Page 205 of Pride and Prejudice Resolutions

"Thank you, Colonel. You have awoken a slumbering beast. You have a way of making the world seem remarkably simple."

"The worldissimple, Bingley. It is men who are complicated. Good luck in Hertfordshire. If the pitchforks get too close, send me a missive. I still have my sabre."

But Charles was already grabbing his hat from the porter and jamming it onto his head forcefully. He marched out of the club,determined to be taken seriously, even if it killed him. His stride would have impressed a dancing master. He did not look at his reflection in the windows nor did he check the height of his cravat. He looked at the horizon, towards the north, and towards a house that was waiting for a master. He was finally, for the first time in his life, in a hurry to grow up. He was halfway to Portman Square before he realised he had left his cane under the Colonel's chair, but he did not turn back.

He did not have time for canes.

He was a man of depth.

Chapter Three: The Meeting

Somerset House was too crowded, too hot, and possessed a dangerously high concentration of people who laboured under the delusion that their own faces were the most fascinating topography in London.

Mary Bennet adjusted her spectacles and planted her feet. She was three hours into "The Mule Pact," a survival strategy she and Georgiana had agreed upon to endure the social season. The rules were simple: stand perfectly still, cultivate the facial expression of a granite boulder, and let the tide of silly people wash around you without leaving a mark.

"Do I appear immovable, Mary?" Georgiana whispered. Her face was straining with the effort of standing perfectly still amidst a swirling kaleidoscope of silks, feathers, and aggressive perfume. "Lady Jersey just trod upon my toe, and I did not flinch. I stood like a rock in the middle of a very fashionable stream."

Mary offered a nod of academic approval. "You achieved the rigidity of a mountain, Georgiana. Lady Jersey, however, is less a woman and more a ship of the line under full sail. To survive a collision with her tonnage is a triumph of etiquette over mass."

Beside them, Mrs Annesley smoothed her gloves, her expression one of polite, professional endurance. "The Great Room is quite congested today. Perhaps we might move towards the architectural models? The crowd seems to prefer the portraits of their own acquaintances to the more technical achievements of the age."

"A very good idea," Mary replied, her gaze sweeping over a nearby wall crowded with insipid countesses and red-faced lords who seemed as though they had choked on a grape. "Men and women are, as a collective, fascinated by the repetition of theirown features. It is a biological redundancy. One would think forty identical portraits of the Prince Regent would be enough for a single city, yet here we are, facing the forty-first. And in this one, he appears to be wearing a corset made of optimism and some unfortunate whale’s entire rib cage."

Georgiana let out a small, muffled giggle and immediately attempted to disguise it as a cough. "Mary! You must not say such things. The Prince is... the Prince."

"I am merely being accurate," Mary replied, checking the set of her bonnet. "Accuracy is often mistaken for rudeness by people who do not like the truth. Let us go. I would rather look at a well-built bridge than Lady Sefton's turban. A bridge does not gossip, and it generally knows how to support its own weight."

She led the way, walking with a deliberate lack of speed that forced the fashionable crowd to navigate around her. Mary had spent her life being the background to her sisters' vivid drama. She knew how to be invisible, but today, she was testing a new theory: if one is invisibleandsolid, one becomes a hazard.

She watched a young man fixing his hair in the reflection of a glass case. She watched a mother whispering a list of rich bachelors to a daughter who looked as though she would prefer the guillotine.

Nobody saw Mary. Usually, she hated it. But today, it was her secret arsenal. She was the natural philosopher. They were the specimens.

The back room was much quieter. There were no portraits here, only drawings and models of things that actually performed a function. The air was cooler, smelling of wood shavings and knowledge. Mary stopped in front of a large glass case.

"What is this?" Georgiana leaned in. "I would say a very complicated set of toy blocks for a giant."

"It is a plan for the West India Docks," Mary explained. Her voice took on the steady, rhythmic tone of a sermon, but with genuine reverence. She had spent years talking to the walls at Longbourn. Now, she finally had an audience. "It uses an ingenious system of locks and basins to keep the ships from grounding when the tide goes out. It is a masterpiece of logic. The engineer has found a way to make the world behave, even when the moon is being difficult."

Mrs Annesley peered at the model. "It is a great deal of brickwork just for sugar and rum."

"Logic is never a waste of brickwork." Mary's eyes traced the lines of the quay. "I find a solid dock much more interesting than a solid reputation. You can ruin a reputation with one sneeze or a bad rumour in a drawing room. But a dock stays put. I have often thought that if people used engineering instead of feelings, there would be much less crying in the garden."

Georgiana looked at the model, then at Mary, her blue eyes wide. "Are you saying Jane should have been a dock, Mary?"

"Jane is too nice for mechanics," Mary replied, fixing her spectacles. "But the rest of us? We are just stone and wood. We let our hearts blow around like dead leaves because we care what people think. If we were built like docks, we would be much safer. We would let the tide go out, and we would simply... wait."

"You are amazing," Georgiana whispered. "I have never heard anyone make mud and water sound so heroic."

"Gravity is easy when you know what things weigh." Mary moved to the next case. "Now, this column. It is a total lie. It is meant to be a Greek temple to make the government seem stable, but the stone cost more than a whole village makes in ten years. It is a very expensive way to tell a fib in marble."

She kept talking, her voice a steady anchor in the noisy building. She did not feel like the plain Bennet daughter. She felt like the keeper of the keys. She felt undeniable.

The quiet of the back room—previously interrupted only by the scratch of Mary's voice against the silence—was suddenly shattered by a loud, cheerful noise. A group of people entered, talking about absolutely nothing with the frantic energy of fleeing a fire.

Mary stood a little taller, squared her shoulders, and narrowed her eyes as she spotted a familiar figure among the peacocks.

Charles Bingley was wearing a dark blue coat that fit so perfectly, it was as though it had been painted on him by a master of the Dutch school. He separated himself from his friends. Next thing, he was standing perfectly still in front of a painting of a naval battle, his chin tilted upward, his brow furrowed in a knot of intense concentration. The man was attempting to solve a riddle in a language he did not speak.