Page 64 of A November to Remember

Elizabeth looked down at her hands. The image of Darcy in the stables, covered in dust, coaxing a child from the rubble, flashed vividly in her mind. Then came the memory of him in the library, leaning close to her.

“He...” Elizabeth traced the edge of the cushion. “There are many sides to him, Charlotte.”

Charlotte raised a sceptical eyebrow. “Many sides? He barely managed a single polite sentence at the Meryton assembly. He looked at you as if you were a particularly unappealing piece of furniture.”

“I know.” Elizabeth let out a frustrated sigh. “But he is not what he seems. He helped a stable boy who was trapped under a collapsed roof. He was... wonderful with the child.”

“Mr Darcy? In the dirt? Doing manual labour?” Charlotte stared at her in disbelief.

“Yes. And then, later, I found him hiding with a book of romantic sonnets he claimed he was not reading.”

Charlotte clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh. “Sonnets! The man who glared at all and sundry at the assembly?”

Elizabeth could not suppress a smile. “We talked, Charlotte. We talked, and we laughed. And today, before we left, he asked if he might call on me here at Longbourn.”

Charlotte dropped her hand, the amusement vanishing from her face. She studied Elizabeth for a long while.

“He asked to call on you?”

Elizabeth nodded, a strange fluttering in her stomach. “He did.”

Charlotte leaned back, a smug smirk on her mouth.

“So. You are not entirely against the man who insulted you.”

“I am simply reserving judgment!” Elizabeth protested, her cheeks heating up. “I am observing him as a fascinating study of contradictions.”

“You are blushing, Lizzy.”

“I am sitting too close to the glass, and the sun is overly warm.”

“It is November, and it is sleeting.”

Elizabeth swatted her friend’s arm. “Hush, Charlotte. I am saying that he is not the monster we thought him. He is awkward, perhaps, and excessively proud. But he is not without goodness.”

Charlotte glanced at Jane, who was still staring broodingly into the fire, and then back to Elizabeth.

“I suppose I must go home and read about the Kentish shrubbery, Lizzy,” Charlotte concluded. “Whoever this poultry enthusiast is, your mother has decided he is my destiny. It seems I am the only one left in Hertfordshire who will need to marry for mere survival.”

Chapter Fifteen: In Anticipation of the Unknown

November 18th, 1811

The study at Longbourn was not large, as libraries went, but it possessed the two qualities Mr Bennet prized above all others in a room: a lock that worked and a door thick enough to reduce his family to a distant, if persistent, storm. Beyond it, the household raged and gusted—ribbons, nerves, the distant thunder of Lydia’s feet on the landing, and, if he listened very closely, the sound of his wife plotting the marriage of at least three of his daughters to men who did not know what was about to hit them.

Within, a man might sit by his fire with a book, a glass, and the accumulated silence of five-and-twenty years of calculated seclusion. He was not reading this afternoon; he was savouring.

From the lower drawer of his desk—the drawer his family believed to contain estate papers, a belief he had cultivated with the same care other men gave to roses—Mr Bennet withdrew a letter. The paper had gone soft at the folds from repeated handling. He had read it, by his own count, fourteen times, and it improved with every acquaintance, as truly monumental absurdity always did. Great comic works were rare. Rarer still was one addressed to oneself.

He settled his spectacles on his nose and allowed his eye to fall once more on the choicest passages.

...the noble condescension of my patroness, the Right Honourable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, whose notice I can never sufficiently acknowledge, having twice been invited to make up her table at quadrille. Furthermore, her ladyship has been graciously pleased to advise me on the disposition of shelving in my upstairs closet and on the exact number of poultry I ought to keep, whilst delivering the most profound observations on the superiority of Kentish shrubbery and the proper maintenance of the parsonage chimneys...

Shelving. Poultry. Chimneys. The man had committed it to paper and sent it into the world with his name attached. Mr Bennet sipped his tea in homage. If this was the standard of clerical correspondence, he might have to reconsider his atheism.

...it is my intention to extend the olive branch of peace, as a clergyman ought, in order to heal the breach produced by the details of the entail. I am speaking of your daughters, regarding whom I have formed certain designs of an amicable nature which I shall disclose on better acquaintance. I trust the circumstance of my standing next in the entail of Longbourn estate will be kindly overlooked by them, as I am fully prepared to overlook it myself...

Prepared to overlook his own inheritance. Magnanimity on a scale not witnessed since the Romans. And then, the closing flourish, the jewel of the collection: