A Most Determined Lady (Pride and Prejudice Variation)

Prologue

Mrs. Marwood first saw Longbourn again on a wet March afternoon, in the second month of her widowhood, and thought at once that the house had the air of a place not ruined, only surrendered.

The rain had stopped before her carriage turned into the drive, leaving the gravel soft, the shrubbery shining, and the windows patched with a dull, watery light.

It was not an ugly house. Mrs. Marwood would not have been so false as to say so.

She remembered it first under her mother, when she herself had been Miss Bennet of Longbourn and every cupboard, tray, servant, and season knew the discipline of a mistress who understood that comfort was not an accident.

She remembered it later under her brother’s wife, another Mrs. Bennet, a gentler woman perhaps, and not so formidable, but still one who knew a household must be governed if it was not to become merely inhabited.

Longbourn had never been grand, but it had been kept.

It had possessed habits. It had possessed consequence of the domestic kind: regular meals, linen that knew its place, rooms used rather than merely survived.

The present Mrs. Bennet had inherited the name, the keys, the table, and the title of mistress. On every other point, comparison was unkind.

What Mrs. Marwood found now, before she had even removed her gloves, was not poverty, nor vulgarity of the larger and more entertaining sort. It was domestic overflow.

Doors opened and shut without result. A maid crossed the hall carrying a tray with the expression of one who had already been accused of three unrelated failures.

Somewhere above, a baby cried in a voice of excellent constitution.

Mrs. Bennet came forward in a flutter of ribbons, handkerchief, nerves, and welcome.

She was fair-haired, still pretty beneath fatigue, and already bearing the look of a woman whom many pregnancies had asked too much of and then left to be blamed for not recovering gracefully.

There had been beauty there once--indeed, there was beauty there still, in the colour of her hair, the delicacy of her skin, the blue of her eyes when they were not enlarged by alarm--but it had wilted under noise, babies, nerves, and the general mismanagement of a life she had never been taught to manage.

Mr. Bennet appeared behind her with the mild amusement of a man who had inherited a governed house and mistaken its former order for a natural property of walls; and three little girls, all at different stages of curiosity and dishevelment, hovered and vanished at the edges of the scene.

Mrs. Marwood, who had buried a husband after forty years of marriage and had come to Hertfordshire in the faint hope that family might prove an occupation, felt her hope alter shape.

Occupation there would be.

Whether any of it would be tolerable remained to be seen.

In Portman Square, occupation had lately become a cruelly thin thing.

Mrs. Marwood had never had children. There had been disappointments early in her marriage, then fewer hopes, then none; and by the time hope had gone, habit had come so strongly in its place that she and Mr. Marwood had learned to be company enough for one another.

Mr. Marwood had no relations near enough in blood or affection to interfere with that arrangement.

A distant nephew wrote at Christmas with admirable regularity and no expectation of being invited; two cousins existed somewhere in Norfolk and chiefly proved that the Marwood name had not expired; but no one came to Portman Square by right.

No one had ever crowded its rooms with claims.

Mr. Marwood had not been a tender man in any picturesque sense.

He had not written verses, sighed over firesides, or called his wife by fond names in company.

He had been a banker to the bone: precise in figures, cautious in judgment, sparing in speech, and more inclined to correct a column of accounts than any disorder of feeling.

Yet he had been hers for forty years, and in that time his habits had become the very furniture of her days.

His chair still stood where it had always stood.

His paper-knife remained in the drawer where he had kept it.

His ledgers, though closed, still seemed to hold the weight of his hand.

Every morning, the house produced breakfast with the same competence as ever; and every morning there was no one across the table to object to the strength of the coffee, ask whether the Funds had moved, remark that a servant had over-polished the silver from nervousness, or contradict her on some small matter merely because contradiction, in a good marriage, may become one of the quieter forms of company.

That was the worst of widowhood, she had discovered.

Not the grief visitors respected, but the uselessness that followed after it.

A house could be perfectly ordered and still feel abandoned by purpose.

A bell might be answered, a bill paid, a room dusted, a tray brought in exactly when it ought; and yet the whole machine, lacking the one person whose existence had given her corrections consequence, seemed to run only because nobody had yet told it to stop.

She had come to Longbourn, therefore, not because she expected comfort from the Bennets, but because family, however foolish, might at least require something of her. She had not expected to be pleased. She had expected, perhaps, to be irritated into usefulness.

In that, Longbourn had exceeded expectation.

“My dear aunt! Poor Mrs. Marwood!” cried Mrs. Bennet, kissing her, lamenting her, and ringing for something all in one motion.

“You cannot conceive what a life I lead, and now to think of your loss besides! Hill! Where is Hill? Jane, my love, do stand where your aunt may see you. Mary, do not pull at your frock. Kitty, if you cough upon Mrs. Marwood’s sleeve, I shall never forgive you.

Oh! such a house as this is for nerves!”

Mrs. Marwood received it all with composure. She had long ago discovered that there are women who make grief easier by giving one something else to dislike.

She was shown to her room, found the fire smoky, the water insufficiently hot, and the maid willing but badly directed.

These were not tragedies. They were symptoms. Mrs. Marwood had a respect for symptoms. A badly trimmed lamp, a late tray, a chair standing where no chair ought to stand: such things told the truth of a house long before its owners did.

By dinner she had learned enough to be wary.

Mrs. Bennet felt everything and arranged nothing.

Mr. Bennet observed everything and prevented almost as little.

Jane, the eldest child, was her mother’s daughter in all the prettiest ways: fair, soft, anxious to please, and already learning that beauty might earn admiration more easily than it earned protection.

Mrs. Marwood pitied her, approved her, and did not find herself curious.

Mary, still very small, looked at books as if seriousness could be acquired by proximity.

Kitty moved because others moved. The infant, Lydia, ruled from above stairs by cries and intervals of ominous silence.

And Elizabeth was missing.

Mrs. Marwood heard the name six times before she saw the child.

Lizzy had been wanted, scolded, called, excused, blamed, and wondered after with such frequency that Mrs. Marwood began to feel a curiosity proportioned less by affection than by professional irritation.

A child so often required and so seldom produced must either be ill, troublesome, or engaged in private business of her own.

She proved to be the last two.

The next morning, just as Mrs. Bennet was explaining for the third time that nobody in the house understood what she suffered, a faint scuffling issued from behind the sofa.

Jane looked in that direction and then away with the conscience of an accomplice.

Mrs. Marwood, who missed very little and disliked concealment chiefly when it was done badly, put up her spectacles.

“Lizzy!” cried Mrs. Bennet. “Good heavens, where is Lizzy?”

The scuffling ceased.

“Behind the sofa, I believe,” said Mrs. Marwood.

There was a pause; then a little girl emerged with dignity, as if appearing from behind drawing-room furniture were an ordinary social entrance.

Her pinafore was marked from the wet gravel; one stocking had descended; her hair had escaped discipline in several directions; and one pocket of her gown moved in a manner no pocket ought to move unless it contained either a live thing or a conscience.

Mrs. Marwood looked through her spectacles and found herself, against expectation, entertained.

“Come here, child.”

The child came, not quickly, and not with any proper appearance of fear.

She had soft brown curls escaping every pin that had ever been placed in them, green eyes too lively for obedience, and a small, determined mouth which seemed already acquainted with arguments it had not yet been permitted to make.

There was Bennet in her face, though not much of the present Bennets.

The eyes, especially, struck Mrs. Marwood with the force of memory: old Mrs. Bennet of Longbourn had possessed just such a bright, assessing look whenever disorder presented itself and expected to be excused.

In the child, it had softened into mischief--not mischief intended, perhaps, but mischief always near enough to be consulted.

“What have you there?”

Elizabeth considered the question as if testing it for jurisdiction.

“A beetle.”

Mrs. Bennet gave a cry. “Lizzy Bennet!”

“It is only in my pocket until after breakfast,” Elizabeth said. “It was on its back near the step.”

“And therefore required a drawing-room?” Mrs. Marwood asked.

“It required assistance.”

Mr. Bennet laughed behind his newspaper.