Chapter XXIV
Mr. Bennet and his visitor entered the room, stopping at the edge of the seating area. Thomas performed the niceties after first securing Sir Thaddeus's permission to present his wife and daughters. He seemed surprised that Bennet would seek his consent. Unfamiliar with the social ballet, Soames crossed the room and held out his hand first to Fitzwilliam and next to Bingley who introduced his sister.
The word baronet instantly attracted the attention of the two older ladies and the two youngest, although Lydia and Kitty quickly abandoned their perusal as soon as they perceived the frost at Sir Thaddeus' temples. Mrs. Bennet and Miss Bingley, on the other hand, devoted their entire focus to the newcomer.
Although he bore a title and, thus, was a rarer commodity than your normal run-of-the-mill gentleman, Mrs. Bennet's practiced eye saw Sir Thaddeus as anything but eminent. His face bore tangible scars of life's battles, and his nose was battered like a pugilist's. Soames' physique tended toward bulk, similar to the detestable Mr. Collins, the man determined to see Fanny and her daughters in the hedgerows. Yet, any title was one more title than what had been conferred upon either of the other two men sitting near her girls. And, Lady Soames—be it Lydia or Jane—would always take precedence over Lady Lucas, the wife of a lowly knight. Mrs. Bennet, though she cherished Charlotte's mama as a lifelong friend, was too great a competitor in the Games of Venus to cede the field if a titled gentleman was on the loose. She had begun to plot her campaign when her husband approached with Soames in tow.
Mrs. Bennet primly folded her hands across her middle awaiting the pair, only to have her hopes dashed by her husband's confidence delivered in a somber voice.
"Despite Sir Thaddeus' friendly greeting just a moment ago, Mrs. Bennet, he is a man burdened by that which we all must know throughout life. The poor man remains in mourning for his wife sadly lost to fever and is, as of yet, unprepared to embark upon a search for a mate to raise his motherless children. Even now those poor waifs repine at Broad Oaks in Nottinghamshire.
"Thus, I would entreat you to counsel your unmarried daughters to tread lightly in their enthusiasm to, how do you put it, catch a husband?"
Mrs. Bennet often may have appeared a crass and grasping woman to those who did not know her, seemingly concerned only about the continuation of her own creature comforts after her husband's much-lamented—and, to this date, uncompleted—demise. However, to a more sympathetic observer, Fanny Bennet should have been understood as akin to a mother bear. Her schemes, while they would have resulted in lining her own den with dry straw and ample berries, were designed to preserve her daughters as gentlewomen: if not of the highest ranks then certainly still in the squirearchy. At heart, Fanny Bennet was a good person.
Thus, her husband's words immediately brought to a halt her visions of gilt-edged entrées into the ton for her girls: not a complete arrest, but rather, as the matron slyly thought, an armistice, like the Treaty of Amiens. Then, back in the Year Three, the Tyrant offered the Government exactly what it—and the dictator himself—desired most: time to redeploy and rearm, anticipating the next innings.
She reached out a hand and gently squeezed Soames' forearm and said with sincere compassion, "Oh, Sir Thaddeus, what doleful news. You must miss your lady wife terribly. Rest assured that you may turn to Longbourn whenever you become lonely. There will always be a place at our table if the chatter of our family will lift your spirits."
Soames had the grace to bow his head in what appeared to be thankful acceptance of Mrs. Bennet's well-intentioned thoughts. In truth, he was concealing a small grin of amazement at Bennet's prodigious manipulative talents.
Not surprisingly, the woman standing two feet from Mrs. Bennet had a diametrically opposed view of the situation. In her disdain for Mrs. Bennet and her own conceited belief in her social superiority, Caroline Bingley ignored her lack of experience. She had not spent nearly five-and-twenty years, as Mrs. Bennet had, navigating the waters of the gentry.
As much as she dismissed many in trade for living in sight of their warehouses, Miss Bingley could well recall the sounds of water-driven fuller's hammers and the clattering of looms in her father's mills. Those memories raised nothing but unpleasant emotions. She could not unthink them. They plagued her, clawed at her, and forced her to scent only the weakness in others so that she could exploit them to her benefit. Like the old fable of the scorpion and the frog, try as she might, Miss Bingley could not simply switch off her basic nature, so desirous was she to rise above the roots of her family's incredible wealth.
And, unlike Fanny Bennet, Caroline Bingley would never have been held up as an example of Christian probity. She was not one to let the grass grow beneath her feet and was ready to seize any opportunity, even importuning a supposedly prostrate widower, to advance her cause.
Her eyes flashed when Mr. Bennet named Soames' estate. Here was a man who had but one degree of separation from his income, unlike Fitzwilliam who was only a manager over an exile's Pemberley assets. And, while a baronet's lady still entered the dining room behind a Countess, she surely could lord it over all those poor women married only to gentlemen. They would be forced to wait upon her stately procession.
Two irons in the fire are always better than one.
Spying a writing desk moved off to one side of the chamber, Caroline sidled over and slipped her hand into her reticule to withdraw a blank invitation. She swiftly inscribed Sir Thaddeus' name upon it before sanding it and tapping the card on the blotter.
Overhearing Mrs. Bennet's condolences, Caroline assayed a softer, more pleasant attitude than her usual when she approached.
"Oh, my dear Sir Thaddeus, I could not help but overhear Mr. and Mrs. Bennet just now. I do hope you will accept our sympathy—my brother's and mine—for your loss.
"While I am unable to offer you the bumptious noise of a Bennet family dinner, perhaps I might entice you to join us for our Harvest Ball in a fortnight's time. Even though you may not be inclined to dance, I believe you will find that our French cook will excite you with an excellent dinner," she said.
Soames flipped the card back and forth in his hand. As he did so, he cast an appraising eye over the tall redhead opposite. While he never had seen himself as God's gift to womanhood, Soames knew that he had an earthy, almost animal, quality about him that excited some females. Even though the Bingley woman spoke in social niceties, he could sense her leaning toward him as if she were iron filings drawn to his lodestone.
He flashed a look her way and replied, "I am gratified at your thoughtfulness, Miss Bingley. I am certain that you were unaware that I had come into the neighborhood to meet with Mr. Bennet on a matter of Canal business, and, thus, the invitation to your ball is a sign of your good breeding and talents as a hostess for Mr. Bingley.
"I would be pleased to accept your invitation and hope that the inclusion of a single gentleman will not cause an imbalance between the sexes in the line of dance.
"Speaking of which: if I am the highest-ranking gentleman to attend your festivities, might I presume to ask for the honor of leading you, the hostess, out in the first set? My dear wife, may God rest her soul, loved to dance. Annie found our neighborhood assemblies to be one of her monthly joys. She would never begrudge me happiness for the sake of form."
A carmine stain swept up from Caroline's collarbones, suffusing her pale skin with a rosy twilight. She giggled like a young miss, an appellation that was over a half-decade behind her, and quickly accepted Soames' request, ignoring the noise level that had spread around the room as her brother entreated Miss Bennet both the first and supper sets. Fitzwilliam spread his terpsichorean largess by begging the first set from Mrs. Bennet, earning him no small measure of Mr. Bennet's gratitude. However, the good lady demurred coyly arguing that she was too old to keep up with a virile man such as he. Richard had the good sense to blush, thank the lady and immediately ask for two from Elizabeth: the first and the supper sets. Then he gallantly begged a set from each of the other Bennet ladies.
Chapter XXV
Longbourn Estate, October 24, 1811
She was adrift…buffeted upon the seas of Mama's chatter…like a forlorn piece of flotsam waiting, praying, to be tossed up from the spume onto a sandy shore: a refuge.
Deep inside her soul, in dreamtime and awake, Lizzy knew the contours of that beach. The shingle had been shaped by ageless gales picking at its grit, rippling it in an unplanned and unreproducible pattern of boundless beauty. Above it all rose a pair of ice-blue eyes beneath a shock of near-black hair that flowed around his shoulders when untied.
There was something pulling her away from the parlor and toward that wind-swept shore. Her denial of what had become her center was growing weaker. Soon, she would break free.
Over the past fortnight, Lizzy's visits to the Dower House had been circumscribed by Mr. Bennet's restrictions. Those limits notwithstanding, Elizabeth had continued to make every effort to check on the progress Smith was making as he healed. She never directly violated her father's instructions: never set out across that narrow gulf between manor and dower. More often than not, Lizzy found that the far end of her calls on Longbourn's tenants would lead her into the smaller house's sitting room just in time for tea. Yet, since the encounter with Collins, she had been unable to satisfy her need to joust and parry with Mr. Smith on a daily basis.
Being a woman who abhorred disguise in any fashion, Elizabeth Bennet had to come face-to-face with the pachyderm. She missed the tall convict like no other man she had ever met. Every fiber of her being shrieked that she would scandalize herself, her family, and all of her friends by giving into this unholy attraction to a man without connections, fortune, prospects, or future.
Now, after days of planning, cutting, pinning, trimming, fitting, and stitching, Lizzy could feel the agitation crawling beneath her skin. She craved relief from all of the folderol that pervaded Longbourn's halls. Between Mary's wedding tomorrow morning and the Harvest Ball later in the day, Lizzy's life had been growing increasingly difficult without the steadying presence of William Smith to balance her moods.
She ground her teeth as Mama launched, once again, into the same breathless refrain, "Oh, girls, we must hurry to finish our work. Mr. Benton will be joining us for dinner this evening as will the three gentlemen from Netherfield. This room must be cleared of every hint of sewing.
"And, be certain to secure every needle. Remember last week when Mrs. Hurst chose to sit near where Lydia had been working. Lud, who would have thought that a lady who had been educated in an exclusive Town seminary would know words like that?
"T'was so unfortunate that Mr. Bingley's sisters are thoroughly exhausted from planning the Ball. They would have balanced our table wonderfully. I would have seated Miss Bingley between Sir Thaddeus—I think she has set her cap for him—and Mr. Collins—oh why did she ever invite that awful man to Mary's Ball?"
Lydia gibed, "Perhaps because Mary and Mr. Benton asked our cousin to conduct the wedding ritual since Mr. Anderton is still taking the waters in Bath? Is it not customary to invite the man who says the words over the couple to all galas?"
Fanny shot back, "Pshaw, Lydia. Knowing how that man eats, he probably got one whiff of Miss Bingley's menu and elbowed his way into our affairs. I doubt if Miss Bingley would deign to include boiled potatoes, though. Say what you may about her, she does know how to plan a party.
"Mary, dearest, your Mr. Benton was so clever to have made the third reading of the banns this past Sunday. You will marry in the morning and dance tomorrow night!
"And, Jane, you clever girl…I have no idea what you did to convince Mr. Bingley…"
At which point, the weary reply could be heard across the parlor, "Nothing, Mama, I said nothing and certainly did nothing. Mr. Fitzwilliam was the one who thought that the Bingleys could please the neighborhood by turning the Ball from its common purpose to something even more festive."
Fanny Bennet continued without taking a breath, "…well, whichever gentleman had the idea matters not to me. My daughter is having a wedding ball instead of breakfast. And the fête will be in the largest ballroom at the most fashionable estate between here and St. Albans."
Mary interjected, "Mama, I keep telling you that Edward and I would have been just as happy celebrating our nuptials with only the family in attendance. Then we could have used the money that you and Papa would have spent on food and fripperies for clothing and blankets for the millworkers. Edward says that every almanac is predicting a ferocious winter.
"However, I will own that it was very gracious of Mr. and Miss Bingley to offer up their Ball. I have no doubt that our wedding day will be something about which Mr. Benton and I will tell our grandchildren.
"Mayhap you and Papa might consider donating the cost of the breakfast to Longbourn Chapel in honor of our ceremony," the blushing young lady asked.
Lizzy could not begrudge her sister her happiness. Mary had changed in the month since her betrothal. Like a delicate white rose sprouting in Mama's flower beds behind Longbourn, the middle child had opened up in the warmth of Edward's affection.
Nor could she censure her mother for enthusing over the fortunate manner in which circumstances had organized themselves. After all, this behavior was the norm for Mrs. Bennet since that awful summer in the Year Zero when she had suffered the cruelest of disappointments. She was fighting to launch each of her daughters from Longbourn's anchorage to safe havens overseen by competent harbormasters before the inevitable overtook Longbourn's parents. Mary was the first.
No, Elizabeth's dark mood grew from without the manor house. She suffered under the burden of knowing that the most interesting man of her acquaintance might as well have been in Scotland's north.
T'was then that she noticed that she had not taken a stitch in the past five minutes.
Sighing, she called out to the room, "Enough! One more mention of a wedding—forgive me, Mary, but I know what Papa means when he complains about lace—or a Ball, and I will consider revisiting Mrs. Hurst's clearly expressed imprecations when she discovered one of Lydia's embroidery thorns stuck in her…"
"Lizzy!" Five voices shouted at her.
She barked out a sharp laugh, tossed her hands in the air, and replied, "See? You keep me bound in here for hours on end, and I lose all sense of proper comportment.
"We all know there is but one solution!"
She looked expectantly at her mother who shooed her from the room with, "Yes…yes. Get yourself gone, Missy. Climb your foolish hill, and do not come back until you can act like a lady!"