Page 41 of The Vanished Bennet Sister

"Mr Darcy visited this morning," Elizabeth said. "He told me what Mrs Bingley intends to do with the information you gave her."

Her mother's face crumpled in a mixture of fear and despair. It was clear that this was no longer a question of denial. She looked deathly pale, which was understandable given that she was being confronted with the reality they had most feared coming to pass.

"She intends to share it," Elizabeth continued, holding her mother’s gaze steadily. "The circumstances of Mary's birth, through Mr Thwaite's circle and whatever channels are available to her. Soon, the ton will learn all about it. Mrs Bingley is the gossip I warned you she was, Mama. The friendship was never what you believed it to be. She extracted a detail in confidence from you, and she intends to use it."

A tear slipped down Mrs Bennet’s face and she stared down at her hands.

"Mama, you must tell us what happened," Jane spoke up. "All of it. We need to understand."

Mrs Bennet’s eyes snapped upwards. She turned to Jane, then Elizabeth, and what was left of her composure broke apart. It had been held together by effort for too long and would no longer.

She told them.

It came in pieces, unevenly, with the halting rhythm of a story that has lived inside one person for a long time and had solidified. Mary’s mother, Alice Haverford, was a girl from a family of upper standing. The Haverfords were respectable and known to the neighbourhood.

A young Alice had made a mistake of the kind that young women of her position were not permitted to make without consequence. She had handled the resulting pregnancy in secret, with the help of her personal maid, keeping the fact from her own family until it was long past the point of easy resolution.

"Alice’s family had money, connections, and a name they wished to maintain, you see," Mrs Bennet explained, sniffling. "The knowledge of an illegitimate infant would have been devastating to their reputation, Alice’s especially. She didn’t think she ought to suffer the rest of her life due to one mistake."

The infant had arrived and been kept in secret. The arrangement lasted only a month before Alice's capacity for concealment ran out.

The maid, a woman who had been in service in the neighbourhood for many years, came to Mrs Bennet in distress, not knowing where else to turn.

"Anyone who knows me understands that I love babies. I had two of my own by then and my heart ached at the thought of the poor Haverford baby being neglected."

Mr Bennet had been, in that season of his life, a man who found it easier to say yes to his wife than to explore the complications of saying no. The Bennets took the infant. Alice and her family moved from the neighbourhood not long after.

"I raised Mary and grew to think of her as my own. I loved her just as fiercely as any of my other daughters. Alice wrote to me some years later," Mrs Bennet’s lips quivered. Another tear rolled down her cheeks which she swiped at hastily. "Six years, I think, perhaps seven. She had married a man who knew about the child and was willing to raise her. She said she wanted Mary back."

The room was heavy with silence.

"What did you do?" Kitty asked.

"I wrote back that she could not have her." Their mother said with a flat directness that acknowledged the decision she made and would make again. "Mary was six or so. She knew nothing about the complicated circumstances of her birth. She had been my daughter since she was an infant. She didn’t know of a different life, and I was not going to send her to a woman who had given her up and then changed her mind only because her circumstances had improved." She paused. "I did not write again after that. Mr Bennet said I ought to maintain some correspondence, but I did not."

"Why did you never tell Mary?" Jane asked.

The question arrived without accusation, as an enquiry rather than a prosecution.

"She was a child. And then she was older, but the right moment for disclosure did not seem to arrive. Then more time had passed, and it seemed…futile. I could not see what telling her would give her that she did not already have, and I could see clearly what it would take away. Her sense of self. The certainty that she was born to parents who desired to have her."

"A disclosure would have given her the truth," Elizabeth said.

"Yes, it would." Her mother did not argue this. Her face sagged from exhaustion. "You are not wrong."

"And then you told Mrs Bingley."

"I told Lavinia," the name came out differently now, smaller and stripped of the warmth it had carried all season, "because she told me about her husband and how hard those years after his death had been. She had wept and I was moved. She seemed so…sincere. I wanted to offer something equal in return for what she had shared."

"She calculated that appearing vulnerable would soften you," Elizabeth said. "She had been building towards this all the while. The friendship, the compliments—it was all in service of this. She knew you likely had a serious secret, and she found the way in."

Her mother appeared to be receiving a truth she had already arrived at privately and was having it confirmed. She sagged in her chair. "I was imprudent. When the news spreads this way, Mary will be devastated. She will not forgive me for this."

"We cannot know what Mary will do," Elizabeth said. "We can only make certain that she hears it from you first, and not Mrs Bingley's version of events. She needs to know, Mama. Today, if possible."

Her mother nodded once and stared into the fireplace.

"Kitty, will you go upstairs and ask Mary to come down? Tell her only that we wish to speak with her. Nothing more."