Page 23 of The Gossip War (Pride and Prejudice Shorts #1)

Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs Bennet got rid of her most deserving daughter.

Lizzy was stunning, William was handsome, Mary was pretty (much to her chagrin), Kitty and Lydia were well behaved (more or less), the Bingleys and Wickham were gone, and I suppose I looked well enough to stand up with her.

It was funny in a way. Everything in our lives turned upside down and topsy turvy with one single sentence: ‘He is engaged to me!’

Before that, our mother was flighty, our father was more a void than a presence, Mary was invisible and unheard, and my two youngest sisters were a couple of brats.

I was supposedly the beautiful and complacent one who would save us from the hedgerows, and Lizzy was the too-clever-by-half girl who would drive away all my suitors.

Everything changed in ten minutes at Netherfield.

Lizzy’s cleverness saved us (not that her beauty was a hindrance, mind you).

I was so suspicious of men I was giving due consideration to spinsterhood.

Mary performed the Herculean task of driving off Mr Collins before the second reading of the banns, which meant we were spared not only his presence for some months, but also the dubious pleasure of meeting Lady Catherine de Bourgh until well after William was married.

Kitty and Lydia were given a hard lesson in the dangers of a slippery tongue and seemed like they might eventually make something of themselves.

Hard on the heels of the Lizzy and William’s exit from Meryton came the entrance of Miss Grimley. She turned my youngest sisters into some semblance of ladies by the time they came out several years later.

Kitty, Lydia, and Georgiana all came out together, primarily because William thought it best to get the miserable chore over with in one fell swoop. Lizzy laughed and patted his head like a puppy, then generally approved of the scheme.

My father came out of his library, my mother rewarded him with affection, and to our surprise, they discovered they got along well after a quarter century.

Less happy with all his fraternal feelings, I suppose, was Mr Bingley. He made his best play to get Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy for a brother-in-law but got stuck with Mr George Wickham. I can assure you that the son of his father’s steward was far short of expectations.

I never paid much attention to the Wickhams, but they did buy an estate (far from Derbyshire), and mostly eschewed London (probably to reduce temptations).

At least half their staff reported directly to my brother, and he surprised me one day by relating that they rubbed along better than anyone expected. I supposed like with like was as good a formula as any, and they were both snakes in the grass.

I never asked about the characters of their eight children, but had to assume they were at least somewhat… ah… clever?

Certainly, Mrs Wickham never made her ambition of being the belle of the ton, but perhaps she found something better. One never knows with people like that.

Mary shocked everyone when she encountered Mr Collins again a year later when joining Lizzy and Darcy in a visit to Rosings.

She had taken up Lizzy’s habit of walking by then.

The man spoke to her at Rosings, made the clumsiest and most obvious ambushes on her walks for a fortnight, then gave her the most god-awful proposal in the history of the English language in the parlour.

Mary related it to me later, and I did my best not to laugh (really, I did).

Much to everyone’s shock, she accepted. Even more to our surprise, she was happy. Oh, it took a few years to slap some sense into him, but any woman not willing to slap some sense into her menfolk does not deserve to be happy.

In the most supreme irony of the whole encounter, her eldest son married the eldest Wickham daughter (how they met, nobody knows), and to everyone’s shock, they were embarrassingly happy.

The fact that George Wickham’s daughter would eventually be mistress of Longbourn sent my mother into fits of giggles that lasted for months at a time.

She had learned to appreciate irony by then.

What she had not learned to appreciate was her eldest, most serene, and most beautiful daughter trading her muslins for a nurse’s uniform. She was mystified when the formerly timid daughter left for the continent with her husband, who was not handsome, not rich, and very rough around the edges.

She was finally satisfied when I returned to England after Waterloo, with a general on my arm, and my one lone baby in the other.

I was happy to think my real wars were over, and I had nothing to fear but the next gossip war.

~~~ Finis ~~~