. I had lugged a traveling chest with twenty pounds of medical texts.
After the violence in London, fear gripped the city.
Everyone with a country estate or relatives in the north sent their children to safety.
Lizzy had shuttered the school, sending the older children to the Lambton school, near Pemberley, and the younger children to the Bingleys’ Hertfordshire estates.
But Lizzy had been loath to separate from Nessy, nor did I want Jane to care for a consumptive child.
Most London physicians ascribed consumption to smoky air, or uncooked milk, or said it was a cancer, a hereditary defect of the lower class, but I supported a neglected theory ninety years old: the cause was a slow and invisible contagion.
Purging class bias revealed the truth: the poor died in droves because they were crammed in tiny rooms. So Nessy traveled with us, but I insisted she isolate in a private coach.
Despite my irritation, I called to Emma, “Keep the windows open while you are with her.” I sounded petulant even to myself.
Georgiana came down next and took my hand. Softly she said, “Are you jealous?”
“Evidently,” I said sourly; then self-mockingly: “Ferociously.”
She whispered in my ear, “You are everything to me.”
“Be careful.”
“I have no cares at Pemberley. This is my home.”
Other carriage doors opened. Even royalty grows tired of sitting.
The coach before ours disgorged two uniformed attendants, then the prince, fifty years old, swinging his arms beside his overfed stomach.
Georgiana and I curtsied; she did not release my hand.
When we rose, a smile played on his lips.
“Miss Darcy. Miss Bennet.” There was a thoughtful pause before he strode toward the courtier of protocol.
“Be careful,” I repeated.
“Twice!” she teased. “Are you my elder sister?”
I gave a crooked smile. “I have seen more of the world than you.”
“I have been to France and Greece. You have not.”
“Last year, Curate Mincekeep rallied his mob against witches at the doorstep of Longbourn. Yesterday, I read the newspaper accounts from Brighton. The invaders persecute those with dark skin, and ‘unnatural’ men and women vanish into their jails as well. There are no champions for the nonconformant, here or there.”
Seriously, she whispered, “Pemberley is safe,” and squeezed my hand before returning to the coach. I curled my fingers, preserving her warmth.
Iridescent blue flashed as a feathered draca landed in the tree beside me. It appeared very like the one from London. Whimsically, I called up, “Did you follow all this way?” He cocked his head, a spectacular songbird until you noticed the scaled face.
I visualized a page of a different Telemann, Fantasia No. 8, and whistled the first few notes.
He sang those back, then sang the rest of the phrase.
That was unexpected. “Have I played that for you?”
A second blue-feathered draca winged to the branch. I had never seen two together. The scales on their faces differed. The first was unquestionably the draca from London.
They piped the opening four bars of the Fantasia in two-part harmony, every note perfect although raised an octave. Alongside the coaches, wig-adorned heads turned. I stood uneasily, the image of Telemann’s score lodged in my mind while the notes danced.
A third blue draca flipped to a neat landing at my feet. They were astonishingly adept fliers, agile as barn swallows and having the same forked tail, but as large as robins.
More heads turned. I muttered, “Shoo,” and kicked a clod of dirt. The draca winged away.
Emma was not the only one with someone to care for. I walked to the coach behind ours, tapped on the coach door, and called, “Miss Bathurst?”
There was a rustle, then the door unlatched, and a drawn, freckled woman’s face smiled hesitantly. “Miss Bennet. I was asleep.”
“You should sleep, then.” She was still recovering from ingesting crawler venom at the ball.
“No. I do not want to. Please join me.”
I climbed in and closed the door. “Let me check your bandages.” Obediently, she turned her back.
I had helped her dress in this nightgown, the drawstrings removed to keep it loose.
The bandages around her shoulders and upper back looked and smelled clean, but I unwound a strip to check.
The scabs were crusted and rising into angry red scars, but dry.
“The cuts are no longer weeping. That is good, but they will become very itchy. You must not scratch.” The back of her head nodded obediently.
Gently, I felt the ring of bruises around her neck. At the ball, those had been hidden by a velvet choker. I had rather liked chokers, but after her halting revelations of captivity, the thought of wrapping a throat for decoration turned my stomach.
I pulled her blanket up to end the examination.
“Your back is healing well. I must find you a proper dress at Pemberley. We will be overrun with royals.” That emerged with ill-advised distaste, so I forced a light tone.
“Perhaps you will be introduced to the Prince.” I lifted her chin with a finger, watching her pupils shrink in the brightness. “How are the cravings?”
“Strong,” she said simply. “That poison was so foul. It burned my tongue. But if I even think of it…” A pink flush colored her freckled skin. “I do not shake anymore, at least.”
“I think it is like laudanum dependency. That requires weeks of recovery.” Her face fell, so I added, “You will recover. This was done to you, but you can undo it. You have triumphed through the hardest days. Pemberley has references on draca and crawlers. An index listed crawler venom. When we arrive, I shall read that for advice.”
“I am much better. My memories are less clouded. You make me feel brave enough to speak of them.” She drew a long breath. “Mary, they have another woman captive.”
An unwanted image of a woman, butchered and dying, snapped into my mind, crisp as an anatomist’s diagram. I hid it behind an image of the Pemberley library index. “Do you mean Miss Rees? She also attended the ball.”
“Not poor Joane. I know she was killed. It was another woman. They brought her only a day before the ball. She was not yet… fully tested.”
“Then you must tell Lord Wellington and Mrs. Darcy.” They had interviewed Miss Bathurst once already, seeking clues about the captive wyves.
“No!” She clutched my sleeve. “Can I not tell you instead? Mrs. Darcy scares me. After I swallowed venom at the ball, I felt her come for me. She was dark and howling. She was like crushing ice…”
That was unnervingly similar to Lizzy’s own description, but I said, “That was fantasy from the poison.”
Miss Bathurst bit her lip. “Pardon me. Of course. She is your sister.”
“Tell me what you remember, and I will tell them.”
“When we were first… caught… they tested us with the venom. To see how strong we were. Only those who survived were brought to be imprisoned in the house.”
A lump settled in my stomach. “Some did not survive?”
“Most did not,” she whispered. “The man who hurt me was so cruel. Worse than an animal, as animals are not mindfully evil. He joked about how only the best-bred English wyves survived, but it was not really a joke. They argued endlessly about how to choose unmarried women with strong draca affinity. Should it be status? The family’s history of binding?
For the last wyfe, they chose a friend of Joane, although Joane’s mind was so lost by then, I do not think she recognized her.
” She pinched the black fabric of my dress.
“She wore the same clothes as you and Joane. I heard her name, but I cannot recall it…”
Joane had only one good friend among the Marys. Frightened, I almost blurted it out, but that would compromise her answer. When interviewing, the patient’s lips speak truth, not the doctor’s.
Carefully, I prompted, “Miss Bottle? Something like that?”
“Spoon! Miss Spoon.”
My heart froze. “I know her.” Not only as a marcher for women’s rights, but as a composer of beautiful melodies for the clavichord. She was my good friend, one of the founders of our ladies’ musical salon, and now a captive to these monsters.