“Do it,” Mrs. Bennet cried. “Do anything. We shall make it up to you, Mrs. Potter. Kitty, fetch my workbox. No, not that one, the larger—oh, goodness, why was I ever born to such trials!”
Lydia’s despair transformed in an instant into delighted speculation—what trims, what flounces, what ribbons to disguise the alteration—and the household fell to work as if compelled by a sovereign summons. Elizabeth sewed where she could be useful; Jane soothed their mother; Mary fetched tea. The sense of ill-will—the deliberate nature of the damage—pulsed beneath the industry like a bruise under a sleeve. Elizabeth said nothing. But when she met Darcy later that afternoon in the drive—purely by chance, for he had ridden over with Mr. Bingley on a matter of chairs—and told him briefly of what had happened, she saw his eyes narrow, not in suspicion of her sisters but in calculation, as if the map he kept in his mind of Longbourn’s disturbances had acquired a new, unpleasant mark.
“I do not like the increasing boldness,” he said lowly. “From stolen items to slashed gowns is not a naturalprogression.”
“It could be spite,” she returned. “A maid slighted, a sister provoked.”
“Perhaps,” he said. But she could see he did not believe it likely, and though she wished it were not so, she agreed with him.
The day’s work went on. Mrs. Potter kept her word and kept her girl beyond sundown; candles were lit; the parlour became, for a few hours, a workroom. By nine o’clock Lydia was twirling in a flutter of gratitude—new skirt fitted to old bodice, an ingenious ribbon trim concealing the join, the whole thing bright as her temper and twice as noisy.
It might have ended there. It did not.
The next morning, before breakfast, a cry went up from the stair hall—sharp, male, unadorned. Mr. Bennet’s voice. Elizabeth, outside in the drive with Mr. Darcy, ran towards it, along with everyone else in the house.
Her father stood at the foot of the stairs, his spectacles in his hand, looking up at the long wall that, from landing to ceiling, was hung with Bennet ancestors and near-relations. He was very pale. On the floor lay a gilt frame, cracked at the corner, and, beside it, the brass hook torn from the plaster. The portrait within—the small half-length of Mr. Bennet painted in his youth, the one they all preferred because it showed him laughing—stillhung above, but not intact. From the gentleman’s cheekbone downward to the breast, the canvas had been slashed: a deliberate, clean cut through oil and linen, as precise as a judgment.
Mrs. Bennet’s scream followed half a breath later. “Murder! Murder in my very house!”
“Not murder,” Mr. Bennet said, very dry—but his voice shook. “Vandalism.”
Lydia and Kitty babbled at once—who would do such a wicked thing—to which Mary contributed, “It is a caution, Papa, a call to reflect upon our vanity in our lineage, painted and displayed—”
“Mary,” Mr. Bennet said, not unkindly, “your piety must wait upon my temper. Hill!”
Mr. Hill came at once.
“Who has been in this hall this last hour?”
“Only the footmen, sir, to lay the fire, and Mrs. Hill to dust, and Sarah to fetch a cloth from the closet,” the old butler replied without fluster. “No one else.”
“Where are they now?”
“In the back hall, sir.”
“Bring them.”
They came white-eyed, swearing they had touched nothing. The footmen set the fallen frame upright. Why Mr. Bennet’s portrait and not the ancestor in bonnet and pearls?Not Mr. Bennet’s Great-Uncle Francis with his hands upon his greyhounds, not the melancholy young woman in blue who had died at nineteen, but Mr. Bennet himself, the living master of the house. The cut did not quite reach the upper edge of the waistcoat. It had been drawn with a sure hand and a sharp blade.
Elizabeth’s stomach turned with a cold she had not felt since she had lain awake listening for the ticking of a candle wick at her door. She looked to Darcy. He had come in at the first cry and stood now a step inside the threshold, his face very still. His eyes moved once over the hall, calculating distances—the staircase to the wall, the window to the landing, the angle of approach from the servants’ passage. When he spoke, it was not with the soothing nothings some men offer in discomfort, but with instruction, crisp and sane.
“No one enters or leaves the house without Mr. Bennet’s leave,” he said quietly to Hill. “You will set a man at the back door and one at the front. You will request that the maids remain in the kitchen until called. If anything has been found out of place in the last day—anything at all—you will bring word to Miss Bennet or to me.”
Hill, grateful for an order that could be obeyed, dropped a curtsey and went without question. Mr. Bennet looked at Darcy as if evaluating the imposition of an outsiderupon his private jurisdiction—then nodded once, briskly, as if to say “Very well; begin saving me, then.”
“Elizabeth,” he said, “I will write to Mr. Jones to call later. Not that apothecaries are of any use with knives, but he is a sober man and will have heard who was out last night. We must also put away these family faces. I am suddenly tired of them.”
“You cannot put yourself away, Papa,” Elizabeth murmured, throat tight.
“No,” he said, and pushed the spectacles up the bridge of his nose with a hand that trembled. “But I can refrain from laughing at him for a day or two.”
Mr. Bennet
He tried to remain flippant and unconcerned. Elizabeth disapproved, but there was nothing for it. The young people had already learned more than he. It gave them a path to follow.Perhaps it is time for me to show more interest in this…mess.
Elizabeth
The incident, coming as it did on the heels of Lydia’s gown, altered the atmosphere of the house as thoroughly as a storm alters the air. The preparations for the ball went on—Mrs. Bennet could not be prevented from planning—but there was a murmur beneath every stitch, a look over every shoulder. Kitty would not cross the hall alone; Lydia, though she laughed too loudly and demanded extra ribbons as compensation, glanced at every shadow as if it might be the handsome ghost of her imagining. Mary read aloud with more emphatic moralizing than usual which did not reconcile anyone to virtue. Mr. Collins made himself notably absent amidst the chaos.
