Fair Stands the Wind (Pride & Prejudice Variation)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

The assembly rooms at Meryton were hot, crowded, and consumed with curiosity.

The local oracles had prophesied the attendance of their new neighbour and, unlike the oracles of old, had gone on to estimate his fortune, his height, and his single state in uncommon, if implausible, detail.

All that remained was to view the gentleman and his party, the oracles having fallen into dispute as to their number and relationship to the main attraction of the evening.

The five Bennet sisters had been kept close to their mother all evening, for that worthy lady was intent upon throwing one or another of them into the path of the newly arrived Mr Bingley as soon as possible and before Lady Lucas got to him or, worse, Mrs Goulding and her bony niece.

Elizabeth Bennet did her best to stifle a sigh.

Her mother’s careful arrangements—“Jane, you must sit on my right and, Lydia, you on my left since you are the most handsome of my girls”—had left her isolated between her sister Mary and a pillar.

Since the former had brought one of her interminable conduct books, she was scarcely more company than the latter.

Elizabeth exchanged looks of commiseration with her best friend, Charlotte Lucas, also seated firmly beside her own mama, and did her best to possess her soul in patience.

On the stage, the serpent player gave a preparatory honk, and the band swept raggedly into the third set of the evening.

The dancers bowed, curtseyed, and began the figure, Mr Wright leading off with his left hand as usual and being put firmly back in place by his partner.

Elizabeth counted the people present, counted the ladies, and subtracted the one from the other to produce the number of gentlemen—which gave the number of women who would be without partners; she counted the number of feathers in Lady Lucas’s headdress, divided the number of feathers by the difference between the number of ladies and the number of gentlemen, and was faintly cheered when the result turned out to be a prime number.

She sighed and was just about to commence an attempt to calculate the floor space of the ballroom, based on an estimated average length and breadth of the floorboards, when the main event of the evening finally occurred.

The doors opened, and the party from Netherfield swept in, led by an undeniably handsome, if somewhat overdressed, lady.

The object of everyone’s curiosity was a smiling young gentleman of perhaps four-and-twenty, regrettably shorter than the first entrant, whom he introduced as his sister.

Despite that, he was by no means ill-looking and appeared good-humoured, which—as Mrs Philips remarked in a rather too penetrating whisper—was better than mere longshanks any day of the week.

This remark gained immediate and unfortunate point when the rest of the party entered: another lady and gentleman, who ignored each other so pointedly they had to be married, and a final gentleman.

The latter was a very tall, dark-haired young man, somewhat older than Mr Bingley, well dressed in a dark blue coat of austere cut, who had chosen to disfigure a particularly fine countenance with a pair of green-lensed spectacles.

The buzz of speculation, which had begun to die down, rose again to renewed heights, a noise that did not go unnoticed by its object who became—although it scarcely seemed possible—even more upright and impassive.

Mr Bingley was making introductions, and an immediate and rather ill-bred silence fell as everyone strained to hear. “...My sister Hurst and her husband and my particular friend Captain Darcy of the Royal Navy.”

There was a moment’s fascinated silence until, after a hurried wave from Sir William Lucas, the band was recalled to its duty, and the set began from the beginning. Under cover of the music, a search for some source of information on this newcomer began with little attempt at concealment.

To everyone’s surprise, it was young Mr Goulding who supplied the keenly felt deficit.

Denied a long and deeply desired career at sea by his position as his father’s heir and by his mother’s completely erroneous conviction that he was ‘delicate’, he had been forced to satisfy himself with newspaper accounts of the war at sea.

As he said to his friend Robert Lucas, “That must be Darcy of the Achilles. You must have read about him! Took the French privateer Liberté off Ushant last year and intercepted a prime convoy the year before. Made over thirty thousand pounds in prize money alone. Was captain in that business in the Baltic—you must have read about it, Bob; it was in all the papers!”

This was better than even the most enthusiastic mama could have dreamed. A wealthy sea captain who must be single, for when would he have had time to marry? And visiting Netherfield too—what could be more convenient?

“He must be in want of a fine, healthy, and above all, young wife,” said Mrs Bennet, with a particularly unpleasant look in the direction of Charlotte Lucas. “Lydia, sit up straight and pull your shoulders back,” she added in what she incorrectly thought was a whisper.

Elizabeth sighed and did her best to hide behind her pillar. Every time she thought her mother could embarrass her no further, she was proved wrong. Elizabeth did her best to convey her apologies by a look, but Charlotte, with colour rather higher than usual, was ignoring her.

The set ended, and Mr Bingley wasted no time in soliciting an introduction to Jane.

Elizabeth thought that she was probably the only person in the room who could see just how nervous her sister was.

Although Jane was used to the attention paid to her beauty, the outbreak of speculation and comment that followed the invitation was still discomposing.

Captain Darcy danced with Miss Bingley and, as far as Elizabeth could see, they exchanged no more than a handful of words throughout the set.

The set ended. Mr Bingley was introduced to Amelia Wallace, and Captain Darcy was bowing before Charlotte Lucas.

Elizabeth looked down to hide her grin as Lady Lucas returned Mrs Bennet’s ill-natured expression.

When she looked up again, she saw Charlotte was pink with pleasure, for at seven-and-twenty she had been forced to concede the floor to younger girls for the last two years.

Elizabeth thought Charlotte appeared in particularly good looks.

The gossip had reached positively frenzied proportions as Charlotte and her partner threaded through the measure, especially as they exchanged considerably more conversation than the captain had shared with his previous partner.

Elizabeth shifted on her cane-bottomed chair and wished the evening were over. The anxiety that she had striven hard to suppress all evening flooded back, and she clasped her hands in her lap and began to calculate how many seconds might pass before she could hope they would be going home.

“Lizzy, if you cannot sit still like a Christian, you can take Kitty and repair the flounce on her hem. That clumsy Harker boy trod on it.” Gathering up a complaining Kitty, Elizabeth headed to a room at the rear where a servant waited with pins and thread for such emergencies.

Together they patched up the errant hem, although the length of the tear meant it took them quite a quarter hour to repair it.

Kitty was wild to return to the dancing, but Elizabeth lingered near the door for a breath of cool, fresh air.

The stars were out, and the full moon was visible over the market cross. She stepped out a little way for a proper view and was startled to see the unmistakable figure of Captain Darcy being helped into what was presumably Mr Bingley’s carriage.

As she returned to the light and heat of the ballroom, she thought to herself how unmannerly it was to be overcome by drink so early in the evening.

Shaking her head, Elizabeth returned to the dancers.

The previous set had finished, and the next was almost complete.

Charlotte was now dancing with the senior Mr Harker, her colour still high, obviously enjoying the unaccustomed attention.

Jane was partnered with Richard Lucas—no prospects there; Lady Lucas would see to that if Sir William did not—and Kitty and Lydia were bouncing around with a couple of younger sons, hardly more than children themselves.

Elizabeth hated having to think about her sisters’ marital prospects in this manner; it was so sordid.

If it were just a case of Jane and herself, she knew they would both rather scrimp and save on fifty pounds a year each, but Mama and the younger girls—!

She halted that line of thought with a firm stamp of a mental foot.

She composed her face, straightened her back, marched back into the ballroom—a determinedly pleasant expression on her face—and took up her seat next to Mary.

The set ended, Mr Bingley asked Jane to dance once more, and Elizabeth’s heart sank.

No doubt, in her mother’s mind, matters were now completely settled, and they could all live happily ever after on Mr Bingley’s money.

It was so difficult to know what to want.

Did she hope that Mr Bingley would fall desperately, and preferably quickly, in love with Jane so that they could all batten onto him like leeches, or did she hope that he would not, in which case they could all live in genteel—and doubtless improvident—poverty instead?

It was all so unfair! Mr Bingley seemed like a pleasant young man.

Why could he not have met Jane when the matter was not so unhappily pressing?

She thought of her poor father alone at home, and her eyes filled with tears.

She realised she would have to move her chair behind the pillar before everyone noticed.