"Yes, Papa."
She did not believe it. She wanted to believe it. The wanting and the not believing sat side by side in her chest and neither one would yield.
Kitty and Lydia were recruited. Lydia complained that searching for a pig was beneath her dignity, a claim that Elizabeth did not have the patience to dispute. Kitty coughed. They were sent to check the north fields and the copse behind the orchard.
"I do not see why I should tramp through fields for a pig," Lydia said, pulling on her boots with the aggrieved air of a woman being asked to do manual labour. "If the pig wished to stay, it would have stayed."
"The pig did not leave of her own will," Elizabeth said.
Something in her voice made Lydia look up. The complaint died on her lips. She went out without another word.
Mary, who had not been asked to help, offered a quotation from Fordyce about the attachments we form with God's creatures and the grief that attends their loss. Elizabeth looked at her sister, who was standing in the corridor with her book in her hands and her expression earnest and her contribution entirely useless, and she said, "Thank you, Mary."
Mary blinked. Elizabeth was not sure she had ever thanked Mary for a Fordyce quotation before. The novelty of it sent Mary back to the parlour in a state of visible confusion.
Kitty returned within the hour, red-nosed and coughing. She had found nothing in the north fields or the copse. She had also lost Lydia.
"She said she was going to ask in the village," Kitty said, picking at the mud on her boots. "She walked toward Meryton. I called after her but she would not wait."
Elizabeth did not have the attention to spare for Lydia's dereliction. "If she asks at the shops, that is something."
"She was not walking toward the shops," Kitty said. She said it quietly, the way Kitty said most things, and Elizabeth was already reaching for her bonnet and did not hear it.
Elizabeth expanded the search. She walked two miles in every direction. She checked farms she had never visited, introducing herself to startled farmers' wives and asking if they had seen a small pig, pink, with floppy ears. She stopped carts on the road. She climbed stiles and peered over walls and looked in barns that smelled of hay and cattle and the cold November air.
She found a brown pig in a field near the Haye Park road. Her heart leapt. She climbed the fence. The pig looked at her with the incurious expression of a creature that weighed fourteen stone and had never been carried in a pelisse.
It was not Truffles. It was not even close to Truffles.
She walked on. Her boots were heavy with mud. Her voice was going hoarse from calling. The light was fading and the cold was settling in, the kind of November cold that seeped through wool and found the skin beneath.
Elizabeth thought about Truffles alone in the dark. Small and frightened. She thought about foxes. About ditches filled with cold water. About farmers who would see a stray pig as property, or as dinner. She thought about the way Truffles pressed againsther at night, a warm weight at the foot of the bed, her breathing slow and even, her trust absolute.
She thought about the open door. The untouched turnip. Hill's eyes darting toward the parlour.
A thought formed. She did not want it. She pushed it away and it came back. Someone had opened that door. Someone who did not want the pig in this house.
She would deal with that later. Now she needed to find Truffles.
Elizabeth lit the lantern she had taken from the stable and kept walking. The lane was black beyond the lantern's reach. The hedgerows were shapes against the sky. An owl called from the elm at the corner of the Longbourn fields, and the sound was lonely and vast and made the dark feel larger.
She walked the Meryton road again. She walked the path toward Lucas Lodge. She walked the lane that led to the Netherfield grounds and stood at the gate and called the pig's name and heard nothing but the wind and the distant bark of a farm dog.
Jane found her on the stile at the end of the Longbourn lane, sitting in the dark with the lantern at her feet and tears running down her face.
"Lizzy. Come inside. You will catch cold."
"I cannot come inside. She is out there somewhere."
"The servants will continue looking."
"I should be looking."
"You have been looking for five hours." Jane sat beside her on the stile. She put her arm around Elizabeth's shoulders. The warmth of Jane's body was a shock against the cold. "We will find her."
"What if we do not?"
Elizabeth's voice broke. The sound surprised her. She had been holding herself together with the fierce, brittleconcentration of a person who believes that falling apart will make the situation real, and the breaking of her voice made it real, and once it was real she could not stop it.
