The Unexpected Miss Bennet Read Free Page A

out of the parlour and stood for a moment in the dim hall. I am as bad as Mama, she thought. I have the fidgets and cannot sit still. The sense of disquiet deepened at the realization that all of her comforts – piano, sermons and learned essays – had become as ashes to her.
    Her father came out of his library and seemed startled to see her in the hall. He looked astonished at her – she wondered if her face told of her agitation.
    ‘Well, Mary,’ he said in greeting. ‘What meditations on the wickedness of men have you worked up for us today?’
    She stopped to consider the question seriously, though she was no fool and knew he asked it only to laugh at her. ‘Nothing yet, Papa,’ she said at length. ‘Perhaps, like Lydia, I should begin a thorough investigation of it myself.’
    He did laugh – but it was a startled, appreciative one, and Mary smiled back, somewhat shyly. She did not often make her father laugh, or at least, not as if he laughed with her.
    The parlour door opened and Mrs Bennet peered out, her cap askew. ‘For goodness’ sake, Mr Bennet! What do you mean by laughing in such a fashion?’
    ‘It was Mary, my dear. She has suddenly acquired a sense of humour.’
    ‘Nonsense. Mary?’
    ‘God wants us to laugh, I think,’ Mary said, already a little ashamed of her previous remarks. ‘It shows us that his creatures are happy and content, and so it cannot be deemed an unseemly thing.’
    Mrs Bennet looked between them, lifted her eyes to the ceiling, and disappeared back into the parlour. Mr Bennet raised a brow, then stumped off. Mary could hear him mutter, Back to normal , and they left her alone in the dim hall.

    THE SMALL VILLAGE of Meryton was still a place of quiet amusements for Kitty and Mary. They walked there almost every day. Once Mary had gone unwillingly with her sisters, but ever since her strange discomfiture she was happy to walk with Kitty down the familiar lanes. Thrown together by the absence of their sisters, they formed an alliance born of necessity. They could never be close in the way Kitty had been with Lydia, to be sure. The youngest two Bennet sisters had been thick as thieves from the time they were small children. Though the younger, always Lydia had led and Kitty followed. Mary sometimes thought of them as a single sister, LydiandKitty . Now with Lydia gone, Kitty had no one to confide in save Mary.
    Mary got used to Kitty’s conversation on their walks on those early summer days. Their bonnets shaded them from the summer sun, and grasses swept along their skirts. It was not that she listened too closely to her sister’s chatter – rather it rolled off her in the same way that a summer rain dripped off new leaves, barely noticeable.
    ‘Jane said that she would bring me to Bath and London this year, and I will go to all of the balls, for I am already out. Mama has said that I can have as many new ballgowns as I like, for Bingley is so amiable he will surely pay for them. I only want to wait to buy them in London, for Meryton’s dressmakers are nothing grand enough. I think a pink one and a yellow one to start, don’t you think? I would love to have white lace for I know I will look just like a bride and everyone will look at me! But I am not sure Mama will approve – she will say that cream is best, perhaps. But perhaps Jane will – she is so happy she will say yes to anything! And Mama will listen to anything Jane tells her. Can you keep a secret, Mary?’
    For a single moment Mary was startled into listening to her sister. Then she thought: whom could I tell, for you are the only one I have to talk to?
    ‘It is a solemn charge to keep a confidence,’ she assured her sister. Kitty grimaced in the way that she always did when Mary said something serious, and took a deep breath, as if to tell Mary her secret all at once.
    ‘I wrote to Lydia to tell her I would be in London and she wrote back and said that she would try to get Wickham to go there. And I am