The Elizabeth Trap (Pride and Prejudice Variation)

Chapter One

The first time that I made Miss Elizabeth Bennet’s acquaintance, she hardly made an impression upon me. I was introduced to a sea of women at the dreadful ball at Meryton that my friend Mr. Charles Bingley dragged me to. She was only one of them.

Perhaps I should put some caveat on the word friend, for Bingley often seemed to operate as if he were of the opinion I must be in want of alteration.

I suppose it only made sense to him. He had pursued friendship with me because he wanted alteration himself.

He wished to be considered more respectable than he had hitherto been considered.

He wanted the acceptance of the sorts of people that I had access to.

So, perhaps, to Bingley, it wasn’t a friendship so much as it was a transaction.

I would provide introductions to him, I would accept him and make it look to others as if they should accept him.

So, then, he must provide something to me in return.

He was constantly trying to provide something for me in return, I think.

Sometimes, I think he must have thought that I wanted liveliness or excitement.

This was why he dragged me to that ball, and this was why he spent most of it pestering me to dance when I didn’t wish to do so at all.

If he could get me to be lively, if he could make sure I had a good time, he would have provided his portion of the transaction.

This was what he was engaged in when I made the second interaction with Elizabeth, though her name wasn’t mentioned at the time, and though I didn’t know what her name was at the time.

“We must have you dance,” he was saying.

“I have told you before, I do not enjoy dancing with people to whom I am not acquainted,” I said. “I’ve already danced with both of your sisters, and there’s no one else in the room with whom it wouldn’t be a punishment.”

“A punishment? When there are so many uncommonly pretty ladies in attendance?” He was entirely shocked.

“You only think that because you have managed to find the only pretty girl in the entire county, I warrant, and you are dancing with her.”

“She has sisters,” said Bingley, and he gestured, and I caught sight of Elizabeth.

But I did not know she was called Elizabeth at that point. I knew that I was looking at a woman who was young and had a pleasing figure, who also did not have anything about her that seemed distinguishable from any other young woman with a pleasing figure and brown curls and dark eyes.

Bingley was talking. “That one, there, just sitting down behind you, she is quite agreeable, I think. You might dance with her.”

“Tolerable,” I said, looking her over, “but not handsome enough to tempt me.”

“Oho!” said Bingley with a smirk.

“No one else is dancing with her either,” I said. “I’m in no humor to go out and give charity dances to women who are being slighted by other men. Off with you, Bingley. Enjoy your dances with the only pretty girl in the room.”

“She is the most beautiful creature I ever laid eyes on,” he said, practically swooning.

And then he did go off on his own and chase after his dance partner, Elizabeth’s sister Jane. But I didn’t know her name at the time either.

I did not dance. I retreated to find somewhere to sit and I passed the rest of the dance in what I can only term discomfort.

I could not quite tell you why I was even there, and I don’t only mean the ball itself, I mean in the country with Bingley.

Bingley and I had met over the summer, and I found him agreeable enough, but I had not thought I would find myself traveling with him and his sisters, spending a great deal of time with them in the fashion that I was doing.

For one thing, he wasn’t entirely the sort that I should be associating so closely with. My family would not entirely approve, I did not think. For another, he was a bit younger than me, and he and I had rather different dispositions. For a third, I wasn’t even certain, sometimes, if I liked him.

But I’d been a bit numb lately.

The business with Wickham and my sister had transpired in the summer.

I had handled it as best as I could, and then I had taken my sister away from that man.

My intention had been for us to go back to the country, to Pemberley, but my sister, Georgiana is her name, had begged me to be allowed to be in London, citing the desire for operas and plays and the continued company of others.

I told her that it was the summer, and no one was in London, no one who mattered anyway, and that there certainly wasn’t a robust spate of plays and operas to see, but she cried and she pleaded, and I acquiesced.

And who was in London?

The Bingleys.

So, then it was sort of a matter of the fact that beggars can’t be choosers, I suppose. The Bingley sisters were kind to Georgiana, and she needed someone to be kind to her in the wake of all of it. We fell in with them, and soon we were spending a great deal of time with them.

I could have brought Georgiana on this trip to the country, but she had refused, saying she wanted to stay in London.

I arranged for her to stay with our aunt, the Lady Matlock, and her husband the Earl of Matlock. They were back in London—it was October now, after all, no longer summer—it was an odd time to be quitting London for the country.

Why was I here?

Why had I followed Bingley and his sisters to their rented house in Hertfordshire and why had I come to this ball and why had I left my sister behind?

It was difficult to say, truly. It wasn’t even like me.

I was not the sort to do these things. I associated with the sorts of people I was expected to associate with, and I went to the city during the times of year when it was expected, and the country during the times of year that it was expected.

I danced with the women that I was expected to dance with.

I was supposed to marry my cousin Anne de Bourgh, and it had not quite ever occurred to me to question that idea.

And then.

Georgiana was trying to elope with Wickham of all people.

Nothing had been as expected since then.

I didn’t give any thought at all to Elizabeth Bennet after that dance. I did not even know her name, after all. I saw her on one other occasion, and it was at a dinner at the Lucas household.

I remember very little about it, only that I thought she looked prettier in that light than she had looked at the dance, though she still seemed to me an ordinary, average, plain sort of girl, and that I may have asked her to dance with me, but she said no.

Well, she didn’t really say no, she said that no one should have assumed she was looking for a dance partner, but that was only because it was impolite to actually say no to men when they asked for a dance.

But I don’t think that I quite made much of who she was at that gathering. If I knew her name, I forgot it. And I certainly gave her no mind over the coming weeks.

I do not think I even made any association with her when it was discussed by the Bingley sisters that they were inviting Jane Bennet to dine with them while Bingley, Mr. Hurst, and I were dining in town.

Mr. Hurst was the husband of one of Bingley’s sisters.

He was an all right sort, I suppose, mostly quiet.

He liked to play cards and he liked to shoot clay pigeons, but there wasn’t a lot to the man, in the end.

He wasn’t much given to having conversations about poetry or philosophy. But, then again, neither was Bingley.

Why was I here? Why was I with these people?

It had been a number of weeks since the ball, and the Bingley sisters had apparently been calling upon the Bennet women and having tea and doing whatever it was that women did.

If this was seen as some kind of ritual to decide whether they would welcome this other woman into their family through marriage, I was utterly oblivious.

I would never marry a woman from that dreadful dance, no matter how pretty, so clearly Bingley would never do so either, or so I thought at the time.

The dinner did not seem significant to me. The girl herself was only a vague memory of a pretty face, and the sister, the tolerable sister, the brown-curled sister with a pleasing figure, not handsome enough to tempt me to dance, that sister? I had no thought of her at all.

But when we returned home from that dinner, we were informed that Jane had been obliged to stay due to the rain and the lack of having a carriage.

In the morning, we were informed that now she had caught a cold and was in bed, not to be moved, until such time as she recovered.

And not ten minutes after I heard such a thing did Elizabeth Bennet appear in our breakfast parlor, her skirts muddied, her eyes bright, her cheeks reddened, her brown curls tumbling out here and there around her face in a most fetching way.

How had she gotten the news of her sister so quickly?

How long had it taken her to walk here all the way from her family’s house?

When had she gotten so pretty?

She was with us in the parlor for barely any time at all, so anxious was she to go and see her sister, and then she quit the room, leaving me dry-mouthed and shaken, for I had been attracted to women before, but it had not quite felt that way, not ever.

Certainly, I had felt the sort of base attraction for women before, wherein I wished to take them into my bed, but I was fairly good at shoving that down, ignoring it, and rising above it.

This was overwhelming, unavoidable, intense in a way I had never encountered. I could not quite fathom what it was that I was feeling when I looked at her.

How that could be, I didn’t know.

I had barely spoken to her since she appeared in the breakfast parlor. All right, truthfully, I hadn’t spoken to her at all. She had spoken. I had gaped at her, open-mouthed, awed by her stunning presence.

However, firmly, I told myself to put it from my mind.

I had been out of proper company for too long, and I was being dazzled by girls in muddy skirts, that was all.

It had been a moment. Perhaps she had looked so pretty because of the sun coming in from the windows.

Perhaps she had looked so pretty because it was the morning after a heavy rain.

Perhaps she had looked so pretty because I was not yet awake.

Whatever the case, I doubted she actually was that pretty.

Why, this was the girl, the one I had said, at that dreadful ball, was not handsome enough to tempt me. I was certain, when I had seen her then that she had not been.

Something had changed.

If it hadn’t been her, perhaps it had been me.