What Elizabeth really wanted was the pistol that Mr. Bennet had insisted she take with her before he’d given her permission to leave Longbourn.
Such a joke, she had thought.
Why would I ever want a pistol, she had thought.
Mr. Bennet had been wiser.
They got to the parsonage fence. Mr. Collins’s garden with its rose bushes and pretty shrubberies stood inside. The sun would set in another twenty minutes, but the look of everything was clear enough still.
Elizabeth worked at the latch to the recently built gate, but she fumbled it twice. She shuddered.
Mary opened the door, and said between pants, “Oh Lizzy—you had—no idea.”
“I thought I was illegitimate.” She stepped quickly over the cobblestones up to the door. Where was the key to the door? She could not remember.
“Poor Lizzy.”
Mary simply turned the doorknob and opened it up. Upon seeing her maid coming from the kitchen, evidently surprised to hear the mistress returning so early, Mary sent her to make tea for them both.
Elizabeth sat right by the door for half a minute. She looked dumbly at the slippers she’d worn, they had been soaked in the evening dew, and the soft kid leather was ripped up from the stones along the way.
“Your poor shoes,” Mary said. “They were so pretty.”
Elizabeth started up the stairs to her room. “He beat me. He shouted that I was a bastard. Again, and again. ‘The child is a bastard’. That was all I’d remembered of him before tonight. I thought I was a bastard. I was so scared to tell you. I should have. Oh, I am so scared.”
“Do not worry,” Mary said following Elizabeth up and into her room. “You are not a child anymore—You think you must leave tomorrow?”
“I don’t know!” Elizabeth flung open her trunk. Piles of neatly wrapped clothes. She started shoving them aside. “He beat my mother too—I remember that! Oh, I hope I shall not cause any great trouble with Lady Catherine for you.”
Mary chewed her lip in worry but then shrugged. “‘Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.’ I would be worthy of no one’s favor if I abandoned you in your time of need—what are you looking for, Lizzy?”
Elizabeth did not reply.
“Even if he is so frightening, he is your father. You must wish to know him. And Lord Hartley as well. I said the two of you looked much alike, but I had no notion that it wassosimilar a relation. Lizzy, what—”
Mary fell silent as Elizabeth triumphantly pulled the pistol from where she’d hidden it, wrapped in a small shawl at the bottom of her trunk. The bullets were next to it.
Elizabeth’s hands stopped trembling. “Thank you, Papa,” she whispered as she pulled it out.
Without any explanation to Mary, Elizabeth grabbed one of the cartridges that were wrapped up separately and proceeded to load the pistol.
“Lizzy,” Mary said when she was done. “I shall not argue that Lord Rochester did not behave horridly to you all those many years ago. He frightened me. He is terribly high handedand demanding. He has no sense of his own wrongdoing... Lizzy, I beg you to tell me that you do not mean to shoot him.”
Elizabeth stared at the now loaded gun in her hand. She looked back at Mary and then back to the gun. Now she felt safe.
“They would hang you! And theyshould if you shot him. Lizzy, put it away. Papa gave you that gun?”
“And he ensured that I knew how to use it.”
Mary stared at the weapon in the dying sunlight as Elizabeth grinned maniacally at it. “Heavens, Papa is as eccentric as Mama always said. Lizzy, I insist that you not shoot any peers of the realm while you are a guest in my house. I am a very lenient host, but I think that is a place to draw a line.”
Elizabeth started laughing. She felt hysterical. She put the gun on the dressing table and started crying.
Mary hugged her. “Dear Lizzy. Dear Lizzy.”
“I am scared of him.”
“Of course you are. He is terrifying. Even with the weakness from his apoplexy, I would run shrieking. And I do not remember having been beaten by him.”
