Page 79 of A November to Remember

Chapter Nineteen: Misgivings and Understandings

November 24th, 1811

Mrs Bennet herded the entire party out of the Longbourn front door like a sheepdog clearing a pasture. The sleet had ceased falling perhaps ten minutes prior, leaving the Hertfordshire landscape resembling a muddy bog. The air bit at exposed cheeks, and the grey sky threatened further aquatic misery. It was, by any rational criterion, an atrocious morning to be out of doors.

“A fine day for a stroll!” Mrs Bennet declared, beaming at the assembled group from the dry safety of the portico. “The fresh air will do you all a world of good! Luncheon will be ready in one hour! Do not hurry back!”

Mary stood on the gravel drive, adjusting her spectacles against the wind. The morning had already been exhausting. Following the Sunday services, Mr Bingley and Miss Bingley had conveyed their regrets, citing Mrs Hurst’s indisposition, leaving the rest of the Netherfield guests to accept the luncheon invitation. The journey back to Longbourn had been an exercise in compression, with the Bennet daughters squeezed into their own carriage, while Mrs Bennet, Mr Darcy, Viscount Keathley, and Colonel Fitzwilliam followed in the viscount’s far superior equipage.

Now, marooned in the freezing damp, the group naturally fractured. Kitty and Lydia immediately wandered towards the main gate, hoping to spot a passing redcoat. Mr Darcy and Elizabeth fell into step together, moving to the orchard. Viscount Keathley and Jane drifted in the direction of the ornamental shrubbery, maintaining a distance of precisely three feet between them.

Mary found herself beside Colonel Fitzwilliam. They rounded the corner of the house, stopping at a weathered stone bench set against the high brick wall of the kitchen garden which offered a modest shield from the wind. From there, Mary could still see the drawing-room window. The colonel brushed the sleet from the seat, and they sat.

The silence stretched between them. Mary could not think of a single thing to say, so she found refuge in the familiar.

“Dr Fordyce would surely consider inclement weather a providential rebuke to the vanity of—”

She heard her voice and stopped. She stared at the wall, heat crawling up the back of her neck, entirely unconnected to the weather. She had done it again; she had opened her mouth, and Fordyce had marched out of it in his buckled shoes.

“I hate small talk,” she said flatly. “I am aware that a lady is meant to excel at it. My sisters do. Elizabeth can fence with a gentleman for an hour and send him away convinced he won. Jane can make a curate feel like a bishop. Lydia can fill a room with laughter. I open my mouth, Dr Fordyce comes out, and I watch people’s eyes die.” She pushed her spectacles up her nose. “I sermonise because I do not know what else to say, Colonel. I know it is tedious. I have always known.”

The colonel was quiet for a moment, staring at the frozen mud near his boots. He stretched his long legs out over the gravel, crossing his ankles. “You sermonise. I eat.”

Mary turned her head to look at him.

“Same regiment, different uniform.” He rested his forearms on his knees. “May I tell you something I have never told a soul?”

“You may.”

“Holland. Seventeen ninety-nine.” The colonel kept his voice level, stripped of its usual booming cheer. “I was eighteen years of age. A raw Cornet. I had no idea what a war actually was until I found myself in the middle of one. We were overrun during a retreat and I was captured by a French patrol.”

Mary’s breath hitched, but she remained still, afraid to shatter the fragile confession.

“They held me in a makeshift camp. A rotting barn with a collapsed roof.” He rubbed his jaw, his eyes distant. “They had no supplies for themselves, let alone for prisoners. I sat on the ground for three weeks. I starved, Miss Mary. Truly starved. I ate things I will never speak of, and then I ate nothing at all. My man Dickinson broke me out during a night raid. He carried me the last five miles back to our lines.”

The colonel finally turned his head, meeting her gaze.

“No one in my family knows. Not my parents, not Robert, not Darcy.” He offered a small shrug. “They think I am simply a glutton. I let them think it. I prefer their mockery to their pity. But ever since that barn, I do not like to see an empty plate. My mind remembers the starvation, even when my body is safe in a Mayfair drawing-room.” He let out a long exhale. “I know what it is to fill the silence with the wrong thing because the right thing is too frightening to say.”

Mary removed her spectacles. She polished the lenses with the edge of her shawl, rubbing the glass like a scullery maid attacking a stubborn stain. It was the only defence she had against crying.

“I have always been invisible,” she said, inspecting the glass against the light. “Not dramatically or cruelly. Just steadily, permanently. The middle child between two beautiful older sisters and two vivacious younger ones.” She slipped the wire frames back over her ears. “My mother forgot my name once at a dinner party. She introduced Jane, Elizabeth, Kitty, and Lydia. Then she looked at me and called me ‘you’.”

The colonel’s head snapped towards her, outrage crossing his features.

“I started reading Fordyce because it was the only voice in the house that seemed to be speaking to me.” Mary folded her hands tightly in her lap. “It told me that plain girls with serious minds had value. I am aware that I am not pretty, Colonel. I have been made aware of it comprehensively. What I have never understood is why being plain and serious means I must also be silent.”

“You are not silent.” The colonel shifted his considerable bulk, turning fully to face her. “You are the loudest person I know. No one is louder than you at the pianoforte. And you counted my ham.”

Mary blinked, the absurdity of the statement breaking through the emotion in her chest.

“Colonel.” She sat up straighter, deciding to engage the only way she knew how: with unvarnished directness. “Does a colonel’s pay support a wife?”

Colonel Fitzwilliam met her directness with his own.

“I am a younger son. My portion is modest, and a colonel’s pay is not a fortune. I would need to continue in the service. It is not Pemberley, Miss Mary.”

“I have lived in a house with five girls sharing three bedrooms.” Mary lifted her chin, her brown eyes locking onto his. “I require very little, Colonel. Merely someone who does not find me tedious.”