Elizabeth woke up the next morning in a cheerful mood. Another lovely day had dawned! Oh, there were matters to settle, to worry upon, and to frown about.
But when the day was lovely, it was lovely.
Poor Mary!
She would be missing her promised guest, and quite likely in being put to a great deal of stress and bother by Lady Catherine who might throw her disappointments over how that evening had ended upon the hosts of the runaway daughter, and also upon Mr. Bennet’s daughter, since they must blame Mr. Bennet in part for her having been raised to be the sort of person who would try to shoot an earl instead of being delighted to be his daughter.
Elizabeth failed, however, to make her worry on Mary’s account cloud her sunny mood. She was home, and she felt free.
Home however was not the same as it once was!
Nearly as soon as Elizabeth rose and began to dress herself, Mrs. Bennet’s lady’s maid knocked on the door, and suggested that if her Ladyship wished, she might use Mrs. Bennet’s own dressing room.
This lady’s maid had a high enough position in the family that she had always adopted the attitudes of Mrs. Bennet towards the unwanted ward, and she tended to treat Elizabeth at times as though she were a lower servant liable to be ordered about by one of the great upper servants such as herself.
Elizabeth rolled her eyes at the offer. “Martha, did Mrs. Bennet order you to refer to me as ‘her Ladyship?’”
“Yes, ma’am. My mistress is quite serious that you shall be treated with proper respect.”
The situation was ridiculous.
It, however, would also be ridiculous to not take advantage of the offer. “That is very kind of Mrs. Bennet,” Elizabeth replied, finding herself slipping into a new role. She would act the grand lady. She would be kind and gracious but also be a person who never forgot her own greater consequence in the world. After all, that is what happened as soon as a person had money.
Wasn’t it?
“You will not mind if I ask for your assistance with my hair, and I hope it will not displease Mrs. Bennet.”
“No, not at all. It will be a pleasure to work with your hair. I have always thought you had very good hair.”
“No! Not my hair. Not with all of the effort that I would put into it.”
“I understood and admired the artistry with which you worked,” the woman replied. Then she flushed. “For my part I also apologize for not having seen before that you were worthy of respect.”
“Much like Mrs. Bennet—but let us not think of such things.”
Elizabeth went to the dressing room. The room itself was familiar as Elizabeth was often sent to fetch things from it. But it was a strange experience to be allowed to sit in front of Mrs. Bennet’s large gilt-edged dressing mirror, with the whole panoply of rouges, oils, nets, ironing rolls, two jewelry boxes, brushes, scissors, and pomade pots.
Mrs. Bennet stood next to the chair and made excellent suggestions and offered that Elizabeth might have free use of anything she wished.
She did not wish to change her room.
Something in her rebelled at the idea of sleeping in a much bigger room while at Longbourn. This had been her room for fifteen years, and she would keep it.
However, three minutes of sitting at Mrs. Bennet’s dressing table convinced her to ask to use Jane’s old room as a dressing chamber. That would be even more elegant, and show her high habits, to insist on having a larger room than her own sleeping chamber to dress in and store her clothes in. Mrs. Bennet would be very impressed, and no doubt tell Lady Lucas about it in scandalized tones.
Her sleeping room simply wasn’t large enough for a large dressing table to be placed in it.
Robert would happily give her the money to equip the room with a better dressing table than Mrs. Bennet’s, and she would give it to Lydia and Kitty for their free use if she ever married and left the house. Thus, completing a petty revenge, one of such subtlety that Mrs. Bennet might think a favor was done to her.
After a thorough ordeal of dressing and preparation, Elizabeth descended to breakfast.
And to her great delight, nearly as soon as she sat down to rolls, ham and eggs, Mr. Darcy arrived, along with Bingley and Robert.
Darcy looked at her with those serious eyes of his. He initially stepped towards her but then hesitated for a moment. There was something endearing about the way he looked almost unsure of himself.
However as soon as she rose and smiled at him, he immediately came around, greeted her with a smile, and a promise that she looked very well.
“Mrs. Bennet had me use her dressing table,” Elizabeth said cheerfully, and loud enough for that lady to hear. “It was most kind of her, and her advice upon the best arrangement of my hair was excellent.”
There. That was wholly unlike the sort of too sure of herself great lady that Lady Catherine played.
Bingley said, “Jane sends her good mornings, but she wished to help organize the plans for our party tomorrow with Mrs. North. We’ve gained a great many positive replies—the Lucases, the Gouldings, Mrs. Long, her nieces. The officers—more than enough persons for an excellent party.”
“Is Mr. Wickham still in the militia?” Darcy asked with a frown.
Papa set his newspaper down. “Don’t worry about that fellow. He’d been accumulating debts at a terrible pace. No way could he pay them back. When the local tradesmen put this together, the haberdasher found out that his none-to-unwilling daughter had been engaged in an intrigue with Wickham. Taylor can be a frightening man with a gun, and so young Wickham was obliged to either marry the girl or decamp in the dead of night.”
“May I assume he absented himself?” Darcy asked.
“He left, like the winter chill.”
Robert laughed. “Wickham? I never liked him. He always smiled too much.”
This made Bingley laugh unexpectedly.
At being looked at by all the party, he made an ahem. “Merely reminded me of something.”
Mrs. Bennet inquired of Elizabeth if her Ladyship wished for any additional favor.
Sudden toadying behavior, simply because she was expected to be rich once the lawsuit completed. Lord! It made it hard for Elizabeth to not begin to act like Lady Catherine. It would be easy to reply in a high handed and demanding manner, always implying that she would provide some very great favor to Mrs. Bennet and her unmarried daughters if only she continued to tolerate it, and then always giving a little less than hoped for.
Perhaps her own manner to Mrs. Bennet when she had been frightened of her had brought out part of Mrs. Bennet’s bullying. She had acted as though she expected to be treated as nearly a servant, so of course everyone did so.
Except for Papa. And except for Mr. Darcy.
But maybe had Elizabeth been confident and smiling, instead of frightened and cringing, Mrs. Bennet would have automatically treated her with more kindness. She was not an ill hearted woman, not generally.
So much of their behavior had been a matter of choosing unspoken roles.
Elizabeth said to Darcy as they walked to the drawing room after the meal was finished, “I have now realized the truth in truism. A person’s manner and bearing often have a great effect upon the behavior of others towards them. Despite my enjoyment in watching different characters, I never knew how my own behavior likely changed how I am treated.”
He replied with a smile, “You are very likely to become strongly aware of such a thing now as your behavior in this family has changed greatly from what it was merely a week ago.”
“It is so odd,” Elizabeth replied. “I feel strange, and as though I am being told to be a different person every time one of the servants, or Mrs. Bennet, calls me ‘Lady Elizabeth’.”
“Be yourself. When I see how you have behaved here, I think you are in fundamentals very much as you have always been. I do like to see you with greater confidence and assuredness.”
“The promise of forty thousand pounds must give anyone a great deal of confidence,” Elizabeth replied laughingly.
“No. That is not it. As I said, you have changed little in fundamentals, and I think what has given you the confidence chiefly is that you are not scared of the memory of your father.”
The morning was one of those perfect days in spring. Warm, but not uncomfortable, with a delightful breeze cooling them in the shade, and making the dappled light peeking through the leaves dance. Thick, overgrown grasses in profusion, dandelions and ladybirds everywhere.
Rather than exploring the neighborhood, they stayed about the vicinity of Longbourn so that Elizabeth could be easily called if Papa’s solicitor arrived during the morning, on the estate and in the village. They sat together on a garden swing, they watched the horses plowing, they visited the cats in the barn.
After a light luncheon, Elizabeth showed Mr. Darcy the library, and as Papa grinned at them both, she gave him a thorough tour of the shelves and chief points of interest in the collection.
This library was Elizabeth’s favorite place in all the world. It gave her a warm and cozy feeling. She had a blushing need to just look at him and feel girlishly happy. Mr. Darcy happily sat in one of the winged armchairs, sipping a steaming mug of tea, and he was suitably impressed by the collection that Papa had built. He loved her writing desk, and he liked the view of the little wilderness outside, with the garden swing visible to the side.
Papa’s London solicitor arrived shortly after noon, with a heavy black briefcase full of papers. Many of these were of personal, and not merely financial, interest to Elizabeth as they included a notarized statement which her mother had made about her before she died, and statements about her manner of death, likewise notarized and made by the doctors and the innkeeper at the house where she’d died.
Her mother’s signature had been written clearly enough, though from what Papa said, it was signed less than three hours before the end.
Papa had been quite thorough at the time in preparing everything to make it as easy as possible to prove her identity for this lawsuit when the time came.
Robert and Darcy both signed statements about Lord Rochester acknowledging her to be his child that night at Lady Catherine’s, and that Lord Rochester had said that from her appearance there was no question that she was his daughter. Then Robert was questioned at some length about his childhood memories of Lady Elizabeth, including the time when Lord Rochester had beaten Lady Elizabeth and Lady Rochester.
Hearing this story repeated made the memory flash before her again. The feeling, the terror, the screams.
But the emotions that it usually brought up were muted and changed this time. Whenever she became too frightened, she remembered the way that Lord Rochester had looked in the reddish light of dusk as she pulled the trigger planning to kill him.
That memory, and the sensations it evoked were by no means wholly pleasant.
But her old sensation of being a helpless child could not exist at the same time as a memory of confidently shooting at the man who had once tormented her.
After Mr. Harris finished questioning Robert, he turned to Elizabeth, and she was minutely questioned about her memories of her childhood—bits were coming back. She recalled particular pieces of furniture, particular trees and locations, and two arrangements of things that Robert could confirm had once been that way, but which had been wholly changed over the last fifteen years.
And she was asked about her memories of being beaten.
The locket was brought forward and shown, and Robert was able to confirm that it was a painting of the second Lady Rochester.
Before the lawyer finished questioning Elizabeth, an arrival occurred which made pursuing a court case to gain Elizabeth’s fortune unnecessary.
“Mary! Mary!” Mrs. Bennet cried out as soon as her daughter stepped from the carriage, followed by Mr. Collins carrying a fine leather document case. “You’ll not believe what a todo we have had here! Mr. Bennet’s Lizzy is actually Lady Elizabeth, the daughter of the Earl of Rochester! And she is to have forty thousand! Can you believe it?”
“I can very well believe it,” Mary said smiling at her mother, her sisters, and Elizabeth. “I was there when she discovered the fact.”
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Bennet said, clearly chagrined at not being the one to share this most astonishing news first. “And this is her brother! She has a brother. He is Lord Hartley. My Lord, I hope you will not be offended if I introduce my daughter, Mrs. Collins to you.”
“Hello, I am very glad to see you again,” Robert replied. “Thought we’d already been introduced by Darcy. I suppose it is easy enough to mistake these things.”
“Now, now, be nice,” Elizabeth told Robert as she went to embrace Mary. “But please tell me that you have not had any serious difficulties with Lady Catherine? What does Lord Rochester mean to do? Is he organizing a lawsuit, or a raiding party, or—”
Papa laughed. “A raiding party? We are not in one of Walter Scott’s novels.”
Everyone laughed.
Mary cheerfully said, “Quite the opposite. We have been sent as friendly messengers. Ah—” She looked at Papa’s solicitor, not recognizing him.
“My London solicitor, Mr. Harris. He is here to begin the process of claiming Lizzy’s fortune.”
“Ah, of course.” Mary turned to her husband. “Give him those papers that Lady Catherine and Lord Rochester had prepared. I believe he shall be the person that Elizabeth will wish to look them over to ensure they are all in order.”
After saying that, Mary handed Elizabeth a folded paper with a very elaborate seal in red wax that Elizabeth imagined to be familiar.
“It is from him,” Mary said, “but the letter is in my hand. He dictated it to me, as he had a mild attack of apoplexy that evening, some two hours after you left. Right hand was too stiff for him to write. There is nothing in it, I think, that shall give you particular unhappiness.” To both Robert and Elizabeth, she said, “I fear that this may be unpleasant news, but the doctor worries that another such attack is not unlikely, and that the next might carry him off. He did not look to be a healthy man.”
Elizabeth also did not know if that was in fact unpleasant news to her.
If Lord Rochester did not intend to abduct her, or bother her in some other way, and Mary’s manner suggested that he did not, it was a matter of indifference to Elizabeth if he lived or died.
Yet, she had some curiosity to know a little more of the man whose child she was.
“It is my honor,” Mr. Collins bowed deeply to the lawyer, “to convey to you papers of some importance which have been entrusted to me by his Lordship, the Earl of Rochester. He gave me such a noble duty, upon the recommendation of my noble patroness, the Lady Catherine de Bourgh, whose fame I am sure you, and all in London, must know.”
The lawyer looked rather askance at Mr. Collins, but he took the fine leather document case with his own small incline of the head. Clearly Mr. Harris was more used to dealing with persons such as Mr. Bennet. Mary showed no signs of consciousness at seeing her husband speak in such a way, which made Elizabeth happy.
Robert looked at Mary suspiciously. “What is my father doing?”
“I can hardly understand how his mind works.” Mary shrugged. “Lizzy shooting at him raised her enormously in his opinion.”
“Oh.” Robert contemplated that. “But what are his plans?”
“My Lord Rochester,” Mr. Collins said for his wife, “has declared to all that Lady Elizabeth is certainly his daughter, and that she must be given the privileges and rights which appertain there to. After some extended discussion with my wife upon the manner of her education, he said—I memorized this, as I thought it to be most telling—he said, ‘Mr. Bennet did better than raising a daughter for me. He raised a better son than I did. She has the stomach that would not shame a peer of the realm. Oh, what a son she would have made.’—and after he said that he remarked in an unkind way upon my Lord Hartley’s tendency to cry easily which I—”
“By George!” Robert exclaimed. “But nothing more about that.”
“I merely wish to say, and I said as much to his Lordship, even though it contradicted him, that I do not think it is in fact unmanly for a gentleman to be able to cry. And he in a very kind way said that this opinion was fitting for a member of the clergy.”
“By George! Must he always—but continue. After declaring that Elizabeth, who he has met once in these fifteen years, is a better son than I am, what did he say then? About practical matters, not his opinions on my character. Or Lizzy’s.”
“His Lordship declared that he would see to it that the income from her fortune was released to her use immediately, and that he would add an additional ten thousand pounds to what had been guaranteed to her by the marriage articles, bringing the total to fifty-two thousand and one hundred seventy-three pounds, as of the accounting at the end of the last quarter.”
“Good God,” Robert cried, clearly still upset by his father’s insults. “You memorized the exact number?”
“No, I cannot recall whether it was seven or nine shillings, so I did not say which,” Mr. Collins replied. “But I hope that shall not shame me in your eyes my Lord, or in yours, my Lady.” He bowed deeply to both Elizabeth and Robert.
Elizabeth caught Darcy’s eye. He was smirking. So was Papa.
Well then, best to be gracious about it. “I thank you, Mr. Collins. This has been very kind of you, and I have no need to hear the present sum down to the penny.”
Elizabeth very much did not wish to think about a sum of money which would provide an income greater than the Longbourn estate. She would become rather faint if she thought about it too directly.
“This was a task given to me by his Lordship,” Mr. Collins said proudly. “How else could I have shown my gratitude, except to do it with as much diligence and capability as I could.”
“Fifty thousand pounds!” Mrs. Bennet exclaimed. She looked as though she might faint in truth.
“Well, well,” Papa said. “And did he say anything else about me?”
“He declared that he will not sue you, though it is his right, and he does not disclaim that right, unless Lady Elizabeth wishes for him to. And he complimented you on how well you taught her to shoot, and the steadiness of her hands.”
“Good God!” Robert said again. “All these years I could have had his approval if I only made a serious attempt to kill him, instead of simply imagining doing so to while away unpleasant hours. Jove! Lizzy, I am glad to not be the favored child.”
Once they had returned to sit in the drawing room, Elizabeth perched herself on the edge of the couch, sitting confidently, like she really was a great Lady. It was happening again. She noticed it now: Simply hearing this number “fifty-two thousand” and “to be released immediately” made her start to think of herself as something bigger and more impressive than she actually was.
Even bigger than she’d thought herself this morning when Mrs. Bennet begged her to use her own dressing room as a favor.
Lord, money could be a frightening, awful thing.
She scanned through the letter from Lord Rochester, reading his words in Mary’s familiar writing. But Mr. Collins had already summarized the essential points.
Beneath Mary’s neat hand was Lord Rochester’s shaky scrawled signature, made with giant letters and odd angles, as though the writer could barely manage to make a straight line, and curves were beyond him.
Elizabeth looked towards the group and asked Mary, “Is he so very ill? Do you think it was the shock of me shooting at him that caused his attack?”
Robert answered instead, “He told me that his doctors had insisted he must avoid excitement, and that his health was in a precarious state. He said to me that he had no intention of doing so. That he would live as the earl, full of dignity, so long as he could. If it was not this shock, then likely something else. You should not blame yourself.”
“That would be odd.” Elizabeth laughed. “To blame myself for giving him apoplexy when I meant to murder him.”
“Self-defense,” Darcy said.
“To self-defend myself until he was dead, then.”
“I can state,” Mary said, “that he was delighted to speak about you. It was while he was laughing quite hard about how you had gone to shoot him when the apoplexy struck him. That he decided to think highly of you afterwards did improve my opinion of his Lordship, but that he did so for such a cause left me...”
“Confused?” Robert said. “By Jove, Lizzy, I would have shot at him too if I’d known he’d like the experience so.”
“No, no. It would not work then. It only counts if you are displaying the stomach of a peer,” Elizabeth replied. Then she frowned and looked back at the letter.
“What else does he say about me?” Robert asked.
“It would only give you pain.”
“I can guess well enough. I do not stand upon my dignity. I have no stomach. I fight no duels. I am too much like my mother. I am shocked though that he has decided that you are not too much like your mother.”
“There is a philosophical discourse in the letter upon the benefits of mixing two strong bloods together. It makes for a poor marriage, but a good child. He advised me that when I marry, I should make certain to rule over my husband, as Lady Catherine always ruled over his brother. He says that he is sure I would not be happy if I allowed him to place me in such a position of subordination as he placed my mother. I was also advised to always keep my gun in a place easily accessible after I marry, so that I might threaten my husband with it.”
Elizabeth glanced around. Both Papa and Mr. Darcy looked agog at this.
“No, really, did he say that?” Darcy asked slowly. “And do you intend to follow this advice?” Then he laughed in a way that made him handsome and young. “And was there anything else written?”
“Not of importance, always maintain the dignity of the house and name, always demand my rights. Oh, he hopes that I shall name my first son Rochester.”
Papa laughed to hear that. “And will you?”
“No, my first son will be Bennet—" Elizabeth carefully did not look towards Darcy as she added, “that is if, when I should marry, my husband is amenable.”
“I like the sound of Bennet,” Darcy said. “It is a good name.”
Elizabeth looked towards him. Blushed. Looked down again. She could not stop the warm smile from spreading across her face.
“I also like it,” Papa said. “I like it very much.”