Elizabeth did not return before he left. He walked back to Caesar and rode to Netherfield and sat in the library and opened the Cowper book and stared at the small pig Elizabeth had drawn in the margin and thought:I am going to have to try harder than this.
CHAPTER 17
Elizabeth
The kitchen was empty.
Elizabeth knew it the moment she stepped through the door. The room had a quality of absence, the particular stillness of a space that should contain a living creature and did not. The fire was low. The turnip lay on the flagstones, untouched. The blanket Elizabeth had folded in the corner near the hearth was undisturbed.
The door to the yard was open.
"Truffles?"
No answering squeal. No scrabbling of hooves. No small pink shape trotting toward her with the proprietary urgency of a pig who considered any separation longer than ten minutes a personal affront.
"Truffles!"
She checked behind the flour barrel. She checked under the table. She checked the pantry, where Truffles sometimes went to investigate the apples on the lower shelf. She checked thescullery and the passage to the cellar and the cupboard where the root vegetables were stored.
Nothing. The kitchen was empty, and the emptiness was wrong.
"Hill? Where is Truffles?"
Hill's face told her everything. The housekeeper was standing in the corridor, her apron twisted in her hands, her expression a mixture of guilt and bewilderment that Elizabeth had never seen on that steady, dependable face.
"I do not know, Miss Lizzy. I checked at the quarter hour, and she was sleeping by the hearth. Sound asleep, she was. When I came back, the door was open and she was gone."
"The door was latched. I latched it myself."
"I know, miss. I cannot explain it. I thought perhaps she had gone to the garden, but I looked and she was not there. I looked in the yard and the stable and the henhouse. She is not anywhere I can find."
Elizabeth stood very still. The kitchen smelled of bread and ash and the faint, familiar mustiness of pig. The turnip on the floor was whole and untouched. Truffles never left a turnip untouched. Truffles regarded turnips the way Mrs. Bennet regarded gossip: as essential sustenance, to be consumed immediately and in its entirety.
Something was wrong. This was not an escape. Truffles escaped with purpose. She escaped toward Darcy, toward Elizabeth, toward food. She did not escape and leave a turnip behind.
"The door was not unlatched by a pig," Elizabeth said.
Hill said nothing. Her eyes darted to the corridor. To the parlour. To wherever Mrs. Bennet was.
Elizabeth did not have time to follow that thought. She was already moving.
She searched the garden first. She checked the flower beds, the shrubbery, the patch of turned earth near the kitchen garden wall where Truffles liked to root. She called the pig's name until the sound of her own voice became strange to her, a hollow, repeated thing that bounced off the walls and the hedges and came back empty.
She searched the lane. She walked the half-mile to the crossroads, looking in every ditch and under every hedge. The November afternoon was grey and the wind had a bite to it, and she thought about Truffles' size, how small she still was, how the cold would find the thin places in a piglet's skin.
Jane came out to help. She had been upstairs writing to Charlotte and came down to find Elizabeth in the yard, muddy and wild-eyed, and she did not ask questions. She put on her pelisse and her boots and she walked beside Elizabeth to Meryton.
They asked everyone. The baker, who had not seen a pig. The draper, who had not seen a pig. Mrs. Phillips, who had not seen a pig but had heard about the new curtains at Netherfield and would Elizabeth like to hear about them. The officers in the high street, who had not seen a pig but offered to keep watch. Mr. Denny, who said he would ask at the barracks.
No Truffles. Not in Meryton, not on the road between Meryton and Longbourn, not at Mr. Hobbs's farm where she had been born, not at Lucas Lodge, not at the church.
Mr. Bennet sent two servants to check the tenant farms to the south. He came out of his library to do it, which told Elizabeth more about the severity of the situation than any words could have. Mr. Bennet did not leave his library for trifles. He did not leave his library for Mrs. Bennet's nerves or Lydia's tantrums or the arrival of guests. He left his library for things that mattered, and the pig, Elizabeth understood now, mattered.
He stood in the hallway and gave instructions with the quiet competence of a man who did not often exercise authority but had not forgotten how. "Thomas, check the Hobbs farm and the fields to the south. James, take the road toward Lucas Lodge and ask at every house. If you see any carts coming from the Longbourn direction, stop them."
He looked at Elizabeth. His expression was the one he reserved for her: fond, dry, and slightly worried.
"We will find her, Lizzy."
