Quiet at Longbourn (Pride and Prejudice Happily Ever Afters #1)

Prologue

Mrs Bennet was looking for her embroidery scissors.

"Lydia! Kitty! Lydia! Jane!" She kept up a rolling exclamation of her daughter's names as she moved through the house.

Omitting Lizzy, who was not at all likely to do anything as peaceable and appropriate as embroidery, and Mary, who she had forgotten altogether for the moment.

She punctuated these exclamations with frustrated mutterings.

As usual, no one gave one solitary thought to her tightly stretched nerves.

The scissors were a wedding gift from a long-dead aunt, and she had a habit of leaving them in unlikely places and then conducting a systematic search of the house that drove everyone in it to some degree of distraction.

On this particular Tuesday in February she had already tried the sitting room, the morning room, every bedroom, the scullery and the shelf in the upstairs landing.

She was running out of places and beginning to feel utterly exasperated, as she often did when the minor inconveniences of life set against her.

This sense that the world at large was failing to live up to her expectations was one she had been increasingly conscious of in recent years.

The strain of the entail on Longbourn—which meant their home would pass to a distant cousin rather than one of her five daughters—had coloured her perception of the world to such an extent that dissatisfaction was an old and comfortable friend.

Layered over that disappointment was a fierce optimism for successful marriages that would "save them all from the hedgerows" and she pursued this plan of salvation with remarkable, if occasionally terrifying, vigour.

She was not entirely without self-awareness. She simply did not know how to be anyone else.

She had been married to Mr Bennet for twenty-three years.

In the beginning, she loved him with wide-eyed exuberance.

But she quickly learnt that he found her personality vaguely amusing at best, and overwhelmingly vexing at worst. She still loved him in a habitual, vague sort of way.

He made her laugh. He was good company when he chose to be, which was less and less these days.

More alarming were the moments of cruelty wrapped in humour.

This cruelty was always verbal and she allowed her nervous energy to protect her from his sharpest barbs.

She was on her way to try his dressing room for the scissors when she heard his voice through the half-open door.

"Mrs Bennet," he was saying, in the comfortable drawl he used when he was at his ease, "is a woman who has made an art form of mortification.

I have spent the better part of my adult life being profoundly embarrassed in public by that woman.

At every assembly, every dinner, every occasion that has called for any degree of social grace.

" A pause. She could hear the rustle of fabric.

"I sometimes think the neighbours pity me.

And the remarkable thing, Stevens, the truly remarkable thing, is that she has no idea.

None whatsoever. She smiles and exclaims and waves her handkerchief and hasn't the faintest notion of the impression she creates.

" Another pause accompanied by a small chuckle.

"It would be almost endearing, if it weren't so relentless. "

The valet said something low that she did not catch.

"Quite," said Mr Bennet, pleasantly. "Quite."

She stood outside the door and felt her world tilt on its axis. She cared fiercely about her family and that could colour her behaviour, but was she truly ridiculous?

She had always known, in a vague, uncomfortable way, that he found her silly. But she had kept herself very busy not looking at it directly. There had always been something else to exclaim about. She never did find the scissors.

She went downstairs and sat quietly by the window in the sitting room. The garden looked exactly as it always had, and she observed it calmly until the sun began to set over the Hertfordshire hills.