Page 89 of The Fee Entail

I sat at the dressing table next to my lifelong best friend, nervous and anxious and filled with trepidations such that I was near to fainting, or worse yet, acting like Kitty’s mother, whose previous behaviour Kitty described in detail when I got in a mood like this.

I could well remember her mother at the Netherfield ball ten years past, and we loved to joke about it, but when I met Mrs Bennet five years ago, free of her husband and living out her dotage under the watchful eye of her daughters, she had calmed considerably, and I actually quite liked her. I could never-ever in my wildest imaginings have predicted it back during that ball, nor during the dark days of the few years that followed.

I can well remember when Charles came for me in Scarborough with Jane. It nearly kills me to think of the things I said to him, to her, to everyone I knew.

Charles returned to my aunt’s house with a new wife, and frankly, a new set of what the Spanish like to call ‘cojones’, though Kitty either chastises me or giggles with me when I use such a word, or some even worse ones I picked up from Charles’ friend Mr Stockton.

His alteration is so painfully obvious to me now, but I had no idea what he was about then, except that he seemed to want to ruin my life, and he went about it with an implacable stubbornness that bordered on insanity. It would be a very-very-very long and painful set of years before he was willing to trust me with the story of how he grew them.

I cannot even pretend to think of what I said to Elizabeth back then when I found she had snatched my so-called prize from right under my nose, and I am still somewhat shocked that she repaid hate with love, gave back acceptance in exchange for censure, and somehow taught me what it means to be a true lady. Where she got her strength back then, I have no idea, and why she kept inviting me back to Pemberley time and time again was a mystery I was completely unable to unravel.

It took a lot of time, and a lot of patience from my new extended family, but finally, at long last, I was broken down to nothing and brought back from the dead.

Nobody else knows what I tried to do the night Kitty stumbled on me and brought me back from the very edge of the abyss, and neither of us plans to enlighten anybody any time soon, but it was the breaking point. From that night, we have been nearly inseparable, and for the longest time, I had no idea if she was not ready to be married, or if she was just not ready to throw me out on my own.

Kitty was the last of the Bennet sisters still unwed, but it was certainly not for lack of suitors. They swarmed her like bees to new spring flowers, and she just deflected them with the greatest of ease. She was much like a good batsman, deflecting men off in one direction or another. Kind-hearted and sincere men got the gentlest of releases from her attention, and eight times out of ten, an introduction to one or two ladies more suited to them. Rogues or cads she was perfectly well capable of taking care of by herself, but she usually let Lydia deal with them, just because Lydia enjoyed it so much.

I can safely say that Lydia and I had more than one screaming match back in the early days, and I always suspected Kitty would send Lydia deliberately to wind me up, and she would come along and calm me back down. I have no idea why Kitty took me on as a project, but it was some years before her considerable efforts were rewarded by first my grudging respect, then my friendship, then my love.

We were standing one day at a ball, nearly five years after I met her and possibly my tenth season, in the same grand ballroom in Rosings where all the other Bennet girls had been married (the Bennets are either traditionalists or superstitious, but they all adopted the same ceremony). With my thirtieth year behind me, I was actually distractedly listening to Kitty while wondering at the relative merits of one spinster’s cap versus another, when both of our worlds were turned upside down in less than a minute.

The two gentlemen were that rarest of commodities, and by that, I do not mean amiable and well-mannered gentlemen, because it turns out that the world is full of them if you know where to look and you do not scare them off by acting like a badger. No, I mean they were identical twins, and it was nearly impossible to tell them apart.

They both asked us to dance, and I have to say both of our hearts were probably lost before the music even started, and we were hopelessly besotted before the set was over. A second set was requested, and that naturally required the gentlemen to call the next day, and the next, and the next.

Our courtships were slow and steady, both of us, I think, afraid of committing the last bit of ourselves to another. Our beaus were not alike in temperament, but both had, by some good fortune, picked the one of us who best suited him, and they gradually turned our initial infatuation into true respect, and then into love.

Now, here we were sitting next to each other, getting ready to go and join our intendeds in that same ballroom at Rosings. How Lady Catherine (I never could quite manage to call her Aunt) managed to handle my ill manners during those first few years is even more of a mystery than how Lizzy did it, but I have learnt to accept such things. Whether she did it for her Bennet nieces, for me, or for her own reasons, I could probably find out by asking, but I had not the courage and she did not press.

Our intelligence indicated that our intendeds planned to make a bit of a show of the wedding, being of a humorous bent, but we were much cleverer than they and we had our own surprise worked up. Kitty and I had identical dresses. Same colour dress, same style, same cut, same ribbons, same lace (long sleeves, of course), same stockings right down to the same colour for the ribbon holding them up, same shoes. In honour of the fun, our maids had even dressed identically this morning, and did up our hair in the exact same style, the exact same number of small pearls, and the exact same combs. It was to be the grandest affair, and we even thought we might just walk up to the wrong groom just as one last joke on the world.

As we came down to go into the same ballroom we had met our beaus in, Lady Catherine was being helped in by Anne’s husband, Thomas, with their boy and their girl trailing happily behind. The two were quiet and studious most of the time… at least when Lady Catherine did not put them up to mischief, and I liked them immensely.

Lady Catherine stopped by and gave us both a small kiss on the cheek, clearly in her element and as happy as it was possible to be. With Betsy Clymer’s wedding just a year before, we were the last of her nieces that she hoped to see well settled before she had her own reckoning. She walked very poorly now, favouring her hip more and more each year, but we all hoped she would grace us for some more years.

Fitzwilliam and Lizzy came in right behind Lady Catherine and went in to try to settle their two girls and two boys down before Fitzwilliam came back to give Kitty away. Lizzy was working on bringing their brood up to five, and would be entering confinement in a month or two. The two girls were the very image of Lizzy and Kitty, and I would say the two boys most resembled Charles and Richard. For obvious reasons, the practice of naming the firstborn male after the mother’s surname had been consigned to the rubbish, and Fitzwilliam certainly did not regret its passing. His heir, Samuel, was a studious boy just like his father, and nobody had the slightest doubt he would do well. The girls were delightful, and I planned to ‘borrow’ them from time to time if I could, though, like most women, I hoped to one day have my own.

Charlotte and Richard were already sitting down with their own three. Their eldest daughter, Emma, was the oldest of that generation, and everything delightful it was possible for a girl to be. Kitty and I amused ourselves trying to come up with better descriptions for her. The two boys I did not know quite as well, but thought well of them. The eldest was to be the heir to Longbourn, and he seemed a boy that was up to the task.

It was kind of funny how easy the heir situation in Longbourn had been to solve once Lady Catherine thought about it for five minutes. When Mr Bennet passed, it was split evenly between his daughters, and Fitzwilliam simply bought all the pieces, put it back together, and gave it to Richard and Charlotte. I had never truly understood what happened in the year thirteen to make him do that. I could have asked, but Kitty told me I probably did not want to know, and I was content to take her at her word.

Mary sat there with her three daughters, wearing the spectacles that had appeared on her head about five years before, next to her husband, Professor Smithson, who had nearly identical spectacles and the same studious air, but let me tell you… if you wanted to have an argument with either of them on any subject whatsoever, you had better have your wits about you. They were like two peas in a pod, and their girls were probably going to change the world some day. I just hoped I would be around to see it.

Georgiana was sitting next to Anne. Her boys were probably somewhere teasing Lizzy’s girls, or they might be hunting for pirates or highwaymen. They were the most adventurous boys I knew, and Fitzwilliam had an astounding amount of diversion winding them up before sending them back home to her.

Lydia was not attending, as she was in Paris with her husband, two girls, and I understood, one more on the way. Her husband was a diplomat, and I suspect he either started or stopped wars every week by threatening other ambassadors with Lydia.

And so it was, with my big family that had managed to save me either from the ghost of my father or from myself, depending on how you looked at it. They all looked at Kitty and me standing there resplendent in our identical dresses, and I knew for a certain fact that they all loved me, and their love was the only thing between me and an endless black pit of despair. When my life had come so close to being over and done with, they saved me, just because I was family, and just because they could.

We approached our beaus, who were standing with the same besotted looks they had when they approached us at the dance, almost certainly matching our own expressions. Charles handed me over to Thomas, and Fitzwilliam handed Kitty over to James.

Archbishop Brown had come out of retirement just for this ceremony… you understand, superstition and all that. At nearly eighty years old, he was not as spry as he once was, but he still kept a proprietary eye on Mrs McCarthy, and if there were not scones at the wedding breakfast, I would not want to be in the same house.

Nervous and excited, I looked over at Kitty and saw the same expression. She borrowed one of my hands from my intended to give it a squeeze and left me to the love of my life while she devoted her attention to her own.

The archbishop was also a traditionalist, so he had the same Book of Common Prayer he had used to marry all the Bennets, Georgiana, and Betsy. It had been his father’s before him, and he had to borrow it from his grandson for the ceremony.

He gave us all a good look and a little mischievous wink for the identical brides, then opened the book and, along with it, the next chapter of our lives.

“Dearly beloved—”

~~~ Finis ~~~