Hadn’t she just decided to keep her distance? So why was this person showing up at her door again? Was it just because there hadn’t been a chance to speak properly on the road earlier? Puzzled, Mary still went out to see who it was.
Given what had just happened, she didn’t invite the visitor in.
“Mary, I’m sorry about Lydia’s rudeness, she just couldn’t accept all at once that something had happened to her husband.” Mary Bennet, seeing her, didn’t care that she hadn’t been invited inside. “Is there really nothing that can be done? Maybe you could go talk to the army about it?”
Perhaps if Richman went, the army might reconsider.
“Go talk to the army and say what, exactly? Mary, I still don’t understand what happened.” So, an explanation first, please.
Hearing this, Mary Bennet’s freshly wiped-away tears nearly welled up again. But she wasn’t about to cry in front of this Mary!
“It was a misunderstanding.”
Of course it was a misunderstanding, Bennet quickly laid out the whole story. Only, in her telling, it was all just Lydia joking around, and she’d never expected the army to take it seriously.
“But I still don’t understand why Lydia would do such a thing. I’ve never done anything to offend her.” Would a soldier really block off a trading partner just because of something a lieutenant’s newlywed wife said? Mary didn’t believe a word of it, but that didn’t stop her from asking.
“No, no! It’s just that Lydia loves showing off too much, she wanted to test what being Mrs. Wickham could do. She didn’t mean any harm by it.” Bennet pinned the entire blame on Lydia’s vanity.
“Now that you put it that way, I suppose I understand. But the damage is already done, and my potatoes are stuck in London. Without any goods on hand, I’d feel awkward approaching the army now anyway.” Mary accepted the explanation for the moment, while politely declining the suggestion to speak with the army.
“Is there really no way at all? Mary, please help me. I don’t want this whole affair to cast a shadow over Lizzy’s upcoming wedding too.”
Mary shook her head. Even if she had a way to help, she had no intention of getting involved. In fact, letting Lydia learn this costly lesson would do her some good, so she wouldn’t cause an even bigger mess in the future.
“Then what am I supposed to do? Mary, what about your husband, Mr. Ethys? On the wedding day, his family looked so very respectable, could he go have a word with the army for us?” Ideally he’d handle it in person. “By the way, where is he?”
A man who’d left the very first day after the wedding, it was already the second day, and still no sign of him coming back?
“I’m sorry, Mary, but that’s not something my husband could help with. Besides, he had business to attend to and won’t be back for a while.” Even though this was a marriage in name only, Mary could clearly see the ulterior motive behind this Mary’s visit.
Recalling the way that woman had run off that day, what was there left to misunderstand? Perhaps using Lydia’s business as an excuse to come here was just a pretense, the real purpose was to sniff out information about her charming husband!
“Why don’t you ask him yourself, if he can’t come back, you could write him a letter! If you find that troublesome, just give me his address, and I’ll write it myself!” Get the address, and there’d be a connection. And once there was a connection, Mr. Ethys would surely come to appreciate her kindness.
“I’m afraid that wouldn’t be appropriate.” Mary pulled her hand free from the other woman’s excited grip. “Mary, if you have business with my husband, you’d do better going to see Mr. Darcy, who hasn’t left yet. I’m sure with his connections, he could easily sort out Wickham’s troubles.”
All right, time for her to leave.
If this conversation went on any further, the other woman’s carefully hidden intentions were bound to slip out entirely.
Both of them lived in Longbourn, and even if Mary wanted distance, she had no desire to make a scene and cut ties outright. After all, gentry status carried weight in a small village, even in Meryton itself, she didn’t want to be the one isolated over this.
“So in the end, you just don’t want to help! Mary Richman, I never thought you could be this selfish, Mr. Ethys could clearly help if he wanted to! Or is it that you already know a letter would be useless, because your newlywed husband doesn’t even like you! Otherwise, he wouldn’t have left you the very next day!”
Mary, who had already turned to go, turned right back around.
She studied Bennet’s state closely now. Having just said all that, her breathing had gone quick and shallow, her whole body tense. Coveting someone else’s husband, that would leave anyone feeling a little guilty. But so what if she felt guilty? She’d said and done exactly what she’d meant to, hadn’t she?
Mary hadn’t wanted to expose all this before, hoping to maintain a stable, peaceful life. But if someone was going to come straight to her door and act this rudely, she wasn’t about to hold back either.
She’d assumed the first person to make trouble would come from her husband’s side of the family. She didn’t expect Mary Bennet to jump out first.
“Bennet, you know exactly why you’re here, and I’ve figured it out too. Don’t use Lydia as your excuse, what you’re doing right now isn’t any nobler than what she did.” Watching the woman’s eyes widen, Mary didn’t hold back the warning. “Bennet may be gentry in Longbourn, but there’s no shortage of gentry families like yours across all of England.”
“Do you really think your family can weather that many more scandals? Lydia’s elopement was already covered up once, if you’re the cause of another scandal, will Mr. Darcy still be willing to marry your sister? No matter how good your older sister is, a suitor still has to weigh the trouble her younger sisters keep causing.”
“After all, he only wants to marry a wife, not the entire troublesome family that comes with her!”
Mary Bennet was terrified, not only because her thoughts had been seen through so clearly, but because Richman knew about Lydia’s elopement too, and was now using it against her!
“What nonsense! No one eloped, no one at all! Lizzy is going to be Mrs. Darcy!” And Jane too, she’d be the future Mrs. Bingley.
“Is it nonsense? Would you like everyone to judge for themselves? People’s eyes see clearly enough, how could anything that happens in Longbourn stay hidden from anyone?”
Especially during that whole busy, chaotic stretch of time, even without having read the novel, Mary knew perfectly well what kind of trouble the Bennet family had brewed back then. And more than that, she already knew how things would unfold.
Just as she finished speaking, Mary saw the female lead herself arrive, her fiancé waiting not far behind.
“Mary, sorry to intrude, I’m here to take her home.” Elizabeth quickened her pace toward the Richman house entrance, the situation between the two clearly looked off, and she worried her sister might have said something reckless. Fancying a married man might be forgivable, but showing up in front of his newly wedded wife was quite another matter.
“Elizabeth, a piece of advice, don’t let your sisters drag you down with them. Your fiancé can help once, he can help twice, but will he be willing to help forever?” Without waiting for an answer, Mary walked back inside, paying the people outside no further mind.
“Mary, what were you thinking?!” Elizabeth, furious, took hold of her sister and pulled her along.
Clearly, before she’d arrived, her sister had already done something infuriating. Otherwise, how could the usually amiable Richman possibly have spoken like that!
“Lizzy, what do we do? She knows everything!” Dragged a good distance away, Mary Bennet finally began to panic.
Richman surely wouldn’t let this go, she was done for.
“Now you’re scared, but why did you come here in the first place? You know full well what you did.” Lydia had been like this, and now Mary too, when would her sisters finally learn some sense and stop causing trouble for the family?
Elizabeth simply focused on getting her sister home, whatever came next could be left to their parents. She wanted no part of it, and told her fiancé to stay out of it as well.
As for Richman, she trusted the woman wouldn’t go spreading rumors carelessly. After all, Richman had given her a warning herself, which meant no ill will.
The well-meaning Mary now had a rough picture of what had happened. It turned out the failure of the deal with the army had been the doing of the two Bennet sisters. One had done it to help her sister and to show off, and the other had simply set her sights on Mary’s nominal husband, sabotaging her business as a result.
But doing wrong always comes with a price.
Lydia’s husband had already been due for reassignment to Newcastle, and now, on top of that, he’d fallen out of favor with his superiors, saddled with what sounded like a 400-pound fine. That the couple could argue like that out in the open showed that even Wickham couldn’t stomach his wife’s foolishness. With this hanging over them, the married life Lydia had dreamed of wasn’t going to go smoothly.
As for the other Mary, fancying someone else’s already-married husband, she must have read herself silly. If she didn’t rein in her thoughts soon, forget finding a husband, she’d drive herself mad on her own.
Meeting the man only once and already showing up at her door like that, Mary couldn’t help but think this would inevitably spread through Longbourn sooner or later. And whatever came of it once it did, it certainly wouldn’t end well for her.
As for Mary herself, though the deal with the army had fallen through, she’d more than made up for it in London.
If not for the Bennet sisters’ interference, she hadn’t even planned to expand her business to London this year! Mr. and Mrs. Richman’s departure had only put the idea in her head, but she’d figured she wouldn’t act on it until next year at the earliest.
Now, though, having gotten a taste of just how good the London market was, how could she possibly leave that much money on the table?
Before October was even over, this year’s entire harvest had already been converted into earnings, with only the year-end pig sale left to look forward to. As for the chickens, they’d keep laying. The original soap supply would continue as before, and the new experiments would keep pace alongside it.
On the second trading day of the month, Mary once again brought 960 bars of dried soap to Meryton. In exchange for twelve pounds, she also once again slipped the tax officer a small benefit.
“Our garrison’s had a change of posting, some of the officers have gone off to Newcastle, and new ones are arriving little by little.” The tax officer certainly knew about everything that had happened recently in Meryton and Longbourn. He hadn’t forgotten the man who’d shown up right after he’d taken his last bribe.
He hadn’t known who the man was back then, but did he not know now? He was none other than Miss Richman’s, now Mr. Ethys’s, new husband!
The tax officer told no one this piece of news.
He’d known all along about Miss Richman’s dealings with the army, and knew she was the one losing out. But that had been her own choice, no one had forced her into it. After that trip to London, he suspected this new Mrs. Ethys would make better decisions going forward.
As for his own part in it, all he’d done was give a quiet warning whenever the army planned to send someone to Longbourn. So he took today’s benefit without a shred of guilt.
No wonder Longbourn had been so quiet lately, Wickham had already left. Since he’d gone to Newcastle, his wife Lydia had surely gone with him. Add in Mr. Darcy heading back to Derbyshire and Mr. Bingley staying at Netherfield, and it made sense things had settled down a bit.
Everyone had greeted each other well enough at the little church a few days earlier. That Mary had simply been sick and hadn’t attended. As for the fine, it wasn’t yet clear how that would be resolved.
After bidding the tax officer farewell, Mary went to see the carpenter about the molds. This order was larger, so it likely wouldn’t be ready until the end of the month.
Fine, she’d go back and keep running small-batch tests in the meantime, while waiting for the new workroom renovation to finish.
Having bought such large equipment, she needed somewhere to put it. The small room in between wasn’t big enough anymore, so she’d walled off a section outside, splitting it into three separate small workrooms: one for rendering fat, one for saponification, and the last for shaping.
Drying would still take place on the third floor, where there was plenty of space.
If everything went smoothly, the milk soap currently in production could, by calculation, have its per-bar cost pushed down to under half a penny. Even at a wholesale price of two and a half pence, a single batch of 500 pounds, 2,000 bars, would bring in over 16 pounds before tax.
That 16-plus pounds might not look like much more than the previous 12-pound batches, but the time saved was the real gain.
Mary alone had been producing soap on a weekly basis, delivering 960 bars every ten days. Once the workroom renovation was finished, with Betsy and Molly helping, the three of them together could produce 2,000 bars in just two days. The rest of the time would simply be waiting for the shaped soap to harden.
With milk soap costs brought down, the other soaps couldn’t be left behind either.
Holding a miniature version of the new mold, Mary got into the carriage for the ride home. In the past few days, she’d already settled on a formula for mint soap and could produce a small batch to test it out. Compared to the milk soap, mint soap’s finished product would look even more refined once made with the redesigned molds.
Naturally, it would also be priced a little higher.
“Whoa—” Just as she was deep in thought, the carriage she was riding in suddenly came to a stop.