Chapter 5 Mr. Pike’s Attentions
Mr. Pike’s Attentions
After our little display I thought Pike was done with me. I could not have been more wrong. He was determined to have me.
From then on, whenever we were in the same room, his eyes were always on me. His attentions, while never quite rising to the level of open courtship, were unmistakable and unavoidable.
Perhaps I should have been flattered. At seventeen, I had never attracted so much as the whisper of a suitor.
Instead, I felt rather insulted. I missed our old companionship.
We had never exactly been affectionate friends, but I could talk to him without getting a headache.
Now he seemed determined that I should leave any encounter with a blinding one.
Why didn’t I want to marry Mr. Pike, you may wonder?
So, too, have I. It was hardly a brilliant match, but as he said, I was unlikely to attract a better, and we did have a rapport of sorts.
And yet—there was that smell of paste and ink that clung to him.
There was the way he’d tossed the gunpowder into the fire without heed for singeing my petticoat.
When we danced, sometimes he held my hand so hard it hurt, as though he feared I’d run away.
And there was my research, my answers fluttering just out of reach as Cariad fluttered above me. If I married him, or anyone, I’d no doubt be obliged to stop. Of course I would marry someday—but surely it needn’t be so soon.
Pike, however, had other ideas. The young man who liked to throw gunpowder in the fire had a similar approach to flirtation.
Every time he bowed to me in the street, looking up at me through his lashes; every time he greeted my family with “Miss Bennet, Miss Elizabeth… Miss Mary,” seeming to put a special emphasis on my name; every time he arranged matters so that he could walk me in to supper at Uncle’s—oh, I hated it.
Whenever he tucked my hand against his arm I envisioned kicking him in the shins.
Yet I felt guilty, too. I could tell many people thought I ought to be grateful for his attentions.
That, I realized eventually, was why I hated it so much. He thought I ought to be grateful, too.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked him once while we were walking. The Lucases had arranged a walk through the hills, and of course Mr. Pike had managed to fall in next to me.
“I ask for very little in this life,” he answered. “I know my place. But what I do ask for, I deserve.”
For a time it greatly disconcerted me. However, I did my best to disregard it.
Perhaps if I ignored it, it would cease, and Pike could go back to being simply my business partner and page turner.
No need to borrow trouble. But a young lady of modest means cannot so easily banish the question of marriage.
It was Elizabeth who made me see my situation clearly.
How to describe my older sister Elizabeth?
There was a time, when we were younger, when we spent quite a bit of time together.
She is the only one of my sisters who likes to read half as much as I do.
We marveled over Mary Wollstonecraft together, and tore through John Bigland’s System of Geography and History .
She is really quite clever—not terribly interested in the sciences, but capable of an intelligent conversation.
But she grew up and became beautiful. I grew up and did not.
What was more, she was my father’s favorite.
When I was banished from his library, she was suffered to remain.
Soon we had very little to say to one another.
She was busy going on visits to my uncle Gardiner’s in town and to her other friends’.
I was retreating whenever I could to my laboratory.
If you plant two identical pea seeds and leave one full in the sun and the other in a murky corner, they will grow up anything but identical.
So I was quite surprised when, one night, she knocked on my bedroom door.
She was already in her nightclothes, her hair plaited down her back. I had not yet let mine down.
“Sit down,” she said. “I’ll do it for you.”
I did. I was too surprised to do otherwise. It was rare that anyone from my family came up to my cramped little chamber. Lizzy took me by the shoulders and turned me a little away from her. Her long fingers deftly picked the pins from my hair.
“Mary,” she said, “do you want to marry Septimus Pike?”
I jumped in surprise. “What?”
“I overheard Uncle and Aunt Phillips talking,” she said. “They seemed to regard it as almost a settled thing.”
“It isn’t!”
“So I thought. Aunt Phillips said you would come around, though, when you realized there would be no other offers.”
“Were our parents there?”
“Papa was.”
“What did he say?”
“He said you were far too young, but that…” She hesitated. “He said he would talk to Mamma.”
The room seemed to be growing smaller around me.
Somehow what I felt most was embarrassment.
That my sister, considered one of the local beauties, should know that this shameful thing was happening to me!
I thought longingly of the secret door in my closet.
Oh, to be in my laboratory, observing and unobserved.
“So,” she said. The brush caught on a tangle that made my eyes smart; Lizzy held up the offending lock and brushed it in one hand so it could not hurt me. “Do you want to marry him?”
“You don’t know if he even intends to offer.”
“But if he does.”
Of course the answer was no, but I found myself asking, “Do you think I ought to?”
“He has certain qualities that are amiable,” she said neutrally.
“But what do you think?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think. The choice is yours, Mary.”
“We are commanded to be fruitful and multiply,” I pointed out.
“That’s so.”
“However, the bard wrote, ‘To thine own self be true.’”
She sighed. “Please, Mary, no more quotations.”
If this poor fellow with his meager charms had approached Lizzy, she would have refused him immediately, and everyone would have backed her. But because it was me, it seemed they would consider it.
And what if I did refuse him? What would become of me?
You must understand, Holzmann, what it is to be a fortuneless female.
The thought of being a full-time poor relation made me shudder.
And what if none of my sisters married well enough even for that?
Could I support myself as a governess? Certainly I was learned enough, but I do not have a way with children.
They seem always to be sticky. It disconcerted me even when I was a child myself.
And in either case, if I did not have a home of my own, how was I to continue my research?
Being a young lady is a bit like playing vingt-un. You start with certain cards, and then you try your best to improve your hand with what comes your way. But if you are too reckless or too arrogant—or too unsatisfied with a perfectly good lot—you may end up with nothing at all.
I hate cards.
“My God,” I said. “I may really have to marry him.”
She gave a sigh of relief. “So you don’t want to.”
“Of course I don’t!”
“Well, I didn’t know. You are friendlier with him than with any other young man.”
“That is hardly saying much! I am extremely unfriendly!”
“All right then. I can tell Papa to refuse him, if he offers for you.”
Of course. Lizzy, Papa’s favorite, would intercede to save me. My laugh sounded bitter.
“How kind of you. He will probably point out that I won’t get another offer to take me off his hands.”
“Nonsense! Of course you will,” Lizzy said, too heartily.
I grabbed the brush so hard the bristles stung my palm and turned to look at her. “Do you really believe I’ll get a better offer? Tell me what you think .”
She hesitated. “I don’t know,” she said quietly.
That was the first time I remember being properly, properly scared.
I suppose Lizzy could see it, for she hurried on: “It will be all right, though. Probably Jane will marry some terribly rich fellow and keep us all in her mansion.”
“Poor Jane.”
“I suppose. I am a delightful houseguest.”
She was trying to cheer me up. I hate being cheered up. But it was kind, I supposed. I mustered a smile. “You can go downstairs. I’ll finish my hair.”
“All right.” She stood and went to the door. “Good night, Mary.”
“Good night.” I hesitated. “Elizabeth?”
“Yes?”
“What if it’s you?”
“What if it’s me what?”
“What if it’s you who marries a rich man?” I asked. “If I never marry—would you be pleased to have me live with you?”
There was just a flash of hesitation on her face before she smiled and said, “Perfectly pleased. We both know it will be Jane, though, don’t we? Good night, Mary.” And she went out and closed the door.
I am not proud to say it, Holzmann, but I threw my brush at the door so hard that the handle cracked in two.