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“This is an outrage! An absolute⁠—”

“The door, Mr. Collins, is behind you. Hill will see you to your carriage. If you wish to correspond with my father regarding the entail, you may do so by post, and he will respond at his leisure, which may be some considerable time.”

Collins sputtered. Collins protested. Collins invoked Lady Catherine’s name no fewer than eight times in the space of twenty paces. But Hill was inexorable, and the front door closed behind him with a satisfying thud.

Jane lay on the carpet with her head in Mrs. Bennet’s lap and Mary kneeling beside her, waving the salts beneath her nose.

“Jane.” Elizabeth crossed the room and took her sister’s hands. “Are you well? He said dreadful things, but none of them were true. Mr. Bingley’s feelings for you are perfectly⁠—”

“What do we do now?” Mary’s voice was small and uncertain, stripped of its usual scriptural authority. “If Mr. Collins is the heir, and Lizzy’s fortune requires her to marry Mr. Darcy, and Jane’s suitor has not proposed, and none of us have any prospects whatsoever—what do we do?”

Elizabeth released Jane’s hands and turned to face her family—her ridiculous, impossible, infuriating family whom she loved despite every evidence of their determination to drive her mad. Her mother, still calculating. Her father, hiding behind his newspaper. Her sisters, looking at her as though she might somehow produce a solution from thin air.

She straightened her shoulders. She lifted her chin. She felt the words forming in her chest before they reached her mouth.

“I shall marry Mr. Darcy,” she said. “If he will have me.”

She did not stay for her mother’s shrieks of delight, her sisters’ exclamations, and Jane’s furrowed, worried brow. Head held high, she went up the staircase to her room—to plan, to mourn, and to resign herself to a man she had not wished to marry. But neither could she lose Uncle Henry’s fortune and consign her mother and sisters to the caprices of a clergyman whose moral compass consisted of Lady Catherine’s whims.

Jane caught her on the landing. “Lizzy, are you sure?”

Elizabeth weighed the question. She thought of Darcy—his rigid formality, his rare flashes of humor. She winced at the memory of the chemise debacle, and the way he had fixed his gaze somewhere above her left ear rather than meet her eyes. She recalled his last words at the lane’s end, that she was no hardship, and how he had watched her until she vanished indoors. He had not come since. She had yet to decide whether that was a mark of delicacy or a fresh affront.

“No,” Elizabeth said. “But I am decided, and that will have to serve.”

Jane squeezed her arm. “Then I hope—I truly hope—that you find him tolerable. More than tolerable. I hope you find him worthy of you, Lizzy. Because you deserve⁠—”

“I deserve,” Elizabeth interrupted gently, “exactly what I am getting. A marriage of convenience to a proud man who may or may not despise me, in exchange for a fortune that will save our family from ruin. It is not romance, Jane. It is arithmetic.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE INTEREST DUE

The billiard room at Netherfield offered scant respite from the gossip swirling through Meryton, but it was far more tolerable than the drawing room, where the two ladies roosted, their sarcastic inquiries designed to remind Darcy, at ten-minute intervals, that marrying Elizabeth Bennet would be a spectacular descent into mediocrity. Mr. Hurst’s interest in brandy was no less taxing than Bingley’s eagerness to sink the cue ball into pockets.

Darcy called the red and contrived to miss it by a generous three inches.

“That,” said Bingley, with a charity that bordered on the medicinal, “was your fourth miss in twelve minutes. You are thinking about her.”

“The nap on this cloth runs contrary.”

“Your aim is as unsteady as if Elizabeth Bennet were watching.” Bingley circled the table with the leisurely confidence of a man whose romantic prospects were uncomplicated by elderly uncles and peculiar wills. “I saw her yesterday, you know. In Meryton walking with her sisters as if she hadn’t a care in the world.”

“Your powers of observation are remarkable.”

“And my sisters supply the interpretation.” Bingley lined up his own shot with unnecessary flourish. “She also threw that clergyman out of Longbourn. The entire village is talking about it. Mrs. Long told Mrs. Hurst, who told Caroline with great relish, that Miss Elizabeth gave him thirty seconds to vacate the premises and counted down like a ship’s captain timing a broadside.”

Mr. Hurst grunted from his corner—a sound that might have been agreement, amusement, or the settling of his third brandy.

“I had heard something of the kind,” Darcy said, though he had avoided the Bingley sisters precisely because he did not wish to hear about Elizabeth Bennet sharpening her knife to shred her uncle’s will.

“Had you? From whom? You have not left this house except to attend church, where you sat like a man awaiting execution and spoke to no one.”

Darcy applied himself assiduously to chalking his cue stick, eyeing the brandy decanter situated on an end table guarded by Hurst’s wide form.

Bingley sank the red ball with a satisfying click and moved around the table. “What I cannot fathom is how you managed it. The banns, I mean. There was no courtship, no shrubbery scene, no walking out together, no—well, no anything, as far as I could observe.”

“There was, if you recall, one very onerous will—at least on Miss Elizabeth Bennet’s side.”