Chapter 21
Hunsford
Dear Elizabeth,
I find I wish to say more about our patroness, but I have some tasks to complete before tomorrow, so I will wait until a later letter to go into more detail.
I am happy in my marriage and in the house. I miss you.
How are our parents and sisters?
With love,
Mary
P.S. I would like you to visit me in March or April. There is plenty of room.
***
London
6th January 1812
Wickham!
You snake!
How dare you steal my housekeeping money? Did you really think I would not notice?
Fifty pounds, Wickham. Fifty pounds! I would say I expect you to repay it, but I know perfectly well you rarely have two pence to rub together. Do not ever show up at my doorstep again!
Dorothea Younge
***
10th January 1812
Dearest Dorothea,
My darling, I am sorry I took the money, but I was truly in trouble, and I know you do not wish for me to be beaten to a pulp by the larger militia officers who tiresomely insisted that I pay my debts of honor.
I will pay you back someday, my dear, when my luck changes.
I know I have hurt you, but surely you can find it in your generous heart to forgive me? You are my dearest, best friend, and my one hope in a dark world.
Your ever adoring servant,
George Wickham
***
Longbourn
10th January 1812
Dear Mary,
Thank you for your recent letter. I am very glad that Hunsford is so pleasant. I look forward to hearing more about Lady Catherine, but please do not rush in responding. I know that you have a great deal to do now that you are mistress of your own home.
You asked about our parents and sisters.
Father is much the same as he was, which is to say he is no worse, though still tired and rarely at the table for dinner.
Having two additional servants is a great help, though, especially his new valet, who has experience with elderly men who are not in good health.
Mother is definitely calmer than she used to be, with two daughters well married. It makes the house much more peaceful.
Kitty and Lydia are still silly, of course, but I confess to a frisson of hope for their sense. They are spending a great deal of time at Netherfield Hall these days, and the atmosphere there is certainly more refined than here at Longbourn.
I must dress for dinner.
I would very much like to visit you. Thank you.
With much love,
Elizabeth
***
Longbourn
15th January 1812
Dear Louisa,
Thank you for your invitation to join you and Mr. Hurst in London. I will definitely avail of your kindness if my stay here becomes intolerable.
So far, I confess to enjoying myself more than expected.
I am still not pleased with Charles for marrying a lady with such poor connections, but Jane is, without a doubt, a dear.
She has surprisingly good taste and also does not lord her new position over me.
We have spent many happy hours speaking of Town.
She and Charles intend to spend at least some of the Season in a hired house, and Jane is appropriately humble about her lack of experience.
If nothing else, she will look very well on Charles’s arm. I am not ashamed to admit that she is truly a beauty, and when dressed appropriately, she can only do credit to the Bingley name.
You asked about archery. Yes, I continue to shoot almost every day and am improving steadily. There is a great satisfaction in using one's muscles and form in such a way. It is marvelous exercise and far more interesting than dull things like walking for miles and miles through the mud.
I am referring, of course, to Jane’s sister, Elizabeth Bennet, who continues to wander here and there on her own two feet. It is odd, but she is a determined sort of lady and has never accepted any of my hints that learning to ride would be a better use of her time.
We do see rather a lot of the Bennets in general, and Mrs. Bennet in particular, visits every other day it seems. I make a point of finding some reason to depart when she arrives, as I find her vulgarity repulsive.
I must confess that Kitty and Lydia, our new sisters by marriage, are marginally better than they were some months ago. They are shooting with me regularly, and I find our conversations diverting.
We are having the Lucases for dinner, and I need to change.
With love,
Caroline
***
Darcy House
London
17th January, 1812
Bingley,
I hope this letter finds you and Mrs. Bingley and your sisters well. Georgiana and I are settled in London for the rest of the winter, and I am delighting in my sister’s company. She is developing into a very fine musician.
I must take this opportunity to thank you for your hospitality over these last months. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Netherfield Hall, and the company of you and your family.
I intend to spend much of the summer at Pemberley, and I would be pleased for you to visit along with Mrs. Bingley. If any of your wife’s sisters would care to join you, I would gladly host them as well.
Sincerely,
Fitzwilliam Darcy
***
Netherfield Park
27th January 1812
Darcy,
I hope someday you have the great pleasure of finding a wife whom you love as much as I love Jane. As you know, in the past I thought I was in love more than once, but I can see now that it was not true love, but ephemeral passion, nothing more.
Jane is obviously a very beautiful woman, but she is also calm and sensible and generous, and kind. The manse is thriving under her care.
I am very glad to hear that you and Miss Darcy are doing well.
I will ask Jane about Pemberley this summer. I am determined to do my duty regarding Netherfield, but think we can spend a few weeks in Derbyshire if my bride so desires it.
Warm regards,
Charles Bingley
***
Drawing Room
Longbourn
Monday, 16th February 1812
“It is far too cold for a walk, Lizzy,” Mrs. Bennet declared. “You would do much better to stay inside where it is cozy. Moreover, Jane may well visit this morning, and you would not wish to miss her!”
Elizabeth glanced at the clock before turning to her mother. “It is not yet ten o’clock, Mamma, and you know Jane and Charles generally do not rise early. I will not walk for long.”
“See that you do not,” Mrs. Bennet said fretfully. “It is very dull here now with both Jane and Mary gone, not to mention that you spend far more time with your father in the library than you do with me!”
Elizabeth blew out a slow breath and repeated patiently, “I will not be gone for long.”
She turned and left in haste. One of the maids was sweeping the vestibule, and immediately set the broom aside to assist Elizabeth in donning her pelisse, wrapping a scarf around her neck, placing a knitted cap on her head, and helping put boots on her feet.
Last of all, Elizabeth put on her warm woolen mittens.
She stepped out of the front door of Longbourn, descended the steps, and walked into the snowy grass, which crunched underfoot.
She looked back toward Longbourn and observed the frost decorating the windows.
A soft snow had fallen overnight, only an inch or two deep, piling up along the gray branches of trees and drifting in little dips and hollows.
The clouds had now cleared away, leaving the sky a pale blue, the weak winter sun setting the whole world glittering.
The narrow path that twisted and turned away from the stables into the woods was particularly inviting this morning, the snow smooth as silk across its surface, unmarred by any footprint or break.
Elizabeth pulled her muffler a little higher and set off at a rapid trot along that milky ribbon towards the woods.
The cold nipped at her nose and ached in her lungs, but her blood was singing through her veins, and her feet carried her swiftly under the trees.
The snow-hush was even closer here, the forest completely silent. No rabbit stirred from its burrow, no fox from its den. Even the bold chickadees in their nests made not a peep. No breath of air stirred to sigh through the trees or brush away their coverlets of snow.
Once out of sight of the house, Elizabeth stopped for a moment to pull in a deep breath of sparkling ice-crystal air, holding it until it warmed in her lungs, before sighing it out slowly in a billowing cloud.
Already her spirits were beginning to lift.
For reasons she did not quite understand, she had been suffering from melancholy these last weeks.
Not much could cut up her peace for long, not entails or nervous fits.
She had learned long ago to let the discord of the household wash over and around her, leaving her unshaken and her good humor intact.
So why was she downcast now? Mary and Jane had both made good marriages to kind, godly gentlemen who loved them and were financially secure enough that their wives would not be in want.
Mrs. Bennet, her fears of poverty assuaged by the marriage of two of her daughters and the securing of Longbourn in the family, was less prone to nervous attacks than she had been since Lydia's birth.
Indeed, Longbourn had never in Elizabeth's lifetime been so serene. Or so quiet.
It was odd. Neither Mary nor Jane was particularly noisy, especially in comparison to Kitty and Lydia, but Elizabeth had not realized how much life they had brought to the house.
She found herself listening for Jane's soothing tones in the drawing room, looking towards Mary's place at the table to solicit her studious younger sister's calm good sense.
She felt a pang of disappointment every time she remembered that they were no longer there.
Jane, at least, visited often in company with her husband, and the remaining Bennets were to be found nearly as often at Netherfield.
The care and affection of the newlyweds for one another were abundantly obvious, and Elizabeth was deeply pleased for her sister.
That Jane was blissfully happy there could be no doubt, and if anyone deserved matrimonial bliss, she did.
Mary's absence, exacerbated as it was by distance, was harder to bear.
Short letters, hastily penned in fleeting moments, were a poor substitute for her daily companionship.
She had sat most often with their father, a habit that Elizabeth had, to a degree, taken up.
It was not entirely a satisfactory arrangement.
Mr. Bennet would occasionally play chess, or discuss books that they had read, but he tended to be, from both habit and pain, rather reticent, and he preferred reading or dozing to conversation.
As for Mrs. Bennet, and Lydia, and Kitty …
well, Elizabeth loved them all dearly, of course, as her mother and sisters, but as far as common ground, there was very little.
The younger girls were distinctly shallow in temperament and interests, a trait that they had unarguably inherited from their mother.
Elizabeth liked assemblies quite well, but she could take only so much rapturous discussion of dances, and men, and dresses, and ribbons before she found longing for a more intellectually stimulating discussion.
She sighed again and set off through the woods.
For some minutes the only sound was the crunching of her boots in the snow before somewhere faint and far off an intrepid bird trilled, its feathers no doubt fluffed to near-perfect roundness against the cold.
As though this were some signal, the woods began to wake, other birds chirping and tweeting, a single squirrel scrambling down a tree to hang headfirst and stare at Elizabeth as she passed.
She wondered where Mr. Darcy was and what he was doing.
Had it snowed in London too? Was he looking out his window on a world rimed in white?
Perhaps snow was not special to him, and he was bent over work or spending time with his sister.
Elizabeth wondered if he ever thought of Hertfordshire or if he might visit again in the future.
She hoped he would. It was a true delight to match wits in conversation with someone who was her equal.
Aside from their first unfortunate interaction at the assembly, he had never condescended to her or reveled in his superiority for being a wealthy, well-connected man.
A slender beam of cool sunlight danced across her eyelashes and made her blink, and Elizabeth stopped and looked up.
Here the heavy-needled fir boughs and bare deciduous branches separated to make a little clearing and allow a glimpse of the sky above.
She stood still for a bit, admiring the arch of clear blue, losing herself in the moment.
A wisp of cloud crossed the sun. Elizabeth pulled her pelisse more tightly about her shoulders and resumed her walk.
She was, she realized, envious of Jane and Mary, and she feared that she would not be so fortunate as to find a compatible husband.
There was a dearth of young men; not only in Meryton but all throughout England, her best and brightest on the Continent facing the Corsican tyrant.
Still, that was not an insurmountable obstacle.
She went to London with her aunt and uncle Gardiner sometimes.
More rarely, strangers wandered through Meryton.
It was not impossible that Elizabeth would meet an eligible gentleman in the next few years.
The problem was that she needed more than mere eligibility in a spouse.
Her own parents were ill-suited; her father was intelligent, lazy, and cynical, and her mother was beautiful and empty-headed.
Elizabeth would be miserable in an unequal marriage.
She was, she knew, clever, and she needed a clever husband who could match her own quickness, but such men were few and far between.
Charles Bingley and William Collins were excellent men, and she was glad to have them as brothers.
She was thankful that Mary and Jane were happy with their husbands.
In their positions, she would not be. What a dreadful thing it would be to find time spent with one’s mate to be onerous or tiresome, one too clever and the other too dull.
Elizabeth knew what sort of a marriage such a match made, and she wanted no part of it for herself.
She wanted someone whom she could debate with, who would delight in an exchange of ideas. Someone like Mr. Darcy.
Elizabeth shook her head to chase that thought away. Mr. Darcy was in Town, where he would meet and marry some refined London lady. He was a friend, that was all. That was all he could ever be.