CHAPTER 1 HEAVEN’S HIGH HORSE
A woman with four sisters and an ambitious mother learns three things before she is twenty: how to overhear a conversation without appearing to, how to smile without meaning it, and how to sit still while a man she hardly knew pointed at her like a painting he was considering purchasing.
Elizabeth Bennet had mastered the first two by the age of nineteen. Tonight, however, was testing the third.
Her father’s cousin, Mr. Collins, had trapped a stranger against the faded wall of the Meryton Assembly room close to a candle whose sconce was overflowing.
“Your gracious aunt, herself, the honorable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, advised me,” Collins pronounced at a volume adequate for a large cathedral, “that the proper method of making amends for inheriting my fair cousins’ home is to marry one of them.
What better way exists to secure their future than offering my hand, protection, and income to one of these unfortunates who might otherwise be turned out of their homes?
Lady Catherine was most particular upon this point. ”
Here, he gestured broadly at Elizabeth and her three younger sisters sitting in a row, as if they were items at a country auction.
“Is he pointing at us?” Kitty whispered while Lydia snorted wetly.
“Surely, not the faded wallpaper,” Mary said, with the grimness of a woman who had already resigned herself to the indignities of the evening.
The stranger Mr. Collins addressed was Mr. Darcy of Pemberley, whom Mama had identified before supper in breathless detail: ten thousand a year, estate in Derbyshire, unmarried.
Elizabeth kept her hands folded and her eyes fixed on the dance floor where their eldest sister, Jane, moved through a country dance with five-thousand-a-year Mr. Bingley.
Mama had designs on him for her prettiest daughter, while telling Mr. Collins he was free to choose any of her lesser daughters.
And Mr. Collins, from the looks of it, was appealing to his patroness’s nephew.
“Your friend, Mr. Bingley, is of course, dancing with the eldest, who is the picture of beauty,” Collins proclaimed as if he were a royal herald.
“But you see the others? Four remaining, all of serviceable age. Lady Catherine was most specific: I am to select the one who will best complement my position. I wonder, sir—as Her Ladyship is your august aunt—might I prevail upon your opinion?”
Darcy’s gaze came down from the ceiling and passed briefly over the row of chairs. Not warmly. Not unkindly. Rather, in the manner of a man completing a task that had been asked of him and finding nothing that required further attention.
“They are none of them handsome enough to distinguish one from another,” he said. “Choose whichever one you find tolerable.”
His pronouncement landed like a cannonball in the punch bowl. Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed. Tall. Dark. A face composed of angles and controlled displeasure, as though the entire assembly had been designed to inconvenience him personally.
Collins made the sound of a man receiving stone tablets on a mount. “Just so. Just so. Though perhaps—the second one, do you think? The one with the intelligent and rather fine eyes, I believe Lady Catherine would approve of her figure.”
“Do as you wish,” Darcy said. The conversation, from his perspective, was evidently concluded.
“Well,” said Lydia, not bothering to lower her voice, “I think Mr. Darcy is perfectly horrid.”
“Hush,” Elizabeth said, surprised by how steady her voice sounded.
“He didn’t even have the decency to look at you properly,” Lydia retorted.
“Thank heavens for small mercies,” she muttered.
Kitty giggled, then stopped when she caught Elizabeth’s glare.
Mary leaned forward. “Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity—”
“Thank you, Mary.”
“—to what we would have others think of us.”
Darcy turned toward the punch bowl, but Collins strode briskly toward Elizabeth, rubbing his hands as if he had received a glowing testimonial and meant to act upon it.
“Cousin Elizabeth!” he announced grandly. “Mr. Darcy was kind enough to commend you particularly. I have therefore determined to solicit your hand for the next set. I trust you will not refuse?”
No lady refused a public dance at an assembly without consequences, and Mrs. Bennet’s wrath, should the story reach her, would be of the sustained and vocally expressed variety commensurate with her notorious nerves.
“Mr. Collins,” she said, rising and taking his offered hand, “you are very kind.”
Collins took his position opposite her, already sweating profusely from his conversation, no doubt. The music began—a lively country dance that would have been enjoyable if Collins had possessed the slightest sense of rhythm or the ability to remain silent for more than eight bars.
“I must confess, Cousin Elizabeth, that I did not choose to dance with you on impulse.” Collins patted her hand for the promenade. “I have given the matter considerable thought. Indeed, from the very hour of my arrival at Longbourn, I perceived in you a disposition most suited to my requirements.”
They separated for the turnabout. Eight bars of blessed silence while the music carried them through the pattern, and Elizabeth moved through the familiar steps, counting the minutes she had to endure.
The figure returned her to Collins, who resumed mid-thought, “Lady Catherine has often observed that the selection of a wife is the most consequential decision a clergyman can make, second only to the selection of his patron. As I have been fortunate in the latter, I mean to be equally judicious in the former.”
He squeezed her hand as if he considered the matter already settled.
“My living at Hunsford is a comfortable one—two thousand a year, with the parsonage newly fitted with shelving in the upper closets, imagine that!—and a very fine prospect of Lady Catherine’s park from the front windows.
The garden, while modest, has been praised by Her Ladyship herself as the neatest in the parish, and she frequently condescends to taking her exercise while imparting her most nurturing admonitions, which are—”
The dance pattern interrupted his monologue.
As the music swept her through the set, she passed through three pairs of hands, which deposited her at the end of the line beside Mr. Darcy.
The insufferable gentleman wore the expression of a man fulfilling an obligation he considered beneath him, dancing with Bingley’s fashionable sister.
He took Elizabeth’s hand on the return. His grip was firm—startingly so, almost a pull rather than a guide, as though he had forgotten the figure required a light touch, or had never learned one.
His eyes met hers for the space of the turn, dark and unreadable, and then the figure released her, and she was back at Collins’s side and his limp and oddly soft hand.
“—the entailment, as you are no doubt aware, places your family in a most unfortunate position upon your father’s passing.
I do not say this to cause distress, but rather to illuminate the extraordinary benevolence of my proposal.
” Mr. Collins’s face shone with the satisfaction of a man who believed himself a godsend.
“In marrying me, Cousin Elizabeth, you would secure not only your future but that of your mother and sisters, who would otherwise be cast upon the mercy of relations. I offer this not in a spirit of triumph but of Christian charity, as Lady Catherine would say.”
Elizabeth spun around, deftly executing the dance figure that blessedly took her away from her partner.
She caught a glimpse of Jane and Bingley, two couples down, clearly enjoying the dance.
Jane would never be proposed to between the figures of a brisk longways set.
Bingley would come properly to Longbourn and speak to her father, and Jane’s life would be wonderful, living in a mansion with sunlit drawing rooms, while Elizabeth would be trapped in a parsonage in Kent with shelving in the upstairs closet and a prospect of Lady Catherine’s frequent admonitions.
When the music brought her back to Collins, he had that particular expression on his face—the one of a man about to deliver something he’d been rehearsing.
“Miss Bennet.” He lowered his voice, which meant the twelve nearest couples had only to make a modest effort to hear him.
“I have had the honor of admiring you since my arrival, and it is my intention, should you be so obliging as to give your consent, to offer for your hand. I flatter myself that my attentions cannot have been mistaken, and I trust you will see the wisdom of the arrangement. Mr. Darcy himself was kind enough to commend you to my attention, which I take as a most auspicious sign.”
“Mr. Collins.” Elizabeth kept pace with his rhythm through the promenade. “Are you proposing to me?”
“I am laying before you the terms of an arrangement that I believe will prove advantageous to us both, and which carries, I might add, the weight of considerable approbation from the highest quarters.”
“Mr. Darcy did not commend me. He could not tell me apart from my sisters.”
“Modesty! A most becoming quality in a future wife. Lady Catherine has often said—”
The couples around them had gone carefully expressionless, the way people do when they are listening to every word while pretending to hear only the violins. She took a breath, waiting until the figure separated them a last time before composing her reply.
“Mr. Collins.” She pitched her voice low. “I am sensible of the honor you do me, and I am sorry to distress you with an answer that gives you no pleasure, but I must decline.”
“You are perhaps anxious,” he said, in the tone of a man who had prepared for this, “that the honor of such a connection should overwhelm you. This is natural. I assure you, Miss Bennet—”
“Mr. Collins.” The music was ending. Other couples were separating, flushed and laughing, departing the dance floor. “I am not overwhelmed. I am in earnest, and I am declining your offer.”
“I understand completely, dear cousin. Your delicacy does you credit, and I am not at all discouraged. Indeed, Lady Catherine has told me that a lady’s refusal is frequently the very best indication of her intentions.
I shall speak to your mother directly, and I am confident that between her good sense and your eventual reflection upon the advantages of the arrangement, we shall reach a happy conclusion. ”
The music ended. Collins bowed, and Elizabeth barely curtsied.
“I wonder, Mr. Collins,” she said before he could turn away, “whether you have considered my sister Mary. She is accomplished at the pianoforte, well-read in scripture, and possesses a strength of moral conviction that I believe would complement a clergyman’s household far more effectively than any quality of mine. ”
Collins considered this for approximately half a second, less time than he had spent describing the dimensions of his garden, and dismissed it with a small, benevolent wave.
“You are all kindness, Cousin Elizabeth. But I know my own mind, and Lady Catherine was most specific that I should choose with an eye toward—but never mind. We shall speak again. Your father and mother will, I am sure, be most agreeable to my suit.”
He wandered off toward the refreshment table, leaving Elizabeth standing at the edge of the dance floor with the distinct sensation of having had a conversation with a man who had not heard a word she said.
Turning back to the chairs, she felt, rather than saw, eyes raking over her. It was Darcy, of course, watching her with an expression of such thorough disapproval that she nearly checked whether she had offended the flowers on the wallpaper.
What, in Heaven’s high horses, had she done to offend him?