Page 39 of Strange Happenings at Longbourn (Darcy and Elizabeth Variations #11)

The day’s work went on. Mrs. Potter kept her word and kept her girl beyond sundown; candles were lit; the parlour became, for a few hours, a workroom.

By nine o’clock Lydia was twirling in a flutter of gratitude—new skirt fitted to old bodice, an ingenious ribbon trim concealing the join, the whole thing bright as her temper and twice as noisy.

It might have ended there. It did not.

The next morning, before breakfast, a cry went up from the stair hall—sharp, male, unadorned. Mr. Bennet’s voice. Elizabeth, outside in the drive with Mr. Darcy, ran towards it, along with everyone else in the house.

Her father stood at the foot of the stairs, his spectacles in his hand, looking up at the long wall that, from landing to ceiling, was hung with Bennet ancestors and near-relations.

He was very pale. On the floor lay a gilt frame, cracked at the corner, and, beside it, the brass hook torn from the plaster.

The portrait within—the small half-length of Mr. Bennet painted in his youth, the one they all preferred because it showed him laughing—still hung above, but not intact.

From the gentleman’s cheekbone downward to the breast, the canvas had been slashed: a deliberate, clean cut through oil and linen, as precise as a judgment.

Mrs. Bennet’s scream followed half a breath later. “Murder! Murder in my very house!”

“Not murder,” Mr. Bennet said, very dry—but his voice shook. “Vandalism.”

Lydia and Kitty babbled at once—who would do such a wicked thing—to which Mary contributed, “It is a caution, Papa, a call to reflect upon our vanity in our lineage, painted and displayed—”

“Mary,” Mr. Bennet said, not unkindly, “your piety must wait upon my temper. Hill!”

Mr. Hill came at once.

“Who has been in this hall this last hour?”

“Only the footmen, sir, to lay the fire, and Mrs. Hill to dust, and Sarah to fetch a cloth from the closet,” the old butler replied without fluster. “No one else.”

“Where are they now?”

“In the back hall, sir.”

“Bring them.”

They came white-eyed, swearing they had touched nothing.

The footmen set the fallen frame upright.

Why Mr. Bennet’s portrait and not the ancestor in bonnet and pearls?

Not Mr. Bennet’s Great-Uncle Francis with his hands upon his greyhounds, not the melancholy young woman in blue who had died at nineteen, but Mr. Bennet himself, the living master of the house.

The cut did not quite reach the upper edge of the waistcoat.

It had been drawn with a sure hand and a sharp blade.

Elizabeth’s stomach turned with a cold she had not felt since she had lain awake listening for the ticking of a candle wick at her door.

She looked to Darcy. He had come in at the first cry and stood now a step inside the threshold, his face very still.

His eyes moved once over the hall, calculating distances—the staircase to the wall, the window to the landing, the angle of approach from the servants’ passage.

When he spoke, it was not with the soothing nothings some men offer in discomfort, but with instruction, crisp and sane.

“No one enters or leaves the house without Mr. Bennet’s leave,” he said quietly to Hill.

“You will set a man at the back door and one at the front. You will request that the maids remain in the kitchen until called. If anything has been found out of place in the last day—anything at all—you will bring word to Miss Bennet or to me.”

Hill, grateful for an order that could be obeyed, dropped a curtsey and went without question. Mr. Bennet looked at Darcy as if evaluating the imposition of an outsider upon his private jurisdiction—then nodded once, briskly, as if to say “ Very well; begin saving me, then.”

“Elizabeth,” he said, “I will write to Mr. Jones to call later. Not that apothecaries are of any use with knives, but he is a sober man and will have heard who was out last night. We must also put away these family faces. I am suddenly tired of them.”

“You cannot put yourself away, Papa,” Elizabeth murmured, throat tight.

“No,” he said, and pushed the spectacles up the bridge of his nose with a hand that trembled. “But I can refrain from laughing at him for a day or two.”

Mr. Bennet

He tried to remain flippant and unconcerned. Elizabeth disapproved, but there was nothing for it. The young people had already learned more than he. It gave them a path to follow. Perhaps it is time for me to show more interest in this…me ss.

Elizabeth

The incident, coming as it did on the heels of Lydia’s gown, altered the atmosphere of the house as thoroughly as a storm alters the air.

The preparations for the ball went on—Mrs. Bennet could not be prevented from planning—but there was a murmur beneath every stitch, a look over every shoulder.

Kitty would not cross the hall alone; Lydia, though she laughed too loudly and demanded extra ribbons as compensation, glanced at every shadow as if it might be the handsome ghost of her imagining.

Mary read aloud with more emphatic moralizing than usual which did not reconcile anyone to virtue.

Mr. Collins made himself notably absent amidst the chaos.

That afternoon, Darcy found Elizabeth in the little morning room where the best light fell. She stood at the tall window, looking not at the view but at the wavering reflection of the staircase glass in the pane—as if she could catch some echo of the hand that had lifted the knife .

He did not speak at once. He came to stand beside her and gave her the courtesy of silence long enough to decide whether she would speak first. She did.

“I am both angry and ashamed,” she said, still looking outward. “Angry at the insult. Ashamed that I cannot make sense of it—of any of it. And that my father is so unconcerned. I feel as if the house is a riddle and we are all too dull to read it.”

He considered. “We are not dull. We are too close. A riddle is easier to a stranger because he is not obliged to respect the cleverness of the author.”

She laughed thinly. “If these acts belong to a living hand, then the logic is not subtle. It wishes to frighten. and to command attention. It wishes to humiliate.”

“And to separate,” he added, turning to her now. “We all looked at each other in blame when we entered the hall. Just for a moment. It was very small. But I saw it.”

She straightened her shoulders. “It will not succeed. Not if we are stubborn. And we are very stubborn,” she admitted, and managed a smile.

A knock at the door—brisk, cheerful—dissolved the moment.

Mr. Bingley’s voice tumbled in ahead of him.

“My dear friends! I am a brute to intrude, but I come with news: the musicians are secured, Mrs. Nicholls’s cousin knows the cotillion everyone wants, and Mr. Goulding has offered two additional footmen for the night.

We shall not lack for candles or chairs or good will.

Miss Bennet,”—his tone softened as he bowed to Jane—“you will delight us all.”

Jane flushed prettily and murmured her thanks. Mrs. Bennet rushed in upon Mr. Bingley like a tide. “Mr. Bingley, you are everything that is good. We have had a dreadful morning—do not ask me to recount it—but your ball shall make all right again.”

Mr. Bingley’s eyes darted briefly to Darcy, who gave the smallest of nods that said later .

Public cheer now; particulars after. Mr. Bingley, with that unfailing instinct for kindness that had caused all prudent people to forgive him everything from the cradle, instantly took command of merriment, praising Lydia’s altered gown, admiring Kitty’s new sash, telling Mary that he relied upon her for a country dance played slower than usual so that Mr. Hurst might keep up.

Within ten minutes, Mrs. Bennet was fluttering again, Lydia had forgotten to be nervous, Kitty was vexing herself to discover whether pink gloves would stain, and Jane was happy.

Amid the light, Mr. Collins reappeared, full of pomposity.

He had, it seemed, drafted a speech congratulating Mr. Bingley upon his public spirit in hosting the ball and was determined to deliver it in full; the recipient bore it with saintly gravity.

As soon as Mr. Collins took a breath, he turned to Elizabeth and beamed.

“Cousin, I have taken the liberty of announcing our engagement for the second set to all the principal personages in Meryton. I find that a public notice often prevents misunderstanding. You must not disappoint.”

“I shall not,” she said, and—because he was insufferable but she was not unkind—added, “I thank you for your forethought.”

Mr. Collins looked at once satisfied and in love. “Ah! The prudence of an amiable woman!”

When he had moved on to rehearse with Mary, who had chosen a hymn as a token of gratitude and been gently persuaded to something more consonant with a ball, Elizabeth exhaled. Darcy, on her other side, did not trouble to disguise a twitch at the corner of his mouth.

“Cruel,” she murmured.

“Accurate,” he returned.

Evening fell, taking the edges of the day with it.

Lamps were lit; the house settled into its ordinary pursuits as if the morning had not happened.

But Longbourn was no longer ordinary. Elizabeth lay awake that night for a time, listening to the winter wind going about the eaves like a persistent beggar, and promised herself—again—that she would not be ruled by dread.

The ball would come; she would dance the first set with Mr. Darcy.

She would dine at his side at supper and end the night on his arm.

Between those sets, life might attempt mischief. She would meet it with light.