Page 40 of The Vanished Bennet Sister

She had managed not to weep in the house, which had required effort, and not to weep in the carriage, which had required more effort still. But whatever had remained of her willpower disappeared now. She sobbed heavily into her handkerchief, the cotton material growing damp from her tears.

She was not a Bennet.

The sentence still did not make complete sense. She had turned it over on the carriage ride, sitting in the corner with her face to the window and the city moving past in its typical indifference. Yet, it remained obstinately on the surface of her understanding rather than sinking into it. She knew the words, and the words' implications, but the meaning kept sliding away from her, refusing to attach itself in concrete ways.

What she could feel, more immediately and with much less difficulty, was the betrayal.

They had known, both of them. Mrs Bennet, who had sat across from her in the midnight sitting room two nights ago, and Mr Bennet, in his library at Longbourn, with his books and the comfortable irony of having a child he had raised as his own for eighteen years without telling her she was not his.

She had lived her whole life in their home, occasionally feeling out of place and attributing it to her own disposition when it had been something else entirely. There was a reason she did not look like any of them, a reason that was not the portrait of Mrs Bennet's grandmother. It was a reason they had both been in possession of since before she was old enough to walk, and they had taken stock of it and decided that silence was the right response.

She sobbed harder into the handkerchief. She made little sound, because she was in a public park and she was still, at some fundamental level, herself. Mary Bennet was someone who prided herself on not weeping audibly in front of strangers. But the effort it required now was significant.

She thought of Mr Thwaite.

This was, she knew, perhaps not the most immediately urgent of her thoughts, but it lingered anyway. He had once informed her, in one of their early conversations, that he was not a man who navigated personal complications with equanimity.

He had not said this as a complaint. He had said it as information, the kind one gives due to having expectations one wishes to be honest about.

He had lost his wife to a robbery that ought never to have occurred; he had spent two years restoring his own equilibrium, and he valued, above most things, the steadiness of his domestic world.

She was now, as far as society was concerned, a complication.

Not by any fault of her own, but that knowledge did not eradicate the fear. She was a woman of uncertain origin. She had a biological mother who was likely somewhere in the world and who, to Mary’s knowledge, had made no attempt to claim her. She was not the straightforward, serious young woman of a good Hertfordshire family that Mr Thwaite had been calling upon all season. Her history was considerably less tidy than that, which could pose a serious problem for a gentleman who wanted an easier personal life.

He had had to contend, already, with the occasionally rambunctious air of the Bennet family—Lydia's volume, Mrs Bennet's effusions and the collective noise of five sisters in various states of seasonal enterprise. He had navigated this with a patience she had never taken for granted. But this was different. This was not the peripheral noise of a family one was learning to accommodate. This was a central and potentially permanent complication, attached to the woman he wished to marry, the kind that did not resolve with time or goodwill.

Thomas had likely arrived at Elena’s address by now. Mary hoped Elena would heed her request and come. Several factors could make that factor impossible and she spent some time considering it all. There was a chance Elena would decide the message was on short notice and she couldn’t come or it could be that she wasn’t present in her lodgings at the moment.

All Mary knew was that she could not go back to the townhouse yet. Not with her mother being back there and Elizabeth handling a crisis she had overheard only in fragments. Not until she had spoken to someone who knew her and could understand the situation, who had known her before any of this was true.

If Elena did not come, she would return home. She was not certain she had the strength for it, at present. But she would do it, because she was still herself. She was not the sort to abandon necessary conversation simply because it was difficult.

A pair of women passed at a distance, engaged in their own conversation. A boy crossed a nearby stream of water with a stick.

She did not know how long she waited. Long enough for the cold to work its way through her shawl. Long enough to exhaust the edge of the weeping and arrive at the flatter, durable misery that came after it.

She was wiping her face for what she had resolved would be the final time when she heard it.

A voice, low and feminine, as though the speaker understood that sudden sound might startle.

"Mary?"

***

Mary

Getting her mother out of her room had required Jane.

This was not a failure on Elizabeth's part so much as an accurate assessment of relative tools. Elizabeth at the closed door would have produced a kind of resistance. Her mother recognised her knock and knew the register of her voice when she had something to address. She also had sufficient energy remaining, after being in bed all day, to resist that combination.

Jane's knock had patience woven into it, and a level of gentle inexorability that did not press so much as simply linger, with absolute confidence that the door would eventually open.

After some minutes of this, the lock had turned.

When she merged, Mrs Bennet bore the appearance of a woman who had passed a wretched night and an equally wretched morning. She occupied a chair in the drawing room with the posture of someone bracing themselves for a difficult conversation.

Every Bennet daughter was present except Mary. Lydia was on the sofa beside Kitty with an uncharacteristic stillness that marked the gravity of the occasion more effectively than any speech she might have made. Kitty had her hands folded. Jane was beside Mrs Bennet, a solemn look on her face.