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Kitty would admit she hadn't really thought this through, but then, thinking things through was not by any means a cat's strong suit. It was rather to be expected.
By 'this,' she of course meant 'being the mistress of her own household.' Really she should have thought it through. It was the natural consequence of marriage, and furthermore it was ostensibly what she had been being trained for for the whole of her life as Kitty Bennet, daughter of the master of Longbourn. She had just never, until quite recently, expected it to happen. She had been Lydia's familiar, after all. They weren't to be separated. Giggling over officers, flirting and dancing, that was all well and good, but she had always, in the back of her mind, expected that if either of them actually married it would be Lydia, and Kitty would be her companion all her life.
It was funny how life worked out when one made plans, wasn't it? Her cat self certainly understood that part of the whole thing, at least.
She had been trained, was the thing. Perhaps not as well as some other girls, and she was old enough and human enough now to understand the disservice her parents had done their daughters in that, especially when marrying well was an absolute necessity, but she knew enough math to keep a housekeeper from cheating her and so forth. If all she'd had to do was manage servants, she could have done that well enough. There was nothing a cat was better at than bossing their staff about, after all. But she had married a clergyman, and while they had servants, there weren't a great many of them. A certain amount of the work of the household fell to Kitty, who felt rather as if she had been tossed into the deep end of a pool and was swimming more thanks to her cattish instincts than her girlish ones.
She would learn, Denny said. He was certain it was similar for all young wives, and she was doing the very best she could. They hadn't starved yet, had they? (Kitty suspected this was rather more thanks to their housekeeper, and to the Carterets and the Darcys, who they were ever so fortunate to live close to, often inviting them to dine than to her own poor talents in the kitchen when she was called upon to exercise them, but she did think she was burning things rather less often as they went on.) She would learn, Elizabeth said. After all, she had, hadn't she, and she had felt quite at a loss often in her first year as Mrs. Darcy. Kitty thought that rather a different kettle of fish: no one ever expected Elizabeth to cook anything. Kitty rather thought that she would have done better as mistress of a great estate, but there was nothing to be done about it. She hadn't fallen in love with the master of a great estate. She had fallen in love with Denny.
Georgiana said better Kitty than her, and that she was never getting married, which made perfect sense. Even without the whole owl thing, Georgiana did not seem to Kitty to be the marrying type. Finding a man who wouldn't mind that his wife was outrageously more intelligent than him would be ever so tiresome, especially when most men seemed to be so stupid. Lydia, even in her letters, talked and talked but said nothing of any real substance, which was most irksome but also quite understandable: Lydia knew that Elizabeth would eventually read those letters. Kitty hoped to have a conversation with her about the travails of married life when Lydia returned from Sainte Josephine, but...well, Lydia's travails of married life and her own were quite different. For one thing, Kitty was actually married.
She supposed if she really wanted to talk to someone about the travails of married life when one was not entirely human, it ought to be Wickham, but even if she did write him letters she doubted in his ability to reply, and well, honestly, she had her skepticism that Wickham would have anything helpful to say. (He did seem to be trying, she would give him that, but it was very much a work in progress, from what she could tell.)
And it wasn't just the household, of course, although the household would have been enough all on its own. As a clergyman's wife, she was expected to tend to the parish, and that was...well. No one had ever accused cats of being charitable, unless one allowed for mice brought to one's door, which no one ever seemed to appreciate as much as they should, in Kitty's opinion. She tried to look at tending to the poor like that: these were the members of her new clowder who couldn't hunt properly for whatever reason, so it was up to her to help them out. She wanted to organize a school, as some vicars' wives did, to help teach the young ones how to hunt, as it were, properly while they still could learn, but she was still a long way out from feeling ready to do that. Crawl before you walk, as the two-leggers liked to say. Georgiana, of course, would have been happy to help her with the school, but Pemberley had its own vicar and its own school, and assisting in another parish's doings would have looked rather odd indeed--and that, Kitty could quite understand. Territory lines were important to cats as well.
The parishioners were understanding as well. Mrs. Denny was young, and still finding her legs. One couldn't expect her to act like an old hand would. It was funny how sometimes she almost wanted them to expect more of her, even as she knew she would have for the moment failed in providing it.
One evening, when the housekeeper had had the day off and no one had been considerate enough to invite them to dine with them and, as a consequence, Kitty had burned their dinner yet again, she turned to Denny and said, rueful, "I don't suppose you would accept raw mouse instead," and he laughed and pulled her into his arms.
"From you, dear Kit, of course I would." He paused, then admitted, "I would then endeavor to cook the mouse, of course..."
Kitty could do this. She could do anything, to keep hearing that laugh.