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I was determined that if she was doing all this to confound me, she would find herself outwitted, because I was in no mood to be trifled with myself. As far as I was concerned, she could go down to the village, find the first carter she came to, and invite him to table complete with his mule; and I would ask the mule to pass the vegetables. She would find she had engaged a worthier opponent than she assumed.

From a practical standpoint, I had no real standing in the parsonage. I was the patroness, but once the living was given, it was for life. I had almost no say in how the parsonage was run, and only the bishop could remove the sitting parson before his death. The building and its acreage were owned by the church, and part of the living was the remuneration for anything grown on that land. Collins chose to while his time away with mostly ornamental plants, but he would have been well within his rights to farm it or lease it out. I was aware that, since Mr Collins became sick, Mrs Collins was raising more poultry, growing a larger garden, and otherwise seemingly preparing herself for life after her husband’s death. I should not be surprised to find the land under cultivation in the spring.

I had no idea she had discharged every single servant in the parsonage, and was somewhat amazed that she did so without me becoming aware of it. Perhaps I was not as well-informed as I once thought. She had been here with Mrs Hewes for months, with not a single other servant. Mrs Hewes knew her way around a kitchen after all her years downstairs at Rosings, so perhaps she was teaching Mrs Collins how to survive on her own. I doubted she learnt it at home, as she was almost certainly gently bred in the first place, but that was all supposition.

It was immediately clear when I arrived that Friday evening for supper that there was something beyond simple gentlemanly behaviour between my nephew and Mrs Collins, but I could not hazard a guess what it was. They did not seem to be lovers, not that I would ever suspect Darcy of stepping so far outside the bounds of decency. They may well have been friends, but there was entirely too much tension between them when nobody was watching for that to really be the explanation. In my more panicked moments, I thought perhaps Darcy was simply waiting for Mr Collins to die so he could stake his claim. I had plans for that boy, but after all the years of cajoling and encouraging, I was coming to believe he would never marry Anne, regardless of what I said or did.

Mrs Collins kept no servants at all, so it was left to her and Fitzwilliam to divest us of our wraps, introduce us to her enormous pack of sisters, and generally keep the assemblage company. Georgianna and one of the middle Bennet sisters seemed to hit it off well, and one of the younger ones seemed enamoured with Anne. Both young ladies were enjoying themselves enormously. That much was obvious with a single glance, and I was happy to see Anne engaged with someone. I began to wonder, perhaps for the first time in my life, why it was that two young girls of such enormous advantages would find such simple pleasure in spending an evening in a parsonage with a pack of virtual strangers.

Mrs Collins set the table herself with a few of her sisters, who apparently appeared unexpectedly only the previous day. I planned to get to the bottom of that story sooner or later as well. It was peculiar for four sisters to arrive so precipitously, perhaps unheard of, and it spoke of something going badly wrong at home.

Mrs Collins and her sisters certainly seemed to have taken it all in stride, because they all looked as if they had lived there for years. All were unfailingly polite. However, I could see some of the girls splitting off and engaging in what appeared to be either more serious or sillier conversations, so perhaps they were already establishing friendships. It was hard to tell with girls of that age.

Fitzwilliam performed the carving appropriately, as the most senior male member of the present company; so I did not read anything in particular into that act.

The fact that he behaved like a footman should have sent me into vapours, but I had adjusted to life in the parsonage better than expected in less than an hour. When I crossed the threshold, I left the world of my own authority and entered the world of another’s. I would consider it the grossest of improprieties and the worst of manners were someone to come into my home and tell me how to run it. I was now a guest in Mrs Collins’ home, and I would follow her rules. Good breeding and manners demanded no less, and nobody would ever accuse me of lacking either. When Mrs Collins came to visit Rosings—and make no mistake, she and her sisters would be attending Rosings before the week was out—then she could bend to my rules.

I had just finished a piece of what I presumed must be one of Mrs Collins’ chickens, and had to admit that the cooking was most simple, just chicken and rosemary; but it was well done. Fitzwilliam graciously left his position at the foot of the table to go behind me and offer me either wine or water.

I was just in the process of choosing the wine in his right hand when I heard—

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As you must clearly see, describing the sound is awkward. I cannot convey the terror that I felt with the sound using only my quill. I have a dozen pages sitting in the grate where I made the attempt, but none of them do any better than this.

The door slammed open on the far side of the room, the glass in one of the ornaments near the door smashed and fell on the ground, and in walked a man shouting the vilest, most heinous language I had ever heard at the top of his lungs.

“YOU HARLOT!! YOU WHORE!! YOU ADULTERESS!! YOU HEATHEN!! YOU MISERABLE WRETCH!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY HOME?! BEGONE, YE HEATHENS!! LET THE WRATH OF GOD SMITE YOU WHERE YOU SIT!! LEAVE MY HOME, YE SPAWNS OF THE DEVIL!!”

There was more… much, much more; but I will neither write it, nor even remember it. That was bad enough, but nowhere near the worst of it.

Mr Collins burst into the room wearing only a nightshirt, drooling all over the front of it, his hair completely askew, as if he had been in bed for months, and carrying an odour that hit my senses and nearly knocked me over, as it preceded him into the room as a harbinger of doom.

Worst of all, he had a fire iron in his hand that he was swinging left and right with all his might. The shattered glass came from an ornament destroyed on his first swing, and he advanced inexorably on the table swinging indiscriminately. He advanced on the other side of the table so fast nobody could move; everybody was frozen like a hare staring at a hawk… Everybody, that is, except for my Anne. She heard him come in, and barely had time to crank her head around so fast I could hardly see it move, and, without any apparent conscious thought, she shoved Georgianna on the shoulder so hard she tipped her over directly on top of the middle Bennet sister, Miss Mary.

Georgianna fell just as I let out a very unladylike scream, and it took me some time to get myself back under regulation. The fire iron, with an end looking as if it was sharpened with Satan’s whetstone and dipped in offal, sailed past the exact spot where Georgianna’s head had been only a moment earlier. Without Anne’s very fast—surprisingly fast, nay, astoundingly fast—reaction, Georgianna would be dead.

Unfortunately, the fire iron then proceeded to land directly on Anne’s arm, right above the right elbow, and scraped all the way up her arm from elbow to shoulder, before coming out and taking just a slight nip out of her head near the temple.

Surprisingly not screaming in pain, Anne fell backwards and rolled over, flat on the ground, and began bleeding profusely. Perhaps she was not screaming because she had been bled enough times to be familiar with the process, or perhaps she was completely in shock, but I could see that there was no time to waste in getting that bleeding stopped.

All this happened so quickly that all I managed to do was push my chair back a little bit. I heard almost instantly the crash of the wine and water jugs that Darcy was carrying, just about the time I saw Mr Collins sweeping the fire iron back directly at Miss Mary Bennet, who was sitting beside Georgianna but starting to stand. He was well on his way to killing her, when she was shoved aside by Mrs Collins, who ran from the head of the table the second Mr Collins entered.

My screams were joined by those of everybody else as the fire iron slid all the way up Mrs Collins’ arm from wrist to shoulder, dragging a line of fire in its wake, and then the sharp tip came up and rapped her very smartly just above the ear, taking out what looked like a large piece of her skull with the sharp edge, and cracking her head with a noise that sounded as if it could be nothing short of fatal.

At almost exactly the same time that Mr Collins started his swing, I heard the carafes Darcy was holding crash on the table directly before me, though I would not notice the wine spilled all over my gown for some time. The destruction of the carafes was followed so quickly by Darcy’s boots landing in the middle of the table that you could not even distinguish the two sounds. By the time Collins’ fire iron reached Mrs Collins’ arm, Darcy had taken one step across the table and jumped over the heads of his sister and Miss Mary. By the time the fire iron hit Elizabeth on the head, Darcy’s fist struck the man with the force of an offended god bent on wrath and destruction. If that strike did not kill the man, I did not know what would because Darcy was in a murderous rage to the point where he could barely restrain himself from hitting the man again and again and again.

Darcy moved preternaturally fast, but he started on the wrong side of the table. It could not have taken him more than three or four seconds to accost the man, but in that time two ladies were cut down. I would later reflect on how Darcy must feel about his supposed lack of protection, and reckoned my nephew would be chastising himself for years; but I truly thought it more likely a man like Collins should be thought of like a fire or a plague. Nobody could have prepared for this. Who would believe three physicians could so misjudge a man’s condition? I would enjoy seeing the Collins neck in a noose one day, if he lived that long, which did not seem likely with my other nephew in the room.

Darcy looked over at Anne quickly, just as I started running from my own chair towards hers, and I noticed that her eyes were open, she was staring at him intently, and she nodded her head distinctly. She must have been in tremendous pain, but she knew what needed to be done, and was giving Darcy instructions as clear as if she had berated him for a full half hour. His duty lay on the floor at his feet, and he was not to be distracted with trifles. I had never been prouder of my Anne than at that very moment. For the second time that night, with no time to think on it, she did what was right.

The very next second, almost as if no time at all transpired between thought and action, Darcy was on his knees examining Mrs Collins’ head injuries. He had extensive training and experience with that sort of thing from all the work they did in the more remote reaches of Derbyshire. Short of a doctor, or possibly Richard’s battlefield experience, he probably had more first-hand knowledge of what needed to be done than anybody.

Fitzwilliam very quickly examined Mrs Collins’ head, and her arm, and prepared to do what he could to save the woman. I was not at all sanguine about her chances, as her wound was the worst I had ever seen or even heard about, and when I finally got a look at Richard’s face, it showed grave concern. He had seen his share of wounds and was not optimistic about her chances either.

I rushed over to my daughter and was proud, relieved, and very surprised by what I found.

Commander