Katie Goto-Švić
Short Fiction
“A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”
Mary Bennet, Pride and Prejudice (Chapter 5)
Mary Bennet’s diary: Friday, September 25th, 1812.
The Lucases came to Longbourn today.
Conversation was largely fixed on Mr. Bingley’s attachment to my dear sister, Jane; the splendid social climb it would be for her and the somewhat scandal for him in marrying below his rank.
Still, I cannot help but think the apparent love match in spite of opposition from the old guard would make a cosy little romance in the end; something that might be played out on stage–by one of those all-female casts of course－so the characters may flirt before an open audience without fear of indecency. I feel Charlotte Lucas would polish up as an excellent Mr. Bingley, though she is far more sensible than he could hope to be.
What greater evidence to that than the fact she has made it to seven and twenty without laying herself upon the meat-market of Meryton whenever the militia comes to stay? She’d never settle for one of those officers, even without her borderline heretical disdain for the institution of matrimony in of itself.
That’s why my sister Elizabeth likes her, and Elizabeth ought to know, as Charlotte’s long-time friend. But while she may know and certainly admire Charlotte, she could never be Charlotte. As dear as my sister is to me, she is but a failed version of the woman who I would venture to say is not only more sensible than Bingley but considerably more handsome as well…
Imagine Charlotte, handsome in Bingley’s frock coat, accentuating the lines of her body, in a different way to her dresses. I’d pick green for her, because she always looks best in green; deep and vivid pulled tight up against the alabaster of her skin. Fresh, clean, beautiful, like the snow-capped trees of the forest in winter.
If my dance partner could be Charlotte, dressed in either, anything, or nothing at all–a live, flesh and blood portrait of…I wanted to say Venus or Aphrodite, but Ishtar seems best–then maybe I’d see the appeal of balls. Part of me, despite what others think, does wish I could take a more organic, or at least convincing, enjoyment in society.
But no amount of gilded glamour can conceal that I’m really there to dance for my supper–a middle daughter of an estate entailed away to a distant male cousin.
Nature did not intend for me to be a scholar, yet here a sit, day in day out, in my study. Nature did not intend for me to
No, why scratch it out? These pages will burn on my death.
Now I need them to live.
Nature did not intend me to love Charlotte Lucas the way Jane loves Mr. Bingley.
And yet to me Charlotte recalls all the beauty of nature, even the parts of nature ladies shouldn’t know about; her rose-red lips semi-parted in the chill of Sunday morning service, plumes of white breath tempting my gaze to follow it through empty space until it sinks gently down, little by little, disappearing into the heat of her exposed bosom that rises and falls with each inhale and exhale of breath as she sings the hymns.
And I am left to wonder, is this diary a genuine and prideful reflection of all I see and feel myself to be, so inextricably entrenched in my nature that I would literally risk everything in writing it down? Or is it vain; that I would expose it all on paper? For there is always the chance of dying suddenly, unplanned, before I can manage to incinerate it all. And the person to find it then would be forced to carry the whole of its contents with them for the rest of their days, without their consent.
Is it vain that part of me actually wants to see the look on someone’s face, right before I take my final breath?
“I admire the activity of your benevolence, but every impulse of feeling should be guided with reason; and, in my opinion, exertion should always be in proportion to what is required.”
Mary Bennet, Pride and Prejudice (Chapter 7)
Mary Bennet’s diary: Wednesday, October 14th, 1812.
Elizabeth got snubbed by Mr. Darcy at the ball last night. She didn’t care; if anything she found it amusing.
Then, Mama embarrassed her at the dinner table by loudly whispering to anyone who would listen about Jane and Mr. Bingley. She always flashes her hand around too lightly and frivolously, proceeding inevitably to drop all the cards down, flat on the table with a heavy, clumsy thud.
Lizzy did not find that amusing.
But I think, who’s to blame Mama for any of it? Five daughters, an estate entailed away, and a husband self-titled as so far above societal politics that he has no choice but to hole himself up in his library, emerging only to sneer at her for being forced to debase herself in attempting his job for him.
Her exertion is, while unseemly, still–tragically–in proportion to what is required.
Lizzy loves Papa, but I see him.
Poor Mama wore a heavy maroon colour to the ball, with the heady effect of too much wine, throbbing like a very sore, conspicuous bruise.
Charlotte wore blue－pale blue like a mid-morning sky in Spring, reflected on the lake. When she stood beneath the illuminated chandelier, her figure became less solid and more like an apparition. She dissolved exquisitely into the light－Spring-lake blue dissolving into a warm golden glow, like lozenges fizzing in a glass.
I suppose Charlotte and I owe particular thanks to the inadvertent joint efforts of Mama, Jane and Bingley. For if they all hadn’t created such a scene, it would have been quite impossible for me to follow Charlotte through the fizz, through the ripples of water suspended in air, and out, past the edge of the world, where we had nothing but our own exchange of body heat to keep at bay the pitch-black chill of the rose-garden.
It must have been midnight, or thereabouts. But the moon was obscured by clouds as if daring, inviting, threatening that if we didn’t do it now we’d regret it.
I wish I could linger more on that last sentence, trace it over and over until the ink soaked straight through the page and stained the desk beneath; a permanent, indelible mark. But Charlotte is arriving soon to practise piano together. Being part of the prescribed set of respectable ‘accomplishments’ for young ladies, it is something it would do me well to become better at–and Charlotte is extremely good, extremely accomplished.
The way she guides my fingers when we practise together, hers ghosting gently over the top of mine…her soft, warm midsection draped in layers of apricot and cream silks melting slowly against my back…her breath teasing at the nape of my neck…
Somehow the idea of accomplishments doesn’t seem so unappealing anymore.
Usually I hate to admit being wrong, but that feeling of accomplishment each time we conclude a session is exquisite to the point of it being quite unspeakable.
“Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached.”
What they say behind Mary’s back, Pride and Prejudice (Chapter 27)
Mary Bennet’s diary: Monday, December 28th, 1812.
Charlotte has married Collins.
The obsequious, self-entitled clergyman, my distant cousin who by entail owns the right to throw my mother, sisters and I out of our own house as soon as Papa dies.
The man who had the obnoxiousness to turn up on our doorstep, have all us daughters lined up before him like cuts of meat displayed in a butcher’s window, and decide which one of us he wished to marry.
This was as a charity, of course, as a sign of his morals so excellent, so selfless, that he would allow a family of women to not become destitute in mere exchange for consuming one of us whole. Not that I was ever seriously considered, of course. My piano playing is dreadful, my drawing skills not much better. Long ago they stopped forcing me to sing, though every now and then I volunteer myself at parties before they can intercept me, just to see the pain on their faces.
Excruciating, stomach twisting, want to take a dessert fork to one’s eyeballs and eardrums and gouge sort of pain.
Collins wanted Lizzy. Mama brokered the deal. I don’t fault Mama for it–what else was she to do?
This is not an age for women.
Lizzy turned him down, because Lizzy is a strawberries and snowcream sort of romantic, still young enough to not see through the thistles and branches tossed over gaping pits in the road before her. She still has a few years left where she can whisper peace, peace in unison with the congregation and mean it. Peace, peace, even though there is no peace; whispered over the smothered face of sadness, fear, and intolerable pain.
I shouldn’t have resented Lizzy this, some final few years of not knowing how to fear the alternative. I shouldn’t have thought anything of it, had Collins not then moved on to consume Charlotte instead.
This is not an age for women.
Charlotte insisted she did it for me.
Took the fall with a man she despised for me.
I am a woman with a laughably small dowry, one-thousand pounds invested at four per-cent per anum. One-thousand-pounds at four percent…forty pounds a year to live off once Papa dies, same as a coal labourer. This is my only option outside of marriage, which I seem to be, at the very least socially, incapable of pursuing to any degree of success.
Charlotte claims she’s given me a third option–for when she is a widow one day, set free from his coverture, she shall remove his boots and waistcoat just as the coffin lid closes and assume the form of a full person again. Then she will return to me, and scoop me and my paltry portion up, just as he did to her, and we shall be happy companions in the parsonage so long as we are allowed to stay.
She will retrieve Longbourn for me by having a son–and through her when Collins is finally gone, there will always be a place for me there. She promises.
Last month I went with Lizzy to visit Charlotte at the parsonage, her new marital home. I had to stop myself from laughing when I saw how she had arranged the rooms–she gave Collins as his study the sunnier front room that ought to have been a parlor. A sure way to keep him there, and a tax well worth paying for an undisturbed parlor in the back, all to herself, even if it was a bit narrow and gloomy.
Charlotte and I found ourselves alone there with relative ease, Lizzy having gone on one of her extended walks. So there we were, standing before each other, ensconsed in pretty pinks and deep reds, the rug beneath our feet thick-woven with plumes of roses extending inward from each of its corners, and a flowing pattern of ribbons and bows lining the edges. The curtains, semi-closed against the encroaching chill of late Autumn, were a similar rich crimson as the roses, embroidered in silk thread with patterns of tiny leaves attached to thin, knotting vines.
A small fire crackled in hearth. It cast a golden sheen in a strip down the centre of the room, contrasting against the grainy white pallor of the sun filtering through the gap in the heavy curtains.
Charlotte’s dress was pink.
I’d never seen her in pink before. It suited her in an intriguing, experimental sort of way, as if she were trying to become part of the room, blended into the colour palette of a painted scene where the bounds of the world, the entire universe, were constricted to the borders of the artist’s canvas, inviolable.
I liked the pink dress, for sure–pale rose chintz accented with raspberry coloured ribbons at the waistline and tied in bows to trim the sleeves. But it could never suit her as well as the deep forest green from when I first fell in love with her. She took my hand and led me to the plush sofa, pressing me gently down to sit before kneeling at my feet. I questioned why we didn’t at least go to a bedroom, but she only smiled, a deliciously inviting smile before disappearing beneath my hem.
The pleasure made me want to scream. I had to bite down hard on back of my hand just to avoid it. But, by God, all I wanted to do was scream.
My mood floated on a high for the rest of the morning. The air outside was crisp and cool and sweet, with the pleasant smoky undertones of logs burning for fire. The sun was pale, but in such paleness clean and clear, unobtrusive toward the softness of the sky, a gentle light blue. For one such as me, who usually would procrastinate at length against so much as coming downstairs into the parlor at Longbourn, it was remarkable to feel myself re-birthed into a world that was beautiful as I walked hand-in-hand with Charlotte.
We walked past the window of another house, just as the cook flung it wide open to place a freshly baked seed cake, citrusy with orange rind, on the sill to cool.
In the surrounding gardens and sprawling fields behind them, the Autumn harvest was at its peak; apples being picked by the barrelful, some glossy red as if candied while still on the tree, others with earthier hues of brown and gold.
Pumpkins in varying shades of orange sat heavily on wooden carts, plump and curvaceous, like shrines to fertility before the plunge into winter.
And it was just Charlotte and I, against the backdrop of a world, of people, who all of a sudden seemed inviting, friendly even. Never had it all felt so beautiful as it did that morning, and I felt glad not just to see it, but to be alive as part of it.
When we returned to the parsonage it was almost time for lunch. Lizzy was waiting for us and she commended Charlotte for managing to coax me outdoors as the three of us removed our bonnets and pelisses.
Then we were at the lunch table. I had already started with a few bites of bread roll, conspicuously stale around the edges and without any butter, when the maid-of-all-work re-emerged from the kitchen with our first course, a vegetable broth.
Carrots and turnips, undernourished, undergrown, floated lonely in a lukewarm soup. Unappetising as it was, each time Mr. Collins repeated the name Mrs. Collins, peppered it ad nauseum throughout the largely one-sided conversation, I brought the spoon to my mouth to avoid the necessity of fabricating a smile because I knew I could not. Mrs. Collins, Mrs. Collins– he sat at her side while I was separated from her by the entire breadth of the table. My dear Mrs. Collins– and I, I could say nothing, do nothing other than keep myself otherwise occupied with the feeble, flavourless soup, mushy vegetables slowly dissolving into it.
Main course: mutton and roast potatoes, undercooked and anaemic respectively. My jaw ached chewing through the mutton. I knew a dessert, at least, would have to follow this already protracted misery.
Why do they make us do this?
Charlotte, Collins, Elizabeth, and I.
Mama and Papa.
Millions and millions long before any of us.
Collins took another stab at rubbing salt in a wound he wished Lizzy had, rambling on about how blissful he found married life with his dearest Charlotte, lovely and dutiful Charlotte. Then the inevitable dessert arrived: a seed cake sparse on the seeds and the sugar, dense and mealy with only weak tea to wash it down. I almost suspected it may have been the reheated dregs from breakfast, diluted so the pot would be full again.
Why do they make us do all this, any of this?
The images of all those people outside, who had seemed friendly during our walk, began to congeal on the canvas in my mind. The paint became grotty, complexions turning grey. Their kind-looking faces were twisted into ugliness now, as they would surely have been in reality had they known what both Charlotte and I really were as we passed them.
The snow cream accompanying each slice of seed cake had been insufficiently whipped, so by the time the plates reached us it had sunk and was semi-melted.
I looked up at Charlotte and noticed her apparent serenity. A slate scrubbed completely blank, near unrecognisable from what I knew of her in our own parallel world. She took a spoonful of the dry cake, soggy at the base from the failed snow cream, and swallowed it down with a sip of the thin, diluted tea.
For pity’s sake, why did we keep sitting there?
Collins began a new tangent about his garden and its proximity to Rosings, residence to his eminent patroness, Lady Catherine. Separated only by a small laneway.
A laneway. The breadth of a dining table.
The proximity seemingly so close and yet insurmountable.
No matter the romance, the intellect, the passion of a bond between women, the entire story-line must invariably be hijacked and gutted out by a man. He absorbs one of them so they no longer exist, the other left behind. The nerve, after barely a month’s acquaintance…
Charlotte can promise as much as she likes, but anyone can see this decision was made out of pragmatic self-preservation, at best combined with a dash of wishful thinking.
So now here I sit, holed up in my little study, trapped because the gash on my wrist ended up deeper than I’d meant it to be. Too much to simply tie a rag around and hide under the generous, billowy sleeve of a house coat, as had been my initial design.
Just now I let it gush and smear all over a stack of new blotting paper. Deep, deep crimson bordering plum, it may as well be straight from the box of beautiful watercolours I bought during my last outing in Meryton with Charlotte, before she came under new management.
Once I was certain every sheet of that paper was an irreparable, soaking, squelching mess, I turned to the piano and used the same peeling knife I used on my wrist to sever the strings inside the piano. I severed them all, though admittedly it was a struggle with such a miserable little knife.
I hope he dies, I hope he dies, I pray to a vengeful God that he dies.
My wrist is bleeding straight through the rag. Unstemmable just like every woman’s monthly curse of Eve.
Eve, curse him and curse the goddamn peace that doesn’t exist, has never existed.
I should stop writing now before I get too dizzy.
“Unhappy as the event must be for Lydia, we may draw from it this useful lesson: that loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable; that one false step involves her in endless ruin; that her reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful; and that she cannot be too much guarded in her behavior towards the undeserving of the other sex.”
Mary Bennet, Pride and Prejudice (Chapter 47)
Mary Bennet’s diary: Thursday, August 5th, 1813.
Wickham has eloped with Lydia and the entire family is in a crisis. The man who enchanted Lizzy for a short while but then went cold has inexplicably returned to destroy the life of my youngest sister, and all us by association.
I let slip to Mama the idea that Papa oughtn’t follow our uncle to London in an attempt to track them down, lest he be obliged to duel. He’d stand no chance against a military man like Wickham, significantly his junior, and my mother, sisters and I would lose everything the split second shots were fired. It wasn’t my intention to be cruel to Mama, only I’d hoped she might stop him from going, a ridiculous misstep on my part because anyone who knows anything about Papa knows there is nothing he could be more apathetic, nay, contemptuous toward, than any opinion of his wife.
I confess I’ve been deeply distracted.
Almost a full year has passed since I sliced that gash in my wrist and it has completely scarred over, but Charlotte continues to fret over it. She simply won’t leave me alone.
Long sleeves, gloves, and at worst bracelets can cover the visible wound well enough, and as I’m already known as a quasi-hermit, no one questions my avoidance of spending much time up close. Charlotte, of course, was always going to be a different matter. The way she cried stung at first, but then it felt good–the splash of her tears, the press of her lips, the wet warmth of her mouth as she gently licked and sucked at the metallic tang of blood that still hadn’t quite stopped leaking out from under the scab. I wonder what it must have tasted like, mixed with the salt of those freshly shed tears.
She simply won’t leave me alone and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
That being said, I did become nervous somewhat, that someone might eventually start asking questions, that somebody might grasp some concept in their mind, a thread on which they would pull, and keep pulling, until…
I know it was wicked of me to use Lydia’s being taken advantage of to run a test, to quote from my most severe of conduct books and watch for any reaction, any flinch, any sign anyone at that table might suspect me a hypocrite.
But there was nothing.
Nothing but blank, grave faces.
Faces that took my sanctimonious words at their most superficial merit, because to all of them, it would seem that is still who I am. Safe in their generalised apathy, at most mild pity and contempt, as it always has been.
And so Charlotte and I continue as we are.
I love her so much.
Mary Bennet’s diary: Sunday, November 1st, 1818.
Collins is dead.
It was consumption they said. He must have breathed in a miasma, despite the air of the Meryton countryside being so clean. And yet something must have been around him, to breathe in then cough back out as red stains onto innumerable handkerchiefs, accumulating until he could no longer get out of bed.
The day I received the letter from Charlotte informing that the doctor had admitted there was nothing more he could do, the scar on my wrist itched. Then, when I went upstairs to change, I found I’d bled straight through my inner petticoats. I never expected it at that time of month and never so strong.
The Curse of Eve.
My stomach dropped and I felt a chill trickle through my knees and down to my ankles, but the hot gushing from my womb didn’t cease. If anything it got stronger, soaking my thighs as I scrambled for a towel, a rag, a sheet, anything to stem the flow.
My heart raced.
God forgive me.
I was almost certainly in no condition to go out, but there was no question that I must; I must go to Charlotte and face her, receive her as mine, suture myself to her, all mine forever more, lest I bleed out of this world alongside Collins instead. So, after a replenishing cup of chocolate, I made my way out with only the briefest of explanations to Mama before requesting the carriage from Papa.
When I arrived at the parsonage it was dusk, the sun sinking, orange and purple, behind thin lines of cloud. The doctor, his patroness’s finest physician, had his carriage parked out front, but I chose to send mine back to Longbourn as soon as I alighted. Charlotte took me by both hands at the door. Her son was quiet and content with Nurse upstairs, she informed me, hidden away safe and unaware. Aside from the maid flickering in and out of the background, we were alone.
She led me to the parlour, where we sat over tea and almond biscuits drizzled with honey. But we didn’t touch the biscuits. It didn’t seem right–not at that moment, with a man still choking in his death bed. And I will be able to swear on my own deathbed, when the time comes, that we did not eat the biscuits, we did not even put sugar in our tea. We simply sat together, a soon-to-be-widow and her respectable spinster companion, slowly sipping in unison from our tea cups decorated with tiny pink roses around the rims.
It was pitch black outside by the time it happened. The doctor came down to inform us but I already knew. I wonder if Charlotte did too.
She briefly went to view the body, pray at the bedside with the priest who’d given the last rites, receive and swallow the Eucharist…Then she floated out, ethereal not like a ghost but a reborn spirit, down the hallway and to the bedroom from where I’d been keeping watch for her through a crack in the door.
The first thing she said was that she loved me.
Then she lay me down on the bed, on my side so she could press up behind me with her arms around my waist.
I told her it wasn’t the right time of month.
She said she didn’t mind.
Her hand went under my skirts and came out drenched. She sucked her fingers clean, just the tips one by one at first, then opening her mouth wider to fit in two at a time, deeper. I looked up at her as she knelt above me, sucking and swallowing the blood of my monthly course just as she had done from my slashed wrist, green eyes illuminated softly in the lamplight.
She told me she loved me again and I knew she meant it.
And I love her.
I love her so much that as I write this I know that even when I one day die, I no longer wish to burn these pages, this record. Let the priest beg me to repent as he administers the last rites, or let whatever resident of Longbourn however far in the future come across its hiding place one day and make of it what they will.
My Charlotte.
Mary and Charlotte. Charlotte and Mary.
I could fill all the rest of these pages with nothing but that and never, ever tire.
Katie Goto-Švić is a Croatian-Australian writer living in Japan. She studied international relations, economics, and Japanese at the University of Sydney and works in business development in the energy and tech sectors. Currently, she is also undertaking a degree in engineering. As a writer, her short fiction and prose has been published across a range of literary journals and anthologies. Some of these include: Santa Clara Review, Barzakh, The Manifest-Station, BarBar, Grande Dame, and the New Contexts: 3 anthology from Coverstory Books. Her full-length crime fiction manuscript, ‘Neon Ghosts’, has been long-listed for The Plaza Prizes 2024 first chapters award.
Photo Credit: Avery Timmons is an Illinois-based creative holding a BA in creative writing from Columbia College Chicago. Her fiction can be found in Mulberry Literary, Fterota Logia, and other online publications.
L'Esprit Literary Review 