The Unrecorded Hours Complete Box Set

Chapter 1

Chapter One

The rain began before the household was awake, and by the time Elizabeth Bennet came down to breakfast it had settled into the steady, businesslike downpour that Hertfordshire produces when it intends to be obeyed.

She stood at the window of the breakfast parlour and watched the gravel sweep dissolve into a sheet of brown water, and understood, with a sinking of spirits she did not trouble to disguise from herself, that nobody would be leaving Netherfield that morning.

It was hard to bear. Everything had been arranged: Jane well enough to travel, the carriage promised for eleven, the trunk packed with the particular satisfaction of a woman concluding a visit that had lasted three days too long.

She had even composed the account she meant to give Charlotte Lucas: the Bingley sisters, all civility above stairs and all contempt below it; Mr. Hurst, who existed chiefly at table; and Mr. Darcy, who had spent five days establishing beyond argument that she was not handsome enough to talk to, and the sixth ensuring she understood it.

For he had not spoken ten words to her yesterday.

That was not remarkable in itself — Mr. Darcy economized on words as other men economized on candles — but there had been something deliberate in yesterday's silence, something performed.

He had sat with a book through the whole of the evening and turned its pages with the regularity of a man who was not reading a line of it.

When she had spoken — to Jane, to Mr. Bingley, once to the room in general — she had felt his attention arrive and depart like a draught from an ill-fitted door.

Whatever offence she had given, it was evidently mortal.

Well. She could not repent of it. A man so determined to be displeased ought not to be disappointed.

"Oh, but this is dreadful," said Mr. Bingley, coming in with the morning's second-best smile, the one he used when he was delighted and felt he ought not to be.

"The lane to Longbourn will be a river by noon.

Miss Bennet — Miss Elizabeth — I am afraid I must be the bearer of hard news, which is that you cannot possibly go today, and the harder news still, which is that I cannot bring myself to be sorry for it. "

"You bear it with great fortitude," said Elizabeth, laughing in spite of herself.

"I have been practising all morning." He went to the window and surveyed the deluge with open approval.

"Sunday, too. There can be no church, no callers, no escape for anyone.

We are all prisoners together, and I mean to be a very cheerful gaoler.

Caroline will be down presently; she will know how to make a wet Sunday pass agreeably. "

Elizabeth had her private doubts on that head, but she kept them between herself and the coffee-pot.

Jane, when Elizabeth went up to her, received the news of their captivity with the serenity she brought to all disasters. "One day more is no great matter, Lizzy. And it would have been a shocking day to take the carriage out. The horses?—"

"Yes, the horses. Everyone in this affair has been excessively considerate of horses.

" Elizabeth sat down on the edge of the bed.

"I had hoped to be home by dinner. I find I am out of temper, and I cannot even walk it off.

I shall have to be out of temper indoors, in a small neat way that disturbs nobody. "

"You are never out of temper above an hour."

"On my own account, never. On yours I can sustain it much longer.

" But she smiled as she said it, and tucked the shawl closer round her sister's shoulders.

"Sleep again, if you can. I will go down and be civil.

If I am not returned by one o'clock, you may conclude that Miss Bingley and I have at last said to one another's faces what we have so long said behind them, and you may send Hill to collect what remains of me. "

Jane's reproachful look followed her out of the room, and did her a world of good.

The corridor outside Jane's door smelled of beeswax and yesterday's fire, and was very quiet.

Elizabeth stood in it for a moment and listened to the house.

A servant's tread somewhere below — the kitchen passage, probably; someone making use of the Sunday to do things that could not be done with company underfoot.

From the direction of the breakfast parlour, Miss Bingley's voice, low and carrying, demonstrating something to her sister.

The creak of the long-case clock at the passage's end marking the quarter-hour, and then subsiding.

These were not the sounds of Longbourn. Longbourn in the morning was Lydia and a door and Kitty's answer, and her father's study swallowing her father, and Hill with cheerful opinions on everything.

This was correct and contained, and it was not hers.

She moved down the corridor without quite knowing where she meant to go.

There was the saloon, where Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst would be by now, doing whatever they did before noon — Lydia's description would have been withering.

There was the breakfast parlour, cleared and empty at this hour.

There was the library, where Mr. Darcy might or might not have gone — he had been dressed for riding, but the drive was a lake — and there was nowhere else in this part of the house that wasn't someone else's room.

She paused at a door that stood half-open on a small sitting room she hadn't used.

Blue curtains, good paper on the walls, a writing desk that had not been written at in some time.

Bingley had bought Netherfield furnished, she knew; it showed in rooms like this one, rooms arranged for the life of whoever had lived here before, not quite reorganized for the life of whoever lived here now.

There was a sampler on the wall in someone else's stitch.

A pair of candlesticks that had been placed on the mantelpiece not because anyone had chosen them but because they had always been there.

The house was pleasant, and it was nobody's yet.

She thought of her father's library, where every shelf was his and every book carried its history. She thought of the morning room at Longbourn with its cracked plaster in the south corner that had been cracked as long as she could remember. She thought: I want to go home.

There was the landing, and its long window. She went to it.

On the landing, Elizabeth paused at the long window.

The park was grey to its edges; the rain had erased Hertfordshire entire.

One more day. One more evening of being examined and found wanting by Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley, whose good opinion, once lost, was lost for ever — he had told her so himself, with the air of a man presenting his character reference.

She had laughed at him then. She rather thought she would have to go on laughing at him, all the way to Monday.

It was only as she turned from the window that she discovered she was observed. Mr. Darcy stood at the foot of the stairs, dressed for riding — though no horse alive would thank him for it today — with his gloves in one hand, looking up at her with an expression she could not read at all.

It lasted a moment only. He bowed, said, "Miss Bennet," in a voice that might have been carved from the banister, and walked away toward the library.

Elizabeth stood where she was a full half-minute.

It was not the look itself that unsettled her — gentlemen looked, even proud ones, even at women only tolerable.

It was that for one unguarded instant, before the bow shut over it like a door, Mr. Darcy had looked precisely as she felt: like a person who had just been told the rain would not stop, and did not know whether he was sorry.