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“My second daughter has a point,” Mr. Bennet said. “With a fortune of eighty thousand pounds, larger than the dowry of duchesses, she would perhaps aspire to one of the impoverished lords of the land.”

“In three weeks?” Mrs. Bennet tapped her fan on Jane’s shoulder. “Dearest, you must call Mr. Bingley and ask that odious friend of his, the one who looked down his nose at us. He has connections.”

“You mean Mr. Darcy?” Elizabeth’s heart sank to her stomach. “But Mamma, he hates us, and I will not have the likes of Mr. Darcy matchmaking for me.”

“Speaking of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy,” Sowerby said, raising his voice and tapping his teacup on the table to silence them. “He is, in fact, named in Mr. Henry Bennet’s will.”

“Named?” her father said, flat. “As another beneficiary? But that is impossible.”

“Not quite, sir.” Sowerby swallowed. “The will states that the marriage must be to Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley, Derbyshire.”

“No.” The word was out of Elizabeth’s mouth before she knew she had spoken it. The room swam—the will, the dining table, Lydia’s open mouth—and righted itself around the one fixed point of her certainty: not him. Then, with a calm she did not possess, she uttered, “I would sooner return every penny to Uncle Henry’s grave than stand at an altar beside that man.”

“Miss Elizabeth Bennet.” Sowerby raised his voice for the first time that morning, and it cracked in the middle of her name. “I must read you the remainder. ‘Should she not be married to that gentleman by the twenty-fifth of March—by her refusal, or from any cause whatsoever—the whole of it passes to Mr. Darcy instead.’”

Sowerby snapped the paper for emphasis, pointing to the line, to which Lydia practically stuck her nose on his finger, Kitty tried to snatch the paper, and Mary pushed up her glasses for a better look.

“I do not believe it,” Elizabeth said, her blood running cold. “Uncle Henry never even laid eyes upon Mr. Darcy.”

“Not to my knowledge,” Sowerby said. “Although he seemed to be well acquainted with Mr. Darcy’s circumstances, including his personal inclinations.”

“How would he know that?” Elizabeth asked.

“By the precision with which he laid out the terms,” Sowerby said without looking at her.

“This has to be a wicked jest,” Mrs. Bennet howled, her fan fluttering into a frenzy, while even Mr. Bennet dropped his customary amusement, his brow furrowing in genuine alarm. She wheeled on him. “Your brother! Your brother did this! You must do something, Mr. Bennet. Write to someone. He is your brother—was your brother—surely there is some legal⁠—”

“Henry is dead, my dear. I find the dead remarkably resistant to seeing sense.”

“He must have bribed him!” Lydia cried. “Mr. Darcy has ten thousand a year. He could afford to buy an old smuggler’s will and have change for a curricle.”

“‘A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways,’” said Mary, who had waited all morning for a verse to fit.

“Perhaps Uncle Henry believed he was helping,” Jane said quietly.

“Helping?” Elizabeth’s voice rose above them all. “If he loved me, if I am his favorite, then why would he do this to me? Why hand me to the one man in England who has already told a room full of people that I was not worth the trouble of standing up with?”

“Well,” said Kitty, “now you see why the rest of us had nothing to do with him.”

“I believe I have concluded the reading, madam.” Mr. Sowerby gathered his papers with the urgency of a man who had weathered a storm and yearned for the safety of shore.

“But there must be more! There must be a way round it—” Elizabeth moaned at the wreckage of her uncle’s last laugh.

“I regret, madam, that the will is quite explicit. The conditions are… unambiguous.”

He bowed himself toward the door. Mrs. Bennet pursued him, bewailing lawyers, letters, and the general injustice of fate. Jane tried to soothe their mother; Mary launched into a disquisition on the evils of money to an audience of none; and Kitty and Lydia jostled each other like puppies over a single bone.

Elizabeth stood in the middle of it, fury building in her chest with nowhere to spend it.

Sowerby reached the hall when Hill’s voice came from the front of the house, clear and correct as always.

“Mr. Darcy of Pemberley, ma’am. He says he has come on a matter of some urgency.”

CHAPTER TWO

THE PRIDE OF REFUSAL

Elizabeth was treated to the spectacle of Mr. Darcy nearly colliding with Mr. Sowerby as the two converged in the corridor.