“Mrs. Bennet.” Mr. Bennet’s voice was sharp. “She knew nothing until you opened that door.”
Elizabeth had not moved. Grandfather. Think she is my daughter. Ward.Words she had heard all her life seemed suddenly to have been spoken in another language and only now translated. Small things she had never questioned; the careless phrase, the odd look, the way Mrs. Bennet’s temper settled most sharply upon her.It was not new. That was perhaps the strangest part. It did not feel like learning something, but like putting a name to something she had always known and had never dared examine.
“If I am not your daughter,” she said, “who am I?”
"It is of no consequence." Mr. Bennet spoke with the even authority of a man closing a door. "You were left to our care. You are our ward. You will conduct yourself accordingly."
“You are the daughter,” Mrs. Bennet said, at precisely the same moment, with the compressed fury of a woman who hadwaited twenty years to say what ought never to have been said and now could not stop, “of the woman who stole my husband. I had every reason, every expectation; I should have had Philip, I should have had the heir, and she did not even give him a son. Instead I was left with Thomas, and children who favor him enough to remind me of it daily; Mary with his unfortunate eyes, Kitty enough of him to vex me, and you. You, who stand there with Philip’s eyes in your face, his eyes exactly, every day of my life forced to look at them and remember. Even as a child you had the same expression he wore when he looked at me; as though I were something he had stepped in and could not quite scrape from his boot.”
"Mrs. Bennet." Mr. Bennet rose. "Enough."
“She would have found out eventually. She is too clever. She is exactly like him.”
They were arguing across her now, neither of them attending to her in the least. Mrs. Bennet had moved from revelation to grievance; not who Elizabeth was, but what it had cost her to keep it hidden. Twenty years of watching every word, of smiling at neighbours, of answering careless remarks, of presenting Elizabeth to the world as her own while every look at her reminded her of why she had not had the life she meant to have.
“Yes,” said Mr. Bennet dryly, “your devotion to family duty has been one of the great constancies of my married life.”
“Do not mock me, sir. You left me to bear it. You with your books and your silence, while I answered every question and smiled through every visit.”
Mr. Bennet’s expression altered, though only slightly.
“And yet somehow you survived.”
Mrs. Bennet pressed on, too aggrieved to stop. She spoke of gowns, lessons, introductions, and the years she had smiled and said yes, this is my daughter, whenever anyone asked.
“Mrs. Bennet.” Mr. Bennet rose. “I demand you cease this instant. Leave this room. Do not speak of this again, I am warning you. “If this story leaves this house, every person in Meryton will suddenly discover a moral opinion on guardianship, inheritance, and my household. I have no intention of inviting the neighbourhood to debate decisions already made.”
She opened her mouth to continue, thought better of it, and swept from the room in high offence, still muttering of nerves, ingratitude, and the general misery of her life.
Elizabeth stood between them and listened. Mrs. Bennet spoke of disappointments and sacrifices; Mr. Bennet replied with old sarcasms and older resentments. Neither seemed much interested in answering the question Elizabeth had asked.At last Mrs. Bennet departed in high indignation, leaving Mr. Bennet alone with Elizabeth.
Mr. Bennet stood by his desk with the air of a man tired by an argument he had not wished to have and had nonetheless lost. For a moment, he seemed almost to have forgotten she was still there.
Elizabeth looked at Mr. Bennet. "I am Philip Bennet's daughter," she said.
"Yes," he said. "You are. And he left your care to us, and we have discharged that obligation faithfully for twenty years. Both your parents died in that carriage accident. You have no one else."
"You said a grandfather. Are there no other relations? What was my mother's name? Why have I never been told any of this?"
Mr. Bennet's mouth tightened. "Your mother's family," he said, with the particular contempt of a man who has rehearsed his grievance for a very long time. "Old names and older pride and the unshakeable conviction that blood entitles them to arrange the lives of everyone beneath their notice. I could never understand how Philip earned their regard when the rest of us were beneath their notice entirely. Your grandfather was perhaps the worst of them. We shared guardianship of you, and for four years that arrangement held well enough, and then he decided I was no longer fit to raise my own brother's daughter. Off to London he went, trailing his solicitor and his men of business, fully persuaded that a man of his consequence had only to present himself and the world would rearrange itself accordingly. For all his grand friends and his ancient name he could not overturn your father's will, and having failed he showed his feelings by leaving everything he possessed not to his only blood relation but to some jumped-up Earl he happened to prefer. You were apparently not worth the trouble of a proper provision."
He sat down and picked up his pen. "The banns for your marriage will be read starting this Sunday. In four weeks you will marry Mr. Collins and remove to the dower house, where you will continue to assist this family as is your obligation, given the considerable care we have provided these twenty years." He did not look up. "It is late. You are tired. I am tired. Go to bed."
Chapter Thirty-One
After the argument she had sat by her window until the candle burned low and guttered into darkness, and still she had remained there, watching the glass turn from black to silver with the slow approach of dawn. Every room in that house had felt altered; her bed, her chair, the walls themselves, all of it familiarand all of it suddenly wrong. One thought returned again and again, not with the force of surprise but with the dull certainty of recognition: she was not their daughter. Perhaps some part of her had always known it.
Philip Bennet had been her father. Mr. Bennet’s elder brother. There had been a mother too, and apparently a grandfather, and perhaps others besides, people who belonged to her and to whom she had belonged, and she knew almost nothing of them. That ignorance pressed harder than the talk of inheritance ever could. The loss of money was Mr. Bennet’s grievance; the loss of a life imagined was Mrs. Bennet’s. Elizabeth found she cared very little for either. What sat like grief was the thought that there had once been a family who had loved her, and they had died before she could remember them, leaving her to grow to womanhood among people who had spoken of duty and obligation when they meant convenience.
By the time the first pale light showed at the edges of the sky, she had not slept a moment. She dressed quietly and went downstairs. Cook was only just stirring the kitchen fire when Elizabeth slipped out through the back of the house and crossed the yard into the fields. She did not pause to wonder whether he would be there. She looked only toward the path where she knew he would come.
He had come almost to Longbourn’s boundary, and moved the moment she passed through the gate, as though he had been waiting a very long time and was very glad to be done with it. "You did not sleep," he said.
"Nor did you," she said.
They fell into step without discussion, the way people do when they have walked the same ground enough times that their feet know the way before their minds have decided. The lightwas coming up slowly, grey and uncertain, and the dew soaked cold through the grass at the edges of the path.
When they reached their place, the flat stretch at the northern edge where the field opened and the Hayes farm sat still in the early light, they stopped. Elizabeth stood without speaking. She had spent the walk thinking only that she must tell him, and now that she must begin, she found she did not know how.
