Chapter Seventeen
JANE BENNET WAS not one to make a fuss. She knew that she would have the best outcome in her life if she did what was expected of her, if she attempted to be pleasing and agreeable, and if she followed the rules.
This sort of behavior had served her well for her entire life, and then she had gone to that dinner with the Bingley sisters and the directive had been put in her head to come back there.
It wasn’t hard to put a directive in Jane’s mind, truly.
She was primed to be agreeable, primed to be pleasing, and primed to do whatever it was that people wished her to do.
She had been trained to embody that all her life.
So, it was easy to charm her.
And then the bites happened, and she’d never felt anything like that in her life. She hadn’t known it was possible to feel so much intense pleasure, and she began to wish to have it, for herself, and this was the real problem with everything now.
The problem wasn’t that Jane didn’t remember being bitten or remember the pleasure, not really.
That was likely a good thing. Jane would have had a hard time reconciling what had befallen her with her own understanding of the world.
She would have specifically had difficulty continuing to believe in her own goodness if she had known that she craved the bite of vampires.
She would have wondered if she were, in fact, too deeply sinful to deserve anything but sheer punishment.
So, forgetting all of that was a good thing, but…
She wanted things now. She wanted things for herself.
She was not certain how to exist in that reality.
The problem, it seemed, was that the very world was not designed for her gratification. It might be designed to gratify certain people—very rich people, or, well, men—but it was not designed to gratify simply everybody.
And perhaps this was a good thing, Jane would think to herself, for it would be a very bad world if everyone were simply out for himself, taking what he liked with no thought of anyone else. It would be a very bad world indeed.
She would then think that her own desires must only be selfish and sinful, truly, that they were leading her towards a path of deep dissatisfaction, that she must return to her comfortable way of being happy with pleasing others.
And then, she simply could not be satisfied with others’ satisfaction, it seemed.
So, she was deeply sad.
Frustrated.
Angry, even.
It culminated in a sense of despair that seemed to weigh upon her, badly affecting her.
When she was finally invited to stay with Elizabeth and her husband, she did not truly care what befell her, not anymore.
Life at home was different now that the entail had been broken, it was true.
Her mother was happier, knowing that Longbourn would be hers to live in until she died.
Her father seemed happier, too. He had always been a joker, her father, but his jokes had often been somewhat mean-spirited, Jane thought, and now they were more joyful.
He seemed to be smiling more when he looked at their mother, and she seemed to be smiling, too.
He had even started taking the advice of some of the tenant farmers about changing the crops that he wished them to grow, and he said that if they diversified, he might have some surplus that could be added to the girls’ dowries.
So, things were better, or at least, they should be, but Jane felt worse than she’d felt in her whole life.
She took a post coach to London and alighted on the doorstep of her sister’s town house in the afternoon, only to be told that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Darcy were currently available, and to be tucked off into a sitting room with a selection of books offered to her for hours.
Eventually, it was time for supper, which did not take place until after darkness had fallen.
This was not abnormal, of course, especially in the late winter, when the days were still relatively short.
Still, when she looked upon Mr. Darcy for the first time, an odd jolt went through her, and she felt as if she was on the verge of remembering something terrible.
“We must have a talk after dinner, Miss Bennet,” said Mr. Darcy. He was not eating, only drinking wine. There was something about the way his eyes glittered. She remembered looking deeply into glittering eyes like that…
She shook herself.
Elizabeth got her attention and asked more questions about home, wishing to know about how Charlotte could have possibly agreed to marry Mr. Collins.
“Well, I suppose she felt she was lucky, in a sense,” said Jane. “You know that she is older than both of us. She likely thought she would never marry at all.”
“Better never to marry than to marry him,” said Elizabeth with a shudder.
“But Lizzy, you were all set to marry that man,” said Jane.
Elizabeth nodded. “True.” She looked to her husband. “Thank heaven for Mr. Darcy, rescuing me from that fate.”
After dinner, they all sat together, and Mr. Darcy asked Jane questions and she struggled to answer them.
“I am not displeased,” she said, defensive. “Everything is fine, I tell you.”
“But do you think of Mr. Bingley?” said Mr. Darcy.
“Never,” said Jane. “I mean, rarely, anyway.”
Mr. Darcy eyed Elizabeth. “They likely put that into the charm, for her to think little of them.”
“What charm?” said Jane.
Mr. Darcy shook his head. “No, never mind that, Miss Bennet. Tell me, then, what is it you are craving, if you don’t mind?”
“Craving?” said Jane. “Lord, I am very full from that supper you fed me. I want for nothing.”
“There is something you are pining after, though,” said Mr. Darcy. “It is not Bingley, and it is not food, but it is something.”
“Just…” Jane lifted her shoulders, trying to find the words for it. “Pleasure, perhaps? Or gratification? The ability to want something for myself and to go after it, to have it.”
“You feel you can’t do that?” said Mr. Darcy.
“Oh, please, husband, no one can do that,” said Elizabeth, settling in next to her sister.
“No one.” He was stunned.
“Even you cannot have everything you wish,” said Elizabeth. “And you are always and forever denying yourself things.”
“Well, that is not the same thing,” he said. “It is one thing to deny oneself a pleasure one knows will bring momentary joy but longterm pain or pain to others. It is quite another to feel as if one has no ability to seek pleasure.”
“Well,” said Elizabeth, “we do not have the ability, people like Jane and me. We are wholly dependent on the goodwill of others for our very survival.”
“Oh, please, Lizzy,” he said. “You are being so very dramatic.”
“You broke the entail,” she said. “But before that, we would have been turned out of Longbourn by Charlotte after the death of Papa. She and Mr. Collins would have owned it. We would have had nowhere to live.”
“Mr. Darcy broke the entail?” said Jane. “How did he do that? I thought it was Mr. Collins’s idea.”
“Ought we be doing this in front of your sister?” said Mr. Darcy. “We’re confusing her. I thought you wished me to charm her back to cheerfulness. I shall simply give her a directive to seek out her own happiness.”
“Oh, you cannot do that. You’ll get her ruined and destroyed,” said Elizabeth.
“Ruined,” said Jane, furrowing her brow.
“Well, to seek out her own happiness, but only if it does not endanger her.”
“Which leaves what, exactly? Jane and I were in a position where we had no way to feed and clothe and house ourselves without appeasing others, Mr. Darcy. I’m not sure you can possibly understand that.”
He appeared to be thinking that through. “Well, she simply needs money, then. A dowry. Would you like a dowry, Miss Bennet?”
Jane glanced at Elizabeth. “What is he going on about?”
“You cannot give my elder sister a dowry,” said Elizabeth.
“Can I not?” said Mr. Darcy. He mused over it. “Perhaps it would seem odd if I did, though we are family now.”
“What about my other sisters?” said Elizabeth.
“Do you wish me to find dowries for each of them?” said Mr. Darcy.
“No, I would not think to ask such a thing!” Elizabeth was adamant. “Why, the colonel is always worried about your using Darcy resources when they all belong to Georgiana—”
“I should use my own money, obviously.” Mr. Darcy was affronted.
“Your own money,” Elizabeth repeated. “Yes, you’ve had time to amass your own fortune and would not need the Darcy fortune. Quite obviously, that is true. You’ve been alive over a thousand years, have you not?”
“What?” said Jane.
Mr. Darcy glared at her. “Dowries for all of them, then.”
Elizabeth’s lips parted. “You… I cannot… that is too much.”
“I don’t think you have any idea how much money I have, Lizzy,” said Mr. Darcy.
Elizabeth swallowed very hard.
“We must come up with some other place where the money has come from, of course,” Mr. Darcy mused. “We could say that it was an inheritance from some relative or other, and we shall charm everyone in the family to tell the tale without question.”
“What is all this charming about?” said Jane, frustrated.
“Miss Bennet,” said Mr. Darcy. “With me?”
Jane looked at him.
“Yes, here with me, in my eyes,” he said. “You will go after whatever gratification you desire, so long as it does not harm you or others. You will believe that you can have what you want, that you can be satisfied.”
Jane felt something unraveling in her, something deep down, something that had been knotted up for far too long.
She let out a breath, and it was as if she could breathe for the first time in a very long time.
ELIZABETH HADN’T REALIZED how much she missed her sister.
They spent a week together, always in each other’s company, talking and playing games together during the day, spending each evening with Mr. Darcy, and Jane was cheerful again, back to her old self.