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Mary Bennet remembered being a child.
Eight and ten and twelve years old, sitting very straight in the parlour with her hands folded in her lap, listening carefully before she spoke and still somehow answering wrongly. She tried very hard. Harder, perhaps, than any of her sisters ever needed to try.
Jane smiled easily. Lizzie laughed easily. Kitty followed wherever Lydia led, and Lydia never cared long enough to feel ashamed of anything.
Mary studied people as if there were rules hidden somewhere beneath their words, rules everybody else had learnt naturally and forgotten to explain to her. She watched Jane’s gentle manners, copied Lizzie’s tone of voice, practised smiles in the looking-glass until her cheeks ached.
None of it ever came out quite right.
Her mother noticed every failure.
“Do stop staring so,” Mrs Bennet snapped one afternoon, while company sat in the drawing room. “Really, Mary, people will think you very odd.”
Mary blinked quickly and lowered her eyes to her sewing. She had not realised she had been staring. She had only been listening to the pattern of conversation, waiting for a place to speak.
The reprimand still burned hot across her skin.
Another time, she spoke too much. Another, she spoke too little. She stood too stiffly beside the fireplace. She forgot to greet a visitor quickly enough. She answered questions too formally, too bluntly, too honestly.
Mrs Bennet’s exasperation filled every room it entered.
“Why can you never behave naturally?” she demanded once, after Mary had ruined some small social call in a way nobody properly explained afterwards. “Your sisters manage well enough.”
Mary wished desperately that somebody would tell her what naturally meant.
When her mother raised her voice, Mary learnt to keep very still. Tears made everything worse. Explanations made everything worse. Even apologies could sour the mood further if she spoke at the wrong moment or in the wrong tone.
So she stood silent while Mrs Bennet scolded her beside the breakfast table, heat prickling painfully behind her eyes.
“You interrupt constantly. You sit there making faces. You cannot spend five minutes in company without embarrassing me.”
Mary picked at the skin around her nails beneath the table. The sharp sting helped anchor her.
“I did not mean…”
“Well, intent is no matter when the effect is so disagreeable.”
Mrs Bennet gave a long suffering sigh then, the sort that made Mary feel large and clumsy and deeply exhausting.
“You’ll understand one day,” she said. “When you have a daughter just like you.”
Mary lowered her gaze to the grain of the table and swallowed carefully.
Some days, Mrs Bennet said it almost lightly, with weary amusement beneath the irritation. Other days, the words landed hard as a curse.
Years later, at Pemberley, Mary heard them again.
The house stood hushed after the realisation of Mr Ryder’s departure. Even the fine rooms felt strained with discomfort. Mary sat rigidly upon the edge of her chair while her mother paced, agitated beyond bearing.
“I hope you have a daughter just like you,” Mrs Bennet declared.
This time there was no humour in it at all.
“Ungrateful and selfish. Forever thinking only of yourself.”
Mary clasped her hands tighter together.
“You never help anybody unless it suits you. Every opportunity handed to you, and thrown away besides. I declare, I do not know how a girl can be so determined to make herself miserable.”
Each word struck with dreadful familiarity. Mary had heard variations of them her entire life. Selfish. Strange. Cold. Ungrateful.
She sat perfectly still through all of it.
That old childhood instinct remained strong even now. Silence shortened the lecture more reliably than defence ever could.
Mrs Bennet continued speaking, voice sharpening with every sentence, while Mary fixed her attention upon the flickering candle beside the mantel. Wax slid slowly down one side in a thin white line.
Mary said nothing.
Years passed.
Many of them.
Mary married. Life settled into something gentler than she had once believed possible.
There were children. Several of them, loud and warm and gloriously alive, filling the house with muddy shoes and dropped toys and endless chatter from morning until night. Mary loved each fiercely and differently.
Then there was Minnie.
From the very beginning, Mary recognised something achingly familiar in her.
Perhaps not in appearance. Minnie carried so much of Tom Hayward in her features. His dark curling hair that refused every attempt at neatness. His eyes looked back at Mary from their daughter’s face, warm brown and solemn when she concentrated. Even the shape of Minnie’s smile belonged to him.
Everything else belonged to Mary.
Minnie disappeared into books so thoroughly that servants sometimes searched half the house before finding her tucked beneath a window seat, oblivious to the world around her. She asked questions that startled adults into silence through sheer blunt honesty.
At dinner, she sometimes forgot entirely to eat while speaking earnestly about whatever subject currently occupied her mind.
One month it was astronomy. Another month, Roman history. Then fossils.
Minnie collected facts with voracious delight and repeated them at the most unfortunate moments.
Tom saw it too, though he viewed it all with cheerful acceptance.
“She reminds me of you,” Tom said once, smiling as Minnie explained the classification of birds with enormous seriousness to her younger brother, who had long since stopped listening.
Mary smiled softly.
“Yes,” she said. “She does.”
The strange thing was this:
Mary understood Minnie easily.
Not perfectly. Minnie remained her own person, with her own fears and joys and peculiarities. Still, Mary understood the shape of her. She knew when Minnie needed quiet. Knew when questions overwhelmed her. Knew the particular exhausted look that arrived after crowded visits and noisy dinners.
And Minnie was wonderful.
Wonderful in her fierce cleverness. Wonderful in her honesty. Wonderful in the way she loved things completely and without embarrassment once she trusted somebody enough to speak freely.
A little odd sometimes, certainly.
Entirely uninterested in subjects other girls pursued eagerly. Far too interested in subjects most people considered dreadfully dull.
Wonderful all the same.
Mary could not understand why those qualities had once inspired such frustration in her own mother.
One afternoon, Minnie sat stiffly silent after upsetting one of her cousins during a visit.
“You ought to apologise,” Mary said gently.
Minnie’s face twisted with miserable confusion.
“I did not mean to hurt her feelings.”
“I know.”
“She asked if I liked her drawing and I said the horse’s legs were wrong.” Minnie swallowed hard. “They were wrong.”
Mary remembered that feeling exactly. The bewilderment of somehow causing injury when she had only spoken plainly.
She remembered her mother’s sharp voice.
Must you always say exactly what enters your head?
Mary was not her mother.
She crouched before Minnie’s chair.
“You were trying to help,” she said quietly.
Minnie nodded once.
“Next time, perhaps ask first whether she wants advice.”
Minnie considered this with complete seriousness, as though Mary had handed her an important scientific principle.
“Yes, Mama.”
And that was all.
No shouting. No humiliation. No sighing disappointment heavy enough to poison the room.
Afterwards, Mary sat alone for some time with a strange ache beneath her ribs.
Because she remembered so clearly how her own mother would have reacted.
How easily irritation had arrived. How swiftly affection had vanished whenever Mary behaved wrongly in ways she never fully understood.
Yet Minnie did all the same things.
And Mary could not imagine loving her less for them.
Her daughter was wonderful.
Mary did not understand how anybody could look at a child like that and respond with anger before tenderness.
She did not understand how her mother had seen her own daughter struggling and chosen exasperation instead of patience.
More painfully still, she did not understand how her mother had loved Jane and Lizzie so easily while loving Mary seemed to require effort.
That evening, long after the children slept upstairs beneath heavy quilts and crookedly tucked blankets, Mary sat quietly beside the fire in her bedchamber.
In her entirely unbiased opinion, it remained the safest and happiest room in the world, not least because Tom was beside her, one arm draped comfortably along the back of the sofa, a book open across one knee, though he had not turned a page in some time.
He watched Mary over the top edge of the volume with patient familiarity.
Tom closed the book carefully.
“Something is wrong.”
It was not a question.
Mary drew one leg beneath herself and stared into the fire.
“My mother used to say,” she said slowly, “that she hoped I would have a daughter just like me.”
Tom managed admirably not to grimace.
Years of practice helped.
Mrs Bennet had never approved of him particularly. His respectable income and good character failed entirely to compensate for the absence of grand estates or impressive connections. Tom, for his own part, found it difficult to feel warmly towards any person who had spent years making Mary feel perpetually inadequate.
Still, he only said, carefully neutral, “Did she?”
Mary nodded.
“Minnie is just like me.”
The words settled softly between them.
Tom waited.
Mary twisted the fabric of her sleeve between restless fingers, a replacement for the way she used to pick at the skin by her nails.
“She does all the same things,” she said softly. “The same habits. The same mistakes.” Her throat tightened unexpectedly. “And I cannot imagine being angry at her for it.”
Tom reached for her hand immediately.
Mary held tightly to him.
“She is only a child,” Mary whispered. “A lovely child. She tries so hard.” Her voice grew smaller. “I tried hard too.”
Years spent believing herself difficult and defective suddenly shattered against the simple evidence of her own daughter sitting before her like a mirror.
Minnie was good. Minnie was lovable. Minnie was worthy of gentleness exactly as she was.
Mary had been too.
The realisation hurt far more than she expected.
“Why did she not love me like that?” Mary asked quietly.
Tom had no answer worthy of the question.
Perhaps nobody did.
So instead he drew her into his arms and held her there beside the fire while the rain continued softly against the glass.