Friends, I recently invited you to share your questions with me and benefit from my experience of this wide world of ours. Happily, I have received missives from a good many correspondents, and can now address myself to the task of answering your queries.
Of course, do continue to send me your thoughts, there is nothing I enjoy more than meeting the good people of the parish.
A most pleasant lady from across the ocean, Carole in Canada, wondered, “how many bonnets does Mrs. Wickham own? I know this seems a frivolous type of question, but you keep bringing them up!“.
But I am taking us away from the topic in hand, and we all know that I can be a devil for such things. One might begin on considering the number of Mrs Wickham’s bonnets and end in the tale of the king of a small principality who was proven to have a fondness for citrus and women of a certain sort, or find oneself happily skipping along an avenue containing Wellington, Waterloo and a terrier named Charlotte who perched on a courtesan’s lap at Drury Lane.
Bonnets, George, bonnets!
Indeed, despite the fragrant Mrs W and her retinue of attendants spending many long hours attempting to answer, they were unable to do so. After all, cried my dearest girl, what might be said to constitute a bonnet? Should she include her feathered headpieces, her masquerade concoctions made to resemble a tulip or a daffodil, and what of those chapeaus garnered by my good self from around the world, and brought home to my dear lady?
To this, a mere simple soldier, the sheer array of what might constitute a bonnet was eyeopening in the extreme. When I attempted to focus Mrs Wickham’s thoughts on the task of counting, she became most irritable and instead we found ourselves dancing the night away. Anything to restore a smile to her pretty face.
And so, alas, we cannot answer. Many, many, many bonnets is the closest we might come to establishing the number.
Now, this may seem like the sort of question that one can easily answer by simply addressing the query to one’s wife or her ladies but in the case of Mrs Wickham, it is not so easy. Those of you who know my delightful spouse may recall that she is never seen in exactly the same bonnet twice, although one might be reused if it is suitable refreshed with new ribbons and sills and the like.