The Longbourn Bloodline (Darcy and Elizabeth Forever: Pride and Prejudice Variations)

CHAPTER ONE

ONCE REMOVED

“Oh, Lizzy, how so very sad for Charlotte that she did not marry the right Bennet heir.”

Elizabeth had never suspected her refusal to marry Mr. Collins would be such a balm for her mother.

But this was the blessed state at Longbourn one not-very-fine December morning when Mr. Bennet informed his wife and five daughters that their recently deceased second cousin, Mr. Collins, had been supplanted by an even more mysteriously distant third cousin with several removes, no one knew how many.

“I shall not entertain any questions.” Mr. Bennet clutched the letter he had received, folding it with crisp satisfaction. “As this new gentleman has very specific requirements, and I should not like to offend him.”

“Offend him?” Mrs. Bennet huffed while spreading marmalade on her toast as if the bread had offended her by not being soft enough.

“Any proper heir should wait until you are buried before making his appearance. Why do these young men insist upon inspecting their inheritance before the grave is dug?”

“How do we know this new heir is young?” Lydia demanded. “He could very well be five-and-sixty, older than you, Papa, and die before you—just as Mr. Collins so conveniently did.”

“Which leaves us nowhere.” Mamma slammed the uneaten bread on her plate. “Why did that dreadful ancestor exclude women from the inheritance?”

“I believe the purpose is to keep Longbourn with the Bennets,” Mr. Bennet replied with a twist of his lips.

“Except Collins was not a Bennet!” Mrs. Bennet’s voice climbed to a pitch that made the teacups tremble. “I cannot fathom why your daughters, who are Bennets, should be passed over simply because they will marry and take other surnames.”

“Collins’s father quarreled with his own father and changed his name, but had he lived, he would have changed it back to Bennet.” Mr. Bennet turned a page of his newspaper with the air of a man thoroughly enjoying himself. “I believe it is the same for this new heir.”

“Oh, what a quarreling family you Bennets are,” Mrs. Bennet moaned. “If Lizzy had married Mr. Collins and he had not died, we would all be quite safe now and not here waiting for yet another stranger to throw us into the hedgerows.”

“Mamma, I suppose Mr. Collins might still have died had I accepted his proposal, as his horsemanship would have been no better,” Elizabeth observed. “And perhaps rather worse, as he would have spurred his mount into a ditch to escape my rolling eyes.”

“This is no laughing matter, Lizzy! Mr. Bennet, you must tell us what this new heir is like, so we may be prepared.” Mamma renewed her onslaught upon Papa’s newspaper.

“And why should I do that? You are prepared to dislike him immensely whilst simultaneously pushing one of your daughters to marry him. I see no purpose in enlightening you.” Papa’s eyes glinted above the printed page. “Though I confess the gentleman may have purposes of his own.”

“Purposes?” Mrs. Bennet seized upon the word like a terrier upon a rat. “What purposes? Is he come to examine the silver? To measure the draperies? Oh, it is monstrous! Mr. Collins is barely cold in the ground, and here comes another ghoul to pick over the remains.”

“I suspect he walks rather too straight and tall for a ghoul.” Papa calmly turned a page on his newspaper.

“Maybe he is in the militia,” Lydia suggested, her eyes sparkling with interest. “What if it is that dashing new one? And that is why Papa is not telling.”

Kitty beside her bounced on her seat. “Or Denny or Carter. Wouldn’t that be vastly diverting if we’d known him all along?”

“He is safely not in the militia,” Papa said drolly.

“Perhaps—” Jane ventured, in her gentle way, “perhaps he will be perfectly agreeable. We should at least be civil until we know otherwise.”

“Civil!” Mrs. Bennet threw up her hands. “How can one be civil to a man who arrives to measure curtains and shelves while your father still breathes? But I suppose if he is young, and if he is not hideous, he might do for Jane, now that Mr. Bingley has proven himself so faithless.”

Jane’s cheeks flushed pink, but she said nothing.

“He might have perfectly good teeth,” Lydia said. “Even if he is not Mr. Bingley who had the very best teeth.”

“I hope he will be kinder to Jane than either Bingley or his awful friend,” Mamma declared hotly.

Elizabeth set down her teacup with a firmness the china had surely not earned.

“Well, I for one am entirely unmoved.” She rose from the table.

“He can have a faceful of warts, be bandy-legged, and smell like turnips, and I would not be compelled to give him a second or even a first look. He is a stranger who means to inspect our home as though we were tenants awaiting eviction, and I refuse to sit here speculating about his teeth.”

“Lizzy—” Jane began.

“We have already witnessed the fate of heirs who come to survey their inheritance before the ink is dry.” Her words were keener than she intended.

“Mr. Collins arrived to measure his prospects, and within a fortnight he was found in a ditch. Perhaps our mysterious cousin should consider it a cautionary tale.”

Mr. Bennet, behind his newspaper, made a sound that might have been amusement.

“I am going for a walk,” Elizabeth announced.

“A walk! In December! You will catch your death, and then where shall we be?”

“Considerably quieter, I should think.”

She did not wait for her mother’s response.

She was already moving through the door, down the passage, and past the kitchen where Hill supervised preparations for heaven-knew-what elaborate welcome for heaven-knew-whom.

Her pelisse hung by the back entrance. She pulled it on without ceremony, wrapped a shawl over her shoulders, and stepped out into the December cold.

The lane from Longbourn toward Meryton was rutted with frost, the hedgerows stripped to dark skeletons against a white December sky. Elizabeth walked briskly. Out here, she could breathe, no matter how cold and bracing the air was.

Poor Jane, though. She often wondered how her elder sister could sit at the window seat and let her mother’s words wash over her.

Mamma said whatever crossed her mind, whether complaints about the Bingley sisters’ ill-mannered slights or lamentations over Jane’s hopes dashed, as if the family were not aware of the mortifying Netherfield ball where Bingley’s friend, that most disagreeable Mr. Darcy, had looked with great disapproval at the entire Bennet lot.

But there Jane sat with her embroidery and her melancholy, and now that a new heir was appearing, Mamma would dangle her most beautiful daughter at this new prospect—no matter how ill his breath or bilious his digestion.

Even more galling than that, Papa would enjoy the spectacle.

Elizabeth recognized his amusement in the way he teased about the gentleman’s purpose and baited Lydia with the militia.

He would find it all a joke while Mamma displayed Jane like livestock at a fair, Mary pounded the piano hard enough to ward off evil spirits, and Lydia and Kitty dreamed about officers becoming Bennets.

Elizabeth saw through her father’s game and declined to be charmed by it.

Which made her next encounter all the more provoking.

A man on horseback appeared around the lane, pulling his reins as he approached.

“Miss Elizabeth.” His dark eyes swept over her unattended state with undisguised censure.

“One must marvel at your endurance, or perhaps your desperation, to frequent such deserted lanes alone. Do you make it a habit to brave the mud and the elements without an escort, or is solitude a necessary refuge from your own drawing room?”

Mr. Darcy remained upon his horse, looking down upon her with that immovable air of consequence that always made her fingers itch to box his ears.

Elizabeth kept her voice cool and her pace steady, refusing to give him the satisfaction of a dropped eye.

“Mr. Darcy. I had not expected to see you in Hertfordshire. Has Mr. Bingley sent you to collect a misplaced sixpence, or perhaps to assure himself that we did not make off with the Bingley family seal or a chipped teacup from the ball?”

“I am here on my own account,” he said. “Not Mr. Bingley’s.”

“Ah, I perceive then that the road to London proved so deficient in amusement that you felt compelled to retrace it.”

“Neither.” He dismounted with the fluid economy of a man who did everything competently and wished you to notice. The bay horse snorted and shifted, and Darcy settled it with a hand on its neck—an absent gesture, practiced and proprietary.

“You brave these lanes with a singular disregard for your own safety, Miss Bennet. A rider rounding this blind turn might easily trample a pedestrian who insists upon walking in the middle of the road without a care for traffic.”

Elizabeth didn’t break her stride, giving him a cool glance over her shoulder.

“You need harbor no fears for my safety, Mr. Darcy. The ruts in these lanes are far too deep for any sensible horseman to ride at a reckless pace—unless, of course, he is more eager to break his own neck than to endanger mine.”

Darcy winced as if she had struck gold in his tooth. “I was sorry to hear of your cousin Collins’s death. A riding accident, I understand.”

“Yes. He fell from his horse on the road quite like this one, rutted and iced. A dreadful business.” She said it with the appropriate gravity, though Collins had been dead for three weeks now and the household’s grief, such as it was, had been substantially eclipsed by the question of his successor.

“A great loss, naturally.” Darcy’s tone suggested it was nothing of the sort.

“Though I confess I was sorrier still to learn you had refused his proposal beforehand. You might have been settled as a clergyman’s widow with a small pension and no husband to endure.

In material terms, Miss Bennet, it would have been a considerably better arrangement than your present one. ”