interview this morning in the library. “What do you want?” Fitz had asked, goaded. And even as she spoke of needing a purpose, of having something useful to do, she had known. If the many eyes of Argus could see into every putrid English corner, then the two humble eyes of his disciple Mary Bennet could bear witness to all the perfidies he wrote about so briefly, and set down what she saw at far greater length than he. I shall write a book, she vowed, but not a three-volume novel about silly girls imprisoned in castle dungeons. I shall write a book about what lies festering in every corner of England: poverty, child labour, below-subsistence wages …
The landscape went by outside, but she did not see it; Mary Bennet was too busy thinking. They set us to embroidering, pasting cut-out pictures on screens or tables, thumping at a pianoforte or twanging at a harp, slopping watercolours on hapless paper, reading respectable books (including three-volume novels), and attending church. And if our circumstances do not permit of such comfort, we scrub, cook, drag coals or wood for the fire, hope for leftovers from the master’s dinner table to eke out our own bread-and-dripping. God has been kind enough to exempt me from drudgery, but He does not need my tapestry chair covers or tasteless pictures. We are His creatures too, and not all of us have been chosen for bearing children. If marriage is not our lot, then something else quite as important must be.
It is men who rule, men who have genuine independence. Not the most miserable wretch of a man has any notion how thankless life is for women. Well, I have thirty-eight years on my plate, and I am done with pleasing men as of this morning. I am going to write a book that will make Fitzwilliam Darcy’s hair stand on end far stiffer than ever it did for my singing. I am going to show that insufferable specimen of a man that dependence on his charity is anathema.
The fire was roaring when she entered the parlour, and Mrs Jenkins came in a moment later with the tea tray.
“Splendid!” said Mary, sitting in her mother’s wing chair without a qualm. “Muffins, fruit cake, apple tarts — I could ask for nothing better. Pray do not bother with dinner, I will have a large tea instead.”
“But your dinner’s a-cooking, Miss Mary!”
“Then eat it yourselves. Has the Westminster Chronicle come?”
“Yes, Miss Mary.”
“Oh, and by the way, Mrs Jenkins, I expect to be gone a week before Christmas. That will give you and Jenkins ample time to set the house in order for the Applebys.”
Bereft of speech, Mrs Jenkins tottered from the room.
Six muffins, two apple tarts and two slices of cake later, Mary drained her fourth cup of tea and opened the thin pages of the Westminster Chronicle. Ignoring the usual ladies’ fare of court pages and obituaries, she turned to the letters, a famous and prominent feature of this highly political newspaper. Ah, there it was! A new letter from Argus. Devouring it avidly, Mary discovered that this time its author was attacking the piecemeal transportation of the Irish to New South Wales.
“They have no food, so they steal it,” said Argus roundly, “and when they are caught, they are sentenced to seven years’ transportation by an English magistrate who knows full well that they will never be able to afford to return home. They have no clothes, so they steal them, and when they are caught, they suffer the same fate. Transportation is as inhuman as it is inhumane, an exile for life far from the soft green meadows of Hibernia. I say to you, Peers of the Lords, Members of the Commons, that transportation is an evil and must stop. As must cease this senseless persecution of the Irish. Not that this evil is confined to Ireland. Our English gaols have been emptied, our own poor indigent felons sent far away. Hogarth would scarce recognise Gin Lane, so denuded is it. I say to you again, Peers of the Lords and Members of the Commons, abandon this cheap solution to our country’s woes! It is as final a solution as the graveyard, and as loathsome. No man, woman or child is so depraved that he or she must be sent into a permanent exile. Seven years? Make it seventy! They will never come home.”
Eyes shining, Mary laid the paper down. Argus’s attention to phenomena like transportation did not thrill her as did his diatribes against poorhouses, workhouses, orphanages, factories and mines, but his fiery passion always inflamed her, no matter what his subject. Nor could the comfortably off ignore him any more; Argus had joined the ranks of the other social crusaders, was read and talked about from the Tweed to Land’s End. A new moral conscience was blossoming in England, partly thanks to Argus.
Why shouldn’t I make a difference too? she asked herself. It was Argus who opened my eyes; from the day I read his first letter, I was converted. Now that I am freed from my duty, I can march forth to do battle against the pernicious ulcers that eat away England’s very flesh. I have heard my nieces and nephews speak to beggars as they would not speak to a stray dog. Only Charlie understands, but it is not his nature to go crusading.
Yes, I will journey to see England’s ills, write my book, and pay to have it published. Publishers pay the ladies who write the three-volume novel, but not the authors of serious works: so said Mrs Rowtree, that time she gave a lecture in the Hertford library. Mrs Rowtree writes three-volume novels and has scant respect for serious books. Those, she informed us, have to be funded by the authors, and the publication process costs about nine thousand pounds. That is almost all I have, but it will see my book published. What matter if, my money exhausted, I turn up on Fitz’s doorstep to claim the shelter he has offered? It will be worth it! But I do not trust Fitz not to think of a way to stop me spending my money if it is invested in the Funds, so I will breathe a sigh of relief when it is safely banked in my name.
“Dearest Charlie,” she wrote to her nephew the next morning, “I am going to write a book! I know that my prose is a poor thing, but I remember once or twice your saying I had a way with words. Not a Dr Johnson or a Mr Gibbon, perhaps, but after reading so many books, I find that I can express my thoughts with ease. The pain of it is the realisation that none of my thoughts thus far has been worthy of commitment to paper. Well, no more! I have a theme would adorn the humblest pen with laurels.
“I am going to write a book. No, dearest boy, not a silly novel in the mode of Mrs Burney or Mrs Radcliffe! This is to be a serious work about the ills of England. That, I think, must be its title: The Ills of England. How much help you have been! Was it not you who said that, before anything can bear fruit, all the research must be done? I know you meant it for the rigours of Prolegomena ad Homerum but for me it entails the inspection of orphanages, factories, poorhouses, mines — a thousand-and-one places where our own English people live in impoverishment and misery for no better reason than that they chose their parents unwisely. Do you remember saying that of the urchins in Meryton? Such a neat aphorism, and so true! Were we offered the chance, would we not all choose kings or dukes for fathers, rather than coal-lumpers or jobless on the Parish?
“How wonderful it would be, were I, busy doing my research, to light upon some awesomely grand personage deep engaged in crime and exploitation? Were I so lucky, I would not flinch from publishing a chapter upon him, complete with his august name.
“When I have assembled all the facts, the notes, the conclusions, I will write my book. Around the beginning of May I will set out on my journey of investigation. Not to London, but to the North. Lancashire and Yorkshire, where, according to Argus, exploitation is most vicious. Mine eyes yearn to see for themselves, for I have lived circumscribed and circumspect, passing the wattle-and-daub hovels in the hedgerows as if they did not exist. For what we see and accept as a part of life when children has not the power to shock us later on.
“By the time that this reaches you at Oxford, I imagine I will have moved to a house in Hertford; believe me when I say that I will not mourn at quitting Shelby Manor. As I write this, the first flakes of snow are falling. How quietly they blanket the world! Would that our human lot were as peaceful,
