mommy was a sick muse (part iii)
[part ii]
~
iii. | you wrote the song i wanna play
“This was dumb as hell,” Mary tells everyone in the car, which includes Will (driving), Lizzie (passenger’s seat, calling the hospital), Jane (backseat, still in her wedding dress), and Lydia (backseat, in labor). “Why did you let Mum blackmail you into getting married so close to Lydia’s due date?”
“Oh, shut it,” says Lizzie. “Like you’ve ever been capable of standing against Mum in one of her moods. She threw that box of hair dye at your head and you caved in seconds.”
“I understand Jane’s desire not to have her wedding photos festooned with my blue hair, as I am a marvelous sister. However, I think the fact that I’m at Cambridge and not married to Peter Aster shows that I am, in fact, capable of standing up to Mum.” Mary turns her attention from arguing with Lizzie to Lydia, who is being exceptionally shitty at measuring her contractions. “How long was that, Lydia?”
“I don’t know, a fucking age and a half,” Lydia moans. “How long is this going to take?”
“I bet twenty hours in the pool,” says Mary. “You’re six weeks early, so this’ll be interesting.”
“What do you mean, interesting, you cunt?” Lydia yells. “I am dying!” Mary tries not to take the insult seriously and begins to time the contractions on her mobile’s stopwatch function.
“You’re not dying, darling,” says Jane, rubbing her hand in circles over Lydia’s lower back. “It’s okay, we’re almost there. Aren’t we, Will?”
Will neglects to answer in favor of gripping the steering wheel more firmly and taking a roundabout in a truly lethal fashion. If Mary had been unsure about Lizzie’s being pregnant, Will’s behavior confirms it. Of course, Lizzie probably is waiting to announce it until after Jane’s wedding (technically now), but Mary didn’t spend most of her summer holiday working with pregnant women only to be unable to recognize the look of it in her own sister.
“You’re at twenty seconds,” says Mary. “Don’t worry, they’re still pretty short.”
Lydia curls her fingers into claws and aims them towards Mary’s face. “I am going to rip all of your stupid hair out!”
“That won’t make you feel better,” Mary promises her cheerfully. “Besides, if you touch my hair I’ll set your head on fire. It’ll be easy with all of that aerosol spray in it.”
“Mary,” says Jane. She’s not very good at threatening, but she’s far more accomplished than anyone else genteelly disapproving. “This is very hard on everyone.”
“Probably hardest on Lydia,” Mary agrees. “That one was 25 seconds.”
“Oh my bloody fucking god,” Lydia shouts.
“You’re such a wimp,” says Mary, leaning forward to tweak Lydia’s nose. “Listening to you, you’d think the baby was coming already. You’ve got hours left, and this is only the very beginning of the pain. It’ll get much worse.”
“Throw her out of this car,” Lydia says to Jane. “I’m serious.” She turns to Mary and says, her voice thrown into a higher register than Mary had thought possible, “This term turned you even more insane.”
“It’s probably that boyfriend of hers,” Lizzie comments. “I’m sure when his face doesn’t look like ground meat he’s quite a catch.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Mary says by rote.
Lydia sucks in her breath and says, “NO. Mary, you didn’t?!”
“What, are you the only Bennet sister allowed to have inadvisable sexual relationships?” asks Mary. “You’re holding at 25, that’s good.”
In the front seat, Lizzie holds her hands over Will’s ears. “Will doesn’t need to hear this.”
“Listen to Lizzie getting prudish,” says Lydia. “You’d think she never-”
“If you finish that I will end you,” Lizzie promises. “Now isn’t the time to be airing out the past. Especially when the present is so much more interesting.”
“What, Mary’s not-boyfriend?” asks Lydia. “Oooh, fucking cunt fuck.” She flops her hand around and settles it on Mary’s bicep, which she proceeds to squeeze with a grip that could bend metal.
“I meant your impending birthing event,” replies Lizzie drily. “You know, the reason why we just fled Jane’s wedding.”
Bless perfect, beautiful Jane; she blushes and says, “The most important part was over. I’m sure everyone will enjoy the wedding breakfast just fine without me.”
“Please, half of the party’s going to be showing up at the hospital.” Years of pipetting in lab practicums have strengthened Mary’s right thumb to the point where it is actually bigger than her left one, but even it is beginning to flag under the constant exertion of using her mobile’s stopwatch function. “Twenty-seven seconds.”
Lydia’s ugly false nails dig further into Mary’s arm. She is paler and trembling slightly. Even though Mary rarely feels sympathy for the most irritating of her sisters, she can’t help the tender feelings that Lydia’s state seems to inspire in her. “Crawford’s the best shag I’ve ever had,” she says abruptly.
Lydia’s grip on Mary’s arm loosens slightly. “Better than Marianne?”
“Not in the beginning, but he improved with practice.”
Will begins to chant under his breath. It sounds a little like the remaining street directions to the hospital.
Lizzie twists in her seat so she can see her three sisters. “I thought you were too busy mooning over that doctor at your clinic? The one with the great arse?”
Her sisters’ knowledge of her inner workings would be more depressing if Mary didn’t know all the facets of their lives in exchange. “What’s the point in that? I’m never going to see him again. Crawford might be a cretin with entitlement issues and an inbred genealogy, but he’s not ten years older than me.”
Jane says absently, “Richard’s only five years older than you, Mary.”
The car falls into silence. Lydia’s shrieking dies huffily, so that Mary’s sudden descent into cardiac arrest is fully audible. “WHAT,” she yells. “What did you just say, Jane?”
Jane stops petting Lydia’s hair. “Oh,” she says faintly. “Oh, dear.”
Lizzie turns treacherously pink, so Mary turns the full force of her shock and anger on her. Lizzie promptly folds like wet cardboard. “Richard is Will’s cousin. I had met him last spring, but when Will and I took Lydia to one of her doctor’s appointments last month, we found out that he had been your supervisor over the summer.”
“I CANNOT BELIEVE ANY OF YOU,” Mary says. She can hear the capitols in her own voice, but she seems unable to stop them. “HOW COULD YOU?!”
Will is now audibly talking to himself, but he’s three months from marrying Lizzie, so he doesn’t get a pass on this. Mary grabs a handful of Lizzie’s hair and shakes her. “You’re all awful! I hate you. Did you say anything?!”
“No,” says Jane hurriedly. “Of course not.”
“Shut up unless you were there, Jane,” Mary advises her. “Here, time Lydia’s contractions while I rips Lizzie’s head off. Her baby can incubate without the contents of her head, I’m sure, since she never seems to use them.”
Any potential violence that Mary could perpetrate against Lizzie is lost when Jane and Lydia both begin to talk over each other. A rapturous “Oh, Lizzie,” overlaps with “You’re pregnant!? Not fair, I’m pregnant.”
“Not for long,” Mary states drily. “Oh for god’s sake, give me back my phone, Jane. You clearly have no idea what you’re doing.”
The occupants of Will’s expensive midsize car pour out into the hospital parking lot while still yelling; a nearby nurse takes one look at them and grabs Lydia. “Have you been timing your contractions?” he demands.
“They’re thirty-two seconds in length,” Mary says over Jane embracing Will and Lizzie and laughing in the middle of the A&E entrance.
“Are you the birthing partner?” the nurses asks, wheeling Lydia inside the hospital and down towards the maternity ward.
Technically they’ve all been trained and Kitty is the closest to Lydia, but she’s also likely to crumple like a toddler at the first sign of Lydia’s disapproval. “Yes,” says Mary.
“Oh god, over my dead body,” moans Lydia.
“So you’d prefer Mum, then?” asks Mary.
Lydia glares at Mary as the nurse executes a perfect turn and guides her wheelchair backwards into the elevator. “You’re such a cunt, Mary.”
“Which is why I’m the only one who can stand you, Lyds.” Mary and half of her psychotically dysfunctional family pack into the part of the elevator left unoccupied by hospital patients.
She leaves Will to watch Jane and Lizzie have meltdowns in the waiting room and goes to scour herself to an approved level of cleanliness before donning the scrubs that have been set out for her use.
Lydia gets predictably bored and whiny the more time that passes that the baby doesn’t show, and Mary occupies her by engaging in one of their favorite arguments, namely whether Lydia could be termed ‘home-wrecker’ for facilitating the end of the marriage of her calculus teacher.
Mary maintains, like she always does in this argument, that ‘home-wrecker’ is insulting and, as with most names for females in control of their sexuality in a patriarchy, ignores the fact that the two people capable of ruining a marriage are the two people in the marriage. Lydia, taking as much pride in her seduction of her teacher as she does in the perfect marks that she achieved in calculus through application of her brain (her seducing her teacher was an added benefit), takes the opposing point.
Even someone as argumentative as Mary cannot have the same debate for more than two hours, so eventually she opens the Sudoku app on her mobile and hands it over. Lydia fills out a Sudoku board like most people fill out multiplication tables; she’s unlocked the expert level in twenty minutes and wanders in circles up and down the room, eyes fixed to Mary’s mobile.
Mary is a reasonably intelligent person; she has no excuse for why it shocks her that when the door opens, it’s Dr. Fitzwilliam-Richard, Will’s bloody cousin-who steps through it. “Heya, Lydia. Mary,” he says. Lydia grunts and taps at Mary’s mobile. Mary has a hard time tearing her eyes from his face; she’s rewarded by a smile, tired and stunning. “Let’s take a look,” Dr. Fitzwilliam suggests after a few seconds.
“Lydia,” Mary interrupts, shaking herself free. “Give me that, you can break all of the records on it later.”
“Shut up, I’ve got one-yes, there it is.” Lydia hands back Mary’s mobile, which is blaring a tinny trumpet noise as pixels of rainbow confetti fall across the screen. Mary turns it off and puts it down somewhere behind her as she helps Lydia onto the bed that has been left, until now, unoccupied.
Dr. Fitzwilliam makes encouraging noises as he measures Lydia’s dilation and tells her about how the next few hours will proceed. Mary realizes that underneath his scrubs he’s wearing the remains of a dress shirt and nice pants-Jane must’ve invited him to the wedding. It makes sense, if Charlie and Will’s families are so close. She hadn’t seen him in the church, but most of her attention had been focused on keeping her mum from interrogating Crawford about the nature of their relationship.
“Can I talk to you for a moment, Mary?” Dr. Fitzwilliam asks.
Mary retrieves her mobile and hands it to Lydia. “I’ve installed some sort of numerical hangman game.” Lydia’s eyes light up greedily.
“What’s up?” she asks when she and Dr. Fitzwilliam have retreated to the hallway.
“I wanted to check that you’re prepared for how the next few hours will likely go,” he explains. His face is just as beautiful as it was three months ago, unfortunately, and most of the authority that he used to exude is gone; in its place, he’s just an attractive guy that Mary wants to sleep with.
“We all did a workshop,” Mary explains. “My sisters and I, at least. I’m the one least likely to cave under Lydia’s repeated verbal abuse. Other than Lizzie, of course, but it’s probably impossible to peel her out from Will’s protective grip at this point.”
Dr. Fitzwilliam’s eyes flick to over Mary’s shoulder, where her family is clumped and loudly talking over one another in the waiting room. “Those are both valid points,” he agrees. His quick grin is just as charming and lethal as Crawford’s best before Edmund Bertram made the innards of a Cornish pasty from his aristocratic features.
“And only a madman would let my mother into a stressful situation considering how fragile she maintains her nerves become.” Mary briefly lifts her eyes towards heaven to convey how she feels about that.
Dr. Fitzwilliam laughs outright. “I see that you’ve thought this through.”
“Lydia may be the most annoying person on the planet,” with the possible except of Henry Crawford, “but she’s my baby sister.” Mary’s family is vitally important to her, the way that her career in medicine will never be. She must relate this in her expression; some remaining aspect of Dr. Fitzwilliam’s expression softens, and suddenly his face is approachable in its attractiveness.
“Since we’re soon to be family of sorts,” he says, offering his hand, “you must call me Richard.”
Considering that it’s just a handshake, it’s pretty fucking criminal how much sexual tension is passed between them in the single moment of contact. Mary can’t be the only one who feels it; something hard flashes in Richard’s eyes before he swallows it back.
The knowledge that he’s no longer her boss and actually only five years older than her flares between them. Jesus. “Well,” says Mary. “I better get back to Lydia before she dismantles my mobile out of boredom.”
She’s turning to do that, trying not to do something especially stupid like walk into a doorframe, when Crawford says from behind her, “Bennet! You aren’t seriously expecting me to sit with your family for the next fourteen hours, are you?”
“Oh, stuff it, Crawford. I loitered by your bedside for how many days, exactly?”
Crawford prowls forward, hands stuffed in the pockets of his trousers. Whatever expensive starch he’s had used to press his suit must be worth it; the creases are still crisp and if it weren’t for his wreck of a face, he’d look just a fresh as he’d had earlier that morning.
“Hello,” says Richard.
“Oh, right,” says Mary quickly. “Richard, this is Henry Crawford. Crawford this is Dr. Fitzwilliam, he’s attending to Lydia.”
“Fitzwilliam,” drawls Crawford. “Your supervisor from this summer, Bennet?”
Mary is surprised enough to gape. “Where the hell did you pick that up, Crawford?”
“Despite your persistent belief otherwise, I’m not a total idiot.”
Richard shakes Crawford’s hand. It’s as they’re standing next to each other, Richard towering a good six inches over Crawford with that Fitzwilliam family gift of height, that Mary realizes she can trace the same aristocratic features in both of their faces, although Richard’s aren’t currently broken. Her usual jibe of ‘inbred’ seems horrifyingly relevant.
“Are you a schoolmate of Mary’s?” Richard asks politely. His face has adopted its former mask of pleased ambivalence.
“That I am,” Crawford agrees. “She blackmailed me into attending this circus.”
Mary elbows him immediately, practice making it easy to avoid his bruised ribs. “It’s not blackmail if I call in a debt. Besides, up until my sister went into labor, you were having a perfectly fine time.”
“There was alcohol until your sister went into labor,” Crawford points out.
“Go talk to my da,” she says, putting both hands on his upper arm and pushing him firmly down the hall. The move has no effect unless Crawford allows it; he resists for a moment and then acquiesces. “Trust me, he’s just as unhappy as you. Don't you have a chess app on your mobile? Play with him, he’s a shark.”
“If your mother asks me one more time how long we’ve been dating, I’m going to break out some stories about the UL that will make her toes curl,” Crawford finally says, breaking from whatever weird moment had fallen over their section of hallway.
“Why don’t you try,” Mary hisses. “When we get home, I’ll make sure to share the delightful anecdote of how your zygomatic arch came to be broken. I did tell you what happened to the guy who knocked up Lydia, didn’t I?”
“Keep fighting dirty, Bennet, and one day someone’s going to take you up on it,” Crawford comments mildly as he turns on his heel and saunters back towards the waiting room.
“Oh, that reminds me,” Mary says, moving her attention back to Richard. “Were you the cousin who went with Will to threaten Wickham?”
Richard smiles faintly. “No, it was our cousin, Anne de Bourgh. She works for MI-6. Or so we assume, at least. It’s not as if she can tell us.” He gestures at a height about three inches below his own; it’s over six feet, at least. “Anne’s about this tall and thin as a reed, but she has a particular expression that conveys how easy it would be for her to break all 206 bones in your body.”
“How useful,” says Mary, trying not to seethe with jealousy.
“It really is,” Richard agrees. Whatever he’d revealed earlier has been bottled up behind professionalism. “I need to go check on some things with the staff. Why don’t you join your sister?”
~
At sixteen hours of labor, a girl, and four pounds seven ounces, Will cleans out the pool. It’s the first time Mary’s father has ever lost the birthing pool since Lizzie, at age eight, took him to the cleaners for Kitty’s birth, but he takes it with good enough grace. “It’s about time I had some competition,” he says with a gleam in his eye. At six weeks early, the hospital want to keep the baby for further examination, but she’s apparently healthy-surprisingly so, considering the genes she has to work from.
Mary appropriates Charles’ car and drives Kitty, Crawford, Jane, and Charlie home. The little house in Finchley is not really prepared to take on all the houseguests that are bound to be flooding in, so Mary sends Kitty out of their joined room to use Lydia’s one-it’s empty, so someone might as well use it-and pours Jane and Charlie, finally exhausted from their wedding and a dinner composed entirely of champagne from the reception and the prawn crackers from the Chinese takeaway Will had ordered four hours into Lydia’s labor, into Jane’s bed in the room she and Lizzie used to share.
Crawford, still mostly doped up, is surprisingly malleable as Mary forces him into her tiny twin bed. “Joining me?” he asks, waggling his eyebrows, but his spirit isn’t really into it.
“You’re at your sexiest when you’re tired and drugged,” Mary assures him. “I’m having a hard time keeping my hands off of you. C’mon, shoes off.” Awash with déjà vu from the first time Lydia overdid vodka cranberries, Mary wrestles with Crawford’s dress shoes and then prods him into a sitting position so she can work off his jacket and waistcoat.
“You smell like hospital soap,” Crawford says into her shoulder. “It’s rapidly becoming a familiar scent.”
Mary guides his elbow through the proper hole in his waistcoat and tries not to find him charming. It’s not as easy as she would have expected. “Trust me, hospital soap is preferable to what I smelled like two hours ago.”
Crawford falls silent as Mary leans him against the headboard to pick at his necktie. “I’m a little bit impressed, Bennet. I knew from the first day of biochemistry practicum that you were a swot, but you’re going to be a rather smashing doctor, aren’t you?”
“Thank you, Crawford,” says Mary drily, “for validating my career aspirations.” She manages to loosen his necktie and decides that if he strangles himself in his sleep, it’s his own damn fault. “Go to sleep before you say something embarrassing.”
“I’m never embarrassed,” he says as she pushes his head into her pillows. “I’m Henry Crawford.”
Mary rolls her eyes heavenward and suddenly has no trouble finding him annoying again. “Good night, Crawford.”
Although Kitty’s bed looks mighty comfortable after the-oh God-twenty-three hours that Mary has been awake and assisting in Jane’s wedding and Lydia’s labor, Mary is well aware of her responsibilities as the only conscious Bennet. In the guest bedroom, she unfolds the guest sofa and makes the bed with new sheets so her grandparents have somewhere to sleep. On her last rounds, checking all of the locks on the doors and making sure a pile of towels and extra bedding is on the couch for anyone else sleeping over, she flicks on the coffee maker and sets out things for tea.
Finally, Mary crawls upstairs and sort of arranges herself so that she falls in some vague arrangement of limbs onto Kitty’s bed. Even Crawford’s snoring doesn’t keep her awake for more than a microsecond.
When she wakes up, fuzzy-mouthed, it’s an immediate, full-body experience. She realizes after a few hazy seconds that her vision is blurred because her glasses have fallen off; when she fumbles for them, an outline in the doorway says, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
It’s Richard. “What is it?” Mary asks, shoving her glasses onto her face and wincing as the light in the hallway sharpens. “Is there something wrong with Lydia? Is the baby okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, they’re fine,” Richard says. “Lizzie sent me upstairs to check on you; everyone just got back from the hospital. Your mum stayed with Lydia.”
“What time is it?” Mary looks towards her wrist before remembering that she isn’t wearing any timepiece due to the tasteful elegance of Jane’s wedding and Mary’s mother’s insistence that a plastic wristwatch did not honor the proceedings.
“A little after eight in the morning,” Richard says. His voice is low and deep; Crawford continues his snores, which seem to be particularly awful due to his broken face. “Go back to sleep.”
Mary wants, rather desperately, coffee and some sort of food. Her stomach loudly complains that the last time it ate was two days previous. Like a proper doctor, Mary wants food more than she wants seventeen more hours of sleep. “No, I can go for a little bit on three hours of sleep. Please tell me someone picked up breakfast.”
“The baker dropped off the rest of the wedding cake. It’s all anyone seems interested in eating.” Mary rolls herself out of bed and winces at the sight of dress, wrinkled from witnessing the birth of her new niece and being slept in. Richard leans against the doorway and adds, “I never told you-you were very good. With Lydia.”
Feeling like she’s at least sixty years older than she is, Mary hobbles out of bed to the wardrobe on her side of the room. “Lydia and I have had sixteen years of constant warfare. At this point I can survive just about anything she throws at me.”
“She’s rather vicious.”
“I won’t say she means well, because she doesn’t, but Lydia lacks an understanding of where normal people draw boundaries.” From the depths of the wardrobe, Mary unearths a jumper too ugly for Cambridge and a pair of particularly ratty jeans. “She doesn’t quite get that her behavior is offensive. Besides, Mum spoils her.”
Crawford’s snores stop, and Mary turns to check that he hasn’t accidentally smothered himself with her quilt. He looks fine as she gives him a quick once-over, her clothing held to her chest, and the bruising on his face appears to have gone down in the past few hours of rest. “At any rate, I’ve got the thickest skin, so I can deal with her. It helps that I also have the most blackmail material on her.”
“Apparently that talent extends further than your sister,” says Richard, tilting his head towards Crawford. “Did you really blackmail him into accompanying you?”
“Of course not. Crawford is a terrible human being, but even his paltry conscience balked at the idea of not repaying me for carrying his bloody corpse halfway across Cambridge to get him medical attention.” Satisfied that he won’t be dying anytime soon, Mary straightens and joins Richard in the corridor, pulling the door shut with a low snick behind her.
“I would ask why you had to do so, but I don’t actually care.” Ignoring conventions of personal space, Richard hasn’t moved from his original position, which puts him about six inches away from Mary. “As long as you don’t have an arrangement with him that bars someone else from interfering?”
“Crawford will dictate the details of my personal life the day that Kitty says six sensible things before breakfast,” Mary says. She suddenly appears to have lost all of the air in her lungs.
The seconds that he spends staring at her feel stretched thin and long; after an aching moment, he curls a hand around the back of her head and says, “I’m sorry, but after waiting seven months it seems ridiculous to waste another second,” and slants his mouth across hers.
Every nerve ending in Mary’s mouth has a conniption and dies. Her lips tingle from the synaptic misfire, and then she drops her clothes onto the carpet and uses her free arms to press herself closer. Her neck should ache from accommodating the difference in their heights, but all she can think about is getting closer, closer, and she steps on his feet and goes up onto her toes.
About ten minutes later, Mary comes back to herself pressed against the wall outside her bedroom, legs tangled in her tragic wreck of a church dress, trying to climb Richard like a tree. The only reason she surfaces at all is that she hears rustling to her left; when she reluctantly turns her head, she sees Jane and Charlie tip-toeing down the hall. What they lack in subterfuge they make up for in effort.
Richard laughs and buries his head in the curve of Mary’s neck. It’s a closer reach than it should be because he has her six inches off the floor, pinned with his hips and one hand plastered over the curve of her breast. “Dear God, that was unsubtle,” he says. His hand curls and he brushes a careful thumb over her nipple, standing to attention under the cool silk of her bodice.
“We Bennets have many talents, but subtlety is not one of them,” Mary replies, volume strangled out of her voice by his touch. “If you want to eat any of that wedding cake, you’re going to have to let go of me. Otherwise, we’re going to kick Crawford out of my room and-”
Richard cuts her off with another kiss. It might actually burn the top layer of skin off of her lips; it certainly feels that way. “Don’t tempt me,” he rasps. “It’d be terribly impolite, and Will would probably skin me alive.”
“Will is hardly the gatekeeper to my bed,” Mary says crossly. “If this is what having a brother is like, I don’t want one and Georgie can keep him to herself.”
Richard laughs again and Mary allows herself one long moment where she locks her legs around his hips and pushes herself against him, letting a lengthy kiss spin out, before she untangles her legs and steps out of his arms. “I’m going to change. I’ll see you downstairs?”
“Yeah,” says Richard. “I’ll-stand here. For a moment.”
It startles a laugh out of Mary; she’s still smiling like an insane person as she rubs her make-up off in the bathroom and pulls on her change of clothes and she tiptoes into her room to deposit her dress in the hamper by her wardrobe.
“Wha time is it?” asks Crawford groggily from the depths of her bed.
“It’s quarter of nine. You can go back to sleep.”
“Right, good,” mumbles Crawford and pulls the quilt further over his face. “Shut the curtains?”
“I’m not your maid,” says Mary, tugging the curtains closed.
“Wake me at half two, my train’s at four.” The words are barely intelligible, but Mary gets the gist of it.
“Not your maid, Crawford,” Mary says, but she’s too happy for the words to have anything approaching acceptable venom. “Oh, bloody hell, yeah, I’ll wake you.” She pats him on the head as she crosses the room-a bruised location, to judge by his responding moan-and she practically skips out of the door and down the stairs.
The kitchen is packed with her family scarfing down the remains of Charlie and Jane’s wedding cake, although Kitty and their grandparents appear to still be asleep. “Morning,” says Mary, making a beeline for a plate with an unclaimed piece of cake. “Is there coffee?”
“Just made a new pot,” says Lizzie. “How in God’s name are you vertical right now? I know we all got some sleep at the hospital, but you certainly didn’t.”
“They train you for this sort of thing in medical school. It’s the same course where they teach you how to write illegibly and sleep standing up.” After three gigantic forkfuls of cake, Mary feels moderately more human. Her blood is electrified from the remarkably pleasant experience of having her mouth ravaged by Richard Fitzwilliam, M.D., but the cake gives her a nice extra kick. “Mmm, this is delicious. Nice choice, Jane.”
“I hope it made up for us bolting right after the ceremony,” says Jane fretfully. “Do you suppose we should write letters of apology to all of the guests?”
There are times where Jane is so bloody English that Mary suspects she bleeds tea. “It’s not your fault Lydia was just as early giving birth as she was doing everything else. She was the fastest of us to walk, after all.”
“And started talking the earliest,” Lizzie adds, since their mother isn’t around to do so.
“And she took to maths like she was born to it,” Kitty says from the doorway. “Oh thank god, coffee.”
“So why shouldn’t Lydia hijack your wedding in order to have her baby?” Mary finishes around her last bite of cake. “It’s perfectly in character. Is there more of this?”
Richard pushes the decimated cake platter in her direction. From the way he’s looking at her, Mary’s surprised that the rest of her family hasn’t started whispering. They’re probably all too tired, and Mary decides not to feed the gossipy beast; she keeps her eyes securely locked on the cake and cuts herself another generous slice.
“I’m back to the hospital to relieve Mum at noon,” Lizzie says. “Is anyone coming with me?”
“I’ll come,” says Kitty. “Oh my lord, Jane, this cake is just as perfect as you are.” Jane blushes and sips her tea, her left hand looped securely around Charlie’s. If the cake doesn’t give Mary diabetes, they might.
“We’ll take a shift tonight,” says Charlie, but he’s immediately overruled by everyone in the room insisting that he and Jane take their wedding trip as planned.
“I can drop you off if Lizzie lends me her car,” Mary says. “I have to take Crawford to Paddington anyway.”
“Make sure to put in more petrol,” says Lizzie, fishing into her pocket and tossing her car keys to Mary. “It’s running on fumes after that dash to the hospital we did yesterday.”
Although Mary has never been the most coordinated of her sisters-Kitty’s the football star-her hand-eye coordination has been strengthened by multiple dissection practicums, so she snatches Lizzie’s keys out of the air and stuffs them in the pocket of her jeans, where they promptly fall through a hole and onto the floor.
“Jesus,” mutters Mary under her breath. “All right, so, I should probably change my pants.”
“We need to finish packing. I hadn’t thought-” begins Jane, and Charlie tugs her by the hand towards the stairs as she outlines all the things she’d hadn’t somehow managed to foresee by virtue of being beauty incarnate.
As the kitchen settles down into whatever facsimile of calm the Bennet family has gotten used to snatching out from under the hand of fate, Kitty takes a gigantic mug of coffee and her plate of cake into the front parlor so she can watch the telly. Lizzie and Will can’t go up to Lizzie and Jane’s room with it so obviously being occupied by the newlyweds, so they take seats around the kitchen table and divide up the Sunday Herald. “Make sure to save the Sudoku for Lydia,” Mary reminds them from her hunched position over the counter.
“I’m not sure I’m emotionally prepared to read the paper,” says Lizzie. “Do we really need to know what stupid thing Clegg has said in the hearing of reporters in the past twenty-four hours?”
Will has disappeared behind the business section, presumably to ensure that the financial world is still firmly under his thumb and unlikely to wrest itself free any time soon. “Where’s Da?” Mary asks. Every cell in her body seems to have realigned itself to maintain constant awareness of Richard is at any point in time. She’s afraid that when they’re alone she’s going to plaster herself across the front of his body and just never let go, like some sort of limpet.
“He’s checking on Gran and Gramp. They’re very enthused about their first great-grandchild, even though Gran keeps remarking that she’d prefer such a gift come under the blessing of wedlock,” says Lizzie. “Thanks to your inability to shut your giant gob, she’s been dropping hints the size of a small country about Will and I moving up the wedding date.”
Mary rolls her eyes. “Lizzie, you’re glowing and Will is, if possible, more protective than he was when Wickham attempted to seduce you. Anyone with half a lick of sense can tell that you’re breeding.”
The newspaper rustles as Will forcefully shakes it out. “Thank you, as always, for an enlightening analysis of the situation, Mary.” He sounds adorably grumpy. Once he probably would’ve seemed stiff and proud, which was how he’d presented himself, but in addition to a different haircut and a move to Glasgow, Lizzie had also talked him into a better personality.
Mary finishes her religious experience with her coffee and eyes the clock over the stove. “I’m going to take a shower before everyone else in this house has the same idea, then I’ll take a quick nap. Will you make sure to wake me up before you go to the hospital, Lizzie?”
“Go,” says Lizzie. “You’ve got the most legitimate claim on the shower, but that doesn’t mean Kitty won’t shank you for it.”
Halfway up the stairs, Mary realizes that she should probably talk to Richard about their ill-timed but nevertheless lovely liaison in the upstairs corridor. Apparently thinking the same thing, Richard is at the base of the stairs when she turns around. “We should-” he begins.
“-talk, yeah,” Mary finishes for him. “Um, can it be at a time when I’m not literally itching for a wash?”
“Let me buy you dinner,” he says. It’s not a question, which is rousingly autocratic. Mary hadn’t realized she found that sort of thing attractive.
“Wednesday,” she answers. “After Lydia’s out of the hospital and my grandparents are gone.”
“Wednesday,” he echoes. “Great. Yes. Three days.” He makes to return to the kitchen and then, rapidly, takes the seven steps between them in two big steps and kisses her. “I’m finding it rather difficult to stop doing that.”
“I can’t think of a single reason that you should,” Mary tells him. He tastes like chocolate and coffee, as does she, but it’s a different sensation when she curls her tongue against his like a handshake. Mary’s wrapped her arms around him and is humming in the back of her throat before she has a chance to think about it. “Fuck,” she says stupidly, pushing him away as much as she pulls herself free. “Wednesday. Right.”
Any chance of her coming across as smooth and not a moron having now been decimated, Mary peels her limbs free and flees ignobly up the stairs to the bathroom.
~
Crawford and Mary are incapable of sharing a space for any period of time without descending into sniping at one another, so Mary does the responsible, adult thing and lets Jane and Charlie coo in a lovesick fashion at one another for the drive into central London. In order for such a state to be maintained, however, Crawford would have to be agreeable.
“I think I have diabetes,” Crawford whispers.
“Shut up,” Mary hisses back. “Don’t be rude.”
“They aren’t listening, they’re too busy staring into each other’s eyes.” Mary focuses all of her attention on the road and refuses to be tempted into peeking at Jane and Charlie in the backseat.
“They just got married. I'm sure if you ever undergo brainwashing and fall in love, you’ll do something similar the morning after your wedding.”
“If I ever get married-thanks for the hint that I’m incapable of love, you’re always such a darling, Bennet-I’m not getting out of bed for three days afterwards.” Crawford leans back in his seat and crosses his feet at the ankles. “I heard it’s better when you’re married. You get to do the weird stuff.”
“Oh, Mary loves that show,” says Jane suddenly. Mary jumps and almost steers the car into oncoming traffic.
“Does she?” Crawford drawls. He and Mary rarely discuss popular culture unless she is defaming his interest in a particularly egregious aspect of it. “I thought hell would freeze over the day we liked the same thing, Bennet.”
“You have the collected works of Robert Heinlein, how was I supposed to infer from that that you’d like Joss Whedon? For one thing, he understands the power of the female.”
“So does Heinlein,” interrupts Crawford with an exaggerated leer.
“Ugh, go stick your face in a blender,” says Mary.
“Edmund Bertram did that for me already,” replies Crawford cheerfully. “I’m afraid my magnificent profile will never be quite the same.”
Mary’s grip on the steering wheel eases back from murderous territory. “We weep for your loss.”
After years of being a Bennet, Jane has a sixth sense for an impending argument and the best way to diffuse it. “I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk very much over the course of your visit. You and Mary seem to be very close.”
In a flash across Crawford’s face, Mary can see the four (lewd) responses he considers and then rejects. “We study together often,” she says. “We share a few courses.”
Crawford is clearly laughing at her; his eyes crinkle and rise in the corners. “Bennet means that she’s using me to get to the top of the class, and once she’s there she’ll slit my throat in my sleep.”
“Nonsense,” says Mary briskly. “If that was my aim, I’d be spending all of my time with George Nyugen.”
“But why would you want to?” Crawford asks. “He has a face like a donkey.”
“George Nyugen,” Mary tells Jane, “could probably make a living posing next to Kate Moss if he wasn’t so set on becoming a neurosurgeon. Crawford, stop being jealous, it’s unattractive.”
“I don’t understand why you’re all so enamored with him,” Crawford mutters. “He’s insufferable.”
“He’s desperately crazed about Emma Wu,” Mary translates for Charlie and Jane’s benefit. “Girton’s tangled love affairs are about three tragic speeches from becoming a Shakespearean comedy. We’ve already got the fisticuffs in Act Two thanks to Crawford.”
“Please, refer your gratitude to Bertram.”
“And last term,” she continues, “we had that hilarious case of mistaken identity with Jenny Fairfax and Frank Churchill, may his name live on in infamy.”
“Churchill’s an arse,” comments Crawford. “I would know. He’s an incurable reprobate.”
“I didn’t know you knew was ‘reprobate’ meant,” Mary says.
“I make it a point to look up all the loving terms you fling my way, Bennet,” Crawford says. “I think you just missed your turn.”
He’s right. This entire enterprise is reminding Mary why she hates driving in London, beyond global warming and the congestion tax exacerbating the already sorry state of her personal finances. “Blast it,” she says, and signals to take the next turn. “I hate driving in London.”
“Thank you so much for doing this.” Jane reaches forward to place a soothing hand on Mary’s shoulder. “It’s always such trouble, taking the Underground with luggage everywhere.”
Mary has never tested this hypothesis, but she feels confident stating that it is a physical impossibility for a person to remain angry when Jane applies her ‘soothing’ voice. “Oh, it’s all right, Jane. I’m just crotchety.”
“Did you just apologize, Bennet?” Crawford gasps theatrically. “I think Bertram might’ve given me brain damage; I must be hallucinating.”
“Oh, I’ll give you brain damage,” snaps Mary, and she takes advantage of a red light to reach across the gearshift and twist Crawford’s ear.
“Jesus, Bennet, are you trying to give me a matching set of fractures? I’ve been slapped with less force than that.”
“By an irritated paramour,” Mary points out.
“And such a title clearly doesn’t apply to you,” Crawford says. “Violence is not an attractive trait in a lady.”
Jane exhales loudly; she knows before Mary opens her mouth what’s coming. “Fuck your stereotypes.”
Crawford snorts. “Learn another song, Bennet. At this point it’s becoming monotonous.” He presses his palm against his injured ear and winces. All of the (annoying) flirtation has been leached out of his voice and replaced by snippiness.
Mary refuses to feel bad. Why should she? Crawford’s an arse and twice the reprobate that Frank Churchill is. The tickling in the bottom of her spine is clearly just her own nurturing nature, which hates exerting violence to anyone, even cads.
“What are you doing while you’re home?” Charlie asks, kindly and slightly desperate. Maybe he and Jane have decided that leaving Mary and Crawford to their own devices will end in bloodshed. “Caro’s got a party on Wednesday-you could bring Kitty? I’m sure she’d love to have you.”
Caro would enjoy hosting the Bennet sisters at one of her posh Belgravia house parties on cold day in hell, but Charlie’s naïveté is probably one of the reasons why Jane loves him; it is a trait Jane herself had in spades. “I’m having dinner with Richard on Wednesday,” says Mary. This time, she manages the turn and promptly gives Crawford a triumphant smirk.
Unsurprisingly, Crawford appears unimpressed. He frowns and opens his mouth, but before he can speak Jane says, “Oh, Mary,” breathily. “That’s wonderful!”
Reminding herself that she is twenty-one, not fourteen, and she’s successfully conducted relationships in the past without bringing embarrassment to either party, Mary suppresses her native desire to squeal. “Yes,” she says as stately as possible. “It is.” She then ruins her stateliness by giggling.
“Where’s he taking you? Somewhere nice?” demands Charlie. He’s clearly begun to take his brotherly duties very seriously.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” replies Mary cheerfully. Thank God for the signs that direct traffic to Paddington; she’d have gotten them lost by now. Luckily enough, she can see the station taking shape across the bridge. “I don’t really care.”
Had Lizzie been in the car, she would have undoubtedly pointed out that Mary always cared about first dates-she’d rejected four potential suitors on account of where they’d suggested taking their first date. Mary dislikes zoos, Tories, and lectures at the LSE, and she sees no reason to be ashamed of that.
Lizzie is not in the car, so Crawford says in a snooty voice the likes of which Mary hasn’t heard in two years, “You’re one of the most judgmental people I’ve ever met, Bennet. Of course you care.”
Stung-judgmental has always been one of Lizzie’s faults, never one of Mary’s-she slams on the brakes outside of Paddington and says tightly, “We’re here.”
Jane and Charlie unload their bags, give Mary a quick hug and kiss each, and dash off to catch the express to Heathrow. Crawford loiters, hands in his pocket, as Mary throws his bag at him. He catches it in his arms and stands there, staring at her, with a peculiar expression on his face.
“What?” she demands, crossing her arms over her chest.
Since he’s being rude, she considers it perfectly acceptable that she returns the favor. The longer she stares at his face, the stranger his features become. Even discolored courtesy of Fanny Price’s honor, his bones are sharp and fine, framed by a tousled cap of blond curls. He’s hardly conventionally attractive, but he’s not a troll, either.
“You look very normal,” he finally tells her. “With the brown.”
It isn’t until he says this that Mary realizes he has never seen her natural hair color. “I’m blonde,” she reminds him with a delicately raised eyebrow. He should know that; he’s in possession of intimate evidence as to the truth of that.
Crawford’s eyes darken from grey to blue. In two seconds he’s dropped his bag and has her pinned to the passenger side of the car, his hands on her shoulders. “Jesus, Bennet,” he rasps. “Why the fuck are you going out with that prick?”
Before Mary can form a response to that non sequitor, Crawford has apparently deemed any reply unnecessary and he slants his mouth over hers, the wide palms of his hands trailing up her neck to the back of her head. He takes a large handful of her dully colored hair and tugs, guiding her in the direction he wants.
To what will be her future embarrassment, Mary responds to his kiss without much input from her higher brain functioning. She rises up to her toes and grips the collar of his shirt and gives as good as she takes, which is fairly good. Crawford groans into her mouth and rips his head back, his eyes glazed.
“What are you on about?” Mary demands. It takes her a few seconds; she can’t seem to speak properly.
“You’re a moron,” Crawford snaps. He runs his thumb along her lower lip and watches it carefully, as though it will give him the answer he wants. “If you really wanted your supervisor hero, you’d have slapped me.”
Mary rears back, but as she’s currently up against a car, there isn’t really anywhere for her to go. “This, from the king of undefined relationship statuses?”
“You don’t want him,” he continues, as though she hasn’t spoken. His thumb rubs against the corner of her mouth as if something is caught there. “He’s old and he doesn’t have the faintest idea what you’re like.”
With no other recourse, Mary stomps on Crawford’s foot. His reflexes are too good for that; his foot slips out of the way in half of a millisecond and then he uses his stupid rowing Neanderthal strength to lift her bodily off of her feet. This is rapidly becoming a trend of which Mary is not fond. “Put me down,” she hisses.
“Give me a chance,” says Crawford. The queer expression comes back into his face, now that lust is fading. “I mean it, Bennet.”
This is unconscionable. It’s also inconceivable. Crawford? In a relationship? “You never mean anything,” Mary says. “I’ll eat my socks the day you commit yourself to monogamy.”
As far as Mary is aware, Crawford doesn’t know how to take anything seriously. In the years that she has known him, through classes and ill-advised recreational shagging, Crawford has floated through his life with only a minimal, bemused interest in his affairs. She’d only ever seen him get really passionate about Fanny Price, and that had ended poorly enough that his hospital bill would’ve made Mary’s mother swoon.
Even if he was serious-which he’s not-Mary is too smart to throw herself into Crawford’s arms and expect anything other than heartbreak and other maudlin, weepy emotions.
“You don’t trust me,” he observes.
Mary sighs and gives up on touching the ground any time soon. “Of course I don’t trust you. I barely know you. I don’t think anyone really knows you, Crawford. Isn’t that the point?”
Finally (finally) Crawford stops staring at her mouth and lifts his eyes to hers. The honking and crying and general bustle outside of Paddington sort of fades into the background, a kind of generalized humming that echoes what is buzzing under Mary’s skin. “Most likely,” he finally says fuzzily.
Taking advantage of his confusion, Mary tries to slip out of his arms. They tighten around her immediately, a band of muscle that speaks to his privileged youth spent rowing up and down rivers on people’s private estates. He licks his lips and speaks slowly, maybe even nervously, although that’s unheard of in Mary’s dealings with Henry Crawford. “I have no idea why, but I really like you, Bennet.”
“That’s encouraging,” says Mary snippily.
“Shut up.” Crawford has given up on eye contact and is now speaking exclusively to her right eyebrow. “Richard Fitzhubert isn’t who you want, and you’d either kill him or dominate him within a week of dating. When you find out that I’m right, and he’s not who you made him up to be, you need to give me a chance.”
Mary has a hard time imagining that Richard won’t be a lovely human being. If anything, it will be Mary who falls far short of his expectations, whatever they might be. “Crawford,” she begins, suddenly aware that he has emotions (like a real boy!) and for some ridiculous, unknown reason, they appear to be tied to her. “I think you need to take some time and figure out why this business with Fanny Price has messed with your head-”
“Forget about Fanny goddamn Price,” Crawford shouts. In a sudden rush, all of the noise falls into their pocket of space. The horns sound louder, the shrieks of small children more piercing, and a few surrounding whispers particularly pointed. “This is not about Fanny. It was always about you, Bennet. Even Fanny was about you.” He releases her and she drops to the ground, stumbling as she suddenly regains her footing. Her knees feel a little numb.
“I,” says Mary. It is the first time she can ever remember being struck speechless. It is a distinctly unpleasant sensation.
“Because I am a mature adult,” says Crawford, being to pick up his abandoned bag, “I’m going to give you until the start of Lent term to figure out that you’re only in love with the idea of you and Fitzhubert saving Malawi orphans.” He sounds snotty but detached. She sincerely believes in this moment that he is the grandson of a marquis; only a dozen generations of breeding could have created that pristine enunciation. “Then I’m going to convince you to date me if it kills us.” He slings his bag over his shoulder and gives her a frosty smile. “I expect it might.”
Mary doesn’t know how long she stands like a moron in front of Lizzie’s car, cradling the keys in her left hand, staring after him as he’s swallowed by Paddington’s mass of holiday traffic.
“OI. GET OUT OF THE WAY YOU DAFT BINT,” someone bellows at Mary.
“Fuck off,” she says. It lacks heat and volume, so she gathers the shreds of her dignity and confusion and piles her limbs back into the car. It takes her four tries to start the car; her hands are shaking.
On the way back, she misses her turn onto the A41 and drives in a weird daze until she finds herself in Hackney Marsh, waiting for a light to change. “What the fuck,” she says to herself, hoping that her voice will help ground the situation. She looks at herself in the rearview mirror and sees that she is flushed, slightly glassy-eyed, her brown, wedding-approved hair mussed into a fuzzy halo around her head. She looks only two steps above thoroughly ravished, like a cross-dressing Shakespearean heroine.
“Oh my god,” she whispers. “He was serious.”
~
[part iv]
~
iii. | you wrote the song i wanna play
“This was dumb as hell,” Mary tells everyone in the car, which includes Will (driving), Lizzie (passenger’s seat, calling the hospital), Jane (backseat, still in her wedding dress), and Lydia (backseat, in labor). “Why did you let Mum blackmail you into getting married so close to Lydia’s due date?”
“Oh, shut it,” says Lizzie. “Like you’ve ever been capable of standing against Mum in one of her moods. She threw that box of hair dye at your head and you caved in seconds.”
“I understand Jane’s desire not to have her wedding photos festooned with my blue hair, as I am a marvelous sister. However, I think the fact that I’m at Cambridge and not married to Peter Aster shows that I am, in fact, capable of standing up to Mum.” Mary turns her attention from arguing with Lizzie to Lydia, who is being exceptionally shitty at measuring her contractions. “How long was that, Lydia?”
“I don’t know, a fucking age and a half,” Lydia moans. “How long is this going to take?”
“I bet twenty hours in the pool,” says Mary. “You’re six weeks early, so this’ll be interesting.”
“What do you mean, interesting, you cunt?” Lydia yells. “I am dying!” Mary tries not to take the insult seriously and begins to time the contractions on her mobile’s stopwatch function.
“You’re not dying, darling,” says Jane, rubbing her hand in circles over Lydia’s lower back. “It’s okay, we’re almost there. Aren’t we, Will?”
Will neglects to answer in favor of gripping the steering wheel more firmly and taking a roundabout in a truly lethal fashion. If Mary had been unsure about Lizzie’s being pregnant, Will’s behavior confirms it. Of course, Lizzie probably is waiting to announce it until after Jane’s wedding (technically now), but Mary didn’t spend most of her summer holiday working with pregnant women only to be unable to recognize the look of it in her own sister.
“You’re at twenty seconds,” says Mary. “Don’t worry, they’re still pretty short.”
Lydia curls her fingers into claws and aims them towards Mary’s face. “I am going to rip all of your stupid hair out!”
“That won’t make you feel better,” Mary promises her cheerfully. “Besides, if you touch my hair I’ll set your head on fire. It’ll be easy with all of that aerosol spray in it.”
“Mary,” says Jane. She’s not very good at threatening, but she’s far more accomplished than anyone else genteelly disapproving. “This is very hard on everyone.”
“Probably hardest on Lydia,” Mary agrees. “That one was 25 seconds.”
“Oh my bloody fucking god,” Lydia shouts.
“You’re such a wimp,” says Mary, leaning forward to tweak Lydia’s nose. “Listening to you, you’d think the baby was coming already. You’ve got hours left, and this is only the very beginning of the pain. It’ll get much worse.”
“Throw her out of this car,” Lydia says to Jane. “I’m serious.” She turns to Mary and says, her voice thrown into a higher register than Mary had thought possible, “This term turned you even more insane.”
“It’s probably that boyfriend of hers,” Lizzie comments. “I’m sure when his face doesn’t look like ground meat he’s quite a catch.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Mary says by rote.
Lydia sucks in her breath and says, “NO. Mary, you didn’t?!”
“What, are you the only Bennet sister allowed to have inadvisable sexual relationships?” asks Mary. “You’re holding at 25, that’s good.”
In the front seat, Lizzie holds her hands over Will’s ears. “Will doesn’t need to hear this.”
“Listen to Lizzie getting prudish,” says Lydia. “You’d think she never-”
“If you finish that I will end you,” Lizzie promises. “Now isn’t the time to be airing out the past. Especially when the present is so much more interesting.”
“What, Mary’s not-boyfriend?” asks Lydia. “Oooh, fucking cunt fuck.” She flops her hand around and settles it on Mary’s bicep, which she proceeds to squeeze with a grip that could bend metal.
“I meant your impending birthing event,” replies Lizzie drily. “You know, the reason why we just fled Jane’s wedding.”
Bless perfect, beautiful Jane; she blushes and says, “The most important part was over. I’m sure everyone will enjoy the wedding breakfast just fine without me.”
“Please, half of the party’s going to be showing up at the hospital.” Years of pipetting in lab practicums have strengthened Mary’s right thumb to the point where it is actually bigger than her left one, but even it is beginning to flag under the constant exertion of using her mobile’s stopwatch function. “Twenty-seven seconds.”
Lydia’s ugly false nails dig further into Mary’s arm. She is paler and trembling slightly. Even though Mary rarely feels sympathy for the most irritating of her sisters, she can’t help the tender feelings that Lydia’s state seems to inspire in her. “Crawford’s the best shag I’ve ever had,” she says abruptly.
Lydia’s grip on Mary’s arm loosens slightly. “Better than Marianne?”
“Not in the beginning, but he improved with practice.”
Will begins to chant under his breath. It sounds a little like the remaining street directions to the hospital.
Lizzie twists in her seat so she can see her three sisters. “I thought you were too busy mooning over that doctor at your clinic? The one with the great arse?”
Her sisters’ knowledge of her inner workings would be more depressing if Mary didn’t know all the facets of their lives in exchange. “What’s the point in that? I’m never going to see him again. Crawford might be a cretin with entitlement issues and an inbred genealogy, but he’s not ten years older than me.”
Jane says absently, “Richard’s only five years older than you, Mary.”
The car falls into silence. Lydia’s shrieking dies huffily, so that Mary’s sudden descent into cardiac arrest is fully audible. “WHAT,” she yells. “What did you just say, Jane?”
Jane stops petting Lydia’s hair. “Oh,” she says faintly. “Oh, dear.”
Lizzie turns treacherously pink, so Mary turns the full force of her shock and anger on her. Lizzie promptly folds like wet cardboard. “Richard is Will’s cousin. I had met him last spring, but when Will and I took Lydia to one of her doctor’s appointments last month, we found out that he had been your supervisor over the summer.”
“I CANNOT BELIEVE ANY OF YOU,” Mary says. She can hear the capitols in her own voice, but she seems unable to stop them. “HOW COULD YOU?!”
Will is now audibly talking to himself, but he’s three months from marrying Lizzie, so he doesn’t get a pass on this. Mary grabs a handful of Lizzie’s hair and shakes her. “You’re all awful! I hate you. Did you say anything?!”
“No,” says Jane hurriedly. “Of course not.”
“Shut up unless you were there, Jane,” Mary advises her. “Here, time Lydia’s contractions while I rips Lizzie’s head off. Her baby can incubate without the contents of her head, I’m sure, since she never seems to use them.”
Any potential violence that Mary could perpetrate against Lizzie is lost when Jane and Lydia both begin to talk over each other. A rapturous “Oh, Lizzie,” overlaps with “You’re pregnant!? Not fair, I’m pregnant.”
“Not for long,” Mary states drily. “Oh for god’s sake, give me back my phone, Jane. You clearly have no idea what you’re doing.”
The occupants of Will’s expensive midsize car pour out into the hospital parking lot while still yelling; a nearby nurse takes one look at them and grabs Lydia. “Have you been timing your contractions?” he demands.
“They’re thirty-two seconds in length,” Mary says over Jane embracing Will and Lizzie and laughing in the middle of the A&E entrance.
“Are you the birthing partner?” the nurses asks, wheeling Lydia inside the hospital and down towards the maternity ward.
Technically they’ve all been trained and Kitty is the closest to Lydia, but she’s also likely to crumple like a toddler at the first sign of Lydia’s disapproval. “Yes,” says Mary.
“Oh god, over my dead body,” moans Lydia.
“So you’d prefer Mum, then?” asks Mary.
Lydia glares at Mary as the nurse executes a perfect turn and guides her wheelchair backwards into the elevator. “You’re such a cunt, Mary.”
“Which is why I’m the only one who can stand you, Lyds.” Mary and half of her psychotically dysfunctional family pack into the part of the elevator left unoccupied by hospital patients.
She leaves Will to watch Jane and Lizzie have meltdowns in the waiting room and goes to scour herself to an approved level of cleanliness before donning the scrubs that have been set out for her use.
Lydia gets predictably bored and whiny the more time that passes that the baby doesn’t show, and Mary occupies her by engaging in one of their favorite arguments, namely whether Lydia could be termed ‘home-wrecker’ for facilitating the end of the marriage of her calculus teacher.
Mary maintains, like she always does in this argument, that ‘home-wrecker’ is insulting and, as with most names for females in control of their sexuality in a patriarchy, ignores the fact that the two people capable of ruining a marriage are the two people in the marriage. Lydia, taking as much pride in her seduction of her teacher as she does in the perfect marks that she achieved in calculus through application of her brain (her seducing her teacher was an added benefit), takes the opposing point.
Even someone as argumentative as Mary cannot have the same debate for more than two hours, so eventually she opens the Sudoku app on her mobile and hands it over. Lydia fills out a Sudoku board like most people fill out multiplication tables; she’s unlocked the expert level in twenty minutes and wanders in circles up and down the room, eyes fixed to Mary’s mobile.
Mary is a reasonably intelligent person; she has no excuse for why it shocks her that when the door opens, it’s Dr. Fitzwilliam-Richard, Will’s bloody cousin-who steps through it. “Heya, Lydia. Mary,” he says. Lydia grunts and taps at Mary’s mobile. Mary has a hard time tearing her eyes from his face; she’s rewarded by a smile, tired and stunning. “Let’s take a look,” Dr. Fitzwilliam suggests after a few seconds.
“Lydia,” Mary interrupts, shaking herself free. “Give me that, you can break all of the records on it later.”
“Shut up, I’ve got one-yes, there it is.” Lydia hands back Mary’s mobile, which is blaring a tinny trumpet noise as pixels of rainbow confetti fall across the screen. Mary turns it off and puts it down somewhere behind her as she helps Lydia onto the bed that has been left, until now, unoccupied.
Dr. Fitzwilliam makes encouraging noises as he measures Lydia’s dilation and tells her about how the next few hours will proceed. Mary realizes that underneath his scrubs he’s wearing the remains of a dress shirt and nice pants-Jane must’ve invited him to the wedding. It makes sense, if Charlie and Will’s families are so close. She hadn’t seen him in the church, but most of her attention had been focused on keeping her mum from interrogating Crawford about the nature of their relationship.
“Can I talk to you for a moment, Mary?” Dr. Fitzwilliam asks.
Mary retrieves her mobile and hands it to Lydia. “I’ve installed some sort of numerical hangman game.” Lydia’s eyes light up greedily.
“What’s up?” she asks when she and Dr. Fitzwilliam have retreated to the hallway.
“I wanted to check that you’re prepared for how the next few hours will likely go,” he explains. His face is just as beautiful as it was three months ago, unfortunately, and most of the authority that he used to exude is gone; in its place, he’s just an attractive guy that Mary wants to sleep with.
“We all did a workshop,” Mary explains. “My sisters and I, at least. I’m the one least likely to cave under Lydia’s repeated verbal abuse. Other than Lizzie, of course, but it’s probably impossible to peel her out from Will’s protective grip at this point.”
Dr. Fitzwilliam’s eyes flick to over Mary’s shoulder, where her family is clumped and loudly talking over one another in the waiting room. “Those are both valid points,” he agrees. His quick grin is just as charming and lethal as Crawford’s best before Edmund Bertram made the innards of a Cornish pasty from his aristocratic features.
“And only a madman would let my mother into a stressful situation considering how fragile she maintains her nerves become.” Mary briefly lifts her eyes towards heaven to convey how she feels about that.
Dr. Fitzwilliam laughs outright. “I see that you’ve thought this through.”
“Lydia may be the most annoying person on the planet,” with the possible except of Henry Crawford, “but she’s my baby sister.” Mary’s family is vitally important to her, the way that her career in medicine will never be. She must relate this in her expression; some remaining aspect of Dr. Fitzwilliam’s expression softens, and suddenly his face is approachable in its attractiveness.
“Since we’re soon to be family of sorts,” he says, offering his hand, “you must call me Richard.”
Considering that it’s just a handshake, it’s pretty fucking criminal how much sexual tension is passed between them in the single moment of contact. Mary can’t be the only one who feels it; something hard flashes in Richard’s eyes before he swallows it back.
The knowledge that he’s no longer her boss and actually only five years older than her flares between them. Jesus. “Well,” says Mary. “I better get back to Lydia before she dismantles my mobile out of boredom.”
She’s turning to do that, trying not to do something especially stupid like walk into a doorframe, when Crawford says from behind her, “Bennet! You aren’t seriously expecting me to sit with your family for the next fourteen hours, are you?”
“Oh, stuff it, Crawford. I loitered by your bedside for how many days, exactly?”
Crawford prowls forward, hands stuffed in the pockets of his trousers. Whatever expensive starch he’s had used to press his suit must be worth it; the creases are still crisp and if it weren’t for his wreck of a face, he’d look just a fresh as he’d had earlier that morning.
“Hello,” says Richard.
“Oh, right,” says Mary quickly. “Richard, this is Henry Crawford. Crawford this is Dr. Fitzwilliam, he’s attending to Lydia.”
“Fitzwilliam,” drawls Crawford. “Your supervisor from this summer, Bennet?”
Mary is surprised enough to gape. “Where the hell did you pick that up, Crawford?”
“Despite your persistent belief otherwise, I’m not a total idiot.”
Richard shakes Crawford’s hand. It’s as they’re standing next to each other, Richard towering a good six inches over Crawford with that Fitzwilliam family gift of height, that Mary realizes she can trace the same aristocratic features in both of their faces, although Richard’s aren’t currently broken. Her usual jibe of ‘inbred’ seems horrifyingly relevant.
“Are you a schoolmate of Mary’s?” Richard asks politely. His face has adopted its former mask of pleased ambivalence.
“That I am,” Crawford agrees. “She blackmailed me into attending this circus.”
Mary elbows him immediately, practice making it easy to avoid his bruised ribs. “It’s not blackmail if I call in a debt. Besides, up until my sister went into labor, you were having a perfectly fine time.”
“There was alcohol until your sister went into labor,” Crawford points out.
“Go talk to my da,” she says, putting both hands on his upper arm and pushing him firmly down the hall. The move has no effect unless Crawford allows it; he resists for a moment and then acquiesces. “Trust me, he’s just as unhappy as you. Don't you have a chess app on your mobile? Play with him, he’s a shark.”
“If your mother asks me one more time how long we’ve been dating, I’m going to break out some stories about the UL that will make her toes curl,” Crawford finally says, breaking from whatever weird moment had fallen over their section of hallway.
“Why don’t you try,” Mary hisses. “When we get home, I’ll make sure to share the delightful anecdote of how your zygomatic arch came to be broken. I did tell you what happened to the guy who knocked up Lydia, didn’t I?”
“Keep fighting dirty, Bennet, and one day someone’s going to take you up on it,” Crawford comments mildly as he turns on his heel and saunters back towards the waiting room.
“Oh, that reminds me,” Mary says, moving her attention back to Richard. “Were you the cousin who went with Will to threaten Wickham?”
Richard smiles faintly. “No, it was our cousin, Anne de Bourgh. She works for MI-6. Or so we assume, at least. It’s not as if she can tell us.” He gestures at a height about three inches below his own; it’s over six feet, at least. “Anne’s about this tall and thin as a reed, but she has a particular expression that conveys how easy it would be for her to break all 206 bones in your body.”
“How useful,” says Mary, trying not to seethe with jealousy.
“It really is,” Richard agrees. Whatever he’d revealed earlier has been bottled up behind professionalism. “I need to go check on some things with the staff. Why don’t you join your sister?”
~
At sixteen hours of labor, a girl, and four pounds seven ounces, Will cleans out the pool. It’s the first time Mary’s father has ever lost the birthing pool since Lizzie, at age eight, took him to the cleaners for Kitty’s birth, but he takes it with good enough grace. “It’s about time I had some competition,” he says with a gleam in his eye. At six weeks early, the hospital want to keep the baby for further examination, but she’s apparently healthy-surprisingly so, considering the genes she has to work from.
Mary appropriates Charles’ car and drives Kitty, Crawford, Jane, and Charlie home. The little house in Finchley is not really prepared to take on all the houseguests that are bound to be flooding in, so Mary sends Kitty out of their joined room to use Lydia’s one-it’s empty, so someone might as well use it-and pours Jane and Charlie, finally exhausted from their wedding and a dinner composed entirely of champagne from the reception and the prawn crackers from the Chinese takeaway Will had ordered four hours into Lydia’s labor, into Jane’s bed in the room she and Lizzie used to share.
Crawford, still mostly doped up, is surprisingly malleable as Mary forces him into her tiny twin bed. “Joining me?” he asks, waggling his eyebrows, but his spirit isn’t really into it.
“You’re at your sexiest when you’re tired and drugged,” Mary assures him. “I’m having a hard time keeping my hands off of you. C’mon, shoes off.” Awash with déjà vu from the first time Lydia overdid vodka cranberries, Mary wrestles with Crawford’s dress shoes and then prods him into a sitting position so she can work off his jacket and waistcoat.
“You smell like hospital soap,” Crawford says into her shoulder. “It’s rapidly becoming a familiar scent.”
Mary guides his elbow through the proper hole in his waistcoat and tries not to find him charming. It’s not as easy as she would have expected. “Trust me, hospital soap is preferable to what I smelled like two hours ago.”
Crawford falls silent as Mary leans him against the headboard to pick at his necktie. “I’m a little bit impressed, Bennet. I knew from the first day of biochemistry practicum that you were a swot, but you’re going to be a rather smashing doctor, aren’t you?”
“Thank you, Crawford,” says Mary drily, “for validating my career aspirations.” She manages to loosen his necktie and decides that if he strangles himself in his sleep, it’s his own damn fault. “Go to sleep before you say something embarrassing.”
“I’m never embarrassed,” he says as she pushes his head into her pillows. “I’m Henry Crawford.”
Mary rolls her eyes heavenward and suddenly has no trouble finding him annoying again. “Good night, Crawford.”
Although Kitty’s bed looks mighty comfortable after the-oh God-twenty-three hours that Mary has been awake and assisting in Jane’s wedding and Lydia’s labor, Mary is well aware of her responsibilities as the only conscious Bennet. In the guest bedroom, she unfolds the guest sofa and makes the bed with new sheets so her grandparents have somewhere to sleep. On her last rounds, checking all of the locks on the doors and making sure a pile of towels and extra bedding is on the couch for anyone else sleeping over, she flicks on the coffee maker and sets out things for tea.
Finally, Mary crawls upstairs and sort of arranges herself so that she falls in some vague arrangement of limbs onto Kitty’s bed. Even Crawford’s snoring doesn’t keep her awake for more than a microsecond.
When she wakes up, fuzzy-mouthed, it’s an immediate, full-body experience. She realizes after a few hazy seconds that her vision is blurred because her glasses have fallen off; when she fumbles for them, an outline in the doorway says, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
It’s Richard. “What is it?” Mary asks, shoving her glasses onto her face and wincing as the light in the hallway sharpens. “Is there something wrong with Lydia? Is the baby okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, they’re fine,” Richard says. “Lizzie sent me upstairs to check on you; everyone just got back from the hospital. Your mum stayed with Lydia.”
“What time is it?” Mary looks towards her wrist before remembering that she isn’t wearing any timepiece due to the tasteful elegance of Jane’s wedding and Mary’s mother’s insistence that a plastic wristwatch did not honor the proceedings.
“A little after eight in the morning,” Richard says. His voice is low and deep; Crawford continues his snores, which seem to be particularly awful due to his broken face. “Go back to sleep.”
Mary wants, rather desperately, coffee and some sort of food. Her stomach loudly complains that the last time it ate was two days previous. Like a proper doctor, Mary wants food more than she wants seventeen more hours of sleep. “No, I can go for a little bit on three hours of sleep. Please tell me someone picked up breakfast.”
“The baker dropped off the rest of the wedding cake. It’s all anyone seems interested in eating.” Mary rolls herself out of bed and winces at the sight of dress, wrinkled from witnessing the birth of her new niece and being slept in. Richard leans against the doorway and adds, “I never told you-you were very good. With Lydia.”
Feeling like she’s at least sixty years older than she is, Mary hobbles out of bed to the wardrobe on her side of the room. “Lydia and I have had sixteen years of constant warfare. At this point I can survive just about anything she throws at me.”
“She’s rather vicious.”
“I won’t say she means well, because she doesn’t, but Lydia lacks an understanding of where normal people draw boundaries.” From the depths of the wardrobe, Mary unearths a jumper too ugly for Cambridge and a pair of particularly ratty jeans. “She doesn’t quite get that her behavior is offensive. Besides, Mum spoils her.”
Crawford’s snores stop, and Mary turns to check that he hasn’t accidentally smothered himself with her quilt. He looks fine as she gives him a quick once-over, her clothing held to her chest, and the bruising on his face appears to have gone down in the past few hours of rest. “At any rate, I’ve got the thickest skin, so I can deal with her. It helps that I also have the most blackmail material on her.”
“Apparently that talent extends further than your sister,” says Richard, tilting his head towards Crawford. “Did you really blackmail him into accompanying you?”
“Of course not. Crawford is a terrible human being, but even his paltry conscience balked at the idea of not repaying me for carrying his bloody corpse halfway across Cambridge to get him medical attention.” Satisfied that he won’t be dying anytime soon, Mary straightens and joins Richard in the corridor, pulling the door shut with a low snick behind her.
“I would ask why you had to do so, but I don’t actually care.” Ignoring conventions of personal space, Richard hasn’t moved from his original position, which puts him about six inches away from Mary. “As long as you don’t have an arrangement with him that bars someone else from interfering?”
“Crawford will dictate the details of my personal life the day that Kitty says six sensible things before breakfast,” Mary says. She suddenly appears to have lost all of the air in her lungs.
The seconds that he spends staring at her feel stretched thin and long; after an aching moment, he curls a hand around the back of her head and says, “I’m sorry, but after waiting seven months it seems ridiculous to waste another second,” and slants his mouth across hers.
Every nerve ending in Mary’s mouth has a conniption and dies. Her lips tingle from the synaptic misfire, and then she drops her clothes onto the carpet and uses her free arms to press herself closer. Her neck should ache from accommodating the difference in their heights, but all she can think about is getting closer, closer, and she steps on his feet and goes up onto her toes.
About ten minutes later, Mary comes back to herself pressed against the wall outside her bedroom, legs tangled in her tragic wreck of a church dress, trying to climb Richard like a tree. The only reason she surfaces at all is that she hears rustling to her left; when she reluctantly turns her head, she sees Jane and Charlie tip-toeing down the hall. What they lack in subterfuge they make up for in effort.
Richard laughs and buries his head in the curve of Mary’s neck. It’s a closer reach than it should be because he has her six inches off the floor, pinned with his hips and one hand plastered over the curve of her breast. “Dear God, that was unsubtle,” he says. His hand curls and he brushes a careful thumb over her nipple, standing to attention under the cool silk of her bodice.
“We Bennets have many talents, but subtlety is not one of them,” Mary replies, volume strangled out of her voice by his touch. “If you want to eat any of that wedding cake, you’re going to have to let go of me. Otherwise, we’re going to kick Crawford out of my room and-”
Richard cuts her off with another kiss. It might actually burn the top layer of skin off of her lips; it certainly feels that way. “Don’t tempt me,” he rasps. “It’d be terribly impolite, and Will would probably skin me alive.”
“Will is hardly the gatekeeper to my bed,” Mary says crossly. “If this is what having a brother is like, I don’t want one and Georgie can keep him to herself.”
Richard laughs again and Mary allows herself one long moment where she locks her legs around his hips and pushes herself against him, letting a lengthy kiss spin out, before she untangles her legs and steps out of his arms. “I’m going to change. I’ll see you downstairs?”
“Yeah,” says Richard. “I’ll-stand here. For a moment.”
It startles a laugh out of Mary; she’s still smiling like an insane person as she rubs her make-up off in the bathroom and pulls on her change of clothes and she tiptoes into her room to deposit her dress in the hamper by her wardrobe.
“Wha time is it?” asks Crawford groggily from the depths of her bed.
“It’s quarter of nine. You can go back to sleep.”
“Right, good,” mumbles Crawford and pulls the quilt further over his face. “Shut the curtains?”
“I’m not your maid,” says Mary, tugging the curtains closed.
“Wake me at half two, my train’s at four.” The words are barely intelligible, but Mary gets the gist of it.
“Not your maid, Crawford,” Mary says, but she’s too happy for the words to have anything approaching acceptable venom. “Oh, bloody hell, yeah, I’ll wake you.” She pats him on the head as she crosses the room-a bruised location, to judge by his responding moan-and she practically skips out of the door and down the stairs.
The kitchen is packed with her family scarfing down the remains of Charlie and Jane’s wedding cake, although Kitty and their grandparents appear to still be asleep. “Morning,” says Mary, making a beeline for a plate with an unclaimed piece of cake. “Is there coffee?”
“Just made a new pot,” says Lizzie. “How in God’s name are you vertical right now? I know we all got some sleep at the hospital, but you certainly didn’t.”
“They train you for this sort of thing in medical school. It’s the same course where they teach you how to write illegibly and sleep standing up.” After three gigantic forkfuls of cake, Mary feels moderately more human. Her blood is electrified from the remarkably pleasant experience of having her mouth ravaged by Richard Fitzwilliam, M.D., but the cake gives her a nice extra kick. “Mmm, this is delicious. Nice choice, Jane.”
“I hope it made up for us bolting right after the ceremony,” says Jane fretfully. “Do you suppose we should write letters of apology to all of the guests?”
There are times where Jane is so bloody English that Mary suspects she bleeds tea. “It’s not your fault Lydia was just as early giving birth as she was doing everything else. She was the fastest of us to walk, after all.”
“And started talking the earliest,” Lizzie adds, since their mother isn’t around to do so.
“And she took to maths like she was born to it,” Kitty says from the doorway. “Oh thank god, coffee.”
“So why shouldn’t Lydia hijack your wedding in order to have her baby?” Mary finishes around her last bite of cake. “It’s perfectly in character. Is there more of this?”
Richard pushes the decimated cake platter in her direction. From the way he’s looking at her, Mary’s surprised that the rest of her family hasn’t started whispering. They’re probably all too tired, and Mary decides not to feed the gossipy beast; she keeps her eyes securely locked on the cake and cuts herself another generous slice.
“I’m back to the hospital to relieve Mum at noon,” Lizzie says. “Is anyone coming with me?”
“I’ll come,” says Kitty. “Oh my lord, Jane, this cake is just as perfect as you are.” Jane blushes and sips her tea, her left hand looped securely around Charlie’s. If the cake doesn’t give Mary diabetes, they might.
“We’ll take a shift tonight,” says Charlie, but he’s immediately overruled by everyone in the room insisting that he and Jane take their wedding trip as planned.
“I can drop you off if Lizzie lends me her car,” Mary says. “I have to take Crawford to Paddington anyway.”
“Make sure to put in more petrol,” says Lizzie, fishing into her pocket and tossing her car keys to Mary. “It’s running on fumes after that dash to the hospital we did yesterday.”
Although Mary has never been the most coordinated of her sisters-Kitty’s the football star-her hand-eye coordination has been strengthened by multiple dissection practicums, so she snatches Lizzie’s keys out of the air and stuffs them in the pocket of her jeans, where they promptly fall through a hole and onto the floor.
“Jesus,” mutters Mary under her breath. “All right, so, I should probably change my pants.”
“We need to finish packing. I hadn’t thought-” begins Jane, and Charlie tugs her by the hand towards the stairs as she outlines all the things she’d hadn’t somehow managed to foresee by virtue of being beauty incarnate.
As the kitchen settles down into whatever facsimile of calm the Bennet family has gotten used to snatching out from under the hand of fate, Kitty takes a gigantic mug of coffee and her plate of cake into the front parlor so she can watch the telly. Lizzie and Will can’t go up to Lizzie and Jane’s room with it so obviously being occupied by the newlyweds, so they take seats around the kitchen table and divide up the Sunday Herald. “Make sure to save the Sudoku for Lydia,” Mary reminds them from her hunched position over the counter.
“I’m not sure I’m emotionally prepared to read the paper,” says Lizzie. “Do we really need to know what stupid thing Clegg has said in the hearing of reporters in the past twenty-four hours?”
Will has disappeared behind the business section, presumably to ensure that the financial world is still firmly under his thumb and unlikely to wrest itself free any time soon. “Where’s Da?” Mary asks. Every cell in her body seems to have realigned itself to maintain constant awareness of Richard is at any point in time. She’s afraid that when they’re alone she’s going to plaster herself across the front of his body and just never let go, like some sort of limpet.
“He’s checking on Gran and Gramp. They’re very enthused about their first great-grandchild, even though Gran keeps remarking that she’d prefer such a gift come under the blessing of wedlock,” says Lizzie. “Thanks to your inability to shut your giant gob, she’s been dropping hints the size of a small country about Will and I moving up the wedding date.”
Mary rolls her eyes. “Lizzie, you’re glowing and Will is, if possible, more protective than he was when Wickham attempted to seduce you. Anyone with half a lick of sense can tell that you’re breeding.”
The newspaper rustles as Will forcefully shakes it out. “Thank you, as always, for an enlightening analysis of the situation, Mary.” He sounds adorably grumpy. Once he probably would’ve seemed stiff and proud, which was how he’d presented himself, but in addition to a different haircut and a move to Glasgow, Lizzie had also talked him into a better personality.
Mary finishes her religious experience with her coffee and eyes the clock over the stove. “I’m going to take a shower before everyone else in this house has the same idea, then I’ll take a quick nap. Will you make sure to wake me up before you go to the hospital, Lizzie?”
“Go,” says Lizzie. “You’ve got the most legitimate claim on the shower, but that doesn’t mean Kitty won’t shank you for it.”
Halfway up the stairs, Mary realizes that she should probably talk to Richard about their ill-timed but nevertheless lovely liaison in the upstairs corridor. Apparently thinking the same thing, Richard is at the base of the stairs when she turns around. “We should-” he begins.
“-talk, yeah,” Mary finishes for him. “Um, can it be at a time when I’m not literally itching for a wash?”
“Let me buy you dinner,” he says. It’s not a question, which is rousingly autocratic. Mary hadn’t realized she found that sort of thing attractive.
“Wednesday,” she answers. “After Lydia’s out of the hospital and my grandparents are gone.”
“Wednesday,” he echoes. “Great. Yes. Three days.” He makes to return to the kitchen and then, rapidly, takes the seven steps between them in two big steps and kisses her. “I’m finding it rather difficult to stop doing that.”
“I can’t think of a single reason that you should,” Mary tells him. He tastes like chocolate and coffee, as does she, but it’s a different sensation when she curls her tongue against his like a handshake. Mary’s wrapped her arms around him and is humming in the back of her throat before she has a chance to think about it. “Fuck,” she says stupidly, pushing him away as much as she pulls herself free. “Wednesday. Right.”
Any chance of her coming across as smooth and not a moron having now been decimated, Mary peels her limbs free and flees ignobly up the stairs to the bathroom.
~
Crawford and Mary are incapable of sharing a space for any period of time without descending into sniping at one another, so Mary does the responsible, adult thing and lets Jane and Charlie coo in a lovesick fashion at one another for the drive into central London. In order for such a state to be maintained, however, Crawford would have to be agreeable.
“I think I have diabetes,” Crawford whispers.
“Shut up,” Mary hisses back. “Don’t be rude.”
“They aren’t listening, they’re too busy staring into each other’s eyes.” Mary focuses all of her attention on the road and refuses to be tempted into peeking at Jane and Charlie in the backseat.
“They just got married. I'm sure if you ever undergo brainwashing and fall in love, you’ll do something similar the morning after your wedding.”
“If I ever get married-thanks for the hint that I’m incapable of love, you’re always such a darling, Bennet-I’m not getting out of bed for three days afterwards.” Crawford leans back in his seat and crosses his feet at the ankles. “I heard it’s better when you’re married. You get to do the weird stuff.”
“Oh, Mary loves that show,” says Jane suddenly. Mary jumps and almost steers the car into oncoming traffic.
“Does she?” Crawford drawls. He and Mary rarely discuss popular culture unless she is defaming his interest in a particularly egregious aspect of it. “I thought hell would freeze over the day we liked the same thing, Bennet.”
“You have the collected works of Robert Heinlein, how was I supposed to infer from that that you’d like Joss Whedon? For one thing, he understands the power of the female.”
“So does Heinlein,” interrupts Crawford with an exaggerated leer.
“Ugh, go stick your face in a blender,” says Mary.
“Edmund Bertram did that for me already,” replies Crawford cheerfully. “I’m afraid my magnificent profile will never be quite the same.”
Mary’s grip on the steering wheel eases back from murderous territory. “We weep for your loss.”
After years of being a Bennet, Jane has a sixth sense for an impending argument and the best way to diffuse it. “I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk very much over the course of your visit. You and Mary seem to be very close.”
In a flash across Crawford’s face, Mary can see the four (lewd) responses he considers and then rejects. “We study together often,” she says. “We share a few courses.”
Crawford is clearly laughing at her; his eyes crinkle and rise in the corners. “Bennet means that she’s using me to get to the top of the class, and once she’s there she’ll slit my throat in my sleep.”
“Nonsense,” says Mary briskly. “If that was my aim, I’d be spending all of my time with George Nyugen.”
“But why would you want to?” Crawford asks. “He has a face like a donkey.”
“George Nyugen,” Mary tells Jane, “could probably make a living posing next to Kate Moss if he wasn’t so set on becoming a neurosurgeon. Crawford, stop being jealous, it’s unattractive.”
“I don’t understand why you’re all so enamored with him,” Crawford mutters. “He’s insufferable.”
“He’s desperately crazed about Emma Wu,” Mary translates for Charlie and Jane’s benefit. “Girton’s tangled love affairs are about three tragic speeches from becoming a Shakespearean comedy. We’ve already got the fisticuffs in Act Two thanks to Crawford.”
“Please, refer your gratitude to Bertram.”
“And last term,” she continues, “we had that hilarious case of mistaken identity with Jenny Fairfax and Frank Churchill, may his name live on in infamy.”
“Churchill’s an arse,” comments Crawford. “I would know. He’s an incurable reprobate.”
“I didn’t know you knew was ‘reprobate’ meant,” Mary says.
“I make it a point to look up all the loving terms you fling my way, Bennet,” Crawford says. “I think you just missed your turn.”
He’s right. This entire enterprise is reminding Mary why she hates driving in London, beyond global warming and the congestion tax exacerbating the already sorry state of her personal finances. “Blast it,” she says, and signals to take the next turn. “I hate driving in London.”
“Thank you so much for doing this.” Jane reaches forward to place a soothing hand on Mary’s shoulder. “It’s always such trouble, taking the Underground with luggage everywhere.”
Mary has never tested this hypothesis, but she feels confident stating that it is a physical impossibility for a person to remain angry when Jane applies her ‘soothing’ voice. “Oh, it’s all right, Jane. I’m just crotchety.”
“Did you just apologize, Bennet?” Crawford gasps theatrically. “I think Bertram might’ve given me brain damage; I must be hallucinating.”
“Oh, I’ll give you brain damage,” snaps Mary, and she takes advantage of a red light to reach across the gearshift and twist Crawford’s ear.
“Jesus, Bennet, are you trying to give me a matching set of fractures? I’ve been slapped with less force than that.”
“By an irritated paramour,” Mary points out.
“And such a title clearly doesn’t apply to you,” Crawford says. “Violence is not an attractive trait in a lady.”
Jane exhales loudly; she knows before Mary opens her mouth what’s coming. “Fuck your stereotypes.”
Crawford snorts. “Learn another song, Bennet. At this point it’s becoming monotonous.” He presses his palm against his injured ear and winces. All of the (annoying) flirtation has been leached out of his voice and replaced by snippiness.
Mary refuses to feel bad. Why should she? Crawford’s an arse and twice the reprobate that Frank Churchill is. The tickling in the bottom of her spine is clearly just her own nurturing nature, which hates exerting violence to anyone, even cads.
“What are you doing while you’re home?” Charlie asks, kindly and slightly desperate. Maybe he and Jane have decided that leaving Mary and Crawford to their own devices will end in bloodshed. “Caro’s got a party on Wednesday-you could bring Kitty? I’m sure she’d love to have you.”
Caro would enjoy hosting the Bennet sisters at one of her posh Belgravia house parties on cold day in hell, but Charlie’s naïveté is probably one of the reasons why Jane loves him; it is a trait Jane herself had in spades. “I’m having dinner with Richard on Wednesday,” says Mary. This time, she manages the turn and promptly gives Crawford a triumphant smirk.
Unsurprisingly, Crawford appears unimpressed. He frowns and opens his mouth, but before he can speak Jane says, “Oh, Mary,” breathily. “That’s wonderful!”
Reminding herself that she is twenty-one, not fourteen, and she’s successfully conducted relationships in the past without bringing embarrassment to either party, Mary suppresses her native desire to squeal. “Yes,” she says as stately as possible. “It is.” She then ruins her stateliness by giggling.
“Where’s he taking you? Somewhere nice?” demands Charlie. He’s clearly begun to take his brotherly duties very seriously.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” replies Mary cheerfully. Thank God for the signs that direct traffic to Paddington; she’d have gotten them lost by now. Luckily enough, she can see the station taking shape across the bridge. “I don’t really care.”
Had Lizzie been in the car, she would have undoubtedly pointed out that Mary always cared about first dates-she’d rejected four potential suitors on account of where they’d suggested taking their first date. Mary dislikes zoos, Tories, and lectures at the LSE, and she sees no reason to be ashamed of that.
Lizzie is not in the car, so Crawford says in a snooty voice the likes of which Mary hasn’t heard in two years, “You’re one of the most judgmental people I’ve ever met, Bennet. Of course you care.”
Stung-judgmental has always been one of Lizzie’s faults, never one of Mary’s-she slams on the brakes outside of Paddington and says tightly, “We’re here.”
Jane and Charlie unload their bags, give Mary a quick hug and kiss each, and dash off to catch the express to Heathrow. Crawford loiters, hands in his pocket, as Mary throws his bag at him. He catches it in his arms and stands there, staring at her, with a peculiar expression on his face.
“What?” she demands, crossing her arms over her chest.
Since he’s being rude, she considers it perfectly acceptable that she returns the favor. The longer she stares at his face, the stranger his features become. Even discolored courtesy of Fanny Price’s honor, his bones are sharp and fine, framed by a tousled cap of blond curls. He’s hardly conventionally attractive, but he’s not a troll, either.
“You look very normal,” he finally tells her. “With the brown.”
It isn’t until he says this that Mary realizes he has never seen her natural hair color. “I’m blonde,” she reminds him with a delicately raised eyebrow. He should know that; he’s in possession of intimate evidence as to the truth of that.
Crawford’s eyes darken from grey to blue. In two seconds he’s dropped his bag and has her pinned to the passenger side of the car, his hands on her shoulders. “Jesus, Bennet,” he rasps. “Why the fuck are you going out with that prick?”
Before Mary can form a response to that non sequitor, Crawford has apparently deemed any reply unnecessary and he slants his mouth over hers, the wide palms of his hands trailing up her neck to the back of her head. He takes a large handful of her dully colored hair and tugs, guiding her in the direction he wants.
To what will be her future embarrassment, Mary responds to his kiss without much input from her higher brain functioning. She rises up to her toes and grips the collar of his shirt and gives as good as she takes, which is fairly good. Crawford groans into her mouth and rips his head back, his eyes glazed.
“What are you on about?” Mary demands. It takes her a few seconds; she can’t seem to speak properly.
“You’re a moron,” Crawford snaps. He runs his thumb along her lower lip and watches it carefully, as though it will give him the answer he wants. “If you really wanted your supervisor hero, you’d have slapped me.”
Mary rears back, but as she’s currently up against a car, there isn’t really anywhere for her to go. “This, from the king of undefined relationship statuses?”
“You don’t want him,” he continues, as though she hasn’t spoken. His thumb rubs against the corner of her mouth as if something is caught there. “He’s old and he doesn’t have the faintest idea what you’re like.”
With no other recourse, Mary stomps on Crawford’s foot. His reflexes are too good for that; his foot slips out of the way in half of a millisecond and then he uses his stupid rowing Neanderthal strength to lift her bodily off of her feet. This is rapidly becoming a trend of which Mary is not fond. “Put me down,” she hisses.
“Give me a chance,” says Crawford. The queer expression comes back into his face, now that lust is fading. “I mean it, Bennet.”
This is unconscionable. It’s also inconceivable. Crawford? In a relationship? “You never mean anything,” Mary says. “I’ll eat my socks the day you commit yourself to monogamy.”
As far as Mary is aware, Crawford doesn’t know how to take anything seriously. In the years that she has known him, through classes and ill-advised recreational shagging, Crawford has floated through his life with only a minimal, bemused interest in his affairs. She’d only ever seen him get really passionate about Fanny Price, and that had ended poorly enough that his hospital bill would’ve made Mary’s mother swoon.
Even if he was serious-which he’s not-Mary is too smart to throw herself into Crawford’s arms and expect anything other than heartbreak and other maudlin, weepy emotions.
“You don’t trust me,” he observes.
Mary sighs and gives up on touching the ground any time soon. “Of course I don’t trust you. I barely know you. I don’t think anyone really knows you, Crawford. Isn’t that the point?”
Finally (finally) Crawford stops staring at her mouth and lifts his eyes to hers. The honking and crying and general bustle outside of Paddington sort of fades into the background, a kind of generalized humming that echoes what is buzzing under Mary’s skin. “Most likely,” he finally says fuzzily.
Taking advantage of his confusion, Mary tries to slip out of his arms. They tighten around her immediately, a band of muscle that speaks to his privileged youth spent rowing up and down rivers on people’s private estates. He licks his lips and speaks slowly, maybe even nervously, although that’s unheard of in Mary’s dealings with Henry Crawford. “I have no idea why, but I really like you, Bennet.”
“That’s encouraging,” says Mary snippily.
“Shut up.” Crawford has given up on eye contact and is now speaking exclusively to her right eyebrow. “Richard Fitzhubert isn’t who you want, and you’d either kill him or dominate him within a week of dating. When you find out that I’m right, and he’s not who you made him up to be, you need to give me a chance.”
Mary has a hard time imagining that Richard won’t be a lovely human being. If anything, it will be Mary who falls far short of his expectations, whatever they might be. “Crawford,” she begins, suddenly aware that he has emotions (like a real boy!) and for some ridiculous, unknown reason, they appear to be tied to her. “I think you need to take some time and figure out why this business with Fanny Price has messed with your head-”
“Forget about Fanny goddamn Price,” Crawford shouts. In a sudden rush, all of the noise falls into their pocket of space. The horns sound louder, the shrieks of small children more piercing, and a few surrounding whispers particularly pointed. “This is not about Fanny. It was always about you, Bennet. Even Fanny was about you.” He releases her and she drops to the ground, stumbling as she suddenly regains her footing. Her knees feel a little numb.
“I,” says Mary. It is the first time she can ever remember being struck speechless. It is a distinctly unpleasant sensation.
“Because I am a mature adult,” says Crawford, being to pick up his abandoned bag, “I’m going to give you until the start of Lent term to figure out that you’re only in love with the idea of you and Fitzhubert saving Malawi orphans.” He sounds snotty but detached. She sincerely believes in this moment that he is the grandson of a marquis; only a dozen generations of breeding could have created that pristine enunciation. “Then I’m going to convince you to date me if it kills us.” He slings his bag over his shoulder and gives her a frosty smile. “I expect it might.”
Mary doesn’t know how long she stands like a moron in front of Lizzie’s car, cradling the keys in her left hand, staring after him as he’s swallowed by Paddington’s mass of holiday traffic.
“OI. GET OUT OF THE WAY YOU DAFT BINT,” someone bellows at Mary.
“Fuck off,” she says. It lacks heat and volume, so she gathers the shreds of her dignity and confusion and piles her limbs back into the car. It takes her four tries to start the car; her hands are shaking.
On the way back, she misses her turn onto the A41 and drives in a weird daze until she finds herself in Hackney Marsh, waiting for a light to change. “What the fuck,” she says to herself, hoping that her voice will help ground the situation. She looks at herself in the rearview mirror and sees that she is flushed, slightly glassy-eyed, her brown, wedding-approved hair mussed into a fuzzy halo around her head. She looks only two steps above thoroughly ravished, like a cross-dressing Shakespearean heroine.
“Oh my god,” she whispers. “He was serious.”
~
[part iv]