Page 30 of A November to Remember

At approximately four o’clock, wearing the blue wool habit her mother had selected on the grounds that it accentuated her eyes, she mounted Nelly—a mare of advanced years and pessimism—just as the first fat droplets began to strike the cobbles.

“Ride briskly, my love!” Mrs Bennet called from the dry sanctuary of the portico, waving her handkerchief. “And if it should rain—well! Providence moves in mysterious ways!”

Providence, it transpired, moved in wet ones.

It was not a deluge. Jane would tell this to herself many times over the following days, with decreasing conviction: it was not a deluge. It was merely rain—steady, patient, and thorough. It did not batter so much as soak, working its way through wool with the diligence of an accomplished needlewoman. By the first mile her gloves had surrendered. By the second, the habit that accentuated her eyes had taken on the weight of a small anvil and was pressing its cold attentions through every layer beneath.

It is only water, Jane thought, her teeth clicking in an involuntary rhythm. Mamma is right. It is an instrument. Besides, I shall not even see him. I shall not even see Lord Keathley.

She blinked, a droplet rolling off her eyelashes, shocked by the betrayal of her own mind.

What do you mean, Keathley? she berated herself, a mortifying heat flushing her cheeks. He is the most insufferable, proud, rude man in the kingdom! You want to see Bingley. Mr Bingley. Make sure you do not confuse the names aloud, Jane Bennet, for that would be disastrous.

By the time the bright windows of Netherfield Park swam out of the grey, Jane could no longer feel her feet, and the instrument had played her thoroughly. She half-slid from the saddle at the front steps, gripping the stone balustrade while her legs reconsidered their responsibilities. A horrified groom appeared to lead poor Nelly away; an equally aghast footman heaved open the great doors.

The entrance hall of Netherfield Park was a temple of polished marble, and Jane was currently desecrating it. She stood dripping, a human rain-cloud set loose indoors, and looked up to find Miss Bingley and Mrs Hurst arrested at the top of the sweeping staircase, staring down as though something had crawled out of their ornamental pond and asked to be fed.

“Miss Bingley.” Her greeting emerged as a croak wrapped in a shiver. “How k-kind of you to invite me. I do apologise for the—” she indicated, with one sodden glove, the lake, the dripping, the general catastrophe of her person, “—for all of this.”

“Miss Bennet.” Miss Bingley descended the stairs at a measured pace, her sympathy arriving well behind her scrutiny. Her gaze travelled from Jane’s ruined bonnet to the puddle spreading across the marble, and her smile achieved the precise temperature of the ice house in January. “You rode? In this tempest? How... rustic of you. Was the carriage quite unavailable?”

“The horses were wanted on the farm.” Jane attempted a curtsy, and the movement wrung a quantity of rainwater from her skirts, which splashed loudly against the marble.

Miss Bingley’s attention settled on the puddle now advancing to the runner. “How terribly brave. Someone must—”

What someone must do was never established, because the green door beneath the stairs opened and Mrs Nicholls took the hall at a march, straight through the puddle.

“Sweet heavens, child.” A warm arm went round Jane’s shaking shoulders, and Jane, to her private mortification, sagged into it. “You are ice to the bone. By your leave, Miss Bingley—I am taking her up the back stairs to the yellow chamber before it is the lungs next.”

“Do whatever is necessary to stop the dripping, Mrs Nicholls.” Miss Bingley was already withdrawing to drier latitudes, orange silk gathered clear of the flood.

Jane meant to apologise again—to Miss Bingley, to the marble, possibly to the runner—but her teeth were chattering too hard to permit diplomacy, and Mrs Nicholls was steering her away gently.

The yellow chamber resolved itself in pieces: a fire being encouraged; hot bricks wrapped in flannel appearing under the counterpane at intervals; her sodden habit being peeled away by Mrs Nicholls and Sarah, a young maid with kind eyes and capable hands; and, finally, the astonishing luxury of dry linen against skin that could not decide whether it was frozen or burning.

“There now.” Mrs Nicholls drew the quilts to Jane’s chin. “Sarah will sit with you. I must go down and have a word with the kitchen, and possibly with the Almighty regarding His timing.”

Jane wanted to say that everyone was being far too kind, that she was very sorry, and that the fault was no one’s but the weather’s. What emerged was a sneeze of such volume that Sarah dropped the poker.

She slept, or something adjacent to sleeping. The fire crackled and the rain went on stitching at the windows. Her thoughts came loose from their moorings and drifted: her mother’s face at the window, narrowing at the clouds. An instrument of providence. Providence, Jane thought muzzily, might at least have provided a dry instrument.

It was full dark when the house changed.

She could not have said what woke her—a door far below, the sound travelling up through the bones of the house; then voices, male, muffled beyond deciphering, and quick feet on stairs. Jane lay in the amber gloom and listened. The gentlemen had returned from Meryton. She could distinguish nothing—only rhythm: one voice rapid and rising, another low and level beneath it, the way a hand steadies a startled horse.

The rapid one, she thought, was Mr Bingley’s.

She had no business recognising his voice through a floor. She recognised it anyway, and pulled the quilt higher against a warmth that had nothing to do with the bricks.

She dozed for more than an hour. The door opened on Sarah, carrying fresh coals and the expression which said she had just witnessed great events and had to tell someone.

“Oh, miss, you’re awake.” The coals went into the grate with a rattle. “Such a to-do below, miss, you never saw. The gentlemen came in more than an hour ago, and when Miss Bingley told them you’d been taken poorly—” Sarah paused in the manner of a connoisseur, “—Mr Bingley nearly swooned, the colonel cursed, and the lord went white as the tablecloth. White, miss. Thomas saw it and told us all in the kitchen. He said—the lord, that is, not Thomas—that Mr Jones must be fetched from Meryton that very instant, and Miss Bingley said surely it could wait until the morning, the weather being what it was, and the lord was thunderous and said—”

Sarah stopped, evidently editing.

“Lord Keathley said the weather could do as it pleased and so would he. And he called for the carriage to be put to again, the horses not even dry, poor things, and Mr Darcy said he would accompany him.”

“Mr Darcy?” Jane’s voice came out as a small cracked thing.