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She escaped before her mother could marshal another objection.
The stairs offered no refuge. Mary sat on the landing, a volume of sermons open in her lap, her face arranged in the expression of pious concern she had been perfecting since babyhood.
“‘Pride goeth before destruction,’” Mary intoned as Elizabeth passed, “‘and a haughty spirit before a fall.’ Proverbs, Lizzy. You would do well to consider.”
“I am considering nothing but my bonnet at the moment, Mary. Excuse me.”
“Fordyce warns us that a woman who places too high a value upon her own judgment—”
Elizabeth passed Jane on the stairs, exchanging a sympathetic nod and a squeeze of hands.
“Lizzy, Papa has locked himself in the library, and Mamma is… well, you know… I only counsel you to consider your own peace. But do not let your pride speak for you; consider the cost. It is too high a price.”
Elizabeth could not reply; the lump in her throat was too formidable. Her gentle sister would have walked barefoot over live coals for the family, and had their positions been reversed, Jane would already be at the altar, arm in arm with a donkey-headed Bottom, if duty required it.
She pressed Jane’s hand, released it, and by the time she reached the ground floor, Lydia and Kitty stood near the front door as impediments to her peace.
“Where are you going?” Lydia demanded. “Off to spend your eighty-thousand pounds?”
“Take us with you,” Kitty added. “I need a new ribbon.”
“I am going to Lucas Lodge, and unless Charlotte or Maria have ribbons to spare—” She did not finish as she pulled on her bonnet and pelisse.
“That is not fair.” Lydia’s lower lip jutted forward in the expression that had been winning her concessions since infancy. “You cannot go visiting Charlotte Lucas while we are trapped in this house with Mamma wailing and Mary preaching. It is cruel. It is tyranny.”
“I am coming too,” Mary announced. “I see Lydia is in need of guidance against covetousness and Kitty has to temper her greed, or is it the other way around.”
Elizabeth’s eyes made another circuit of her skull as she pulled on her gloves. “I shall go walking, and I am not preventing any of you from taking your own walks; however, Charlotte Lucas might not welcome an invasion. Lucas Lodge is hardly the Bastille, to be stormed by a mob.”
“Charlotte will welcome us,” Lydia crowed. “And she will take our side. If not, Maria surely will.”
“Besides,” Kitty said, pulling on her own gloves. “Charlotte might know where Mr. Lefevre has gone. He is her cousin, after all, and he danced with you all through the autumn, Lizzy. Someone ought to write him.”
The name landed as a book dropped on her foot. Byron Lefevre, with his irrepressible laugh, his abominable poetry, and his readiness to dance every set at the Meryton assemblies. He had been amusing—perhaps even possible. He had regarded Elizabeth as interesting rather than invisible, and she had permitted herself to imagine—not marriage, exactly, but something she could not quite name.
“Mr. Lefevre is in Ireland,” Elizabeth said. “And he is nothing to the purpose.”
“But he might come back! If he knew what was happening, he might—”
“He might what, Kitty? Ride from Ireland to rescue me from my eighty thousand pounds? He has no fortune and no prospects. He writes poetry about larks and sells nothing.” She heard the sharpness in her voice and could not soften it. “Mr. Lefevre cannot help me, and I would thank you not to mention him again.”
The silence that followed was almost worse than the questions. Kitty’s face crumpled into the expression she wore when she knew she had blundered but didn’t understand why.
“Well,” Lydia said, adjusting her bonnet, “if we are not going to talk about anything interesting, we may as well walk. Mary, do not tell me you are to accompany us.”
Mary was already prepared, her boots laced, her cloak pinned, and a volume of sermons tucked under one arm. “‘The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.’ Jeremiah seventeen, verse nine.”
“Thank you, Mary. I shall add it to my growing collection of unhelpful quotations,” Elizabeth said as the cold breeze slapped her face.
They walked in a ragged procession down the lane toward Lucas Lodge, the March morning pressing cold and grey around them. The hedgerows were bare, the fields flat and colorless, and the sky a featureless ceiling offering neither rain nor relief. In the distance, a lark sang the sort of song that Byron Lefevre would have written a poem about.
Elizabeth envied its lack of uncles.
Lydia filled the silence as nature abhors a vacuum. “I do not see why Uncle Henry could not have left the money to all of us equally. Sixteen thousand each would have been perfectly fair, and then we could each choose our own husbands without interference from dead relations.”
“Perhaps,” Mary ventured, “Uncle Henry intended a moral lesson. The scriptures tell us that it is easier for a camel—”
“If you mention the camel and the needle one more time, Mary, I shall scream, and the entire parish will hear it, and they will assume I am my mother.” Elizabeth clenched her fists in frustration.
