The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

“Splendid! In future these commode chairs will be put outside on the terrace, where they will be sheltered if it rains. You will have privacy for your motions. In the meantime, you are going to clean this room of the food, wees and poohs. Miss Mary, Miss Kitty and Miss Jane will show her group how to do this, and it will be done properly. Dust shovels first to scoop up the solids, then we scrub, wipe, and mop. Hop to it!”

While that went on, Elizabeth removed the brown habits to the terrace, and instructed Herbert to have them taken away and burned. The commode chairs went out under shelter, after which the commanding officer talked to Camille about food.

The Pemberley chef had supervised the children’s menu himself-a mistake. Therese had cooked for over fifty people, but her only instructor had been Father Dominus. Whereas the tyrant in the Pemberley kitchen had a fit of the vapours if one of his sauces was too buttery-or, worse, not buttery enough. Elizabeth sent for Mrs. Parmenter.

“Use one of the under-cooks capable of making plain food,” she instructed. “Absolutely no wine, exotic herbs or any other flavouring that alters taste. Roast meats, stews, soups, a little chicken to introduce them to something other than red meat. For dessert, tarts, puddings, jellies. Plain bread, and plenty of it. Confine foods like eggs and bacon to breakfast. And cut it all up for the time being. These poor children cannot use a knife and fork, they are used to a spoon. Give them small beer to drink, it is what they are used to.”

All of which was as nothing compared to giving each child a bath. Elizabeth deliberately chose one of the smallest children to go first; a boy named William who looked about four years old.

“Oh, he’s adorable!” Jane whispered, eyes brimming. “Such a dear little man!”

“I’m glad you like him. You may have the honour of giving William his first bath,” said Elizabeth.

By the time the hot water reached the ballroom it was an ideal temperature for a bath, not far above lukewarm. The cakes of soap came from Paris and were perfumed with jasmine; the sponges came from the Red Sea and produced a deliciously tickling trickle of water down the spine. Well aproned, sure of William’s pleasure, Jane picked him up and popped him into the shallow tin bath.

That was the end of peace. William let out a screech of outrage, sank his teeth into the edge of Jane’s hand, and proved he could walk on water.

“Mary, I think Jane needs help,” said Elizabeth.

“No, I do not!” growled Jane, jaws clenched. “I’ll beat the little monster yet!” Smack! Down came Jane’s hand on William’s flank. “Now sit in the water and be still, you imp of Satan!”

By this time Mary was engaged in her own struggle with Timmy, and Kitty was discovering that girls were equally opposed to being assaulted by soap-and-water. Nothing daunted, Elizabeth grabbed Camille by one arm and threw her into a vacant bath, brush ready to scrub away eleven years of accumulated dirt.

Mrs. Thorpe, who had stayed to witness with her own eyes Mrs. Darcy conquer, drummed up a dozen hefty maids to assist, and gradually, fighting, screaming, resisting all the way, the forty-five Children of Jesus had their first bath. By the time it was over and the howling children were wrapped in huckaback towels, every grown woman was soaked to the skin.

Now remained the horror of teaching the children how to put on under-drawers, let alone the other layers of clothing society demanded. They wanted their robes, and wept for them desolately, but the caves were a thing of the past, and so were their robes.

Foreseeing trouble, Elizabeth took William and showed him how to pull down his under-drawers and trousers (they swam on him) before sitting on a commode, and gave the boys a dispensation to go out into the garden and wee there. This meant the girls felt discriminated against, which necessitated a lecture on having to sit to wee while boys didn’t.

“Oh,” groaned a sopping Elizabeth as she lay back in a chair in the Pink Parlour and drank her tea thirstily. “Only now do I understand how privileged we are. We bear however many children God ordains, but we hand them over to nurserymaids and see nothing of their bad side, let alone deal with wees and poohs.”

“Yes, today should teach us what it is like to rear children without servants,” said Mary, munching cake.

“Though,” said Kitty, “the Children of Jesus are a special case, not so? They have never been trained in any way, whereas I imagine that even the poorest mother must organise herself to deal with her situation more comfortably than the kind of thing we saw today. I would think that her older children must be put to helping her with the younger and the babies.”

“Well said, Kitty!” Mary poured herself more tea.

“And well done, girls,” said Elizabeth warmly. “Our labours are not yet done, but today was the worst. By the time that the twenty nursemaids I have asked Matthew to find arrive here, we will have instilled some of the daily routines into our charges.” She got to her feet. “Tea came first, but now I am going to go to my room, lie down, take a nap, and dress for dinner. After a bath!”

“Never say that word to me again!” cried Jane with a shudder. “To think that I actually smacked a child!”

“Yes, you’ll hurt long after he doesn’t,” said Mary wickedly.

Sherry or Madeira in the Rubens Room restored the ladies to some semblance of themselves; Kitty’s recounting of events in the ballroom revealed that she was no mean raconteuse, and had the gentlemen doubled over with laughter.

“Lizzie alone seemed to have some idea of what was to come,” Kitty ended, looking down at her shell-pink lace gown with fervent love. “She told me to wear a dress of mattress ticking! And after ten minutes in the ballroom, I swear I wished I owned one! As it was, I wore an awful old thing of beige cambric, then sent it to be burned. ’Twas good for naught else, I assure you.”

“It is clear to me,” said Mary, “that the children cannot be accommodated in the ballroom for much longer. It pleases me that their spirits have not been broken, and they mouth ‘light of Lucifer’ and ‘the dark of God’ like meaningless cant, so they were never drilled in Cosmogenesis. However, that is not what I wished to say, which is that until an orphanage can be built they have to be put somewhere suitable. I am not foolish enough to think that such things grow overnight, like toadstools. Angus, you are a man of eminent good sense. What do you suggest?”

“I have no suggestions,” he said, startled.

“Fitz, you are an MP and therefore must know something. What do you suggest?”

“That we utilise Hemmings, since my lease on the property still has months to run. I’ve told Matthew to engage carpenters to put tiered beds in three of the bedrooms-one for the girls, two for the boys. Which leaves three bedrooms for the nursemaids, if you will consent to engaging a mere nine instead of twenty. The large drawing room will make a good schoolroom, the small one a staff room. The dining room will seat all the children on benches at refectory tables. The two teachers can live in the cottage, the general servants in the attic. And so on, and so forth.”

“Brilliant, Papa,” said Charlie, grinning.

“Does this mean you’ll build the orphanage, Fitz?” Angus asked slyly, while the ladies listened breathless.

“Do I have any choice? But I shall bludgeon Charles Bingley into contributing, never fear! I’ve found eight acres of quite unfarmable land just this side of Buxton, close enough to halfway between here and Bingley Hall. However, we’ll cast our net wide enough to catch fifty-five more children, and build to house one hundred in all.” He coughed, looked at the ladies with amusement and apology. “Under ordinary circumstances I would retain my innate scepticism about such a large institution-that its staff would embezzle, perhaps also ill-treat the children. But with our ladies supervising every sneeze and shuffle, I doubt anyone will get away with much.”

“That is splendid news, Fitz,” said Mary, very pleased.

“As you say, Mary, an MP has to be good for something.”

Angus saw nothing of Mary for the next three days; all her time was given up to the children, since even nine nursemaids proved hard to find at such short notice.

It isn’t fair, he told himself; in the days when she lived in Hertford, I saw more of her than I have here at Pemberley. Some kind of task always has first call on her time, including these wretched children-and her without a maternal bone in her entire body! Jane does it melting with sensibility, Kitty does it because she is easily dominated, and Elizabeth does it because, of all of them, she is the true mother. But Mary does it from that huge sense of duty-does love enter into her life at all? At this moment I tend to think it does not. She is kind, but not loving.

Prey to the blue devils and atypically morose, he was jerked out of what was threatening to become a mire of