“So…” Papa’s brow furrowed, and he began to pace. “I wonder if it is not Mr Collins himself.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“… Nor his voice, grating as it is. Nor even his personal manner, though I do wonder at his welcome in the home of anyone of sense.” He tapped the spine of the booklet once against the desk. “It is expectation, voiced as authority.”
Elizabeth stared at him. “That is absurd.”
“Quite possibly,” Papa replied. “But it is at least a consistent absurdity.”
She laughed. “I do not see how my head could possibly object to such a distinction.”
“Nor do I. Which is what makes it interesting.”
“Oh, come, now!”
“You did not leave the table because Mr Collins was tedious,” he continued. “You endured him long past that point. You left because something in his manner crossed a line you could not ignore—even if you did not yet know where that line lay.”
Elizabeth leaned back in her chair, unsettled not by the conclusion, but by how closely it matched her own unarticulated experience.
“I am not imagining this, Papa.”
Papa met her gaze. “I should be very surprised if you were.”
He moved to the sideboard and poured a small glass of wine, which he set within her reach without comment. “Elizabeth,” he said gently, “you are not prone to dramatics. You do not retire from supper lightly. And you do not complain of headaches as a rule.”
She wrapped her fingers around the glass, trying to soothe herself with the cool of it. “And what am I to do?”
Papa considered her for a moment, then said simply, “Pay attention.”
“I can hardly do otherwise,” she snorted as she lifted the wine glass.
“And do not allow anyone else,” he added, “to tell you what a thing means before you have decided whether it exists at all.”
Elizabeth nodded slowly. That, at least, was advice she could trust.
Even if it still made no sense.
Chapter Twenty-One
Elizabeth left the housebefore anyone thought to look for her.
The morning had not yet gathered itself into calls and visits; the air held that pale, undecided quality of late autumn, cool without being sharp, the light thin but serviceable. She took her shawl from the peg by the back door and went out as though she had done so a thousand times before—quietly, without announcement, without destination.
The door shut behind her with a soft, final sound. She drew a breath and found it went where it was meant to go. That alone decided her pace.
She walked at first, briskly, as though she merely meant to turn about the garden before breakfast. The house was already receding behind her. When Mr Collins’s voice reached her through an open window, earnest and unrelenting even at this hour, she turned without hesitation and followed the line of the hedge instead.
The sound did not follow.
Her steps lengthened as her skirts brushed damp grass. She moved faster—not from alarm, but from the unshakable certainty that stopping too soon would invite something she did not wish to test. The path narrowed, then vanished altogether, leaving only ground she knew by habit rather than sight.
Elizabeth broke into a run.
Not recklessly, not far, but with the focused urgency of someone seeking space rather than escape. The morning air cut clean across her face. Her breath deepened, full and unimpeded, each one arriving without effort or warning. The farther she went from the house, the more the world seemed to resume its proper dimensions.
She slowed only when the rise came into view—the low bank beyond the meadow where the land dipped inward, sheltered from the path and the house alike. She had liked the place since childhood for reasons she had never bothered to examine.
Elizabeth stopped there and bent forward, hands braced against her knees.
