1. Chapter One #2
“Not at all. Only restless. He is already improved.”
Elizabeth smiled. “I am glad.”
Jane’s gaze—gentle, attentive—rested upon her. “And how are you this morning, Lizzy?”
“Well, thank you.”
Jane hesitated only a moment before continuing, “And what are your plans for the day?”
Elizabeth reached for her tea once more. “I believe I shall read. Aunt Gardiner sent a new book, and I have not yet had the opportunity to begin it.”
Jane’s expression softened with approval—and concern. “You must take care not to strain yourself. Too much reading may bring on a megrim.”
Elizabeth made a small face. “I shall be prudent.”
Mr. Collins stirred. “I have heard it remarked,” he said, with renewed seriousness, “that reading is a most improving occupation—particularly for the mind. It is therefore a matter of some regret that, in your case, Miss Elizabeth, the effect appears to be rather the reverse.”
There was a brief silence.
Lydia’s hand stilled.
Kitty’s gaze dropped once more.
Mrs. Bennet sighed deeply. “My poor girl—”
Elizabeth rose. “I believe I have had sufficient,” she said, though she had scarcely eaten.
“Lizzy—” Jane began.
“I am quite well,” Elizabeth assured her gently. “I shall take a little air—and my book.”
She reached for her father’s walking stick, which rested where she had left it against the chair. Her fingers closed around it with familiar certainty.
"Mind yourself," Jane whispered solicitously.
“I always do.” Elizabeth turned toward the door.
One step. Two. Three. She could not hurry. The room lay clear enough before her—near things, known things. The doorway. The hall beyond. She counted without thinking, each measure ingrained through repetition.
Four. Five. Six. The corridor opened. Seven. Eight. She turned left. Nine. Ten. The small table by the wall—two steps further. Eleven. Twelve. She passed it without touching.
There was a comfort in this—this mastery of space, this certainty of movement where once there had been none. It had not come easily. There had been missteps, bruises, frustration, and the long, weary ache of learning to trust herself again.
But she had learned. And she would not unlearn it.
The morning room lay ahead, its windows catching the full strength of the light. Elizabeth moved toward it instinctively. Brightness aided her—brought what clarity she could claim into sharper focus.
She reached the chair by the window and sat.
The book lay where she had left it the previous evening. She picked it up and turned it in her hands, angling it so that the light fell most directly across the page.
The print was small.
There were no larger editions to be had—not in any common circulation—and she had long since abandoned the hope of such accommodations. Instead, she read as she must: slowly, laboriously, with frequent pauses to rest her eyes when the strain grew too great.
It was enough, she reminded herself. It must be enough. She could see. Indeed, she had regained sight in her left eye when doctors had feared she would be completely blind.
Elizabeth opened the book. The words swam at first, then settled. She tilted her head slightly—just so—and brought the page nearer. Her left eye adjusted. The shapes sharpened.
She began to read.
Outside, the morning carried on as it always did. Voices in the distance. The faint creak of a cart upon the lane. Somewhere, a bird called from the hedgerow.
Within, the room was still.
Elizabeth turned a page. And for a little while, at least, the world arranged itself into something she could wholly see.
After a time, her head began to throb. She read the same line three times before understanding it.
Elizabeth let out a small breath and lowered the book a little, blinking against the faint ache already beginning behind her left eye.
The morning light was good, stronger here than in most places in the house, and yet even good light could not undo what had been done.
It merely made the effort easier for a time.
She rested the book against her knee and turned her face toward the window.
From this angle she could see only a portion of the lawn with any clearness, but it was enough to know the day had ripened into one of unusual mildness.
The grass shone where the dew had not long since lifted.
Beyond it, the shrubbery blurred into softened greens and browns, and farther still the lane disappeared into brightness.
If she narrowed her eye and looked too long, the edges of things sharpened for half a breath before dissolving again into indistinctness.
She had learned not to chase clarity once it fled. The pursuit only punished her.
A movement in the doorway drew her attention.
“Lizzy?” It was Kitty, speaking gently as though uncertain whether she would be welcome.
Elizabeth smiled at once. “You need not hover as though I were a fretful great-aunt. Come in.”
Kitty entered with a piece of workbasket ribbon looped carelessly about her wrist and shut the door softly behind her.
Though still more subdued than Lydia by nature, she had long since lost the shrinking hesitancy that used to make her seem scarcely formed in her own opinions.
The change had come gradually enough that Elizabeth could not have named the exact moment of it, but she felt its result now in the calm steadiness with which Kitty crossed the room and took the chair opposite her.
“I did not mean to hover,” Kitty said, though she smiled a little. “Only to see whether you had a megrim already.”
“Not yet. I am merely wavering on excellent terms with one.”
Kitty’s expression turned sympathetic. “Then perhaps you ought not to read.”
“Jane has already said as much.”
“And she is usually right.” There was slight admonishment in her sister’s tone.
Elizabeth tipped her head. “You grow dangerously sensible.”
“I am older than I was.” Pride, now. Elizabeth had learned to discern much form one’s inflection after she lost her sight.
“So am I, unhappily.”
Kitty’s gaze moved to the book in her lap. “Is that the one Aunt Gardiner sent?”
“Yes. She writes that it is diverting, though I begin to suspect she recommended it in the hope that I should improve myself.”
“That does not sound like Aunt Gardiner.”
“No. Which proves how little I have progressed, for she still hopes it.” Elizabeth hoped her sister heard the tease in her voice.
Kitty laughed softly, then grew reflective.
For a moment she turned the ribbon about her fingers, smoothing it.
Elizabeth watched her, waiting. In the old days Kitty would have blurted out whatever lay nearest her mind.
Now she often approached a thought as though testing its edges before offering it.
At length she said, “Mama did not mean anything by it at breakfast.”
Elizabeth kept her gaze upon her sister’s hands. “I know.”
“She is only—”
“Very much herself?”
Kitty huffed a little laugh. “Yes. That.”
Elizabeth leaned her head back against the chair. “I do know it, Kitty. I know she means kindness.”
Kitty looked up. “But?”
Elizabeth was silent for a moment. Outside, the faint sound of someone crossing the gravel reached them, then faded.
“But there are times,” she said at last, “when I wish to pass a morning without being pitied for surviving it.”
Kitty’s fingers stilled on the ribbon.
Elizabeth turned the book over once in her lap, feeling the embossed line along its spine.
“I do not mean to be ungrateful. I know very well that Mama’s concern is genuine.
There are many daughters more neglected.
But to be perpetually her poor girl—to be looked at as though one were always on the edge of fresh calamity—” She stopped and shrugged with one shoulder. “It is tiresome.”
Kitty’s answer came so promptly that it seemed to have waited on her lips. “You are not tiresome.”
Elizabeth looked at her and smiled faintly. “No, but being pitied is.”
Kitty considered that with the seriousness of one receiving instruction. “Then perhaps we ought to train Mama out of it.”
Elizabeth laughed. “You may attempt it, if you are bold enough.”
“I am not bold enough,” Kitty admitted. “Lydia might be.”
“Lydia would only do it by accident, which is another matter entirely.”
That earned another smile, though it faded as Kitty said more softly, “I do not pity you, Lizzy.”
Elizabeth’s gaze lifted fully to her face.
Kitty continued, a little color rising in her cheeks but not enough to stop her. “I worry, sometimes. And I am sorry, because I remember what you were like before. But I do not pity you. You are—you are only you. A little more determined, perhaps.”
Elizabeth could not answer at once. Something warm and unexpected moved through her chest, the sort of tenderness that was almost too delicate to be touched directly. How strange, she thought, that comfort should so often come from those once deemed least capable of offering it.
At length she said lightly, because anything more serious might undo her, “Do not say so too loudly, or I shall become intolerable.”
Kitty’s smile returned. “That danger passed long ago.”
“Impertinent girl.”
“Yes,” Kitty said. “Lydia taught me.”
They sat together in companionable quiet after that.
Elizabeth picked up the book again, though she did not open it immediately.
She liked Kitty’s presence in the room. There was ease in it.
No demands, no conscientious sympathy, no officious attempts to assist where no assistance was needed. Only company.
After a minute or two, Kitty rose and crossed toward the window. Elizabeth heard the small metallic sound of the latch, then the faintest current of cooler air entered the room.
“I have opened it only a little,” Kitty said. “The air was close.”
“Thank you.”
Kitty glanced out. “Jane is on the lawn.”
“With Thomas?”
“Yes, our nephew is quite recovered from his poor temper this morning. And there is Mrs. Hill. He appears resolved to escape both.”
Elizabeth smiled at the image. “He has his mother’s sweetness and his grandfather’s preference for liberty.”
“And perhaps a little of Lydia as well.”
“Then Heaven preserve us all.”
Kitty leaned one shoulder against the window frame. “Jane looks tired.”
Elizabeth’s smile softened. “She often does.”
“She never complains.”
“No. Jane would go serenely to martyrdom if she thought anyone else might be made easy by it.”
Kitty was silent for a moment. Then she said, “I am glad she married.”
Elizabeth turned a page of the unopened book with her thumb. “So am I.” Jane’s marriage had preserved their home, even though her husband had not survived long past a year of marriage.
It had been a strange, hurried season of grief and necessity, and yet from it some good had come.
Jane had chosen gently, bravely, and with more composure than anyone had a right to expect.
There had been no romance in the beginning, not as novels chose to frame such matters.
No long courtship, no fluttering hopes. Only affection, respect, and the clear understanding that without her marriage the future of the family would be precarious at best.
And then, unexpectedly, love had grown where duty had first been planted.
Mr. Collins, her father-in-law had been miserly and ridiculous upon inheriting.
His son was much the same. The master of Longbourn was still a ridiculous man in many respects.
No miracle could make him elegant. But the loss of his son, coupled with Jane’s calming influence, he had become less rigid in his habits, less narrow in his comforts, and considerably more tolerable than the son who had once stood to inherit.
His absurdities remained, but they had softened at the edges.
He deferred to Jane in household matters.
He adored little Thomas with a solemnity that was nearly comic.
And though his observations were often painfully ill-timed, he had never treated Elizabeth with cruelty.
Only with thoughtlessness.
And perhaps, Elizabeth reflected, thoughtlessness was the commonest failing in the world. Certainly, more common than malice.
“Lizzy,” Kitty said, still looking outward, “do you ever think of London?”
The question came so unexpectedly that Elizabeth stilled.
“Sometimes.”
“I do,” Kitty admitted. “Not because I wish to go. Only because—it feels as though everything changed there, and afterwards we all became…different.”
Elizabeth rested her hand upon the cover of the book.
Not in London, she thought. On the road home from it. In the violent instant between one breath and the next. In the darkness that followed. In the weeks after, when pain, uncertainty, and grief had remade the shape of every ordinary thing.
“Yes,” she said. “We did.”
Kitty turned from the window then and came back toward her. “I do not think you should read any more this morning.”
“Despot.”
“I have learned from Jane.” Kitty took the book from her hands.
“That is even worse.” But Elizabeth rose all the same, slipping a finger between the pages to mark her place. The ache behind her eye had sharpened while they spoke; she could no longer pretend otherwise.
As she stood, Kitty moved the chair slightly aside without comment, clearing Elizabeth’s way before it became an inconvenience. It was done so naturally that gratitude did not need to be spoken. That, more than the act itself, touched Elizabeth.
She took up her father’s walking stick and let her hand settle upon the worn curve of its handle.
“Will you come into the garden?” Kitty asked. “The light is kinder there than in this room, and Thomas will be delighted to tyrannize us both.”
Elizabeth smiled and turned toward the open door. “Very well. But if he attempts to seize my cane again, you must defend me.”
Kitty’s laugh followed her into the hall.
And with that sound beside her—light, sisterly, unforced—Elizabeth went out to meet the day.