CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
WHAT CANNOT BE GOVERNED
Elizabeth
Mama had been cookingsince dawn, which meant she had been plotting since midnight, because in the Clark family, pastry and planning were indistinguishable arts. Naturally, she enlisted her daughters to stir, chop, and bake, and had transformed the kitchen into something between a military encampment and the costume room of a theatrical production.
Cinnamon and I had arrived at dawn, as contractually, I was allowed one weekly visit with my family, and Mama immediately recruited me to kitchen duties.
“You are up early,” I said, though the observation was less about her hours and more about the fact that she had clearly been awake long enough to bake three varieties of biscuits and begin a syllabub.
“You have finally arrived.” Mama wiped her hands on her apron, the one her mother had embroidered with the Clark family crest, a rolling pin crossed with a sheaf of wheat, which she claimed was a real crest and Papa claimed was an invention, and neither of them would concede the point. “The napkins need pressing. Lydia hasbeen told twice and has pressed nothing but her opinions upon Kitty about which ribbon to wear.”
“Good morning to you, too, Mama.”
“Good morning is for women who have not been awake since four. For the rest of us, there is purpose.” She laid the pastry over the pie dish with a flourish. “The walnut biscuits are for the table. I have made twice the usual quantity because Miss Darcy consumed four the last time she visited, and a girl who eats with that appetite requires feeding, not correcting.”
Cinnamon took her place beneath the kitchen table, intent on reclaiming every inch of her domain and every morsel that might drop from above. I dried my hands on my apron and began transferring biscuits to the good Wedgwood plate. “How many are we expecting?”
“The full Netherfield party. Mr. Bingley, Mr. Darcy, Miss Bingley, Mr. and Mrs. Hurst, and Miss Darcy.” Mama ticked them off on floury fingers. “Fourteen with our family and Mrs. Long. It is unlucky to have thirteen, you know. I have seated Mr. Darcy to my right and Mr. Bingley beside Jane, and if Caroline Bingley does not approve of her placement beside Mary, she may take the matter up with the Lord Almighty, who, I am told, also seats people according to His purposes.”
“And Mr. Hurst?”
“Mr. Hurst will be seated where the food is. His requirements are simple, and I intend to meet them generously. A well-fed man is an allied man.”
Jane appeared in the kitchen doorway, already dressed in her blue muslin with her hair pinned in the soft arrangement that made her look like a portrait of a woman who had never experienced a moment’s anxiety. She had, naturally, experienced many, and her calm was armor of the most effective variety. It let her move through the world without anyone feeling obliged to protect her, both a virtue and a danger.
“Mama,shall I arrange the flowers?”
“You shall arrange yourself beside the dining room window where the light catches your hair to the best advantage, and leave the flowers to Kitty, who will get them wrong, and Mary, who will correct her.”
“Mama.” Jane’s reproach was gentle and entirely ineffective.
“I am not scheming, Jane. I am hosting. There is a distinction, though I grant the tools are similar.”
Lydia exploded through the kitchen door with Kitty in her wake, both of them mid-argument about whether officers wore their dress swords to dinner or only to balls.
“Lizzy! Is Mr. Darcy terribly handsome when he is not being insufferable? Because Kitty says he scowls even at dinner, and I said that scowling men are quite exciting in novels but insupportable in person.”
“Mr. Darcy scowls at approximately the same frequency that you talk, Lydia, which is to say constantly and without sufficient provocation.”
“Then he will be exhausting.” Lydia seized a walnut biscuit from the cooling rack and ate it in two bites.
Mary came in last, carrying a book that was not Fordyce’s sermons but a volume on household management. She set it on the table, poured herself tea, and said nothing, but her silence was the attentive variety of a girl who noticed things that louder sisters missed.
“Mary, you will help me with the syllabub,” Mama said. “Your hand is steadier than mine for the whip.”
Mary flushed with quiet pleasure and took up the whisk.
My hand went to my ear before I could stop it, and the going was reflex, and the reflex carried a memory—flour on his cheek, flour on my brow, the warm kitchen at Netherfield where the flour had meant something neither of us had said and both of us had understood.
Mama took a towel and wiped my ear.
“There is no flour behind my ear, Mama,” I protested.
“No. But there was something in your face just now that lookedremarkably like it.” She turned back to her pie. “The carriages will arrive at four. Mr. Bennet,” she raised her voice toward the library door with the projection of a woman who had been summoning her husband from behind his newspaper for a quarter of a century, “if you intend to participate in this dinner, you will require a clean cravat and a willingness to engage in conversation with persons who do not live between book covers.”
“I have been informed,” Papa’s voice emerged from the library, “that one of our guests assessed my cleverest daughter’s intelligence and concluded she was fit for employment. I look forward to examining his criteria.”
