Chapter 17
Elizabeth
The kitchen was empty.
Elizabeth knew it the moment she stepped through the door.
The room had a quality of absence, the particular stillness of a space that should contain a living creature and did not.
The fire was low. The turnip lay on the flagstones, untouched.
The blanket Elizabeth had folded in the corner near the hearth was undisturbed.
The door to the yard was open.
"Truffles?"
No answering squeal. No scrabbling of hooves. No small pink shape trotting toward her with the proprietary urgency of a pig who considered any separation longer than ten minutes a personal affront.
"Truffles!"
She checked behind the flour barrel. She checked under the table. She checked the pantry, where Truffles sometimes went to investigate the apples on the lower shelf. She checked the scullery and the passage to the cellar and the cupboard where the root vegetables were stored.
Nothing. The kitchen was empty, and the emptiness was wrong.
"Hill? Where is Truffles?"
Hill's face told her everything. The housekeeper was standing in the corridor, her apron twisted in her hands, her expression a mixture of guilt and bewilderment that Elizabeth had never seen on that steady, dependable face.
"I do not know, Miss Lizzy. I checked at the quarter hour, and she was sleeping by the hearth. Sound asleep, she was. When I came back, the door was open and she was gone."
"The door was latched. I latched it myself."
"I know, miss. I cannot explain it. I thought perhaps she had gone to the garden, but I looked and she was not there. I looked in the yard and the stable and the henhouse. She is not anywhere I can find."
Elizabeth stood very still. The kitchen smelled of bread and ash and the faint, familiar mustiness of pig.
The turnip on the floor was whole and untouched.
Truffles never left a turnip untouched. Truffles regarded turnips the way Mrs. Bennet regarded gossip: as essential sustenance, to be consumed immediately and in its entirety.
Something was wrong. This was not an escape. Truffles escaped with purpose. She escaped toward Darcy, toward Elizabeth, toward food. She did not escape and leave a turnip behind.
"The door was not unlatched by a pig," Elizabeth said.
Hill said nothing. Her eyes darted to the corridor. To the parlour. To wherever Mrs. Bennet was.
Elizabeth did not have time to follow that thought. She was already moving.
She searched the garden first. She checked the flower beds, the shrubbery, the patch of turned earth near the kitchen garden wall where Truffles liked to root.
She called the pig's name until the sound of her own voice became strange to her, a hollow, repeated thing that bounced off the walls and the hedges and came back empty.
She searched the lane. She walked the half-mile to the crossroads, looking in every ditch and under every hedge. The November afternoon was grey and the wind had a bite to it, and she thought about Truffles' size, how small she still was, how the cold would find the thin places in a piglet's skin.
Jane came out to help. She had been upstairs writing to Charlotte and came down to find Elizabeth in the yard, muddy and wild-eyed, and she did not ask questions. She put on her pelisse and her boots and she walked beside Elizabeth to Meryton.
They asked everyone. The baker, who had not seen a pig.
The draper, who had not seen a pig. Mrs. Phillips, who had not seen a pig but had heard about the new curtains at Netherfield and would Elizabeth like to hear about them.
The officers in the high street, who had not seen a pig but offered to keep watch.
Mr. Denny, who said he would ask at the barracks.
No Truffles. Not in Meryton, not on the road between Meryton and Longbourn, not at Mr. Hobbs's farm where she had been born, not at Lucas Lodge, not at the church.
Mr. Bennet sent two servants to check the tenant farms to the south.
He came out of his library to do it, which told Elizabeth more about the severity of the situation than any words could have.
Mr. Bennet did not leave his library for trifles.
He did not leave his library for Mrs. Bennet's nerves or Lydia's tantrums or the arrival of guests.
He left his library for things that mattered, and the pig, Elizabeth understood now, mattered.
He stood in the hallway and gave instructions with the quiet competence of a man who did not often exercise authority but had not forgotten how.
"Thomas, check the Hobbs farm and the fields to the south.
James, take the road toward Lucas Lodge and ask at every house.
If you see any carts coming from the Longbourn direction, stop them. "
He looked at Elizabeth. His expression was the one he reserved for her: fond, dry, and slightly worried.
"We will find her, Lizzy."
"Yes, Papa."
She did not believe it. She wanted to believe it. The wanting and the not believing sat side by side in her chest and neither one would yield.
Kitty and Lydia were recruited. Lydia complained that searching for a pig was beneath her dignity, a claim that Elizabeth did not have the patience to dispute. Kitty coughed. They were sent to check the north fields and the copse behind the orchard.
"I do not see why I should tramp through fields for a pig," Lydia said, pulling on her boots with the aggrieved air of a woman being asked to do manual labour. "If the pig wished to stay, it would have stayed."
"The pig did not leave of her own will," Elizabeth said.
Something in her voice made Lydia look up. The complaint died on her lips. She went out without another word.
Mary, who had not been asked to help, offered a quotation from Fordyce about the attachments we form with God's creatures and the grief that attends their loss.
Elizabeth looked at her sister, who was standing in the corridor with her book in her hands and her expression earnest and her contribution entirely useless, and she said, "Thank you, Mary. "
Mary blinked. Elizabeth was not sure she had ever thanked Mary for a Fordyce quotation before. The novelty of it sent Mary back to the parlour in a state of visible confusion.
Kitty returned within the hour, red-nosed and coughing. She had found nothing in the north fields or the copse. She had also lost Lydia.
"She said she was going to ask in the village," Kitty said, picking at the mud on her boots. "She walked toward Meryton. I called after her but she would not wait."
Elizabeth did not have the attention to spare for Lydia's dereliction. "If she asks at the shops, that is something."
"She was not walking toward the shops," Kitty said. She said it quietly, the way Kitty said most things, and Elizabeth was already reaching for her bonnet and did not hear it.
Elizabeth expanded the search. She walked two miles in every direction.
She checked farms she had never visited, introducing herself to startled farmers' wives and asking if they had seen a small pig, pink, with floppy ears.
She stopped carts on the road. She climbed stiles and peered over walls and looked in barns that smelled of hay and cattle and the cold November air.
She found a brown pig in a field near the Haye Park road. Her heart leapt. She climbed the fence. The pig looked at her with the incurious expression of a creature that weighed fourteen stone and had never been carried in a pelisse.
It was not Truffles. It was not even close to Truffles.
She walked on. Her boots were heavy with mud. Her voice was going hoarse from calling. The light was fading and the cold was settling in, the kind of November cold that seeped through wool and found the skin beneath.
Elizabeth thought about Truffles alone in the dark.
Small and frightened. She thought about foxes.
About ditches filled with cold water. About farmers who would see a stray pig as property, or as dinner.
She thought about the way Truffles pressed against her at night, a warm weight at the foot of the bed, her breathing slow and even, her trust absolute.
She thought about the open door. The untouched turnip. Hill's eyes darting toward the parlour.
A thought formed. She did not want it. She pushed it away and it came back. Someone had opened that door. Someone who did not want the pig in this house.
She would deal with that later. Now she needed to find Truffles.
Elizabeth lit the lantern she had taken from the stable and kept walking. The lane was black beyond the lantern's reach. The hedgerows were shapes against the sky. An owl called from the elm at the corner of the Longbourn fields, and the sound was lonely and vast and made the dark feel larger.
She walked the Meryton road again. She walked the path toward Lucas Lodge. She walked the lane that led to the Netherfield grounds and stood at the gate and called the pig's name and heard nothing but the wind and the distant bark of a farm dog.
Jane found her on the stile at the end of the Longbourn lane, sitting in the dark with the lantern at her feet and tears running down her face.
"Lizzy. Come inside. You will catch cold."
"I cannot come inside. She is out there somewhere."
"The servants will continue looking."
"I should be looking."
"You have been looking for five hours." Jane sat beside her on the stile. She put her arm around Elizabeth's shoulders. The warmth of Jane's body was a shock against the cold. "We will find her."
"What if we do not?"
Elizabeth's voice broke. The sound surprised her. She had been holding herself together with the fierce, brittle concentration of a person who believes that falling apart will make the situation real, and the breaking of her voice made it real, and once it was real she could not stop it.
She pressed her face against Jane's shoulder and cried.
Not the quiet, dignified crying of a woman in a novel.
The ugly, helpless kind, with sounds and shaking and a complete loss of the composure she had been maintaining for five hours.
She cried because Truffles was gone and the night was cold and she could not do anything about either of those things.
Truffles was not just a pig. Truffles was the animal who slept at the foot of her bed and followed her through the village and escaped every enclosure because being near Elizabeth was worth more than food or comfort or safety.
Truffles was the creature who had never judged her, never found her wanting, never decided she was not handsome enough.
Truffles was the only one who had seen Darcy clearly from the beginning. And now she was gone.
The thought came and Elizabeth let it come, because she was too tired to push anything away.
Darcy had held the pig at the ball. Darcy had talked to the pig in the library.
Darcy had fed the pig bread crusts and scratched her ears and let her sleep beside his chair.
And Truffles had loved him for it, completely and without reservation, and Elizabeth had called the pig's judgment foolish, and now the pig was gone and the judgment did not feel foolish at all.
It felt like the truest thing in the world, and Elizabeth had been too proud to see it.
She wiped her face. She stood up. She picked up the lantern.
"I am going to look again."
"Lizzy —"
"I am going to look until I find her or until the sun comes up. Whichever comes first."
Jane did not argue. Jane stood up and brushed the frost from her pelisse and said, "Then I will come with you."
"You do not have to."
"I know."
They walked into the dark together. The lantern made a small circle of gold on the road, and beyond the circle was nothing, just black fields and black hedges and the cold wind moving through the bare trees.
They walked the lane toward Meryton for the second time.
They walked the path that skirted the Longbourn fields.
They called the pig's name into the dark, and the dark gave nothing back.
Elizabeth thought about the first night she had brought Truffles home.
The pig had been so small she fit in two cupped hands.
She had wrapped the piglet in her green pelisse, the good one, and carried her against her chest, and the pig had squealed the whole way and then gone silent against Elizabeth's heartbeat, and Elizabeth had looked down at the small, warm, trembling thing in her arms and thought: You are mine now, and I will keep you safe.
She had promised. She had not said the words aloud, because one did not make promises to pigs, but the promise had been there, implicit in every turnip and every scratched ear and every night she had slept with the pig at the foot of her bed. You are mine. I will keep you safe.
She had broken the promise. She had left Truffles in the kitchen with a latched door that someone had unlatched, and she had gone for a walk, and the pig was gone, and the promise was broken, and Elizabeth could not breathe for the weight of it.
They searched for another hour. The lantern oil burned low. Jane's hands were blue with cold. Elizabeth's feet were numb in her boots and her throat was raw and her hope was down to the thin, stubborn thread that was all she had left.
At midnight, Jane took her arm and steered her home.
Elizabeth went because her body was failing, not because her will had.
She walked through the Longbourn door and up the stairs and into her bedroom and she looked at the folded blanket at the foot of her bed where Truffles should have been sleeping, and the blanket was flat and cold and empty.
She did not undress. She did not remove her boots. She sat on the edge of the bed with the lantern on the floor and she stared at the empty blanket and she thought: I will find you. I will find you if I have to walk every road in Hertfordshire. I will find you.
She did not sleep. She waited for the first grey light of dawn, and then she went out again.