Page 38 of Strange Happenings at Longbourn (Darcy and Elizabeth Variations #11)
Chapter Twenty-Four
Mrs. Bennet received the card with a cry that might have roused the church wicket.
“A ball! Oh, my dear Mr. Bingley! To think—at last! Jane, my love, where is that pale green sarsenet—the one with the new sleeve? Lizzy, the blue sprig—no, the white muslin with the silver trim—oh, we must have Mr. Cartwright see to the hem. Lydia! Kitty! Where are you? Mr. Bingley gives a ball!”
Lydia and Kitty arrived at a run, their clamour enough to unsettle a small army. In the doorway, Mr. Collins appeared, breathless, having evidently been summoned by the thunder of feminine joy.
“A ball?” cried Lydia, bouncing on her toes. “A ball at Netherfield? Oh, Mama, a new gown—say I may have a new gown!”
Kitty, not to be outbid, added, “And shoes! My old ones pinched last time.”
“Girls, girls, we shall see,” Mrs. Bennet said, which meant in the language of mothers that she had already decided upon everything and would act as though the idea were theirs.
“Mr. Bingley, you are the finest young man in all Hertfordshire. I knew you meant to be generous. I told Mr. Bennet you surely would be, but he only laughed at me. He does not value me. He never values me.”
“I value you exceedingly at this moment, madam,” Mr. Bennet said, appearing with the expression of a man resigned to a tempest. “Because your happiness relieves me of the burden of being cheerful myself.”
“Papa!” cried Lydia, “only think—new gowns and new gloves!”
Mr. Collins cleared his throat, his hands opening and closing like a portly bird’s wings.
“A ball. Why, this is most agreeable. I am tolerably skilled in the country dances. They are much approved of by Lady Catherine as an exercise in social order, provided, of course, that no immodest figures are attempted and that the partners observe due decorum.” He glanced at Mary before turning to Elizabeth.
“Miss Elizabeth, cousin, may I solicit the first—”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Elizabeth said, not unkindly but firmly, “I have already engaged my first set.”
“Already!” Mr. Collins looked wounded. “But I am a relation—surely—”
“I am honoured by Mr. Collins’s request,” she continued, “and shall be happy to stand up with him for the second set.”
The wound was instantly staunched. “The second set! Oh, Miss Elizabeth, you overwhelm me with condescension. Perhaps I might write you a note with our set, lest any confusion arise and some forward person imagine himself privileged to—”
“Collins,” Mr. Bennet said, with dry mercy, “save your ink. Elizabeth’s memory is adequate, I assure you.”
Mr. Collins turned straight away to Mary, asking for her first set. Mary accepted, though Elizabeth noted a slight look of distaste on her face. She wondered if the idea of marrying Mr. Collins had lost some of its charm.
Meanwhile, Lydia was already beating the drum of acquisition. “Mama, you know I cannot possibly wear the blue sprig again. It is a fright, and last time Mr. Denny said it made me look like a milkmaid. Not that I object to appearing pastoral, but there is pastoral and pastoral .”
Kitty chimed in on her note. “And I must have the pink sash—Lydia stole it and promised to return it and never did, and that is why my gown looked old at Mrs. Phillips’s, and you said so yourself.”
“Peace, peace! We shall see to the ribbons,” Mrs. Bennet cried, half-laughing, half-weeping for joy. “Jane, my love, Mr. Bingley is the most amiable man! Mr. Bingley, you are the most amiable man!”
Mr. Bingley, glowing, attempted to say he did not deserve her praises; Mr. Darcy, at Elizabeth’s side, said nothing at all, but when their eyes met, she saw in his the memory of Oakham Mount—the first, the supper, the last—and it steadied her like a hand at her back.
Thus, the household entered upon that state of anticipation, which is busy enough to simulate happiness and noisy enough to rival it.
The days that followed were a concert of fitting, trimming, ordering, sending, pinning, pressing, exclaiming—and counting, always counting: gloves, stockings, hairpins, candles, chairs.
Mrs. Bennet commanded as a general; Hill obeyed with the resignation of a veteran.
Mary practised a dignified march through two quadrilles in the parlour while Lydia attempted a caper that nearly snapped a chair leg.
Kitty claimed the looking glass, then yielded it with much sighing.
Jane blushed at every mention of the ball and grew lovelier with each blush, which had the tidy effect of producing more mentions.
Through the hubbub, Elizabeth kept her private plan tucked into her pocket like a folded note. She could imagine how it would go.
She walked the east wing with Mr. Darcy and Jane in the clearest morning light she could find, counting windows, measuring steps beneath her breath.
She tapped upon the wainscot, not enough to arouse questions, only enough to teach her ear a new language of hollows and solids.
Twice she noticed a change in moulding too subtle to be accidental.
Once she found a faint seam where whitewash had pooled in a hairline.
She said nothing yet. She wanted, before she told him, to carry not suspicions but a path.
Two days before the ball, Lydia’s calamity struck.
Hill discovered her in a cow’s anguish upon the bedchamber floor, the pale-blue sprigged muslin, which had been re-trimmed and made new to pacify the lack of a new gown, in a heap upon her lap, her cheeks blotched red with grief and indignation.
“It is ruined! Ruined! Look at it! I shall never go to Netherfield. I shall die first. ”
Elizabeth went at once, and Jane close behind her.
The damage was indeed appalling. The skirt had been slashed, not torn; a long, deliberate gash ran from hem to knee, jagged at the edges as if the cutter’s hand had lost steadiness, then found it again.
And the bodice had been snipped at the shoulder seam, spoiling the set of it.
Whoever had done it possessed a needlewoman’s understanding of what could not be disguised.
“Lydia,” Elizabeth said softly, “were you wearing it? Did you stumble? Catch it on a nail?”
“I am not a fool,” Lydia sobbed. “I laid it on the bed to admire it, and when I came back from the stillroom for a ribbon—to compare the shade—it was thus.” She flung an arm wide towards the ruin. “Someone hates me, that is all.”
Mrs. Bennet arrived and cast up her hands to heaven with such energy that a hairpin flew. “I am the most ill-used of women! My child’s gown! Who would do such a spiteful thing? Hill! Hill, find the culprit at once!”
Hill, gray as linen and twice as imperturbable, did not alter her expression. “I will ask the maids, madam. No one has been on this landing this last hour but Miss Lydia, Miss Kitty, and Sarah. And Sarah was with me, turning the mattresses in the small room.”
“Kitty!” Lydia cried, round as accusation itself. “Kitty, you dreadful cat, confess!”
“I never!” Kitty’s offence was instant and no less genuine for being intermittent. “Honestly, I never touched it,—I did not even come in. I do not know what you wear, though I hope it will not be that fright in blue, for it makes you look sallow—”
“Enough,” Elizabeth said sharply enough to cut the argument’s stitch. “Quarrelling will not mend it.”
“Nor will scolding,” Mrs. Bennet wailed, falling back upon her favorite refuge. “Hill, send the boy this instant to Meryton for Mrs. Potter. She must see what can be done. Oh, to think my poor Lydia—my poor child—should be kept from a ball by the malice of the envious!”
Mrs. Potter came. She pursed her lips, pinched the muslin, turned it to the light, and shook her head with the professional gravity of physicians and dressmakers alike.
“It may be turned and pieced if you have over-lace to cover the join. Else, you must trim the hem a good three inches and raise the whole; that will not suit. Or—” her eyes slid towards the wardrobe—“we might take the skirt from the white muslin and attach it to the blue bodice, if the bodice’s stays will suit.
The sleeve is not ruined. But the waist seam is—hm.
” She measured with her thumb. “Yes. You will have less breadth. I can do it if I sit up half the night and bring a girl to baste.”
“Do it,” Mrs. Bennet cried. “Do anything. We shall make it up to you, Mrs. Potter. Kitty, fetch my workbox. No, not that one, the larger—oh, goodness, why was I ever born to such trials!”
Lydia’s despair transformed in an instant into delighted speculation—what trims, what flounces, what ribbons to disguise the alteration—and the household fell to work as if compelled by a sovereign summons.
Elizabeth sewed where she could be useful; Jane soothed their mother; Mary fetched tea.
The sense of ill-will—the deliberate nature of the damage—pulsed beneath the industry like a bruise under a sleeve.
Elizabeth said nothing. But when she met Darcy later that afternoon in the drive—purely by chance, for he had ridden over with Mr. Bingley on a matter of chairs—and told him briefly of what had happened, she saw his eyes narrow, not in suspicion of her sisters but in calculation, as if the map he kept in his mind of Longbourn’s disturbances had acquired a new, unpleasant mark.
“I do not like the increasing boldness,” he said lowly. “From stolen items to slashed gowns is not a natural progression.”
“It could be spite,” she returned. “A maid slighted, a sister provoked.”
“Perhaps,” he said. But she could see he did not believe it likely, and though she wished it were not so, she agreed with him.