That harsh face.
“Bastard. I am going to kill the bastard!”
She’d been scared of that face even before the gentleman had beaten her. Her mother thrashing on the bed.Mr. Bennet is a kind man. He will care for you.Her skin had been so, so hot.
Dead eyes.
It was easier to remember how her mother had looked as she died now that she could study her image in the locket.
“I…” Elizabeth shivered. “There is little that I remember.”
Darcy frowned.
“I do not want to remember.” Elizabeth suddenly felt a need to explain herself to him, and there was that sense of safety she had around him. “And I should not mention it, but I am so deeply grateful to you, for helping to keep her from handing the locket to Lydia. Mr. Bennet would have made Lydia to give it back in time, but—”
“I only did what was right.”
“You acted as a true gentleman. Even though it was not properly your business. You must say thatIought to have refused to give it to her. But…” Elizabeth shrugged.
He smiled at her. There was a sort of warmth there.
“Do you really remember nothing,” he asked some minutes later, “before Mr. Bennet?”
That shivering memory again. “Nothing good. No, no—I would laugh with Mama. I would run about. There had been pretty dresses. Play. A boy…he was named Bobby—Robert, I think. I remember so little. Just when she died.”
“And you do not know who your people were?”
“Mr. Bennet is enough for me.”
“Yes, but…your mother’s family. And what was your father’s station and county? You know nothing?”
Elizabeth could not lie to Mr. Darcy, but she could also not admit the truth. She now refused to look at him, and she felt a return of that anxiety and unpleasantness in her stomach. And the memory echoed, the fists. The sound of them striking flesh. Pain.
There had also been a long carriage trip. Her mother still alive, with a look in her eyes that was horrible.
“Miss Elizabeth, I apologize for pressing you on this matter,” Darcy said. “I can see that it is a topic you do not wish to discuss.”
Elizabeth picked at the sleeve of her dress. “My mother was Mr. Bennet’s relation. I know that. I think. He never says anything about my father’s family. I think he did not like him.”
That was something Elizabeth had not realized she knew, but it was true.
Any mention of her father, the real father, had brought an unpleasant emotion into Mr. Bennet’s manner. His eyes always turned to look at the pistols above the mantlepiece.
The two soon returned to the house.
That night, in the dead of night, at the darkest time when all slept, Elizabeth woke from a nightmare, filled with fists, her dying mother’s face, and the echoing word “bastard”.
Chapter Seven
Several days later, and only after Bingley and Darcy had insisted on proving Elizabeth’s boasts about shooting and her eccentricity by taking them with her one morning for their sport when Jane was healthy enough to easily sit up with Bingley’s sisters.
Elizabeth had of course hit every bird, though one was winged rather than struck clean.
Darcy in fact missed one of his birds, and Bingley three.
That had been a delightful morning, and she had felt great interest in seeing how the two gentlemen behaved themselves when chiefly entertaining themselves, rather than being on display in the drawing room.
It was also Elizabeth’s dear hope that Mrs. Bennet never heard about the story.
