Jane smiled fitfully at Mama and Papa. “I am a charge upon your goodness again.”
“After I thought we were done with you all.” Mr. Bennet frowned rather annoyedly. “Mr. Hawdry ought have done a better job of providing for you and the children. No use speaking ill of the dead. No use. Though I dare say, in the general the dead deserve more of censure than the rest of us.”
“No use. No.” Jane’s eyes seemed about to cloud with tears again, and she clutched little Fanny tighter to her, until the little person squealed, “Mama!”
“And,” Elizabeth asked, as a woman who had been quite willing to speak ill of Mr. Hawdry while alive, and who had not lost that willingness simply due to the shuffling off of the gentleman’s mortal coil, “you then have no plans? No expectations? No fortune?”
Jane looked at Elizabeth with a blank face, somehow drained of animation, and the more perfect for it. She lacked her habitual serene smile, and now had a distant look of devastation.
“Lord! You need worry for nothing!” Mrs. Bennet exclaimed. “You are home! Safe and home. We shall take care of you, and your lovely, lovely girls.” Mama kissed the top of the head of Lavinia. “We’ll see you festooned in ribbons and pretty things, as soon as you leave mourning. And do you want a cake and some honey?”
“Yes, yes,” Mr. Bennet said, softly, “I shall be very happy to see you here again, Jane. You are welcome to stay, so long as I live.”
“Oh, Papa! You really do not mind?” Jane started to cry, and Mama embraced her and both girls at once, while Papa got up and awkwardly patted Jane on the shoulder.
Elizabeth sat, stiff, stoic and aghast.
She would be the only one who could do something in the end — they would save nothing, do nothing. Mama’s own fortune ran to two hundred pounds in a year, and Elizabeth was now — though who knew if such would end in the next quarter — earning more than three hundred per annum. Papa would die. It would fall to her to support Jane and her children, and Mama, and everyone else.
She would never be able to depend on anyone. She would never be allowed to make a mistake. Every book would need to sell, there would be no margin to make a significant mistake in business matters, or they would starve in the hedgerows — or perhaps slip into something worse than genteel poverty.
She should cease to spend what little she did spend from the profits of her writing on her own interests, subscriptions, friends, and the like.
They could depend on her — she would let them depend on her. But she could not depend on them.
Our heroine in miserable mood left the house and walked outside in the now freezing evening rain, turning endless circles near Longbourn. Round and round in the wilderness, her feet crunching on the pebbles and grasses.
The cold wind helped her think clearer.
The accounts could not sum.
No one made enough from writing to be able to support her mother and her sister, and her sister’s daughters as gentlewomen. Five women, inclusive of herself. She could support herself happily and comfortably. Several of her literary friends had offered her places to stay, and without the need to remain socially acceptable, Elizabeth was quite willing to let all appearances go.
For an author the outside environment didn’t matter so much.
She needed a room of her own, pen, paper, and coffee. The occasional chocolate and taste of rum or a hot punch would be nice, but not required.
That was it.
All she needed for a happy life. And her friends, but writers and poets, assumed their friends would be short on money, and making shift as they must. Dresses dyed into a new color, clothes stitched back together, living in some attic garret that froze in the winter and sweated in the summer — they were almost points to brag upon.
Elizabeth had set nearly a thousand aside in the consols from the profits of her books. She had too much money already to ever be properly praised for poetic poverty.
But her family, yet having hopes outside of their own imagination, they needed more.
She wished… she wished she could throw this burden on someone else.
The rain had ceased, and there was a glint of sunlight, reddish in the distance, as the sun rapidly sank beneath the horizon. Like she always did, Elizabeth had taken her notebook bound in a waterproof binding.
She sat on a white wooden bench, the paint peeling, in the corner of their garden. She had a need to write again, as a way to forget and ignore her own troubles. It had always been that way. She had only truly begun to write after Jane’s correspondence was denied to her, as a way of letting go of her angry emotions.
Even after it became too dark to see the page before her, Elizabeth sat and scribbled, writing, and writing, quickly and confidently, and for that time she did not think at all of Jane, or her fears for the future, or anything at all.
Her hands became stiff from the falling cold, and a light rain, quickly becoming stronger, started up once more. Elizabeth closed the notebook and reentered the house by the back door. She quietly went up to her warm room, set more logs in the stove, and stirred it into a pleasant blaze. Elizabeth sat before the fine china inlaid rosewood desk which Papa had bought for her.
A pretty desk, perfectly sized for her form, and she liked it very much.
Elizabeth looked again through the sheaf of notes she’d taken for the scheme of the story.
In the end, the heroine would, after she had fallen in love with a noble and good man, be prevented from marrying him. His high family expected more from him, and he must do as he was required, honor and duty required he marry another woman. It was impossible for anything else to happen.
But… at this moment… Elizabeth did not wish to write a story that ended unhappily.
She wanted them to fall into each other’s arms.
It was like her desire to cry about Jane, and about how she could not ignore the rest of the world, and abandon her family to their fates.
Elizabeth placed a thick piece of paper before her. She began to write a scene from the end of the book. Where the man arrived and told her that his family now required he marry the heiress, to save the estate, and to protect the honor of their ancient name.
Except instead of Elizabeth’s own voice sounding for the words of the man, suddenly he spoke in Mr. Darcy’s sharp tones. And suddenly he demanded the right and he claimed the need to care for her.
His speech began when he claimed there was nothing he could do. No chance to escape these bounds with honor. But he ended desperately begging her to marry him, to no longer shoulder her own burdens, to say that though they both would be hurt by others, that he chose her. He chose her beyond family, beyond name, beyond duty. Beyond every concern.
She would no longer need to bear all the weight of her own life on her own back. That was what he promised.
And then, as Elizabeth wrote almost unwillingly, the woman, this character she identified with more closely than any heroine she had written since Miss Bretton in Fashion Exposed:
She looked bleak eyed at Mr. Hamilton, and she said in mournful tones, “Sir, I thank you. I thank you, sir, exceedingly for the great honor of your request. And I am most sensible — But… oh. Oh, I wish not to cause any painful heartache in you. But it is entirely impossible for me to make an acceptance of your request to me. For in these past months, I have learned that others cannot be trusted. That no man can be relied upon, and neither a woman. I am alone, I shall remain alone, and I alone these burdens will bear. I need no other support than my own character.”
And Miss Honorius raised her hand to stop Mr. Hamilton’s reply. “In this matter I am settled and decided, beyond any chance of modification. You know you must not marry me for your own sake, and for my own sake, I do not wish it. I beg you, sir, I beg you as you claim you love me leave me now, and do not speak upon this matter anymore. As you respect me, go and let me alone as I must remain.”
And with his sad sight on her, he tilted his head to her in gesture of parting, and with sodden slow step, steppe
d out into the sad September air.
Miss Honorius collapsed onto the divan once the door doomed them both with its dead closing thud.
“Come back,” she whispered at the dead door. “I meant it not. Please come back.”
With a puff of air the spell of writing left Elizabeth and she pushed the paper away.
She touched her cheeks, they were wet.
This was not the only time she had cried unknowingly while writing. But this was the first time she had ever written a heroine to wish rationally for a gentleman.
What was wrong with her?
Elizabeth’s chest was tense with the passion from the writing of the scene. She stood, and paced twice back and forth, before opening the door. Another walk. She needed another walk, even though it was already completely dark.
At least, Elizabeth thought, her audience would probably like the mournful scene.
Chapter Eleven
Under the thin pretense of speaking with Mr. Bennet, but all involved knew it was to call on Elizabeth, Mr. Darcy had visited Longbourn at least twice a week since his entrance into the neighborhood.
In any other circumstance Darcy knew that a man who called upon a woman who was extremely attractive and beautiful, and charming, and in truth, perfect in all important respects — except those which were objective matters of reputation, connection, and fortune — such a man would be considered to be courting her.
But he might consider himself free to cultivate this valuable friendship, one coming to mean as much to him as connections of far greater duration, because they both had a perfect understanding that it was a platonic relationship betwixt them.
That is, one which only involved speech.
Darcy, though he was not a man with an excess of self-understanding, he knew that his feelings towards Elizabeth had long since left the romantically disinterested and entered the territory of a strong infatuation.
However, a week’s ceasing of this discourse was upon him. Even Elizabeth agreed that delicacy towards Jane’s feelings must be observed, and that the widowed lady must be given chance to recover from her loss before being crowded with a crush of visitors and new acquaintances. And the appearance would be decidedly improper if Elizabeth or her parents went calling about on their friends while leaving their widowed family home with only her memories to comfort her.
The first two days of this interruption in seeing Elizabeth went easily enough. The third day Darcy rode round the neighborhood near Longbourn several times, and he haunted the bookseller and his circulating library for several hours more.
In the end Darcy purchased another eight guineas’ worth of books which he had no intention to read for several weeks more, and which he did not particularly want because they had already been bound.
At least he finished another one of Elizabeth’s novels. There was only one left for him to enjoy for the first time.
He should have arranged with Elizabeth for them to meet, as if by chance, at the bookseller. He was quite sure she would have agreed to such an assignation. But perhaps shopping would have also been contrary to appearances — no, Elizabeth could have claimed she wished to buy a volume of melancholic poems to comfort the bereaved. That was an entirely proper quest for a loving sister to embark upon.
But if they had made an arrangement to meet, Darcy would have needed to abandon the pretense he still made to himself that nothing which was not innocuous and innocent existed in his connection to Elizabeth.
He hardly knew himself anymore.
On Saturday evening an expedient at last came to mind, though he was not certain this scheme would work. Mr. Darcy was a religious man who always attended church services, while Mr. Bingley and his family only attended every second or third week. Always since he had settled in the neighborhood, he had chosen to attend services at the parish nearest Netherfield, but he had heard from Elizabeth that her family had habitually attended the church services in the parish chapel at Meryton.
It would not appear particularly strange if Darcy, a stranger to this neighborhood, chose to observe out of curiosity a different rector’s preaching on one Sunday. For purposes of comparison.
This scheme unfortunately showed every possibility of leaving him nothing but the pleasure of a several mile long ride in the morning cold. Despite her ample other virtues, Mr. Darcy did not think Elizabeth to be a particularly religious woman.
They had spoken a little on the topic, and she did agree to having the belief that all ought in the creed and confession of the high church. Darcy did not see any confusion between the sinful behavior she had engaged in when yet nearly a girl, and this belief. After all, a great many great men professed the most passionate devotion to the Christian faith, especially in comparison to the godless beheaders of their ordained rulers in France, but they yet lived in the most open and hideous sorts of sin.
However, he knew Elizabeth did not like clergymen. It was no surprise; she had been treated harshly by at least two of them, and likely more.
More likely than not she made it her habit to stay home on Sundays, and to perhaps engage in some private prayers.
Further, the delicacy that suggested the Bennets call upon no one, nor be home for visitors, due to the unhappiness of the family’s now returned eldest daughter also gave an additional excuse for the family to not attend Sunday service — but set against that Jane Bennet had been married to a man of the cloth.
She might wish to go to service, even after only having been settled again in Longbourn for four days. Or she might desperately not wish to go, because a church building itself would trigger recollections of a loss too fresh to be anything but painful.
Every speculation pointed the same direction.
There was a chance.
Sunday morning Darcy went to the parish church in Longbourn, and having no reserved pew, he sat near the back of the church. The building had been built in the style of the early Tudor period, likely when England still lived under the Romish church. Fine buttressed arches, and stained glass windows of a better quality than any other art he had seen in this town.
Darcy waited.
When the choir went to stand up, with no sign of the Bennets, Mr. Darcy felt crushed. It was irrational, but he had desperately wanted to see Elizabeth again. Five days now since he had laid eyes upon her.
What would he do when he returned to Pemberley? He would need to spend such a long time without hearing her laughing rushing voice, without being able to ever see her pretty form, without being dazzled by her light brown eyes. Without being able to hear any speech from her. And he would have no right to ask Mr. Bingley for news of her.
There would be no chance of communication with her until he was in town again, if she had returned there, or until he had come south to stay once more with Mr. Bingley. And he wouldn’t even know which he ought to do to see her again.
There was something in Darcy’s guts, like a dully sinking rock of anxiety.
The smaller church door opened. Darcy’s stomach leapt when he saw her enter the fine, old parish chapel.
Elizabeth wore a somber dress in a dark purple that seemed entirely out of character for her. She shuffled past him and into her family’s pew which stood at the front and at an angle to where Darcy sat. But as she went in, watching her sister, she had not noticed him sitting by the side.
Mrs. Hawdry was a woman well worth watching.
For a moment Darcy almost blinked in surprise. Mrs. Hawdry had a pale quiet face, but her cheeks and nose were delicate, and her face was a perfectly shaped, beautiful oval with vibrant clear skin. Her hair was long and the color of ripe wheat. The heavy black dress flowed with her form, revealing just enough of a woman’s curve to entice a man. Mr. Darcy thought that she was, in the sort of objective sense that men in clubs would discuss which woman was the greatest beauty, possibly the prettiest girl he had ever seen.
That thought was a distant thing, because Darcy barely spent two seconds glancing at Mrs. Hawdry before he turned back
to frown in worry at Elizabeth. She did not look well — her usual spring was missing from her steps. Her eyes had dark circles as though she had not slept well of late. And the dark colored dress did not match her looks, making her look more somber and unhappy.
Mr. and Mrs. Bennet sat together, and then Mrs. Hawdry. Elizabeth sat next to her sister, stiffly, keeping herself a little apart. She looked around unsmilingly, as if a great additional weight had fallen upon her.
Then by chance Elizabeth’s eyes lighted on Mr. Darcy. She lit up happily, smiling as if the sun had risen, and he smiled happily back at her.
“Mr. Darcy! Oh, Mr. Darcy!” Mrs. Bennet exclaimed when he approached them after the service. “Lord! — never so shocked as to see you here.”
“Yes,” he replied a little stiffly. Much as he wished otherwise, he found it difficult to enjoy conversation with Mrs. Bennet. “I am glad to see you as well.”
“Most polite!” She smiled at him. “Jane, come here. Jane. This is a new friend — he has become a dear friend to Lizzy and your father. Mr. Darcy, my daughter, Mrs. Hawdry.”
Darcy bowed to Jane. “My deep condolences on your loss.”
There was something lost in Mrs. Hawdry’s eyes. She replied in a soft voice that was very sweet, and yet only barely audible, “Most kind, sir. Most kind… pleased to meet you.”
Darcy now permitted himself to fully turn to Elizabeth.
She smiled at him widely and spoke with a teasing voice, as though she understood exactly what his scheme had been. “A little far afield, Mr. Darcy, from your normal Sunday pastures.”
“I merely wished,” he said unembarrassedly, “to see a different service.”
“Oh! Poor Mr. Oversteegan,” Mrs. Bennet said. “He shall not be happy to hear you have found his service so dull.”
Elizabeth smiled at him, and he thought there was something grateful in her eyes, something which suggested that she felt a feeling similar to his own — whatever that was.
“Mr. Oversteegan gives a perfectly serviceable service, but I never miss a Sunday, and it can at times be interesting to see how a different speaker deals upon the same topic.”
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