“Of course it is. Now what is your purpose in telling me this?” Bennet was fully aware his wife would tell him whether he asked her the question or not.
“Mr Bingley, that is what Hattie told me his name is, and his party will take up residence on the final Friday of this month. You must be the first to call on him and issue an invitation to the Michaelmas assembly on Tuesday following. Then he will return your call and see Jane and fall under the power of her charms. Once he sees Jane’s beauty he will not want to look at any of the other young ladies in the area,” Fanny burbled her brand of logic.
“You may call on this Mr Bingley, but I will not,” Bennet asserted.
“Mr Bennet how you like to vex me. You well know I cannot call on an unmet gentleman at his home! Youmustcall on him otherwise he will not marry Jane,” Fanny insisted. “With the estate entailed away, Jane must marry a wealthyman so we will not be thrown into the hedgerows by that odious Mr Collins before you are cold in the ground.”
“I repeat, I will not be calling on him. He is welcome to call on me here. There is no reason to bestir myself from my bookroom,” Bennet returned. “Please tell me why he would choose Jane, mayhap he will want an intelligent wife like Lizzy.”
“No man will ever want that hoyden who you favour,” Fanny screeched. “You have turned her into a bluestocking, who traipses all over the estatewith her hems six inches deep in mud. This is all her fault. If she was not so wilful, she would have been born a son!”
As was his wont, when Fanny denigrated his favourite daughter, he said nothing to check her, but rather grinned as all was as it should be. The resulting argument and hysterics was enough of a deterrent, but that was combined with his not wanting to trouble himself. “Be that as it may, I repeat: I willnotcall on the man, single or married,” Bennet stated as he waved his wife away.
“My nerves! Oh, what spasms and palpitations I suffer. How could you Mr Bennet! You have no concern for my nerves,” Fanny cried as she forced some tears from her eyes forgetting her husband had long been inured to that tactic.
“On the contrary, Mrs Bennet, your nerves have been my constant companion these four and twenty years,” Bennet averred. “Close my door on the way out if you please.”
His wife turned and stomped her way out of the study, slamming the door with enough force to rattle several books in the bookcases which lined the study walls, except for where the door and window were. “Hill, my salts!” Fanny screamed as she made her way back towards the drawing room.
Hearing the result he had desired, Bennet was well pleased.
~~~~~~~/~~~~~~~
That evening while Jane was braiding her younger sister’s hair after Elizabeth had done the same for her, Elizabeth turned before Jane had completed the plait she was making. “You heard Mama going on about the new tenant who will be living at Netherfield Park, did you not?” Jane nodded her head and then gently gripped Lizzy’s shoulders to turn her so her back was towards her to complete the braid. “I think I saw them when they came to view Netherfield Park. Well I saw two men, and based on Mama’s effusions that was when the estate was let.”
“What did you see? I am sure you were on one of your rambles,” Jane smiled as she tied the ribbon which would—hopefully—hold her sister’s wild, wavy hair in place.
“I saw two men who arrived in a large coach. I had walked the three miles to Netherfield Park when I saw Uncle Phillips meet them. One has strawberry blond hair; he is about the same height as our uncle. From that distance—I did not want to reveal myself—I could not see their features clearly. The other was much taller than our uncle and had dark hair, even darker than my own.”
“Mayhap Aunt Hattie’sinformationis true for once and one of them is single,” Jane surmised. “There were no ladies you saw with the men were there?”
“There were not, but that means nought,” Elizabeth averred. “The men could have come to see the estate and will only bring their wives if they think it is worth them viewing the manor house.”
“However, the fact a lease was signed by this Mr Bingley gives lie to that supposition,” Jane opined, “unless he cares not what his wife thinks of the home of which she will be mistress.”
“As long as this man, if he is single, is not anything like Mr Hawthorne who wrote you those plagiarised verses he claimed as his own when you were sixteen,” Elizabeth smiledand Jane put on a look of outrage, which only caused Elizabeth to giggle.
Nigel Hawthorne had leased Netherfield Park for two years, and had been a single man of five and thirty summers. He had been captivated by Jane’s beauty and had, of course, been encouraged by her mother to pursue Miss Bennet. After some months of inept courting on his behalf, he had written Jane verses which he had claimed as his own.
Unfortunately for the man, Jane showed the poetry to Lizzy, who immediately identified them as written by John Donne and copied fromThe Good Morrow. At first Jane, who always wanted to give people the benefit of the doubt, asked her younger sister if she could be in error. All doubt was removed when Lizzy had led Jane into their papa’s study and had opened the book to the page where word for word were the verses Mr Hawthorne had insisted were originals written by himself.
When knowledge of what he had done was made known far and wide in the neighbourhood, via Hattie Phillips’s lips—after the same Fanny Bennet who had wanted the man as her son-in-law told her older sister—an embarrassed Mr Hawthorne had quit the estate and had never been seen in Meryton again. To date, if anyone brought up the reason the man had left the area, Fanny claimed she knew not of what they spoke.
Their father had made much sport of the occurrence, making his wife the butt of his jokes, in private as well as in more public settings. Elizabeth had expressed her mirth along with her father.
“If not before, hopefully we will meet the Netherfield Park party at the assembly upcoming,” Jane mused.
“I anticipate there being some interesting characters for me to sketch,” Elizabeth stated.
Like her father, she liked to take other’s measures and,like him, she very seldom allowed for the possibility she was in error. Once she had made her sketch, she would not revise her opinions.
Jane and Elizabeth climbed into their shared bed and Jane blew out the one remaining lighted candle on her side. “Sleep well, Lizzy.”
“You too, Janey.”
Chapter 2
“And this is the estate you found for us, in the wilds of Hertfordshire where all of the savages are so far below us?” Miss Caroline Bingley whinged before the Bingley coach came to a halt. “It is nothing to my Pemberley. It is bad enough Mr Darcy is not with us today.”
