Miss Bennet is Gone (Pride & Prejudice Variation)

Chapter 1

Elizabeth Bennet was days from her wedding, and she had discovered in herself a happiness so great she did not entirely believe it, but a walk before the fashionable hour on the arm of the man who had occasioned it was as near as she had come to bliss.

"You are very quiet," Darcy said.

"I am committing my contentment to memory. It is a novel sensation, and I should like to be able to describe it accurately later."

"For what purpose?"

"For the next occasion on which you provoke me. I intend to recite it back to you and say, 'observe, sir, that I was once perfectly happy in your company, and consider how far you have since fallen.'"

"You are assembling evidence against me eight days before you have promised to spend your life with me."

"I am a thorough woman. You knew that when you asked."

"I did," he said. "I confess it was among the reasons I loved you."

She turned her head to look at him. "Was it indeed? You wished to marry a woman who would remember every one of your failings?"

"I wished to marry a woman who would notice them at all.

I had met a great many who would not have troubled themselves.

" He said it lightly, his eyes ahead on the gravel, and she had learned that he reserved his plainest truths for these moments.

"I had not expected to mind the difference as much as I find I do. "

"That," she said, "is dangerously near a pretty speech. I shall have to note the date. You make so few of them that each one ought to be commemorated."

"Then I shall ration them more strictly."

"You will do no such thing. You will be as extravagant as I require, or I shall tell Lady Matlock that you have been miserly with your bride, and she will have a great deal to say to you about it."

He laughed, the low breath of one surprised out of him. Elizabeth counted it a victory, and a considerable one.

She had been collecting those victories every time she surprised Fitzwilliam Darcy into laughter against his better judgment, and she did not mean to stop until the collection was indecent. Six months engaged had taught her his delight.

A barouche came round the bend at the measured pace of a carriage whose owner wished to be seen taking the air. Mrs. Alderton sat very upright within it.

When Elizabeth had first appeared in town as Darcy's intended, a country nobody who had somehow carried off the catch of the Ton, Mrs. Alderton had looked her over once and thereafter declined to see her at all.

This morning, she inclined her head. It was a small motion, precise and deliberate, not warmth, but acknowledgment, which in certain circles was the harder of the two to give or to get.

Elizabeth returned it with exactly as much as she had been given. She did not slow her step. She did not look after the carriage once it had passed.

Beside her, Darcy had seen the whole of it and said that she had forgiven Mrs. Alderton and was vexed with herself for the mercy. It was precisely the look and precisely the reason, and she declined to confirm either.

"You are very sure of yourself this morning," she said.

"I am very sure of you. It is a different thing, and a better one."

She turned that over and could not improve upon it, which was rarer than she cared to admit. "Then I shall have to grow less legible," she said. "A wife ought to keep a little of herself in reserve, if only to leave her husband something still to discover."

"Keep as much of yourself in reserve as you please." He looked down at her, tipping her chin up, and said the plain thing while staring into her eyes. "I have the whole of my life to reach the end of you. I find I am in no particular hurry."

"Two pages, then. No more." And because the morning was bright and the man was hers, she laughed.

His face changed, as it always did at the sound, as though her laughter were something he had accomplished and might fairly take credit for.

Eleven days, she thought. Elizabeth leaned a little more into his arm which she could trust to hold.

The dinner at Matlock House was small, which was its own kind of welcome. Lady Matlock did not assemble large parties for people she meant to keep. She kept them by degrees, at her own table, where she could watch how they did.

It was not, however, without its small examinations. Mrs. Henderson, a friend of the Countess for many years, seated across the table from Elizabeth, had the serene persistence of a woman who believed a question asked sweetly enough could give no offense however often it was repeated.

She wished to know, over the soup and again over the fish, at which seminary Miss Bennet had been finished as though the first answer had merely been mislaid between courses.

"I was not finished anywhere, ma'am," Elizabeth said pleasantly, the second time. "Mr. Darcy has undertaken to manage the deficiency himself."

Lady Matlock set down her glass. "She was educated at home, Eleanor, by a father who taught her to think, which I have found answers a great deal better than Bath ever did."

She then turned the talk to the prospects of the Season so smoothly that Mrs. Henderson never learned she had been handled.

Georgiana Darcy had attached herself to Elizabeth before the soup and stayed there, narrating in a happy undertone the history of a volume she had run to ground at Hatchard's after a fortnight of searching.

She was seventeen and had not yet learned to hide what pleased her, which Elizabeth found restful beyond description. There was so little in this family one could take at face value, and here was a girl who was precisely herself.

I always wanted a sister who enjoyed reading as I do, Elizabeth thought, and did not say, because Georgiana would have colored to the roots of her hair.

Once, when the talk had risen loud enough to cover them, Georgiana leaned close.

"I have been practicing something," she confided, with the gravity of a girl entrusting a great secret.

"I should like to call you Lizzy, as your family does, if you will allow it.

I have said it to myself a great many times, so that I should not lose my nerve when the moment came. "

Having brought it out at last, she lost her nerve entirely and could not lift her eyes from her plate.

Elizabeth, who had wished for a sister who read and found she was to be given one who also rehearsed her affections in private like lines for a play, pressed the girl's hand beneath the cloth and told her she might begin that very moment.

Georgiana, too pleased to manage the whole of the word, got as far as "Liz—" and there ran aground, and the two of them agreed, without a word and very kindly, that she had finished.

When the men withdrew to the library and the ladies rose for the parlor, Lady Matlock's hand came to rest on Elizabeth's wrist. A light pressure. Stay.

The others moved ahead through the doors, and the two of them were left in the long room with the candles guttering low and the fire settling, and Lady Matlock drew her toward the window as though they had a small conspiracy between them.

"I have something for you," she said. "I had meant to wait for the morning of the wedding, and then I decided I am too old to manage surprises, and that I would rather watch your face now, while it is only the two of us."

She opened her hand. In it lay a brooch of gold, set with a single dark stone that took the candlelight and held it.

"It was Anne's," Lady Matlock said. "Lady Anne Darcy.

My husband's sister, and the best of that whole proud family, which I may say now that they are all of them past contradicting me.

She wore it the first season she was mistress of Pemberley.

It is not a grand thing. I have grander I might have given you, and I daresay everyone will expect me to have done. "

She pressed it into Elizabeth's palm and closed Elizabeth's fingers over it with both her hands. "But the grand things are for the world. This was hers."

Elizabeth looked down at the small weight in her hand. She was not, as a rule, a woman who wept over jewelry, and she did not now; but she could not immediately speak, which was the more unusual condition in her, and the harder to disguise.

"You came into this family," Lady Matlock went on, more quietly, "and I think you believed you would have to make yourself smaller to fit the door of it.

I have watched you. I wanted you to know that, and that it was never required, whatever anyone may have let you think.

" She released Elizabeth's hand. "Fitzwilliam has never been an easy man to love.

You have done it without being asked to be anyone other than who you are.

That is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the whole of it. "

"Thank you," Elizabeth said. It was not effusive.

She had found, in a life of ready words, that the words came hardest exactly where they mattered most, and that the people worth saying them to could tell the difference between what was meant and what was merely produced.

"I will wear it," she added, "and not only for the world. "

Lady Matlock looked at her a moment longer, and nodded once, satisfied. Then she turned them both toward the parlor and the lamplight and the sound of Georgiana playing for them.

Darcy handed Elizabeth up into his carriage himself, though the footman stood ready, and took the seat across from her rather than beside. The lamps were lit along the pavement, and on these short drives he liked to be able to look at her, which he could not do at all well sitting beside her.

She kept worrying at something small in her gloved hand, half hidden in the folds of her cloak. He did not ask.

Darcy had seen his aunt draw her apart as the ladies left the table, and he had come to understand the patience that loving Elizabeth required. She would tell him what she wished him to know, in her own hour, and was never the worse for being let alone until then.