Page 8

"You may begin with the simplest one," Elizabeth said, placing the book between them. "Only do not insist upon correcting my singing. I have suffered enough from your superior opinions on that subject."

"I do not correct you because I wish to be superior," Mary answered. "You always know when I make a mistake in a word, and I wanted to know something you did not."

Elizabeth looked at her with surprise. She had often found Mary tiresome and had seldom considered that Mary might feel just as overshadowed by Jane's sweetness and Elizabeth's quickness as Elizabeth sometimes felt by being a guest in her own home.

"Then we shall each have something to teach the other," she said. "Though I warn you that German spelling has defeated men much wiser than either of us."

Their lessons were not an uninterrupted success. Kitty insisted on learning phrases suitable for flattering visiting gentlemen, and Lydia spent a fortnight calling everyone in the house a cabbage because she had misunderstood a word in a story. When Mrs. Bennet complained of the noise, Mr. Bennet observed that the younger girls were only proving the international reach of folly.

Yet those afternoons gave Elizabeth an unexpected pleasure. In teaching her cousins the words Minna had taught her, she found that her mother's language no longer belonged entirely to a lonely past. It was also a living part of Longbourn, capable of making Jane laugh and Mary sing and even Lydia pay attention for five consecutive minutes. She began to read aloud from Minna's books without the painful certainty that every page must remind her of what she had lost.

The years moved forward. Elizabeth grew taller and stronger, discovering that a quick answer could make her uncle laugh and occasionally offend her aunt. She learned to dance with Jane in the drawing room, to sew with Mary, and to rescue small possessions from Lydia's explorations. She enjoyed long walks with the Lucas children and became friends with Charlotte, who was older, sensible, and inclined to appreciate Elizabeth's irreverent observations.

Once, after Mrs. Bennet had complained of the expense of educating five girls, Charlotte asked Elizabeth whether she intended to become a governess.

"I should make a very poor one," Elizabeth answered. "My pupils would discover too quickly that I liked them best when they questioned me."

"There are worse qualifications," Charlotte replied. "But you should not suppose every disagreement an invitation to argue."

"Then the world must learn to express itself more plainly."

Charlotte smiled but did not contradict her.

By fourteen, Elizabeth knew the sounds of Longbourn as thoroughly as she knew the turns in its garden paths: Jane's quiet step on the stairs, Mary's determined scales, Kitty and Lydia quarrelling over a ribbon, and her uncle's cough from behind the library door. Even Mrs. Bennet's complaints belonged to the daily pattern. Elizabeth had learned where to retreat when they stung, and where Jane would find her afterward.

Time at Longbourn was measured less by birthdays than by the alterations people ceased to notice. Jane no longer knocked before entering Elizabeth's room; Kitty brought torn ribbons to her for repair as naturally as she brought them to her mother; Lydia complained when Elizabeth was away for an afternoon, though she declared herself delighted to have the room to herself. At tea, Mary sometimes pushed a difficult passage beneath Elizabeth's elbow and waited, without asking, for a German word or a better translation.

There were limits to that belonging. Mrs. Bennet spoke of four daughters when discussing settlements and of five girls when complaining of dressmakers' bills. Elizabeth learned to hear the distinction without flinching in company. Only once, after her aunt had declared that another mouth at the table was an expense no sensible household could overlook, did Jane notice that Elizabeth had left half her dinner untouched. The next morning Jane slipped a biscuit into Elizabeth's pocket before they went walking. She did not mention the previous evening. Elizabeth broke the biscuit in two and gave her half. Neither thanked the other.

Only on certain evenings, when the house grew quiet, did Elizabeth take out the locket and open it to the miniature. The woman's face remained a stranger's. Sometimes Elizabeth would whisper a German phrase her mother had taught her and wait, as though the answer might come from somewhere beyond memory.

None ever did.

CHAPTER 3

A Most Inconvenient Rescue

September, 1805

Elizabeth had been sent to Lucas Lodge with a basket of early apples and returned with an invitation to dinner, a borrowed novel, and Charlotte Lucas's opinion that Mr. Collins, of whom Mrs. Bennet had lately begun speaking with alarm, was probably more agreeable at a distance.

"You cannot know that," Elizabeth had protested.

"No," Charlotte admitted, "but I have noticed that people are often more agreeable at a distance, particularly relations one has never met."

Elizabeth was still smiling over the observation when she heard a shout from beyond the bend in the road.

She stopped. The road between the village and Longbourn passed through a stretch of trees before turning beside a shallow ditch and an old stone wall. She knew it well and knew, too, that a carriage coming fast around the bend was in danger of meeting an approaching cart before either driver had room to pass.

A horse screamed. There came a tremendous crack, followed by the dreadful grinding sound of wood against stone.

Elizabeth dropped the basket and ran.

A handsome traveling carriage lay on its side, one wheel broken at an unnatural angle. A horse struggled in its traces while a groom attempted to free it. The driver had been thrown clear and lay groaning beside the ditch. Another man knelt near the carriage door, calling for help.

"Is anyone hurt?" Elizabeth demanded, though the answer was plain enough.

The groom looked up, startled to see a young lady in a walking dress approaching the wreck. "Stand back, miss! The team may bolt."