His brows rose.
“I mean it,” she said. “If Mama learns of this before matters are entirely fixed, she will tell every person within ten miles before breakfast and spend the rest of her life hounding me to purchase lace, jewels, gowns, and perhaps husbands for all five of us at once. And Papa—” She hesitated, guilt pricking her even though the concern was just. “Papa would tease her with it. Or forget it matters. Or decide a few hundred new books are a very reasonable expense now that I am rich.”
Mr. Philips did not contradict her.
“Can Netherfield be leased?” Elizabeth asked. “And the rents invested? I do not need an estate. I would not know what to do with one, except worry over its accounts as I do Longbourn’s.”
“It can be leased. Managed. Improved, even. If handled well, it may grow into a very substantial security for you.”
“And must Papa be told?”
Mr. Philips hesitated, and that hesitation told her everything. “Legally,” he said slowly, “as you are not yet of age, your father would ordinarily possess considerable authority. However, if the property and dowry are granted by the Crown under specific terms, and if secrecy is required by those terms until a named date or circumstance, then your father’s authority may be greatly limited.”
Elizabeth released a breath she had not realized she held. “Then let there be secrecy.”
“I will speak with Lord Matlock.”
“Please. I do love Papa,” she added quietly, “but he has never treated practical matters as though they are real until they inconvenience him personally.”
“I know.”
Elizabeth looked toward the trap door, now guarded and catalogued and no longer merely hers in any sense. “I do not want my name in the papers. I do not want people coming to stare at me. I do not want prestige, or attention, or gentlemen appearing because they have heard a fortune has been tied to my petticoats.”
“That,” Mr. Philips said, “is perhaps the wisest thing you have said all day.”
“Only perhaps?”
“I am leaving room for improvement.”
She smiled.
He reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “I will protect it, Lizzy. As much as law and prudence allow, I will protect all of it.”
After he left to pursue yet another impossible series of papers, Elizabeth remained seated in the cellar, though the bustle around her gradually resumed. Men carried up a tray ofcoins. Someone called for another cloth-lined box. Dr. Llewellyn exclaimed over a bit of tile.
Elizabeth heard all of it from a great distance.
Netherfield.
Ten thousand pounds.
Her mother safe.
Her sisters safer.
A future no longer wholly dependent upon marrying before her father died.
It felt impossible. Absurd. Like a dream brought on by exhaustion, floodwater, and Roman ghosts.
She thought suddenly of a morning months earlier when she had teased Jane over the idea that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. How grandly they had laughed at the notion that fortune could make a person desirable merely by existing.
Well.
She was now a young lady of large fortune.
Who knew where such a thing might take her?
Perhaps, for the first time in her life, she could marry how she wished. Whom she wished. Not for rescue. Not for security. Not because Longbourn would one day belong to someone else and five daughters must scramble for shelter before the roof vanished over their heads.
