Mrs. Bennet Has Her Say Read Free Page B

removed from me and over which I have no say whatsoever. I find myself living with a stranger and I must confess to being lonely.

    Before the New Year, at Longbourn
    Dear Jane,
    Oh, how I wish I could have been with you and Mr. Phillips for this Christmas season, my first as a married woman and heavy with child to boot. But, as you know from Mr. Bennet’s greeting to you in early December, it is best that I not travel—or do much of anything else if you would know the truth. I am inclined to wish that he were still be-deviling me to conceive; at least, when ’twas done, ’twas done. Now he hovers; he never leaves my side, not in the day, not at night. He is forever pulling up footstools, has had the carpenter raise my favourite one so that my feet, when Mr. Bennet places them onto it, are level with my hips. “No sense in forcing the little tyke out before his time,” he says with a gurgle he believes is a chortle. Believe me, Mr. Bennet is not capable of chortling; gurgling is as close as he can come. And now he does it all the time, believing it to recommend his suitability for fatherhood. I have warned him that the child may not wait the requisite nine months; indeed, that the little tyke, as he would call him, could appear as early as this month. He agreesinstantly, eyeing the enormity of my belly. “The sooner the better,” he gurgles and rings for Cook to bring me the camomile tea replete with herbs known only to him that he believes will facilitate the birth of his first son. I sip. I know otherwise, of course, and have decided to name her Jane. What better beginning could I bestow upon her than the blessing of the name of one so dear to me. You can be sure I have not consulted Mr. Bennet on this matter. Occasionally I admit to a pang of sympathy; he knows so little of the woman who is his wife. But then he does something like cock-a-doodling about the dining room proclaiming his approaching fatherhood in tones so stentorian that Mrs. Rummidge claps her hands over her ears. You are fortunate that we did not visit you this holiday; there is no telling when Mr. B.’s outbursts will occur or what form they will take. One would think it was he who was carrying a child.
    Yrs affectionately,
Marianne
    Late December at Longbourn
    Dear Jane,
    My time is near. The winds howl, snow drifts against the windows; the fierceness of winter threatens our everycomfort. How I wish you were here with me. That your duties to your husband overwhelm your love for your sister I well understand. The demands upon our role as wife are not to be denied. I do hope Mr. Phillips regains his health soon. In your absence, Mrs. Rummidge, herself a mother several times over, has summoned a midwife to assist in the birth and lying-in soon to be mine. Mr. Bennet, as you might imagine, is loudly insistent on calling for a doctor when the time is nigh. He has read a monograph on forceps, an ugly-sounding instrument used to draw the baby from the mother should contractions be reduced. A doctor, he insists, would have knowledge of this procedure along with the proper use of opium or chloroform should the pain be too great. I laugh at him. He can read all he likes, know all there is to know, but in this regard I reign supreme. I will not have a doctor or drugs; I will not be bled as he urges, for my humours have never been more balanced than now and my sense of well-being protects me and my baby from the interference of strangers, albeit men of medicine. The very thought of a man present in the birthing chamber repulses me. Mrs. Rummidge, it would seem, agrees with me so wholeheartedly that she would absent herself, too, from my chamber. She who when I first arrived at Longbourn seemed so capable, so comforting, so experienced in the ways of motherhood, has fallen into bits and pieces now that my time is close upon me. She has agreed to boil water though she continues to ask the reason—why ought I to know?—but will