Page 6 of The Vanished Bennet Sister

"Miss Bennet," he said. "I hope you enjoy the remainder of the evening."

"I expect I shall. I hope the same for you."

They separated, moving to opposite sides of the assembly room.

Bingley appeared from the direction of the dance floor, looking beyond pleased.

"I danced with Miss Bennet a second time, confirming what I had already suspected from the first. We are incredibly well-matched. Simply first-rate! She is a true diamond of the first water."

Darcy’s mind turned to the subject of his own recently concluded dance. He was not sure of how to interpret the conversation with Miss Elizabeth Bennet. Many of the statements she uttered were not said with spite. There had been nothing in it of the malice that passed for wit in certain environments, the kind designed to cut rather than to illuminate.

However, her words had been delivered with gravity, which meant they could be received as either true observation or a source of amusement at his expense.

He could not determine which was the case. Thus, he was unsure whether to resent their encounter completely.

Chapter Three

Mary

The letter had arrived only the previous day and yet, Mary had read it several times.

This was not, she told herself, excessive. Elena's letters rewarded close reading. They were not the kind of letters one absorbed in a single sitting and set aside; they accrued meaning on return visits, the way a piece of music revealed its structure only after the ear had grown familiar with the rhythms.

She smoothed the pages against the writing desk and read the relevant passage again.

I have been thinking further on what you wrote of the Messiah's second act: that the music does not ornament the ideology but enacts it. You are correct, and I believe most commentators miss this entirely because they listen as a cohesive audience. What matters is to listen as unique participants. The distinction matters. Worship that positions the congregation as mere audiences is, at its root, a misapprehension of what prayer is for. We attend to the divine as a practice. The recitative passages are not decoration between the great choruses. They are the breath of the entire program.

Mary had written, in her previous reply, what she had considered a fairly modest observation about what separated sacred music from simply solemn ones. She had cited Handel’s work, which she was largely familiar with, as an example. The recitative sections of the Messiah often functioned as a form of intense contemplation. She had not anticipated that Elena would extend the idea even further, so succinctly that Mary agreed with it entirely.

This was what made the correspondence remarkable from the beginning.

It had begun months before, shortly after Mary had returned from visiting the Gardiners. Mary had been at the Meryton parish library on that afternoon, returning a volume on church music that she had borrowed, when the curate handed her a letter. He had explained that it had been sent by a woman seeking a correspondent with devotional interests. The woman had written, apparently, to a number of parishes, to no avail, but when the missive arrived in Meryton, the curate had thought immediately of Mary Bennet.

Mary had, of course, been delighted that the curate considered her a notable spiritual figure. She had read the letter in the carriage on the way home, learning that Elena was a widow of some years, lived north of the countryside, and was seeking intellectual and devotional companionship. She also valued music and was often in the habit of questioning the structure and meaning behind lyrics.

Mary had spent the next day debating whether or not to respond, and on the second day of contemplation, she made the decision to write back.

That had ushered in the start of a correspondence that was now three months old. Multiple letters had been passed back and forth and in that time she had learned the following: Elena was seven-and-thirty, though she explained that people often mistook her for a younger woman. She had been married to a man of scholarly inclinations, with whom long conversations had been a primary pleasure of the union. Upon his death, she was swamped with such intense loneliness that it compelled her to seek companionship. She had a daughter and two sons, none of whom she described at length. And finally, she wrote about matters of theology with a clarity of mind that suggested that she’d been engaging with these subjects for decades and had long passed the stage of needing to perform for others.

Mary did not know what to make of her good fortune. She had Mr Thwaite, who engaged her seriously on subjects of interest, which she was grateful for. Then there was Elena, who posed as both an intellectual correspondent and a friend. Despite being far older, Elena did not attempt to impose her views on Mary, nor did she encourage Mary to put on a false performance in their interactions. They simply proceeded naturally, as if distance had been resolved and the most important matter was the subject at hand.

Mary’s attention went to the middle of Elena’s most recent missive, where she was discussing the dynamics of music.

The great error, I think, is to treat the chorus as the point and the solo passages as preceding elements. The 'Hallelujah' is magnificent and everyone knows that. But the tenor recitative before it, which almost no one discusses, is where the theology actually does its work. It asks a question that the chorus then answers. Without the query, the answer is only noise, however glorious.

Prayer works the same way. We have become, in many of our churches, very accomplished at the answer. We are considerably less practised at the query.

Mary had read this part multiple times with sustained attention, thinking through opposing arguments. She could not easily debate this one.

Elena's opinions were not the opinions one encountered in general society, where subjects were often treated without depth. She did not speak of musical composition as uplifting, or as an ornament to worship, or as evidence of the divine in human art, all of which were positions Mary had encountered frequently. These were, on close examination, less about the music than about the speaker's desire to appear appropriately moved by it.

Elena spoke of music as a form of reasoning, conducted in sound rather than in language. This was a position Mary had arrived at herself, years ago, upon years of practice at Longbourn’s pianoforte, and had not previously had anyone to share it with.

The library at Portman Square was, at this hour of the morning, at her complete disposal. And the time before her mother was properly awake or Lydia required an audience for her various schemes, belonged to her. Mr Thwaite’s book collection ranged from theology, philosophy and music history in proportions that satisfied her considerably more than Longbourn’s shelves did.

Back at home, the library contained Mr Bennet's historical interests, the remains of Mrs Bennet's girlhood novel collection, and a small number of devotional works that had been there since before Mary could read and showed no sign of having been much consulted since. Here she had several works on music history, volumes of theological commentary, a German text on counterpoint that she could read imperfectly, and a collection of essays on the relationship between liturgy and musical form that she had been working through since the day of arrival.

She picked up the paper again, reading the final parts of the letter.