Mrs. Bennet Has Her Say Read Online Free PDF

adventures may come my way. After all, it is not my fault that things have not come out right. Besides, while London may be noisy it can offer nothing as unnerving as the eternal bawling and wailing from the bedroom above. In fact, I may find once more the man I was before this monumental betrayal. My sensibilities, many of them I recall as quite exquisite, may be restored.
    As if to remind me of what I was fleeing, Mrs. Rummidge stood at the head of the stairs and screeched, “Shame on you running off to the city of sin and corruption whilst your dear ones struggle to survive! I swear on my virginity the sainted Jesus will come looking for you!” “Shhh,” I heard another voice, unmistakably my wife’s,say. “Let him go. You cannot miss what you did not want in the first place.”
    I slammed the door on my way out. “I have married a shrew,” I muttered, “and she just seventeen.”
    On my way down the walk I began to whistle, a tune recalled from my youth, “Constant Billy.”

Ch. 4

    November at Longbourn
    Dear Sister,
    He has departed the scene, though not, alas, forever. He has gone to London, he says to purchase a book, though I know better. I did not come to this marriage completely ignorant of the ways of men. Do you recall Mindy Sharpton, she being left an orphan at an early age and forced to find her own way in the village? Did we not feel sorry for her even after we discovered her and the tailor’s boy, Billy Cummings, locked in a tussle in the alley behind the shop? We hastened on but no detail had escaped us, not the frayed hem of her petticoat, not the mud on the soles of her boots, nor Billy’s trousers around his ankles, nor the sickening sight of his mouth stretched into a rictus the likes ofwhich we hoped never to see again. (Little did I know that I would too soon see just such a sight, and in my marriage bed at that!) Poor Mindy Sharpton with only one path left to her, and that trodden by men of the village whose respectability was unquestioned. I remember asking dear Mother why a man, Mr. Broadley the leather merchant, a husband and father, would seek out the company of a girl like Mindy Sharpton. Mother stiffened. “Now, young lady,” she said, “leave well enough alone. It is the way of all men and has ever been such.” We knew better than to persist with our questions and so, with a shrug, we grew further and faster into the womanhood that was our fate.
    Am I not a Mindy Sharpton? Am I not a foolish girl who cast propriety to the winds and fell head over heels into the arms of a stranger? You might well ask, dear sister. You never ever called my behaviour into question; you never ever scolded me. You simply put your arms around me there in the little bedchamber in the house of our childhood and held me safe. “Hush, dear Marianne,” you said over and over and smoothed my hair. What else you could have said I cannot imagine. Surely you were as ignorant as I of a future with a child and without a husband. Surely you were almost as frightened as I. The two of us—you and I—shared a desperation unknown to respectable young ladies, ladies like those Mother predicted her daughters would become. I betrayed her as only a daughter can betray a mother. Had she lived she would have known the shame of my indecency. She would haveseen me as less than Mindy Sharpton, for after all, I did not have poverty to excuse my behaviour; I did not need to exchange my skirts for coin; I did not need to become a whore; and yet in her eyes I did. Illness is never a blessing, but in this instance it carried her off and saved her. But nothing saved me.
    There are times when shame for the deceit with which I entered this marriage threatens to overwhelm me. But then, I look to my little Jane and wish with all my heart that Mother could be here to love her. All would be made right again . . . and . . . So Mr. Bennet travels to