She laughed—a small sound—and he bent to gather a handful of papers from the floor, shuffling them aside to clear the window seat. “Come,” he said. “Sit, before I lose track of you again.”
Elizabeth obeyed, settling into the cushioned recess. Her father’s gaze dropped at once to the crust of bread in her hand. He made a thoughtful sound—approval, perhaps—and returned to collecting the scattered correspondence, stacking it with more care than usual, though it was clear there was no hope of restoring order.
“Papa,” she said, watching him. “What on earth have you been doing? It is the middle of the night—or very nearly the morning—and you look as though you have not slept in a week.”
He paused, letter in one hand, the candle guttering slightly in the other.
“Reading,” he said lightly. “Remembering. And…” He glanced at the floor, at the ring of paper and leather and ink that had formed around him. “Trying, rather unsuccessfully, to persuade the past to explain itself.”
“May I see?”
Her father hesitated only a moment before handing her the letter he had been holding to the candle, as though it were no more remarkable than any other scrap in the room. Elizabeth took another bite of her bread and unfolded it carefully one-handed, the paper thin as linen and twice as fragile.
Her eyes went first to the date. She blinked, then laughed softly and looked up at him.
“This is from more than sixty years ago! I have never even heard of the writer. Is this the urgent mystery that has deprived you of sleep?”
Papa made a vague, helpless gesture and bent to gather more papers, as though order might yet emerge if he persisted long enough. “From my great-uncle to my grandfather. Read it. At least the end. The rest is rather dull.”
Elizabeth lowered her gaze again. The letter was precisely as he had said—mundane, almost comfortingly so. Complaints about London lodgings. The filth of the market. The price of candles. A longing for home—Longbourn, she supposed—that expressed itself in careful sentences and domestic detail. She read a few lines, then another, her attention wandering until…
Here. The tone altered.
“‘…I regret to say that Aunt Abigail is not improved by the change to London from Longbourn. Indeed, she is rather gone-off, in both spirits and sense, and her behaviour has grown such that I scarce know how to account for it…’”
Elizabeth’s chewing slowed.
“‘…she speaks at times with a confidence wholly unconnected to her circumstances, and at others not at all. She will sit for hours and then rise in the most severe agitation, always with some warning about a storm coming, and sometimes two days before it does so. She quite terrified my mother-in-law yesterday by chasing her from Aaron’s nursery with cries of pestilence. Pestilence! The very idea! The physicians have done what they can, though the bleedings have only weakened her…’”
Elizabeth swallowed.
“‘…there is talk of confinement, though I cannot think where she might be placed. She is no longer young, but I begin to fear for the children, who are all quite frightened by her manner and questions…’”
The candle wavered. Elizabeth angled the page and read on, her brow knitting.
“‘…I do not understand it any better than you. Father said she was so merry and quick of wit when she was young, until this nonsense took her. I wish to Heaven she had never been raised at Longbourn, for the place seems to agree with her no better than with the others of her disposition.’”
She folded the letter and held it in her lap, the bread forgotten in her hand.
“That is—” Her voice caught, and she stopped, surprised by it. “That is dreadful.”
“Yes.”
Elizabeth looked up at him. “Who was she?”
“My grandfather’s aunt,” he replied. “Or his uncle’s sister, depending on which line you trace. She lived at Longbourn for most of her life.”
Elizabeth glanced back at the letter. “They speak of her as though she were a burden of some long standing. As though she had ceased to be… herself.”
“They did,” Mr Bennet said. “And they were not unkind people, by the standards of their time.”
She was silent for a moment, then asked, very softly, “Why were you reading this, Papa?”
He did not answer at once. He gathered the remaining papers into a neater stack, though it was clear he was no longer seeing them. When he finally looked at her, the humour had not left him—but it had thinned, drawn back to something more honest beneath.
“Because,” he said, “I have been telling myself for years that such tales were family nonsense. That every house has its eccentric women and its unfortunate stories, and that ours were no different. And because I am no longer certain that was ever true.”
Elizabeth frowned faintly and rose, setting the letter aside. As she did, her hand brushed one of the papers her father had stacked too neatly to be accidental. She lifted it without thinking… and then paused.
