Slow of Wit, Chapter 2

Hello everyone! Here's this week's update of 'Slow of Wit'. Not much other news from me at the moment. Editing isn't exactly glamourous but it's so important!

Chapter 2

Much to her mother’s horror, by the age of twelve Mrs Bennet’s middle child had become what the neighbours called ‘bookish’.

It was quite correct for the girl to read in the parlour in the evenings, of course, provided that the more serious book covers could be disguised behind the light blue dust-jackets Mary hemmed with such bad grace in the mornings. If she hid behind a book then so much the better! For no-one would be so impolite as to interrupt a young lady from her romantic musings, even if the poems she professed to read were really a series of sermons.

If they were polite to leave her in peace, so to was Mary’s conduct a model of propriety. It was when the girl opened her mouth that the problems began, and then eyebrows were raised.

No, she could read in the evenings. Mrs. Bennet could at least be glad of that small mercy. But it was when the wretched girl began opening books at the breakfast table that the neighbourhood began to whisper, and whispers were something the lady of the house could not abide.

“Mrs Didram should indeed be speaking more softly, what with her second eldest defecting to the French,” the good woman professed to her confidante, Mrs Lucas. “And you know, her Sunday lace is quite yellow and torn at the edges, but all this could be overlooked, my dear, if she did not indulge in the wicked act of gossip!”

Whether Mrs Didram’s Napoleonic shame was unearthed or not never emerged, for despite all of her proclamations Mrs Bennet did not confront her daughter about the new habit. She knew not how to address the strange child, whose thick spectacles made the lustrous eyes she shared with her sisters seem grotesquely opalescent. Mary bestowed her smiles rarely, and such gifts were so unflattering to her colourless cheek that her mother was quite at a loss as to how to speak to the girl.

“Let her be,” Mr Bennet decided at length, worried into irritation by his lady’s nightly sermons. “She is happy, I think, or as near it as any of the girls have a right to be. Let her be.”

Mary was unaware that she was the subject of such consternation, for her rebellious action was quite innocently done. She was the middle child, and well aware of it. Above her was a perfectly matched pair, as there was below. Those below her were children yet, giggling and snorting over their porridge in a manner which Mrs Bennet insisted they would grow out of without her interference. (What a vain hope that became! Lydia in particular never lost the habit, and even as a young bride was wont to shock her husband with her violent exclamations over the morning post).

Those paired above Mary were adult beyond her comprehension, already wearing long skirts and filling out their tight bodices and their quick minds in equal parts. They did not giggle but laughed softly behind raised fingertips, dabbing their mouths gracefully and barely moving in case the steam from the teapot would tease apart their fastidiously coiffed curls. Jane’s never fell out, but it was a rare day that saw Elizabeth’s ringlets last past noon.

And then there was Mary, the girl in the middle. She might have summoned the maid to her room before dawn like her sisters, but she did not share her room like the two older ones did, and the prospect of sitting beside the dresser for hours tortured by curling tongs without a bosom companion to confide in did not appeal to her.

She refused to turn to the younger ones, who she genuinely could not understand half of the time, and did not want to understand for the remainder.

The paired doves had each other, and Mary sat alone. They rarely spoke to her. Logically, then, she began to bring a book down to the table in the mornings, and sipped her tea wrapped in the warm balm of Fordice or Swift. When she was feeling particularly daring she would bring Radcliffe or Woolstonecraft into her family realm. It was a chilling moment beyond anything those women could evoke when she realised that she could have read Lewis aloud and not a word would have been uttered.

Years passed, and it became a habit.

When Lydia’s flitting mind turned to the pursuit of that most female indulgence, she approached her sister to ask her which novels were the most shocking. Mary was almost at a loss; tempted to refuse, she listened to her sister’s heartfelt entreaties for nearly an hour before finally surrendering to a mind more stubborn than her own. In an act that was almost as perverse as Lydia’s newfound interest in the printed word, she produced a book whose hellish domains had long left her own nightmares:

Vathek.

What a text! She recalled sleepless nights where she had been afraid to close her eyes, lest she reopen them in the depths of eternal torment. That dark prince taunted her dreams, mocking her pleasures for weeks until she turned to the church and confessed to the almighty that she had read about such profane deeds, and turned them over in her mind, and thus had done them in thought… had she done them in deed? Her mind had offended her, so how might she pluck it out?

The priest, in his goodly wisdom, told the girl to come back when she had committed a real sin. When she looked blankly to him, he further instructed that his lost lamb leave in peace and not dwell on such foolish whims.

Not to be discouraged from believing in her own damnation, Mary repented at length. She diligently applied herself to a study of the ethics of Solomon and Esther, until she was disturbed from her heartfelt penance by the pleas of her sister and petulantly handed her the very volume which had dominated her soul.

Consumed by guilt the next day, she hastened to her sister’s room and hesitated outside, horrified by the odd sounds which resonated from within. So akin to sobs, so muffled and unlike her loud sisters, they might have been the whimpered cries of the doomed, beautiful children Vathek had marched into the abyss. And yet when she opened the door and saw the tears shining on her sister’s cheeks, she felt a great passion of disgust, for they were laughing.

Mary made an exclamation. They stared at her, and then pointed merrily at something in the book. The page was creased and damp with their tears of mirth, and blotted the ink which calmly spelled out the seduction of the virginal princess. Both of the girl’s faces were lit with curiosity and flushed with laughter. Lydia spoke first.

“Is that what men do? Do you read about this in all your books, Mary?”

Her tongue was so rapid! Against such a flight of glee her elder sister was quite unable to form a reply. Whether the words came quickly to her mind or not, they tripped and collided with one another on her lips. And so Mary could only say:

“It’s… it’s n… no…not…”

“Oh, it is!” Lydia’s eyes burned with something beside delight for a moment, and she clutched at her stomach as if it ached.

“You… you… mustn’…t…” Mary attempted to retrieve the volume, and when she finally held it beyond her sister’s reach Lydia’s expression set.

“Give it back,” she ordered, “Or I shall tell mama that you have it.”

“And how shall yuh-you explain how you know what it’s ab-bow-bout?” The girl tried not to stumble, and saw her sister’s affected contrition with triumph. It was a short lived victory.

“I will tell father, then.”

“Just give it back, Lyddie.” Kitty sounded bored. At the age of seventeen she was no great reader; the delights of the book had only interested her slightly, and she had seen her sisters fight more often than she had finished a pair of shoe roses.

“Have Jane and Lizzie read this?” Lydia was unrepentant, and had snatched the book back with a gleeful exclamation. She opened it again to the offending section, finding the marred page with ease and running her thumb along some choice phrases. “Do they know about this?”

“I am not sure it is ac… accurate.” Mary said with dignity. Kitty looked up with a question on her lips, but Lydia shushed her with a shake of the head.

“Of course it is.” She raised her chin. “Or else why would he write it? Anyone who’s actually done those things who read this book would know in a moment if it’s not true, and then they would laugh at this story and not read another word of it. I say it must be the truth.”

Kitty’s eyes grew huge. “I don’t think men really do that, Lyddie. They wouldn’t. I mean, men don’t talk to the devil, do they? But that’s in the story, too.”

“Oh, you’re no fun.” Lydia tossed her head and promptly dropped the book to the floor. “Have it then, Mary, if you’re missing it so much. I will not say a word. Mama would probably be just as bored by the two of you as I am.”

The girl kept her word, at least to a point. The following morning Mary was dismayed to open her door in the morning, and find that the hallway held the gaunt silhouette of her sister Elizabeth. Unlike Jane, Lizzie seemed as if she would never grow into her long legs and arms, and at twenty even her dark eyes looked overlarge in her thin, juvenile face. Her bearing was as easily graceful as always, though, even if she had her arms folded.

She explained that Lydia had told her about a certain book, and that she wished to see it. “For,” she said, “I am sure it is not one that I have found, nor Jane.”

“No,” Mary mumbled, and handed her the slim pamphlet. Elizabeth perused it with intense alacrity for upwards of ten minutes, and then returned the book to its owner without comment.

“Where did you get it?”

“Aunt Philips has a steward, and it was a gift.” The girl explained the barest details in her slow, considered tones.

“I see.” Elizabeth pursed her lips for a moment at the implications of that story, and then a brightness returned to her eyes. “You are clearly skilled at keeping secrets! Perhaps Lydia was not the best person to confide in, but I can control her this time, I think. In future you must be more circumspect, dearest.”

“Must I stop reading?” Mary asked, and the plea in her tone was far more glaring than the hesitation over the words. Her sister frowned and shook her head, looking confused.

“I would never tell you that. This book is unusual, but it is certainly not as bad as our sister so merrily described it. In any case, it is probably for the best that one of us knows these things. I do not think we could dare ask mama! Papa would not mind us knowing, but we cannot ask him.”

She added the last with the certainty of being her father’s favourite: the only one who was sometimes allowed into the library while their father was resting in its solemn sanctuary. Elizabeth’s lips quirked in a smile and she turned her bright gaze towards her sister. “Perhaps now you should be the one to instruct us!”

Thus it so transpired that Mary and her sisters found themselves ensconced together in the parlour in the evenings, speaking in low voices. Between the three of them they had enough knowledge to wholly confuse their adolescent certainties.

Jane, as the more experienced and the one who was the longest ‘out’, could describe the different touches of tens of dancing partners. She mused over the way they spoke differently to her when she did something as simple as wearing different dresses, and how their breathlessness made her own heart race. Elizabeth made a hobby of illustrating men’s characters. She used her quick wit and lively eye to make assure declarations about everything from passion to pride which she claimed she could read in a man’s upturned lip.

Mary added to this expertise of mankind her forbidden reading: the words of men who were speaking to other men, read by an ignorant woman whose knowledge was grown in that refined chasm which lay between scripture and sensuous poetry.

Two weeks later, Netherfield Park was let at last.