Prologue #2
Since Mrs Bennet was too unwell to receive Mr Collins, entertaining him fell to her daughters.
As it happened, Mr Collins did not require entertaining.
What he required was to speak and speak at great length about the evils of disobedience and licentiousness, and of his conviction that Lydia must have been naturally bad to have behaved so wickedly—so wantonly—at such a young age.
He had ended his remonstrations by telling them, “You are grievously to be pitied, for who, as Lady Catherine has so condescendingly said, will ever connect themselves to such a family.”
“Who indeed,” Mary murmured as Kitty burst into tears.
As a pale, sorrowful Jane consoled them both, Elizabeth endeavoured to keep her composure, but it proved difficult. Lady Catherine de Bourgh was none other than Mr Darcy’s supercilious aunt. If she knew of their troubles, it would not be long until he did as well.
Her humiliation was complete.
Mr Collins appeared exceedingly uncomfortable witnessing his cousins’ grief.
He consulted his watch, shifted his considerable weight from his left foot to his right, and consulted his watch a second time before sitting himself upon a chair on the opposite side of the room and directing his gaze to the window.
What he did not do was toss them all out into the hedgerows, as Mrs Bennet had always feared.
Whether it was duty that inspired such charity, or some other motive, Elizabeth could not say.
Neither she nor her sisters were in any position to question their good fortune, and so they silently submitted to the custodianship of their cousin—for better or worse.
Thereafter, life at Longbourn was rarely enjoyable.
The absence of their father and sister was keenly felt, as was the disgrace that Lydia’s infamy had brought upon them.
Each day, Mr Collins strove to impress upon his cousins the brittleness of a lady’s virtue and assigned them readings from Fordyce’s Sermons.
Walking to Meryton was strictly forbidden; venturing out of doors was only permitted under his eagle-eyed chaperonage, and then, only after they provided evidence of their having devoted sufficient time to penitent reflection.
As the entire house was in mourning, attending assemblies and parties was out of the question; the few neighbours still willing to acknowledge them were promptly turned away by Mrs Strictland, the new housekeeper.
While Elizabeth had long known her cousin was not a sensible man, she was astounded by the lengths to which he was prepared to go in order to keep them all respectable.
Under Mr Collins’s stewardship, Longbourn was no longer an affectionate, noisy home; it had become stagnant and oppressive.
Not once had he acknowledged the grief that Elizabeth and her sisters carried in their hearts; his focus was on his own concerns and the disgrace that Lydia had wrought within his domain.
Perhaps, had Elizabeth been allowed to walk the wooded paths she loved so well, or to simply indulge in a solitary ramble within view of the house, she would have been better able to cope with Mr Collins, his dictums, and her grief.
Her cousin, however, refused to permit such a luxury.
He would accompany her for a turn in the garden, or else she would remain within the house.
Elizabeth had felt like a prisoner, and Longbourn no longer felt like her home.
Their one saving grace was Charlotte. While Mrs Collins could not silence her husband’s clangourous tongue or curb his stifling edicts, she could and did distract him by encouraging him to spend much of his time with Longbourn’s steward, so that he might learn all that he needed to know about being the master of an estate.
Armed with this new purpose, he absented himself most mornings, endeavouring to learn what his wife insisted was required of him as a gentleman farmer.
The spectacle of Mr Collins, with his considerable girth, attempting to mount Mr Bennet’s enormous gelding so that he could tour the fields and inspect the hedgerows, had incited his cousins—and even his wife—to laughter on multiple occasions.
Their departure from Longbourn, when it finally came, was bittersweet.
Lydia’s scandal, aided by Mr Collins’s invectives and denouncements, had tainted the family’s every interaction with their friends and neighbours, most of whom would no longer even acknowledge them in church.
Although Charlotte and her family were sympathetic, at Longbourn, Mr Collins was lord and master.
The Bennets’ life in Hertfordshire was not the same.
On a Tuesday morning in September, when the weather was mild and the sky was an impossibly vivid shade of blue, their aunt Cahill arrived on Longbourn’s doorstep.
While Mr Bennet had spoken of her in passing countless times over the years, none of his daughters had met her due to a breach between them that occurred as a result of his marriage to Elizabeth’s mother, of whom their aunt had not approved.
Mrs Cahill’s pleasure upon learning that her brother had regaled his daughters with stories of their youth nearly moved her to tears.
An hour passed in Mr Collins’s company was more than enough time for Mr Bennet’s sister to decide that her brother’s heir was an absolute ninnyhammer.
When he had concluded his tale of an unfortunate encounter he had the previous week with a gaggle of belligerent geese, their aunt turned to Jane and said, “Have any of you ladies been to Yorkshire?”
“No, ma’am,” Jane replied. “We have not had that pleasure.”
“Well,” Mrs Cahill told her as she set her teacup upon the table and rose from her chair, “there is no time like the present.”
The following morning, Elizabeth and her sisters found themselves bundled into a fine, large carriage with their mother and aunt, who was perfectly amenable to having Mrs Bennet reside in her dower house if it meant that her nieces would not be subjected to the bombastic rhetoric of a witless man who could barely feed himself without slopping his pudding down the front of his coats.
It was an excellent arrangement for them all.
Mrs Cahill, a childless widow whose independence was owed to her late husband’s estate having no entailment, proved to be an exceedingly generous aunt.
She hired a nurse for Mrs Bennet, so that the full burden of her care did not rest upon her daughters.
For her nieces, she engaged a music master and a drawing master, and chaperoned their lessons herself.
She also ensured that they all had pretty gowns to wear to dinners and parties hosted by her neighbours once their period of mourning had passed.
Elizabeth, in particular, had come to love her deeply, not only for the material comforts that she provided, but for her frankness, her wisdom, and the opportunity she had given them to begin their lives anew, without the constant taint of scandal hanging over their heads.
For that, she would ever be more grateful than she could say.