"I refuse him because I do not love him, Mamma."
"Love! What has love to do with it?"
Everything, Elizabeth thought. Nothing, Elizabeth thought. She did not know which answer was correct.
Mrs. Bennet cornered Mr. Bennet in his library. Elizabeth could hear them through the door, her mother's voice rising and her father's replies too low to catch. She stood in the corridor with Truffles at her ankle and waited.
Mr. Bennet called her in. He sat behind his desk with his spectacles on and his expression unreadable and looked at her for a long moment before he spoke.
"An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do."
Elizabeth's eyes stung. She blinked. "Thank you, Papa."
"Do not thank me. I am simply being honest about which daughter I prefer." He paused. He took off his spectacles andpolished them on his sleeve. "You did the right thing, Lizzy. Though I confess the pig's contribution was a bonus I had not anticipated."
Collins left Longbourn two days later, his trunk repacked and his dignity imperfectly restored. He mentioned Lady Catherine seven times during breakfast on his last morning, as though invoking her name could repair the damage to his self-regard. He did not look at Elizabeth. He did not look at Truffles. He walked to the waiting carriage with the careful posture of a man who expected to be charged from behind at any moment.
Charlotte accepted him within the week.
She came to Longbourn to tell Elizabeth herself. They sat in the parlour with the door closed and the fire low, and Charlotte folded her hands in her lap and looked at Elizabeth with the steady, practical gaze that had never failed her.
"He is not a bad man, Lizzy. He will provide a comfortable home."
"You used the word 'comfortable' three times in that sentence."
"Because it is a comfortable situation."
"Do you love him?"
Charlotte's pause was the only answer Elizabeth needed. It lasted two seconds. It contained twenty-seven years of arithmetic: the cost of ribbons, the price of candles, the dwindling pile of coins in her father's desk. Charlotte was twenty-seven. She had no fortune. She had no beauty that would arrest a man across a room. She had intelligence and practicality and a clear-eyed understanding of what the world offered women like her, and what it did not.
"I am not romantic," Charlotte said. "I never was. I ask only a comfortable home. And considering Mr. Collins's character, his connections, and his situation in life, I am convinced that mychance of happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast on entering the marriage state."
"I hope you will visit me at Hunsford," Charlotte said, when she stood to go.
"Of course I will."
Charlotte smiled. It was her real smile, the one that softened the practical lines of her face. "I shall have a garden. Mr. Collins says the garden at Hunsford is very well situated. I intend to grow vegetables."
"Charlotte Lucas, the vicar's wife, growing vegetables in Kent."
"Charlotte Collins," Charlotte corrected, gently.
The name landed like a stone in water. Charlotte Collins. Elizabeth pressed her lips together and nodded and walked Charlotte to the door.
That evening, Truffles stole a turnip from the kitchen and ate it under Mr. Bennet's desk while he pretended not to notice. Elizabeth sat in the garden in the autumn dusk and thought about Charlotte's real smile and Charlotte's garden and the wordcomfortablerepeated like a prayer, and then she thought, unbidden and unwelcome, about Darcy's hand on Truffles' back in the library at Netherfield, and she pushed the thought away and went inside and held her pig and did not think about it again.
She thought about it again.
She scratched Truffles behind the ear. The pig sighed and pressed closer.
"You and I," Elizabeth said, "will be just fine."
The pig grunted. It sounded like agreement. It sounded like enough.
CHAPTER 12
Elizabeth
