The Worst Proposal in England (Austen Ever After #1)

Chapter One

There was a particular quality to a letter that arrived before its subject had finished deciding what to feel about the matter it described, and Elizabeth Bennet held just such a letter in her hand three weeks after Hunsford, reading it twice to be certain she had not imagined its contents into being worse than they were.

She had not imagined them. If anything, Mrs. Philips's hand, cramped and eager as it always grew when there was news to deliver, had made them milder than the truth.

"A Mr. D. of great fortune," the letter ran, "did make an offer to a young lady of this neighbourhood while she was visiting in Kent, and was refused in terms so decided that the gentleman quit the county within the day, and has not been seen in society since, though whether from mortification or fury none can say, and I confess, my dear sister, I long to know which, for either would make a delicious story, and I have already promised Mrs. Long that I would discover the particulars from you directly you returned. "

Elizabeth set the letter down upon her dressing table with the careful precision of a woman handling something that might, if mishandled, explode.

She had not told a soul. She had returned from Kent a fortnight past with the whole weight of Mr. Darcy's letter folded into the lining of her trunk and the whole weight of what it contained folded somewhere less accessible than that, and she had said nothing, not to Jane, not to her father, certainly not to her mother, because there had seemed no way to say it that did not require explaining a great deal more than she was prepared to explain.

That he had proposed. That she had refused him, and refused him unkindly, in words she still winced to recall precisely because they had been so effective.

That he had written to her the following morning, a letter of eight pages that had unmade and remade her opinion of him in the space of a single reading, so that she scarcely knew, now, whether the man she had refused and the man who had written that letter were entirely the same person.

And now Meryton knew. Not the particulars, not yet, but enough. A rich man. A refusal. A retreat.

She went to find her father, because there was no other course open to her that did not involve waiting for the story to arrive at Longbourn's door before she had prepared the ground to receive it, and she found him in his book room with the particular stillness about him that meant he had already heard something and was waiting to see what she would do with the knowledge that he had.

"Lizzy." He did not look up from his book, though she suspected he was reading nothing. "Your aunt Philips has been busy, I collect, from the expression you are wearing."

"You have heard, then."

"I have heard that a gentleman of ten thousand a year proposed marriage to a young lady in Kent and was refused, and that the young lady in question has been observed these three weeks to be unusually quiet upon the subject of her visit, which in a daughter of mine is remarkable enough to constitute evidence in itself.

" He set his book aside at last. "I did not ask you before now because I judged, correctly I think, that you would tell me in your own time, or not at all, and either was your right.

But it appears your aunt has decided the timing is no longer yours to choose. "

Elizabeth sat down without being asked to, which she had not done in her father's book room since she was a girl small enough to require the courtesy.

"It was Mr. Darcy," she said.

Her father's eyebrows rose, though not, she thought, in genuine astonishment; he had likely arrived at the name himself, given the wealth attached to it and the location of her visit, and required only her confirmation.

"Mr. Darcy," he repeated. "The very disagreeable Mr. Darcy, who danced with no one at the Meryton assembly and pronounced you not handsome enough to tempt him, within your own hearing, and has been the subject of your finest scorn ever since."

"The very same."

"And he proposed to you."

"He did."

"And you refused him."

"I did."

Her father was quiet a moment, studying her with the look he wore when a matter had turned out to be more interesting than he had anticipated and he was recalibrating his enjoyment of it accordingly.

"Well," he said at last, "I confess myself relieved. I had feared, from your silence, that you meant to accept a man who called you not handsome enough in a public assembly room, and I should have had to summon considerably more energy than I possess to object to it."

"It is not so simple as that, Papa."

"It rarely is, with you." He studied her further, and something in his expression sobered.

"You did not tell me at the time. You have not told your mother now, though your aunt appears set upon telling the whole county for you.

Why the silence, Lizzy, if the matter is as straightforward as a rude man receiving a refusal he thoroughly deserved? "

Because it was not straightforward. Because she had refused him in anger, citing his cruelty to Mr. Wickham and his interference between Bingley and Jane, and he had answered her, in writing, with an account of both matters so different from what she had believed that she had been obliged to reconsider nearly everything she thought she knew of his character, and had not yet finished the reconsidering, and did not know how to explain a change of heart that was still, three weeks on, incomplete.

She said none of this to her father. She said, instead, "Because it is a private matter, and I did not think it would remain private long enough to require managing, and now it seems it will not remain private at all."

"Ah." Her father's mouth twisted, not unkindly. "Your aunt Philips has never in her life kept a secret longer than it took to find a second person to tell it to. I might have warned you, had I known there was a secret to keep."

"You might have," Elizabeth agreed, with more asperity than she generally permitted herself with her father, "though I own I did not anticipate needing to swear you to confidence over a proposal I refused within the first five minutes of receiving it."

"No," her father said, gently now, "I don't suppose you did."

By the time Elizabeth came down to the parlour, her mother had heard enough of the substance, if not the particulars, to have worked herself into a state that was neither quite triumph nor quite despair but some anxious admixture of both.

"A man of ten thousand a year, Lizzy, and you said nothing to me!

Not a word, not the smallest hint, and now the whole of Meryton is saying you refused him, though I am sure I cannot conceive why, unless it is the truth, in which case I do not know what I have done to deserve daughters who will ruin themselves and their sisters out of pure contrariness, for you know as well as I do that a man's fortune does not become less real for his having once been rude at an assembly. "

"Mama, I have not ruined anyone, and I would thank you not to speak as though I had committed a crime rather than declined an offer of marriage, which I am given to understand remains, for the present, within a woman's rights."

"Declined an offer of marriage from a man with ten thousand a year," her mother said, in the tone of one reciting a particularly damning indictment, "and from Pemberley itself, Lizzy, for Mrs. Philips says it is the very same Mr. Darcy who is nephew to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, whose parsonage you were visiting, which means you refused him under his own aunt's roof, very nearly, and I do not know how you expect Kitty and Lydia to find husbands when their own sister has made herself a byword for refusing the best offer any Bennet is ever likely to receive. "

Jane, who had come to stand beside Elizabeth with the particular gentleness she reserved for moments when their mother's distress threatened to become general, said, "Mama, I am sure Lizzy had good reason, whatever it was, and it is no one's affair but hers."

"It is everyone's affair, Jane, when the whole of Meryton is discussing it over their tea, which they will be by tomorrow if they are not already, and I do not see how it can be no one's affair when your own aunt has been telling the story to Mrs. Long this very afternoon."

Elizabeth felt the particular vertigo of watching something she had believed private become, in the space of an afternoon, a matter of public record, subject to interpretation by people who had never heard Mr. Darcy's voice thick with feeling as he made his offer, who had not seen the eight pages of his letter or felt the ground shift beneath their own settled opinions as they read it.

They would have only the shape of the story: a refusal, a retreat, a rich man made a fool of by a country girl with no fortune to recommend her boldness.

They would decide, among themselves, what that shape meant, and she would have no say in it whatsoever.

"I think," she said, with more composure than she felt, "that I shall walk out, before I say something to Aunt Philips that I cannot unsay."

She took the lane toward Oakham Mount, not because she expected the walking to resolve anything but because it was the one activity that had never yet failed to make a difficulty feel more bearable, even when it altered nothing about the difficulty itself.

The March air was cold enough to sting, and she was glad of it; it gave her something simple to feel, in place of the complicated tangle that had occupied her since Kent.

She had not decided, in three weeks, what she meant to do about Mr. Darcy's letter, or the feelings it had unsettled in her, or the very great possibility that she had refused, in a fit of righteous and not entirely justified anger, the one man in her limited acquaintance whose character, properly understood, might have suited her better than any other she had met.

She had not decided because there had seemed no urgency in the deciding; he was in London, or at Pemberley, or wherever such men went to recover from refusals, and she was at Longbourn, and their paths, she had assumed, need not cross again unless she wished it, at some distant point, once she had settled her own mind.

She had not accounted for Meryton learning of it. She had certainly not accounted for the story preceding her own resolution, arriving fully formed and already distorted before she had so much as decided what the truth of the matter was, let alone what she meant to do about it.

She stood at the top of the mount a long while, looking out over the fields toward a horizon that gave her no answers, and thought, with a clarity that felt almost like dread: this is only the beginning of it. Whatever shape this story takes now, I am no longer the one telling it.