She walked home. The lane was quiet. The wind had dropped. Truffles was warm and heavy against her chest, her breathing slow and even, her eyes half-closed. She was asleep before they reached the gate.
Jane was at the gate. Mrs. Bennet was in the hallway. Mr. Bennet was in his library doorway with his spectacles pushed upon his forehead. They saw the pig in her arms and the tears on her face and nobody said a word.
Jane took Elizabeth's arm and led her inside. Mrs. Bennet said something about supper. Mr. Bennet said nothing. He looked at the pig and looked at Elizabeth and looked at the direction Darcy had ridden, and his expression was the one he wore when he was revising an opinion.
Elizabeth carried Truffles upstairs. Jane followed with a basin of warm water and a cloth. They cleaned the pig together. Elizabeth washed Truffles' hooves and her belly and the scratch on her snout, and Jane held the pig steady, and Truffles bore the washing with the resigned patience of an animal who understood that the price of being loved was occasional hygiene.
The scratch was shallow. It would heal. The cold had not gone deep enough to do damage. Truffles was exhausted and her eyes had a haunted look that Elizabeth had never seen in them before, the look of a creature who had learned that the world contained people who would take you from your home and leave you in a cold place.
Hill appeared in the doorway with a bowl of warm milk and a plate of bread. She set them on the floor without speaking. Her face was tight with guilt.
"It was not your fault, Hill," Elizabeth said.
"The door was unlatched, miss. I should have —"
"It was not your fault."
Hill nodded. Her eyes were red. She left, and Elizabeth heard her footsteps on the stairs, heavy with the slow tread of a woman who had been trusted with something precious and felt she had failed.
Elizabeth sat for a moment. Then she put Truffles on the bed, where the pig immediately burrowed into the blankets. Elizabeth went downstairs.
She stopped in the corridor outside the parlour. She stood with her hand on the door frame and her jaw clenched so tightly that her teeth ached, and she let herself think the thought she had been pushing away since yesterday.
Hill's eyes darting toward the parlour. The door unlatched from inside. Someone who did not want the pig in this house.
Not Caroline — Caroline was at Netherfield. Caroline had arranged it, yes. But someone at Longbourn had opened that door.
Her mother. Her mother, who fussed and fluttered and worried about net curtains and entails and the cost of candles. Her mother, who would have done anything — anything — to remove an obstacle to Jane's happiness, if someone gave her a reason and a method. And Caroline had given her both.
Elizabeth stood in the corridor and let herself be angry. Not the measured, purposeful anger she would carry into the room. The other kind. The kind that wanted to shout, to slam doors, to say things that could not be taken back.
Elizabeth stood in the corridor and breathed. She breathed until the shaking in her hands stopped. She breathed until she could trust her voice to carry words instead of wreckage. It took longer than she expected.
Then she opened the door.
Her mother was in the parlour. Alone. The fire was low. Mrs. Bennet was sitting on the settee with her hands in her lap, not working at her embroidery, not reading, not talking. Just sitting. She looked up when Elizabeth entered, and her face did something Elizabeth had not expected. It crumpled.
"Oh, Lizzy."
"Mamma." Elizabeth closed the door. She stood in the centre of the room and looked at her mother and felt the anger and the grief and something else, something harder to name, somethingthat might have been pity. "The kitchen door was unlatched. Hill did not unlatch it."
Mrs. Bennet's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "Miss Bingley said. She said the pig was the obstacle. She said Mr. Bingley would never propose to Jane if the family kept a pig in the house. She said no gentleman of consequence would associate with us. She said —" Mrs. Bennet's voice fractured. "I only wanted Jane to be happy. I only wanted one of you to be safe."
Elizabeth stood very still. She could feel the anger in her chest, hot and tight, and she could also see her mother's face, the real terror beneath the nerves, the arithmetic that governed everything Mrs. Bennet did: five daughters, no fortune, an entail, and a future that narrowed with every year. Mrs. Bennet had not acted from malice. She had acted from the oldest fear she knew. The fear that her daughters would end up with nothing.
It did not excuse it. It did make it comprehensible.
"Truffles was alone in a cold pen for a day and a night," Elizabeth said. Her voice was steady. She made it steady. "She was frightened. She was hungry. She did not understand why she had been taken from her home."
Mrs. Bennet pressed her handkerchief against her mouth. Her eyes were wet.
"Miss Bingley used you, Mamma. She told you what you wanted to hear, and you did what she needed you to do, and Truffles paid for it."
"I know." It came out small. Smaller than Elizabeth had ever heard her mother sound. "I know, Lizzy. I am sorry."
Elizabeth looked at her mother for a long time. Mrs. Bennet did not fill the silence with excuses or justifications or nerves. She sat with what she had done, and the silence was the quietest Elizabeth had seen her mother be in years.
"Do not listen to Caroline Bingley again," Elizabeth said. "About anything. About Jane, about the pig, about the family. She does not have our interests at heart."
