The Unexpected Miss Bennet

Table of Contents

 

Mary sat back with her fingers folded, waiting to be called upon again. It was pleasant enough to have a position in the neighbour-hood as the willing musician, but she felt a faint prick of disquiet as she looked out over the assembled guests. Almost all were young men and women with whom she had grown up. No, in many cases they were younger than she was. She had left the schoolroom some time since, and was now a full-grown woman of twenty years. She frowned, and then remembered her mother’s strict admonitions not to scowl so, as it wrinkled her brow.

‘Do you not get tired playing?’ came a voice at her side. Mary started and looked up at the young man smiling pleasantly at her. She remembered that they had been introduced but she had already forgotten his name. His dress was unkempt and his hair overlong, but he had a good-natured smile and she smiled back at him.

‘Music is the balm that comforts our souls,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t tire me to play.’

‘Even music for dancing? I find it exhilarating, rather than peaceful. But I cannot sit and do one thing over and again. I must always be moving.’

Mary opened her mouth but had nothing to say. Young men didn’t often talk to her. She felt heat rise in her cheeks and tried desperately to think of some aphorism or other. He didn’t seem to notice her reticence. Instead, he suddenly smacked the top of the pianoforte, making her jump.

‘I know. You should dance the next dance with me, and then we can compare whether dancing or music is the more tiring.’

He spoke as if it were the simplest thing in the world, that she should just rise and dance. With him.

Before she could say a word, Maria Lucas jumped in.

‘Oh no!’ she said. ‘Mary doesn’t dance – if she did we would have no one to play, for none of us has the patience. Go on, Mary – we’re all ready. Play more for us. Mr Aikens, you are ready, I know, and you promised to dance another with me.’

The young man looked between them and his smile faltered. Mary felt her mouth move in a smile of her own, and she began another air. She kept her head down, concentrating on her fingers, until she sensed that the man had gone. When she looked up he was dancing with Maria Lucas.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

 

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with Robert Hale, Ltd.

Copyright © 2011 by Patrice Sarath. Cover art: The Duet (Mezzotint), Schweninger, Karl the Elder (1818 – 87) /The Bridgeman Art Library. Cover design by Lesley Worrell.

 

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Sarath, Patrice.

The unexpected Miss Bennet / by Patrice Sarath.—Berkley trade paperback ed. p. cm.

ISBN : 978-1-101-55278-0

1. Single women—Fiction. 2. Sisters—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3619.A722U54 2011

813’.6—dc23

2011032526

 

 

I
T IS A comforting belief among much of society, that a plain girl with a small fortune must have no more interest in matrimony than matrimony has in her.

Mrs Bennet was not a particularly doting mother, but she did have one object, and that was to see all of her daughters married. She was the most often bemused by Mary, her third daughter of five, and the one with the fewest prospects.

It was not that Mary was plain, exactly, for she was a Bennet, and the Bennet girls were known as the prettiest in their small neighbourhood. But she said the most alarming things and was full of dire pronouncements on the base leanings of men, of which men were not eager to hear, and though she applied herself diligently to the piano and singing, she was not as accomplished as many another girl who approached the task with rather more gaiety than determination.

It might have been with something like relief, then, her two eldest daughters having made quite eligible matches, that Mrs Bennet could surrender her vigilance with regards to Mary. For Kitty, some effort must still be made, of course, and that was a daunting enough task in itself. But Mary – Mrs Bennet owned herself unequal to the task.

She confided as much to her eldest daughter Jane on one of her frequent visits, that her nerves were not up to finding a husband for Mary.

‘No, Mary must stay here and be a comfort to me and Mr Bennet,’ Mrs Bennet declared. ‘And after we die you must take her in, Jane. She will be no bother. She loves only her piano and her sermons and she will do quite nicely and will be quite out of the way. She can help you with the children as you begin to have them, and so she will be able to pay her own way.’

Jane endeavoured to assure Mrs Bennet that she would be able to provide a home for Mary for many more years, and that Mary would find a higher place in Jane’s home than governess when such an unhappy event as Mrs Bennet’s passing on came about, but Mrs Bennet had already flitted on to another topic, in which Lady Lucas had offered up some slight and Mrs Bennet received the insult so eagerly as to make Jane suspect she enjoyed the opportunity to consider herself ill-used.

But what to do about Mary? Jane, ensconced in the height of domestic happiness, began to suffer a niggling doubt. Could it be right that she should be so happy while her middle sister was not? Jane took up an accounting of the Bennet sisters’ fortunes. Of the five, she and her next sister, Elizabeth, were married to men they loved and respected. Their youngest sister, Lydia, had become entangled with a disgraceful rake, in circumstances which had brought down a scandal upon the whole family. Then there was Kitty who, fortunately, was not yet attached. Rather than let her go the way of Lydia, towards which destiny Kitty’s nature predisposed her, Jane and Elizabeth had each taken a firmer hand in her upbringing. For the sake of Kitty’s future happiness and respectability they could not let her follow Lydia’s example; it would not do to have
two
scandals in one family.

There was no need to have such a fear for Mary, who practised goodness with sober devotion and no little pride, and thus was less susceptible to the wiles of bad men. But even Mary, for all of her sermonizing against the evils of pleasant society, had expressed interest in a more fulfilling life than that of living on her sister’s charity. Should not she have a chance of finding such happiness with a like-minded gentleman as Jane had found with her Bingley or Lizzy with her Darcy?

Jane worried, and when Jane worried, she acted. That evening she composed a letter to Lizzy.