CHAPTER ONE
Here I am, sitting in my bedgown, my hair out of curl and hanging about my face, staring at my sickly reflection.
Elizabeth Bennet allowed herself to indulge in these melancholy thoughts when the time came to leave being a guest in one home and settle herself as a guest in another. She moved continually between winter visits with Jane’s family in Gracechurch Street, a month on occasion with the Gardiners, and the rest of the year with Mary and Mr Collins at Longbourn. The latter was the most trying of all the living situations Elizabeth progressed through in the course of a year, and now it was time to return to living with Mary and her husband, along with her mother and Lydia.
A household headed by a brother-in-law is the least congenial for a poor unmarried sister.
Even though Jane and her children were her greatest source of happiness, spending the winter in Jane’s household had its own taxes on Elizabeth’s forbearance. If it was not Mr Cuthbert’s dull observations about the price of stock on the Exchange, then it was his mother’s critical opinion of her for still being single that made Elizabeth long to be elsewhere. The birth of another little nephew had made Elizabethmore necessary than ever to Jane, but Mrs Cuthbert had no patience for spinsters.
How can someone who is not yet one-and-twenty be classed a spinster?
It was a judgement likely based on comparison: of her five sisters, only she and Lydia were unmarried; and Lydia, at nearly sixteen, could be forgiven this unnatural state for two more years as far as Mrs Cuthbert was concerned. Jane had wed at fifteen, Mary at seventeen, and Kitty, during her first visit with Jane and Mrs Cuthbert, had received a proposal at seventeen. Elizabeth had spent every winter with her eldest sister since Jane had married and, although a few gentlemen seemed taken by her, none had made Elizabeth an offer.
When her thoughts passed over facing Mrs Cuthbert at breakfast, returning to Mr Collins’s home and suffering his and Mary’s pedantic speeches, listening to her mother’s laments over her eldest unmarried daughter’s prospects, the feeling of everything in her life being dull and insipid, the sensation of weariness with her constant removal from one set of people to another, Elizabeth felt another pain in her chest, localised around her heart.
Not now, not now, not now.Willing away one of these spells of pain had never worked in the two years she suffered them, but she still begged it to stop.
Her fingers and toes began to have that stinging, numb feeling, but thankfully she was already safely seated. The severe, bursting pain spread through her chest to crush her lungs. She feared she might faint; she focused on her reflection in the glass until her breathing steadied: her pale skin, the sheen of perspiration on her forehead, her parted lips rapidly trying to draw in more air, her eyes filling with tears.
Elizabeth pressed a fist against her breastbone until the torment stopped. The sharp, stabbing pain lasted another ten seconds, and then faded.Gone for another week, another day, or another hour?It always came back; it was only a matter of when. A lingering exhaustion followed one of these spells, but she could not indulge in it now; Jane’s mother-in-law expected her at breakfast.
“Why didyou not go to the circulating library this morning, Lizzy?” Jane asked.
Mrs Cuthbert spoke before Elizabeth could answer. “Who pays for your subscription? I cannot imagine there is room in the economy of your own expenses.”
“It costs me three shillings, Mamma,” said Robert. “I do not begrudge my sister three shillings a quarter to read whilst in town. I can afford it.” He did not look up from his newspaper. Elizabeth knew his mind was already fixed on the day’s call of the prices of stock, the shouting out of names, the recital of news, and whatever bustle of activity awaited him at the Exchange.
“We begrudge Lizzy nothing, certainly not when having her here is such a comfort to me.” Jane smiled at her husband, who remained silent behind his paper.
“I suppose you shall stay with us when Jane is lain-in again,” said Mrs Cuthbert. “For your sake, my dear Jane, I hope the next child is a girl. A daughter would be a comfort to you in your position in life more than a spinster sister.”
“Yes, Mother Cuthbert. Have you been in your room all morning, Lizzy?”
“Only when I was not in the nursery playing with the boys. I will miss them when I leave tomorrow.”
Mrs Cuthbert set down her fork. She was a large woman, much in love with the booming sound of her own voice, and she could not put down her cutlery nor initiate a conversation without making the entire party start. “Is young Robert not a fine boy, Eliza, and well behaved? So like his father when he was six.”
“Well behaved” was not the description she would have chosen for the mischievous boy. “Robert has grown since I first came, and Matthew has a little likeness for his father, I think. Thomas delighted me. The good humour of his countenance is bewitching.”
“I wonder at your ever having the blessing of such stout, clever little boys of your own,” Mrs Cuthbert said with a mournful shake of her head. “Our dear Jane has given Robert four boys in six years. Mrs Collins is expecting her second. You must feel the duty to Mr Cuthbert and Mr Collins by now to marry. Although, I suppose you mightalways make yourself useful in one of your sisters’ households during their illnesses and lying-ins. Between Mrs Cuthbert, Mrs Collins, and now Mrs Redmond, someone will have need of an old maid.”
Elizabeth pretended she had not heard and addressed Jane. “Do you not think little Thomas much like his namesake? He is not yet two, but he has such humour in his countenance, not unlike Papa had.”
Jane opened her mouth, but Mrs Cuthbert spoke too quickly. “Your father has been dead these two years. Remind me of what did he die.”
Jane had the greatest patience in the world. “He had a disorder of the heart, Mother Cuthbert. For some years he suffered a complaint of sudden pain across his chest and a difficulty breathing. He was at first able to lessen his pain with rest and medicines, but one day whilst walking he was seized by a pain in his breast and left arm.”
“And Mr Bennet then fell down dead?” Jane bowed her head. “At least he had the pleasure of seeing you well-settled before he died. And Mrs Bennet, I have no doubt, was comforted at his death by her middle daughter’s marriage that secured a home for her and her unmarried daughters. For Mary’s sake, I am pleased, but that duty as the next eldest should have fallen to you, Eliza.”
If only Jane had married a man whose mother was dead.
Instead of voicing that thought which would ensure she was never welcomed into Robert’s home again, Elizabeth imitated Jane’s sweeter temper as best she could. “My father was proud that an amiable man of good fortune had married his eldest daughter.”
Mrs Cuthbert could praise her son as easily as she criticised a spinster, and this talk occupied the rest of the meal. Robert was a successful Exchange broker; Robert invested the one-thousand-pound legacy left to him by his father and three years later had ten thousand pounds; Robert was a remarkably skilled speculator; Robert had now realised a fortune of fifty thousand that yielded twenty-five hundred a year; Robert purchased this elegant house in Gracechurch Street within walking distance of the houses of commerce and all the best shops in the city.
When she concluded this subject—for the present—Robert rose. “I must be at the Exchange before twelve.” He bowed to his wife and was gone without another word to anyone.
How could a man who had won his young wife with a few lines of poetry turn out to be such a dull creature?
