Chapter 11
Elizabeth
Mr. Collins proposed on a Wednesday morning, four days after the ball, between the rose bed and the kitchen garden, with the formal gravity of a man delivering a sermon and the perception of one of the pews.
He had spent the days since the ball following Elizabeth through the house with renewed purpose.
He sat beside her at meals. He complimented her reading with the specific observation that "reading is an admirable occupation for a clergyman's wife," which was less a compliment than a list of duties.
Truffles did not like him. She gave him a wide berth and grunted when he came too close, which Elizabeth interpreted as the pig's version of tolerating a bad smell.
Elizabeth was checking the state of the autumn cabbages. She was kneeling in the dirt with her gloves on and Truffles rooting nearby when Collins materialised on the garden path, his hands clasped behind his back, his expression arranged into what he apparently believed was tenderness.
"My dear Miss Elizabeth," he began, positioning himself in front of her with the care of an actor hitting his mark, "almost as soon as I entered the house, I singled you out as the companion of my future life."
Elizabeth stood up. She brushed dirt from her knees. She opened her mouth to interrupt. Collins held up a hand.
"Allow me to enumerate my reasons. First, I think it a right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances to set the example of matrimony in his parish.
Second, I am convinced it will add very greatly to my happiness.
And third, it is the particular advice of the very noble lady whom I have the honour of calling patroness. "
"Mr. Collins —"
"Lady Catherine de Bourgh. You may have heard the name.
She is of the most extraordinary condescension and has specifically suggested that I find a wife.
She said, 'Mr. Collins, you must marry. Choose properly, choose a gentlewoman, and let her be an active, useful sort of person.
' And I thought at once of you, Miss Elizabeth. "
He said this as though being described as "an active, useful sort of person" by a woman one had never met was the highest form of romantic praise. Elizabeth wondered, briefly, if Lady Catherine selected wives the way one selected horses: by their gait and their capacity for work.
"Mr. Collins, I am honoured, but —"
"You are thinking of your small fortune. I assure you, I shall never reproach you for it. And the matter of the entail is quite settled. When your father dies, this estate becomes mine, and I wish to assure you that I would never turn your mother and sisters out of doors."
He said this as though it were a gift. As though the fact that he would not evict her family from their home was a kindness rather than basic decency.
He was smiling. He was radiating the benevolent satisfaction of a man who believed he was being extraordinarily generous and expected a proportional response.
"Mr. Collins, I must decline."
The smile held. It held the way a portrait holds its expression: fixed, painted, unaffected by the events occurring in front of it.
"You are too modest. It is natural for a young lady to refuse the man who she secretly means to accept."
"I do not secretly mean to accept."
"Your feelings do you credit. Allow me to assure you that my situation in life, my connections with the family of de Bourgh, and my relationship to your own family make me a most eligible match."
He stepped closer. Elizabeth stepped back. Her heel caught the edge of the cabbage row. He stepped closer again. He was reaching for her hand. His fingers were pale and slightly damp and she did not want them touching her.
"When I next speak to you on this subject," he said, "I shall hope to receive a more favourable answer."
"Mr. Collins, I am perfectly serious. I am not the sort of woman who —"
Truffles, who had been rooting in the turned earth near the kitchen garden wall, lifted her head. Her ears pricked. She looked at Collins, then at Elizabeth, and something in Elizabeth's posture or her voice or her scent communicated distress with a clarity that required no words.
The pig charged.
She covered the distance between the kitchen garden and Mr. Collins before Elizabeth could draw a breath, and she hit his ankle at full speed with the unerring aim of a creature who knew exactly where she was going.
Collins yelped. He stumbled sideways. His foot caught on the edge of the flower bed and he went backward into the box hedge with a crash that sent leaves flying.
He sat in the hedge, his dignity in ruins, his mouth opening and closing without sound.
A box leaf drifted down and settled on his head.
Another caught in the collar of his coat.
His stockings were splashed with mud from the flower bed, and one shoe had come off and was lying on its side in the turned earth like a small, defeated ship.
Truffles stood between him and Elizabeth with her ears flat and her hooves planted, making a low, rumbling sound that Elizabeth had never heard before. A warning. A line drawn in the dirt.
Elizabeth pressed her lips together very hard.
She did not laugh. She did not laugh because laughing at Mr. Collins, who was sitting in a hedge with box leaves in his hair and a pig standing guard over the woman who had refused him, would have been unkind, and Elizabeth was many things but she was not unkind.
She did not laugh. She pressed her lips together so hard they went white, and she did not laugh.
"The pig," Collins said, from inside the hedge. His voice had risen half an octave. "The pig has attacked me."
"She is protective. I apologise. But my answer remains no, Mr. Collins."
"Lady Catherine will be most displeased."
"Lady Catherine was not being proposed to."
She collected Truffles, who was still rumbling, and walked inside. She made it through the kitchen, up the back stairs, along the corridor, and into her bedroom. She closed the door. She sat on the bed. Truffles was warm and solid in her arms, grunting with the satisfaction of a job well done.
The laughter broke free. Silent and helpless, her shoulders shaking, her face buried in the pig's neck.
She laughed until her ribs ached. She laughed until Truffles squirmed.
She laughed until she could breathe again, and then she sat with the pig in her lap and looked at the ceiling and thought: If I am going to refuse every man who proposes to me, I should at least train the pig to wait for a signal.
The aftermath was predictable. Mrs. Bennet had hysterics.
She wept into her handkerchief. She raged.
She declared that Elizabeth was the most ungrateful, headstrong girl in England, and that the pig was a menace that should have been drowned at birth, and that they would all die in poverty in a ditch because Elizabeth was too proud to accept a perfectly respectable man who would have saved them all from ruin.
"Mr. Collins has connections! He has Lady Catherine's favour! He has a good living and a house with two parlours! And you refuse him because of pride!"
"I refuse him because I do not love him, Mamma."
"Love! What has love to do with it?"
Everything, Elizabeth thought. Nothing, Elizabeth thought. She did not know which answer was correct.
Mrs. Bennet cornered Mr. Bennet in his library. Elizabeth could hear them through the door, her mother's voice rising and her father's replies too low to catch. She stood in the corridor with Truffles at her ankle and waited.
Mr. Bennet called her in. He sat behind his desk with his spectacles on and his expression unreadable and looked at her for a long moment before he spoke.
"An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do."
Elizabeth's eyes stung. She blinked. "Thank you, Papa."
"Do not thank me. I am simply being honest about which daughter I prefer." He paused. He took off his spectacles and polished them on his sleeve. "You did the right thing, Lizzy. Though I confess the pig's contribution was a bonus I had not anticipated."
Collins left Longbourn two days later, his trunk repacked and his dignity imperfectly restored.
He mentioned Lady Catherine seven times during breakfast on his last morning, as though invoking her name could repair the damage to his self-regard.
He did not look at Elizabeth. He did not look at Truffles.
He walked to the waiting carriage with the careful posture of a man who expected to be charged from behind at any moment.
Charlotte accepted him within the week.
She came to Longbourn to tell Elizabeth herself. They sat in the parlour with the door closed and the fire low, and Charlotte folded her hands in her lap and looked at Elizabeth with the steady, practical gaze that had never failed her.
"He is not a bad man, Lizzy. He will provide a comfortable home."
"You used the word 'comfortable' three times in that sentence."
"Because it is a comfortable situation."
"Do you love him?"
Charlotte's pause was the only answer Elizabeth needed.
It lasted two seconds. It contained twenty-seven years of arithmetic: the cost of ribbons, the price of candles, the dwindling pile of coins in her father's desk.
Charlotte was twenty-seven. She had no fortune.
She had no beauty that would arrest a man across a room.
She had intelligence and practicality and a clear-eyed understanding of what the world offered women like her, and what it did not.
"I am not romantic," Charlotte said. "I never was. I ask only a comfortable home. And considering Mr. Collins's character, his connections, and his situation in life, I am convinced that my chance of happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast on entering the marriage state."
"I hope you will visit me at Hunsford," Charlotte said, when she stood to go.
"Of course I will."
Charlotte smiled. It was her real smile, the one that softened the practical lines of her face. "I shall have a garden. Mr. Collins says the garden at Hunsford is very well situated. I intend to grow vegetables."
"Charlotte Lucas, the vicar's wife, growing vegetables in Kent."
"Charlotte Collins," Charlotte corrected, gently.
The name landed like a stone in water. Charlotte Collins. Elizabeth pressed her lips together and nodded and walked Charlotte to the door.
That evening, Truffles stole a turnip from the kitchen and ate it under Mr. Bennet's desk while he pretended not to notice.
Elizabeth sat in the garden in the autumn dusk and thought about Charlotte's real smile and Charlotte's garden and the word comfortable repeated like a prayer, and then she thought, unbidden and unwelcome, about Darcy's hand on Truffles' back in the library at Netherfield, and she pushed the thought away and went inside and held her pig and did not think about it again.
She thought about it again.
She scratched Truffles behind the ear. The pig sighed and pressed closer.
"You and I," Elizabeth said, "will be just fine."
The pig grunted. It sounded like agreement. It sounded like enough.