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“Who is the letter from?” Lydia jutted her shoulder to block their progress. “Is it another gentleman come to offer for Lizzy’s fortune?”

“It must be Mr. Lefevre!” Kitty squeaked. “Will he challenge Mr. Darcy to a pistol duel behind the assembly rooms?”

“‘They that take the sword shall perish with the sword,’ as Matthew reminds us,” Mary intoned from the corner. “Violence is a poor substitute for moral rectitude.”

“Thank you, Mary,” Elizabeth replied, sidestepping her chorus of sisters. “I shall keep my pistols polished and my temper on a tighter leash.”

Only Jane stood quietly at the base of the staircase, her blue eyes large and watery with sisterly distress. “Oh, Lizzy, I hope you slept at all.”

“Sleep is a luxury ill-suited to an heiress whose world is collapsing about her ears. I would sooner keep my lamp trimmed and watch for the bridegroom’s arrival,” Elizabeth said, noting Mary’s swift nod at the Scriptural flourish, “than be found napping when the hour comes.”

Lydia, who had abandoned the blockade, was already found with her ear pressed hard against the library oak. “Lizzy, the man is a clergyman, and Papa mutters like a roasting partridge. Says he means to assert his claims, and Mamma declares it means he is looking for a wife. You may have him, Lizzy, and leave Mr. Darcy to me. I am quite tall enough for a barouche.”

“A clergyman?” A faint, hopeful pink colored Mary’s cheeks. “Is he possessed of a pleasing countenance?”

“They never are,” Lydia sniffed, just as Mamma shoved her aside, threw open the library door, and unceremoniously pushed Elizabeth across the threshold.

Mr. Bennet sat at his desk, the letter unfurled before him. He glanced up at the spectacle in the doorway—his wife bandaged, his daughter barefoot—and sardonic amusement flickered across his features before he suppressed it.

“I asked your mother to let you slumber, Lizzy, but her nerves are clearly impervious to sleep.”

“The way of the slothful man is as a hedge of thorns,” Elizabeth hastened to say before Mary could, “but the way of the righteous is made plain. Papa, what do a clergyman and hedgerows have to do with me?”

“They have everything to do with you!” Mrs. Bennet swept past Elizabeth and stationed herself at the corner of the desk like a prosecutor preparing to deliver a closing argument. “When your father dies⁠—”

“Which I have no immediate plans to do, my dear.”

“—this house, this estate, everything we possess will pass to a man we have never met, a clergyman from Kent who writes letters full of condescension and scheme⁠—”

“The letter contained no schemes, Mrs. Bennet. Merely an excess of subordinate clauses.”

“—and we shall be thrown into the hedgerows like common vagrants while this Collins person takes everything that belongs to us.”

Elizabeth held up a hand. “I beg your pardon, but why would Mr. Collins take our things?”

“Because he is a horrid, horrid man!” Mrs. Bennet said.

“More horrid than that odious, hateful Mr. Darcy?” Elizabeth raised an eyebrow. “Mamma, you might require your smelling salts. On Wednesday Mr. Darcy was the most despicable man in Christendom, and now a clergyman has knocked him off his throne by post, without even troubling to call.”

“Mr. Darcy is not going to throw us into the hedgerows!”

“Why hedgerows, Mamma?” It was wicked to bait her mother, but she had dragged her out of bed for this farce—yanked her from a dream of Byron Lefevre joining the militia and resplendent in his redcoat.

Mr. Bennet laid the letter face down and took off his spectacles, which, in twenty years, had never signified anything good. “Because Mr. Collins is now the heir of Longbourn after your uncle Henry.”

“But why not us? Your daughters? Jane?” The laugh went out of her. Beneath the linen bandage, her mother’s face had turned the color of a boiled beetroot; the ribbons of her cap quivered, and her bosom heaved as if she were on the losing side of a charging bull.

“Henry was my heir,” her father said, “a circumstance which permitted me to ignore the entail for another twenty years. But now that my brother, who is three years younger than me, has died, the entail can no longer be ignored, and the female line cannot inherit our estate.”

“Your father’s great-grandfather hated females!” Mrs. Bennet stomped her foot. “He set it up so only males can inherit, and now that Uncle Henry, who was your father’s heir, has gone and had an apoplexy⁠—”

“Mamma, you mean to have an apoplexy if you won’t sit and drink tea.”

“There will be no tea in the hedgerows, Lizzy.” Mrs. Bennet drew herself up with tragic passion, one hand pressed to her bandage and the other pointed at the carpet, as though the hedgerow had already sprouted through it. “No tea whatsoever, Lizzy, if you don’t marry Mr. Darcy and gain Uncle Henry’s fortune before Mr. Collins comes to take inventory.” Mrs. Bennet snatched the letter from her husband’s hands. “He writes of ‘making himself known to the family’ and ‘offering such comfort as lies within his modest means’—modest means, indeed!—and your father sits there reading while the wolf circles the sheepfold!”

“I believe the wolf is currently in Kent, my dear. We have some days yet before the circling begins.”

“We have no days! We have three weeks until Lady Day, and if Lizzy does not secure Mr. Darcy and his consent to this marriage, we shall lose the eighty thousand pounds and the house and everything we⁠—”