Prologue
Mrs Bennet was looking for her embroidery scissors. "Lydia! Kitty! Lydia! Jane!" She kept up a rolling exclamation of her daughter's names as she moved through the house. Omitting Lizzy, who was not at all likely to do anything as peaceable and appropriate as embroidery, and Mary, who she had forgotten altogether for the moment. She punctuated these exclamations with frustrated mutterings. As usual, no one gave one solitary thought to her tightly stretched nerves.
The scissors were a wedding gift from a long-dead aunt, and she had a habit of leaving them in unlikely places and then conducting a systematic search of the house that drove everyone in it to some degree of distraction. On this particular Tuesday in February she had already tried the sitting room, the morning room, every bedroom, the scullery and the shelf in the upstairs landing. She was running out of places and beginning to feel utterly exasperated, as she often did when the minor inconveniences of life set against her.
This sense that the world at large was failing to live up to her expectations was one she had been increasingly conscious of in recent years. The strain of the entail on Longbourn—which meant their home would pass to a distant cousin rather than one of her five daughters—had coloured her perception of the world to such an extent that dissatisfaction was an old and comfortable friend. Layered over that disappointment was a fierce optimism for successful marriages that would "save them all from the hedgerows" and she pursued this plan of salvation with remarkable, if occasionally terrifying, vigour.
She was not entirely without self-awareness. She simply did not know how to be anyone else.
She had been married to Mr Bennet for twenty-three years. In the beginning, she loved him with wide-eyed exuberance. But she quickly learnt that he found her personality vaguely amusing at best, and overwhelmingly vexing at worst. She still loved him in a habitual, vague sort of way. He made her laugh. He was good company when he chose to be, which was less and less these days. More alarming were the moments of cruelty wrapped in humour. This cruelty was always verbal and she allowed her nervous energy to protect her from his sharpest barbs.
She was on her way to try his dressing room for the scissors when she heard his voice through the half-open door.
"Mrs Bennet," he was saying, in the comfortable drawl he used when he was at his ease, "is a woman who has made an art form of mortification. I have spent the better part of my adult life being profoundly embarrassed in public by that woman. Atevery assembly, every dinner, every occasion that has called for any degree of social grace." A pause. She could hear the rustle of fabric. "I sometimes think the neighbours pity me. And the remarkable thing, Stevens, the truly remarkable thing, is that she has no idea. None whatsoever. She smiles and exclaims and waves her handkerchief and hasn't the faintest notion of the impression she creates." Another pause accompanied by a small chuckle. "It would be almost endearing, if it weren't so relentless."
The valet said something low that she did not catch.
"Quite," said Mr Bennet, pleasantly. "Quite."
She stood outside the door and felt her world tilt on its axis. She cared fiercely about her family and that could colour her behaviour, but was she truly ridiculous?
She had always known, in a vague, uncomfortable way, that he found her silly. But she had kept herself very busy not looking at it directly. There had always been something else to exclaim about. She never did find the scissors.
She went downstairs and sat quietly by the window in the sitting room. The garden looked exactly as it always had, and she observed it calmly until the sun began to set over the Hertfordshire hills.
Chapter One
The house at Longbourn had become a very quiet place in recent months.
This ought to have been a relief. Elizabeth had spent the better part of her life navigating the considerable noise of it, the exclamations, the nerves, the regular declarations of impending ruin that attended every ball, every neighbour, every young man who had the misfortune of passing within a mile on horseback. She had become an expert at finding small pockets of peace between the storms.
She had not expected the storm to simply stop.
It happened all at once. There had been no single moment she could point to, no argument or incident that explained it. Rather, all at once, her mother stopped producing noise.Or at least she produced so little noise that it was the same thing. She answered direct questions, she instructed the servants when there was absolutely no other choice, she sometimes hummed sad airs in a sotto voce. But otherwise she drifted through the house like a wraith, spending much of her days overlooking the garden in contemplative silence.
It reminded Elizabeth of the time that Lydia had hidden Mary's favourite hymnal and she had stopped playing the pianoforte in protest. Except that even without Mary's earnest pounding of the keys there had still been her mother's squawks and Lydia's giggles and Jane's tinkling laugh. But her mother's silence seemed to have soaked into the bones of the house. Lydia and Kitty were bewildered into quiet. Jane frowned and studied their mother and even her father appeared uncomfortable.
She wondered if her mother was ill. Perhaps a bout of putrid throat or a lingering megrim. But she had no other symptoms, just constant infuriating silence.
Her mother sat by the window, her hands folded in her lap, humming gently. It had been three months since Mrs Bennet had last made a fuss about anything.
Elizabeth had told herself, in February, that her mother was having a difficult few weeks. In March she told herself that the cold weather always made her quieter. By April she had run out of things to tell herself and had begun instead to suspect that the silence had a cause, and that the cause had a name, and that its name was Thomas Bennet.
???
"Mama," Jane said, settling beside her with particular gentleness, "we have had news from Netherfield. The house is to be let at last. Mrs Long says they have been opening the rooms and showing it to prospective tenants these past weeks. And who knows who may settle there. Is that not exciting?"
"He might be an eligible gentleman, Mama," Elizabeth added from the doorway, a letter still in her hand, "or perhaps a family with five eligible sons! Can you imagine such a thing?"
"That is a very nice thought, my dear," said Mrs Bennet without enthusiasm.
Jane looked at Elizabeth. Elizabeth returned her gaze with a defeated shrug before turning a bright smile on her mother and trying again to bring her back to herself with the pleasant, abstract type of local gossip that she had previously thrived on.
Her mother nodded absently. But whatever Elizabeth did, however gently Jane cajoled her, their mother was lost behind a wall of vague, persistent sadness. She did not weep. She did not take to her bed. She sat by the window and looked at the garden and when they spoke to her she answered them correctly and then went back to looking at the garden.
???
Lady Lucas arrived at half past two on Tuesday, bright, high-pitched and slightly exhausting, as she always was. She considered it her Christian duty to know everythingabout everyone within a five-mile radius and pursued this duty with great dedication. She was fond of Mrs Bennet, in her way, and her visits had continued loyally through what she referred to, with some delicacy, as "her difficulties." Elizabeth appreciated the loyalty while finding the woman rather wearing.
