Chapter 6
Elizabeth Bennet stood in the small steward’s room just off the back passage near the kitchens, her sleeves rolled above her wrists and three account books spread open across the table before her.
“The numbers still do not balance,” she said wearily.
Mr. Hill, the estate butler, shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. “Beggin’ your pardon, Miss Elizabeth, but Farmer Jones swears the south pasture will yield less than expected after the rain.”
Elizabeth pressed her fingertips against her temple.
“And yet somehow he still managed to purchase a new gelding at Michaelmas fair,” she replied dryly.
Coughing into his fist, Mr. Hill watched as Elizabeth dipped her pen into the inkwell and made another notation in the ledger. At eighteen, her handwriting possessed the neat decisiveness of someone who had spent years correcting other people’s mistakes.
“Reduce his spring seed grain allowance by one quarter until the arrears are settled,” she said at last.
Mr. Hill blinked. “Miss Elizabeth?”
“If he can afford a horse, he can afford to pay what is owed to Longbourn.”
The man shifted again. “Mr. Bennet generally allows extra time.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth answered shortly, “and that is precisely why half the tenants delay payment until they are nearly desperate enough to be turned out.”
The butler wisely held his tongue.
Elizabeth immediately felt guilty.
The tenants were not the true problem.
The true problem sat upstairs in his library with a book in one hand and a glass of port in the other while his daughter attempted to prevent the estate from slowly collapsing around him.
“Very well,” he muttered. “I will speak to Jones.”
Elizabeth nodded distractedly and turned another page in the ledger.
Coal deliveries.
Roof repairs.
The butcher’s bill.
Two maids requiring replacement aprons.
Three tenant cottages needing chimney work before winter.
And still no indication whatsoever that her father had looked at the estate accounts she placed upon his desk three days earlier.
“Miss Elizabeth?”
She looked up.
The butler hesitated. “There’s also the matter of Widow Martin.”
Elizabeth’s shoulders sagged slightly.
“What now?”
“She cannot pay for the pig she lost last month. Says she’ll be ruined if she has to purchase another before winter slaughtering.”
Of course she would.
Elizabeth closed her eyes briefly.
“Very well,” she said at last. “Take the cost from the discretionary household account.”
The man looked startled. “That’s your pin money account, miss.”
“Yes, Mr. Hill, I am aware of that.”
“But your winter pelisse—Mrs. Bennet said you were to have a new one made.”
Elizabeth almost laughed.
A new pelisse.
How delightful it must be to worry about such things.
“I shall survive with my old one,” she replied.
Mr. Hill bowed awkwardly. “You’re a good lady, Miss Elizabeth.”
No, she thought tiredly after he departed, merely a practical one.
The door shut behind him, leaving Elizabeth alone with the ledgers once more.
For several moments she simply stared at the columns of figures without seeing them.
She had begun helping with the accounts at fourteen. A necessity for running a household, her father had said. She did not argue, although she had never seen her mother so much as glance at the household accounts.
At first, it had only been small things.
A forgotten payment.
A tenant dispute.
A servant dismissed without replacement.
Then Mrs. Bennet’s spending increased while Mr. Bennet retreated further into indifference, and Elizabeth gradually realized that no one else was paying attention.
No one else even understood there was danger.
Jane hated unpleasantness and trusted everyone implicitly.
Mary preferred Fordyce and Scripture to practical matters.
Kitty avoided conflict.
Lydia scarcely noticed anything beyond ribbons, officers, and amusement.
So, Elizabeth stepped quietly into the gap.
She learned which merchants cheated.
Which tenants drank.
Which servants stole candles.
Which roofs leaked.
Which fields flooded.
Which accounts her father ignored unless cornered after dinner in an unusually good humor.
By sixteen, most of the village instinctively came to her before approaching Mr. Bennet.
By eighteen, Longbourn functioned largely because Elizabeth made certain it did.
And she was so very tired.
A knock sounded.
Mrs. Hill entered carrying a tray with cold tea and toast. “You missed luncheon again, miss.”
Elizabeth looked blankly toward the window.
Indeed she had.
“I forgot the hour,” she admitted.
Mrs. Hill set the tray down with a look of concern she wisely attempted to disguise. “You work too hard.”
“I work exactly as hard as necessity requires.”
The older woman hesitated. “Miss Elizabeth…” She lowered her voice. “You cannot carry the whole estate forever.”
Elizabeth gave a faint smile devoid of humor. “Can I not?”
Mrs. Hill’s face tightened with sympathy.
There it was again.
That look.
The servants knew.
Perhaps not every detail, but they knew enough.
They knew Mr. Bennet neglected matters.
They knew Mrs. Bennet spent freely.
They knew creditors waited longer than they ought.
And they knew the second daughter quietly held everything together with sheer stubborn determination.
“If anything were to happen to your father…” Mrs. Hill began carefully.
Elizabeth’s hand tightened around the edge of the ledger. That fear lived constantly inside her. If Mr. Bennet died, Longbourn would pass immediately to Mr. Collins—a man none of them had seen in years.
Her mother would be cast out.
Her sisters portionless.
The younger girls nearly unemployable.
Jane beautiful but vulnerable.
And Elizabeth—
Elizabeth had no fortune, no connections, and no illusions.
She knew exactly how quickly gentlewomen could become burdens. “I know,” she said softly.
Mrs. Hill reached out impulsively and squeezed her shoulder before withdrawing again with servant-like restraint.
“You should not have to bear this alone.”
Elizabeth stared down at the accounts spread across the table. “But if I do not,” she whispered, “who will?”
She rubbed at the stiffness in the back of her neck and carefully closed the ledger before her.
The figures had begun to blur together sometime during the last quarter hour. Candle wax had dripped down onto the table beside her elbow, and outside the narrow windows, the weak gray daylight of February was already beginning to dim toward afternoon.
Too many hours bent over accounts again.
With a weary sigh, she closed her account book, stretching until her spine gave a faint crack.
The small room off the back hall had once been intended for household storage, but over the years it had gradually become the place where estate matters accumulated whenever Mr. Bennet neglected them long enough.
Bills, tenant accounts, inventories, and correspondence now occupied nearly every shelf.
And, increasingly, so did Elizabeth.
She flexed her ink-stained fingers and crossed toward the window. For the first time in weeks, the glass was not coated with frost.
January had been viciously cold.
The ponds froze solid before Christmas. Three tenant children had nearly died from a fever brought on by damp and insufficient coal, and Cook had spent nearly every morning chipping away at the ice that covered the water bucket.
Then, quite suddenly, the weather changed.
The thaw came unnaturally fast. Snow vanished within two days beneath warm rains that turned roads into rivers of mud. The strange weather had become the subject of nearly every letter and conversation throughout Hertfordshire.
Even London was suffering.
Only the previous week, Mrs. Gardiner had written of overflowing streets and endless rain leaking through the windows along Gracechurch Street.
Her aunt, heavily pregnant with her fourth child, complained good-naturedly that the weather had confined the children indoors so completely that they had begun climbing furniture “like tiny savages deprived of sunlight.”
Elizabeth smiled faintly at the recollection.
Her aunt’s letters were among the few things that reliably lifted her spirits.
With another stretch, Elizabeth abandoned the ledgers entirely and wrapped her shawl more firmly about her shoulders.
Fresh air.
If she remained buried among account books another hour, she thought she might scream.
The halls of Longbourn were unusually quiet as she descended the back stairs.
Mrs. Bennet had retired upstairs with a headache after learning that haberdashery’s prices for lace had risen again in Meryton, while Lydia and Kitty were somewhere above stairs giggling over some piece of gossip or another.
Mary, who had just come out only a few months before, practiced the pianoforte with determined mediocrity in the drawing room, and Jane sat writing letters beside the fire.
Mr. Bennet, naturally, remained shut away in his library.
Some things in life were dependable.
Elizabeth passed through the kitchen, nodding absently to Cook and a scullery maid, before stepping out the servants’ entrance into the yard.
The air smelled of wet earth and smoke.
Everywhere the snow had melted, the ground had become a sea of mud. Water dripped steadily from the eaves, and wagon ruts cut deep trenches through the lane beyond the stable yard.
Still, compared to the brutal cold earlier in the month, the air felt almost mild.
Elizabeth drew a deep breath and slowly released it.
For several precious moments, she simply walked.
Past the kitchens.
Past the smoking house.
Past the bare winter gardens where only dead stalks and stubborn cabbage remained.
The quiet soothed something raw inside her.
She had not realized until that moment how tightly wound she had become.
Then she looked southward.
Her steps slowed.
Dark clouds gathered low along the horizon, heavy and swollen with rain. Even as she watched, the distant line of gray seemed to thicken.
More weather coming.
More rain.
The roads would worsen again by morning.
Elizabeth folded her arms tightly against herself.
The tenants would struggle to move fodder.
Another cottage roof might collapse.