Chapter Thirty-Seven
Kitty and Mary
Kitty married before Lydia.
This offended Lydia enormously.
"She is younger in every way that matters," Lydia complained when the engagement was announced.
Kitty looked up from her sketchbook. "I am older than you."
"By ten months. That hardly counts."
"It counted whenever you wanted to borrow my things."
"That was different."
Elizabeth sat between them in Longbourn's drawing room and smiled.
There had been a time when Kitty's every sentence followed Lydia's. Now Kitty's humor had sharpened into something dry and quiet, a quality no one had noticed because Lydia generally reached every joke first.
Her future husband noticed.
Thomas Bell was a young solicitor and nephew to Mrs. Bell of Brighton.
He met Kitty during a visit to his aunt and later encountered her again when she stayed with Jane at Netherfield.
He did not possess great wealth or striking looks, though Mrs. Bennet privately lamented both facts.
He had kind eyes, an excellent memory, and a habit of asking questions because he genuinely wished to hear the answers.
The first time he saw Kitty sketching, he did not say, "How pretty."
He asked why she had chosen charcoal instead of pencil.
Kitty spoke for ten minutes.
Elizabeth knew then.
Not that Kitty would marry him. She had learned better than to claim endings.
But that Thomas Bell had seen her.
That was a beginning.
Their courtship lasted nearly two years. Kitty became increasingly interested in portraiture and spent one winter in London taking lessons from a respectable woman artist introduced through Georgiana.
Mrs. Bennet found the arrangement suspicious until Darcy pointed out that accomplished drawing was considered an asset in fashionable ladies.
Mrs. Bennet then praised Kitty's artistic ambition to everyone within reach.
"Your mother is adaptable," Darcy observed.
Elizabeth smiled. "When adaptation can be made to sound like her own idea."
Kitty married Thomas at twenty-two.
Mr. Bennet gave her the framed sketch of Longbourn from his library as a wedding present.
Kitty cried.
So did he, though he denied it.
Mary did not marry for years.
Mrs. Bennet suffered.
Mary did not.
She continued lessons with Mrs. Cunningham and later spent long visits with Georgiana at Pemberley, where access to a larger music library transformed diligence into genuine skill. Mary would never be a brilliant performer. Once she accepted that, she became a very good musician.
More importantly, she stopped performing every thought.
Elizabeth noticed the change one evening when Mary began to quote a moral essay during dinner, paused, and said instead, "No. That is not actually relevant."
Lydia nearly dropped her fork.
Mr. Bennet laughed, then caught himself. "Forgive me. I am laughing with you."
Mary considered and smiled. "I know."
At twenty-eight Mary became acquainted with Mr. Nathaniel Price, a widowed schoolmaster from a neighboring county who had come to Pemberley to discuss a charitable school. He liked theology enough to listen to Mary and possessed enough humor to interrupt her when listening became endurance.
Their first conversation lasted an hour.
Lydia watched from across the room in horror.
"He asked her about Fordyce," she whispered to Elizabeth.
"Romantic."
"Horrifying."
Mary married at thirty.
Mrs. Bennet declared she had always known Mary would marry a learned man.
No one challenged this.
They had matured.
At the wedding breakfast Mary played a short piece she had composed herself.
Elizabeth sat beside Darcy and listened.
The melody was restrained, delicate, and far more emotional than Mary would ever have admitted.
When it ended, Darcy whispered, "You were right."
Elizabeth looked at him. "About?"
"Mary."
Her eyes filled.
Darcy squeezed her hand beneath the table.
Three times.
I am here.
Elizabeth thought of an old woman lying in Pemberley and regretting laughter offered too cheaply.
This Mary had been allowed room to become herself sooner.
Not because Elizabeth remade her.
Because she stopped making her smaller.
That difference mattered.
Bingley and Jane's marriage also gave Elizabeth a view of her sister she had not fully understood the first time. Jane did not become forceful in Darcy's manner or witty in Elizabeth's. She remained gentle. But gentleness, Elizabeth realized, was not the absence of strength.
When Bingley considered a risky investment proposed by a London acquaintance, Jane did not tell him what to do. She asked him to explain it to her.
Halfway through the explanation Bingley stopped.
"I do not actually understand how the return is produced."
Jane smiled. "Then perhaps you should understand before deciding."
Bingley stared at the papers. "Darcy would have said no already."
"Probably."
"You aren't saying no."
"It is your money."
Bingley laughed. "This is more frightening."
He declined the investment the next day.
Years later it failed spectacularly.
Bingley told Darcy, who said, "I would have advised against it."
"I know."
"For once I would have been right."
Bingley smiled. "Perhaps. But now I know why I was right too."
Darcy had no answer to that.
Elizabeth did.
She kissed Jane when she heard the story.
Jane looked bewildered. "What was that for?"
"Nothing."
Jane smiled. "You are becoming sentimental."
"Age."
"You have used that excuse since you were twenty."
Elizabeth stared.
Then both sisters laughed.