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CHAPTER ONE
A FORTUNE WITH CONDITIONS
“Uncle Henry is dead, and he left everything to Lizzy?” Lydia’s voice cut across the room before Mr. Sowerby had finished the first paragraph.
Elizabeth blinked as six pairs of eyes converged upon her. Lydia’s accusing. Kitty’s confused. Mary’s composing an expression of moral improvement. Her mother’s shocked, and her father’s amused that his braggart brother had contrived one last stunt.
And Jane—who had no dowry, who was in love with a man she could not afford—looked at her sister with such plain, uncomplicated gladness that Elizabeth had to turn away.
“Yes, I do believe it amounts to eighty thousand pounds,” the solicitor said, glaring at Lydia and Kitty as they crowded around him, peering at the will laid out on the dining table.
The words rippled through the room, but none felt their weight so keenly as Elizabeth. Her entire worldly fortune, as of half past ten on a Wednesday, amounted to six pounds eleven shillings, secreted in a tin—painstakingly amassed over four winters of resisting new gloves.
“But… why me?”
Nobody heard her, which was for the best, since she had no notion what she meant. Why not Jane? Why not all five of them, divided, as everyone in this house had assumed since she was a child—as she had assumed herself, almost a month ago when the letter came, and she was the only person at Longbourn who wrote back to ask how he had died.
Then Mrs. Bennet completed her prolonged inhalation and exploded, jumping to her feet.
“Eighty thousand pounds. Mr. Bennet. Did you hear that? Your brother has left Lizzy eighty thousand pounds!”
“I am in the room, my dear. I heard.”
But no dry remark ever stopped Mamma from celebrating when money was involved. She was already circling the room. “We are saved. Whoever thought your blackguard brother would ever amount to a brass farthing, much less eighty thousand pounds. Mr. Sowerby, are you quite certain?”
“The estate, after settlement of certain obligations, stands in the neighborhood of that figure, madam. If I might be permitted to continue—”
But there was no reasoning with Mamma when eighty thousand pounds needed adulation. Her fan flapped triumphantly in front of Jane, who dutifully provided an audience to her theatrics.
“Jane! Jane, eighty thousand pounds, that is more than Miss Bingley, Miss Lucas, and Miss King combined—more than every girl in Hertfordshire put together—” She counted her fingers, brow twisted as she attempted sums in her head. “Why, that is a fortune greater than Mr. Bingley’s income, if we invest it properly.”
“Will Lizzy share her fortune with us?” Kitty asked, giving Elizabeth the same expression of abject begging she did whenever borrowing a ribbon or bonnet.
“If I may proceed.” Mr. Sowerby cleared his throat.
“You may,” Mrs. Bennet said. “Are you quite sure that Elizabeth is Mr. Henry Bennet’s sole beneficiary?”
“Quite so, and—”
“But of course it is Lizzy.” Mrs. Bennet turned upon Elizabeth. “She was the only one who listened to his tales of smuggling on the high seas. She encouraged him, and now he rewards her with his ill-gotten—”
“Mamma, he was our uncle, not a criminal,” Elizabeth reminded. “And we are mourning him still.”
“Well! Of course we are all very sorry that Henry is dead—he was Mr. Bennet’s brother, after all, though I cannot say I ever understood the man, what with the shipping and the warehouses and the reek of French perfume—but Lizzy, my dear, you must see that this changes everything. Eighty thousand pounds! You shall have your pick of any gentleman in three counties!”
“Is my Lizzy going to purchase herself a husband with her eighty thousand pounds while still in mourning?” Mr. Bennet murmured from behind his newspaper, though not a rustle came from the pages. “I was under the impression that we must wear black a while longer before Lizzy can spend her fortune on ribbons, silks, and first editions for the library.”
“Papa, this is serious,” Jane said gently. “Eighty thousand pounds is a very great deal of money and must be carefully managed.”
“For Lizzy, but not for us!” Lydia pointed an irate finger at Elizabeth. “She was boot-licking the bootlegger and the rest of us may go hang.”
“Lydia, I did not toady to him,” Elizabeth said. “He was interesting, and he had adventures. He sent me an Italian dictionary from Naples and told me the harbor smelled of lemons and gunpowder. I wrote to him because the rest of you shunned him. Said he was a smuggler or a rum runner or something unsavory.”
“He was liable to walk off with the china and silver,” Mr. Bennet said. “That was why he was seldom welcome here at Longbourn, not that it ever kept him away.”
“And to think he left his entire fortune to the one niece who encouraged him.” Mrs. Bennet heaved her considerable chest with false pathos. “Where does a man like Henry Bennet come by eighty thousand pounds? I have said since the year four that he was a smuggler, waving those diamonds around, and nobody listened. You may all consider yourselves told.”
“You said it last Thursday, my dear, when you were also quite certain he had left us nothing at all.”
