"I did not examine her petticoat."
"You examined something," Caroline said, with a sharpness that surprised him.
He went to his room.
He sat by the window and opened the book. On the third page, he found a margin note, written in a small, sharp hand that he recognised immediately though he had never seen her handwriting before. It read:This is the best line in the whole collection and no one ever talks about it.
He read the line she had marked. It was about the quiet comfort of familiar places, and the way the heart returns to what it knows even when the mind has moved on. He read it again. He read it a third time.
He turned the pages slowly. There were more notes. Small, decisive annotations in soft pencil. An exclamation mark beside a passage about solitude. The wordyesbeside a stanza about autumn. A tiny drawing of what appeared to be a pig in the margin of a poem about devotion, which made him close the book and press his hand over his mouth.
He sat in the fading light and thought about a woman who wrote in the margins of books and drew pigs beside poems about devotion and carried a piglet through a village and looked at him, just once, as though she could see something in him that he could not see in himself.
He was in trouble. He suspected the pig had known it before he did.
CHAPTER 7
Elizabeth
The rain began on Thursday morning and did not stop.
Jane had been invited to dine at Netherfield with the Bingley sisters. It was a kind invitation, graciously extended by Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst, who had apparently decided that Jane was the one Bennet sister who could be tolerated in their drawing room. Elizabeth suspected the invitation had more to do with Bingley's obvious attachment than with any genuine warmth from his sisters, but she said nothing, because Jane was happy and Elizabeth did not believe in ruining happiness with suspicion.
Mrs. Bennet, however, had plans.
"You must go on horseback, Jane."
"On horseback? But it looks like rain, Mamma."
"Nonsense. A little weather never hurt anyone. And if it should rain..." Mrs. Bennet paused, as if the thought had only just occurred to her, which it most certainly had not. "You willbe obliged to stay the night. At Netherfield. Where Mr. Bingley lives."
Mrs. Bennet delivered this logic with the air of a military strategist unveiling a campaign. Elizabeth, who could see the scheme as clearly as if her mother had drawn a diagram, opened her mouth to object.
"Do not interfere, Lizzy. Your sister must go on horseback."
"Mamma, it is going to pour."
"All the better."
Jane went on horseback. She wore her best riding habit and her new bonnet and looked, as she always did, like a portrait of quiet beauty on its way to an appointment.
The rain came down before she was halfway to Netherfield. Not a gentle rain, not an English drizzle, but a heavy, drenching autumn deluge that turned the lanes to streams and the sky to the colour of wet slate. Elizabeth stood at the window and watched the water sheet down the glass and thought dark thoughts about her mother's stratagems.
By the time Jane would have reached Netherfield, she would have been soaked through, chilled to the bone, and in precisely the condition Mrs. Bennet had intended.
The note arrived that evening. It was in Jane's handwriting, which was usually elegant and precise but which now had the wobbly, uncertain quality of someone writing while feverish.
Dearest Lizzy, I find myself taken ill. A sore throat and a headache. The Bingleys are very kind and have insisted I stay until I am well. I am sure it is nothing. Do not worry.
Elizabeth read it twice. Then she went to her room, changed into her sturdiest boots and her warmest pelisse, and came downstairs.
"I am going to Netherfield," she said.
"It is three miles," Mrs. Bennet said. "And it is raining."
"Jane is ill."
"She has a cold. She will be perfectly well attended. Mr. Bingley will see to it."
