AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“What? How?” my father stuttered.
“It is a gift, as I have been telling you for the last twenty minutes,” said my mother impatiently. “I am sure it is not so unusual as you think it is. Surely other people have the same, we simply do not hear about it. It is not the sort of thing one advertises, after all.”
“How long?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
“I think I have always had it, but Mama noticed when I was six,” I said.
“Do you not remember how Jane recovered so quickly from the pox? Or how you went from tired and marked one day to energized and clear the next? You owe your quick recovery to your six-year-old daughter. As we owe her Lydia’s life.”
My father blinked at her.
“Do you remember when Kitty fell off the swing in the garden and cut open her knee? Everyone thought it would need stitching up, but once Lizzy came home, it looked as if it had never happened.”
Papa continued to stare at my mother as if she had suddenly begun speaking fluent Greek.
“What about your aunt Ida?”
“Aunt Ida?” repeated my father.
“She visited Longbourn in ’02. She thought it would be her last visit. She was curled in on herself with arthritis and her lungs were weak. Every year she became ill with influenza and came close to death, each time leaving her weaker than the last.”
“Hill’s tonic helped her.”
“Tosh! Elizabeth helped her. She snuck into your aunt’s room and slept beside her all night, and your aunt woke right as rain! Even now, she is living in London, happy as a lark!”
Father’s mouth opened and closed, but no words emerged.
“You owe your daughter a great debt of gratitude. One you can never repay.”
Father suddenly shifted his attention to me and his eyes narrowed. “Of what do you speak?”
“Your sons.”
“My sons?”
“Yes. Do you not remember what they told us after Lydia was born? That I would conceive no more? That my womb was too damaged?”
“Doctors are often wrong.”
“So you will allow that doctors can be wrong but not yourself?”
“Jane Frances Bennet!”
“Thomas John Bennet!”
“Enough!” I cried. “That is enough.” I turned to face my father. “Papa, I understand this is a lot to discover in one day and you are likely overwrought. Why do you not sit down and have a brandy?”
I withheld my laugh at his stupefied expression. Barely.
“Mama, I appreciate you standing up for me and defending me to Papa. Let us allow him to consider what you have told him and speak again in a day or two. He cannot be expected to adjust his perceptions of the world so quickly.”
My mother nodded reluctantly and Papa blinked at me like an owl. I took his elbow and led him to his favorite chair by the fire, then poured him a generous measure of brandy. I patted his hand and slipped out of the room, glad to have this behind me.
My father had not had the best possible reaction, but neither had he had the worst. I could only hope he would not ship me off to Bedlam in the morning.
***
My father proved to be a bigger man than we had thought him. Two days after our conversation, he called me into his study. After asking me mundane questions about my studies with Mrs. March, he gestured for me to sit in the chair across from his and rested his elbows on his knees.
