In which Mr. Bennet coughs again; and thereafter suffers the ministrations of his wife, and Kitty frets.
A/N: Just so you know: there will be no dying in this fic. But the plot will take a surprise jag from Bennet family sitcom to dramedy. This chapter took an unexpected and serious turn with Kitty's fretting, but I hope I managed to convey what I meant and that you enjoy it.
Also, SURPRISE! More Shakespeare allusions. Expect the next chapter, in which Mr. Jones is sent for, and Mrs. Bennet takes to her bed.
To answer a review: curry was a fashionable but not new addition to the British table by 1810, and any number of spices were being imported from India, as well as China and the East. I have not yet tracked down a Paprika reference, but they definitely had Cayenne pepper, so if I can't find it, I'll swap to that. Thank you for the excellent question.
Mrs. Hill carried the tall and steaming glass into Mr. Bennet's book room at Longbourn with all the dignity of a lady-in-waiting carrying the Queen's crown. Elizabeth, coming down the staircase, hid in the shadow of the wall.
She listened.
"You must drink it, Mr. Bennet, for it will cure your fevers and resolve your cough and make you quite well again!"
"If I drink it, Mrs. Bennet, will you not leave me the freedom of will and my own room to rest?" Her father sounded annoyed.
Mrs. Bennet harrumphed, loudly, and Mrs. Hill exited with her usual speed, the serving tray tucked under her arm.
"You must drink all of it, Mr. Bennet, and I shall not mind your temper, you being so ill," Mrs. Bennet was saying, and she bustled through the doorway. "Lizzy! Lizzy!" she called, seeing that the entryway was deserted. Elizabeth stepped forward and presented herself, as if she had been coming from the back parlour, book in hand.
"Yes, Mamma?"
"You must make sure that your father drinks all of my special brew, which will do wonders for his cough and make him quite well again. You must stay with him until he drinks it all! Now go, he is in his room, and do as I say — Hill! Mrs. Hill," Mrs. Bennet called after the housekeeper, and trotted after her, raising her skirts in her haste.
Elizabeth came around the door to her father's book room.
"So, you have been set as eagle-eyed guard," Mr. Bennet grumbled, raising an eyebrow at his favorite daughter. "Are you not afraid of my temper?"
"Afraid of your temper? Of your steel, sir, never."
"But if I am of lead, I might yet be gold, if the virtues of this concoction are to be believed. With which powers, according to Mrs. Bennet," he added in a secretive whisper, "I might be transmuted to King Midas."
Elizabeth laughed; he chuckled, winced, then half-coughed, half-sputtered.
The rising steam off the glass smelled inviting, if not familiar to Elizabeth, and she recognized it at once. A pale brownish liquid with bits of herb floating in it: it was a fairly innocuous concoction of her mother's invention, consisting of hot water, lemon, honey, feverfew and rosemary, and a tiny tipple of rum.
"It is not so bad, Papa," she chided him, and he took a long swallow.
"True, my dear, but once I have drunk this one in solitude, she shall come back with more. I shall be well-watered and well-sugared,"
"And well-annoyed," Elizabeth added, and Mr. Bennet sighed dramatically at her playfulness. Elizabeth pretended not to notice that there was a hint of another cough at the end.
"Away with you and let me to my tempering," her father waved his hand, "there is yet some pig in me."
Kitty sulked, at first taking up her needle and the child's smock she was supposed to be mending, and then throwing it aside. Her full mouth pouted, then worried at the rough edge of her forefinger's nail. The clock on the mantel struck half past one, with familiar delicate chimes. With a drawn-out sigh, she slumped into the window-seat.
Kitty was bored.
The tall glass of her mother's brew sat at the table at her father's elbow, and it had been sitting for such a duration that it had ceased to steam. Her mother had delivered it and Kitty. There had been a long list of instructions that her mother had rattled off, but Kitty's head had spun so much that she had lost track after the first three.
Mrs. Bennet had arranged her husband on the settee to her satisfaction, so that he could lay his head back and put his feet up and therefore rest from his cough. He had been quite swaddled, supplied with shawl, scarf and lap blanket.
But the shawl was dangling precariously over the back of the settee, tassels almost touching the carpet, having been abandoned almost immediately. And the scarlet paisley scarf she had arranged about her husband's neck sat in a loosely wrapped bundle on the side-table, next to a towering stack of neatly starched handkerchiefs. The lap blanket was tossed onto an opposing chair.
With long practice, Mr. Bennet was ignoring all of it in favour of his newspaper, but he was observing his third daughter's fretting.
"Your mother is quite gone," emerged her father's calm voice, hidden behind his newspaper, "I release you from your burdensome labours."
"Mamma said I was to watch you until you drank your medicine," Katherine's retort trailed off at the slight dip of the front pages, and the appearance of her father's eyebrows, high up on his forehead. She quailed.
Mildly, he replied,
"And so I shall, you have my word on it. Or do you not believe me?"
"But Mamma said!" Kitty blurted out, then blushed. She did not want to be vexing her father because of her mother but there seemed to be no choice of hers that would let them both be pleased with her.
Kitty drew up her needle and mending again and sewed another part of the seam where it was torn under the arm. Mr. Bennet was silent, apparently reading, then the clock struck the hour. He coughed.
"Why does she fuss over you for coughing and scold me for it?" She spoke quietly to the mending on her lap, half petulant, half upset. She had not meant to be heard by her father, or to sound so, like her heart was in her mouth, and Kitty braced for her father to call her silly again.
"Catherine," he called instead, and Kitty raised her eyes to meet his dark blue eyes looking steadily at her over his half-furled newspaper, "Would you prefer the fuss, child?"
He surveyed the mess about him with a dark amusement. "Or being treated like a boy still in the nursery?"
Kitty wrinkled her nose. "No! But I do not like to be scolded for something not my fault. You scolded me for it also."
"Ah," her father said, and there was a richness in that word which Kitty did not quite understand, and he folded up his newspaper and put it aside.
"Come here, Kitty. Or now that your hair is up, and you are out, are you too old to sit and talk with your father?"
Kitty obeyed, putting her mending into her basket and leaving the window seat. She sat gingerly next to her father. She felt her insides quivering. It was not at all like the quiver she got when she sat next to Captains Denny or Carter, who were exciting because they were handsome and charming and eligible and flirtatious.
Rather, Mr. Bennet saw much more than she did and that frightened her, and the things he said disconcerted and confused her. She did not think herself so very silly, but her father did, and he was a very learned man, and that made her feel foolish, although she did not know why, and sullen, because she did not like to be not liked.
"You must not always stop your thinking at the appearance of things, child," Mr. Bennet continued, "their essentials may be quite different. What things seem and what they are are not the same."
Kitty thought about this and frowned in confusion.
He sighed and tucked her under his arm as he had when she was littler, and he was reading to her. Sitting here, like this, with her father to her left reminded her of her childhood, when he had always had time enough to read to them with the low growling voice of a lion, or the squeaky, pitchy mouse from Aesop's Fables.
"I was not scolding you, kitten," Papa said, "Rather, someone else who ought to know better: your mother."
"It sounded like you were scolding me," Kitty objected, sure on this point. He sighed again, this time almost wearily.
"I was speaking ironically," he stopped, as if seeing the confusion on her face, "Irony is—dissimulation," and stopped again at her ignorant frown and tried a different explanation,
"Feigned ignorance. I was being intentionally contradictory, to point out how ridiculous your mother's complaints were, by also making that demand in words but meaning something quite different. It is about meaning the opposite of what you say."
Kitty tried, she did, but what he said made no sense to her. It was all quite impenetrable. She felt stupid and cross.
"Ask your question, Kitty," said he, "it is written all over your face."
"Does Mamma understand what you mean, Papa?"
"Ah," he murmured, and it was quite a different sound even from before. Kitty's confusion mounted.
"Your mother is—more concerned with making a show of things than understanding them."
"But if isn't what you want, then why do you not just say so? It just confuses me! I would think Mamma is just as confused by….by ironically," Kitty pointed out, feeling as though she quite missed the point, but insistent.
"By irony," Her father corrected quietly, and his eyes wandered over the blanket, shawl, scarf, and the glass before returning to hover over Kitty's dark blonde curls. "Your mother does what she wants or likes—regardless of what I want—even though I am the one who is sick."
He cleared his throat, face blank. "Because she has never done as I want unless I insist. And I do not like to insist."
"But, Papa, I do not like to be scolded for coughing. I do not want to be scolded. And all you are saying is making it too complicated to understand!" Kitty cried, feeling tears springing to her eyes, and wriggled out from under his arm, so that she could sit quite straight and face him.
Mr. Bennet, looking at her directly, said coolly,
"And would you like it very much, if I treated you as if you were as silly as you seem rather than the rational creature you are? Like you were a doll to be wrapped in lambswool and ordered about and treated as if you haven't a thought in your head? If I insisted?"
The last word sounded almost rounded with importance, almost bell-like, as if it had a much greater depth and distance than it seemed to have.
Kitty shook her head, shaking off the resonance. She stamped her foot, but prettily as Lydia did, and pouted towards her father.
"No, Papa," and her voice was a whine, for Kitty was quite vexed that he seemed to be scolding her again, "I want you to insist. You must make her stop scolding me for coughing."
Kitty could read the humour on her father's face, the light in his eyes, the tiny smile hidden in the corner of his mouth and felt the urge to stamp her feet again and yell like Lydia might have, or her mother. Why did he not understand her?
"Well," Mr. Bennet drawled, his voice deepening in his amusement, "you have quite caught the lesson then, for that is irony, my kitten."
Kitty was certain that he was being difficult on purpose, because she was helping her mother and because she was not Lizzy. And feeling that she had been quite insulted, though not sure where, huffed, and stood up, her hands on her hips, and then, picking up the glass, handed it to him with only a slight slosh of ill-mannered grace.
He looked at her for a long moment, with no expression on his face whatsoever, and gently took it. Then he drank the whole glass, in one go.
"Your filial duty is fulfilled," he said drily, and went cross-eyed for a moment, breathing heavily into a handkerchief, quickly snatched from the tower.
Kitty bent to pick up her basket, then turned on her heel and left without another word, and let her petulance banish all thoughts of her conversation.
"You do not think he is so very ill, then, Lizzy?" Jane was asking, as they descended into the atreum at Longbourn, having dressed for dinner.
Jane and Lizzy had spend the better part of the day in Meryton, discussing with Mrs. Lamb, their dressmaker, what might reasonably be freshened on their silk ball gowns before the ball at Netherfield. And then, as they were already in Meryton, they had paid a call on their Aunt Phillips, and stayed for a lengthy tea and conversation of the past week's news and the comings and goings in the parish.
Mrs. Haversham was expected to deliver her child any coming day; Mr. Davies' boy, Will, had had a litter of puppies; and Mr. Jones had a new man for his assistant, Mr. Smith, newly come from London.
"Not so ill as Mamma thinks, not very ill at all, I should say," Lizzy responded, and smiled at her sister, "he was nearly grumbling earlier, like a dog with a sore paw."
"We did deliver Mamma's message to Mr. Jones, so he will set all right tomorrow," Jane said, the color rising back into her cheeks.
"He will set Mamma right tomorrow, certainly."
"Lizzy!" Jane said and clutched at her sister's hand as the two sisters fell to giggling.
"My dears," Mr. Bennet called as he emerged from his room, and they turned, hearing his voice and the cheer in it.
"My dear daughters," he repeated loudly, and visibly staggered, "my daughters, my ducats—"
"Papa!" They said together and raced to his side.
"You said he was not so very ill," Jane said to her sister, taking one of her father's hands in hers.
"He was not!" Elizabeth rejoindered, her tone quite heated, "he was quite well, I thought."
"Surely he is not well now," Jane's blush was very high, "for he stumbled. Could it be a sudden fever?"
Mr. Bennet seemed content to lean against the wall and let them talk. His eyes looked glassy. And Elizabeth, her curiosity and worry aroused, stepped quite close. She sniffed the air.
"Papa," she asked him, suspiciously, and then, when he did not rouse, poked him hard in the waistcoat buttons. "Papa, you are lushed."
"Quite soused, I think," he said, shutting his eyes, "Your mother would not let me alone unless I drank that concoction of hers — and she has been making it stronger and stronger all this morning and into the evening."
Lizzy could not resist it: she giggled. Jane gave her a hard look, then as if she saw the joke, giggled too. Mr. Bennet cracked a sartorial eye,
"The last one was nearly half rum, and I shall have a splitting headache on the morrow but wonder of wonders! My cough is quite gone. I am cured."
He drew himself up to his full height and seeming to shake himself into a more composed dignity, offered an arm to each of his daughters, and then they went into dinner.
Mr. Bennet, although fond of an occasional glass of port, was not accustomed to being in his cups, and it is fair to say that he was very merry that evening, and very charming to each of his daughters by turn, and that Mrs. Bennet was quite pleased to see that her ministrations had put him into such gaiety.