They were all assembled in the sitting room when Mr Bennet appeared. He did this sometimes, materialised briefly from his library as though to confirm that the rest of the house still existed, exchanged a few pleasantries, and retreated.
Elizabeth had been watching her mother for weeks. Through Lady Lucas' visits and the girls' squabbles and the daily minor dramas of Longbourn, her mother had remained perfectly, unnervingly still. But when Mr Bennet spoke, something happened. Not much. A slight tension around the eyes. Hands that gripped a little tighter in her lap. It was gone almost before it arrived. But it was there, every time, and Elizabeth had begun to look for it.
"Lady Lucas." He inclined his head with the easy warmth he reserved for company. "You find us all in good health, I hope."
"Indeed, indeed. And Mrs Bennet looking very well, I think."
Mrs Bennet smiled. It reached no further than her mouth.
"She is very well," Mr Bennet said. "Mrs Bennet has always possessed the enviable ability to recover from any disappointment by finding a fresh subject for excitement."
Lady Lucas laughed, a bright and hollow sound that filled the room.
Elizabeth looked at her mother's hands. There it was. The grip. Just for a moment, the knuckles whitening slightly against the fabric of her dress, and then releasing, and then her mother's face arranging itself back into a pleasant smile as though nothing had happened.
Elizabeth had laughed at jokes like that herself. Not so long ago. She had thought them clever, had privately enjoyed the deftness of them, had told herself there was no real harm in wit. This remembrance sat in her chest, like a crumb of rich food that had not gone down properly.
Lady Lucas, still smiling, turned to Jane to ask about the Netherfield news. The conversation moved on, and Mr Bennet excused himself shortly after with a small bow and returned to his library.
Elizabeth waited until Lady Lucas had gone and her mother had been persuaded upstairs to rest before she knocked on her father's library door.
"Lizzy." He looked up from his book with the particular pleasure he reserved for her, warm and immediate, and she felt the familiar pull of it rub against her newer sense of discomfort. "Come to keep your old father company?"
"I came to ask you something, Papa," she said, and sat down across from him without being invited.
"How alarming," he said. "You have your mother's expression, Lizzy. Not the panicked one, that would be too ordinary. It is, horror of horrors, the determined one. I have always found it the more frightening of the two."
"Papa." She looked at him directly. "What did you say to Mama?"
He did not move and his expression did not change. Yet there was a pause before he answered, slight enough that another person might not have noticed it. Elizabeth noticed it. She knew very well the difference between her father searching his memory and her father searching for a version of the truth.
"I say a great many things to your mother," he said. "I have been saying things to your mother for twenty-three years. You will have to be more specific."
"Something happened," Elizabeth said. "Early in the year. Something you said. And whatever it was, she has not been herself since."
He was quiet for a moment, which was itself unusual. He set his book down, which was more unusual still.
"You are very observant," he said. "I have always considered it one of your finer qualities." He folded his hands in his lap. "It is possible," he said carefully, "that I was on one occasion rather less guarded in my remarks than I might have been. I was fatigued. Stevens was there. I may have said something that your mother, had she happened to overhear it, might have found—" he paused, selecting the word with precision, "—dispiriting."
Elizabeth looked at him. "Dispiriting," she said flatly.
"It was not intended for her ears."
"I see," Elizabeth said. "That is very reassuring."
He had the grace to look, very briefly, uncomfortable. "Lizzy—"
"What did you say?"
Another pause. He picked up his book and put it down again. "Nothing that was not, in the strictest sense, true," he said. "Nothing I have not thought a thousand times. I am not a man who says things he does not mean, whatever other faults you may lay at my door."
She stood up. "No, Papa. But it does not follow that every observation must be sharpened into a joke at Mama's expense.She may be foolish sometimes, but she feels things very deeply, and she has spent her whole life caring about this family."
She had her hand on the door when he said, "Lizzy, my girl." She turned. He was looking at her with an expression she had not seen on him before. "It was poorly done," he said. Then quietly and without irony. "I am aware of that."
"Yes," she said. "It was."
She went out and closed the door behind her, a little more firmly than was polite.
