Chapter 3
ELIZABETH
It happened on a Tuesday.
Elizabeth would remember this detail later with the peculiar precision that shock bestows on irrelevant facts. Tuesday. The fifth of April. Lamb for dinner. Charlotte had worn her grey muslin. The clock on the parlour mantelpiece had stopped at ten past three and no one had wound it.
The evening at Rosings had been unremarkable — Lady Catherine's usual interrogations, Collins's usual worship, Darcy's usual watching from his position by the fire.
Colonel Fitzwilliam had been absent, called to the garrison at Maidstone on regimental business — a half-day's ride, and without his easy conversation to act as a buffer, Elizabeth had found herself more exposed than usual to Darcy's scrutiny.
Twice during dinner their eyes had met and held for a beat too long, and twice she had looked away first, which annoyed her, because Elizabeth Bennet did not look away first. It was not in her constitution.
But there was something different about Darcy tonight.
A tension in the set of his shoulders, a sharpness in his attention that went beyond his customary observation.
When she had risen from the dinner table, his gaze had followed her with an intensity that felt less like interest and more like alarm — as though he were watching someone walk toward a cliff edge and debating whether to call out.
She had not understood it then. She would understand it later.
The carriage brought them home at half past nine.
Collins had been quiet during the ride — unusual for him, and Elizabeth had marked it without attaching significance.
He entered the parsonage first, went directly to his study, and closed the door.
Charlotte exchanged a glance with Elizabeth that was difficult to read in the dim hallway — relief, perhaps, or its opposite.
They settled in the parlour. Charlotte took up her mending.
Elizabeth opened a book — Johnson's Rasselas, which Fitzwilliam had lent her — and tried to read.
The words swam. She kept seeing Darcy's face across the dinner table, that expression of urgent attention, the way his hand had tightened on the stem of his wine glass when Lady Catherine had asked Elizabeth about her family's connections.
An hour passed. Charlotte's needle whispered through fabric. The fire cracked and settled. From the study came the scratch of Collins's pen, and then silence, and then the sound of his chair pushing back.
He appeared in the doorway. Elizabeth looked up from her book and registered several things simultaneously: his face was flushed, his cravat was loosened, and his eyes — his small, damp eyes — were fixed on her with an expression she had never seen in them before.
Not the usual simpering admiration. Something harder. Something that had edges.
"Cousin Elizabeth." His voice was different too — thicker, slower, as though the words were being squeezed through something. "I wish to speak with you about your conduct this evening."
Elizabeth set down her book. "My conduct, Mr. Collins?"
"Your behaviour at Rosings." He stepped into the room.
Behind him, the study door stood open, and Elizabeth could see the decanter on his desk — sherry, half-empty, though it had been full that morning.
"Your manner toward Lady Catherine was impertinent.
Your manner toward Mr. Darcy was" — he searched for the word, his mouth working — "familiar. "
"I was civil to everyone present, Mr. Collins. I fail to see—"
"Do not contradict me." The words came out louder than the room could hold. Charlotte's needle stopped.
Elizabeth sat very still. She had spent her life reading people — it was her sharpest skill, the instrument she played with far more precision than the pianoforte — and what she was reading now in Collins's face sent a cold thread of fear through her stomach.
This was not bluster. This was not Collins the pompous, Collins the ridiculous, Collins the fool.
This was a man who had been drinking alone for an hour and had worked himself into something that the sherry had not created but had freed.
"Mr. Collins," Charlotte said from her chair, her voice carefully neutral. "Perhaps we might discuss this in the morning, when—"
"I am not speaking to you." He did not look at his wife. His eyes stayed on Elizabeth. "I have watched you, Cousin. I have watched the way you look at him. The way you speak to him. The way you encourage his attentions."
"I have encouraged nothing—"
"Do you think me blind?" He advanced. Two steps.
His shadow fell across her lap, blocking the firelight.
He smelled of sherry and something sour beneath it — sweat, stale and sharp.
"Do you think I cannot see what passes between you?
You have spent every evening at Rosings casting your lures at Lady Catherine's nephew, making a spectacle of yourself, and by extension making a spectacle of me. I will not have it."
Elizabeth stood. The movement was instinctive — she would not sit while he stood over her, would not give him the advantage of height. They were nearly the same stature, Collins slightly taller but thickened with drink and bad posture. She held his gaze.
"Mr. Collins, you are mistaken. Mr. Darcy and I have exchanged nothing beyond common civility. Your imagination has supplied what reality has not."
The blow came without warning.
His open hand struck the left side of her face with a force that snapped her head sideways and sent her stumbling into the chair.
She heard the impact before she felt it — a flat, meaty sound, like a hand slapping a table — and then the pain arrived, bright and immediate, filling her cheekbone and radiating outward to her temple and jaw. Her vision blurred. She tasted copper.
Charlotte screamed. A short, sharp sound, cut off almost as soon as it began.
Elizabeth caught herself on the chair arm.
Her hand went to her face and came away clean — no blood, not yet — but the skin was already tightening with heat, the bruise building beneath the surface.
She turned to face Collins and saw him breathing hard, his hand still raised, his expression a mixture of righteous fury and something else — a flicker, there and gone, that might have been shock at what he had just done.
It lasted half a second. Then it was gone, replaced by the harder thing.
"You will apologise to Lady Catherine for your behaviour," he said, his voice shaking but determined. "And you will cease your shameful pursuit of Mr. Darcy. I will not have my household disgraced."
"You have just struck a woman in your own parlour, Mr. Collins.
" Elizabeth's voice was steadier than she felt.
The pain in her face was a bright, singing thing, but beneath it something else was building — a cold fury that started in her spine and spread outward, ice behind the fire.
"I would suggest that the disgrace is entirely your own. "
The second blow was harder. Closed fist this time, to the same cheek, and Elizabeth went down. Her knees hit the floor. The carpet was threadbare — she could feel the boards beneath it — and her hands splayed flat to catch herself, and the world tilted and rang.
"Stop it!" Charlotte was on her feet, her mending fallen to the floor, her face white. "William, stop this at once!"
Collins rounded on his wife. "You will be silent. This is a matter between myself and my cousin, and you will not—"
"She is my friend, and you are hurting her!"
"She has brought it upon herself with her wanton behaviour! I will not be mocked, do you hear me? I will not be made a cuckold in my own parish, in the very presence of my patroness—"
He was moving toward Charlotte now. Elizabeth, on her hands and knees, saw the shift in his body — the way his shoulders squared, the way his weight transferred forward.
She had seen dogs do this before a lunge.
The observation was clear and cold and arrived from a great distance, as though the part of her mind that analysed and calculated had detached from the part that was kneeling on a carpet tasting its own blood.
Charlotte did not retreat. She stood her ground with her hands at her sides and her chin raised, and Elizabeth saw in her friend's face something she had not seen in months — the Charlotte she remembered from Hertfordshire, clear-eyed and unbowed.
Collins's hand closed around Charlotte's arm. He wrenched her toward him. Charlotte cried out — a sound of pain, not fear — and Elizabeth thought: He has done this before. This is not new. This is the thing she has not told me.
She got to her feet. The room swayed, steadied.
On the mantelpiece, beside the clock that had stopped at ten past three, stood a marble paperweight — a decorative sphere the size of a man's fist, given to Collins by Lady Catherine as a gift upon his ordination.
Elizabeth had seen it every day for a fortnight without ever really noticing it.
She noticed it now.
Collins had Charlotte by both arms. He was shaking her, his face inches from hers, his voice a continuous stream of invective that had ceased to form recognisable words. Charlotte's head snapped back and forth with each shake, her eyes wide, her mouth open.
Elizabeth picked up the paperweight. It was heavier than she expected — dense, cold marble, smooth against her palm. She crossed the room in three steps.
"Let her go," she said.
Collins turned. His eyes found the paperweight in her hand and something changed in his face — not fear but a sharp, sudden rage, the fury of a small man confronted with resistance where he expected submission.
He released Charlotte and came at Elizabeth. She raised the paperweight but her arm would not swing — some deep, paralysing hesitation locked her shoulder, her elbow, her wrist — and Collins's hand closed around her forearm and wrenched it down.
The marble slipped from her fingers. Charlotte caught it before it hit the floor — one fluid motion, as though she had been waiting for exactly this — and swung.
The sound was nothing like Elizabeth had imagined.
Not the dramatic crack of novels and stage plays but something duller and wetter — a dense, compressed thud, like a mallet striking a turnip.
Collins's eyes went blank. His mouth opened but no sound came out.
He stood for one impossibly long moment, swaying, his hands still raised as though reaching for something that had already moved beyond his grasp. Then his knees folded and he went down.
The paperweight rolled from Charlotte's hand and came to rest against the leg of the table. It left a dark smear on the carpet.
Silence.
Elizabeth looked at Collins on the floor.
He lay on his side, one arm bent beneath him at an angle that did not look natural.
His eyes were closed. His mouth was open.
A thin line of dark blood traced a path from behind his left ear across his jaw and dripped, steadily, onto the carpet, where it pooled in the threadbare weave like water finding a crack.
She looked at Charlotte. Her friend stood perfectly still, her hands at her sides, her face the colour of candle wax.
She was staring at her husband's body with an expression that Elizabeth would remember for the rest of her life — not horror, not grief, not triumph, but a kind of blank, exhausted recognition, as though she had always known this moment would arrive and had merely been waiting for it to choose its evening.
"Charlotte," Elizabeth whispered.
Charlotte did not respond. She continued to stare at the body on the floor. The blood continued to pool. The clock on the mantelpiece continued not to tick.
Elizabeth knelt beside Collins. She had seen her father do this once, years ago, when a tenant had collapsed in the lane — two fingers pressed to the throat, just below the jaw, waiting for the faint drumbeat that meant life.
She pressed her fingers there now and held them. Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty.
Nothing.
She looked up at Charlotte. "He's dead."
The words landed in the silent room like stones dropped into deep water.
Charlotte blinked once, slowly, and then her legs gave way and she sank to the floor beside Elizabeth, and the two women knelt together on the bloody carpet beside the body of William Collins, and neither of them moved, and neither of them spoke, and the night pressed in through the dark windows of the parsonage like something that had been waiting outside the glass for a very long time.