Page 7 of The Vanished Bennet Sister

You speak of your sisters with such affection. I’m certain you love them very well.

I should like to know more about your home life, if you are willing. I hope you know enough by now not to assume I’m asking out of idle curiosity. I believe you can understand a person more fully when you know the household that formed them. Given that you’ve said very little of your place within your family, I suspect you are modest on the subject.

As Mary pondered how to respond, she glanced out the window. The square below was quiet at this hour. There was a footman crossing on some errand and bare trees stood in patient rows. She had grown unexpectedly fond of this view.

Her place within her family. She turned the phrase over in her mind, unsure of how to answer.

It was not that her relations were unkind. That was far from the truth. Jane was the sweetest creature alive and Elizabeth could be counted on for undiluted honesty. Her father paid closer attention to her than he often did anything other than his books, and her mother, although she did not know what to do with a daughter who preferred Fordyce to fashion plates, was supportive. Lydia and Kitty had their own world, loud and self-sufficient, and Mray moved around its edges without much requirement.

She had always existed separately from the entire dynamic. This was likely due to her position in the household as the middle daughter. She had qualifying traits of her own, like playing the pianoforte with great diligence and reading theology books no one else asked about. But a long time ago, she had come to terms with the fact that she wasn’t that impactful, compared to her sisters. People often forgot her name. No one had ever organised an idea with her at its head.

Mr Thwaite, to his considerable credit, did not appear to fall in line with this assessment. She had not yet decided what to make of his interest; it still surprised her, at intervals, that he was intrigued by her alone.

Mary had previously mentioned that she had a suitor to Elena, and with time, she hoped to tell the older woman more about her relationship with Mr Thwaite, which was blossoming splendidly.

She retrieved a fresh sheet of paper and dipped the pen.

Dearest Elena,

Thank you for your treatise in the earlier paragraphs. I will try to answer your question honestly, as you have always answered mine.

Jane is the eldest of us and the best. I mean that without irony. She sees goodness in people with such clarity that it has always seemed to me a kind of vision. She perceives things that the rest of us miss, because we are not looking in the right way. Elizabeth is sharp and kind, a combination that is quite rare to see; most people with her quality of mind use it to keep the world at a distance. Elizabeth uses it to pay attention, which I have always admired.

Kitty and Lydia are the youngest and the loudest. Lydia especially. I am fond of them both, even if I do not always understand them.

As for myself, I am the middle child, as I suspect you may have already inferred. Not unhappily so. But the middle has a level of invisibility that I have never quite known how to address, and have largely stopped trying to. I find I prefer the company of books and music to the company of most drawing rooms, and these concepts, thankfully, return the preference.

She paused, reading back over what she had written, and considered whether she had said too much. Should she revise it? No, she thought. Elena’s question had been straightforward and she had answered it directly. This was, she suspected, why their correspondence worked as well as it did.

I ought to mention, since I have been somewhat dilatory on the subject, that the family has come to London for the season. We are in a very handsome townhouse in Portman Square. The library is excellent, and I have been making full use of it. A few days into our arrival, we attended a subscription ball that excited the rest of the household. Yet I found it bewildering in the way I find most such assemblies unusual: a great deal of motion and very little substance, even as I understand I may be a partial judge. Kitty and Lydia found it magnificent. Elizabeth, I think, found it merely interesting, whereas Jane danced with an amiable young gentleman and has been pleased about it ever since.

I played the Broadwood Grand in the music room the previous night for several hours. That, I did not find bewildering at all.

As to your analogy on preceding elements, I find myself wanting to provide a different perspective, but I am not yet certain I have the terms for the disagreement. My objection is something like this: The practice of prayer achieves its effect upon the practitioner. The technique, therefore, cannot be separated from the interior condition of the person practising it. I’ll expand further on this idea once I have the correct wording.

She set the pen down and flexed her fingers. The clock on the mantelpiece drew her attention with its ticking sound. She had only a couple of seconds before the distinct noises of her mother and sisters took over the early morning quiet.

She folded the correspondence she had been rereading and placed it with the others in the small lacquered box she kept secured in the upper drawer of the writing desk. The box was growing full in a satisfying manner, just as accumulated objects had meaning beyond their quantity.

She had not told anyone about the correspondence.

This fact did not trouble her. She was accustomed to keeping the interior portions of her life away from the household's common knowledge; it was the natural consequence of years of being the sister no one thought to ask.

But if she was being accurate about it, there was a distinction between habitual privacy and deliberate concealment, and she was aware that this particular case resided closer to the latter.

The justifications were available, and she pondered about them.

Her mother would be immediately full of enquiries, and the queries would be the wrong ones, focusing on the minutiae. If Mary responded that she did not know the answers, her mother would find this insufficient and communicate that relentlessly.

Mrs Bennet could furthermore form the view that corresponding with a stranger of unknown family and position was below what might be expected of a Bennet girl with a suitor, and would possibly be disapproving on grounds of impropriety. The prospect was exhausting to contemplate.

Lydia meanwhile, would find the subject of devotional exchanges too absurd for anything other than playful mockery. Kitty would agree with Lydia and Jane would be mercifully neutral. Elizabeth would have a genuine interest, but she was also a curious person, and Mary did not want the details of her life being subjected to analysis.

It was simpler then, to say nothing.

Chapter Four

Elizabeth